Does God want us to be wealthy?

Question 11080

Material wealth is one of those subjects on which the Bible says a great deal more than most congregations want to hear, and it says it in both directions. Anyone hoping for a simple verdict, either that riches are a blessing to be pursued or that poverty is inherently holy, will be disappointed by the actual text.

So does God want us to be wealthy? The short answer is that God wants us to be His, and He distributes material wealth according to purposes He has not fully explained. The longer answer is worth having, because a great deal of damage has been done by teaching that promises otherwise.

What God Promises and What He Does Not

God promises to supply need. Paul writes that his God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19), and he writes it to a church that had just given sacrificially out of their own shortage. Need is the category, not surplus.

Jesus makes the same distinction in the Sermon on the Mount. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you (Matthew 6:33). The things in question are food, drink and clothing, the basics of survival. He does not say that a portfolio will be added.

What God nowhere promises is material wealth as the normal outcome of faithfulness. The letter to the Hebrews describes believers who went about destitute, afflicted and mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy (Hebrews 11:37-38). Any doctrine that makes prosperity the measure of God’s approval must explain that verse, and it cannot.

The Old Testament Pattern and Why It Changed

Much of the confusion comes from importing Israel’s national covenant into the Church. Under the Mosaic covenant, material blessing in the land was tied to national obedience and material loss to disobedience (Deuteronomy 28). Those were covenantal sanctions on a theocratic nation in a specific territory, not standing promises to individual believers in every age.

The Church is not under that covenant. Israel and the Church are distinct in God’s programme, and the promises given to the one cannot be lifted wholesale onto the other without producing exactly the confusion we see. I have set out that distinction in my answer on the difference between Israel and the Church.

Even within the Old Testament the picture is not tidy. Job was righteous and lost everything. Asaph in Psalm 73 nearly lost his footing over the material wealth of the wicked and only recovered his balance when he considered their end. The wisdom literature knows perfectly well that prosperity and piety do not track one another reliably.

What Jesus and Paul Actually Taught

Jesus was warmer towards the poor and sterner about money than almost any teacher in history. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25). He warned that you cannot serve God and money, and He told a parable about a man whose barns were full the night his soul was required of him.

This is not because material wealth is evil in itself. Abraham was rich, Job was restored, Lydia had a business, and Paul instructs the rich in this present age to be generous rather than to divest. The danger is not the money but the grip. Wealth is a competent servant and a ruinous master.

Paul’s summary in 1 Timothy 6 is the most balanced statement in Scripture. Godliness with contentment is great gain. The Greek autarkeia describes a sufficiency that does not depend on circumstances. Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, and the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. Notice that it is the desire, not the possession, that Paul targets.

The Texts the Prosperity Teachers Misuse

Third John 2, that you may prosper in all things and be in health, is a standard letter greeting of the period, the equivalent of hoping someone is keeping well. It carries no more doctrinal weight than the opening line of any first century letter, and it was written to one man named Gaius.

Second Corinthians 8:9, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich, is about the incarnation and salvation, as the surrounding chapter about a collection for poor believers makes plain. Reading it as a promise of material wealth reverses the entire argument Paul is making.

Malachi 3:10 is addressed to a nation robbing God under a covenant that promised agricultural blessing in a specific land. Lifting it into a modern giving appeal, with the implication that donations trigger a financial return, ignores both the covenant and the context. On the wider issue see my answer on whether Christians should tithe.

What Material Wealth Is Actually For

Scripture treats resources as a stewardship rather than a reward. The rich are told to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future (1 Timothy 6:18-19). Money is redirected outwards, and that redirection is itself the safeguard against it becoming an idol.

This means that a Christian with material wealth is not to feel guilty but to feel responsible. Wealth held loosely and deployed generously is a great good in the kingdom, funding gospel work, relieving poverty and supporting families. Wealth held tightly quietly rearranges the heart around itself, which is what Jesus meant about treasure and heart travelling together.

I have written more practically on this in my answer on biblical stewardship and on the related question of whether Christians should be poor.

The Damage the Wrong Answer Does

I want to be plain about the pastoral cost of the prosperity teaching, because it is not a harmless enthusiasm. It tells the sick that they lack faith, the bereaved that they failed to confess correctly, and the poor that their poverty is a spiritual verdict. It has taken money from people who could not afford to give it, on the promise of a return that did not come.

It also misrepresents God. A Father who dispenses material wealth in proportion to religious performance is not the Father of the New Testament, who makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good. The gospel of a crucified Messiah is not naturally illustrated by a prosperous life.

If you have been under that teaching and it has left you feeling like a failure, I would gently suggest the failure was never yours. See my fuller answer on the dangers of the prosperity gospel.

Contentment as the Real Target

Paul says he has learned in whatever situation he is to be content, and that he knows how to be brought low and how to abound (Philippians 4:11-12). Notice that both states had to be learned. Prosperity requires as much spiritual skill as poverty does, and possibly more, since it is harder to notice that you are in danger.

Contentment is not indifference to circumstances and it is not the pretence that nothing hurts. It is a settled confidence that God is enough, which frees a person to hold material wealth without gripping it and to lack it without panic.

That is the target Scripture actually sets. Not a figure in an account, not a vow of poverty, but a heart that has stopped calculating its worth in either direction. I have known contented rich Christians and contented poor ones, and they were recognisably the same species.

It is worth remembering as well that the New Testament was written to churches containing slaves, day labourers and people living close to the edge. When Paul writes about generosity, he assumes that some believers have very little and that the church exists partly to make sure they are not left in want. That is a different economic vision from the one most of us absorb from the culture around us.

So, now what?

Ask what your money is currently doing rather than how much of it there is. Look at where it goes over a month and let that, rather than your stated convictions, tell you what you actually believe about material wealth. Bank statements are honest documents.

Then aim at contentment rather than at a figure, and give in a way that costs something. If God has given you more than you need, He has given it for a reason that involves other people. If He has given you less than you would like, He has not withdrawn His favour. What would change this month if you treated everything you own as borrowed?

But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.

1 Timothy 6:6-8, ESV