Plan B Is Plan A: Suffering, Failure, and the Redemptive Logic of God
I can tell you when things actually started moving for me. Not the moment a plan came together. Not a single breakthrough or a well-timed decision. It was after things had fallen apart more than once, after I had watched the same pattern repeat across different seasons and different circumstances, that I finally began to understand what was happening. I had been measuring myself against every failure, accumulating a verdict against my own life, judging myself with a severity that, I eventually realised, God himself did not share. When I stopped doing that, when I laid down the prosecution and stepped into the actual message of the cross, something shifted. The life I had been treating as a series of mistakes turned out to be the very terrain on which God had been working all along.
I am writing this for the person who believes they have missed it. Missed God's plan. Taken the wrong road. Made the wrong choice. Stayed too long or left too soon. And who now sits in the wreckage of that conclusion, wondering whether the life they are living is a consolation prize or a punishment.
I want to argue something that may be more provocative than it first appears: Plan B is not God's concession. It is, repeatedly and across the full sweep of Scripture, his chosen method. The broken place is not where God is absent. It is where he works.
The Formula We Were Sold
There is a version of Christianity that operates as a performance system. Its logic is straightforward: enough faith, plus enough righteousness, plus enough correct decisions, equals divine protection and blessing. Failure, within this system, is always diagnostic. If something went wrong, you did not pray hard enough, believe correctly, choose rightly, or give generously enough. The formula failed because you failed it. It is the pornography of the American dream dressed in a clerical collar. Like all pornography it is a simulation of the real thing, designed to produce the feeling of intimacy without the cost of it, the appearance of encounter without the surrender that genuine encounter requires. It hijacks your deepest hunger and sells it back to you at a price. The prosperity gospel is American consumerism in theological drag, and God is the product being moved. The pimps got rich. The johns stayed hungry. The bride of Christ got put on the street and told to call it ministry.
To understand where this came from and why it is so resistant to correction, you have to go back further than Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, the two figures most associated with the Word of Faith movement. You have to go back to F.F. Bosworth, whose 1924 book Christ the Healer built the theological runway on which everything that followed took off. Bosworth was not a charlatan. He was a sincere man with a genuine healing ministry. But he established the foundational error on which the entire structure rests: that physical healing is provided in the atonement in exactly the same way as forgiveness of sins. His primary text was Isaiah 53:4-5, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, and by his stripes we are healed. Because Christ bore both sin and sickness at the cross, Bosworth argued, to remain sick after conversion is equivalent to remaining in sin after conversion. Both have been paid for. Both are available by faith. Both are appropriated the same way.
The argument is not without a textual basis, which is precisely what makes it dangerous. Isaiah 53 in the Hebrew uses words that throughout the Old Testament carry both literal and metaphorical weight, and the New Testament never once, in any epistle written after the cross to explain what the atonement accomplished, lists physical healing as an atonement provision. Paul, who wrote more about the cross than anyone, left Trophimus sick at Miletus, advised Timothy to take wine for his stomach ailments, and carried his own unanswered thorn. If healing were a purchased covenant right like forgiveness, these pastoral moments are inexplicable. Bosworth built the argument in good faith. Hagin and Copeland inherited it and built an empire.
Kenneth Hagin took Bosworth’s healing theology and fused it with material drawn almost verbatim from E.W. Kenyon, a late nineteenth century New Thought teacher who had synthesised Christian vocabulary with metaphysical mind-science philosophy, the same intellectual stream that produced Christian Science. From this fusion Hagin developed positive confession, the teaching that faith-filled words carry inherent creative power because believers share the divine nature. Speak health and it comes. Speak poverty and you create it. The believer must maintain an unbroken positive verbal confession regardless of physical reality, because reality is subject to words. The practical consequence is that lament becomes a faith violation. Honest prayer becomes dangerous. The entire book of Psalms, two thirds of which is complaint, anguish, and argument addressed to God from inside suffering, becomes an instruction manual for what not to say. Hagin also taught that believers are little gods, divine beings of the same class as God himself, with inherent authority over physical reality. His source for this was not Scripture rightly read. It was Gnosticism with a Texas accent.
