Jacob Have I Loved, Esau Have I Hated

"The elder shall serve the younger" was simply a prophecy about the future. The prophecy was not in itself the sole reason for that outcome.

It's like, if you say the Titans are going to be beaten by the Sea Eagles next Saturday, it won't later mean there weren't reasons during their game why one team lost and the other won. It won't mean your statement was the sole reason why it happened. It just means you are smart and know the outcome.

And the statement, "Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated" is a statement that was made centuries after Jacob and Esau had both lived and died.

What was Paul's point? He was illustrating the principle that the present predominant outcome in the nation of Israel relative to the Gospel was not indicative of some failure in God's promises. Rather, in the same way that God had foreseen both positive and negative outcomes for Isaac's children, similarly God had also already foreseen (in the Scriptures of the Prophets) the present outcome (that many ethnic Jews were missing out on experiencing salvation while only a remnant of Jews were receiving it). The prophetic promises hadn't failed - God had already warned that this would be the case.

"The elder shall serve the younger" didn't mean there wouldn't be reasons on Jacob's part nor on Esau's part why one would gain the ascendancy over the other. (Even before birth, the babies were already struggling with each other in the womb! God's above statement came in response to a question from their mother Rebekah about this particular trait of the boys!) Similarly, Paul wasn't saying that the Jews' own unbelief had nothing to do with the outcome. That idea would be so foreign to Paul's design in His Epistle to the Romans. Paul was just illustrating that the Prophets themselves had written of this precise outcome.

In the same way that the Sovereign God had long expressed love to the descendants of Jacob rather than to the descendants of Esau because of the behaviors of their respective ancestors, just as He had foreseen before they were even born - similarly, some Jews were now experiencing their promised salvation while other Jews were missing out, due either to their faith or their unbelief, just as the Scriptures of the Prophets had foreseen would be the case.

Even if we take Paul to mean that God chose Jacob over Esau without any respect to what their actual behaviors would later be, it still brings out this point: that it is God's sovereign prerogative to make choices upon His own basis. And when it comes to saving a soul, what was that basis, according to what Paul had taught up to this point in the epistle to the Romans? Faith! Thus Paul was illustrating that we can't complain that God set faith as the prerequisite for obtaining the promises despite the ramifications of that for ethnic Jews who did not believe. The fact that the Jews were either experiencing or missing out based either on their faith or their unbelief, was an outcome that was no less supportive of the tenets of God's sovereignty, foreknowledge, promises, prophecies, plans, prerogative, covenants, His already stated set basis, and His mercy.