Prosperity is guaranteed, but will you pay the price?
Deuteronomy 28:1–12
Young men are in desperate need of help today. What they face is measurably worse than the Great Depression, the Cold War, or even the Second World War. It’s causing a lower percentage of young men to get married, have children, and own their own home than at any time in the last 150 years.
This war on men is preventing men from realising themselves as men. They’re facing a tsunami that will sweep them away to a wasted, empty life — far from the meaning that wife and family and home offer. They already have a home in heaven. They need a home, a wife, and children in the here and now.
But there is an answer to the plight of young men, and it’s found in God’s word. I want to outline in this episode an open secret from the Bible that will enable Christian young men to prosper and have all the good things their heart could ever desire, regardless of the obstacles.
I’m Nathan F. Conkey with God’s World, God’s Way. My mission is to apply God’s way — his law and covenant — to God’s world, so that God’s men might know God’s transforming blessing. Sponsored by CR101Radio.com, in association with Grace Community School and Nicene Covenant Church. Visit CR101Radio.com where you’ll find free Christian audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts for the Christian who can’t accept the easy answers.
But I must warn you: this message is too controversial for many to touch — even though it’s found on almost every page of the Bible.
It Happened Before — It Can Happen Again
Let me illustrate how this played out in the lives of God’s saints in Holy Scripture, to help rekindle your hope for success in God’s world.
Take Isaac. He was forced by drought into the land of the Philistines. They weren’t from the same tribe, they didn’t serve the same God, and their relationship was marked with disagreements. But somehow, when Isaac sowed a crop, he reaped a hundredfold — a hundred times his investment. So what? Well, what God did for Isaac in impossible circumstances, he can do for you today — if you learn how God’s prospering hand works in time and history.
But consider also Jacob. Everything was against him. He was far from home with nothing but the shirt on his back. And yet Jacob was able to go from owning nothing to millions in wealth in only six years — after finding a wife and having a whole troop of children. Something extremely powerful, above and beyond nature, reached down and transformed the material outcomes of Jacob’s life.
That same God can prosper you too in a totally transformative way — even if you have next to nothing to your name.
But can God transform my life even if I have nothing right now? We’ve previously thought about Job. He went from having much to having nothing at all. But with God’s hand on him, the once-afflicted Job went from no money to vast wealth — double what he had possessed before, equalling $40 million-plus in livestock alone in today’s money.
So if you have nothing right now, brother — congratulations. You’re pre-qualified for God’s blessing. The true transformational invisible hand can take your nothing and make it into a whole lot of something. But only if you know how the Lord’s prospering hand works.
This isn’t some fringe charismatic thing. The Bible goes to great lengths to describe the terms and conditions of this divine blessing. There are entire books of the Bible dedicated to it. You can’t really understand the Bible without knowing how this blessing works.
Daniel and Joseph
Maybe you think you’re not tall enough, strong enough, or handsome enough to succeed in life — something’s missing. Well, consider Daniel, who was not a whole man. 2 Kings 20:18 says of those taken to Babylon to serve the king: They shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. Daniel’s body was not whole. Plus, he was exiled from his land, brought to a pagan country — the mightiest empire of its day by far. But worse still, he and his friends insisted on making problems for themselves by not eating the meat given to them, for religious reasons.
Daniel refused to compromise his religion — ever. And yet he rose to the absolute top of his profession and stayed there, despite a conspiracy mounted against him by his most powerful colleagues. None of this was normal or natural. A tremendous, earth-shattering power was at play in Daniel’s life — the hand of God reaching down from heaven on behalf of his precious saints, to prosper them in dramatic, undeniable, and public ways. That same blessing hand is still at work today. It is foolish to despair.
But perhaps you have a criminal record, or live in the wrong place. Well, consider Joseph. He was sold into slavery by his own brothers. He was falsely accused of attempted rape by Potiphar’s wife. A death sentence hung over him for all his days. He was far from home in a foreign land, speaking a foreign language, in prison for over ten years with no hope of release.
But we all know how the story ends — with a very visible exaltation to the dizzying heights of power in Egypt. Something above and beyond the so-called natural world was at play in Joseph’s life. What transformed his life? It was God’s promised blessing given to him in a dream, and Joseph’s continuing faith in that promise, that kept him pursuing his God-given calling even in the depths of a dungeon — plus his refusal to sin, even in secret.
