If God loves everyone, why did he only reveal himself to the Jews before Christ? Isn’t that unfair to the Gentiles who didn’t receive a revelation? Trent Horn addresses this dilemma on Catholic Answers Live.
Caller: One question that I have encountered in the past, and I’ve had some trouble explaining to an atheist friend, is: if God loves all people equally, then why did he choose only to reveal himself to the Jews before Christ? And I was hoping you could give me a way in which I could explain that that might make sense to somebody who is an atheist, what the Church believes about why God chose the Jews to be the chosen people, and, you know, the argument they make is that “Well, God ignored all the other people at the time, and he only loved the Jews,” and that’s something I could use some help in answering.
Trent Horn: Your atheist objector is assuming that unless God loves everyone equally, there are some people he does not love. But it could be the case that God loves everyone, but he loves some people more than others; or he gives more grace and more gifts to some people rather than others.
And that’s not unfair for God to do, because none of us have a right to anything from God. Everything we receive from God is grace, a free gift; and so we have no right to complain about the idea that we should get more than other people. All that God owes us is that God must adhere to being goodness itself, so God cannot act in an evil way towards us. So God loves the world. God loves every person. He doesn’t necessarily love everyone equally, you know, so he gives some grace to others other graces to other people.
Why does he do that? Well, we don’t know. We don’t know some of these ways. In Isaiah 55 God says: “As the heavens are above the earth, my ways are higher than your ways.” Romans chapter nine is very clear: for us to say “Why did God pick the Jews and you didn’t pick me?” that’s like the pot saying to the potter: “Why does that pot get to be on the dinner table and I am the chamber pot in the bathroom? Why is one pot for noble use and the other for ignoble use?” You don’t have—if the potter wasn’t here, you wouldn’t even exist.
So I would say that God, he loves the world, he wants all people to be saved, but he chooses to give different graces and gifts to different people, and that’s within his right. And so we see in the Old Testament, God chose Israel to be the people through which he would be manifested to the world. He chose not to make his existence obvious to everyone, so that’s why God did not reveal himself to every people and every time in the same way he revealed to Israel. He gave Israel that sacred task. It was also a big responsibility—he held Israel to a higher standard than he did the other nations, because they should have known better. The same is true for Christians today.
So I would say that if you look in the Old Testament, God did not not love other peoples. And he made it clear in the story of Ruth, the story of Rahab in Jericho, that he shows his love to all peoples. Read the the story of Jonah, as a great example of that. God didn’t hate the Ninevites and only love the Jews; he wanted to bring the Ninevites to repentance. He loves everyone, but he chose the Jewish people for that special task to bring the Messiah into the world.
And now, through Jesus Christ, we now have a universal covenant for all people to be a part of, and it was part of just God’s plan of different events—you couldn’t see the whole picture going on over thousands of years—that culminates into a masterpiece. And as little splotches on the painting, we’re not in the best position to know if God was being a good artist; but if you step back where God is and you see the whole painting, we see the the majesty of salvation history through the means that God has chosen.
I’d also, Dan, I would challenge your friend who’s an atheist: if he has this idea that there’s, like, this moral rule that if God existed, or people in general have an obligation to treat people equally, where does that moral rule come from, this obligation to treat people with equality? In an atheistic universe you can’t have these kinds of binding universal moral rules, but if God exists you can. So that should make him reconsider his atheism. So I hope that’s helpful to you.