The Cut-Rate Grace of a Health and Wealth Gospel

God loves you (the TV evangelist shouts to his listening audience). He loves you and he wills for you to enjoy perfect health.

And he wants you rich. After all, the cattle on a thousand hills belong to him. Would an earthly millionaire make his own children eat poor food, wear shabby clothes, and ride in a broken-down family car? Of course not! Neither will your heavenly Father give you anything but the very best.

What is the desire of your heart? Name it, claim it by faith, and it is yours! Your heavenly Father has promised it. It’s right there in the Bible.

But is it? Jesus Christ said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” And the autobiography of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 11–12 reads like the very antithesis of the gospel of health and wealth: “Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.… I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.… [T]here was given me a thorn in my flesh.… Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

No doubt many who preach the unbiblical gospel of health and wealth are well meaning. They sincerely, though mistakenly, believe this to be an important part of the “full gospel.”

But the danger of this perverted gospel of health and wealth is that it makes false promises. These in turn lead to unscriptural desires for wealth and material prosperity, to false hopes for perfect physical health, and in the end to false guilt and despair.

Guaranteed Prosperity?

As with all heresies, some pieces of truth are embedded in the gospel of health and wealth. For example, the apostle John begins his third epistle with a friendly Christian greeting: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth” (v. 2). Health and wealth preacher Kenneth Copeland misinterprets this as a universal promise.

It is doubtful, however, whether the apostle John conceived of prosperity primarily in terms of financial and material things. In any case, this standard formula of greeting for a personal letter of that time is certainly no more than a wish, and definitely not a guarantee or promise. Likewise, the “abundant life” to which the apostle refers in John 10:10 is clearly spiritual life from God rather than material affluence.

The greatest evil of this perverted gospel centers in its complete reversal of biblical values. Wealth is not our goal. It is not wicked to be poor. The Christian is not to set a high priority on the well-advertised creature comforts that twentieth-century America makes possible. The abundance of things we possess is not the measure of our true success. What most Americans call success is in God’s eyes our downfall. God’s great goal for us is not wealth and prestige (though these may come), but goodness.

Our Lord warns those who would too readily follow him to count the cost first (Luke 14:28). When he bade Ananias call the apostle Paul to serve him, he added, “For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 8:16).

Christians who live in obedience to Christ must not expect to ride in Cadillacs, wear fur coats from Neiman-Marcus, live in a suburban mansion, and vacation each winter in the Bahamas. These are not always wrong, but we must not make them into life goals or special signs of God’s approval. Especially, we must not claim these material things as promises to be received by faith.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood the gospel better when he wrote, “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold in the market … at cut-rate prices.”

Guaranteed Health?

The gospel of health and wealth is right at this point: A morally conscientious person who recognizes that his body is the temple of the Holy Spirit generally has better health because he takes care of himself physically.

Also, in a sense the Bible teaches healing in the Atonement. Scripture presents sickness as part of the curse from which Christ redeemed us. Isaiah 53 affirms: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (v. 4). But the Hebrew can also be translated, “Surely he has borne our sicknesses and carried our pains.” Verse 5 adds, “By his stripes we are healed.” Two New Testament references to this passage are instructive: Matthew interprets it literally to refer to the healing of physical diseases during our Lord’s earthly ministry (Matt. 8:17). The apostle Peter later applies the same passage figuratively to spiritual health and healing from sin (1 Peter 1:24–25).

As Gordon Fee says, “Isaiah … refers first of all to the healings of the wounds and disease of sin. Yet, since physical disease was clearly recognized to be a consequence of the fall, such a metaphor could also carry with it the literal sense, and this is what Matthew picked up” (The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels).

Healing from the effects of the Fall is clearly promised by Scripture. But according to Romans 8, the curse will be lifted completely only at the end time.

So the ultimate healing of the whole person is promised only with the resurrection of the body at the second coming of Christ.

Yet God can miraculously break into our present sphere when he chooses, healing our bodies now in anticipation of the final healing. Granted, Christians are divided on this matter. Some hold that in this present age God heals only through secondary means such as doctors and medicine, without miracle. Yet Scripture encourages us to pray for the healing of the sick. At least in part this is to be reckoned as miraculous healing (James 5:14–15). Therefore, when my children became ill, though I took them to the doctor I also prayed that God would miraculously heal them. However, we must understand that God has never promised to heal here and now.

One would not suspect this from the words of one faith healer, the late Hobart Freeman: “To claim healing for the body and then to continue to take medicine is not following our faith with corresponding action. If we feel the need of anything in addition to faith, then we do not have faith to be healed. When genuine faith is present, it alone will be sufficient for it will take the place of medicine and other needs” (Faith).

This is to hold out promises contrary to the teaching of Scripture. It should not surprise us, therefore, when the Associated Press reports, “Ten mothers, six or seven infants, and a diabetic man who stopped insulin in the belief that God would cure him, have died over the past three years as a result of refusing to take medicine.… All were followers of Hobart Freeman.”

Some genuine promises of Scripture are taken entirely out of their biblical context by those enthralled with the gospel of health and wealth. John 14:13 is an example: “I will do whatever you ask in my name.” But what does it mean to pray in Christ’s name? Certainly not merely to repeat the formula. Rather, it means to make requests on his authority. And it is only when we know that we are asking for what he wills (and not merely what we wish) that his promise holds. That is why, in a parallel passage making the same universal promise, John introduces the safeguard “according to his will” (1 John 5:14). Even our Lord inserts into his own prayer for deliverance “if you are willing” (Luke 22:42). To take a promise out of its context is to force Scripture to say what it does not say. We then turn its divine promises into false claims that will only delude the gullible.

Consider the simple believer who is assured by a preacher he trusts that John 14:13 is a universal promise with no qualifications. He may feel that his faith is utterly destroyed. He may question the truthfulness of God.

In anger he may rebel against a God who has “deceived” him. Few are harder to reach with the biblical gospel of God’s love in Christ than those whose relationship with God has been twisted out of shape by the false gospel of health and wealth.

Redemption’s Future Tense

The root error of the false gospel of health and wealth is this: It seeks to apply a theology of future glory to the believing and obedient Christian right now. But our Lord taught a theology for here and now that both sustains us in hard times and holds out hope for tomorrow. We cannot claim now what God in his grace has promised only for the future. God loves us too much to give us everything we want right now.

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