Jeremiah Wright, July 8, 2926
There is a question that troubles many sincere believers when they look at the vast crowds filling the arenas of the prosperity preacher’s week after week. How does God allow it? How can a man stand before tens of thousands, holding a Bible he barely opens, preaching a message of self-fulfilment with almost no cross in it, and prosper decade after decade without interruption? We ask the question as if the flourishing of such men were a mystery, a strange oversight in the government of God, something He has somehow failed to address. But Scripture gives an answer to this question, and the answer is far more sobering than the question. The false teacher drawing the massive crowd is not evidence that God has looked away. In many cases he is the judgment of God delivered to a people who did not want God, and the crowd sitting under him is not his victim. The crowd is receiving exactly what its heart demanded.
This sounds severe until we let Scripture speak, because Scripture has been saying it for nearly three thousand years. Jeremiah looked out at the religious landscape of his day and described it in words that could be printed over the entrance of half the platforms of our generation. “An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land. The prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule on their own authority; and My people love it so!” Jeremiah 5:30 and 31. My people love it so. The false prophets of Judah were not an invading force imposing themselves on an unwilling nation. They were a supply meeting a demand. The people wanted smooth words, and the market produced men willing to speak them. Isaiah recorded the demand in the people’s own voice. They were a rebellious people “who say to the seers you must not see visions; and to the prophets you must not prophesy to us what is right. Speak to us pleasant words prophesy illusions” Isaiah 30:10. Speak to us pleasant words. That sentence is the founding charter of every prosperity ministry on earth, and it was written seven centuries before Christ.
Micah saw the same transaction in his day and named it with withering precision. “If a man walking after wind and falsehood had told lies and said I will speak out to you concerning wine and liquor he would be spokesman to this people” Micah 2:11. Promise this people what their appetites crave, Micah says, and they will make you their preacher. Nothing has changed but the vocabulary. The wine and liquor of the eighth century before Christ have become the breakthrough, the favour, the best life now, the harvest on your seed offering. The appetite is identical. The carnal heart wants its desires sanctified, wants religion to serve as the delivery system for everything it already worshipped, and it will gladly crown any man who agrees to perform the service. The false teacher and his crowd are not predator and prey. They are partners in the same transaction, and both parties are getting what they came for.
But Scripture takes us one level deeper than the transaction, and this is where the truth becomes genuinely fearful. God does not merely permit this exchange from a distance. He judicially employs it. When Ahab surrounded himself with four hundred prophets who told him only what he wanted to hear, the prophet Micaiah pulled back the curtain and revealed what was actually happening in the heavenly court. “Now therefore behold the Lord has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the Lord has proclaimed disaster against you” 1 Kings 22:23. Ahab had spent his reign hating the word of the Lord and silencing the men who spoke it, and the judgment God appointed for him was not fire from heaven. It was prophets who agreed with him. He was given the voices he had always wanted, and those voices marched him to his death at Ramoth Gilead. The lying prophets were the sentence. The king who refused the truth was handed the lie, and the handing was the judgment.
Ezekiel states the principle in its most naked form, and every churchgoer in our generation should read. Certain elders of Israel came and sat before the prophet to inquire of the Lord, looking outwardly devout, and God said to Ezekiel, “Son of man these men have set up their idols in their hearts… should I be consulted by them at all?” And then this. “I the Lord will be brought to give him an answer in the matter in view of the multitude of his idols” Ezekiel 14:3 and 4. God answers the idolater according to his idols. The man who comes to religion with an idol enthroned in his heart will receive a word that matches his idol, and the matching word is not God’s blessing on him. It is God’s sentence against him. He asked for a god shaped like his desires, and he was given preachers who would describe that god to him weekly, and the description will comfort him all the way to the judgment seat where the true God is waiting.
Paul carries this exact doctrine into the New Testament and attaches it to the last days. He describes people who perish “because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in wickedness” 2 Thessalonians 2:10 to 12. Read the sequence carefully. They refused the love of the truth first. The deluding influence was sent second, by God Himself, as judgment. The delusion is not the devil outmanoeuvring God. It is God handing people over to the lie they preferred, exactly as Romans 1 describes Him three times handing the rebellious over to the corruptions they chose. Psalm 81 records the same divine sigh over Israel. “But My people did not listen to My voice… so I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart to walk in their own devices” Psalm 81:11 and 12. There is no darker sentence God pronounces in this life than to give a people what they insist on wanting.
And Paul told Timothy that the last days would be characterised by precisely this market. “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine but wanting to have their ears tickled they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires” 2 Timothy 4:3. Notice again who does the accumulating. The people do. In accordance to their own desires. The verse does not describe wolves hunting down reluctant sheep. It describes consumers assembling a clergy to match their appetites. The smiling preacher in the stadium did not create the demand for a crossless Christianity. The demand created him. He is the invoice for an order the crowd placed, and the tragedy is that the invoice arrives looking like a blessing, week after week, while the souls receiving it sink deeper into a deception they mistake for the favour of God.
This reframes how we should think about the crowds themselves, and here we must be careful to hold two truths together. There are undoubtedly genuine sheep scattered inside those buildings, newly converted or poorly taught, whom the Lord will lead out in His timing, and we should pray earnestly for them, for He knows those who are His. 2 Timothy 2:19. But the system itself, and the multitude that sustains it, cannot be described as innocent victims of a clever man. Jesus explained why crowds gather around certain messages. “This is the judgment that the Light has come into the world and men loved the darkness rather than the Light for their deeds were evil” John 3:19. The crowd under the false teacher has usually heard enough truth to know it did not want it. There are faithful churches in the same city preaching the whole counsel of God to a few dozen people while the arena fills with tens of thousands. The disparity is not an accident of marketing. It is a revelation of appetite, and the appetite is the very thing under judgment.
This truth should land on us before we aim it at anyone else, and this is where we must turn toward our own hearts. The judgment of being given what we want is not reserved for prosperity arenas. Every one of us should ask the question honestly. What do I actually want from God? Do I come to His Word to be searched, corrected, and conformed to His Son, or do I come to have my existing life spiritually decorated? Do I love the preaching that wounds my pride before it heals me, or do I quietly drift toward voices that leave my idols undisturbed? “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9. The same appetite that fills the stadiums lives in the remnants of our own flesh, and the man who thinks himself immune to it is the man most exposed. Let us pray the prayer that protects against the judgment of pleasant words. “Search me O God and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me and lead me in the everlasting way” Psalm 139:23 and 24.
And let us end with the mercy, because there is mercy here for anyone willing to receive it. The God who judges the lovers of lies by giving them liars is the same God who delights to give the truth to everyone who genuinely wants Him. “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart” Jeremiah 29:13. No soul that hungers for the true God is ever handed a stone. The deluding influence falls on those who refused the love of the truth, never on those who cry out for it. So if anyone reading this recognises with a shudder that they have been sitting under pleasant words, feeding an appetite rather than following a Saviour, the door is not shut. The judgment described in this article is for those who persist in loving the lie, not for those who turn from it. Turn. Ask God for a love of the truth, and He who gives generously to all without reproach will give it. James 1:5. Better the Word that wounds and heals than the smooth message that soothes and damns. Better a small room and the whole counsel of God than a filled arena under His sentence.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.