Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Does God Play Favorites? | Torah | Deuteronomy 10

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Everyone plays favorites. But does God play favorites? What do you have to offer him? How should you react to God’s love and favor? In today’s episode, Keith uses Deuteronomy 10 to discuss how you should respond to God’s grace. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Deuteronomy 10

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I pulled into the ballpark with my youngest son, Luke. We were getting there for the first game of his Little League season. He was probably in about the fourth grade, although I don't remember exactly. He said to me, Dad, I want to make the All-Star team this year. The Little League All-Star team was made up of one player from each team as selected by the team's coaches.

So every coach got to select one player to put on the All-Star team. I'm not the kind of dad who sugarcoats things. I believe that facts are our friends. And the sooner we embrace the truth, the better. So I said to Luke that he was not going to make the All-Star team. Now remember, this was before a single game had been played. But I didn't need to see any games to know who was going to be selected for the All-Star team. In fact, I could have made a pretty solid prediction about which kid was going to be selected

from every team. Ready to find out my secret? The coach's son was going to make the all-star team. A shockingly high percentage of coach's sons made the all-star team because the coaches made the decision. My point isn't that their kids weren't great players. My point is that we can't help but play favorites. We are all guilty in one way or another. Figure skating analysts have expressed concern about judges favoring skaters from their own home country. Back in the 2014 winter games, a scandal was generated after a Russian skater won the gold medal in the short program beating out another highly favored skater from a different country. That skater had previously won the gold in 2010, but now got beat by the Russian skater.

And maybe that was fair, but the optics didn't look very great when the Russian skater went off the ice and hugged one of the Russian judges. One of the other skaters said, Our jaws dropped when we saw that happen. But at the same time, she said, none of us are strangers to how skating works. You either deal with it or you don't. The subjective nature of figure skating,

combined with a unique system that allows judges to score athletes from their own home countries, has created an environment rife with conflicts of interest, which is why figure skating has consistently been plagued by controversy. NBC News, found that approximately one-fifth of 164 judges eligible for the upcoming figure skating events are current or former leaders in their National Skating Federation, which of course gives them a natural incentive to inflate the scores of their own countrymen.

Human beings play favorites, and we usually favor those who can benefit us in some way. But God doesn't play favorites. Deuteronomy 1017, for the Lord your God is God of God. and Lord of Lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. Unlike us, God doesn't play favorites. He doesn't show partiality toward one group or another. You can't bribe God to pay more attention to you or be kinder to those people you like. So why can't you bribe God? Well, a bribe is offering someone a gift to act in your favor. There are stories about how referees and sports have been bribed to favor a particular team.

But God can't be bribed because God doesn't have any needs. You can't offer God anything he needs or wants. He already has it all. It's like a homeless person isn't going to be able to bribe Jeff Bezos with money. So why is it a big deal that God doesn't show partiality or that God doesn't play favorites? Well, this gets really interesting. Stay with me for just a second. C.S. Lewis said that when it comes to relationships, we form rings that are often exclusive. You might think of rings of friends or rings of business relationships. People on the outside of the ring want inside, and people in the inside of the ring are very slow to let more people in. The advantage of a ring is that it helps those who are a part of it. People feel important because they are part of the in group. Or in business, people in the inside of the ring might do special favors for each other.

Because we want to be seen as a somebody, because we want to be perceived as important or cool or smart or attractive or whatever, we try to get into the inner ring. We start acting different around people. We give time and attention to people who can do something for us. In other words, we show favoritism to people who can help us in some way. Everybody does this. You might not want to treat people differently based on what they can do for you. but if you're just honest with yourself, you have to admit you do it at least from time to time. But since God has no needs, since God can't be bribed, since he doesn't show favoritism,

he doesn't need to hang out at the cool kids table. Here's the next verse in Deuteronomy 10. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. So God stands up for the people that no one else wants to be. around. God does things for people who are poor and needy. God is on the side of those who everyone else has overlooked. If you're concerned about your social status or your financial opportunities, or if you want to be around people who are in the cool group, you're not going to spend time

with the widow or the poor or the foreigner. See, those people, the vulnerable people, they can't do anything for you. But since God doesn't need anything from us, he can shower love and attention on the people that everyone else overlooks. So let's apply this in two ways. First, that God cannot be bribed means that God offers His grace to you when you have nothing to offer him. This is what it says in Deuteronomy 1015.

The Lord set his affection on your ancestors and loved them and he chose you their descendants above all the nations as it is today. God chose you because he loved you, not because you could do anything for him, not because you deserved it. Here's Deuteronomy 9, 6. Understand then that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people. Three times in one paragraph, God emphasizes that he did not choose Israel because they were righteous or good or moral or smart.

In fact, they are stiff-necked and proud and rebellious. God repeats it over and over and over to get it through our thick heads that every good thing in our life, including our relationship with Him, is due to God's undeserved grace. Here's another way we can apply it to our life. Because God doesn't have needs, because He doesn't play favorites, and because we have received his undeserved grace, we should treat others with grace. Back in Deuteronomy 10, it says, he defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing, and you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. In other words, God calls us to love others the way he loved us.

Since God loved us when we were lost, we should love lost people. Because God was patient with us, we should be patient with others. because God forgave us we should forgive others but not just any others we should love and serve and forgive outsiders foreigners people who aren't like us people who don't agree with us people who can't do anything for us people who will never be able to put in a good word with us with our boss people who will never be able to invite us over to their house or write a letter of recommendation for us people who no one will be impressed to see us around. These are the people that God has called us to love.

We can love them with the same love that God loved us. God doesn't play favorites, and those who understand His grace don't play favorites either. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage,

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