The seventh chapter contains a small piece of religious sociology that is unusual in a devotional text for its lack of sentimentality. Four kinds of people who have acted well approach God, Krishna says: the distressed, the one who wants to know, the one who wants something, and the one who knows. All four are described as good, which is worth emphasising, since the distressed and the acquisitive are not dismissed.
Of the four, the one who knows is called dearest, on the ground that such a person is constantly disciplined and devoted to one thing only, and that they are, in the chapter's phrase, his very self. The others are not condemned; they are placed. Anyone who has ever prayed in an emergency or asked for a specific outcome is in the list, and the list says they have come to the right address.
The chapter then addresses those who worship other deities. Whatever form a devotee wishes to worship with faith, Krishna says, he makes that faith steady; worshipping accordingly they obtain their desires, which are in fact ordained by him; but the fruit gained by those of small understanding is limited, and those who sacrifice to the gods go to the gods while his devotees come to him.
Commentators have taken that passage in sharply different tones. Read one way it is inclusive, granting that other worship is real, effective and divinely upheld. Read another it is a ranking, with other destinations described as bounded. The verses support both emphases, and the chapter moves on without resolving the tension, leaving the harder statement of the same problem to chapter nine.