Prosperity Gospel

Usually, when one hears the term ‘prosperity gospel’, if one knows anything about the varieties of Christianity at all, this conjures up images of televangelists staging ‘evangelistic’ spectacles of thousands and raking in the dough. Well, of course they deserve to get rich off these spectators, because they are revealing to them God’s great secret: He wants you to be prosperous in this world, as well as saved in the next. No sense in wasting time. Follow the Bible, and start ‘plundering the Egyptians’ now. After all, the Bible says that the wealth of the wicked is the inheritance of the righteous. And we know who they are.

Another name for this kind of Christianity is ‘name it and claim it’, which gives to the ordinary believer the ability to cash in on God’s profits, as long as they keep believing. Of course, if they doubt, even for a moment, their blessings can disappear in a flash. It makes me wonder, that they don’t even suspect that these ‘blessings’ must not be very solid if they’re able to dissipate so readily.

The prosperity gospel is, of course, ‘another gospel’, one different from the one, eternal gospel announced by Gabriel to Mary of Nazareth, preached and lived by Christ and His holy apostles, and carried aloft and announced to all the living for one last time before the close of the age and the Day of Judgment. It’s another gospel, just like those that holy apostle Paul warns us against when he writes, “even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!” (Galatians 1:8) Wow! Very strong language! This must be important!

The holy apostle also writes to the Church at Corinth, but he may as well be writing to any number of churches from that day forward (and he does), “if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough” (2 Corinthians 11:4).

Personally I have already seen and experienced the destruction of family life and spiritual life caused by the preaching of this prosperity gospel. I should rather not call it a gospel because it is anything but ‘good news’, except to those who promote it. As for those who suffer it, who ‘put up with it easily enough’, it is actually ‘bad news’, yet by believing in it, trusting in it, many Christians see black as white and white as black, call evil good, and good they call evil. The holy apostle doesn’t write Anáthema!—‘let him be eternally condemned’—without good reason.

But this prosperity gospel is not limited to the televangelistic cults. It has made inroads into many modern churches, and it is even making inroads into the ancient Church. What surprises me is that it has found a welcome among groups that we generally regard as pious and otherworldly when we encounter them, groups that in their simplicity call themselves ‘apostolic.’

This morning, a co-worker who belongs to one of these pious, otherworldly groups confidently bragged to me, that just yesterday he had bought $1300 worth of coins from a local bank, coins that were turned in by someone, an elderly person, as a deposit.

The bank clerk counted the coins and gave the customer a receipt, but she didn’t record the transaction officially. She then went to a list of fellow church members and phone numbers, and called them to announce that old coins had been turned in, and who wanted to buy them. Apparently no one had the cash to invest, until she got to my friend. He had the $1300 to buy the whole pile of coins. He came in with the money and bought them. Then, the clerk recorded the transaction, officially, as a deposit of bank notes.

“My gosh!” I exclaimed, “you were able to buy $1300 worth of silver coins at face value? That’s about a twentieth of their worth as silver or as collector coins!” My friend corrected me, “Well, they weren’t all silver. There were three gold coins too.” That really shook me. I have heard of people turning in older coins, silver ones, that they have found here or there around the house, or spending them, without realizing that their value as metal is much higher than their legal tender (face) value. But I wasn’t prepared to hear what my friend said next.

“Yeah, we have church members who work in all the banks around here,” he explained. “They have a list of church members who want to buy old coins when they are turned in at the bank, and when someone deposits some, they call us off the list.” I found it incredible that, (1) the banks allowed this, and (2) the bank tellers and fellow Christians who bought up these coins have absolutely no sense of the dishonesty involved. They can say they are ‘following the law’ in accepting legal tender at face value, and so they’re doing nothing wrong.

When silver was $5 an ounce, this kind of thing was going on. Today it’s almost $24 an ounce. I suppose it doesn’t matter how big the profit is in buying precious metal coins at face value, whether you’ve made four times the value or twenty-four. What matters to me is that someone is being consciously cheated, because the letter of the law allows it to happen, because the Christian conscience has been numbed or lulled to sleep, and we ‘put up with it easily enough.’ These are the sins of which we should be ashamed, but the preaching of ‘another gospel’ has freed us from all shame, especially where wealth is concerned.

The Lord is with us, among us, all the time, always and everywhere. He doesn’t let us see Him because, if we did, we would be forced against our will to behave ourselves in His presence. Instead, because He hides Himself, we are free to behave ourselves as we wish. This He allows because He wants people who do what is right because they love Righteousness, who live holy lives because they love Holiness, who walk in His ways because they love Him. He wants sons and daughters, not slaves.

For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:20