The reason I have called it poverty gospel is because you seem inclined to the idea that poverty is piety and wealth is wickedness.
That's weird
Where did you get this idea? Please point out the post. Otherwise, its obfuscation.
Regarding poverty as piety, that's also not true. Simply "lacking" is no more pious than simply "having", or simply being tall, or short, or healthy or sick. These are facts of life, and most of the time, there is little choice in the matter. Where you are born, which opportunities you get in life, which kind of body you get and its weakness, etc etc. God never consults us before he decides to plant us in certain situations. Those babies dying of AIDS because their mothers had HIV when they gave birth to them or breastfed them, they never got to decide which womb to show up in. Those Turkansa who were dying of famine barely 2 years ago, they never chose to be born into a culture that is dependant on rains etc etc. If they were consulted, probably they would have opted to be born as Bill Gates' or Oprah's kid or something.
Piety has to do with choices we make, not conditions we find ourselves in. If that rich young man had done as Christ requested, sold all his property, given it to the poor and followed Christ, pretty much what Paul did, that would have been pious. And more than that, it would have been an act of faith in Jesus who provides for everything, and an act of love for Jesus, whom he would've thereby loved more than his wealth. Who knows? Perhaps he would've been one of the Apostles. Piety is when we willingly give up what we do have, which no one is too poor to do. Everyone, even a chokora, can give up something for the sake of another person. It's not a preserve of rich people who believe in the prosperity message.
Moreover, piety can also consist in accepting your condition. This does not mean that you do not work to improve it with what you have, or that you fail to trust in God for your provisions, but that you know that not having what you want doesn't mean the end of the world. It doesn't even mean lack of faith in God. God is the point, not his gifts. And you love him for his own sake, not for what goodies he gives you. Consider Job. God allowed him to become poor and thereby prove that it was God he loved and worshipped, not the gifts God had given him. My point is that God tries everyone who loves and believes in him. In fact God says,
"those whom I love, I chastise". What does this mean? It's the language of a father. A father gives freely to his children. But sometimes, he deliberately withholds some things from them too. You read in Paul's letters that he suffered from a certain thorn in the flesh, and asked God to take it away. God told him "
My grace is sufficient for you". That means that God sometimes deliberately permits us to go through hard times, probably to wean us from all sorts of false gods and attachments we have in things that we may not realize we worship. Whenever I lose things, property, opportunity, even friends, looking back later on, I realize I had almost made them small gods in my life. Isnt it good if God then takes them away from me, for my own sake? Moreover, when God takes something away, or allows something to be lost, he always replaces it with something better. So our attitude should be patience, faith and trust. Point is, there's our plan and then there's God's plan. Faith means believing in God's plan when it doesn't seem to coincide with ours.
The prosperity message would make Christians believe that when such trying times occur, its because they are weak in faith. Yet, sometimes God permits it to mature us spiritually. Sometimes God readily removes these experiences in a single prayer, sometimes he keeps us safe from even experiencing them in the first place, unbeknownst to us etc etc. My problem with prosperity preachers is presenting a half-truth, instead of the whole spectrum of Christian experiences in this world. Do you know that Jesus PROMISED that his followers would suffer? And he BLESSED them for it in advance? What was he talking about, then, if wealth and good things are a guarantee to Christians at all times, depending only on whether they have faith or not? Surely that message is only half-true. That's why it smells so bad from a distance. Even non-believers can tell it is bunk. It's as if God is not God and he is required to respond to us the way WE want/think, and not the way HE wills.
