What is the
Prosperity Gospel?
John McKee | September 2023
The word gospel really means good news. Whenever we speak about the gospel we are talking about the good news of Jesus Christ - who He is and what He did. It’s the Son of God becoming man and entering this sinful world, but living in perfect sinlessness and obedience to the law of God, yet the innocent Jesus went to the cross for guilty sinners, dying in our place, bearing the punishment for our sins and being raised to life again so that we can have new life in Him when by faith we know Him as Saviour and Lord. The benefits of this good news do not end with the forgiveness of sins, for to believe the gospel is to be adopted into the family of God as we receive the Holy Spirit, and it is to live everyday with the promise of eternal life and the certain hope of heaven. This is the only gospel, and it is the best news we will ever hear.
You may however have heard of another gospel, not that there is another one, but there are many false gospels and one of these is called the prosperity gospel (Galatians 1:6-10). You might be familiar with that name, but even if you have not heard of the prosperity gospel before you will probably have come across some of the teachings that come with it. The prosperity gospel is a cruel twisting of the truth that preys on vulnerable and desperate people by exchanging the riches of Christ for the supposed riches of this world. It loses sight of eternity and is concerned only with the things of this world. It offers health, wealth, and happiness but is powerless to deliver any of these things. The prosperity gospel is interested in God only for what we can get from him and treats Christianity almost like a vending machine; we simply put in a coin of faith, select what we want, and God must surely give it to us.
In many parts of the world today whenever people hear the word gospel, they think in terms of prosperity rather than anything to do with Jesus Christ or the cross. It teaches that God only ever wants us to be healthy, wealthy, and happy and that this life must be filled with constant blessing. If sickness or suffering enter into our lives it must be because of a lack of faith on our part. If only we have enough faith, then God will certainly heal us, or perhaps we will never even get sick to begin with. If we only have enough faith then God will certainly grant us the desires of our heart, whatever those desires might be. A nicer car, a promotion at work, a full bank account, or even the all clear from the doctor; the prosperity gospel says God will give you all these things. No surprise it is so attractive to so many people.
The true gospel is good news that we can receive only by faith. No amount of good works, self-improvement, or human effort can ever pay the debt of sin. The riches of Christ cannot be earned or purchased, they come only by the grace of God which we receive by faith in Jesus Christ, and this saving faith is itself a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8-9). The prosperity gospel misunderstands faith and twists it from being the gift of God into being something which we must produce in ourselves in order to convince God into doing what we want. It treats faith like a magic formula, so if we can just get it right then we can control God.
The proper response to the true gospel is to serve God in gratitude for all the wonderful things He has done for us freely in Christ, but the prosperity gospel would force God to serve us because of all the things we have done.
Maybe you see your dream car drive past - the prosperity gospel would advise you to tell yourself that one day soon you will be driving that car. You just need to start believing that you will drive that car, and the logic goes that if you have enough faith then God will surely grant you the car of your dreams. A bigger house, a promotion at work, a full bank account; the prosperity gospel says all these things can be yours so long as your faith is strong enough. However, if you begin to doubt - if you allow negative thoughts into your mind or speak negative words out of your mouth - then you will destroy your own faith, rob yourself, and prevent God from pouring blessing upon you.
This teaching lies at the heart of the prosperity gospel, and it can appear under different names and disguises. It is commonly called “word of faith”. However, while this term may give the appearance of Christianity, it is only a thin veneer, for beneath the surface this idea is far more pagan than Christian. Word of faith teaching is little more than a rebranding of concepts from New-Age Occultism such as “manifesting” or “the law of attraction” – i.e., think good things and good things will come to you.
It fundamentally denies the sovereignty of God and instead treats God more like Santa Claus or a genie in a bottle who only exists to grant our every wish provided we have enough faith. But crucially here the faith is in ourselves rather than in Jesus Christ. Faith ceases to be the gift of God by which we grasp hold of His promises and instead faith becomes the means by which we strong arm God and coerce Him into giving us what we want. The god of the prosperity gospel is certainly not the God of the Bible, but an idol from our own imaginations whose sole purpose is to grant our deepest desires. The true gospel offers us the riches of Christ which are infinitely more precious than anything this world could ever offer. The Bible has a lot to say about wealth and not all of it bad. Those who have been blessed with great wealth should see it as God’s gift to them and therefore use what God has given them to serve and glorify Him (Acts 20:35). Anyone who is driven by their own greed for material gain or who sees Christianity simply as a way of getting rich has sorely misunderstood the gospel (Matthew 6:24; Luke 12:13-21).
However, although we might easily spot prosperity teaching on wealth, what the prosperity gospel has to say on health can be much more subtle and far more dangerous. Apply word of faith theology to sickness, and the results are devastating. For example, a couple who have struggled with infertility or suffered a miscarriage are told that if they just have enough faith then they will soon hold their baby in their arms. This is one of the cruellest lies and wicked false hopes that can ever be offered to anyone.
A woman may be sick but refuses to see a doctor or seek any medical help because she thinks that to do so would be a lack of faith and allowing doubts to enter her mind, in which case her sickness will become real, and God will not heal her. She believes that because she is a Christian it is impossible for her to be sick and so she ignores every symptom. Another person is slightly less extreme, he can acknowledge that he is sick but believes that it is always God’s will to heal the sick and that this healing will be his so long as he has enough faith. Perhaps he stops taking his medicine as he thinks medicine is a sign of weak faith. Suddenly any potential recovery is dependent upon his own performance, and if he is not healed then this must be his own fault for lacking faith or praying weak prayers.
The prosperity gospel says you must believe yourself better and this is a terrible burden to place on anyone; it is the absolute last thing a sick person needs to hear, and it is most certainly not biblical.
