Speaking Prosperity Into Existence
Over the last couple of decades I’ve heard prosperity teachers teach
that if we have enough faith we can speak things like prosperity into
existence with our positive confession.
It works this way. You verbally confess the existence of a new car, even
though when you look down your driveway a new car is nowhere to be found.
That’s okay, you just keep speaking and acting as if it’s there. So
when your friend notices your old junker of a car, you tell him that’s
your new car. He scratches his head and thinks, "you’re crazy man!
That’s your old junker".
Prosperity people point to Romans 4:17 in defense of their thinking. It
says, "God … calls things that are not as though they were".
Ultra faith and prosperity people thus say that God speaks things into
existence by thinking something is really there when it isn’t. The mere
thinking of it will produce its reality. They say we should be like God
and do the same.
You can’t find this teaching in Romans 4:17 or anywhere else in the
New Testament. This form of humanism is merely an attempt to trick one’s
mind into a false faith and hope. One friend calls this "mental
gymnastics". Prosperity people call this faith, but it’s not.
The paragraph that ends with Rom. 4:17 states that by faith in God’s
grace both Jews and Gentiles are Abraham’s offspring. Verse 17 says that
God has called the Gentiles, those who "were not" special, a
special people. Once they weren’t. Now they are.
Here’s my amplified version of this verse. "God .. calls things
that are not, that is Gentiles, as though they were, that is, Abraham’s
offspring". God is now calling Gentiles Abraham’s offspring if they
have faith in Jesus. It’s bad Biblical interpretation to suggest this
verse means anything more than that. The context of verse 17 is all about
Jews and Gentiles and nothing else.
God can speak things into existence, but Romans 4:17 isn’t telling us
that. Genesis chapters 1 and 2 tells us that.
We should never take one phrase that anyone says from its context and
broaden its application to include all sorts of other things. For example,
if you ask me, "how are you doing". I’ll answer, "I’m
fine". What I mean, is at that moment of time I’m doing fine. I’m
okay. It doesn’t mean I’m always fine. It doesn’t mean I’m fine
with same sex marriages. It doesn’t mean I’m fine with my neighbor’s
loud music. I‘m only fine as I answer your question. To suggest I feel
fine about all sorts of other things isn’t logical. The same applies to
God and Rom. 4:17.
The Bible doesn’t teach we can speak prosperity into existence. If it
did, I ‘m sure Peter would have done so. He could have given the lame
beggar in Acts 3 money instead of a healing.
So I Don’t Have Enough Faith
Most of the time when I first meet someone I tell them I can’t see
well. That helps them understand me when I don’t respond to them when
they wave to me as they pass me on the street. This also tells them that I’m
not smelling my watch when I try to see what time it is. Or, if the end of
my nose is black, it’s only because I forgot to lick the ink off my nose
after reading the printed page.
Throughout my life after scraping my nose back and forth across the
printed page, I always lick my finger and rub the ink off my nose. I don’t
need a black dot on the end of my long nose to make it stand out more than
it already does. It took me the longest time after getting into computers
to stop rubbing my nose after reading the monitor. There’s no ink on my
monitor, but out of habit my finger would still go to my nose.
Once an ultra faith and prosperity person cornered me after a meeting
and began preaching to me about my lack of faith. He told me that if I had
real faith, that faith should heal my eyes. He didn’t realize that it’s
not our faith that really heals. It’s Jesus that heals. Our faith only
gives Him the permission to heal if He so desires.
I told this man about the three Hebrew men in Daniel 3 who were thrown
into the fire. In verse 17 they said, "if we are thrown into the
blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and He will
rescue us from your hand, O King. But even if He does not we want
you to know, O King, we will not serve your gods…"
"But even if He does not" is not exactly a positive
confession. Positive prosperity people would call this phrase a lack of
faith and a bad confession. These men were speaking well until they
introduced the "but clause" into their confession. But this isn’t
right thinking. These men had great trust in God. They trusted no matter
what happened, whether God saved them from the fire or not. It made no
difference to them.
The same applies to me. I trust Jesus, knowing He can heal my eyes, but
if He doesn’t, I’ll still trust Him. To me, this is a real and lasting
faith. I’ve been trusting Jesus for decades, and still do, even though
He hasn’t always done everything I thought He should have. I’m not
trying to trick my mind into thinking I can see when I can’t. If I took
positive confession thinking to its logical extreme, I, a legally blind
person should be driving our van down the street. But then you’d need
more faith and swift feet as I head towards you on the sidewalk, not
knowing if I was on the sidewalk or the road.
The three Hebrew men trusted in God and were delivered from the fire.
In Acts 7 Stephen trusted as well, but the stones and rocks killed him
just the same.
The bottom line to all this is that we serve and trust in Jesus no
matter what, whether rich or poor. It makes no difference. We don’t
trust to get. We trust Jesus because He’s shown Himself to be the central
truth of the universe and we have no other logical choice to make than to
trust Him.