The familiar adage, ‘let the buyer beware’, is no longer true. These days suppliers are obliged to make accurate statements about their products. You can read on the label exactly what’s in the box, down to the last component, constituent element or crumb (e.g. ‘may contain traces of peanuts’), and what it can do to or for you (e.g. ‘tranquiliser: may cause drowsiness’) – false or unrealistic claims are against the law.
Unfortunately, there are no trading standards for the Christian faith, and many times those who commend the gospel make claims about its blessings which do not stand up to scrutiny. What are the ‘money-back’ guarantees of the gospel? What can each and every one of us who trust in Jesus expect as a result?
A recent and growing phenomenon in popular Christian teaching is what may be called the prosperity gospel. Not a few preachers in the Western world tell people that God wants them to get really rich. Brian Houston, of the Hills Christian Life Centre in Sydney, is one example.
In what follows I respond to his book, You Need More Money: Discovering God’s Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life (Castle Hill: Maximised Leadership, 1999). My comments are not a general or personal judgment; I merely respond to his ideas. In You Need More Money, Houston claims that “the scriptures… [are] full of promises of prosperity” (p. 10). He summarises the goal of the book as follows: If you and I can change our thinking and develop a healthy attitude towards money, I believe we can all walk in the blessing and prosperity that God intends for us. We will never have a problem with money again (p. 3).
Not unrelated is his exhortation that “[I]f you are struggling with your health, know that it is the will of God to see you whole and healthy. Health is one of the promises of God for our lives” (p. 31). A number of American televangelists make similar claims, with book titles like Redeemed from Poverty and Sickness and God’s Will is Prosperity.
Few salesmen would pass up the chance to sell a product that promises nothing less than health and wealth! What are we to make of such teaching?
Before taking a look at You Need More Money, it is helpful to consider a section of Paul’s letter to the Romans where he lists what he considers to be the biggest boons of being a Christian.
The benefits of peace with God
In Romans 5:1-11, Paul’s mood changes from cool and collected to rapturous ecstasy. Up until this point in the letter, he has been occupied laying a charge against the entire human race (all are under sin’s power and condemnation) and announcing what God has done through Christ to remedy the situation (justification by grace through faith). In chapter five he switches gear, moving to the first person and the present tense: we have this, we have that. His exuberance is unmissable as he bounces from idea to idea. Make no mistake, Paul is no less enthusiastic about the benefits of peace with God than the most flamboyant prosperity preacher. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (5:1-5).
Rather than guaranteeing health and wealth, Paul’s gospel brings something very different, namely hope and hardship. The surprising thing is that Paul thinks this is good news, something worth boasting about, as much as someone might show off their new house or car. The verb “to rejoice” (5:2-3) is in fact the same word as in 3:27, where most Bible versions translate it “boast”: “Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded”. Paul rules out, in chapter 3, boasting of the ‘what I’ve got or done’ variety, only to replace it in chapter 5 with boasting about what God has done “through our Lord Jesus Christ”. Paul thinks we can boast about our hope and sufferings.
First, peace with God guarantees glory in the future. Christian hope for Paul is not baseless optimism (like the young girl hopes to travel to Mars, or hopes to marry Prince William). Like our notion of hope, biblical hope is full of strong desire, but the difference is for Paul that this longing is combined with a certain expectation. As the NIV puts it, “hope does not disappoint” (5:5a). Christians have an absolute assurance of a glorious future with God beyond the grave.
Understandably, this hope gives us great pleasure in the mere anticipation of that day, as we relish the thought. Admittedly, knowing that peace with God guarantees sufferings in the present sounds less agreeable. To avoid misunderstanding, it is worth noting that the early Christians were not masochistic nor anti-pleasure; asceticism arose among some Christians in the second century from Greek rather than biblical roots.
Rather, Paul says there are three reasons to rejoice in our troubles. Firstly, we boast in suffering because of the beneficial results it produces. We rejoice because we know suffering yields endurance, which then shows our true character as God’s children. The suffering Christian is like a new electronic circuit board in a “burn in environment” with a “full load” being tested, not so much to see whether, but to prove that all of its components will persevere.
Similarly, God allows his children to suffer, not in order to break them, but to demonstrate their tried worth. To use New Testament metaphors, God the father disciplines his children, God the metal worker refines the gold in the fire and God the gardener prunes the vine. All three images point to an essential but painful process which is for our good.
In short, troubles are good because they give us a fresh sense of our need for God and call us to depend on him. Secondly, we boast in sufferings because of the hope it engenders. Hope is both necessary for handling hardship and is strengthened by hardship.
Like a cramped long-haul flight with plastic food and bad movies, calling to mind your destination makes it possible to endure present suffering. “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:17). Suffering in the present makes you look forward to a better future.
The third thing that makes it possible to boast in our hardship is the love of God. We see in verses 5-9 that what underlies Paul’s positive thoughts about suffering is his firm conviction that God loves us: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts…God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:5, 8). God’s love assures us that our negative experiences are not evidence that he is angry with us, for he knows us and our circumstances perfectly and has our welfare at heart.
In the language of Romans 5:2, we “stand in grace”, forgiven and adopted into his family. The suffering child of God is like the infant who stubs their toe and needs a reassuring cuddle from mum or dad as much as a bandaid.
Verse 11 supplies the third occurrence of rejoicing or boasting in Romans 5, which helps explain the first two: “More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ”. The reason hope and hardship are cause for elation is that they lead us to the great and gracious God, in whose right hand are pleasures forever. Notice, though, that the two benefits Paul highlights as God’s will for every Christian are a far cry from health and wealth.
