Prosperity Gospel; Spiritual Prosperity
3 John 2 KJV
“Beloved, I wish [pray] above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in
health, even as thy soul prospereth.”
This is one of the most
abused verses in all of the Bible. The reason it is so
abused, distorted, misapplied, is because this has been taken out of context
and is the key verse for supporting what is called the prosperity gospel or the
health and wealth gospel. It is a form of teaching that dominates the air waves
today. It is important to realise that in any heresy they all follow Satan’s
big lie technique. That is, if you say something loud enough, long enough and
often enough people will eventually believe it.
The word for “prosper” in
verse 2 is the Greek word euodoo [e)uodow] and it
simply means to be well. Etymologically this comes from as word that’s prefix
is eu. Whenever we see that prefix in Greek it has
the idea of benefit or something that is good for you, something that is well.
For example, we have in English the words euphoria or eulogise. So we have eu plus the word hodos
[o(doj] which is the word for a path, a journey, like a
traveller going on his way. So this word euodoo
was a word in everyday use, like “Have a good day.” The broad use of the term
was hoping things turned out well, having success during the day; not in the
sense of hoping someone made a lot of money during the day but that things just
go the way that you want them to go, that your journey would go well. In the
Greek world this was a common greeting used in letters of that day for wishing
someone success in life and in that sense it is not a divine promise of
material success or financial abundance. But that is how it has been
misinterpreted and misapplied today. So John is praying that things would go
well with Gaius and that he would be in health. The second word, health, is the
Greek hugiaino [u(giainw]. Both words are infinitives of result. hugiaino is a standard word used for
health, physical wellbeing. But it had a broader meaning as well, a generic
sense of stability, that things in life would be well balanced and temperate.
John adds a final phrase to
this that gives it a spiritual emphasis: NASB “just as your soul
prospers.” There the word prosper is a repetition of the first word we looked
at, euodoo, and there he is
emphasising that physically he might be as healthy and stable as his soul is
now because of his spiritual maturity.
It is vital for a pastor to
teach people how to think. Satan so often distracts and distorts is because
people just don’t think, and one of the things that happens is that somebody
will be heard to use certain phrases that may sound legitimate but are not, so
we have to learn to listen with discernment.
The health and wealth gospel
It goes by several different
names: the health and wealth gospel, the prosperity gospel, and it is also known as the faith movement or the word of faith
movement. This “word of faith” really brings in the Gnostic element of this.
Gnosticism was the idea that I have to find out the secret knowledge. I will
have the key to health and prosperity and success in life and happiness in life
but I just have to find out that secret formula, that secret knowledge. But in
Gnosticism they always had something outside of God and that was these Gnostic
principles. They were abstract principles that exist outside of God and even
God is subject to them. This is the same thing that is seen in the word of
faith movement. They abstract this principle of faith to a principle that even
God is subject to. So faith in and of itself becomes a metaphysical principle
of power, and the way they talk about faith reveals this. So it is a
neo-Gnostic movement. It is also called the born-again Jesus movement and that
brings in the idea that their Jesus isn’t the Jesus of the Bible and doesn’t do
what the Jesus of the Bible does. It is also known as the name it and claim it
theology because of the emphasis on positive confession.
Their basic thought is that
all growing and spiritually mature Christians should be living lives of total
material success, physical health and financial wealth which is attained
through a positive confession of faith. In other words, if you are sick it is a
sign that you are not trusting God, you are carnal, you don’t know anything
about the Bible, and you are not using faith at all in your life. Jesus does
for the sin of poverty and if you are poor you are just not trusting Jesus.
They make poverty a sin, sickness in and of itself a sin, so they have a
distorted view of the atonement.
