"The scripture tells us to be a prisoner of hope! The world may tell you that you'll never get out of debt, that business is bad, but you just tell them, I can't help but hope for good things. I'm a prisoner of hope!"Such are the (paraphrased) promises of the prosperity gospel. Basically, it tells us that, as Christians, we are entitled to material blessings from God. God wants us to be happy, healthy, and wealthy--and if we do the right things, we will receive these blessings from Him.
"Those who follow God's laws will gain in monetary wealth! Repent and be baptized, and God will pour out of His cup a blessing you cannot contain!"
There are a number of problems with this position. Finer minds than mine have taken it upon themselves to write on the topic. They have pointed out that the entire theology is backwards and egocentric, making everything revolve around pushing the right buttons to obligate God to do our will rather than seeking to do His--essentially reducing him to a Cosmic Vending Machine. They have pointed out that, in the scriptures, "the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10), that one of the most critical of the Ten Commandments is "do not covet," and that Christ lambasted the wealthy with a fervor only paralleled by his venom for the religious (Matthew 19:24). I do not want to cover the same ground, though I applaud those who have.
What I want to do instead is test the idea of a gospel of wealth not against the individual "proof texts" of scripture, but against its overall story. Does the Bible, at bottom, present us with a story of a God who consistently overwhelms His faithful with material blessings--happy, healthy, wealthy lives--or does it tell a different story? According to the gospel of wealth, if we do the right things, material blessings will always follow, and the Bible is full of the the stories of many people who followed God's commandments and did the right things. It should logically follow, then, that the Bible is full of stories about extravagantly wealthy, healthy, and happy people, right?
This is where a problem appears, for in fact, the Bible is not a book where every page drips fine perfumes and tells of gilded halls inhabited by whole and happy people. Rather, the Bible is a book where every page drips blood, sweat, and tears. It is a book filled with enormous, unfathomable suffering, poverty, sickness, and even death. According to prosperity gospel, these things should never befall the truly faithful, since they can simply claim God's blessing for their lives and enjoy material prosperity--so one would be tempted to say that all of the suffering in the Bible is just the wicked people, or maybe just the result of lack of faith on the part of those suffering. But closer analysis shows that this is not so. In fact, of the heroes of the faith, the truly righteous and faithful people of the Bible, only one of them seemed to enjoy material blessings because of his faithfulness toward God--King Solomon...and did I mention he suffered from depression (a la book of Ecclesiastes, the most down and depressing book in the Bible by far)? Here is a brief survey of people in the Bible who didn't get a rose garden when they followed God.
- Able--The original righteous man deserves special mention. He offered a more excellent sacrifice than his brother Cain (Hebrews 11:4). His reward was being counted righteous by God...and materially-speaking being the first murder victim in human history. I'm sure that was fun for him.
- Noah--The only righteous man in his generation ("blameless" in fact, Genesis 6:9). His material reward was that he and his family were the sole survivors of a watery apocalypse that wiped out all other human life, after which they got to start out on a virgin world--rebuilding from an ecological catastrophe of unfathomable proportions that would have entailed enormous hardships...oh, and also the lifespans of his children and their offspring were cut to about 10% of the lifespan pre-Flood humans enjoyed. It would be as if you and your kids had to start over after a nuclear winter killed everyone else and you had to face life knowing that your children would only make it to their fifties, your grandchildren to their forties, and that a few generations later your descendants wouldn't live past their teens. Cheery thoughts.
- Abraham--Abraham is an interesting character in that he is one of the few people God promised material blessings. Specifically, God promised him an innumerable host of descendants and an enormous tract of land including at least all of present day Israel, Lebanon, and parts of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt (conservatively). God did eventually fulfill His promise, but neither Abraham nor his descendants for seven generations would live to see it. Abraham himself spent his entire life as a nomad, living in a land that was not his own and dwelling in tents. When he died, he had only one living heir, and owned no more land than a small burial plot. This would be the extent of his descendants' real estate for more than a two centuries (longer than the sum total of American history). He would pass on the expectation of a material blessing that never materialized two his son, grandson, and great-grandchildren, all of whom imparted promises of possessing large tracts of land, resources, and cities to their offspring only to have those offspring live their entire lives as landless nomads in strange territory.
- Jacob--Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, deserves special mention. Like his forefathers, he looked toward the promised material blessing of land but never owned any. While he was initially prosperous in other ways, famine reduced him to sending his children to beg bread in a foreign country. Things became so desperate for him and his family that he willingly sent his favorite son to beg for food in Egypt knowing full well that it would probably result in his death. As for health, Jacob was one of the aforementioned descendants of Noah who lived only a 10% of what was previously considered the normal human lifespan (and he knew it, describing the days of his life at one point as "few and evil"). It is true he was a dastardly little villain in his youth, but he pulled a 180 and did something that I'm sure any prosperity gospel preacher would consider a commendable act of faith. He wrestled God and refused to let Him go without first receiving a blessing. He was given a new name--and a limp that would stay with him for the rest of his days (so much for the blessing of health). As for getting blessed with happiness...well, the guy had more family drama and domestic violence in his household than half of our cable networks put together.