Kenneth Copeland built directly on Hagin and added corruptions of his own. His most catastrophic contribution is the teaching that Jesus did not complete the atonement at the cross, was dragged to hell, was tortured by Satan for three days, and had to be born again in hell before resurrection could occur. This directly contradicts Christ’s own words from the cross: it is finished. Copeland’s theology requires it not to have been finished. He has also taught that God is approximately six feet two inches tall, weighs around two hundred pounds, and is himself a faith being, meaning God operates by the same faith principles Copeland sells to his followers. God becomes a fellow practitioner, not a sovereign creator. The implications for Christian theology are not minor. They are total. Copeland’s net worth has been estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. He owns a private airport. The people funding his ministry are, in many documented cases, in genuine financial distress. The money flows in one direction without interruption.
The movement also produced a specific liturgy that most people who grew up in or near it will recognise immediately. If I just give enough, God will return it multiplied. If I just speak to the mountain, it will move. If I just confess health, the diagnosis will change. If I just find the right words and repeat them with enough faith, God will perform. Each of these is a variation on a single root error: that God’s behaviour toward you is contingent on your performance reaching a sufficient level. The cross has no place in this system except as a mechanism for unlocking entitlements. Grace has no place in it at all.
Perhaps the most insidious formulation the movement produced is this one, attributed to Hagin and repeated throughout Word of Faith teaching as a foundational principle: faith begins where the will of God is known. It sounds like confidence in Scripture. It is a trap. And its deepest corruption is not merely intellectual. It is exegetical. Psalm 103:7 tells us that God made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. The distinction is precise and devastating. The people saw what God did. Moses knew why. That deeper knowledge of God’s ways came through a lifetime of sustained intimate relationship, and even Moses, standing in that intimacy, was told in Exodus 33 that he could not see God’s face. The Word of Faith formula inverts this entirely. It claims that any believer, by mastering the correct technique, can achieve the kind of foreknowledge Scripture reserves even from Moses. But the deeper corruption is in what it does with the will of God once it claims to have found it. Scripture is consistent: God makes his ways known so that his people can obey, not so they can confess outcomes into existence. Moses knew God’s ways so he could lead, intercede, and suffer in alignment with purposes larger than himself. The formula takes that and routes it in the opposite direction entirely. Knowing becomes not the basis for faithful obedience but the trigger for a performance that obligates God to deliver. In Gethsemane, Jesus prayed: if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. If faith begins where the will of God is known, and if Jesus knew the will of God perfectly, then that conditional, that if it be possible, is either a performance for our benefit or evidence that the Son of God himself was not fully operating in faith at the decisive moment of history. The framework cannot survive contact with Gethsemane. The nevertheless is not doubt. It is the highest expression of faith in all of Scripture. And it is the precise opposite of what the formula produces.
The movement also corrupts the gift of tongues in its own image. Romans 8 teaches that the Spirit intercedes through us with groanings beyond words, praying according to the will of God when we do not know how to pray. That is genuine and profound. Praying in the Spirit can be a form of intercession that transcends your cognitive limitations and aligns with purposes you cannot fully articulate. But the prosperity stream converts this gift into a technique for extracting the will of God as specific information, so that the believer, armed with that information, can then confess in absolute certainty and remove all submission from their prayer. The Spirit, who in Romans 8 is the sovereign agent of intercession praying through you, is demoted to a research assistant unlocking God’s filing cabinet on your behalf. The nevertheless of Gethsemane is replaced by a formula. Psalm 103:7 tells us God made known his ways to Moses through a lifetime of intimate relationship. The prosperity use of tongues claims to hand that depth of knowing to anyone who prays long enough in the right technique. It replaces intimacy with method. That is not the gift of the Spirit. It is the gift of the Spirit perverted into a mechanism for the same false certainty the rest of the formula requires.
The prosperity gospel corrupts obedience as completely as it corrupts faith, and in the same direction. Its obedience message takes the Mosaic covenant’s blessing and curse structure, which operated at the level of a theocratic nation state over centuries, and reduces it to a personal performance contract: obey and God blesses, disobey and God withholds. The result is a standard no one can live up to, because it was never designed to be lived up to individually. Paul’s argument in Galatians is precisely this: the law was not given as a mechanism for earning blessing but to demonstrate that no one can, so that grace would be the only remaining foundation. The prosperity movement takes what Paul calls a schoolmaster leading us to Christ and turns it back into the examination you must pass to receive what Christ already purchased. The person inside this system is never obedient enough. There is always a sin that might explain the unanswered prayer, a shortfall in giving, a moment of doubt that contaminated the confession. The system quietly reinstates the condemnation that Romans 8:1 abolished. Paul did not write: there is therefore now no condemnation for those who obey sufficiently. He wrote: for those who are in Christ Jesus. The location is the ground of security, not the performance record. The prosperity gospel preaches grace as the entry point and performance as the operating system. Those are not the same gospel. The second one is not the gospel at all.
