I spent years sitting under the prosperity gospel teaching before God himself led me out through his Word. 

If you’ve followed my posts from the beginning, you may have noticed my spiritual journey and transformation.

It really took one passage of scripture, a warning from God, to change my entire spiritual life that I’d thought was already built on firm ground.

I’m so convinced now, that every Christian needs to read The Word of God with a deep hunger and longing for the truth, understanding, and revelation. In this way, I believe He will reveal a lot of things as He did for me.

And when you have such a sure foundation of the truth, there is nothing that can dissuade you or pull you into any form of heretic teachings that is rampant out there.

We are in the last days. False teachers are going all out. 

The Prosperity Gospel is one that is still at large today and many are still falling into it- because it sometimes hides itself in sound teachings. 

There is one doctrine within that movement I have not yet addressed directly, and it sits at the very center of their entire theological framework: the claim that the Abrahamic covenant entitles every believer to earthly wealth and material abundance. 

Televangelists like Kenneth Copeland, T.D. Jakes, Joseph Prince, to name a few have built enormous platforms on this reading of Scripture. 

They quote Galatians 3:29 to argue that if you belong to Christ, you are Abraham's seed and therefore heir to the same material blessings God gave Abraham himself. They present this as a sworn, irrevocable oath, pointing to Hebrews 6:13 as proof that God has bound himself to deliver prosperity to every believing Christian.

But the question is if this reading is correct, why was the church of Macedonia so poor? Why did Paul know what it meant to be in need? Why did Jesus himself have nowhere to lay his head? Why have they not taught on Philippians 4:11 or 1 Timothy 6:5?

These are not rhetorical distractions. They are the fault lines that expose the entire prosperity framework when you press it against the full witness of the New Testament.

To understand what prosperity teachers get wrong, we need to read the original passage in full and resist the urge to skip ahead to our favourite verse.

Genesis 12:1–3 

The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your country, your relatives, and your father’s home, and go to a land that I am going to show you. I will give you many descendants, and they will become a great nation. I will bless you and make your name famous, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, but I will curse those who curse you. And through you I will bless all the nations.”

Notice what God promises here: descendants, nationhood, a great name, and a blessing that would extend through Abraham to all the nations of the earth. The prosperity gospel reads the word “bless” through a purely material lens and concludes that Christians are entitled to replicate Abraham’s personal wealth. But Paul himself tells us in Galatians exactly what the word “offspring” in this passage was pointing toward, and it is not financial inheritance.

Galatians 3:16 

The scripture does not use the plural “descendants,” meaning many people, but the singular “descendant,” meaning one person only, namely, Christ.

This is one of the most important interpretive moves in the entire New Testament. Paul draws the reader’s attention to the Hebrew word zera, which is grammatically singular, and argues that the land promise, the seed promise, and the blessing promise of Genesis 12 find their ultimate referent not in a class of prosperous Christian believers but in one person: Jesus Christ. The entire Abrahamic covenant was, from the beginning, a Christological promise.

Furthermore, Abraham was already a wealthy man before God ever spoke to him. Genesis tells us that when Abram left Haran, he took with him his wife, his nephew, and all the possessions they had accumulated there. His wealth did not arrive as a result of his faith. His faith arrived while he was already prosperous, living in one of the most advanced civilizations of the ancient world. The prosperity gospel's foundational argument, that Abraham's obedience produced his material abundance and that believers can expect the same, collapses at the very beginning of the story.

Ironically, you will find that many false teachers will avoid certain parts of scripture that do not fit the narrative of their teachings such as this verse.

Galatians 3:14 

Christ did this in order that the blessing which God promised to Abraham might be given to the Gentiles by means of Christ Jesus, so that through faith we might receive the Spirit promised by God.

Read that second clause slowly: the content of the Abrahamic blessing given to Gentiles through Christ is the promised Holy Spirit received through faith!

But none of them brings up this verse!? I wonder why.

For more context, the inheritance that Paul has in mind throughout this entire chapter is justification by faith and the indwelling presence of God through the Spirit. This is confirmed by what he writes just a few verses earlier.

