Getting sin wrong has devastating consequences, not just for eternity but for our lives now and for all those around us. Last week, I addressed how having the wrong idea of origins produces a wrong view of sin and thus a wrong view of the cross. Two other groups I will address today are the Prosperity Gospel people and the Progressive Christianity people. As these groups comprise numbers comparable to the Roman Catholic Church worldwide (500 million if not more), we can’t just consider this a side issue. A few weeks ago, I looked at how these different teachings get sin wrong in general, but now I’m going to zoom in and showcase what this means.
Changing the definition of sin is very common in the Prosperity Gospel and “Word of Faith” teachings. Rarely do they use that term, but when they do, they use it in an entirely different context than what the Bible uses. Sin is not “high treason against a thrice holy God” (thanks to Justin Peters for this description), but rather just a “barrier to your blessings.” This one is tricky, because it has just enough orthodoxy to make you want to accept it, but just like rat poison it is 95% good and 5% deadly poison. Sin is defined as being “wrong,” things that God does not like, but they portray sin as nothing more than a mountain to climb or a canyon to cross, and all doable by man’s own efforts. Do you have cancer? Your sin may be a barrier to receive your healing miracle. What is that sin? Usually “not enough faith,” even citing Romans 14:23 to support them. And while not a blanket statement, there are many of these people who use your financial contributions to them as the evidence of your level of faith. This is what Justin Peters, who has cerebral palsy, experienced while at one of the “events” by Word of Faith preachers. By “screening” him from going up to the stage, they instead asked what their contributions to “God” (by that meaning to them) were like.
The consequences of having such a view of sin, in which the end goal of dealing with sin is to get health, wealth, and prosperity in this life, are devastating. Many think that these teachings only work in a nation where there are already high levels of prosperity (the U.S., for now). But one of the great evils of these teachings is showcased by many of the “preachers” of these ideals going to third world countries (like in Africa or to the Philippines) and effectively milking those very poor people dry, promising physical and temporal relief from their physical problems, by giving the tiny bit of money they had to the preachers. This is highway robbery, and these teachers are going home laughing as they soak in the money they were just “given.”
But it’s worse than that. Because of their false views of sin, where it is a barrier between you and your blessings, the theory showcases that if you are more healthy, more wealthy, and are having more business success, you are more righteous than those who are not. And it is absolutely crippling of any who do not end up on the top of the Ponzi scheme. It’s a slavery system, and most people don’t even know it. Another aspect of this self-righteousness is that those who promote this message will declare that they are “spokespersons” of God or even declare that they ARE “God” (known as the little gods doctrine). Daring to speak against them is speaking against God Himself, citing 1 Samuel 26:9 to “not touch the Lord’s anointed.”
So, if we take these teachings to their logical conclusion, if you believe that your righteousness will yield heath, wealth, and prosperity, and that if you don’t have it, it is because you have sin in your life, that means that unless you are extremely wealthy, you not only have sin in your life but are going to Hell. This is part of why Job’s friends were dead wrong. Job suffered not because he sinned but because he was righteous. So by these teachings, only a select few will “get in,” and even more so, how many purely pagan people are rich without appealing to those teachings? They get in, too, because they meet the qualification that the Prosperity Gospel teaches.
The Prosperity Gospel is not the only teaching that gets sin wrong. So do the Progressive Christian teachers, and they are growing to the point where a documentary “American Gospel: Christ Crucified” needed to be made to confront these teachings. These teachings are a combination of post-modernism in which there are no absolute truths, everything is relative to the teacher/listener, and also New Age mysticism. I do believe this is the primary approach that will be used to incorporate Christianity into the “one world religion” that we see being built.
In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell describes the doctrines of Christianity as bricks in a wall that keep people who don’t promote the doctrines of the faith out, and he mocks it as “Brickianity.” He taught that instead of our doctrines being bricks, they should be treated more like springs on a trampoline, and they stretch depending on the weight or importance of the person. We should all just get on the trampoline and jump and have fun. The problems of this line of thinking are frightening. Bell is suggesting we toss out all the concrete ideas and moorings that define reality and replace them without own ideas. The very title of his book describes the repainting of an Elvis doll to “restore” it. Except nothing in his book does what this title suggests. The title calls for a repainting so we get a brand-new looking doll that looks like the original. What he did in this book, however, is to completely redefine all the terms and phrases so they can’t even be recognizable to the original. What does this have to do with sin? Bell describes that in a book he wrote several years later: Love Wins.
Love Wins (which I have not read but have watched the book trailer) is about universalism. It’s about Jesus’ death on the cross, emptying Hell, and that it doesn’t matter what you believe or what your morals are, you get to go to heaven. In other words, sin becomes an utterly meaningless idea. It does nothing and causes nothing since it is now completely done away with. The vile abuser gets the same prize as the holy man. Since Rob Bell in this book believes that any road leads to heaven, why should he claim Christianity as his faith, considering Jesus explicitly said, “No man comes to the Father except through Me”? It’s a legit question and since the writing of that book, he’s fallen from the spotlight. Yet when I picked up Velvet Elvis about 12 years after it was written, it was still #84 of ALL TIME on Amazon books (it’s much lower now, but it’s still high up there in the rankings). So whether Bell is still popular or not, his books have not gone away.
Bell is not the only one promoting this. William Paul Young wrote The Shack in which he defines sin as a “sickness” that needs to be cured in this fictional novel. While I applaud the attempt to deal with the grief of a father who lost his daughter to a rapist and murderer, the writing was extremely poor, and the doctrines taught to help Mack heal were simply atrocious. In this book, sin never draws God’s wrath, but simply is “its own punishment.” Young also showcases “the Father” (Papa, portrayed as a fat black woman) dancing sexually to rebellious rap music. He has God “loving” rebellion and defiance.
In both of these cases, sin is either avoided entirely or treated as powerless, weak things that don’t mean anything anyway. As a result of this, what is the point of the cross? What becomes of the Gospel? It becomes moot and pointless as well. Both groups define sin wrongly because they define God wrongly. They try to define God by their own likings, and that will always excuse the self from being in need of a Savior. I only touched on the surface of this, but this series is depressing enough. I have to keep this in such a depressing mode for one or two more weeks before we can delve into the proper response to sin. Next week, I’ll deal with an issue that has now become hot that the 2022 Shepherd’s Conference had to confront it as a theme: Liberation Theology and Critical Race Theory. Then I’ll return to going back to what God said sin is and what it truly does and from there we can see what our responses to sin must be.
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