Though You Build, I Will Throw Down

3but Esau I hated, and made his mountains a desolation, and gave his heritage to the jackals of the wilderness.” 4Whereas Edom says, “We are beaten down, but we will return and build the waste places”; Yahweh of Armies says, “They shall build, but I will throw down; and men will call them ‘The Wicked Land,’ even the people against whom Yahweh shows wrath forever.” 5Your eyes will see, and you will say, “Yahweh is great—even beyond the border of Israel!”

A sculpture carved in stone keeps its form for thousands of years. That is why sculptors pour their ideas into stone. Stone demands more time and labor than other materials, and a statue calls for special care. A misjudged blow can ruin the fine detail of a work, and a sculptor must therefore work carefully over a long time.

Delicate works are also made of sand. The entries at a world sand sculpture festival are so grand, even so beautiful, that it is hard to believe they were made from nothing but sand and water. Unlike stone, though, sand has a drawback: a sand sculpture cannot be kept for long. A wave, or even the touch of a hand, can bring it down, and to our regret the works can be seen only while the festival lasts.

Depending on the material, some works, like those in stone, last a long time, while others, like those in sand, survive only in photographs. Sculptors say that heavy stone cannot be easily cut or shaped, but after repeating the same work thousands and tens of thousands of times, they come to feel they are breathing together with the stone. Any work must first be complete in the artist’s mind. Only when the artist brings that inner work out into the world, with precision and in fine detail, can it win people’s recognition.

The same is true of the Christian life. Those who serve Christ honestly have a steadfast faith formed through God’s word and the experience of life, like a sculpture of unchanging stone. To have a faithful walk with God, we must set the word at the center and live it out in obedience. Faith tempered by hard training takes a long time to mature into the faith of a child of God; but once that faithfulness takes hold, no suffering or fiery trial can easily shake it.

A statue that has weathered wind and rain for many years looks all the grander and more profound. In the same way, those who endure in faith grow into deeper fellowship with God as time passes, and they can tell the spiritual from the worldly, because they can discern God’s will by his word. But a faith built of sand is a hypocrite’s faith; when the waves of hardship roll in, it vanishes without a trace. Just as a sand sculpture collapses easily, a hypocritical faith is quickly toppled by circumstance and feeling, and it cannot put down deep roots.

Hypocritical faith looks full on the outside, but at its core it is always wavering. Just as a sand sculpture survives only in photographs, such people look back on the days when they gave themselves to God and prayed; they live in the past and do not grow. Hypocrites, too, must once have had a season when they served God sincerely, but without endurance their faith never takes root, and they slip back into sin easily. Though God keeps giving them grace and fresh opportunities, the time they have spent being shaped by the word, prayer, and service has been short, which is why they drift back and forth between the church and the world. However diligently such people go to church, they cannot help but be unhappy, as though always carrying a heavy burden.

Jacob was like a work in stone. He did not live a glamorous life, but look at him: whatever his circumstances, he did all he could to stay by God’s side, turning back from the road he was on, falling and rising again and again. Esau, on the other hand, inherited all his father’s wealth and lived at ease, yet his life became a sad one that vanished without a trace, like a sandcastle. The reason Esau could not become one of God’s people is not that God loved Jacob and hated him. He was given the privilege of being born the firstborn of Isaac, the son of Abraham, the father of nations, but he showed his unbelief by not valuing his birthright, and his life came to have nothing to do with God.

When God says he has chosen Israel and the remnant, he does not mean that he especially hated some and especially loved others. It means that those who hold fast to their faith to the end, so as to remain at God’s side, are the ones who become the children God has chosen.

Presbyterians hold to the doctrine of predestination: salvation comes not by human effort but to those whom God has specially chosen and predestined. God sees every life as present; he already knows who will receive him and who will forsake him. It is from this perspective that we speak of predestination. Seen this way, if people who were Satan’s servants from birth meet Christ, who became the atoning sacrifice for us, and hold to that faith until the moment they die, they are the predestined, the chosen children of God. Of course, it is not human beings who choose salvation; but because God has given the gospel equally to all humanity, those who persevere and stay faithful to the end are the ones who receive eternal life.

Holding fast to faith requires a will of one’s own. Everyone has the opportunity to hear the gospel, but salvation comes only to those who go beyond hearing the word and receive Christ. If someone refuses him on human judgment, they must answer for it themselves. In short, since God has promised to save anyone who receives Christ, those who stand firm in faith until the moment they put off the flesh are the predestined, the saints who will enjoy eternal life in heaven.