The texts the movement deploys are real, but they have been stripped of their context until they mean something their authors never intended. Jeremiah 29:11, the verse about plans for a future and a hope, was spoken to people being told their captivity would last seventy years. God was not promising to prevent exile. He was speaking from inside it. The future and hope were real, but they ran through sustained suffering, not around it. Ephesians 3:20, exceedingly abundantly above what we ask or think, is not God as the turbocharger of your ambitions. The operative phrase is in us: the working happens by his power, through us, not by our strategies succeeding. 3 John 2, a standard first-century letter-opening salutation, has been redeployed as a divine prosperity guarantee. Using it as theology is the equivalent of treating the phrase Dear John as a statement about God’s personal affection for everyone named John.
What Bosworth, Hagin, and Copeland built across three generations is not a strand of Christianity with some theological peculiarities. It is a different religion, assembled from Gnostic anthropology, New Thought metaphysics, misread covenant theology, and the prosperity assumptions of post-war American capitalism, held together with selectively quoted Scripture and exported to the world as the gospel. Its Jesus did not finish his work on the cross. Its God is a faith-being. Its believers are little gods whose suffering is always, without exception, their own fault. That is not Christianity. It is its photographic negative. And it does its worst damage not in the prospering but in the failing.
What the Formula Does to People
When the formula fails, and it always eventually fails, the person is left not merely with the grief of the loss but with a theological verdict attached to it. The person who prayed in faith and was not healed. The person who gave sacrificially and remained poor. The marriage that collapsed, the child who was lost, the business that failed. Each of these arrives already carrying an accusation: your faith was insufficient, your choices were wrong, your righteousness fell short.
The prosperity gospel does not merely fail to comfort people in suffering. It actively compounds suffering with false guilt. It adds a theological charge to every wound. And it does this most virulently among the poor and the desperate, the very people Jesus said he came to liberate, telling them their poverty is a faith problem and offering a solution that requires them to give money they do not have.
This is not a peripheral pastoral concern. It is a justice issue. And it is the theology of Job's friends, who argued with great precision that Job must have sinned because righteous people do not suffer like this. God's verdict on them in Job 42 is direct and unambiguous: they did not speak rightly. Job, who sat in the ash heap and argued and refused the formula, was the one speaking truth.
The Biblical Anatomy of Plan B
Before addressing the cross itself, it is worth observing how consistently this pattern runs across the full canon of Scripture. Plan A, understood as human flourishing without rupture, is almost nowhere in the biblical narrative. What is everywhere is God working through the rupture. This is not occasional. It is the dominant structure of the story.
Joseph is the first sustained example. The pit his brothers threw him into and the years in Potiphar’s house are not detours from God’s purpose. They are the mechanism of it. Remove the pit and there is no Egypt, no preservation of Israel through famine, no Exodus narrative, no nation from which Messiah eventually comes. The suffering is not incidental to the story. It is load-bearing. Joseph himself names this at the end of Genesis: you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good. He is not saying the harm did not happen. He is saying the harm was the means.
Moses spent forty years in Midian after the failed rescue attempt that was supposed to be the beginning of Israel’s liberation. By any prosperity gospel reckoning, that failure was diagnostic. He had acted presumptuously, killed a man, and fled in fear. The formula would say: insufficient faith, wrong choice, consequences followed. What actually happened is that the burning bush did not come to a successful man at the height of his influence. It came to a fugitive, tending another man’s flock at the back of the desert, forty years into what looked like the ruins of a calling. The failure was not the interruption to the story. It was the preparation for it.
David was anointed king by Samuel while Saul still sat on the throne. Between the anointing and the coronation came years of caves, betrayals, a period of living among Israel’s enemies, the deaths of people he loved, and the accumulated weight of being hunted by the very king he was destined to replace. The man described as being after God’s own heart wrote Psalm 22 before he wrote Psalm 23. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me came before the Lord is my shepherd. The green pastures were on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death, not instead of it.
