For those who have no faith in God and cannot make a living preaching the true gospel, they can make a living preaching a false gospel. They do that by speaking against the commands and promises of God, and against the powers of the Holy Spirit. Then they will obtain financial support from those who also have no faith, and who wish to believe a system that is contrary to the word of God.

The message of deliverance and victory that we proclaim about Jesus Christ requires faith to receive it, and it requires the power of God to fulfill it. The Faithless cannot handle this message because they cannot believe it and so the things that this message promises will never happen to them. So they change the message to accommodate their own unbelief and experience. And then they attack the true gospel.

False teachers attack the good news and preach bad news instead. They attack deliverance and preach bondage. They attack prosperity and preach suffering. They attack healing and preach sickness. They attack God’s righteousness in the believer, and insist on man’s sinfulness even in those who have supposedly believed, making the blood of Christ of no effect. The message of defeat and suffering, of sin and sickness, is a thoroughgoing counterfeit gospel. It is what a religion would be when there is no God in it.

This false gospel is lucrative. It can make a man’s career. In fact, some preachers have received prosperity from men by preaching against prosperity from God. People who have no faith in God for prosperity would endorse a preacher who attacks faith in God for prosperity. They might endorse a preacher who claims that God has given us a cultural mandate to generate prosperity by human effort and hidden providence, but they would condemn someone who teaches prosperity by faith in God and by his obvious providence and miraculous power.

It is financially profitable to attack the prosperity gospel. Defending the orthodoxy of man is a reliable money-making scheme. The religious populace is full of unbelief toward God and full of pride about their own suffering. To manipulate unthinking and unbelieving religious people, a preacher only has to tag “prosperity” on any message or person that he wishes to attack, and he is guaranteed to gain a strong measure of support to feed his ego, and often a good sum of money along with it. A preacher can tag the word “prosperity” upon any promise of the gospel itself, and he can then speak against it with approval from the faithless religious crowd. Such a preacher offers the faithless an assurance that their unbelief is in fact piety.

The same is true for God’s commands and promises concerning healing. A statement can come straight out of the mouth of Jesus, but when a preacher calls it “the gospel of healing” or “the gospel of health and wealth,” then suddenly he can attack it to a cheering crowd throwing money at him. If he persists, he might secure a publishing contract and receive an evangelical award. The religious charlatans claim that they are preaching against heresy, but they are the ones running their own scam.