Does God Want You to Build Wealth?

FAITH & FINANCE

What the whole of Scripture actually says about money, abundance, and the steward's calling, and why almost everyone gets it wrong.

Iron Eagle Advisors  |  Real World Money

If you have spent any time in church and any time managing money, you have probably felt the tension. Faith pulls you one direction. Business pulls you another. You sit in the pew on Sunday and hear that the love of money is the root of all evil, and then you go to work on Monday and spend eight hours helping people accumulate more of it. After a while, that friction starts to wear on you.

I know because I have lived it.

What I want to offer you today is not a motivational pep talk about how God wants you to be rich. The prosperity gospel has done enough damage. What I want to offer is something more useful and more honest: a careful look at what Scripture actually says about wealth, abundance, and the responsibility that comes with both, read in full context, not cherry-picked for a bumper sticker.

The answer, as it turns out, is more generous and more demanding than either camp wants to admit.

The Bible Is Not Anti-Wealth

Let's establish this clearly at the outset, because a lot of well-meaning believers carry a quiet guilt about prosperity that the text simply does not support.

Abraham was extraordinarily wealthy. Genesis tells us he was rich in livestock, silver, and gold. Isaac inherited that wealth and expanded it. Jacob became prosperous enough that his flocks alone were a significant economic force. Job, before and after his suffering, was described as the greatest man among all the people of the East, and his restoration included doubled wealth as a sign of God's favor.

Solomon's prosperity was not a coincidence or a compromise. It was a direct gift from God in response to Solomon asking for wisdom rather than riches. God's response was essentially: because you asked for the right thing, I will give you what you asked for and what you did not ask for. Wealth followed wisdom as a consequence of right orientation.

The Proverbs 31 woman, held up throughout Jewish and Christian tradition as a model of virtue, is a businesswoman. She evaluates fields and buys them. She plants vineyards from her earnings. She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies merchants with sashes. She is, by any reasonable definition, an entrepreneur and investor, and the text praises her without qualification.

Joseph administered the most powerful economy of the ancient world and did so with integrity and skill. Zacchaeus was a wealthy tax collector whom Jesus specifically sought out, not to rebuke his wealth but to transform his relationship to it. Joseph of Arimathea, who provided the tomb for Jesus' burial, is explicitly identified as a wealthy man and a disciple.

The pattern is unmistakable. Wealth, throughout Scripture, is not a problem. It is a condition, one that carries responsibility, one that can corrupt, but one that is entirely compatible with a life of genuine faith.

The Hebrew Vision of Shalom

To understand what the Old Testament actually teaches about prosperity, you have to understand the concept of shalom. English Bibles translate it as peace, but that translation loses most of the meaning. Shalom in the Hebrew imagination is comprehensive flourishing, including physical health, relational wholeness, communal harmony, spiritual alignment, and material sufficiency, all present simultaneously.

The good life as envisioned by the Hebrew scriptures is not a life of spiritual achievement paired with material indifference. It is a life where every dimension is whole. Poverty, in this framework, is not a virtue. It is a condition to be remedied, an absence of shalom that the community is obligated to address.

Deuteronomy 8 captures this beautifully and honestly. God is speaking to Israel about the land He is bringing them into, and the description is almost extravagant: streams and pools of water, wheat and barley, vines, fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil, honey, iron ore, copper. He says they will eat and be satisfied. Material abundance is explicitly woven into the covenant promise.

"When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you."  Deuteronomy 8:10

But here is where the text gets interesting. Immediately after the description of abundance, the warning begins. Not a warning against the abundance itself, but a warning against what abundance does to memory and posture.

"Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God... Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God."  Deuteronomy 8:11-14

And then perhaps the most important verse in the entire biblical theology of wealth:

"You may say to yourself, my power and the strength of my hands produced this wealth for me. But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth."  Deuteronomy 8:17-18

The danger is not prosperity. The danger is the story you tell yourself about where it came from.

What Jesus Actually Said About Money

Jesus talked about money more than almost any other subject. More than heaven. More than hell. More than prayer or fasting or the kingdom of God. If you read the Gospels looking for his financial teaching, you will find it everywhere, and it is more nuanced than either the prosperity camp or the poverty camp wants to acknowledge.

