At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“To have respect of persons is not good: For for a piece of bread that man will transgress” (Prov. 28:21).
“To show partiality is not good, because for a piece of bread a man will transgress” (Prov. 28:21, NKJV).
This proverb reminds me of an apocryphal story that has floated around for years—attributed variously to Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Groucho Marx, and others like that. The story goes this way: a man asked a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars. After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “yes, probably.” Then he asked if she would do it for twenty dollars. She was offended, and asked, “What do you think I am?” And the riposte is “we’ve already established what you are . . . now we are just talking about the price.”
Back to the proverb. Having respect of persons means to show partiality. And if you are the kind of person who shows partiality, this means that you are bought, or influenced, or dazzled by something that ought not to have that kind pull on you. And once that establishes what kind of person you are—the kind who can be bought—the price can gradually be ratcheted downward. The end result is you have become the kind of person who would sell someone out for a morsel of bread.
So what does it mean to avoid showing partiality? It means that we are to love everyone with whom we come into contact. Now to love someone means that we are to treat them lawfully, from the heart. This does not make us egalitarians, where we treat everyone the same. That is not an avoidance of partiality. The Bible says we are to render honor to whom honor is due. But we are to do it under divine authority, and not because the person honored has an undue influence over us. If we give way to that, then everything afterwards is just haggling over price.
