God will prosper his people in Christ. I believe all things will work to our good. I believe throughout our lifetime that good is not necessarily material, but to form us into the likeness of Jesus. But I also believe that when he has finished doing so, he will share with us every good thing that belongs to him. We will lack nothing in him and we will prosper in every meaning and sense of that word in a perfect new creation with him. 

Yesterday, I wrote about how Romans 8:28 points us to a particular good to which all things are working for those who love Christ. These are not general goods, or wish-dreams that we have imagined, but the greatest good of being conformed to the likeness of Jesus. God has ordered everything in the universe with the specific intention of making his people like his Son.
As part of that, I said we often imagine goodness in a lesser form. We tend to think in terms of the goodness of health, wealth and happiness. Yesterday, I pushed away from that towards the truth of Romans 8:29 which insists the goodness of becoming like Jesus is a greater good than such things.
But it is hard to get away from the reality that health, wealth and happiness are good things. Again, even a cursory glance at the Old Testament shows you how such things are often built into the promises of God to his people. There is a reason why some assumed King Solomon was the one that God was going to send. His reign marked the high point of Israel’s history. They were wealthy, happy and enjoyed peace on their borders. These were part and parcel of what God promised his people.
Reformed people can get a bit funny about this stuff. It is a point Dale Ralph Davis makes so helpfully and graphically that I previously highlighted it here (and frequently think on it). He says:
We can say that 1 Kings 10 speaks a word of testimony, namely, that the prosperity of the people of God is always a gift of Yahweh’s goodness, which (I think) demands of us both gratitude (lest we idolize the gifts in place of God) and joy (lest we despise God’s gifts as though they were sinful). Some have difficulty with the latter response in 1 Kings 10. In spite of the positive tone of the writer commentators seem convinced that all that gold can’t be good and so feel impelled to emphasize the clouds on the horizon for Solomon’s kingdom. It reminds me of what missionary Don McClure once told about the Nuer people in the Sudan: ‘the Nuer believes that milk is a beverage for women and children, but he likes it so well that he cannot bear to see it all go to the women, so he makes a cocktail with a bite by adding cow urine, which makes it a man’s drink.’ That is, he can’t enjoy it unless he ruins it first. I wonder if we don’t do that with 1 Kings 10 – feel obligated to moan over ‘materialism’ and all that could possibly go wrong with such bounty rather than acknowledging that it is the blessing of the Lord that makes rich (cf. Prov 10:22) and being content to enjoy that should he give it. Must we, to stretch illustration into analogy, pour cow urine over the text in our panic to stay out of bed with the whore we call the health-and-wealth gospel?
Dale Ralph Davis, 1 Kings: The Wisdom & the Folly, Christian Focus, 2002, p. 104-5
Anything that smacks of the prosperity gospel – even if scripture expressly says it itself – must be shot down. We don’t want anyone thinking God might want them to actually be healthy, wealthy or happy do we? Well, that sort of thinking can end up making us deny what the Bible plainly says. Solomon’s reign being one such example.
What does that have to do with Romans 8:28-29? Because clearly that text does say that the good to which God works all things is conformity to the image of his son, Jesus Christ. It is right to say that good is higher than any other we might imagine. So, in what way might we do what Dr Davis tells us we ought not to do with this text?
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The confidence in facing death comes from our union with Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. As the God-man, Christ’s victories become our victories through faith. When the shepherds bowed before the babe lying in a manger, they weren’t bowing to a mere earthly king who would scourge their physical enemies. Even though they may not have anticipated the fullness of the resurrection and ascension, the little town of Bethlehem was ground zero for death’s inevitable demise. To defeat death, God passed through its shadows. Born of a virgin, the spotless lamb walked the paths of righteousness that lead right into the mouth of death where he blasted off the gates of hades (Acts 2:27). Where he went, so we are empowered to follow—through death into life.