He never tells a wealthy follower that their wealth is the problem. He tells them to hold it loosely. He tells them to be generous. He warns them about the specific spiritual danger that comes with abundance, the way it can crowd out dependence on God, the way it can become an identity, the way it can make a person feel like they have already arrived.

The danger is not prosperity. The danger is the story you tell yourself about where it came from.

The rich young ruler is the passage most often cited to argue that Jesus opposed wealth. But read it carefully. Jesus does not tell him his wealth is sinful. He identifies precisely where this particular man's heart is stuck, where his possessions have him rather than the other way around, and he offers him the one thing that would set him free. The man walks away sad. Jesus lets him go. He does not chase him down with a revised offer.

Zacchaeus is the counter-narrative. Also wealthy. Also encountered by Jesus. But Zacchaeus's response is immediate and extravagant generosity: half his possessions to the poor, fourfold repayment to anyone he has defrauded. Jesus does not say now you have given it away you are acceptable. He says salvation has come to this house today. The wealth was not the barrier. The posture was.

The Parable of the Talents is perhaps the most striking financial text in the New Testament and the one most often overlooked in these conversations. A master entrusts significant sums to three servants and goes on a journey. Two of them invest and produce returns. One buries his out of fear. When the master returns, the two who produced are praised and rewarded. The one who buried his talent, who played it safe, who took no risk, who preserved rather than grew, is rebuked in terms that would shock most cautious Christians.

"His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest” .Matthew 25:26-27

The expectation embedded in this parable is not merely that you should preserve what you have been given. The expectation is that you should seek to grow it. That you should be productive with it. That burying it in the ground out of fear is a failure of stewardship, not a form of humility.

The Three Places Scripture Draws a Hard Line

Having established that wealth itself is not the problem, it is equally important to be honest about where Scripture does draw clear lines. There are three of them, and they are not ambiguous.

The first is the love of money. First Timothy 6:10 is one of the most frequently misquoted verses in the Bible. It does not say money is the root of all evil. It says the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. The internal orientation is the problem, not the external condition. A person can be poor and consumed by the love of money. A person can be wealthy and genuinely free from it. The verse is a diagnostic about the heart, not a verdict about the bank account.

The second is exploitation. The Hebrew prophets, including Amos, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, are ferocious on this point and it is worth sitting with their language because it is not gentle. They do not attack wealth. They attack wealth built on the oppression of workers, the cheating of customers, the exploitation of the poor, and the manipulation of markets for personal gain. Amos is particularly pointed about people selling the poor for a pair of sandals, trampling the heads of the poor into the dust. This is not abstract theological concern. It is specific, economic, and it carries serious consequences in the prophetic tradition.

A genuinely biblical approach to investing has to take this seriously. It is not enough to generate returns. The question of how those returns are generated, what businesses produce them, what practices they involve, and who bears the cost, is a legitimate biblical question, not merely a political or social one.

The third is forgetting the source. We have already seen this in Deuteronomy 8. The consistent warning through both testaments is not against prosperity but against the amnesia that prosperity can produce. The person who looks at what they have built and concludes they built it alone has made a theological error with significant practical consequences. Pride of this kind, in the wisdom literature, reliably precedes a fall.

The Wisdom Literature's Consistent Thread

Proverbs, read as a whole, presents one of the most coherent economic philosophies in ancient literature. And its central insight is this: seek wealth directly and it tends to flee or corrupt. Seek wisdom, integrity, diligence, and honest dealing, and prosperity tends to follow as a consequence.

"Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow."  Proverbs 13:11

"A faithful person will be richly blessed, but one eager to get rich will not go unpunished."  Proverbs 28:20

The orientation matters enormously. Wealth as an outcome of living and working rightly is celebrated throughout Proverbs. Wealth as the object of direct pursuit is consistently warned against, not because wealth is bad but because making it the goal corrupts the means by which you pursue it.

Ecclesiastes adds a further dimension that is often missed. Chapter eleven, verse two offers what is arguably the first written articulation of portfolio diversification: invest in seven ventures, yes in eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land. This is not a footnote. This is wisdom literature presenting the spreading of risk as prudent stewardship. Concentration is not courage in this framework. It is folly. The humble investor who diversifies is wiser than the confident one who bets everything on a single outcome.

The Prosperity Gospel Gets It Backwards

It is worth naming this clearly because if you are building a faith-integrated approach to finance, you will be compared to the prosperity gospel whether you want to be or not. The distinction matters and it needs to be stated plainly.

