I’ve been reflecting on the destructiveness of the health and wealth prosperity gospel. It isn’t because I enjoy it! But some prosperity preachers like to make much of their ‘healing’ ministries, so I run into them during my studies.
And sometimes they use scriptures like this to promote their really, really bad, illogical, unbiblical thinking:
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all,
how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Romans 8:32
Rather than discourage you with something I came across from a prosperity preacher on Romans 8:32, I thought these paragraphs from Pastor John might be more helpful.
John Piper on Romans 8:32 in The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die, p. 52:
But what does “give us all things” mean? Not an easy life of comfort. Not even safety from our enemies. We know this from what the Bible says four verses later: “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered” (Romans 8:36). Many Christians, even today, suffer this kind of persecution. When the Bible asks, “Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword” separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:35), the answer is no. Not because these things don’t happen to Christians, but because “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).
What then does it mean that because of Christ’s death for us God will certainly with him graciously give us “all things”? It means that he will give us all things that are good for us. All things that we really need in order to be conformed to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29). All things we need in order to attain everlasting joy.
God gives us things that are good for us – like dependency on him when nothing else is going right in our bodies or our children’s bodies. Like hope in him when our circumstances are anything but hopeful.
Like the assurance of an eternity with Jesus!
Excellent. Reminds me of this Robert Culver quote from his Systematic Theology text: “The salvation that every true believer possesses includes all the blessings one shall ever need.”
You are a complete idiot who doesn’t know hebrew or Greek. You are preaching about a god that sits by and watches his children die. You sick fucking hypocrite. No one buy what this piece of garbage is selling you.