In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, one of the characters observes that ‘prosperity knits a man to the world’ because it makes living in this fallen world comfortable. The enlargement of our earthly possessions reduces the honour of God in our lives. This is through making us want to live longer in this world not because we desire to glorify God, but because we are afraid of losing what we already have. This creates a vicious cycle. The more we have in this world, the more we prefer this world, and the more we configure our lives to maintaining our prosperity rather than focusing on living for God.
When I was a young economist, one of the principles of economics that fascinated me was Say’s Law, which states that ‘supply creates demand’. It does this by generating income for households in one time period, which in turn makes them want to spend that income in the next time period. There is something analogous to this when it comes to all prosperity. The problem with prosperity (in whatever form it takes) is that the very accumulation of blessings strangely expands our longing for more, because there is within each human heart a root of fallen life that longs for satisfaction that no material thing can satisfy.
