Welcome to Day 1411 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible – Truth from the Epistles and the Apostles – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1411 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.


Mastering The Bible – Truth From The Epistles and ApostlesInsight Seventy-Three: The Epistles At the Antidote to the Idea That the Righteous Invariably ProsperPerhaps the notion will be foreign to you, but I have met Christians who presume that material wealth and personal success are proof of God’s blessing. There are whole ministries that play on people’s emotions that support this unbiblical philosophy.  It doesn’t take much thought to realize how unbiblical that proposition is. Many unbelievers are financially prosperous and quite successful. Conversely, many believers have next to nothing. They aren’t poor or persecuted because they don’t have enough faith or because they haven’t sent money to a ‘television ministry.’ They are poor for a plethora of reasons, some of them quite complex and systemic to their political and cultural situation. But if they are faithful, they are also blessed.


Frankly, the poor and persecuted believers across the world resemble the early church more than believers in the American church. The Epistles don’t portray early believers and their fledgling congregations as unusually prosperous, influential, and relatively carefree. It’s precisely the opposite.


It is hard to miss the early believer’s social status if one invests any time reading the New Testament. Paul started numerous churches. Poverty and personal need was not unusual in them (2 Corinthians 8:1-2: Romans 16:2; Philippians 4:19; Titus 3:14). Paul and the apostles themselves were poor (2 Corinthians 6:10; Philippians 4:11-12). James’s words indicate that poverty was prevalent (James 2:2-6). The church at Jerusalem—surely loved deeply by God—was notoriously poor, so much so that Paul collected offerings for Jerusalem almost everywhere he went (Acts 2:42-47; 3:6; 1 Corinthians 16:1-2; Galatians 2:7-10; cf. Rom. 15:26-28; Acts 24:17).


First-century believers also suffered severe persecution. The New Testament is filled with such descriptions. Despite the claims of modern religious hucksters, the apostles suffered, even though they were the very people one might suppose to be the most prosperous if God’s blessing leads to a life without hardship. The apostles were beaten (Acts 5:27-42), and the godly were martyred (Acts 7:54-60). Paul suffered with almost unbelievable regularity (Philippians 3:8-10; 2 Corinthians 5:21-29). Most of Peter’s first epistle is about enduring suffering for faith in Jesus (1 Peter 2:19-23; 3:14-18; 4:1-19:5:9-10). Perhaps the most poignant contradiction to the notion that wealth and prosperity defines the...