Where did all of this come
from? It didn’t just pop up. We have to understand history. It has its roots in
the early or middle part of the nineteenth century. Many assume that all charismatics have this same sort of view, and that is not
true. The most influential charismatic, though, that got into health and wealth
teaching was a man named Kenneth Hagen, Snr. He is considered the father of
this health and wealth, born-again Jesus theology, but it is a very different
form of healing than traditional charismatics held
to. Word of faith teaching is really the result of a combination of ideas that
arose in the 19th century. On the one hand there was the development
among non-Christians of the transcendental thinking, an almost a pantheistic
view that God is in everything and above everything, He is not imminent in
creation He is just transcendent and you can’t really know Him. So once you get
God so far out there you can’t know anything about Him the only way you know
anything is when it is generated out of yourself. So it has this very mystical
emphasis. Then at the same time coming out of
To buy into these
philosophies and attempt to syncretise them with Christianity means being a
failure in the spiritual life because it is using a lot of ideas and principles
for problem-solving that are contrary to the Word of God. In fact, what they
emphasise is human ability. So new thought metaphysics is just a loose mixture
of all kinds of ideas that were never systematised. It is a precursor to the
new age movement. New thought metaphysics emphasises the immanence of God but
it also emphasises the divine nature of man, that every man has a spark of
divinity in him, (That is different from being in the image and likeness of
God, by the way) and that every human being has immediately available to him
God’s power. You just have to have the right key, the right mental attitude,
and then you can tap into God’s power. According to them sin, disease, and
poverty are all the result of incorrect thinking. In their view Jesus was
simply a teacher and a healer, a mere man, not God. He was no more divine than
the rest of us because we all have that spark of divinity in us. New thought
thinking has strains of monism, i.e. that ultimate reality is all one, there is no real distinction ultimately. It picks up ideas
from ancient Gnosticism, and Platonism as well. In
essence its true belief was that ultimate reality is spiritual and not
physical. We are just sort of an image of ultimate reality, like Plato’s
shadows in the cave. We are not real, what is real is what is out there in this
sort of ultimate reality. Therefore physical effects are merely secondary and
not real. The human mind through positive mental attitude and positive
conception can change the physical realities, and we can change from sickness
to health, from poverty to wealth.
New thought didn’t have any
specific dogma, it was based on hypnotism and a lot of self-help type of
things. It picked up ideas from social Darwinism, Unitarianism,
transcendentalism, Platonism, and a lot of other isms that were popular at that
time. Probably the person that Quindy had his
greatest influence on was a woman by the name of Mary Baker Glover Patterson
Eddy who was the founder of Christian science. His
thinking was also influential in what has come to be called the unity
So that gives an idea of
where this thing comes from and who these people are, but its roots are not
biblical exegesis, its views are a hodge-podge, an
amalgam of all kinds of Gnostic, transcendental, self-help type of ideas, and
much of it comes right out of demon possession and demon influence.
What do they believe? What is
it that is so bad that they believe? What do they believe about God? If we are
going to critique a theological system we always start with God. What do they
think about the Bible? What do they think about Jesus, about His person? What do
they think about Jesus and His work on the cross? How do they define sin and
what sin is, and how do they define the solution to sin? You just break it down
into the basic categories and analyse it that way.
What do they believe about God?
They say that God created the world and does everything by speaking words of
faith. God created by faith, and the way they take that is God uses faith to
create things. So they view faith as some sort of abstract principle that
exists outside of God. Remember, we have emphasised again and again and again
when we were studying Genesis that when God created the heavens and the earth
in Genesis 1:1 there were no laws outside of God in existence. God created them
all: them laws of physics, biology, logic, etc. The
laws of logic, foe example, are simply a reflection of the orderly thinking in
the mind of God. God does not follow some sort of abstract principle. Love does
not exist outside of God. God does not live in accordance with some kind of
external principle; He is the standard; He is the embodiment of these things.