This interplay between God’s promise and Joseph’s faithfulness, in God’s good time, turned certain death into promotion to the highest heights of administrative power imaginable.
The Answer Is Simple — But Not Easy
Do you want to know how to have God’s hand descend upon you — to touch your work, to multiply your investments a hundredfold, to take your zero and turn it into superabundant provision, or to elevate you from condemned prisoner to the dizzying heights of political power? Do you want to know what Daniel did in order to go from castrated exile in the heart of pagan darkness to second in command of a vast, sprawling empire?
I’m afraid you may be disappointed. It’s so uncomplicated.
The answer to the question — how can I obtain God’s blessing to materially alter my situation on earth? — is super simple, but not easy.
If you don’t need God’s blessing, if you can get along without God transforming your material circumstances, please stop listening. But if you feel the need for God’s hand upon your life, what follows can be the start of a tremendous transformation — undeniable, visible, and public.
We’re going to look at a few verses from Deuteronomy 28.
The If-Then Covenant
Indeed, if you diligently obey the Lord your God to carry out all his commandments that I am giving you today, then the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. Moreover, all these blessings will come upon you in abundance, if you obey the Lord your God. — Deuteronomy 28:1–2
Let’s boil it all down to two words: if and then. God says: if you do the things I call good and don’t do the things I call bad, I will cause good things to happen to you in my world.
Now, evangelicals get a bit jumpy when works are mentioned. Too often, everything is reduced to the act of salvation — and since we can’t work for salvation, works are off the table for polite Christian discussion. But salvation is but the entry to the Christian life. We can only enter into salvation through Christ and his finished work on the cross. But when you enter the Christian life, you enter into a life of work. There’s no one who goes through that door without getting a job to do.
God himself guarantees that if you do what he tells you in his law, he himself will cause good things to happen to you on this earth. He says: it shall come to pass — not it might, not it probably will, and certainly not — as all too many church leaders might say — you definitely won’t be blessed on this earth. Only dodgy charismatics say that. No. God says it shall come to pass. There’s a God-given guarantee of good things in God’s world if you follow God’s way of doing things.
What is the secret that binds God to bless you? Diligently obeying the voice of God and observing carefully all his commandments. It’s that simple. You don’t have to be a genius or go to seminary or be a minister or missionary or evangelist. All God asks is that you obey all of his commands.
But this may be a stumbling block for you. Perhaps you’ve been told that Christ came to obey the law fully so that we don’t have to. I’m not here to argue that at length — except to quote the Holy Spirit in Romans 8:4: Christ came that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. To walk after the Spirit is to obey God’s law, according to the New Testament.
The Blessing of Status
The first part of the Lord’s extensive incentive programme is something every man wants, whether or not they admit it. Status. High status.
I didn’t put it in the Bible. It was there already when I opened the page. You see, the Lord knows man — he made him from the ground up. He made him to be a king under the King of kings. It’s not a bad thing for a man of God to want to be high up in the hierarchy. It’s a positively good thing. Otherwise God wouldn’t have offered it as his premier blessing.
Can the Lord take you from where you are now and change your low status into high status? Not a problem. Let’s count the cost, however.
Remember Daniel. Stranger in a strange land, worshipping a God who would never fit in with the pantheon of Babylon. And yet, little by little, Daniel and his friends rose to the top of the tree. But this wasn’t arbitrary — it was in response to their continued obedience, obedience to the point of death on multiple occasions.
They knew the law of God — and inferred, long before the Jerusalem Council ruled in Acts 15, that it was unlawful to eat meat sacrificed to idols. Even though they risked death, they obeyed the Lord. And later, Daniel’s friends were called to bow down to an image — and they refused. Not because of personal preference, but because God had commanded them not to: You shall not make for yourself a carved image… you shall not bow down to them, nor serve them (Exodus 20:4–5).
And when they went through that trial successfully, they were promoted even higher. Then Nebuchadnezzar spoke: Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon (Daniel 3).
Why did God do that? Not on a whim. Because he is faithful to his covenant: If you diligently obey the Lord your God to carry out all his commands, then the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.
Daniel continued to be exalted time and again. And you can too — if you are willing to go the road less travelled, the road of the studied application of the law of God to your own life and work. There is no limit to how much God may bless you in his chosen way at his chosen time.
Daniel ended up like Joseph — second only to the great king after his obedience. It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom 120 princes, and over these three presidents, of whom Daniel was first. Then this Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes, and the king thought to set him over the whole realm (Daniel 6).