The prosperity gospel takes the abundance thread in Scripture, which is real, and turns it into a transaction. Give to get. Sow a seed to reap a harvest. Name it and claim it. Faith as a mechanism for extracting material blessing from God. It is not just theologically careless. It is a reversal of the entire stewardship framework.

In the prosperity gospel, wealth becomes proof of God's favor and poverty becomes evidence of insufficient faith. That leaves the faithful believer suffering through cancer or bankruptcy or a sick child with no framework for their experience, and it is a lie that has caused real damage to real people.

The biblical framework is the opposite in its orientation. You are not managing your money to extract blessing from God. You are managing God's money on His behalf, according to His standards, for His purposes. The difference in posture is everything. One is transactional. The other is vocational.

Contentment as a Financial Guardrail

Paul's letter to the Philippians contains a verse that is almost always quoted in a context of making do with less. But read in full, it says something more interesting.

"I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound."  Philippians 4:11-12

Paul says he has learned contentment in both conditions, in need and in abundance. Which implies that abundance is a legitimate state, not a guilty one. The lesson is not that poverty is better. The lesson is that contentment is possible in either condition, and that it has to be learned. It is not a feeling that arrives automatically. It is a discipline that is cultivated.

For financial planning purposes, contentment is actually a guardrail. It is the thing that prevents prosperity from becoming a treadmill. The person who has learned contentment can ask the question that almost no financial plan ever asks: how much is enough? That question, genuinely considered, not as a way to stop working but as a way to orient the work, changes everything about how a person manages money, makes decisions, and eventually transitions out of the accumulation phase of their financial life.

Generosity as a Financial Strategy

Scripture treats generosity not merely as a moral obligation but as a financial discipline with real effects. This is a claim that sounds naive until you look at what it actually produces in people's financial behavior.

"One person gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty."  Proverbs 11:24

The mechanism here is not magical. It is psychological and spiritual. Generosity breaks the grip that money has on a person. The chronic giver is liberated from the anxiety and hoarding instinct that destroys so many financial plans. They make better decisions because they are not operating from fear. They take appropriate risks because they are not paralyzed by the prospect of loss. They give their investments time to grow because they are not compulsively watching the balance.

Building giving into a financial plan as a non-negotiable line item, not as charity, not as an afterthought, but as a foundational discipline, is not just a religious practice. It is a habit that shapes the entire character of the financial life that surrounds it.

The Synthesis: What the Bible Actually Teaches

When you read the whole narrative rather than curating individual verses to support a predetermined conclusion, a coherent and surprisingly robust financial philosophy emerges. It can be stated simply.

God expects his people to be productive, diligent, and skilled stewards of whatever they have been given. Abundance is a natural and celebrated outcome of faithful stewardship, honest dealing, and wise planning. The danger is never the wealth itself. It is the pride, the exploitation, the forgetting, and the misplaced love that wealth can produce when the heart is not carefully guarded. Hold it with open hands. Give generously. Build honestly. Diversify wisely. Plan patiently. And remember who owns it.

You are not managing your money to extract blessing from God. You are managing God's money on His behalf.

That is a complete financial philosophy. It is ancient and it is modern. It is demanding and it is freeing. It applies to the blue-collar worker in Charlottesville trying to figure out if it is okay to want a better life for his family. The answer Scripture gives that person is an unambiguous yes. And it applies to the business owner wondering whether ambition and faith can coexist without compromise.

They can. The evidence is on every page.

The question is not whether God is comfortable with your prosperity. The question is whether your prosperity is making you the kind of person God can trust with more.

Iron Eagle Advisors serves blue-collar and middle-income families in the Charlottesville, Virginia area with a stewardship-based approach to financial planning. The Real World Money Show airs locally and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Securities and investment advisory services offered through LPL Enterprise (LPLE), a Registered Investment Advisor, Member FINRA/SIPC, and an affiliate of LPL Financial.

LPLE and LPL Financial are not affiliated with Iron Eagle Advisors.

Faith Driven Investing (FDI) has certain risks based on the fact that the criteria excludes securities of certain issuers for non-financial reasons and, therefore, investors may forgo some market opportunities and the universe of investments available will be smaller

There is no guarantee that a diversified portfolio will enhance overall returns or outperform a non-diversified portfolio. Diversification does not protect against market risk.​