Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

12. “It was said to her that the elder shall serve the younger.” While this primarily means the
election of Isaac to the progenitorship, and the reprobation of Esau to the same, it has here a potent
symbolic meaning which is not to be overlooked, i.e., that the old Adamic nature in us is to serve
the new creature imparted by the Holy Ghost in regeneration. The word “serve” means a slave,
involving the perfect submission of the old man.
13. “As has been written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” This is the language of
Malachi 1:2, 3, five hundred years after the time of these men. Hence it does not apply to these men
personally, but representatively to Israel, a godly people, and the Edomites, very wicked idolators.
14. “Then what shall we say? Is there unrighteousness with God? It could not be so.
15. “For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I do have mercy, and will compassionate
whom I do compassionate” (Exodus 3:19). This progenitorship was a great and signal mercy, yet it
did not exclude the reprobated from grace and glory but does imply from a place in the honored
Messianic progenitorship.
16. “Then therefore it is not of him that willeth nor him that runneth, but of God who showeth
mercy.” This progenitorship, the greatest blessing this side of heaven, was bestowed on Abraham
and his seed by the sovereign discriminating mercy of God. Yet while it was special to Abraham and
his seed, instead of excluding all others from the kingdom of grace and glory, it was the provision
of God’s redeeming love for the whole human race.
17. “For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, that for this very thing have I raised thee up, that I may
show forth my power in thee, in order that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” At that
time Pharaoh was absolute monarch of the only organized government on the globe. He built the
pyramids, the world’s greatest wonder to this day; there being no mechanical powers on the earth
at the present day competent to erect them. It has been estimated that it would take twenty thousand
men one hundred years to build Cheops. When I climbed to the top and stood on its pinnacle, five
hundred and fifty feet above the earth, and looked down the huge mass covering thirteen acres of
ground, I no longer doubted the estimate. God did not mock Pharaoh. He sent him His two best
preachers, Moses and Aaron, to preach the gospel. to him that he might be saved. Of course the
gospel resisted hardened his heart, as in every other case. The same sun that softens the wax, hardens
the clay; so the same gospel that saves those who receive it, hardens and augments the damnation
of all who reject it. Hence souls lost in Christendom reach a hotter hell than the heathens. If Pharaoh
had been converted, he was the very man to glorify God in all the earth, by sending the gospel to the
ends of the earth. He had the men and the money, and was competent to preach the gospel and
proclaim the true God in all the earth. Pharaoh did like millions of other sinners, rejected the gospel
and plunged into ruin for time and eternity, defeating the purposes of God for which He had raised
him up, that he might be converted under the preaching of Moses and Aaron and preach the gospel
of God’s truth and righteousness to all the earth.
20. “O vain man, who art thou that repliest against God? Whether shall the thing formed say to
him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus?