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GOD IS NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 26, 1869

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 33, No. 5.

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GOD IS NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

It is strange how blind men will become in their opposition to God and his word. The other day a man brought up to me this objection against the word of God, viz., It says that God is no respecter of persons, and in another place it shows that God was a respecter of persons, for he destroyed the Canaanites and preserved the Israelites alive. * So he loved Abraham, and communed with him; but had nothing to do with the heathen nations around him. Hence it follows that God was partial, and a respecter of persons. But let us see in what sense God is a respecter of persons; whether it means that he respects alike both good and bad, saint and sinner, the pure and the vile, or whether it means something else. The whole passage reads thus: “Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.” Acts x, 34, 35. Peter was a Jew, and had been taught that God loved the Jews above all other people, and that he did not respect the Gentiles. But when he saw that God was with Cornelius, a Gentile, he exclaimed as above that God equally respected and accepted in every nation him who feared God, and worked righteousness. It is these qualifications that God respects in every person of any nation. It does not assert that he respects alike both righteous and wicked.
God destroyed the Canaanites because of their abominable wickedness. Deut. xviii, 9–12. He loved and blessed Abraham, “because,” says God, “that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.” Gen. xxvi, 5.
If we first misrepresent God’s word, or misunderstand it, then it is easy to find contradictions in it. But when the great day of God shall reveal every secret, and expose every falsehood, then, even the lost will have to say, “True and righteous are thy judgments, Lord God Almighty.” May we say so now.
D. M. CANRIGHT.