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Ways Christians See It

Does God promise us good things in this life?

Psalm 73, Deuteronomy 8:11-18, John 16:33, Romans 8:18-28

Asaph nearly loses his faith over this. He looks at people who despise God and finds them healthy, wealthy, and untroubled, and he concludes he has kept his heart clean for nothing. His feet had almost slipped. The psalm does not pretend the problem is imaginary.

How Christians answer this shapes everything downstream. It determines what a believer expects, what they conclude when it does not arrive, and whether a hard reads as God's absence or God's presence. A great deal of quiet loss of faith happens here, and usually not because someone stopped believing God is real. It happens because they believed a promise God had not made.

Where everyone agrees

Everyone here agrees that God is good, that he is generous, that suffering is real and not illusory, and that he is not indifferent to it. Nobody here thinks poverty is holy in itself or that wealth is proof of wickedness. The disagreement is about what God has actually promised for the years before the .

God delights to bless his children now

The Father gives good gifts. Expecting provision, healing, and flourishing is faith, not presumption.

What it claims

Jesus said that if you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven. That is an argument from the character of a parent. He told us to ask for daily bread. James says we have not because we ask not. The blessings of Deuteronomy 28 attach real, material good to faithfulness, and the Psalms are full of people expecting rescue in this life and receiving it. A theology that expects nothing from God until after death is not humility. It is a failure to take the Father at his word.

Who holds it

Much of Pentecostal and charismatic teaching, and, in a far more careful form than its caricature, a broad stream of evangelical piety. Its extreme version is the prosperity gospel; its moderate version is held by an enormous number of ordinary Christians.

The texts it stands on

  • Matthew 7:11 How much more will your Father give good things to those who ask him
  • 3 John 2 I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health
  • Psalm 37:25 I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his children begging bread
  • James 4:2 You do not have because you do not ask

Strongest case

It takes the generosity of God seriously, and it produces people who actually pray expecting something. Its critics rarely notice how much of the Psalter is on its side, since the psalmists ask for concrete rescue constantly and thank God when it comes.

Hardest question

It cannot account for the apostles. Paul was beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed, and he calls that the pattern rather than the exception. Jesus promised tribulation explicitly. Pressed even slightly, this view tells suffering people that their suffering is a diagnosis of their faith, which is precisely what Job's friends did and precisely what God condemned.

How it answers that

Its more careful defenders reject the prosperity version outright and say the objection targets that, not them. The claim is not that faith guarantees outcomes. It is that a child may ask a good Father expecting good, and that Scripture repeatedly models this. On the apostles, they answer that Paul also knew how to abound, that the New Testament records healings and provision constantly, and that a theology built only on Paul's hardships would have to ignore half of Acts. The failure mode is real and they name it: the moment expectation becomes entitlement, the friends of Job are back in the room.

Holding the map

The practical divide here is not really about theology. It is about which failure you have watched happen. People who have seen someone crushed by a promise that did not arrive will lean one way. People who have seen someone go grey and joyless expecting nothing will lean the other.

One thing worth holding from Psalm 73 regardless of position. Asaph does not resolve his crisis by working it out. He says it was wearisome until he went into the sanctuary, and the turn happens there, among the others. Whatever you conclude, that is a comment on where this question actually gets answered.

EKLI serves Christians across traditions. On questions where churches differ we explain how each one sees it and leave the deciding to you.

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