Jeremiah 29:11, the verse the prosperity movement deploys most confidently, must be read in its actual context to be understood at all. It was not delivered to a prospering nation. It was spoken into catastrophic national failure, to people who had lost the temple, the city, the Davidic monarchy, and the land itself. God was not promising to prevent the exile. He was speaking from inside it, and the immediate surrounding verses are a command to settle in, plant gardens, build houses, and seek the welfare of the city of their captivity, because the exile would last seventy years. The future and hope were real. They ran through seventy years of sustained loss, not around a single day of it.
The pattern is not occasional. It is the grammar of the biblical narrative. God consistently works not around failure but through it, not despite rupture but by means of it. The prosperity gospel, which treats suffering as the absence of God’s blessing and smooth progress as its presence, has misread the entire structure of the story it claims to be telling.
The Cross Destroys the Formula
Jesus was perfectly righteous. He had perfect faith. He made no wrong choices. He was a refugee in infancy, a manual labourer from a despised town, a man with nowhere to lay his head. He was betrayed by a friend, abandoned by his closest followers, tried on fabricated charges, tortured, and executed between criminals.
If the formula were true, Jesus was either faithless, unrighteous, or under a curse. There is no other conclusion available within the system. That conclusion is the reductio ad absurdum that collapses the entire framework.
Paul addresses this in 1 Corinthians 1. The word of the cross is foolishness to every human wisdom system precisely because it runs through weakness, failure, and death rather than around them. The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. The weakness of God is stronger than human strength. This is not a problem to be explained away. It is the point.
Consider also what the rejection of Jesus by the Jewish people actually produced. Paul works through this with extraordinary care in Romans 9-11. The hardening of Israel was not a disruption to redemptive history. It was the mechanism of it. The opening of the Gentiles, which is to say the existence of the church as most of us know it, came through what looked like the catastrophic failure of Plan A. The resurrection is not Plan A restored. It is something Plan A could never have produced.
The apostles confirm the pattern. Peter was crucified upside down. Paul was beheaded. James was beheaded. Stephen was stoned. These were not men of insufficient faith. They were the foundation of the church. Within the prosperity framework their deaths are theological scandals. Within a biblical theology of Plan B they are entirely coherent.
Paul as Autobiographical Argument
Paul does not theorise about Plan B from a distance. He inhabits it and argues from inside it. His letters are not abstract theological treatises. They are written from prison cells, from the aftermath of stonings, from the experience of shipwreck and hunger and the chronic pressure he describes as the daily anxiety for all the churches. His biography is his argument.
In 2 Corinthians 11 Paul catalogues his sufferings in deliberate detail: five times forty lashes minus one, three times beaten with rods, once stoned, three times shipwrecked, a night and a day adrift at sea, danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from his own people and from Gentiles, danger in the city and in the wilderness, toil and hardship, hunger and thirst, cold and exposure. He is not recounting this as a record of spiritual failure. He is presenting it as apostolic credential. The immediate context is a confrontation with what he calls super-apostles, figures who presented a more polished and triumphant version of Christian ministry. His response is not to match their impressive record. It is to out-suffer them. The suffering is the argument. His catalogue of wreckage is his evidence that the power at work in him is not his own.
Then comes the thorn. Paul prayed three times for its removal. God said no. Not: you lack faith. Not: you chose wrongly. Not: greater obedience will lift this. The answer was: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. This is the single most devastating verse in the New Testament for the prosperity framework, because it is God himself refusing to remove a suffering from his most faithful apostle and giving as his reason that the suffering is the mechanism of the power, not the obstacle to it. The weakness is not what Paul must overcome to access God’s strength. It is the condition under which God’s strength operates most fully. Paul’s response is not protest. It is one of the most counterintuitive statements in all of Scripture: therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Paul’s prison letters are perhaps the most striking biographical evidence of all. Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon were written from chains. The letter that contains the most sustained argument for joy in the New Testament, Philippians, was written by a man under arrest awaiting a capital verdict. The contentment he describes in Philippians 4 he explicitly says he had to learn, using the Greek word for training acquired through experience. Contentment in need is not in Paul’s framework a faith failure to be overcome. It is a spiritual discipline forged in the very conditions the prosperity gospel tells you God wants to remove from your life. Paul’s life is the prosperity gospel’s most articulate refutation, and he wrote most of it in prison.
