God Hated Esau?
I am having a hard time with the issue of free will and God’s sovereignty. I believe in both. I am going through Romans 9. and I know Paul is talking about choosing the Nation of Israel (Jacob) and not Edom (Esau). I have listened to all the podcasts but still, I can’t lean towards Calvinism. (Am I really saying that? I never thought that I would be saying that!) I followed men once. NEVER AGAIN. Help me!
—VIA TEXT
Response: The argument about Calvinism vs Arminianism is endless, it seems. I agree with you; I will never identify myself by an “ism” again. Someone’s systematic theology does not define my belief as the Bible reveals truth. Just by way of background, though, I found this overview which seems quite fair about the two at GotQuestions.org. https://www.gotquestions.org/Calvinism-vs-Arminianism.html
I have found it much safer and easier to understand if I just read what Scripture says. What Paul is doing in Romans is an argument which flows from God’s covenants. I have never seen anyone defend either Calvinism or Arminianism from the perspective of the biblical covenants—but the covenants are what shed the light on Paul’s arguments.
Calvinism generally tries to explain God’s election and choice on the basis of simply His sovereign right to choose some for salvation and to choose others for destruction regardless of a person’s personal decision. Yet the Bible doesn’t describe this kind of system. Ephesians 1 is the classic description of God’s election and predestination—and Paul is clear that God’s choice of the saved occurred in Him before “the foundation of the world”. But HOW this happened we aren’t told. So typical Calvinism says people are born predestined to be saved or lost without any consideration for their own responses to God. In other words, they say that the lost are born pre-determined NOT to respond. Yet Scripture doesn’t say this.
In Romans 9 Paul makes an argument for God’s choice by using a variety of Old Testament promises as the evidence that He sovereignly chooses who and when He will call His people. The first thing that helped me understand these Old Testament quotes was hearing commentator Tony Garland on SpiritandTruth.org showing how Paul’s quotes of God’s promises to Israel in Hosea and Isaiah were not being re-applied to the gentiles now in the new covenant because Israel had refused to accept Jesus and thus lost their right to God’s promises to be His people. On the contrary, Paul’s quoting those promises was doing TWO things: it was re-affirming God’s covenant promises to Israel and also explaining that God had another layer of fulfillment to those promises: the inclusion of the gentiles. Paul was not saying God was done with Israel and had moved on the gentiles, calling gentiles/the church His people instead of Israel. Paul was, rather, re-affirming that those promises were STILL applying to the remnant of Israel but that there was also a NEW application to believing gentiles. God was still going to call Israel His people—but He was also opening that promise to include believing gentiles. The mystery of the church was being revealed now, and believing gentiles are being included in God’s promises to call “not my people”—MY PEOPLE.
This promise, that God had said He would call apostate Israel “my people” one day and that this promise cannot be broken is based on God’s covenant promises to ABRAHAM. And we find that God’s promises to Abraham can actually be traced clear back to His promise to Eve, that He was bringing a chosen, holy Seed into the world to redeem His fallen creatures, the human race, the descendants of Adam.
When Paul quotes Exodus, saying (v. 15) that God has mercy on whom He chooses to have mercy and compassion on whom He chooses, He is building his argument on God’s declaration of His own purposes and sovereign foreknowledge after Israel worshiped the golden calf and Moses broke the covenant tablets. God was not going with Moses and Israel after they defied Him because they pleaded or because Moses pleaded but because God sovereignly chooses His people and keeps His sovereign promises.
God covenanted with Abraham that he would have a son of promise, that the promised son Isaac would yield descendants who would become a great nation who would inherit the land and through whom the world would be blessed. God was keeping that promise when He told Moses He would go with him in spite of Israel’s apostasy. He wasn’t going with them because Israel repented or because Israel asked for Him to go; He was going because Moses the mediator said he needed God to go with them—and God will go because He has unconditionally promised Abraham that He was making his offspring a nation, and He had sovereignly chosen to make the nation of Israel and He would not abandon them. All this was ON THE BASIS OF HIS OWN CHOICE, not on the basis of their fickle hearts and fragile promises.
