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Esau Selling His Birthright (Hendrick ter Brugghen)
Thus you will walk in the ways of the good
and keep to the paths of the righteous.
For the upright will live in the land,
and the blameless will remain in it;
but the wicked will be cut off from the land,
and the unfaithful will be torn from it. (Proverbs 2:20 -22)
Day 13 Esau Sells His Birthright
Notes from The Great Adventure Session 5 Patriarchs
The lives of these early people often exhibit what will be true of the nations that come from them. In Genesis 25, the Lord tells Rebekah the twins jostling in her womb will become two struggling nations, and that the nation that springs from the elder will be weaker and will serve the nation that comes from the younger.
Jacob means he grasps the heal or, figuratively, he deceives. And from the moment of Jacob's birth, he is grasping at what belongs to his older brother: first his heel, then his birthright, and finally their father's blessings.
Esau is no match for Jacob's cunning. He is more interested in satisfying his immediate physical needs than in hanging on to his birthright, and Jacob is able to wrest it from him for a pot of stew.
Later he and Rebekah trick Isaac into giving him the blessing as well. The boys struggle from day one, and the younger is coming out on top.
God chooses Jacob not because of his faithfulness or his behavior; not because of anything he's done, either good or bad. He chooses Jacob while Jacob is still in his mother's womb. God chose Jacob before he'd had a chance to do anything good or bad to show that God's people did not rise "naturally" or according to worldly skill or wisdom but because of His initiative. They were not chosen because they were better than others but simply out of what the Catechism calls God's "sheer gratuitous love."
Catechism of the Catholic Church
218: In the course of its history, Israel was able to discover that God had only one reason to reveal himself to them, a single motive for choosing them from among all peoples as his special possession: his sheer gratuitous love. And thanks to the prophets Israel understood that it was again out of love that God never stopped saving them and pardoning their unfaithfulness and sins.
Romans 9: 10 - 16
...Rebekah's children were conceived at the same time by our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad - in order that God's purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls, she was told, "The older will serve the younger." Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on who I have mercy, and I will have compassion on who I have compassion." It does not therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God's mercy.
***
DAY 13 Original Sin and Justice
CHALLENGE: “Original sin is unjust. How could a good God punish us for something done by our ancestors?”
DEFENSE: This misunderstands what original sin is. God doesn't punish us because of what Adam did.
Genesis 1 and 2 depict God creating mankind in a state that was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). “As long as he remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die. The inner harmony of the human person, the harmony between man and woman, and finally the harmony between the first couple and all creation, comprised the state called ‘original justice’ ” (CCC 376).
But man turned away from union with God through sin, which Genesis depicts as the act of eating the forbidden fruit (CCC
390).
If Adam and Eve had remained in original justice, their descendants would have been born in it as well. However, having lost this through sin, their descendants are born deprived of original holiness
and justice. Thus we are said to be born in original sin.
However, we are not personally guilty of Adam’s sin, and God does not hold us accountable for it.
“Original sin is called ‘sin’ only in an analogical sense: It is a sin ‘contracted’ and not ‘committed’—a state and not an act” (CCC 404).
“Original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice” (CCC 405).
Although it is not a personal fault, original sin has consequences for human nature, which is “wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin—an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence” (CCC 405).
The situation is like that of a rich man who gambles away his fortune and is unable to pass it on to his children. The gambler was personally at fault, but his children experience the deprivation and
poverty that his actions brought about. In the same way, God gave our first parents an abundance of spiritual riches that they lost through their own folly. The fault was theirs, but we are born in spiritual poverty and out of divine intimacy.
Jimmy Akin, A Daily Defense: 365 Days (Plus One) to Becoming a Better Apologist
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