So God is then viewed by them as a faith being. In their view God Himself is
bound by the forces of the spirit world (This really brings in some of that
Gnostic stuff) and he can only operate through the force of faith. You have to
tap into this faith force and use this faith force and make a positive
confession in order to do anything. All this means is
that there is some sort of power over God to which he must appeal and which He
must use in order to create things. Therefore God is less than God, He is not
an eternally omnipotent God, and not the creator of everything; there are
certain principles of ultimate reality that are even outside of God that He
must conform to. So for them their god is not the God of the Bible. They break
down the creator-creature distinction. Furthermore, when the Scripture says
that man is created in God’s image this means that human beings are little
gods. If God has to tap into this faith power, this metaphysical power, in
order to create things then we can too. So we are created as little gods. This
really starts blending into Mormonism. The same thing is true for the positive
confession people, the health and wealth people: we are all little gods and we
can imitate God by speaking the same words of faith with the same creative
power. And just as God created His reality by words of faith you can create new
reality by words of faith. So if you don’t like your reality all you have to do
is learn the magic words and you can create your own reality, and you, too, can
have health and wealth, success and prosperity.
What did man become at the
fall? They believe that Adam’s nature was transformed into Satan’s nature. It’s
not a sin nature, it is Satan’s nature. Adam’s godhood got transformed to
Satan’s nature, so there is a sort of kidnapping of Adam’s deity. Well if that
is the problem then at the atonement Jesus’ death must have as its purpose to
restore human beings to godhood, and renewed incarnations of God. They have an
extremely demonic view of the atonement. In the atonement Kenneth Copeland
teaches that Jesus Christ became obedient to Satan and took Satan’s nature upon
Himself. What does the Bible teach? The Bible teaches that on the cross Jesus
Christ was absolute perfect righteousness. He never loses that perfect
righteousness; He never becomes personally guilty of sin. God the Father in His
perfect righteousness imputes judicially the sins of the world on Christ. It is
a judicial imputation, it is not a real imputation.
Jesus doesn’t become a fallen creature, He does not personally sin on the cross
and He does not acquire a sin nature. He becomes spiritually dead in a judicial
sense; He is temporarily separated from God the Father so that the sons of the
world can be poured out upon Him. When we say Christ died spiritually what we
are saying is that the penalty for sin was spiritual death, not physical death.
That means separation from God and a loss of a human spirit so that we cannot
understand the things of God and we cannot do anything that pleases God. When
Jesus Christ died spiritually He was judicially separated from God between
When they talk about
salvation the word of faith people teach that Christians in regeneration are
then empowered to speak words of faith again and define health and financial
prosperity guaranteed by the cross. All of this is nothing more than a
neo-Gnosticism. The word of faith gospel has a different Jesus, a different
gospel, and a different God. To access their god you have to have a special
knowledge or gnosis in order to achieve health and wealth and prosperity.
How do they do that? Their
methodology is positive confession. This means you have to visualise what you
want, which is an occult methodology borrowed from Hinduism, and then he speaks
that into existence with his mouth. It is a form of magic. What is confessed
then is supposed to come to pass. They say that if a believer wants to be
successful over their circumstances they must confess it positively. There is
no negative thinking here, you can’t admit that you have a headache, if you
have physical pain you can’t admit it because you are not trusting God if you
do. Positive confession creates a positive reality and, for them, a negative
confession creates a negative reality. For them salvation, health and
prosperity all must be spoken by the mouth in order to come into existence. Of course,
if this is true Moses, Job, Jeremiah, David, Jonah and Elijah would all have
problems because they all got pretty depressed at times in their spiritual life
and their words and negative confessions would have created all kinds of
disasters. We have to realise that this teaching which dominates so much today
is just completely unbiblical and based on false exegesis of passages.
3 John 2 is a key verse.
Another verse that they go for has to do with divine healing, another major
plank in their thinking. For them healing and positive thinking are
inseparable. The verses they go to is Isaiah 53:4, 5 NASB “Surely
our griefs He Himself bore, And
our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God,
and afflicted.
One of the greatest
charges and lies of the health and wealth crowd is that those of us who don’t
believe in charismatic forms of healing don’t believe God heals. God still
heals but God is sovereign and He heals when he will, when he will, it is not
determined or manipulated by human beings.
We have to be careful of
how people use and distort Scripture. We live in an age of as much heresy and
as much distortion as the time of the early church. One of the greatest
distortions is the distortion of grace. People today don’t understand grace.
The health and wealth gospel crowds do not understand grace.