Galatians 3:8–9

The scripture predicted that God would put the Gentiles right with himself through faith. And so the scripture announced the Good News to Abraham: “Through you God will bless all people.” Abraham believed and was blessed; so all who believe are blessed as he was.

In other words, The Word of God saw in the future that the Gentiles will be saved as well- and thus declared and included this promise to Abraham. So that all who believed are justified just as Abraham was. The whole passage in this passage was about being justified by faith and not of keeping the law whom the Galatians were still trying to commit to. 

Prosperity teachers frequently turn to Hebrews 6 to anchor their argument in what they call a God-sworn oath of material blessing.

Hebrews 6:13–20 (NKJV)

For when God made a promise to Abraham, because He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, saying, “Surely blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply you.” And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise… that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.

Read in isolation, it is easy to hear the phrase “surely blessing I will bless you” and conclude that God has made an irrevocable financial commitment to every believer. 

But the author is writing to believers tempted to spiritual sluggishness and urging them to persevere in faith, following the example of those who, through faith and patience, inherited the promises. 

The passage ends not with a vision of earthly abundance but with a vision of entering the presence of God behind the veil, following Jesus who has gone before us as our great High Priest. The hope that anchors the soul in Hebrews 6 is not prosperity; it is access to God’s Kingdom through the sacrifice of Christ.

I want to be careful here, because the answer to the prosperity gospel is not poverty theology. Scripture is not teaching us that God delights in the suffering of his people or that material provision is somehow ungodly. The heart of God toward his children is quoted by Paul in 2 Corinthians 8:15; the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. 

God’s provision is real, it is faithful, and it is calibrated by his wisdom rather than our demand. It operates within a relationship of trust and dependence, not as a transactional reward for faith properly exercised.

Paul’s warning in 1 Timothy 6:5 is directed precisely at teachers who have come to regard godliness as a means of financial gain. The prosperity gospel does not merely cross this line occasionally; it builds its entire system on the assumption that spiritual faithfulness produces material return. This is the error Paul names and rejects explicitly.

Abraham himself understood this. The author of Hebrews tells us in Hebrews 11:9–10 that Abraham lived as a foreigner in the land of promise, dwelling in tents, because he was looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, whose architect and builder is God. The man at the center of the prosperity gospel’s favourite argument was himself living as a pilgrim, because he knew that the ultimate promise was not land in Canaan but a city not made by human hands.

There is a word buried in the Hebrew text of Genesis that prosperity teachers have been reading for decades without ever stopping to look at it carefully. They quote it constantly. They build entire theological systems on it. They tell their congregations that because God said it to Abraham, it belongs to every believer today in the form of financial abundance, health, and earthly success. The word is barak, and it means something far more extraordinary than any of them have preached.

The three-letter root at the heart of barak is ב-ר-כ, and it is inseparable from another Hebrew word built from the same root: berek, which means knee. The verb barak, in its most literal use, means to kneel. You can see this in Genesis 24:11, where Abraham's servant makes his camels kneel down by the well of water outside the city of Nahor. The same word used for a camel bending its legs to rest is the word used when God blesses Abraham.

When the verb barak moves into what Hebrew grammarians call the piel form, its meaning intensifies into something remarkable: to bend the knee in order to present a gift. Not to transact. Not to reward. To kneel and offer.

Read Genesis 12 again with that picture in mind. God appears to Abram and says, "I will bless you." In the Hebrew, what God is saying is closer to this: I am descending to you, bending the knee, presenting myself as a gift to you. The God of the universe, in the very act of the Abrahamic blessing, was performing an image of condescension and covenant, not a cosmic financial transfer.

The noun form of barak is berakah, and it is worth spending a moment with what this word actually carries in its Old Testament usage. Berakah in its full semantic range includes divine favour, fruitfulness, and covenant relationship. It describes the state of a person who is in right relationship with God and through whom God's life is flowing. It is not a synonym for prosperity. It is not interchangeable with wealth. In its deepest sense, berakah describes a person who has been touched by the life of God and through whom that life is now available to others.

The Hebrew mind would not have understood Abraham's berakah as a personal bank account. It would have understood it as a covenantal status, a standing before God and among the nations, tied entirely to the purposes God was working through Abraham's line toward the Messiah.

It was always relational. God coming down to where you are.