- Joseph--As a young man, Joseph was a paragon of virtue amidst the dark feuding of Jacob's wild family. His father favored him (not really because of this, more so due to the fact that he was the child of his favorite wife) and gave him material blessings, including an expensive and impressive coat. His brothers took it away, tossed him in a hole, and sold him to human traffickers. After being bought up by the Egyptians--whose ancient slave labor is infamous even today--he was thrown into prison and left to rot there as a direct result of his doing the right thing and refusing to violate God's sanction against adultery. When he used his divinely given dream-interpreting gifts to help a friend in prison get out, the friend immediately forgot about him. Joseph's life did eventually turn around for the better, but he had to take some enormous lumps along the way.
- Moses--Moses was adopted into the royal Egyptian family. He was a prince of Egypt, enjoying its immense power and wealth, the finest education and healthcare in the then-known world...and then God came along. Moses lost all of that. He spent the next forty years as a herdsman in the desert. After that, he returned to Egypt only to be scorned by his own people and the Egyptians as he struggled to set the enslaved Israelites free. When he was finally successful, his material reward was wandering around the desert with the whiniest people on the planet using him as their designated complaint department. While Egyptians died with style and were buried in massive monuments that impress tourists to this day, Moses was buried in an unmarked grave at a funeral that nobody attended.
- David--David was a man after God's own heart. He was the man God chose to rule the kingdom of Israel as the first of a line that would stretch all the way to Christ. And when God made this known to David, the young man's world fell apart. He had become a famous warrior, a champion of Israel who stood at King Saul's right hand during parades. But soon he was a fugitive, running through the wilderness, seeking shelter in caves and holes in the ground, begging for asylum in foreign cities, feigning madness to escape his enemies, grabbing a meal wherever he could (including the one place where the commandments laid down by God specifically said he was not allowed to). When he did become king he still had to struggle all his life with family infighting and treason, including the awful experience of having one of his own sons killed by his trusted friends after said son ran him out of town and publicly had sex with all of David's wives on the palace rooftop. Before David died, he also got to experience circulation problems which gave him perpetual chills. Fun times.
- Solomon--An odd character, Solomon was the wisest, wealthiest, most powerful, and least happy man in the Bible. His final work, the book of Ecclesiastes, is so dark and depressing that many Christians skip over it entirely.
- Jeremiah--A godly prophet in a godless time, Jeremiah and his friend and scribe Baruch were explicitly given a single material blessing from God for their service: survival. They witnessed the capital city of their nation sacked multiple times. They experienced poverty, brutal sieges, starvation, betrayal, arrest, imprisonment, and forced relocation to a foreign land (which was also sacked brutally as soon as they arrived). He is known as "the weeping prophet" and wrote the only book of the Bible that compares with Ecclesiastes for unpleasantness and depressing content: the book of Lamentations, whose name literally means weeping. The prophet is perhaps best known for his promise that God has plans for us "to prosper...and not to harm" us...but few remember the context of these words. In context, they are a promise delivered to Jews taken as prisoners of war to a foreign land hundreds of miles from home, to whom Jeremiah has just delivered the news that neither they nor their children will ever see their homeland again, that they will remain exiles, foreigners in a strange land, for the next seventy years--oh, and by the way, they are the lucky ones!
- Job--God Himself declares Job to be a blameless and peerlessly righteous and faithful man. He is one of the few people in the Bible God is explicitly said to have blessed materially with wealth, children, and health. And then, God took it all away. No act of faith on Job's part could make Him restore it. Job suffered the most devastating personal catastrophe in human history. In a single day he lost all of his children and all of his wealth (and the guy had a diversified portfolio, for pity's sake!). Thereafter, his health went to pieces in a disgusting and humiliating way. Thereafter, Job repeatedly confessed to having suicidal thoughts. The consolation was that he got to keep his friends and wife--but this consolation came with a knife in the back because all of these people were apparently prosperity gospel preachers who thought that Jobs suffering was entirely his own fault and argued long and hard to prove it was so. Eventually, God showed up to straighten things out, but never gave Job any kind of explanation for his devastating losses and intense suffering.
