Albert Barnes Commentary Malachi 1:2

"I have loved you, saith Jehovah. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob`s brother, saith Jehovah: yet I loved Jacob;" — Malachi 1:2 (ASV)

I have loved you, says the Lord. What a volume of God’s relationship to us is contained in these simple words: "I have loved you." God would not speak this way unless He still loved. "I have loved and I do love you" is the force of the words. When? And since when? In all eternity God loved; in all our past, God loved. Tokens of His love, past or present, in good or seeming ill, are but an outflow of that everlasting love. He, the Unchangeable, has always loved, as the apostle of love says, we love Him, because He first loved us (1 John 4:19).

The deliverance from the bondage of Egypt; making them His special people; the adoption, the covenant, the giving of the Law, the service of God, and His promises (Romans 9:4); all the various mercies involved in these; the feeding with manna; the deliverance from their enemies whenever they returned to Him; their recent restoration; the gift of the prophets—all these were so many individual pulses of God’s everlasting love, uniform in itself, yet manifold in its manifestations.

But it is more than a declaration of His everlasting love. "I have loved you," God would say, with "a special love, a more than ordinary love, with greater tokens of love than to others." So God brings to the penitent soul the thought of its ingratitude: I have loved you—I, you. And you have said, Wherein have You loved us? It is a characteristic of Malachi to exhibit in all its nakedness human ingratitude. This is the one voice of all people’s complaints, ignoring all God’s past and present mercies, in view of the one thing which He withholds, though they dare not put it into words: Wherein have You loved us? Within a while they forgot His works, and the wonders that He had showed them (Psalms 78:11); they made haste, they forgot His works (Psalms 106:13).

Was not Esau Jacob’s brother! says the Lord: and I loved Jacob, and Esau I have hated.

"While they were still in their mother’s womb, before any good or evil deeds of either, God said to their mother, The older shall serve the younger (Genesis 25:23). The hatred was not a proper and formed hatred (for God could not hate Esau before he sinned) but only a lesser love," which, in comparison to the great love for Jacob, seemed as if it were not love.

"So it says, The Lord saw that Leah was hated (Genesis 29:31); where Jacob’s neglect of Leah, and lesser love for her than for Rachel, is called hatred—yet Jacob did not literally hate Leah, whom he loved and cared for as his wife."

This greater love was shown in preferring the Jews to the Edomites, giving to the Jews His law, Church, temple, prophets, and subjecting Edom to them, and especially in the recent deliverance. "He does not speak directly of predestination, but of pre-election, to temporal goods." God gave both nations alike over to the Chaldeans for the punishment of their sins; but the Jews He brought back, Edom He left unrestored.