“As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.'”  (ESV)

This verse has given interpreters and readers a lot of trouble over the centuries.  The biggest reason for this is that somewhere along the line the basic understanding of the ideas of love and hate changed to be in line with how we think about them today.  We most often think of love and hate as emotions.  In the Scriptures, though, they are both decisions of the will that have less to do with how someone is feeling about the object of the decision than about their intentions toward them.  More specifically, to love someone throughout the Scriptures is to choose them.  To hate someone is to not choose them.  The reasons for these choices may be many, but it is choice, not emotion, that is the basic idea. 

In this case, God chose Jacob, and not Esau, to be the one through whom He was going to work out His plans to bring His Messiah to bear.  This didn’t have anything to do with Jacob himself.  God simply chose him.  He could have chosen Esau just as easily, but He didn’t.  We could analyze this choice and the reasons behind it to death, but the simple fact is that God doesn’t tell us why He chose this way and so we don’t know.

Furthermore, this was not somehow unfair of God to choose one over the other as some might allege.  Genetically speaking, for Him to bring a single individual to bear, He was going to have to choose a single ancestral line.  One person can’t come from two genetic lines in a single family.  That’s not how He designed biology to work.  What’s more, it is not unfair because the whole purpose of His choosing one of them was so that He could reveal Himself more fully and offer eternal life to everybody.

This last part is the key.  God’s plan has always been to reveal Himself to everybody so that everybody can be in a right relationship with Him and experience the life He offers.  Rather than just forcing Himself on us, though, He chose the path of love.  That path is a lot harder and often more winding, but in the end, the life is offers is much sweeter because we have chosen it ourselves.  He chose so that we could too.  The only question now is how we will choose.