"What concern is it of yours? You follow me."

Prompted by several different things, including Athanasius's recent (and unsuccessful) attempt to convince Todd and others that being a nun is better than being a wife, I've been planning on writing a post with the title, "God loves me best." The key idea of the post would be that God may well love me more than He loves you, and God may well love you more than He loves me, and if either possibility sticks in your craw you need to get over it.

Then I read a post by Rachel Watkins titled, "MOM (GOD) ALWAYS LIKED YOU BETTER...." She says a lot of sensible things about how God's love for you is not directly proportional to how easy your life is, but goes too far when she writes:

No, God loves me just as much as anyone else....

Seeing why God doesn't love everyone just as much as everyone else -- and, for that matter, understanding what it means to say, "God doesn't love everyone just as much as everyone else" -- isn't easy for egalitarian Americans, but it should be easy to set aside at least the one objection that it's non-egalitarian:

Objection. It would seem that God loves everyone just as much as everyone else, for otherwise He would love one person more than another, and that's not fair.

Reply to Objection.Trust me, chum, the last thing you want is for God to treat you fairly.

The idea that justice implies egalitarianism, or egalitarianism implies justice, doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and when I've seen it advanced it has tended to come from wounded pride rather than any theological principle.

There's a simple remedy for anyone offended by the idea that God might love someone else more than He loves them: Be holier than everyone else.

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