Suffering, Shame and the error of Prosperity.

Matt Walsh has a wonderful rant up about those very popular heretics, the Olsteens, and their prosperity Gospel. His conclusion is the conclusion that we are reaching with the public religion we have, what is left after three generations of liberal activists (Social Justice Warriors) have gutted the church.

But nonsense is all that’s left when Christ is taken out of Christianity; when we preach a Word that doesn’t include words like sin, and duty, and obedience; when we adopt a Gospel that has no redemption, no forgiveness, no mercy, no justice; when we minimize prayer and virtue and truth; when we forget that ours is a faith for warriors and martyrs; when we pretend that Christ didn’t promise us suffering and persecution in this life; when we substitute true joy for mere happiness; when we treat the Bible like a theological box of Legos that can be deconstructed and reassembled into anything we want it to be. Ultimately, the Greatest Thing in the universe is turned into something as worthless, interchangeable, and disposable as an inspirational Facebook meme.

[A quick note the Matt. I paste your tags into the link, as I know you get paid by page views.]


But the church, when it is on fire, is not something that is praised or popular. The leaders of the church are arrested and killed. The church is joyful, but is fasting and is in prayer, particularly when appointing those who are going to lead it. The church on fire induces rage among the religious and pious, particularly those who are pagans, and this rage leads to persecution and pogroms.

But Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and having persuaded the crowds, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead. But when the disciples gathered about him, he rose up and entered the city, and on the next day he went on with Barnabas to Derbe. When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.

Then they passed through Pisidia and came to Pamphylia. And when they had spoken the word in Perga, they went down to Attalia, and from there they sailed to Antioch, where they had been commended to the grace of God for the work that they had fulfilled. And when they arrived and gathered the church together, they declared all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. And they remained no little time with the disciples.

(Acts 14:19-28 ESV)

Paul did not preach prosperity. Instead he encouraged them to continue in the faith and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.

We are promised suffering, not health. We are promised poverty, not prosperity. We are promised hatred, not praise. But this does not matter, for we should see the praise of this world as worthless compared with Christ.

When I folded my firm in November of ARSH 2011, it certainly smacked of defeat. I admit that. Just because I did it with moral certainty doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a decided air of “the bad guys won and I lost” about it, and doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a tough pill to swallow at the time. But now, good grief, I am so overjoyed to have my engagement with these markets and that industry in the rear-view mirror and totally out of sight I can hardly describe it. All of us who have been calumniated as “tinfoil behatted loons” with regards to the corruption, manipulation and non-viability of the markets now stand confirmed and vindicated. How is anything other than a total financial market strike justifiable now??

When I concluded my “shutting down letter” with the words of David, it was with the grinding teeth and clenched fists of a blind faith. Now I restate it with nothing but confirmed joy:

“This is the Lord’s doing; and it is wonderful in our eyes.”

Yes, it was, and yes, it is.

I have said beware of the pious. Well, the prosperity doctrine is not new: it is the sin of Lucifer, that I can be like God, and attain all wealth and glory for myself, shoved into clerical garb and using scriptures to gild a smoking turd. Do not be deluded by the smiles and happiness.

When Adam and Eve sinned in that cataclysmic way, their fallen humanity discovered pudor, and they expressed their shame in a physical way by covering their private parts. Those of you who have seen Massaccio’s fresco of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden have seen the agony of pudor. When King David is confronted by the prophet Nathan about his murder of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, and David’s adulterous act with her, he is overwhelmed with a sense of shame at what he has done. And he acknowledges his guilt and repents of what he has done. When the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable realizes what he has done, he is overwhelmed with a sense of shame, and this sense of shame brings him to his moral senses and he returns to his father to ask forgiveness. Notice that in this parable, and in the story of King David, the sense of shame, pudor, is needed for repentance, conversion and for seeking forgiveness.

What happens when this sense of pudor is lost or is deliberately forgotten? Then we have a person who lives his life solely to satisfy himself, his needs and his wants. Literature is strewn with such characters. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina denies her marriage vows to give herself over to her lustful passion for Count Vronsky. And she deliberately denies any sense of shame about her behavior; she rationalizes her betrayal of her marriage vows in the name of freedom and love, and finally, in a terrible realization of her crime, she kills herself. Now Tolstoy wrote this novel as a tragedy, to delineate how the denial of shame under the guise of a specious freedom must end up in self-annihilation. But what if a society, a culture, denies shame, relegates such an idea and such an emotion to the staid past? That question has great relevance for us today, for indeed we are a culture in which pudor has been set aside, has been denied, and all of this in the name of personal freedom.

Our selfish desires, either formulated as freedom and autonomy or as blessings and prosperity, are too small a god to worship, and too small a goal to spend one’s live on. Our God, by way of contrast, is greater than anything we can comprehend, and the kingdom of God is not found in the lies of televangelism or the controversies of the blogosphere, but in aiding the suffering people of Christ.

4 Comments

  1. Saved and Prosperous said:

    Yeah but, we’re promised that we will overcome it.

    I have no interest in listening to the Olsteens and the perversion of the prosperity message.

    However, I am not really interested in hearing a similar inaccuracy about how this life is all about suffering and pain.

    This is nothing more than the reverse side of the same coin – a type of smug piety that enjoys reminding everyone to get back under the bus for Christ.

    What about “more than conquerors”? Is that for later only? Heaven?

    I will not cheapen Christ’s sacrifice by acting like there is no deliverance in it.
    The Olsteens got the prosperity message wrong. But I’m living it, and it works.

    September 10, 2014
    • Titan000 said:

      “However, I am not really interested in hearing a similar inaccuracy about how this life is all about suffering and pain.”

      No. But following Christ involves suffering.

      ”What about “more than conquerors”? Is that for later only? Heaven?

      I will not cheapen Christ’s sacrifice by acting like there is no deliverance in it.
      The Olsteens got the prosperity message wrong. But I’m living it, and it works.”‘

      Did it work for the apostles who were poor were persecuted and all killed except for John?

      September 10, 2014
      • Saved and Prosperous said:

        I’m not an apostle.

        He came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. Let’s not forget that many of those martyred were expecting martyrdom. And that there are those for whom such a calling seems to be true.

        Christ tasted death for all of us. The idea that we are living in continuous suffering and sacrifice is, in my opinion, a mistaken ideology. Let’s not forget that the apostles also saw and performed many miracles, and won many to Christ. I think that living such experiences would change a man so much that they would not even notice the minor temporal privations experienced.

        It is a mistake to assume that we are to experience the pains the apostles experienced if we are not also to experience the joys. If I could participate in the miraculous healing of thousands, if I could witness dead children being restored to their mothers, if I could see the releasing of hundreds from the bondage of demonic influence, I would probably be so transformed beyond any sense of myself that I would feel as Paul did – better for me to go, better for them to stay.

        I am beyond certain that the apostles were so filled with the presence and experiences of the Lord and His Spirit that they too were so full of the joy of the Lord that they also lost much of the sense of self, and that suffering was not even noticeable in the face of the manifested displays of the Lord’s glory.

        The error in the prosperity message is that the prosperity is for us to live high on the hog. The Lord DOES want us prosperous, so that we can do His will in the earth with that prosperity. He is looking for those he can trust with wealth, so that it is spent on the lost. Wealth in the hands of the just will further the Kingdom.

        I’m prospering in health and in career, and I thank the Lord for it, and look to share my prosperity with others.

        You are correct to say that the Lord tells us problems will come. But He also tells us that he has purchased our victory over those things.

        September 13, 2014

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