Why Are Christians Blind to Wealth and Power in the Bible?
Genesis: Various
In the last episode, we opened up our Bibles and saw a much bigger Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob than we’ve ever seen before. They did rule over great houses numbering in the thousands. They were very, very rich in cattle, gold, and silver. They had their own private armies and local and regional alliances. It’s all in the text.
The question is — why don’t we see it when we read it? Is there something like a cataract in our eyes that makes us skip over a word or miss a line? What’s wrong with our vision when we read the Bible?
How Do We See the World?
We see through our eyes first of all. But that stream of light is channelled to our brain, which unscrambles the flood of data and makes sense of it. But that’s only part of the story. We aren’t just a machine for seeing and processing information. We bear the imprints of God as no other creature does.
Something happens between the mind and the heart that moulds and shapes our vision — highlighting and underlining the things we think are righteous and worthy, and obscuring the things we deem evil or worthless. We all know what happens when we buy a new vehicle, say an F-150 pickup. All we notice on the road are other F-150s. Our heart directs our vision.
Could it be that, between the mind and the heart of the Christian, our vision has been hijacked? Someone has rewired our heart so that we value poverty and weakness and fixate on them when we read Scripture, as if they were in themselves virtuous — and view wealth and power as morally tainted and worthless. Why else would we wince at and skip over all mention of gold and silver and armies and alliances when we read the life of Abraham?
We Christians need urgently to ask ourselves: why are we so selectively blind?
The Demonic Doctrine Behind It
Perhaps you’ll say: That’s the prosperity gospel. The important thing is the gospel, Nathan. Not one inch from the cross.
We must certainly be careful. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and wealth isn’t the gospel. But we must put those warnings against the plumb line of God’s word. Any warnings against studying wealth as well as poverty — however well meant — if they take us one inch away from the plain words of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, must be cast out at once, like Hagar and Ishmael.
It’s a fact. Abraham was very rich, Isaac was very, very rich, and Jacob — despite all his hardships — was richer still. Abraham rubbed shoulders with Pharaoh, Isaac with King Abimelech, but Jacob was so great as to bless Pharaoh himself — the greater blessing the lesser.
Let’s take a trip to the optician and test our vision by looking at Job in our mind’s eye. When we think of Job, what picture comes to mind? Isn’t it his destitution and poverty? And yet, it was the devil’s doing that made him poor. We downplay the greatness of Job so much that we have trouble seeing it, even though he was the richest man in the East — a Rothschild of his time. The value of his livestock alone before the devil robbed him was at least $35.7 million in today’s money. After his restoration, his livestock can be valued at up to $104.6 million.
The reason why we suffer from selective vision is simple: the church has been the victim of a wily deception.
Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times, some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. — 1 Timothy 4:1
God’s church has been blinded by demonic lies.
The Ancient Greek Lie
The New Testament church was born in a pagan sea of demonic lies, penned by ancient Greek and Roman writers — the very writers celebrated as the classics in so-called classical Christian education. But that’s another story for another day.
This particular lie says that material things — things we can see and touch — are evil and low, and things that are non-material or so-called spiritual are good and exalted. Paul himself had to confront this directly. 1 Timothy 4 tells us that these classical pagans forbid to marry and command to abstain from foods — the material pleasures and responsibilities of marriage and food, which tie us to the earth, are evil and to be avoided.
This lie whispers: the weaker your body, the stronger your spirit. Minds tainted by the oil spill of classical Greek and Roman thought look on wealth as morally suspicious in itself — gold is so heavy, so material, how unspiritual. But it’s not just wealth that’s suspicious. It’s the activities that produce wealth — business, commerce, capitalism — so universally hated by all whose minds have been turned by this demonic deception.
Wealth is an encumbrance and an embarrassment at best, something to be glossed over in the text of Scripture. Perhaps this is why Jacob — dealmaker, capitalist, and irrepressible businessman — continues to be so vilified.
The Power Lie
But why are we also blind to the power of the patriarchs? Abraham’s 318-strong fighting force, together with his allies, bested a force of five kings. Shouldn’t we be proud of the victories of the man of faith, the friend of God (James 2:23)? Shouldn’t we strive to emulate the father of the faithful — including his powerful exercise of justice, rescuing helpless captives?
Satan has whispered in our ears: power is evil. Run from it. Power proceeds from wealth, which is already evil. According to this deception, the most powerful and effective men are, by nature, evil, whilst the weakling and the ineffectual are good-hearted and righteous. And the collapse of Christian influence in the 20th and 21st centuries is ample testimony to how far this deception has blinded the Church.
