I have loved you, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob,
And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness [Mal. 1:2–3].
"...[L]let’s understand one thing: God never said this until Jacob and Esau had become two great nations which had long histories. Therefore, God said that He loved Jacob because of the fact that He knew what was in Jacob’s heart. He knew that here was a man who had a desire for Him and that Esau did not have a desire for Him at all. But it had to be worked out in fifteen hundred years of history before God was prepared to make the kind of statement He makes here in Malachi. We need to understand that the difference here between loving and hating is simply that the life of the nation that came from Esau, which is Edom, and the life of the nation which came from Jacob, which is Israel, demonstrate that God was right when He said that He loved one and hated the other.
All this reveals something that we need to face up to today. We have majored so much on the love of God. Do you know that if God loves, God also hates—because you cannot love without hating? As someone has said, love and hate are very close together. If God loves the good, He has to hate the evil—it couldn’t be otherwise—and that is exactly what we find here. The histories of the nation of Israel and the nation of Edom are altogether different. God says that because of Esau’s life, because of the evil which was inherent in this man and which worked itself out into the nation of Edom, He is justified in making this statement."
McGee, J. Vernon: Thru the Bible Commentary. electronic ed. Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 1997, c1981, S. 3:993