Not only so — but Daniel’s name was highly exalted over all the world. When Darius sent out his decree: To all peoples, nations, and languages that dwell in all the earth, peace be multiplied to you. I make a decree that in every dominion of my kingdom men must tremble and fear before the God of Daniel, for he is a living God (Daniel 6:25–26).
God is no man’s debtor. If we obey the Lord extravagantly and continuously — like Daniel — he will bless us to the utmost degree.
The Blessings Are Inescapable
But, you say, I’m happy just to obey. Obedience is its own reward. So it is. But God gave us a treasure of incentives in order that we might obey him — and we are fools if we think we don’t need what God says we need.
In fact, these blessings are such that you can’t refuse them. If you have been obedient, they’re coming for you like a hypersonic missile. When the Lord sees your careful obedience to all his commandments, he gives the order — and a blessing missile is launched at you. You can’t outrun it. You can’t dodge it. You can’t bury yourself deep enough to protect yourself from it. All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you.
Deuteronomy 28:3 continues: Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country.
Like Daniel and his friends, you may be in a city — London, Washington, Seoul, Puebla, or Abuja. You may think yourself lost in the sea of humanity. How can the Lord exalt me here? I’m just a worker bee, a machine tool worker, a salesman, a mechanic, a policeman. There are no prospects for me to advance. But it doesn’t matter. God says: Blessed shall you be in the city.
What do you say? I live in the middle of nowhere. I’m just a farmer. There are no prospects here. The economy has been flat for ever, and now it’s going down. The government wants to take the farm from my family. But the hand of God reaching down from heaven is more than a match for any persecuting bureaucrat. God’s bunker-buster blessings can blast through all obstacles if you will observe carefully all his commandments. You will be blessed — even if you live in Cleveland, Alabama, or Ballyshutmaguttery, County Cavan.
Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, the produce of your ground, and the increase of your herds, the increase of your cattle, and the offspring of your flocks.
Jacob left his father’s livestock operation with nothing but the shirt on his back and a staff in his hand — but when he returned to the promised land twenty years later, he was able to give his murderous brother a gift of almost a million dollars’ worth of livestock. Even though his uncle Laban was a deceiver and a thief who was actively plotting to keep him as an employee forever. How was Jacob able to go from zero to millions in an unglamorous industry, fighting his boss all the way?
It was God’s blessing hand from heaven to earth that transformed Jacob’s life from would-be slavery to independent wealth with his own business. Genesis 31:13 says: I am the Lord who met you and vowed to bless you. And God has met us in his word in Deuteronomy 28 — to bless all who will carefully obey his voice, even and especially you.
Verse 12 of Genesis 31 says: I have seen all that Laban did to you. God is bigger than any boss who is at war with you. God sees your enemies — and the Lord will tip the scales in the favour of all those who fear him and walk in his ways.
Jacob says: God took Laban’s wealth and gave it to me. Ecclesiastes 2:26 says: To the sinner he gives travail to gather and heap up, that he may give it to him that is good before God.
But what did Jacob do to have the Lord go to bat for him? First of all, Jacob obeyed his father Isaac when he sent him away with no money and no help on a perilous journey far to the north. Jacob was obeying one of the hardest and most basic of all commandments: Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you (Exodus 20:12). That was the foundation of his blessing.
He spent seventy years serving his father without complaint, despite the fact that Isaac never loved him. He consistently honoured all the lawful authorities in his life — including wicked Laban, who tormented him by tricking him into marrying Leah and changing his wages ten times. Jacob had internalised the law that was later codified in Exodus 22: even when no one was watching but the Lord, even when Laban’s sons were stealing his own livestock, Jacob made good any loss from his own pocket.
These Blessings Are for All of God’s Sons
But you say: I’m no Jacob or Daniel. Good news. These if-then blessings are not the special property of the super saints. They belong to all the sons of God. And they aren’t just an Old Testament thing either. Revelation 2 says: To him who overcomes, I will give to eat from the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God. If you overcome, then I will give you this tremendous blessing.
Christ said he did not come to do away with the law of God but to put it into force, to fulfil it. And that includes the if-then blessings which are at the heart of God’s law.
This is how young men like you can overcome even in tremendously difficult circumstances like today.
I really am keen to share more of this theme with you in coming weeks. If you have any questions, please contact me at questions@godsworldgodsway.com. Until next week.