Divine Hatred and Human Ingratitude Run Their Course

The oracle of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi. “I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you say, “How have you loved us?” “Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.” If Edom says, “We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins,” the LORD of hosts says, “They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called ‘the wicked country,’ and ‘the people with whom the LORD is angry forever.’” Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the LORD beyond the border of Israel!”

Malachi 1:1-5

The proper title “Malachi” is from the word angel (מֲלְאָךְ) with the first person possessive ending. Taken in a woodenly literal way it would be “my messenger.” As such, modern scholars will offer their theories as to whether or not this refers to a literal individual.1 That 3:1 uses the same expression to signify the Messenger to come also points to an individual type. Even the word for oracle (מַשָּׂא) is diverse, often meaning “burden,” so that some translations will opt for this.

Why does this book at the end of the Old Testament begin with Jacob and Esau—two characters from its first book, Genesis? In the case of Jacob, the answer is easy for anyone who keeps reading the Scriptures after Genesis. Jacob is synonymous with Israel. Often they are used interchangeably to speak of the whole nation as if one man. In the case of Esau, his name also came to stand for a whole people group, his descendants, the Edomites—because “Edom” sounds like the Hebrew for red, the color of the stew that Esau purchased in exchange for his birthright.2

Esau despised the LORD’s inheritance, but this is a book about Jacob despising the LORD’s inheritance. So, in a sense, Jacob is about to be placed in the dock beginning with a “post-mortem” of Edom, to show Jacob that this end of the reprobate is what their hearts and actions are currently like.

Doctrine. Since God’s hate for man’s ingratitude runs its course, let us turn from the heritage of the reprobate.

• • God’s Decree is Perfect

  • Esau’s Heritage is Hopeless

  • Jacob’s Question is Disingenuous

God’s Decree is Perfect

The decree in question is predestination. Predestination to salvation has two sides: election and reprobation. The first, election, refers to God’s choice to save whomever He wills; the second, reprobation, refers to God’s passing over those whom He does not will to save. The Apostle Paul cites this very passage in his central treatment of this doctrine in Romans 9.

As it is written, “‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated’” (Rom. 9:13; vv. 2c-3a)

Here, Esau is the main focus, which means that reprobation is the main focus. Therefore, we must see that God’s decree of reprobation is perfect in four main respects: (i.) in its invincibility; (ii.) in its right; (iii.) in its explanation; and (iv.) and in its attribution of hate.

God’s decree is perfect in its invincibility. What God decrees cannot fail to be accomplished: “no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2); “and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Dan. 4:35)

God’s decree is perfect in its right. “The LORD is righteous in all his ways” (Ps. 145:17); “his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice” (Deut. 32:4). In that same place in Romans 9, Paul answers this head on:

But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Rom. 9:20-21)

God’s decree is perfect in its explanation. In other words, all reasons for human action—ultimate or proximate, primary or secondary—these all fit together as an unfolding of the decree: “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps … The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Prov. 16:9, 33). Peter makes this same confession of an all-encompassing decree in his prayer.

for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place (Acts 4:27-28).

God’s decree is perfect in its manifestation of hate. This is a most difficult doctrine for obvious reasons, and also for reasons that require years of study in Scholastic theology. And for those who understand that issue, I use the word “manifestation” for that reason. Let’s stick to the more obvious difficulty. How is hate compatible with the God who the Scriptures describe as love? Our first business is to settle that this is indeed what Scripture says. For instance: “you hate all evildoers” (Ps. 5:5); “his soul hates the wicked” (Ps. 11:5). The other word that the Bible frequently employs for divine hatred is abomination (תּוֹעֵבַה), that is an object of disgust, and it is true that in the majority of those uses, the object of God’s hatred is a wicked practice. Yet we become what we practice: “for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD” (Deut. 18:12).

Some will try to find away out of the implications here by supposing that “hate” here really means a lack of love or a lesser love3—a kind of passing over, but with the affections. He did not love Esau in quite the same kind, or to quite the same degree. Others press the covenantal context of both terms—love (אָהַב) and hate (שָׂנֵא)—so that their primary reference falls back to choice and rejection;4 but choice and rejection of what and to what ultimate end? But these remedies meant to offer relief in our day will be of no consolation whatsoever on Judgment Day.5 At any rate, the following statement about being indignant with them forever is not hypothetical and logically rules out the possibility of a lesser love leaving any hope.

