We Overcorrected

Somewhere along the way, in our entirely justified horror at the prosperity gospel, a lot of us flinched too far in the other direction. We got so allergic to the man on television promising you a jet for your seed-faith offering that we started to flinch at something the Bible says plainly and constantly: that righteousness generally leads to blessing, and sin generally leads to ruin.

I want to push on this, because I think the overcorrection has quietly cost us something.

Open the Psalms. Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil… let him turn away from evil and do good, let him seek peace and pursue it (Ps 34:12–14, quoted in 1 Pet 3:10–11). Open the Proverbs. When a man’s ways please the Lord, even his enemies are at peace with him (Prov 16:7). This is not the prosperity gospel. This is just the gospel’s older, plainer cousin — the simple covenantal observation that the world is morally shaped, that how you live tends, over time, to produce a harvest after its own kind. Peter quotes Psalm 34 to suffering people without a single line of theological hedging. He doesn’t stop to harmonize it against a purer systematic framework. He just says: the Psalm says it — so live this way.

Now here is where the overcorrection sneaks in. We have all met the book of Job. We know that the righteous sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes prosper, and we know that simplistic karma-theology is precisely the error of Job’s three friends. So we have built a reflex: the moment anyone says “godliness leads to blessing,” we reach for Job and shut it down.

But think about why Job is in the Bible. Job is a remarkable book precisely because nothing in it happens the way it normally does. It is the exception, and the whole drama depends on its being an exception. If the righteous-suffering scenario were the rule, Job wouldn’t be a forty-two-chapter crisis; it would be Tuesday. The error of Eliphaz was never that he prescribed virtue — it was his simplicity, his blindness to the cosmic battle raging above the visible facts, his certainty that the moral equation was clean when it was anything but.

And you do not build a theology out of the exceptions. You acknowledge them, you reverence what God is doing in them, and you keep teaching the rule. The rule is good news. The rule is the reason we can look a struggling believer in the eye and say: pursue holiness like your life depends on it, because in the ordinary providence of God, the way of righteousness really is the way toward good days. That’s not a prosperity preacher talking. That’s just Psalm 34, which we apparently decided was too risky to believe.

Take what’s useful — outline it, preach it, reword it, ignore the rest. No attribution needed.