The Sunday Mail
Pastor Paul Reynolds
THERE is nothing wrong with making money. Quite the reverse — God encourages it in many situations and clearly regards it as a good thing, even when the country you live in is a godless mess.
For example when the Israelites were in exile in Babylon, God told them to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7, NIV).
There are also specific occasions in the Bible where God uses money as a blessing on people and shows that He is with them through the provision of great wealth. Most notably there was King Solomon who was prompted by God to ask for anything he wanted.
When Solomon asked for wisdom to govern the Israelites well, God responded by promising to grant him fabulous wealth. God also blessed Jabez with an enlarged territory, safety and freedom from pain (1 Chronicles 4:10).
So what does that have to do with us?
As an example of what our lives should be like, it has nothing to do with us. God hasn’t asked you what you would like with an implication that He might well give you whatever it is that you ask for. He also nowhere invites us to ask Him for more possessions or a larger portion of land to our name. The stories of Solomon and Jabez are not intended to be lessons on how we should live or what God should provide but as examples of different ways in which God has graciously and generously treated His people throughout history.
They are outliers — exceptions to the norm, even in their own time.
It wasn’t that Old Testament believers routinely asked for and were provided with great wealth, or that the most faithful acquired great wealth. In fact if you look at the faith ‘hall of fame’ in Hebrews 11, when you go down the list of all the people who God is commending, some of them were extremely poor (for example most of the prophets) and some were killed (pretty much the opposite of what Jabez asked for).
In the New Testament it gets much worse for God’s people, financially speaking. The early church in Jerusalem nearly starved to death, Paul the apostle — the most famous missionary in history — frequently had barely enough food to survive. Jesus himself couldn’t afford his own house.
Radical generosity is called for and riches are portrayed on the one hand as one way in which God can bless people, but never as something to be sought for its own sake.
There is one passage in the New Testament that talks explicitly about God providing us with plenty. In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians ( 9:7-11) he says that God “is able” to give us a lot — more than we need, but He follows that up by giving us the reason he might do that: “So that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work, so that you can be generous on every occasion, with gifts freely scattered to the poor”.
God might bless us financially and it’s perfectly okay to enjoy that, so long as we understand that first, it wasn’t a reward, and second, it’s primarily there so that we can bless others, not so that we can hoard, flaunt or waste it on expensive trivialities.
That is why the recent onset of scandals and lawsuits against such ‘churches’ can only be a good thing in my opinion. Tragic as it is to see anybody dragged through the courts for falsely invoking God’s name in business deals or false prophecies, there is hope. But for that hope to be realised, more Christians need to stand up and renounce the false gospel of financial promises.
For the sake of those millions of people living away from God’s love who so desperately need his forgiveness, Christians in Zimbabwe need to rise up and declare — loud and clear — that God is for the downtrodden, the poor, the weak, the helpless and the vulnerable. Not to turn them all into rich people writing memoirs about how much cash they have and dishing out bad financial advice, but to make them into children of the Most High God who have something far greater than a good car to look forward to, an eternity in the glorious company of their heavenly Father, friend, king and saviour.
There is nothing wrong with making money. But making disciples of Jesus is infinitely more worthwhile.
