Does God Have Favourites? Divine Favouritism Examined

Question 2017. Does God practise divine favouritism, choosing to love some people more than others, or is that impression something we bring to the text rather than something the text actually teaches? I ask this because Scripture does describe God choosing Israel out of all the nations, calling David “a man after his own heart,” and letting John rest his head on Jesus’ chest as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Read carelessly, that looks like a God with pets.

Scripture, however, is direct on the point: God does not practise divine favouritism in the sense of loving certain people more because of their merit, status or background. What it does describe is God assigning particular roles, callings and privileges to particular people and nations for the sake of His larger purposes, without that ever meaning He values the excluded less as human beings made in His image.

The verses that rule out divine favouritism directly

Peter states it as a discovery that reshaped his whole ministry. Standing in Cornelius’ house, having just watched the gospel reach a Gentile household, he says, “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35). Paul makes the same point twice in Romans, “God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11), and James warns believers directly against showing prosopolempsia, literally “receiving the face,” favouring the wealthy visitor over the poor one in the assembly (James 2:1-4). If divine favouritism were how God actually operated, these commands would be asking believers to be more just than God Himself. Scripture never does that.

Then why does God choose some and not others?

This is where the real question lives. If God shows no favouritism, why does He choose Abraham out of Ur, Israel out of all the nations, David out of Jesse’s sons, the twelve out of Jesus’ many followers? The consistent biblical pattern is that God’s choices are choices of assignment, not choices of superior worth. Deuteronomy 7:7-8 could not be clearer about Israel specifically: “It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you.” God is explicit that His choice of Israel was not a reward for anything Israel brought to the table. It was grace attaching itself to weakness, not favouritism attaching itself to merit.

The same pattern holds with David. Samuel is told plainly, “the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). David was the youngest, the one left minding sheep while his brothers stood before the prophet. Being chosen was not proof of superior standing beforehand. It was God’s own right as King over all, exercised according to His own purposes, to select an instrument for a particular calling.

Israel’s election and the Church, held distinctly

My own dispensational framework matters here. Israel’s election is a call to a specific role within God’s redemptive plan, carrying real, unconditional promises that remain valid, “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29), but that role was never a statement that Gentiles mattered less to God. Genesis 12:3 makes the missionary purpose explicit from the very beginning: Abraham was blessed “so that in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Israel was chosen to be a channel, not a private reserve. Reading the Old Testament as evidence of divine favouritism misses the point of why Israel was chosen at all, to be a light to everyone else, which I explore further in my article on how the Trinity is present even in the Old Testament.

What about “the disciple Jesus loved”?

John’s repeated self-description in his Gospel troubles some readers the most, since it sounds like personal favouritism within Jesus’ own inner circle. I think the more accurate reading is that John is describing his own overwhelming, personal experience of Jesus’ love, not making a comparative claim that Jesus loved him more than Peter or James. The Gospels never show Jesus treating Peter, the most volatile and outspoken of the twelve, as loved any less. He restores him fully after the denial, three times asking “Do you love me?” to undo three denials (John 21:15-19). Different relationships within Jesus’ circle carried different textures, John’s quiet closeness, Peter’s boisterous loyalty, Thomas’s honest doubt, without any of it implying a hierarchy of how much Jesus actually loved each man.

It is worth noticing, too, that the wider New Testament pattern of gifting and calling reinforces this. 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 speaks of varieties of gifts, service and activities, all coming from the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God, distributed “to each one individually as he wills.” Paul’s whole point in that passage is that unequal distribution of gifts among believers was never meant to be read as unequal love. An eye is not more loved than a hand simply because it has a more visible function within the body.

Distinct roles are not divine favouritism

I find it helpful to separate two things that get run together. One is worth, how much God loves and values a person. Scripture is unbending here: every human being is made in God’s image, and Christ died for the whole world, not a favoured subset of it (John 3:16, 1 John 2:2), a point I set out more fully in my article on why an all-loving God does not simply save everyone. The other is calling, what particular role or task God assigns a person within His purposes. Callings are genuinely unequal. Not everyone is Abraham, not everyone is Moses, not everyone is Paul. But unequal calling has never, in Scripture, meant unequal love. A father who sends one child to run the family business and another to train as a doctor is not loving one more than the other. He is assigning roles suited to gifting and purpose.

What Paul’s own case shows about grace, not favouritism

Paul is a useful test case, because by his own admission he had less claim on God’s affection than almost anyone in the New Testament. He describes himself as having “persecuted the church of God” and calls himself “the very least of all the saints” and even, later, “the foremost” of sinners (1 Corinthians 15:9, Ephesians 3:8, 1 Timothy 1:15). If divine favouritism operated on merit, Paul would be near the bottom of the list, not near the top. Yet God appointed him apostle to the Gentiles, entrusted him with more of the New Testament than any other single writer, and used him to plant churches across the Mediterranean world. Paul himself draws the conclusion explicitly: “by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10). His calling was never a reward. It was grace landing on someone who had, by his own account, no claim to it whatsoever.

This is the same logic running underneath every example in this article, Israel, David, John, Paul. None of them were selected because they had earned a place ahead of others. Each was chosen according to God’s own purposes, for tasks suited to His larger plan, while His love for the people not chosen for those particular roles remained undiminished. Divine favouritism would require a competition for God’s affection with winners and losers. What Scripture actually describes is a King who assigns tasks freely while loving every one of His subjects without measure.

Why this matters for how you see yourself

I meet Christians who quietly assume God has favourites, and that they are not among them, usually because someone else’s ministry seems more visible, more gifted, more fruitful, a doubt that usually says more about a shaky grasp of what God’s love actually is than about anything true. Comparison of this kind treats calling as a scoreboard, when Scripture treats it as an assignment. The believer teaching a handful of children in Sunday school is not loved less than the one preaching to thousands, any more than the eye is loved less than the hand. That comparison game has no biblical warrant. The same God who chose the fewest, weakest nation on earth and called it His treasured possession is the God who calls you, whatever your visible standing looks like. Divine favouritism is not how the God of Scripture operates. Assignment according to grace is.

So, now what?

If you have ever wondered whether God loves someone else’s calling more than yours, I would point you back to Deuteronomy 7:7-8. He did not choose Israel because they were impressive. He chose the fewest of all peoples and loved them simply because He loved them. That same freely given, non-competitive love is what holds you, whatever your role turns out to be. Do not measure God’s love for you by the size of your platform. Measure it by the cross, where He held nothing back for anyone who would receive it.

“So Peter opened his mouth and said: ‘Truly I understand that God shows no partiality.'” (Acts 10:34, ESV)