Malachi 1:4

4Whereas Edom says, “We are beaten down, but we will return and build the waste places”; Yahweh of Armies says, “They shall build, but I will throw down; and men will call them ‘The Wicked Land,’ even the people against whom Yahweh shows wrath forever.”

Anyone who has received God’s warning must repent and return to him, no matter what. Since God rebukes because of sin, someone who offers only excuses instead of repenting is as good as answering that they do not mind being judged. If such a person is not saved, the responsibility is their own.

Psalm 36:1 says that sin speaks to the wicked deep in their hearts, and that there is no fear of God before their eyes. Only those who fear God can obey his word, but the wicked have ceased to be wise and to do good, and still they do not fear God. Esau grew up watching his forefathers hold fast to their faith even while they were being put through the fire, yet he never turned back. Instead he insulted God with proud words, saying that even without God’s help he could live by his own strength.

But there is no nation and no person in this world that can live without God. People were made from dust, the stuff of this world, so when the good God rebukes them, they set themselves against him instead of examining themselves. And the outcome of a choice against God’s will is death. When God reproves us so that we turn from sin, we must, the moment we hear it, strive to be born anew in our deeds, our words, and even our thoughts.

Of course, no one likes rebuke and admonition. But God’s call to repent is not like human relationships, where each side looks to its own gain. It is grace: he is warning his people in advance so that they do not fall into Satan’s schemes, and for that reason we must obey without condition. God’s word may not make sense to you. You may think your way is far better than his, or that obeying means taking a long detour. But no one can see even a step ahead or know what will happen next; if God tells us not to go, we must not go. Only by listening to people of God like the prophet Malachi, who bring us God’s grace and rebuke, can we live our lives well.

Wanting praise as we do, we can find reproof uncomfortable. But even when we cannot understand it right away or grasp God’s deeper purpose, if we obey the word first, in time we will come to see why. Trust what God has done so far and simply obey, and you will soon understand why he told you to repent, why he told you to let go of what you were holding. When we trace God’s will through the whole Old Testament, we can see that he wanted the people of Israel to serve him as their almighty King.

But Edom does not grasp God’s deep purpose and declares confidently that it can live by its own strength, without God. If, like Edom, you have received God’s warning, the shortest way back to restoration is to stop judging, stop complaining, and turn your present life around. Hearing Edom’s boast, God said that though Edom might build diligently by human righteousness, he would throw it down. However hard people build, if God does not protect what they build, it will easily fall before the world’s attacks.

This does not mean that God himself tests and attacks Edom. It means that once God removes the hedge of the Holy Spirit, no one has any way to fend off Satan’s attacks, and Edom collapses of its own accord.

Genesis 11:4

4They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.”

When everyone spoke one language, people grew proud. They built the tower of Babel to make a name for themselves, but God, seeing their wickedness, confused their language and brought the building to a sudden halt. One language could have been a fine means of speaking with one another and worshiping God, yet they used it to oppose him. They boasted that they had power to rival God’s, but God already knew their ambition. He confused the one language he had given them as a blessing and scattered them. As a result they could no longer understand one another, and they had to stop what they were doing.

This is also why God warned Israel and Edom. They banded together in wicked purpose and claimed they could live by their own strength without God, but if God withdraws his hedge of protection even briefly, all they have becomes useless. Edom, having left God, could not escape judgment in the end. They had been given many chances, but their sin had grown so great that they collapsed.

It is not that God gave Esau no opportunity. As Cain was born Adam’s firstborn, Esau was born the firstborn of Isaac, whom God loved, so he had more chances than anyone. But Esau threw that blessing away himself; that is how he fell into the abyss. What those who show unbelief toward God, as Esau did, have in common is that they display human greed and pride, human righteousness and boasting. They judge the word by the worldly knowledge and prejudices they have gathered, and by human reason and ideology, and that keeps them from living rightly. Because these things puff people up and drive them into greater sin, if we set ourselves aside and reflect on the warning God has given, we can discover our own sin.

To be spiritually evil is different from being immoral or lacking in human kindness. The standard is the word: whatever goes against God’s will is evil. Even someone the world praises as a good person, if they live with a mind other than Christ’s, God will call evil.

However learned and cultivated you may be, if you never forget that even this was given by God, you can live a good life. The judgment God sends is so terrible that no human being can bear it, and we must repent.