Esau’s Heritage is Hopeless

Esau was left an inheritance for a time—and that is the key, it was a temporal good, not evidence that Esau had an eternal hope after all. So, that time had run out: ‘I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert’ (v. 3b). This is stated in the past tense because, well, it was. Their downfall was prophesied in Jeremiah 49:7-22.6 Lest anyone think that Esau represented them and it is not fair to the descendants, the prophet Obadiah tells us that they committed a “violence” against “your brother Jacob … On the day that you stood aloof, on the day that strangers [Babylon] carried off his wealth and foreigners entered his gates” (vv. 10, 11). Beyond that, it says, they gloated, and rejoiced, and boasted at the downfall of Jacob; and they “looted his wealth … cut off [those who tried to escape] … [and handed] over his survivors” (vv. 13, 14). They were traitors and murderers in every respect.

A further divine determination is added:

If Edom says, “We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins,” the LORD of hosts says, “They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called ‘the wicked country,’ and ‘the people with whom the LORD is angry forever’” (v. 4).

This may strike you as the worst example of insult to injury. Worse yet is the careless reader that may hear in this “rebuilding project” a kind of return to God. That would be most absurd. Since the reference is to the destruction of their people group and their place in the land, such a hypothetical rebuilding would be of the same. It is a temporal heritage. The heritage of the reprobate does not include God in its thoughts. 

To say, then, that his heritage is “hopeless” must mean that he hopes not. It is not that he would hope, but finds none. It is that he cares nothing for that which one ought to truly hope. He brushes it off. The truth is that we think God’s hate is a passive thing, because that evil in ourselves which we would justify poses as a passive thing. It shows up as ingratitude, or indifference.

Yet God has wrath for the sinner’s “passive-aggressive” war against Him.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth (Rom. 1:18).

Esau’s great sin did not make the people of Edom named after “red” because he made the ground run red with blood, but because he chose a bowl of red soup. His sin was passive, on the surface. He didn’t scream at God so much as he sighed and turned his head and rolled his eyes at God. These are the sins of the priests in this book.

Jacob’s Question is Disingenuous

Look at God’s stance toward them and then look even more carefully and slowly at their question back: “I have loved you,”7 says the LORD. But you say, “How have you loved us?” (v. 2) In what tone do you read that question back? They might as well have said, “Who are you again?” One commentator guesses that even if this question is “not in actual words, this reaction may be assumed in the mind and acts of the people … [and very likely] found in ‘the protesting and questioning cries of the hecklers, when he first delivered his message on the streets.’”8

God is even so gracious as to point to another mighty work, perhaps on the same level as the exodus from Egypt or their return from Babylon. He hints at something like this with the last detail: ‘Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the LORD beyond the border of Israel!” (v. 5) It is their own eyes and they shall say. The covenant people shall be rescued in the end. But this even greater deliverance will be BEYOND THE BORDER OF ISRAEL.

Are Jacob and Esau so different? Not at all. Apart from Christ, apart from a work of the Spirit on the people God has chosen—Jacob would be in the same place as Esau. The only difference between them that could be good news lies in the words that they should cling to: “I have loved you” (v. 2). One commentator even suggested the “have” here references before time, in the other side of the decree, namely election from eternity.9 This made all the difference from the beginning of Israel’s adoption by God:

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt (Deut. 7:7-8).

This made the only difference at the root. When it comes to their natural, fallen indifference, there is no difference at all. Esau despised his birthright all in one day, in one glance into a bowl of stew: Jacob despised his birthright day after day, year after year, after being rescued once from the house of Pharaoh, and then twice, now from captivity in Babylon.

A true Israel to come must be the opposite of this indifference. Only a faithful Substitute for God’s people explains why they will not be judged with the reprobate, as only Jesus’s prayer for Peter made the difference between that traitor Peter, and the other traitor, Judas. So it would be here with two peoples. In Lamentations, even as the city was being sacked in the century before:

The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter of Zion, is accomplished; he will keep you in exile no longer; but your iniquity, O daughter of Edom, he will punish; he will uncover your sins (Lam. 4:22).

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. I mentioned that there were some less obvious reasons for the difficulty in the doctrine of divine hated. One that is better left for the written form of this sermon and only for the advanced student in theology has to do with whether we can speak of hatred in God properly or improperly. The Scholastics—both before and after the Reformation—spoke of hate in relation to God as real ad extra, but as metaphorical ad intra. The clearest reason was given by Aquinas: “Because as love is related to good, so is hatred to evil.”10 Consider that God is good, and that all evil is outside of Him. That means that before God created anything else, there was nothing to hate, but there was the greatest object of love. Few would deny that love is greater than hate.

