God’s Purpose for Prosperity

The garden was lush with a clean atmosphere. The palpable presence of God permeated the air. The man and the woman were oblivious to the concept of lack, insufficiency, and poverty. God commanded them to be fruitful and multiply— He commanded them to prosper.

The truth is, the principle of prosperity is not the invention of a televangelist or an American business mogul. Prosperity was, and is, God’s idea. That’s right! God desires that the human race prospers. This concept may seem controversial to some, but let us consider what the Bible says in Genesis 1:28 above.

The word fruitful here comes from the Hebrew word pāra, which means “to bear fruit.”1 God designed us to be fruitful in every area of our lives. This word also implies increase. We were created to experience increase. Anything that doesn’t increase is not functioning according to God’s purpose, His specific command to bear fruit.

God wanted the human race to reproduce after its kind because the human race was made in the image of God. The more humans reproduced, the more the earth looked like God. This is why the enemy sought to introduce sin into the world because sin brings barrenness, which is antithetical to the nature of God. The more sin, the more barren the earth would become. Barrenness is unnatural.

Let’s look at the word fruitfulness more in depth. Oxford English Dictionary defines fruitful as “producing good or helpful results; productive,” and Merriam- Webster Dictionary includes the meaning of “offspring.”2 This word originates from the Latin word fertilis, which means “fertile or fertilizing.”3 In other words, God created mankind and put within them the fertilizer necessary to expand His abundance into every sphere of society.

God had a plan. He wanted human beings to be His ambassadors on earth. Mankind was designed and fashioned in the image of God, and as image bearers, humankind was called to establish His kingdom and advance His agenda on earth. In fact, Adam and Eve and all humankind were intended to spread the atmosphere of the garden of Eden across every conceivable sphere of the planet.

If God designed human beings to be fertile, abundant, productive, and fruitful, when and where did poverty, lack, and barrenness come into the picture? Poverty and lack came into the earth as a result of the curse, and the curse came about as a result of sin. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they unleashed a spiritual cancer called sin that began to corrupt the very fabric of the world. Their sin didn’t simply affect them; it actually affected the entire human race and all of creation. Sin turned the world upside down. Faith was replaced with fear. Confidence in God was replaced with self-righteousness and spiritual insecurity. True worship was replaced with man-made religion. For the first time in mankind’s existence, they experienced guilt, shame, and condemnation.

In Genesis 3, we see the implication of sin in the curse God pronounced over humanity.

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:

“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”
— Genesis 3:17–19

Notice what the Scripture says, “Cursed is the ground for your sake …” This implies that the power of sin not only hindered man’s fellowship with God, but it actually hindered his relationship with the earth. The ground that once yielded its fruit to Adam and Eve was no longer in cooperation with them but instead was barren and stubborn and could only be tilled through toil.

We must understand that toiling is a part of the curse. Before humankind fell, Adam tilled the ground from a posture of rest and peace. Adam worked, but he did not toil. The word toil is defined as “exhausting physical labor or to work extremely hard or incessantly.”4 It was never God’s plan for human beings to struggle or be oppressed by lack and poverty.

In the book of Genesis, God gave Adam stewardship over the garden of Eden. He was called to “dress and to keep it.” What did this mean? The Hebrew word for dress there is the word ʿāḇaḏ, which means “to work or to serve.” The other word used in this passage is the word keep. This is from the Hebrew word šāmar, which means to “keep, guard, observe, or give heed.”

Another word used to describe this term is celebrate (as in celebrating the feast days). This is very powerful! Adam was called by God to steward the garden of Eden with a sense of stewardship or celebration. He was happy and joyful in his work. He wasn’t waiting to clock off from work because of stress or exhaustion. Instead, Adam actually worked from a posture of rest.

This was God’s original design and was God’s plan not just for Adam but for the entire human race. Understanding the purpose and law of stewardship is essential to understanding and walking in biblical prosperity.

God never establishes anything in the earth without a steward. In the garden of Eden, mankind were the legal stewards of that environment. This is why the serpent came to tempt Eve in the garden; he was after the legal custody of the garden of Eden. Unfortunately, due to sin, mankind gave up their custodianship to the devil, and so began the spiritual and physical decline of the earth. God is a God of stewardship, and He abides by three main laws of stewardship:

A. We cannot be trusted with resources we don’t have the capacity to steward.
B. God will not give you more if you have shown an inability to manage what you have.
C. God holds us accountable for what He places in our care.

We have been called by God to steward the resources He has entrusted to us. God did not create you to toil. It is not His will that you struggle for money or that you live hand to mouth. You are probably asking yourself, But what about all the poverty in the world today? That is a great question. The truth is that the world is not suffering from a lack of resources; the world is suffering from poor stewardship.

Sin released a curse that has caused selfishness, greed, and abuse to proliferate throughout the world. Children are hungry in so-called third-world countries, not because of a deficiency in natural materials, but because of bad governance and poor stewardship. Some countries have more natural resources than any other place in the world, but their citizens can’t even afford a bag of rice. Why? Sin not only separates people from God, but it separates people from His purpose and provision. The late Dr. Myles Munroe would often say, “Where purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable.”

Many years ago, on my first-ever mission trip, I went to West Africa. Upon arrival, I was shocked at the level of poverty that I witnessed firsthand. There was no running water or functional plumbing. There were no microwaves; everything that I ate was prepared over a fire with hot coals. Even my clothes were ironed with a hot iron that used coal. This region has more gold and diamonds than almost any country in the world, yet the people were in abject poverty.

I sat with a group of pastors who represented over twenty churches in the area and asked them what their biggest need was for their ministries; they all said, without hesitation or equivocation, “Money!” Although the answer seemed so obvious, I was actually very surprised. At that moment, I realized the self-righteous narrative that I held for so many years that “It’s not about money!” was not only false, it was self-centered and demonic.

These pastors loved God and were leading their local churches to the best of their abilities, but they were being oppressed financially. They told me that they couldn’t compete with the local mosque that possessed more resources. This wasn’t because their country was physically barren; this was because the curse had not been broken. That’s right! In the same manner, thousands, if not millions, of people are operating under a curse of barrenness because they do not know that it is the will of God for them to be blessed.

My encounters in Africa gave me a totally different perspective on wealth and poverty. I realized that it was easier to hyper-spiritualize the problems of the less fortunate because it gave me a comfortable excuse. As long as I made everything spiritual and ignored the pragmatic aspects of the gospel and the kingdom of God, I didn’t have to face the poverty mindset which I justified through spirituality. (We will discuss the poverty mentality in a later chapter.)

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Content taken from Teach Me How to Prosper by Kynan Bridges ©2024. Used by permission of Chosen Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group.