Does God have favourites?
Question 2017
The question tends to arrive from one of two directions. Some people ask it because they have read the Old Testament and noticed that God appears to deal very differently with different people – choosing Israel over the nations, calling Abraham while seemingly overlooking his contemporaries, appearing to prefer Jacob to Esau before either had done anything to earn it. Others ask it from a more personal place: a sense of being overlooked by God while others seem to receive His attention and blessing without apparent effort. Both are legitimate starting points, and both deserve a careful answer from Scripture.
What Scripture Says About Partiality
The most direct biblical statement on this question comes in Acts 10:34, where Peter, having been dramatically corrected by a vision and led to the Gentile household of Cornelius, declares: ‘Truly I understand that God shows no partiality.’ The Greek word translated ‘partiality’ is prosopolempsia, literally ‘receiving the face’ – the practice of favouring someone based on their status, appearance, or social position. Paul repeats the same principle in Romans 2:11: ‘For God shows no partiality.’
This is not a peripheral observation. It forms the basis for the entire argument about Gentile inclusion in God’s redemptive purposes. If God showed partiality – if He genuinely preferred Jews over Gentiles in the way a human patron prefers his clients – then the gospel being extended to all nations would be a kind of divine policy change. But Peter’s point is precisely that there was no partiality from the beginning. God never measured people by the categories that human beings use to elevate some above others.
But What About Israel?
The obvious challenge to this is the undeniable fact that God did choose Israel from among the nations, did enter into covenant with Abraham and his descendants, and did give Israel privileges He did not give to others. Paul addresses this in Romans 3:1-2: ‘Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.’ There is a real and genuine distinction in God’s dealings with Israel.
The key text for understanding this is Deuteronomy 7:7-8, where God Himself explains the basis for His choice: ‘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 and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers.’ The choice of Israel was not based on Israel’s greatness, moral superiority, or numerical strength. It was based on God’s own love and His faithfulness to promises already made to the patriarchs. There is nothing here that resembles the favouritism operating in human social hierarchies.
God’s special purposes for Israel were also purposeful in a much larger sense – for the benefit of the nations, not merely for Israel’s advantage. The Abrahamic covenant carried a global horizon from the very beginning: ‘in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’ (Genesis 12:3). Israel was not chosen to be the permanent recipient of exclusive divine attention but to be the channel through whom the Messiah would come and through whom the knowledge of the true God would reach the world.
God’s Love Is Not a Finite Resource
Behind the question of favourites often lies an assumption about love that applies to human beings but not to God: that love is a finite resource, and that to love some more is necessarily to love others less. A parent with several children who appears to favour one is distributing a finite emotional resource unequally. But God is not like this. His love is not quantifiable in a way that means more for one person implies less for another.
John 3:16 says that God loved the world – not a selection from the world, not a preferred group within the world, but the world. 1 Timothy 2:4 says that God desires all people to be saved. 2 Peter 3:9 says that God is patient, not wishing that any should perish. The God who chose Israel and who in Christ has provided salvation for all is not distributing a limited supply of divine concern.
The Personal Dimension
When the question comes from a feeling of being overlooked – of watching others receive apparent blessing, healing, or answered prayer while one’s own life seems harder and one’s prayers less obviously heard – the answer cannot be purely theological. But the theological truth does speak directly to the feeling. God has no hierarchy of preferred believers. He is not more interested in people with visible ministries than in people who will never be publicly recognised. He is not closer to the spiritually energetic than to those who struggle in relative obscurity.
The parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew 20:1-16 makes this point in a way that deliberately unsettles human instincts about fairness and preferment. Those who worked all day received exactly what they were promised. Those who worked one hour received the same. The owner’s response to the grumbling is uncompromising: ‘Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?’ God’s dealings with His people are not governed by a competitive merit system. The love He has given to those who are in Christ is the same love with which He loves the Son Himself (John 17:23).
So, now what?
God does not prefer some people to others based on their status, performance, or desirability. He does, however, have specific purposes – for Israel in the history of redemption, for the church in the present age, and for every individual believer whose life He has purposed and whose name He has known since before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). Being the object of God’s specific, purposeful attention is not the same thing as being His favourite in the way the question usually means. It is something far better.
“For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.” Romans 9:15-16
