I always thought it was relatively simple. You were created for one purpose: to glorify the Creator. This is the fulfillment of your purpose; it is in your best interest. It’s the one and only path you can take to fulfillment and peace.
That means that you have to alienate yourself from everything within your soul that longs for something else. The promise of the Scripture is that you can know, and be granted sufficient power, to want what God designed you for. It’s not that you get what you want, but that you want what you get.
So every attempt to slap a Jesus sticker on name-it-and-claim-it is a lie from Hell. Joel Osteen is simply a more recent huckster of that ancient deception, and there are others publishing the same lies afresh today. All of those are nothing more than elevating your fleshly nature to deity. It’s idolatry.
We can look forward to God crushing a lot of that when the economy collapses a bit more. Yes, it’s a long, slow process, but there’s no stopping it. And as we enter the survival mode, the lies of that name-it-and-claim-it will become painfully obvious. (Did you know that was the name of a book by Frederick K.C. Price?)
No, not every physical malady will be healed. Not every sorrow that haunts you will go away. There is plenty of suffering that is part of His glory. The issue is in how you handle it. Don’t get lost on that. The sheep of His pasture will suffer. Often they will suffer more and greater sorrows than the cattle who aren’t in His pasture. He gets to decide what glorifies Him.
This is part of the same idea that He gets to decide who shall be in His family and who ends up in Hell. He’s the Judge; we are not. By no means does He need to explain it to us, nor satisfy our internal sense of justice. He is justice. We are accountable for building a concept of justice based on what we can learn about His moral character. Creation itself is built on that character. No human conception has any meaning.
The whining and posturing gets tiresome.
Was this prompted by any particular event (just to be clear, everything you’ve said is absolutely correct)?
Yes, but it was something here locally with me. Someone I know keeps pushing the prosperity gospel.
Barf. I thankfully never got suckered into that.