Mingled feelings must have possessed Jacob at this time; strange remembrances must have been his! Twenty years ago he had passed over that Jordan—near which he now stood—in flight from an enraged brother, meditating and preparing vengeance for an act of fraudulent injury. What a weary pilgrimage he had since followed; what sorrows, what desolations had possessed his aching heart; how he had toiled and suffered wrong; even now was fleeing from it! Yet, those twenty years gone, he was coming back, not to the prospect of peace and happiness, not to the hope that his brother had forgotten his vengeance, or that he would easily be reconciled to him; but to face a mindful, aggravated avenger, strengthened by four hundred followers. Surely he had fled and been in exile to no purpose! Surely, by deferring it, he had increased his trouble! It must have been that Jacob now acutely remembered the cause of Esau’s anger; that he meditated on the mean advantage that he had taken, the base fraud to which he had been a party, the lying, the profanity of his lips, the evil deeds which led to evil consequences. Ah! now he felt that man cannot sin with impunity, that transgression and punishment are bound together as cause and effect, that vengeance, though it tarry, though it slumber, though we run from it, and hide from it many, many days, will yet accomplish its purpose, will surely repay! Yes; and did he not feel that vengeance had even followed him; that he had been its victim all those twenty years; that the frauds of Laban, from first to last, and the strifes and dissensions of his own household were the fruits of his deceit; that GOD had allowed them, that in a way He had caused them in retaliation, in punishment of his sin! What an experience to him, what a proof to us, my brethren, that sin will surely find us out!