In my first year as a youth pastor, my mentor told me that ministry is just helping people die. These words bounced in my head as I paced the empty hallway to room 472. All the precise and prepared answers learned in seminary can easily fly out the window when it’s just you, a dying saint, and your Bible. Have you stood beside a perishing soul? What you say next—what I had to say next—exposes our theology. In those moments, we come uncomfortably aware of the depth of our faith.
Do we believe what we believe we believe?
Will that Christian close their eyes in this life and truly awake in paradise? Do we really expect to see them again? If we haven’t settled these questions in our own conscience, our shepherding from this life to the next will confuse rather than comfort.
Death is ugly. And the Christian has a complicated relationship with it. In one sense, death reminds us of the horror and consequences of sin (Rom. 6:23). On the other hand, dying is, as Charles Spurgeon said in his comments on Psalm 23, the porch to heaven. To reach those green pastures—to be with Jesus in paradise—we must traverse the valley of the shadow of death.
So, in a believer’s final moments, do you expound on the punishment wrought by death or the shining sea waiting beyond? One may produce fear, the other hope, but both are true. I want to offer an attitude that gets the best of both. The attitude Paul assumed, and the attitude displayed by Christ—mockery. Paul mocked death on the basis of Christ’s resurrection:
“When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”“O death, where is your victory?O death, where is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor. 15:54–57).
Mocking death reveals a confidence in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection. The slayer of death began his triumph in the manger and continues his victory march until he will plunge the final enemy into the lake of fire (1 Cor. 15:24–26, Rev. 20:14).
Though Dead, Yet History Speaks
Reading church history brings us into conversation with those who’ve gone before us into death.
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Someone accused by his interlocutor of using the slippery-slope argument should reply that the debate should not focus on the notion that cause A could lead to cause B—which is unremarkable—but rather, on how likely it is that cause A could lead to cause B. If recent experience is any indication, the slippery slope against which that interlocutor had protested is likely to unfold in all its decadence as the years progress.

Every now and then, a piece of philosophical theory breaks into the popular consciousness, such that people without any philosophical education regularly refer to it. One such theory is the rejection of the slippery-slope argument, which holds that an event, A, will set off a series of events culminating in some dreadful consequence, B—and therefore A should not occur. “The supposed ‘slippery slopes’ are fake, silly rhetoric to placate the faithful,” a columnist recently wrote, pointing to how partisans on different sides of contentious issues like gun rights or abortion take extreme positions. True, such arguments can sometimes ignore a potential middle ground and overlook the fact that the dreaded consequence will not necessarily follow. But slippery-slope arguments are not always incorrect, and they offer insight about the nature of modern progressivism.
Usually, rejection of slippery-slope arguments occurs in the context of their claims that some policy will have bad consequences. These claims may be wrong, but the slippery-slope label does not prove their wrongness. Societies slide down such slopes all the time: history is full of examples of nations that moved in a progressive direction over time, tended toward decadence or exhaustion after altering rules for elites, and then relaxed moral standards. Indeed, the slippery-slope argument, especially in the context of social decay, has a noble pedigree. Plato observes in The Republic that democracy leads to authoritarianism; as freedom and equality expand beyond orderly limits, only hardheaded authority can rein them in. The fall of the Roman republic to authoritarian empire and the rapid collapse of French republicanism before the rise of Napoleon stand as examples.
Today’s slippery slopes are more familiar. Consider contemporary discussion over the nature of rights. While political conservatives generally define rights negatively (freedom from something), progressives define them positively (freedom to something). The preservation of negative liberties is definite and circumscribed, seeking to conserve a particular thing; the search for positive liberties is less bounded, aiming to widen the scope of what is alleged to be true freedom. Contemporary progressives tend not to be satisfied with certain political victories, which, once achieved, give way to new demands: for example, activists hoping to secure rights for sexual minorities initially made assurances that those who disagreed would be left alone; now they intend to stamp out dissent and expand the universe of rights beyond gay marriage.
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