PROSPERITY: WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

Part 5

Can someone reverse the curse?

Pastor Maselo Mosomane

“Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:17-19

When God passed sentence on man He said; “because you have heeded the voice of your wife.” In other words God is saying, because you listened to your wife; because you paid attention to what your wife said to you. This is what I am convicted to believe in my heart: as much as things happened after they ate, the problem was not in the tree. With the same breath I am convinced that as much as the woman took a deliberate action and took the fruit of the forbidden tree, ate and gave to her husband who also ate; the problem goes beyond the woman. I believe the problem is deeper than the tree and the woman.

In His opening address to Adam God said; “because you have heeded” To heed is to listen to - to pay attention to. Adam listened to his wife Eve; he paid attention to what she said to him and acted on her suggestions. He heard and submitted to what she said. The opposite of the word heed is to disagree. When Adam heard what her wife said he heeded i.e. he paid attention and agreed to what was said. He had a choice to disagree but; out of his own free will he chose to accede. He could have rejected everything but Adam accepted his wife’s offer and also ate.

What do we understand out of all this? Adam acted against what God said. He knew exactly what God said about the tree of knowledge of good and evil but he disregarded that and submitted to her wife’s suggestions. When you deliberately act against the rule or instruction, you are DISOBEDIENT. This is what Adam did. He disobeyed God and refused to admit his guilt. Instead of pleading guilty he blamed it all on his wife.

We’ve heard in the above Scripture what God said would happen because of Adam’s act of obedience. When we analyze the outcome of the sentence we see nothing else but the reason for our poverty. Being so informed by the Scripture we can safely draw a conclusion that poverty is the results of DISOBEDIENCE. When Adam disobeyed God, judgment was passed against him. The anatomy of that judgment is all we see in the world today – poverty, sickness and death. The absence of poverty is prosperity. Poverty and prosperity may be starting with the same alphabet but they are not synonyms; they are miles far apart.

Obedience is synonymous to prosperity the same way disobedience is to poverty. When Adam obeyed he remained prosperous but when he disobeyed, everything turned around. He became poor.

Beloved; the same is true with us today. What made Adam prosperous can make us prosperous too. The same act of OBEDIENCE that kept Adam rich can make us rich too. All the time Adam was in obedience he lacked nothing but as soon as he disobeyed he lacked everything and had to work hard to make ends meet. Wouldn’t this be the right place for us to take stock of our condition and see what is in force in my life? How do I describe my condition? We work hard even for lousy things which were supposed to be free and the sad thing about it is that we have embraced the effect of disobedience as a way of life.

The same is true even in our lives today. You see when we disobey the instructions we end up spending more time doing something we could have spend half the time or even less if only we could have followed the instruction. Have you realized that every product comes with a manual? How many times have you messed up things just because you would not read the manual? Things will always work well and faster if we would only go by the rules of the manufacturer.

God is more than the manufacturer – He is the creator. He created the earth and all that is in it including us. He knows how things are suppose to work here on earth. He also knows what works better for us; hence he gave us the manual. When we follow the manual we win but when we disregard the manual we lose. Our manual is the word of God which is packaged in the bible. Like Adam of old, we have the word of God to go by. Adam rejected the word and he lost it all. When we do the same we lose too.