Now let us briefly look at the history of Edom. God said that because he hated Esau, he made his strong mountains a desolation and gave his once-rich heritage to the jackals of the wilderness. This means that however hard Esau might try to escape judgment, once God has decided, there is no escape. Esau was the ancestor of Edom; he came to be called Edom because he had asked Jacob to feed him that red stew, saying he was famished. Believing that this incident had cost him his birthright, Esau set out to kill Jacob, and with his mother Rebekah’s help Jacob fled to the house of his uncle Laban. He lived like a slave in Laban’s house for more than twenty years before coming home, only to bear the grief of never seeing his mother Rebekah again. Rebekah, too, helped Jacob because she knew his faith, yet for that she had to bear the pain of never seeing her son again as long as she lived. God, who does not overlook sin, may have made this lifelong parting of mother and son the price of the lie by which Jacob passed himself off as Esau. We must know that God calls even a small sin to account, even when the one committing it thinks they are doing something good.

When Jacob returned home, Esau, as though he had planned it, handed over the family home to his younger brother and led his own household away to rugged, rocky mountain country. Years later Esau’s descendants went to war with Saul, king of Israel, and later still, when King David subdued the surrounding nations, Edom was conquered along with them and became a vassal of Israel. Around 586 BC, when the kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonian Empire, Edom also was brought down by Babylon. Then, in the New Testament era, Antipater, an Edomite, became an administrator under the Roman Empire, and his son later became Herod the Great, who ruled the region of Palestine under Rome. Herod the Great ruled as far as Samaria and Galilee, but when Jerusalem fell in AD 70 in the First Jewish–Roman War, the history of Edom came to an end with it.

The Edomites, proud and convinced they could make their way in the world by their own strength, kept reaching for power. But God did not protect them, and, as he had foretold, the nation of Edom vanished from the earth. When God said that though Edom builds, he will throw down, he did not mean that he would hound and harass them. He meant that he would not be their protector. However hard people labor toward goals outside God’s will, God can bring all of it to nothing; the wise course is to obey his will.

Luke 15:18-20

18I will get up and go to my father, and will tell him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight. 19I am no more worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants.”’ 20“He arose, and came to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

No passage teaches better than the parable of the prodigal son what a child of God who has left him should think, and what they should resolve to do, when hardship comes. Like Edom, the prodigal son was confident that as long as he had money he could live on his own; he asked his father for his inheritance in advance. The father knew his son meant to leave him, yet he gave him his share as he asked. The father certainly knew that his son was not ready. Judging from how gladly he embraced the son when he came back in tears, the father seems to have had his son learn for himself that the world was not as easy as he had imagined.

We too have times when things go well for us in the world or we have plenty of money, and it seems we could live without God. Then leaving him holds no fear. At such times God knows we will fail if we go out into the world alone, yet he does not stop us by force; he watches.

Having received his share from his father, the son went far away to live as he pleased, but he had no experience of life, and he gave in to the desires of the flesh and the temptations of Satan until he had squandered everything. In the same way, anyone who sins tries to get far away from their protector. Those who had been kind to the prodigal while he had money would not give him even the husks the pigs ate once it ran out. Facing the world without his father, the son came to realize that everything that had kept him alive until then had been possible only because of his father’s protection.

Up to this point it is a mistake even a person of faith can make. But when people who have lived trusting in their own ability, strength, and health lose all of it, what they decide then determines whether they are clothed once more in God’s grace or fall still deeper into the abyss. This is because when God removes his hedge of protection, what we have labored to build may crumble, as it did for Edom, and great wealth may scatter like sand, as it did for the prodigal. If what you build keeps falling down despite all your efforts, God is knocking on the door of your heart, for it is his signal, calling you to come further into him and to walk with him rightly.

It would not have been easy for the prodigal to make up his mind to return to his father. He probably hesitated a great deal on the way. But because he did go back, he was welcomed by his father and could live as a son. Esau, however, though God warned that he would tear down what Esau built, complained and resisted instead of turning back, and he vanished from the world. Everything Esau had worked so hard to build was sin, and God had no choice but to judge him. Thus some people turn the opportunities God gives equally to everyone into blessing, while others turn them into grounds for judgment.

Which of the two, Jacob or Esau, are you standing closer to? God embraces those who repent and becomes a hedge of protection so that they may enjoy rest. You need only fall into his arms without hesitating. I hope you will never be proud like Edom, never doubt, never complain, but live by faith according to God’s will. Then, just as Jacob received the love and blessing of the all-knowing, almighty God, you will receive them too. May you always examine yourselves and be wise children of God who turn away from the path of sin.