Does Jesus hate people because of their ancestry?

I have been involved in reaching out to Muslim people for over 35 years and, surprisingly often, I hear Christians talk as if descendants of Ishmael are cursed by God.

Few Muslims are actually descended from Ishmael, but I have often had to confront the idea that certain ancestries are less likely to be Christian – as if there is a genetic favouritism from the living God. I have even heard modern conflicts between Israel and Palestine framed as if one DNA is blessed by God whereas another is not.

Are some ancestries really more blessed by God than others? If we have certain genetics or DNA, does God love us more than others? Does God really show favouritism based on our genetics?

Few peoples get a worse press in the Bible than Edom. Obadiah’s whole prophecy is a charge sheet against them: “Because of the violence against your brother Jacob, you will be covered with shame; you will be destroyed forever” (Obad.v10). When Jerusalem burned, the Edomites did not weep for their brothers; they gloated, cheered the destruction on, and cut off the fugitives (Obad.v11-14).

Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel all take up the same case against Edom’s pride and cruelty (Isa.34v5-6; Jer.49v7-22; Ezek.25v12-14). Malachi condenses the verdict into the most unsettling sentence in the prophets: “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated” (Mal.1v2-3), and Paul quotes it in Romans 9v13. Many readers hear those words as the LORD’s decree over two individuals (and their descendants), one loved and one hated before either had drawn breath.

Jacob was the bearer of the gospel of Christ in that generation – not Esau. This decision to use the younger for the gospel goes against human culture and human pride. Esau was told that he would need to serve his younger brother. He found that very hard to do in his early life – and many of Esau’s descendants stood away from Jacob/Israel in their pride.

Remember what the words of Malachi were really about. “Jacob” and “Esau” in Malachi are Israel and Edom, the church and the peoples outside her. John Gill (the English Particular Baptist theologian) calls the hatred “a negative, not positive hatred” (Gill on Malachi 1v3) – not malice, but turning away from those outside the church towards those inside the church – away from Edom that had made itself the enemy of the people of grace. Edom’s rejection was Edom’s refusal: the refusal to receive the LORD’s blessing in the LORD’s way, through the younger brother, by faith rather than pride.

The proof that this was never about bloodline stands in the Law itself: “Do not despise an Edomite, for the Edomites are related to you … The third generation of children born to them may enter the assembly of the LORD” (Deut.23v7-8). Israel was commanded not to hate the very people the prophets condemned. Why? Because the ancient church was a missionary people, and the door stood open for any Edomite who would come down from the proud rock of Seir, own the God of Jacob, and take a place among His people. Their national behaviour showed that the Edomites were not the LORD’s people – but they could be.

The tragedy of Edom is that a nation offered the birthright despised it, generation after generation, exactly as their father had once despised it for a bowl of stew (Gen.25v34; Heb.12v16-17).

And yet Esau himself is a far more hopeful figure than his descendants.

Before the twins were born, the LORD declared their destiny: “The older will serve the younger” (Gen.25v23). Esau’s calling was to accept that Jacob, the younger, would carry the gospel blessings of Abraham in that generation – to submit to his scheming little brother and receive the blessing of the Promised Seed through him.

At first, he could not do it. After Jacob’s deception of their blind father, Esau nursed murder in his heart (Gen.27v41). But Hebrews tells us something easily missed: “By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come” (Heb.11v20). Isaac blessed both his sons, and the writer counts that double blessing an act of faith. How did Esau come to be blessed?

Twenty years after Jacob’s betrayal of Esau, Jacob limps towards the meeting he has dreaded for two decades, his droves of bribes strung out ahead of him, his careful speeches rehearsed. “But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms round his neck and kissed him. And they wept” (Gen. 33v4).

Every clause of that sentence reappears, in the wording of the Greek Old Testament, in the most famous homecoming the Lord Jesus ever described: the father who “ran to his son, threw his arms round him and kissed him” (Luke 15v20). It can hardly be an accident.

The Lord Jesus drew the welcome of the prodigal from Esau’s welcome of Jacob. Esau stands as the picture of warm-hearted, overflowing forgiveness: no terms, no history lesson, no repayment schedule, just the running embrace that makes Jacob’s rehearsed speeches look as foolish as the prodigal’s rehearsed speech and doubts.

Jacob himself says something incredible when he looks into the welcoming face of Esau: “To see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favourably” (Gen.33v10). Only the night before, at Peniel, Jacob had wrestled with God and seen His face – and lived. Now he sees the same face of forgiveness and grace shining out of the brother he cheated. When the wronged forgive freely, they show the world the face of God.

The man who once could not stomach the LORD’s choice of his younger brother has become the man in whom the LORD’s own welcome can be seen. Esau, the “Gentile” of the family, was converted – and the Lord Jesus referred back to Esau’s grace when He wanted to show sinners what the Father’s forgiveness looks like.

So Jacob and Esau do become representative figures – of Israel and the nations, of the church and those outside her, and Paul uses them exactly so in Romans 9. But the whole point of the choice of Jacob was that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen.12v3). Election was never a locked gate against the seeking soul; it is the LORD’s guarantee that His purpose of grace for the nations cannot fail. The line between “loved” and “hated” never ran along the bloodline – Esau the twin found grace, while many a son of Jacob perished in unbelief. It runs along the line of faith in the Promised Seed, the true Israel, the Lord Jesus Christ.

That is why we must be careful about reading the Old Testament as if salvation were a matter of racial identity – a misreading that spills over into modern politics all too easily. The Bible itself never reads it that way. The nation of Edom perished by its own settled contempt for grace; the individual Edomite was always welcome; and Esau himself, embracing the brother who wronged him, became a living portrait of the God who runs to meet returning prodigals. If the LORD could put His own welcome in the face of Esau, then no one reading these words stands outside the reach of that embrace.