This deception is spread through false teachers. For example, the 20th century’s best-known so-called Reformed theologian Karl Barth said in Dogmatics in Outline:
For the Almighty is bad as power in itself is bad.
He identified the devil with power and the true God with weakness. No wonder Christians are so weak.
Although very few Christians would say amen to Barth, he represented a strain of thought found nearly everywhere in Christendom. How many times have you heard: Politics is a dirty business? The so-called spiritual ones, according to respectable Christian teachers, are weak and poor and preferably incompetent in worldly matters.
Two More Lies That Blind Us
Old Testament bad, New Testament good. Manichaeism holds that the God of the Old Testament was evil because of his preoccupation with the material world. Christians would never say the two Testaments were written by separate gods — but they almost universally believe the Old Testament is inferior to the New because of its supposed focus on the material. Don’t focus on the Old Testament, they say. Mine it for spiritual nuggets. Focus on Job’s trials, not his wealth and ministry.
The priesthood of the expert. When the Edict of Milan (AD 313) made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, Christians received the pagan temples as compensation. The buildings came as a package deal — temples need priests. And what is a priest in the pagan sense? Someone cut off from normal life and material concerns, with a special affinity for the spiritual. But what does that make the non-priests — the ordinary people, the laity?
When the logic of the pagan temple overtook the church of God, the word of God was pressed into a pagan mould. The Bible came to be seen as a kind of hidden knowledge, understandable only by those initiated into the mystery of the faith. This problem still persists in nearly every church on the face of the planet. If you’re going to read the Bible, you’ll need an expert to guide you.
And so the very people who could best understand Job, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — stockmen, ranchers, businessmen, the great and powerful men of the earth — are effectively barred from meditating on these men’s lives. Righteousness is separated from wealth, and justice from power. And where does that wealth and power flow to? To the ungodly and the unprincipled.
The Evolution Lie
Another doctrine which makes us skip the material details is small-e evolution — another relic of paganism. This doctrine maintains that each generation is better than the one before — wiser, smarter, morally superior. So by the time you get to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, these guys were foolish, evil, knuckle-draggers. What could we possibly learn from them?
We see this evolutionary principle when commentators read what Abraham did before Pharaoh and go wild: How foolish you were, Abraham. You should have told the truth. My superior wisdom deems it so. I am so clever, and you are such a dum-dum. With this attitude, the particulars of Abraham’s life — his wealth and power and business empire — serve no purpose for the enlightened people of the 21st century.
With all these errors in the mix, and a kind of elitism in the church that insulates the clergy from correction by the laity, the mistakes and oversights of clergymen and commentators are simply passed on — or amplified — generation after generation. The very non-spiritual patriarchs are scrubbed clean from the stench of trade and the smells of the stockyard. Only their inner life remains. They hover three feet off the ground.
What Do We Lose?
What’s so bad about missing the details of the lives of the patriarchs?
If we fail to see that the blessing of the Lord made Abraham very rich, Isaac richer, and Jacob richer still, we have made them in our own meagre image. We have stolen from God. Like vandals who strip the lead from a church roof — keeping the outward form intact, but causing the structure to rot from the inside out — those who strip the wealth out of Scripture, the power from God’s people, are pagans.
Make no mistake. Those who strip the wealth out of Scripture and the power from God’s people dress in smart casual wear, sometimes skinny jeans and crocs, or even clerical garb — and stand at the front of churches, replacing the whole counsel of God with a watered-down paganism.
How Do We Restore Our Vision?
As opposed to the pagan idea of evolution, we must embrace special creation — God made the world and every part of it, from nothing, in six days. Matter matters to God, and he loves it. In fact, the second chapter of Genesis, describing the rivers of Eden, says: the gold of that land is good. Wealth is there from the start, and in its quintessential form, gold, it is called good by God himself.
Together with the creation, we must believe in the incarnation, where God took on human flesh — an impossible and repulsive thought for pagans, but a wondrous mystery to God’s people. Flesh, things material, are forever good, because God has forever taken on flesh.
The Law and Covenants form the next bulwark against pagan lies. The first command is the dominion mandate — to have dominion over the animals and, by extension, the whole earth. Man’s God-given task ties him forever to the world of matter. The Ten Commandments give us our moral framework — not a pagan matter-bad/spirit-good dualism. God not only gives us commands; he blesses us for obedience to them — with long life, health, riches, honour, and more.
As we meditate on the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Law and Covenant of God, we restore the edifice of our mind. We shore up the cracks that let the winds of evil doctrine blow through us. The acid rain of demonic deception rolls off us, into the gutter where it belongs.
If you have any questions, you can email me at questions@godsworldgodsway.com. See you next week.