I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau.
Romans 9:13 

There are over thirty thousand verses in the Bible. Many of them we adore and memorize. Some of them confuse us. And still others unsettle us. For many Christians, Romans 9:13 is a verse that both confuses and unsettles. 

There are at least two reasons why this verse may bother us. For starters, we just don’t like the language of God hating people. Give me “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16) or “God proves his own love for us” (Romans 5:8), but “I have hated Esau”? What am I supposed to do with that? 

More troubling, though, is that in the surrounding context, Paul makes it crystal clear that God’s love and hate has nothing to do with anything that Jacob and Esau did. Instead, God hated Esau before the twins “were born or had done anything good or bad” (Romans 9:11, NIV). God is therefore not reacting to anything in Esau when we read that He “hated Esau.” Which seems to leave us with an uncomfortable conclusion: God chose to hate Esau for no reason. And that just feels cruel, arbitrary, and deeply unfair to Esau. 

But is that really what Paul is saying?

While “love” and “hate” are often used today to refer to strong emotions which arise as a reaction to something (e.g., “I love this about you” or “I hated when that happened,” etc.), that’s not always how the Bible uses those terms. In Luke 14:26, for example, Jesus says that if we want to be His disciple we have to “hate” our father and mother. But He can’t mean something like “despise” or “detest.” Otherwise, Jesus would be telling us to disobey the fifth commandment (“Honor your father and your mother”). Plus, in Matthew 10:27, Jesus’s warning is that we would not love our parents more than Him (implying that we should love our parents!). To be Jesus’s disciple, then, requires us not to detest our parents but rather to be even more devoted to Jesus than we are to them. 

In the context of Romans 9, God’s “love” for Jacob seems to be a reference to God’s choice to let Jacob inherit the promises made to Abraham. In Genesis 12:1–7, God appeared to Abraham and promised to give him numerous descendants, to give them the land of Canaan, and to bless all the nations of the earth through them. After Abraham’s death, Isaac inherited these promises (Genesis 26:3–4). Since Esau was technically Isaac’s firstborn, it would have been expected that he would be the next one to inherit these promises. Instead, God chose Jacob as the one to inherit them—“chose” being the meaning behind “loved” in Romans 9:13. 

What Paul is saying in Romans 9:13, then, is simply that God chose Jacob, but not Esau. “Love” and “hate” refer to actions taken by God, not His reasons for taking those actions. In other words, it’s not that God chose Jacob because He loved him and rejected Esau because He hated him; rather, “love” means “chose” and “hated” means “didn’t choose.” 

Romans 9:13 is but one verse in a larger argument that Paul is making: God is free to act as He chooses, and we will not always understand why He acts the way He does. Regardless, we can be certain that God is just. And we can take comfort knowing that no one who turns to Him in faith will ever be turned away (John 6:37).

Additional Resources for Understanding God’s Word:

A Year in the Bible | 4 Volume Bundle		In Christ Alone | Romans Bible Study		The Theology Handbook		The Attributes of God Bible Study
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