“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” -Jesus

The prosperity gospel is not the gospel, or the good news of the Bible. The prosperity gospel is not about your deliverance from sin, it is about having a god who delivers you from uncomfort. It is a gospel of health and wealth. To borrow a line from Joel Osteen, it is about “living your best life now.” This false narrative has made its way into Christianity. It presents itself as quiet lies slipped into the ears of Christians and it is the bold voice of the wolf like the televangelist who tells his congregants that if they give all they have to his ministry, God is going to bless them immensely. This narrative of God wanting to give you health and wealth stands in stark contrast to what the Bible says and life reveals. We see in common grace that God does give wealth, but it is like the rain. Both the believer and unbeliever may or may not receive it.

Some of the beliefs associated with the prosperity gospel put ourselves in God’s place. One way this is done is by the idea that our words have power. If we say our prayers with the right words, God is obligated to answer them—or so those in the prosperity heresy believe. This may come from the Bible verse where Jesus tells His disciples that he will grant all they ask. The first issue with this is that it removes what Jesus says from the context of His disciples asking in accordance with His will. The second interpretation issue is that the prosperity gospel does not look at our requests being granted by Christ, but of Christ being submitted and obligated to answer them. This is not a King granting His servant’s request, but a perversion. This is an abominable way for us to look at our Lord. The role of King and servant is switched. Another way that the prosperity gospel puts us in the place of God is in misunderstanding God’s love for us. The prosperity gospel makes the center of the gospel, not on Jesus, but man. The biblical gospel is one that shows God’s undeserved love of us by focusing on what He did. It brings glory to Him. The prosperity gospel is one of God glorifying us and almost begging our love in promises of happiness and health. The prosperity gospel says that God wants to give all the worldly desires of our heart; and in fact, God does want to give us our heart's desire, but He wants that heart desire to be of Him. When we have our desires focused on God, we will see those requests answered.

Like all heresies, the prosperity gospel misrepents Jesus and His Word. When we look at the life of Jesus and the apostles, we do not see physical wealth. We see Jesus call Himself homeless. We see Him live a life we would associate with poverty. We see Him die at a young age on a cross. The life of Jesus is not a story of health or wealth in this life. It is the opposite. The lives of the apostles are also the same. Their lives were ones of suffering, pain, exile, and death. Jesus even tells us our lives will look like His and theirs. The prosperity gospel is not the gospel you find in the Bible, it is the one that is made palatable to the American diet. It offers promises that will not be fulfilled, hurt, and a false witness of Christ that will only result in disappointment, and even Hell.

When we read the old testament, we may see promises for a rich land and bountiful harvests. These were words given by God to the Isrealites. It was His promise to His nation to care for them as long as they would also agree to be His nation and follow after Him. It was a promise from a King to His people. Those promises were to an Isreal who had made God their king. This was a theocracy with rules that many of us would not want to follow. These promises that prosperity teachers will use are distorted without context. Instead of looking at what the Bible says about an issue, they decide their own views and find biblical phrases to claim the Bible says it too.

We do not come to Jesus for any promise of wealth, we come to Jesus for His promise of Himself. If you went to Heaven, and everything you wanted was there, but Jesus, would it still be Heaven? In the prosperity gospel, it would be. If true, all the prosperity gospel can offer is temporal health and pitiful wealth. Jesus gives us what we need most. Himself.

“If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.”

― St. Augustine