You might want to grab a Bible as we consider what the Bible has to say about healing and in particular the healing miracles of Jesus. In the gospels we see Jesus restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf; He caused those who could not walk to rise up and leap with joy; He healed diseases and even raised the dead back to life. The healings done by Jesus are radically different from the so called “faith healings” of the prosperity gospel. In all but one case the healings done by Jesus were instant and complete, and the one exception was deliberately done in order to teach his disciples about seeing who He really is (Mark 8:22-38). At least the disciples could see more clearly than the many so called “faith healers” today who lack 20/20 vision. As people who claim to have the power to heal there is a strangely high number of them who wear glasses.
When Jesus healed the ten lepers only one of them came back to thank Him, the other nine did not display any faith of any kind (Luke 17:11-19). Furthermore, Jesus healed blind people who did not even know who He was and were therefore incapable of having faith in Him (John 5:13; 9:36). Jesus also raised the dead back to life, but the widow’s son could not express any faith while his body lay lifeless (Luke 7:11-17). When we consider these accounts, and there are many more we could consider, it is clear that Jesus did not require a massive amount of faith from people in order to heal them, but graciously healed even those who rejected Him. There are however several instances when Jesus says to someone, “your faith has made you well” (Matthew 9:22; Mark 5:34; 10:52; Luke 7:50; 8:48; 18:42). Do these words support the prosperity gospel view of healing? Was Jesus contradicting Himself or confused when He said these words? Certainly not. These words could also be taken as “your faith has saved you”, as although Jesus cared deeply for their physical healing, His main concern was for their spiritual healing which comes only through salvation as they trusted in Him. His power to heal did not depend on their faith.
As Christians we certainly do not deny that God heals people today, indeed we believe that all healing comes from God. Sometimes that healing might appear extraordinary and unexplainable, but far more often it comes in common ways as God works through the gifted hands of doctors and the medicines they prescribe. The Bible encourages us to pray for the sick (James 5:14) and prayer is always the best place to start. God can heal, but that does not necessarily mean that He will. The Apostle Paul may well have struggled with his eyesight and there is good reason to believe that his “thorn in the flesh” was a physical condition which never went away (2 Corinthians 12:7). Paul even encouraged Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach when he was unwell (1 Timothy 5:23).
Paul certainly did not lack faith, nor did he deny God’s power to heal as God had previously worked through him to bring about miraculous healing (Acts 20:7-12), but Paul understood that it is not always God’s will to heal everyone. This does not mean that God is any less good or that our faith is any less real. We trust God and pray for healing; if it comes, we rejoice and give thanks, but if healing does not come, we should not despair and blame ourselves for some lack of faith, but rather hold firm to the promise that God works all things for good (Romans 8:28), even sickness. The prosperity gospel claims to offer the same healing power of Jesus and the Apostles for those who are sick today but delivers only false hope and empty promises. It deceives people into thinking they are healed while their symptoms remain, or if their symptoms do disappear because they are responding well to treatment, only to later reoccur, the prosperity gospel says they are to blame for this reoccurrence. While the prosperity gospel only offers false hope for this life, the true gospel provides real hope for eternity.
A quick glance at the Bible shows us that the lives of God’s people are so often marked by hardship and suffering.
There was no one like Job in all the earth, he feared God and turned away from evil (Job 1:7), yet Job lost all his wealth, his children, and his health and never understood why these things happened. But despite pressure from his friends and even his wife, he would not curse God. David was a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), yet much of his life was lived on the run as he was betrayed, pursued, and persecuted. As we read the Psalms, we get a sense of David’s desperation as he endured these things. John the Baptist was beheaded (Mark 6:27). Stephen was stoned to death (Acts 7:58-60). Peter was thrown into prison (Acts 12:1-5). Paul suffered more than most: five times he was lashed, he was beaten with rods, stoned, shipwrecked three times, surrounded by constant dangers, hungry and thirsty with no food, cold with no shelter (2 Corinthians 11:16-33), yet Paul gladly endured it all and was able to write, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).
Paul could have had a very successful life and career; all the riches of this world could have been his, and yet in Christ he found a treasure far surpassing anything this world could offer him. It was a treasure worth suffering and even dying for - it was the riches of Christ, the gospel of grace, an eternal glory set before him. Church history tells us the same story. The Puritan John Owen outlived all ten of his children, nine of whom died in infancy. Missionary to the New Hebrides, John Paton had to sleep on top of the graves of his wife and son to stop cannibals from digging up their bodies. More recently and more locally we might think of someone like Maud Kells who was shot while serving as a missionary in the Congo. There are Christians all around the world today living under severe persecution because of their faith in Jesus Christ.
This is not the life free from all hardships, suffering, and sickness that the prosperity gospel promises. These people never possessed the riches of this world, yet they all had something infinitely greater. In the Christian life we will face hardships, we will face suffering, we will face sickness, and eventually we will all also face death; but we can do so knowing that Christ our Saviour has gone before us, He has experienced all of these things and triumphed over them so that we might follow Him with hope (Hebrews 4:15). The prosperity gospel is a false promise which says we can escape these things in the present, but the true gospel, the only gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ says that by the grace of God we can endure them, and that beyond them there is a better country where the sufferings of this present time are no more, and where we shall live for all eternity in the glorious presence of our God and Saviour. This is not false hope, it is real hope, it is our only hope, our living hope. God does not promise to give us everything we want, but He does promise to give us everything that we need.
Let us look then to Jesus, not for what we can get from Him, but because of who He is and all that He has done for us.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1-2). So next time you come across a meeting, book or person talking about the gospel, be wise to discern whether it is the true gospel, or the prosperity gospel, for failing to distinguish will have life-changing, eternity altering implications.