The contrast couldwhardly be more stark. The first relates to the future, and the second is the very opposite of the ease and comfort we associate with affluence.
If this is the case, how then do some preachers advocate a prosperity gospel as opposed to a gospel of hardship and hope? The answer is that they misread the Bible.
A flat reading of Scripture
You Need More Money includes many exhortations to generous giving to God’s work, and appropriate warnings “always to give God the glory for what he is doing in your life, especially in the area of blessing” (p. 103). It also offers lots of practical advice and what might be termed popular psychology (e.g. “If your self-esteem is low, you will never see yourself as valuable or worthwhile, and nor will anyone else”, pp. 127-28). Our concern, however, is with its main theme, which Houston puts in the form of a question and answer: “Is it God’s will for you to prosper? The answer is undoubtedly YES” (p. 55; capitals original).
This assertion is backed up with texts from across the Bible. The problem with Brian Houston’s argument is that, when it comes to interpreting the Bible, he doesn’t take into account the biblical context of those texts, and he also seems to have difficulty distinguishing between literal and metaphorical language.
Most of his proof texts come from the Old Testament and are read as if addressed directly to individual believers in Christ. Two of his favourites are Joshua 1:8 (pp. 20, 58) and Deuteronomy 8:17-18 (pp. 56, 95, 103).
In the former text, Joshua is promised that if he meditates on the Law, “then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success”. Houston surmises that “prosperity is definitely a result of applying God’s word to your life”, and then asserts that “this is a specific promise from God and yet there are so many who don’t believe it” (p. 20). “He [i.e. God] gives us the power and ability to get wealth through the principles and instructions of His word” (p. 58).
In context, however, the success and resultant prosperity promised to Joshua is as a commander of Israel’s army as he seeks to “cause this people to inherit the land that I [i.e. God] swore to their fathers to give them” (1:6). The primary blessing under the old covenant was rest in the abundance of the land of milk and honey. Under the new covenant this rest is in the superabundance of heaven (Heb 4:1-11). Joshua 1:8 remains a valuable text calling for courage and fidelity to God’s word, but its specific promise of material prosperity does not apply to Christians.
Deuteronomy 8:17-18 is similarly misunderstood. The text states: “You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth” (v. 18). Houston comments: “[I]f you still aren’t sure that God wants you to prosper, ask yourself … why would He promise prosperity and success if He preferred us to remain poor?” (p. 56). However, the next sentence supplies the context of Moses’ words: God blesses you thus “that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers”. We no longer live under the law of Moses in the promised land. Put simply, for Christians such promises of prosperity are out of date, for Christ is the end of the law. Even in Old Testament times they were not understood absolutely. There was never a perfect correlation between righteous living and material blessing. Houston reads the Bible like a wide open plain, when it is actually more like a range of mountains. In other words, he fails to take into account the basic distinctions of salvation history that prevent serious misuse of Scripture.
A second problem concerns metaphorical language. A key text for Houston is 2 Corinthians 8:9, where Paul recalls the cost and purpose of the incarnation for the Son of God: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich”. Houston’s comments are worth quoting in full: “I’ve heard people misinterpret this scripture to support their belief that it is biblical to be poor. They only read half of it, that “though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor”. They completely miss the crucial point because if you read on, the reason why He became poor was that “you, through his poverty, might become rich”.
That is what it says. He became poor so YOU could become rich. The purpose of Jesus coming to earth included giving up a place of abundance and riches and becoming poor so that we could escape that poverty” (pp. 12-13; emphasis and capitals original).
Houston is right to declare that Jesus became poor so that we might become rich, but does not seem to realise that “rich” here is not meant to be taken literally. Instructively, the letter to the Laodiceans in Revelation has both the literal and metaphorical senses of riches in neighbouring verses. Jesus tells the literally rich they are spiritually poor, and need to become spiritually (or really) rich: For you say, I am (materially) rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realising that you are wretched, pitiable, (really) poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be (really) rich … (Rev 3:17-18; words in brackets added).
Jesus is talking about being “rich towards God”, which, as the parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21) shows, has no connection to material riches, except perhaps inversely. Earlier in 2 Corinthians, Paul describes his own ministry in similar terms: he was “(materially) poor, yet making many (really) rich” (6:10). Along with drinking Jesus’ blood, eating the bread of life, waking from sleep and many other powerful images, getting rich (by buying gold!) is a metaphor for salvation and is not meant to be taken literally.
The consequences of misreading the Bible on the subject of poverty and riches are grave. To claim that the benefits of peace with God include health and wealth is an insult to tens of millions of Christians in the Majority World, who are not and may never be affluent, but may nonetheless be just as faithful to God and blessed by him as us, if not more so. Closer to home, it ignores the Bible’s clear teaching on the dangers of greed and the freedom contentment brings.
Further, it sets up false expectations so that when hardship or trouble of whatever kind comes, believers are not equipped to cope, and may become disillusioned with the faith. With tragic irony, the real problem with prosperity preachers is that in focusing on material benefits, they undersell the gospel of beneficial hardship and glorious hope that boasts in knowing and being known by God.
Dr Brian Rosner is a lecturer in New Testament and Ethics at Moore Theological College. This is an edited extract from Brian’s latest book, Beyond Greed.
Beyond Greed by Brian Rosner
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