There are two extreme errors meant to resolve this. Either love is greater than hate in the essence of God—in which case, something in God’s essence is greater than something else in God’s essence, which implies a God made of parts or else multiple gods. That is off limits. The opposite extreme error is to deny the reality of wrath. If wrath is not in God, one infers, then wrath is not of God. God in no sense “has” wrath. However, the Scriptures already cited are plain that the wrath of God is real.

Use 2. Correction. Divine hatred has a course. That is because the wrath of God, like His mercy, are relations that we ascribed to manifestations of His holiness, His justice, and His love, so that these are not of the essence of God in Himself. Wrath presupposes an object of wrath—but in God, in eternity, there is nothing but what is eternally blessed. Outside of God, wrath is unleashed from holiness, as the Scripture compares God in His wrath to a fire that “breaks out” in the camp.

As the sun that poetically “runs its course with joy” (Ps. 19:5), so the wrath of God rises in time, and it runs its course with righteous indignation. Against what? Here, it is against a passive despising of God, which is a hatred of God. He says,

for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me (Ex. 20:5)

Back behind our outrage at the hatred of God is our denial of man’s hatred of God; and this denial is itself a portion of that hatred.

Use 3. Exhortation. Let us rebuild! Note the contrast between the wicked country raising its fist up to God’s decree and determining to rebuild. This in spite of God’s superior declaration that He will demolish it again. All such Babels will be knocked down in historical succession. But is it not fitting, by way of contrast, that Malachi is the last book in our Christian canon, and that the last book in the Hebrew canon, namely, the Chronicles, ends with the summons for a good rebuild? It came through the lips of the pagan king—God making His decree through the lower:

Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up’ (2 Chron. 36:23).

Let us not rebuild with the Babylonian mob what was fundamentally a national rebellion against the true God, though it call drape the American flag over its latest godless tower! Let us rebuild that which Nehemiah saw smoldering back in his true home; let us repopulate the pulpits to which Ezra so burdened himself to make a study and teach others the same; and let us return to our fathers and embrace the wives of our youth, as this prophet will go on to address. The problem is not rebuilding per se; but what are we working on such that it would last forever?

Use 4. Consolation and Admonition. In the context of that most famous line of Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon hope all ye that enter here,” it is a personification of the gates of hell. It speaks and tells of its most primal causes—causes that can only be in God: four divine attributes.

Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.11

Love.

Justice I understand as its cause. Power makes sense. Wisdom as well. Other divine attributes could have been mentioned; but Dante understood that, given the fall, divine love requires hate—not in love itself, not intrinsically, but extrinsically. If the enemies of love should threaten God’s children: if they should steal our greatest good, then such a being as God is, such a fountain of all love, must drown all such obstacles between the beloved and His love. And it is this raging, rushing tide that is hatred divine.

This word is given to us through the prophet Malachi that we would turn from hating these living waters, lest we be drown in them.

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1. The Targum’s reference, “Whose name is called Ezra, the scribe,” is cited: cf. Pieter A Verhoef, The Books of Haggai and Malachi (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 187.

2. Genesis 25:25; 26:30-34.

3. cf. Theodore Laetsch, Commentary on the Minor Prophets (Concordia, 1956), 512.

4. cf. Eugene H. Merrill, An Exegetical Commentary: Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994), 391.

5. C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch take the opposite, and correct in my judgement, position: “The verbs אָהַב, to love, and שָׂנֵא to hate, must not be weakened down into loving more and loving less, to avoid the danger of falling into the doctrine of predestination.” — Commentary on the Old Testament, Volume X (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 430.

6. Babylon made an end of Edom in 553 B.C., just a few decades after their treachery against Judah in 586.

7. It is suggest that, “The Hebrew perfect may also be rendered in the present tense, ‘I love you.’” (Verhoef, The Books of Haggai and Malachi, 193). Let us grant the possibility. Would this change the role that Jacob’s question plays? Not a bit. Indeed, it would only add to their ingratitude if God should presently express that He is still very much intent on their good, and yet their response is that which is reflected in the rest of this book.

8. Verhoef, The Books of Haggai and Malachi, 198.

9. Ronald Hanko, The Coming of Zion’s Redeemer: The Prophecies of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi (Jenison, MI: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2014), 420-21.

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I.96.1.

11. Dante, Inferno, Canto iii.