- Paul--Paul enjoyed a measure of prestige in 1st Century Palestine that few could afford or attain too. He was born with Roman citizenship--the mark of the upper-crust of Imperial society that many spent fortunes trying to attain. He was also born with an impressive Jewish pedigree. He studied under the greatest religious teachers of his day and became renowned among them, surpassing all of his peers. He had health, wealth, prestige...everything a man could want. Then, he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. They say he fell off his donkey, but thereafter it's evident that he just kept falling. He suffered severe health problems with his eyes from that time forward. This is possibly the "thorn in the flesh" that he applied the prayer of faith to for healing three times, only to have God point blank refuse to heal him! His old friends became his new enemies. Before the week was out he was running for his life. He was despised, even by fellow Christians who resented his claim to apostleship and constantly attacked his ministry. In 2 Corinthians 11:23-33 he gives a summary of his sufferings so far, which includes being beaten within an inch of his life (by legal definition of the time) five times, three less severe beatings, suffering a (barely) unsuccessful execution (we're not talking lethal injection--we're talking stoning), three shipwrecks, 48 hours on the open water, perils of every kind, cold, hunger, thirst, poverty, betrayal, stress...the list goes on and on! But don't worry, it get's worse because after this letter Paul would be arrested and sent to the most infamously evil ruler in ancient history (Nero), in whose capital he would spend the rest of his days as a prisoner in increasingly deteriorating conditions until he was finally beheaded. He never did get to see his dream of spreading the gospel to Spain come true (Romans 15:24-25, note that Paul was arrested in the middle of the Jerusalem trip mentioned in verse 25 and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner). Paul's life was great in terms of material blessings, until he met Jesus converted, and started doing the sorts of things the prosperity gospel preachers tell us to do. Thereafter it took a downward spiral ending in dank prison cells, isolation, betrayal, and gruesome death.
- The Disciples--It is worth noting that of the twelve Apostles chosen by Christ (eleven, if we discount Paul, Matthias, and Judas Iscariot), only one of them died of natural causes, and he lived out his remaining days in exile and isolation on a tiny Mediterranean island. Unlike Paul, these men hadn't been huge successes before meeting Christ, but the meeting certainly didn't improve their material situation much. Christ warned them that they would face tribulation, be cast out of their local congregations, hauled before judges, thrown in prisons, and killed by people who thought their death was commanded by God. All of it came true.
- Jesus--Saving the best for last, there is Jesus Christ Himself. God the Father loves us just as He loves Jesus. Jesus was perfect, so we can be sure that anything that went wrong in His life was 100% not His fault as a result of faithlessness or failure to follow the gospel of wealth. He was also, according to the Bible, tempted in every way that we are but did not sin. Whatever is not of faith is sin--so if we can screw up the material blessings God wants for our lives by not pushing the right divine buttons, He had equal opportunity to do so but didn't. Knowing this we should expect Jesus to have lived--in accordance with the prosperity gospel--a life of unparalleled opulence, abundant wealth, extraordinary health, and giddy happiness. But if this is our portrait of Christ, we do not believe in the Jesus portrayed in the Bible. In the Bible, Jesus was the poor son of a working-class couple who lost his father before he was thirty. He grew up in the social and economic backwater of a country occupied by foreign powers. He was not wealthy by any stretch. He was not particularly good looking (Isaiah 53:2)...and this was before He began His ministry. His ministry's start was marked by forty days of fasting in the wilderness, wherein He suffered extreme hunger and temptation from Satan himself. Materially speaking, it went downhill from there. Jesus discouraged one would-be-follower by telling him that even the birds and the foxes were wealthier than He was, because at least they had a place to spend the night (Matthew 8:20). He suffered hunger, thirst, weariness, and feelings of being overwhelmed on his journeys. He and His disciples pooled their resources into a single purse from which they gave money to the poor who constantly pressed in on them--but it was a bag with a hole in it named Judas, who apparently listed kleptomania among his more admirable qualities (some have proposed that the others just didn't notice because the amount of money the disciples commanded was so huge the skimming went unnoticed, but in the ancient world huge sums necessitate multiple purses for the practical reason that gold and silver have a property called mass, which tends to add up quickly in any significant amount--instead, it may be the at the opposite is true and they didn't notice because they ran out of money so quickly they couldn't tell if it was legitimately spent, given away, or snatched up by Judas). While He did not seem to suffer any health problems that we know of, He was far from the happiest man in the world. He was described as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" who is never expressly said to have laughed or smiled, but is said to have "wept" on multiple occasions. His family thought He was crazy. The crowds didn't know what to think of Him but followed Him everywhere as if He were giving out free candy. He was run out of town multiple times, forever in trouble with the religious authorities, and was forced to escape mobs hungry for his blood on several occasions. The culmination of His life and His self-declared mission from the Father was to be betrayed by a member of His inner circle, abandoned by all of his friends, dragged around town to be assaulted, insulted, and convicted for crimes He didn't commit, turned over to foreigners who mocked Him and beat Him so severely that He was no longer recognizable as human, handed over to a blood-thirsty mob, dragged out of town, subjected to the most public, painful, and horrific form of execution ever devised by man, cut off from the Father, and robbed of His sole earthly possessions--His clothes--by the men who executed Him. And then He died. In some versions, He went to Hell, but establishing that in Scripture is ticklish business. Needless to say, He did not enjoy immense material blessings in this life. In fact, His life is a portrait of unparalleled material destitution and suffering (especially considering that before coming to Earth He lived and reigned in Heaven of all places)--and He was doing everything right!
Holler, brother! Nice analysis of the great figures of faith and the Author of Faith Himself! Oddly encouraging to read this - to know that life can suck, but you can still praise God like all these heroes of the faith did!
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