Sovereign Love

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.

God does not grade on a curve. If He did, Esau might have passed. Jacob, on the other hand, certainly would have failed, as he conned his father into placing the blessing on him rather than on his older brother. According to cultural traditions, Esau deserved God’s blessing. Yet God does not bestow grace on those who seem to deserve it. If one’s righteousness were the condition for God’s grace, no one would enter the kingdom. All would experience separation from Him in a Christless place called hell if grace were based on human response to God’s righteous conditions. But that is what is so amazing about grace! The point is not that God loved Jacob more than Esau, but that He desired to make a covenant with Jacob instead of Esau. Consequently, the reason why election is referred to in Malachi 1 is not to create a sense of exclusion. Instead, election is deployed by the prophet to comfort and reassure the people of God.

God’s electing love is not based on performance, position, or power. It’s based on His prerogative. The input you have in election is the same input you had in choosing your parents, the country you were born in, or the city in which you were raised. In the same way, the Jewish audience of Malachi had done nothing to deserve God’s grace and love. But they had it!

God’s rejection of Edom is a response to their wickedness. There is a contrast in the text between wicked Edom and blessed Israel. Since the Edomites demonstrated pride, arrogance, and violence, God is considered righteous by the prophet in His harsh punishment of the nation. The nations will experience two closely connected penalties for their unrighteousness: (1) The land will be destroyed and left completely uninhabited by humans. (2) The land will be possessed by the demonic (i.e., cursed) (Utley, “Study Bible Commentary”). The Edomites, descendants of Esau, were destined for destruction. One commentator expresses it this way:

Esau’s descendants would be excluded as a nation from that special electing love that would belong to Israel. God’s choosing Jacob and his descendants meant that he established a permanent relationship with Israel as a whole, in which he would instruct them with truth, train them with righteousness, care for them with compassion, bless them with goodness, and discipline them with severity; regardless of how often they strayed from him, he would be faithful to them by his grace until his work in them was complete and “all Israel” (Rom 11:26, referring back to true Israel in Rom 9:6) would enjoy the righteousness, peace, and joy that come from knowing God (Jer 33; Ezek 36; Acts 13:16-41; Rom 9–11). (Clendenen, “Malachi,” 253)

Malachi’s prophecy comes to fruition when the Nabataean Arabs force the Edomites to settle in Idumea between 550 and 400 BC (Du Plessis, “Getting to Know,” 209). Tensions would continue between the people of Jacob/Israel and the people of Esau/Edom. In 37 BC Herod the Great, an Idumean, began to rule the nation of Israel as a client-ruler of the Roman Empire (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 12.8). The Romans appointed Herod over the land because they recognized the ancestral relationship between Idumea and Israel but did not understand the situation fully. The story of Jacob and Esau is played out in miniature in the interaction between Jesus and Herod. No wonder Herod, the Roman appointee, was worried when he heard of the One “born king of the Jews” (Matt 2:2). Like Jacob, Jesus was chosen by God. Herod was not!

God’s love for Israel should not be left to speculation. He pointed the people to a historical event to prove His love: the people of God had been brought back from Babylonian captivity while the land of Edom remained in perpetual ruin.

Reading about the suffering and destruction of God’s people, you may ask, “How do I know God loves me?” The answer to this question now, as in Malachi’s day, is found in a historical and historic event, the cross of Jesus Christ. Romans 5:8 declares, “God proves His own love for us.” How? “In that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The cross stands as a historical landmark to the bold declaration with which Malachi opens his prophecy: God has loved us. Jesus Christ is the pinnacle display of God’s sovereign love.

Like Israel, God’s love for us is an electing love that places the initiative with God. Scripture says that we were once wayward in sin, unable to save ourselves. We were alienated from God (Col 1:21), dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1-2), blinded by the enemy (2 Cor 4:3), morally bankrupt (Gen 8:21), and defiled in our bodies (Rom 1:24-25). Yet God saw our condition and initiated our adoption. Ephesians 1:3-6 states,

Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens. For He chose us in Him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ for Himself, according to His favor and will, to the praise of His glorious grace that He favored us with in the Beloved.

Election, then, is a biblical expression of God’s love for us in Christ. Election is meant to humble us, remove boasting, remove entitlement, remove pride, and eradicate self-reliance.

God’s love is unconditional. The nation of Israel did nothing to deserve election or salvation from slavery, and, in the same way, you did nothing to deserve His love. Even when we stray, He runs to meet us, just as the loving father did in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). The father of the wayward son, who represents God in the story, ran to embrace his repentant son, even though the son had asked for his inheritance early (which was tantamount to telling his father, “Hurry up and die already!”) and had squandered it! There was no way that the son could have paid his father back, nor did the father wish him to! He wanted nothing but reciprocal love from his son, and this is all God wants from us. We can do nothing good to persuade Him to love us more. Neither can we do anything wrong to make Him love us any less. No one will ever love you like God loves you (1 John 4:9, 19) and the only proper response is to love Him back.