"PROSPERITY GOSPEL IS A FIRST-CLASS RELIGIOUS FRAUD AND A PONZI SCHEME"

Below are the seven most important reasons why the so called prosperity gospel or the gospel of health and wealth or the gospel of financial abundance is a typical religious fraud and a ponzi scheme that is covered with God, the name of Jesus Christ, the Christian faith and with the manipulated, twisted or the wrong interpretations of the Bible for the personal enrichment or the benefit of the prosperity preachers only:

(i) Prosperity gospel is not biblical in its origin or nature. This gospel came from men and not from God. This gospel was man made and man created. This is a strange and another type of gospel that is not from the New Testament Scriptures. It is a greed gospel that is based on the love of money and materialism. A gospel that Jesus Christ, his 12 apostles and the early Church did not preach anywhere and at anytime in the Bible days. There is no single known traditional or any historical precedence of this type of gospel anywhere in the entire New Testament Scriptures or in the entire history of the early Christians and Church. This prosperity gospel is not the pauline gospel that was preached to the Jews and the Gentiles by Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ. This prosperity gospel measures spirituality, divine blessings and spiritual growth in the life of a Christian by using money and materialism as the measuring tools, its biblical standards and spiritual requirements.

(ii) The canon of the Scriptures (The Bible) was completed in AD 96 through the divine revelation of God that was given to Apostle John who was later martyred for his faith in Jesus Christ in the Isle of Patmos. This development signified the end of the last Book of the Bible which is the Book of Revelation. The today's prosperity gospel is an extra-biblical revelation that is based primarily on the false promise of money, materialism, sound health or healing for the tithers and sacrificial offering givers. This strange gospel started in the 1940s almost 1,838 years later after Apostle John's divine revelation was given to him to complete the last Book of the Bible. Prosperity gospel started through a small religious sect that was known then as the "Faith and Healing Movement" in the southern United States or in the so called Bible-Belt region of America. It was pioneered by the late Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin Sr respectively. The core teaching of the prosperity gospel says that "God wants all Christians to be very rich in this life, stay healthy and the key to that divine blessings is by giving one's tithes, regular offerings and using the creative power of positive confessions to make or create your own world the way you want it to be in all reality". This gospel was later preached across the length and the breath of the United States before it was then exported from America to the nations of the world in the later part of the 20th century.

(iii) This prosperity gospel has produced two visible, distinct and very different mixed results anywhere this type of gospel is preached and is practiced worldwide. The two results are:(a) The primary beneficiaries from this prosperity gospel are the prosperity teachers or preachers themselves who continue to enrich themselves from the tithes and the offerings of their ignorant, gullible and vulnerable givers. These prosperity preachers are normally wealthy or super-rich. (b) The tens of millions of their followers and givers worldwide continue to live daily in abject poverty and lacking the basic needs of life despite their givings and the promises of financial liberty to them through this prosperity gospel.

(iv) The givers to this type of gospel are always financially and materially worse of or more miserable at the end of the day when you compare their financial and material status after months or years of givings to this gospel of wealth and health or to this so called prosperity gospel.

(v) The teachings of the prosperity gospel also violates the three traditional or the conventional ways in which people have being making money all over the world for thousands of years, such as, employment, business ownership, investments and savings.

(vi) This prosperity gospel teaches that its followers and givers live in the supernatural heavenly realm of an economic system on earth that is totally immune to the present global financial systems and the economic forces of this present world that can only affect the non Christians who do not practice the teachings of this prosperity gospel in real life.

(vii) Prosperity teachers teach that financial abundance and the practical answers to the problems of abject or chronic poverty in the life of a Christian comes directly by tithing and by giving of one's offerings. There is no single biblical evidence to show that tithing was ever practiced once or regularly in the entire early Church according to the accounts of the New Testament Scriptures. Jesus Christ and the New Testament Scriptures never commanded the Christians to tithe. The grace giving that is clearly visible throughout the New Testament Scriptures and was openly practiced or demonstrated extensively by the early Church or the early Christians throughout the 1st century Church era was never based on the mandatory tithing for the nation of Israel according to the law of Moses in Malachi 3:8-11.

The givings that were seen and practiced by the early Christians in the New Testament Scriptures were based solidly on the scriptural directive from 2 Corinthians 9:7 which reads "Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (NIV Translation of the Bible). The New Testament Scriptures type of grace-giving that was practiced openly and extensively throughout the early Church was not mandatory for Christians or required from Christians. It was not a 10% based giving that is known as tithing. It was not a divine curse if it was not done by any Christian. It was not an act of robbing God and it was never tied to any divine discipline coming from the devourers or to any overflowing divine blessings that come from the opened windows of heaven.