Unfortunately, many of us read the New Testament as if there wasn’t an imminent apocalypse about to occur and as if an epoch of history, the end of the age, wasn’t about to take place at the time. We treat exhortations given under those conditions as paradigmatic for all of church history. We ignore the historical and covenantal context of the first century church. We forget that the Old Covenant covered 4,000+ years of church history in a variety of stages in redemptive history, and the New Covenant covers 66–69 years of one unique stage (some say 96 years) of that history which, according to Hebrews 8:13, the Old Covenant was yet to fully vanish, but was about to very soon.

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God’s initial design in creation did include a connection between blessing and material prosperity for all humanity. This connection was not a defect. It was not introduced as a result of the fall, but predated the fall. Therefore, there is nothing in this dynamic that needed to be rectified by Christ or his new covenant.

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