All of these promises, which Paul says were a mystery hidden in God prior to His revelation of them, were eternal realities, and His unconditional covenant promises to Abraham are the basis of His saying He has mercy on whom He has mercy and He hates and hardens whom He will. So when He says He has loved Jacob and hated Esau, God is not saying He has made Esau unable to believe God, and He is not saying He made Jacob unable to distrust Him. Rather He is affirming His eternal, unconditional covenant promises to Abraham which began to reveal the way He would bring about the promised holy Seed to redeem humanity. Paul is doing his best to explain God’s eternal covenant promises that cannot be broken. He is not making statements about man’s depravity, partial depravity, or unconditional election per se. He is simply arguing and explaining that God’s promises cannot be broken.
When we lay the reality of our universal natural spiritual death over these accounts (as Paul explains our spiritual death in Ephesians 2:1–3 and in Romans 3:9–18), we see that there is NO ONE—not even those God calls to specific callings, such as Moses or Abraham or Paul—no one who is born with a predisposition to choose God. Every single person ever born is born dead in sin. Every person ever born must respond to God, and Jesus said no one comes to Him unless the Father draws him (Jn. 6:44). Peter tells us that God is not willing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance (2 Pet. 3:9). These texts alone—plus all the texts that call us to BELIEVE—reveal that God makes Himself known to all mankind.
The question of HOW these two things can both be true is never explained. Arminians say God’s foreknowledge is based on His knowing beforehand who will choose Him. Yet this explanation makes man the driver, the determiner of personal salvation. Each person has to exercise his own free will to say YES or NO to God. Yet Scripture tells us that salvation is of the Lord, not of our choice or decision.
What we are left with is an apparent paradox: two things that cannot be resolved. Scripture never tells us how to resolve them, even though they appear to contradict each other. That leaves us having to believe that both are true, that God sovereignly chooses, elects, and predestines His own, and each person ever born has God’s own revelation of Himself as Romans 1:18–22 explains. Each person must either believe or refuse to believe. And each person’s belief is enabled by the Father’s drawing him to Jesus. In other words, we literally hold two apparently contradictory perspectives as true at the same time, accepting the fact that from God’s perspective, these things do not contradict. They only appear to contradict from our perspective because we cannot see eternity. Our perspectives are limited.
But back to Romans 9. Paul is affirming God’s covenant promises. He chose the promised seed before Abraham had Isaac; He chose Jacob before Jacob and Esau were born. It was not dependent upon either of their choices or decisions. It was God’s own choice. And as far as God “hated” Esau goes, that is not a statement of emotion but of God’s sovereign choice that Esau would not be the recipient of His covenant promises. Importantly, God’s “hating” Esau does not mean that Esau had no choice as to whether or not to believe God. We aren’t told whether or not he did. We are told that he ended up not retaliating to Jacob, and the two made an amicable agreement to respect each other’s boundaries and borders for their descendants. So God’s choice of Jacob was a covenant choice, not a statement of whether or not Esau would be eternally lost. But God sovereignly covenanted that His provision of seed, land, and blessing for Abraham’s descendants would come through Jacob, not through Esau. Jacob was the line God established to bring about His covenant promises to Abraham and to bring about the promised Seed who would redeem the world.
There is mystery here that God has not revealed to us. Calvinism and Arminianism do not explain our only options when we look at this. Calvinism and Arminianism are systems derived and codified AFTER Calvin lived. Calvin himself did not systematize Calvinism, and if we read Calvin’s works, they don’t sound like what we have been told is “Calvinism”. These two systems seem to function mostly within the framework of “covenant theology”, not within a biblical framework that sees the covenants named in the Bible as the ways we understand God’s plans, purposes, and promises.
My suggestion is that we let go of the “systems” and “isms” and read the ways Paul explains salvation and God’s faithfulness. He is meticulous in His use of the Old Testament to explain new covenant reality, and when he quotes the Old Testament, he is both affirming the original promises as well as explaining the new covenant revelation of God’s inclusion of believing gentiles in His covenant promises on the basis of Jesus’ blood.
We really can’t explain the “HOW” of God’s eternal choice and election, but Paul affirms that they are true—on the basis of God Himself and the fact that His word cannot be broken. At the same time, we are individuals asked to believe Him. We are never asked to understand the mysteries He does not reveal, but we are asked to believe what He promises and says.
So, I say, let go of the tyranny of the “isms”. Calvinism is never taught as a system in Scripture, and neither is Arminianism. Rather, God has revealed His covenants that He has sovereignly made and guaranteed. He has made His eternal promises, and we can believe every word we read in Scripture using His own revelation of His purposes and covenants as the framework for understanding the theological structure of His faithfulness and of our need to believe and trust Him. †
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