God's Economy and Prosperity

Every now and then my inner prophet finds a reason to rant about something. This week, I was at Best Buy looking to buy a headphone extension cable for at work when the prophet awoke.

I was in the audio section, looking at headphones, extenders and any other item that I thought might give me the extra six inches or so that my current headphones lack so I'm not constantly testing how taut I can make the cables while I listen to music at work. I was vaguely aware of an under the counter TV like you would put in your kitchen with a religious broadcast playing. I was totally immersed in the hunt, so the TV didn't grab my attention at all, until the speaker hit on the topic of poverty.

I don't know who the speaker was, but she was talking about how poverty was a curse and prosperity teaching, which is experiencing a fairly healthy following right now, is completely biblical. She said that she had been poor and didn't like it, how Jesus came to take the curse of poverty away and how God's people in the Bible were always prospered when they were faithful.

At this point she had my attention and I had ceased the hunt altogether. I listened to her talk about the topic for a few minutes and left Best Buy feeling sick and angry. I thought about how much of what she said sounded just like Job's friends as they tried to get to the heart of why he was so afflicted. I thought about how far off their counsel was about the methods and purposes of God. I thought about how Job is believed by most scholars to be the oldest book in the Bible in terms of when it was written and yet we still have this kind of teaching going on.

I admit to having ignored most teaching on prosperity because the idea that God is more concerned about my happiness than my holiness flies in the face of what I know about guys like Jeremiah and Paul. The whole topic gets screwed up because most people latch onto a false economy when we talk about how God prospers people.

The glory (and money) seems to be found for preachers that can convince people that God wants to give them...things. But the "things" God wants to give us are things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. He wants to give us things like relationships that can be easy or hard and things like suffering so that we can share in the fellowship of the sufferings of Jesus.

I was upset at the teaching that I heard because, to me, it represented prosperity at the level of material well being, but ignored the wealth of knowing God better whether through the prosperity of resources or the prosperity of experience that brings us to a larger understanding of who He is. God is in both. God prospers people through whatever methods He ordains to use.

I think C.S. Lewis said it best when he said that he who has God and everything has the exact same thing as he who has God and nothing.