Malachi 1:2

⁸“But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham my friend, ⁹you whom I have taken hold of from the ends of the earth, and called from its corners, and said to you, ‘You are my servant. I have chosen you and have not cast you away.’

³The LORD appeared of old to me, saying, “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore I have drawn you with loving kindness.

¹⁵Only the LORD had a delight in your fathers to love them, and he chose their offspring after them, even you above all peoples, as it is today.

¹⁰Not only so, but Rebekah also conceived by one, by our father Isaac. ¹¹For being not yet born, neither having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him who calls,^12[+] it was said to her, “The elder will serve the younger.”¹³Even as it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

⁴Since you have been precious and honored in my sight, and I have loved you, therefore I will give people in your place, and nations instead of your life.

⁷From the days of your fathers you have turned away from my ordinances and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the LORD of Armies. “But you say, ‘How shall we return?’

⁸Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me! But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In tithes and offerings.

⁸When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the children of men, he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the children of Israel. ⁹For the LORD’s portion is his people. Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. ¹⁰He found him in a desert land, in the waste howling wilderness. He surrounded him. He cared for him. He kept him as the apple of his eye. ¹¹As an eagle that stirs up her nest, that flutters over her young, he spread abroad his wings, he took them, he bore them on his feathers. ¹²The LORD alone led him. There was no foreign god with him. ¹³He made him ride on the high places of the earth. He ate the increase of the field. He caused him to suck honey out of the rock, oil out of the flinty rock; ¹⁴butter from the herd, and milk from the flock, with fat of lambs, rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the finest of the wheat. From the blood of the grape, you drank wine.

⁶For you are a holy people to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, above all peoples who are on the face of the earth. ⁷The LORD didn’t set his love on you nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all peoples; ⁸but because the LORD loves you, and because he desires to keep the oath which he swore to your fathers, the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

³⁷Because he loved your fathers, therefore he chose their offspring after them, and brought you out with his presence, with his great power, out of Egypt;

¹³“Your words have been harsh against me,” says the LORD. “Yet you say, ‘What have we spoken against you?’ ¹⁴You have said, ‘It is vain to serve God,’ and ‘What profit is it that we have followed his instructions and that we have walked mournfully before the LORD of Armies?