The Wages of Sin

Read Genesis 27:46-28:9

We live in a time where we choose our future spouses. In those days, however, it was the parents who chose spouses for their children. The reason is not so much that they don’t trust their children, but that marriage was not seen as a union of two people (even though it is), but a union of two families. Thus, we should not be surprised that Rebekah finds the Canaanites (“Hittite women”) to be unsuitable wives for Jacob. The Canaanites were seen as “outsiders”. It’d be like your Chinese parents responding to you if you brought, say, a black significant other home. It’s not that they’re racist, but they see blacks as “not-Chinese”. That is, outside of their culture.
Isaac agreed without much discussion, I presume, and told Jacob to go to Padaan-aram, the homeland of the family’s ancestry. Esau, who was not the recipient of Isaac’s blessing, realized too that marrying a Canaanite woman was displeasing to his father. But note verse 9: he found a wife from among Ishmael’s descendants besides the wives that he had. The problem, by the way, was not that he had many wives (it was acceptable back then), but that those wives were Canaanite.

Let’s backtrack. What happened was that Esau married a bunch of Canaanite wives - read: “outsiders”. At the time, it was important to keep the “bloodline pure” from foreign influences. To do otherwise would be unrighteous. Thus, God continued to insist that the nation of Israel never marry foreigners, because Israel’s holiness was at stake. My guess is (and this is not biblically-supported) that Rebekah saw that and worried that her son Jacob would do the same. So, she sent Jacob to find a proper wife.
Esau, on the other hand, noticed that he made a mistake. So he sought to bandage that by adding an acceptable wife to his harem. Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve the problem. Even if he killed his Canaanite wives to marry an acceptable wife, the fact was that he did not regard righteousness as important in the first place! Here, Esau has put himself in a situation where he has to reckon with his mistakes for life. He could marry 1,001 acceptable women, but that doesn’t relieve him of the guilt from his mistakes.

Let us be careful, therefore, of sin where we will have to reckon with its wages for life. I come from a family where many of my uncles and aunts during their teenage years had no regard for holiness, and had sex with many, many others. The many babies that resulted were all aborted. My mom often said, “Our family will one day be judged because so many abortions occurred because they don’t know the importance of making the right decisions.” I’ve heard stories of where teenagers in the same predicament had the courage to carry their babies to term, but it really messed up their schooling, and often the families involved as well. Like Esau, no amount of bandaging can remove their guilt. Although Jesus can remove the guilt, Jesus never promised that he would remove the temporal consequences of those sins. So let us exercise care whenever we make decisions in life.