God Works From Inside the Wreckage
Paul calls God the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort in 2 Corinthians 1. The Greek word for comfort is paraklesis, to call alongside, the same root as parakletos, the word Jesus uses for the Holy Spirit in John 14. God does not comfort by preventing suffering. He enters it. He calls himself alongside you inside the affliction. And the comfort produced there, Paul says, becomes the very comfort with which you will one day meet others in theirs. The suffering is not wasted. It is productive in a way that no amount of protection could have been.
Romans 8:28 is one of the most quoted verses in the Christian world and one of the most routinely misread. It is almost never read alongside verse 29, which immediately defines what Paul means by good. All things work together for good does not mean comfortable, successful, or according to your plan. Paul defines good as conformity to the image of Christ. If the goal is Christlikeness, and if Christ's path ran through suffering, rejection, and death before resurrection, then a path that looks like his is not a malfunction. It is the road. Furthermore, this verse is written inside a theology of groaning. Creation groans. Believers groan. The Spirit groans. Romans 8:28 is not a triumphalist promise. It is a word issued from the ash heap, toward a destination that redefines everything we mean by good.
Isaiah 30:21 says: your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, this is the way, walk in it, when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. The guidance comes when you have already turned the wrong direction. Not before, as a reward for correct navigation. After. The voice follows you into the wrong road. That is the entire point of the verse.
What the "I Missed It" Belief Actually Steals
The belief that you have missed God's plan produces three specific destructions. It robs joy. It undermines strength. It generates a particular, unfalsifiable confusion in which every new difficulty becomes evidence of a past mistake and every closed door confirms you are off track. You spend your present auditing your past rather than moving through your present with God.
Consider what Scripture actually says about joy. Habakkuk 3 is the most radical statement of joy in the entire Bible. The prophet constructs a systematic destruction of every material basis for joy: no blossoms, no fruit, no harvest, no livestock, no economic survival. Then he declares joy anyway. Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will take joy in the God of my salvation. That yet is doing enormous theological work. It is a declaration of independence from circumstance. The joy has no material basis whatsoever. Its only basis is God himself. This verse alone demolishes the prosperity framework. If joy required the right outcomes, Habakkuk has no grounds for it. He rejoices anyway.
Psalm 16:11 locates fullness of joy in presence, not outcome. The person who has made every wrong turn but is close to God has more access to joy than the person who made every right turn but is distant from him. Psalm 51:12 is David after Bathsheba and Uriah, a man who did not merely miss the plan but committed adultery and arranged a murder, reaching for the restoration of joy as something belonging to him by virtue of salvation, not virtue. The salvation was not revoked by the catastrophic failure. And neither was the joy that belongs to it.
In John 16, hours before the crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples their sorrow will turn into joy. Not be replaced by joy, as though sorrow were an error. Turn into it. The same substance transforms. The anguish of labour becomes the joy of birth. The sorrow is not wasted. It is the mechanism of the joy that follows.
The belief that you have missed God's plan does not come from humility, though it presents itself that way. It is actually a form of functional atheism. It operates as though God's sovereignty ends at the border of your mistakes, as though your failure is the most significant force in the narrative. That is not lowliness. It is inverted pride.
Psalm 139 asks: where shall I flee from your presence? If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. The God of Scripture cannot be outrun by your failures. Romans 8:38-39 says nothing in all creation will separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Paul does not need to list your bad decisions because they are already covered by anything else in all creation. Your wrong turn is not more powerful than death. It cannot strand you outside his purposes.
Conclusion: Reframing the Promise
The failure is load-bearing. Joseph's pit, Moses's exile, David's caves, Paul's thorn, the cross itself. In every case, remove the failure and the story does not improve. It disappears. These were not detours from God's purpose. They were the mechanism of it.
Ephesians 3:20, read correctly, does not promise your plan but bigger. It promises something that could not have been conceived from within Plan A. The working happens in us, by his power, through the broken material. The preposition is in, not despite.
The prosperity gospel promises to protect you from the road Christ himself walked. The actual gospel promises he will walk it with you. Not the removal of Plan B. The redemption of it into something Plan A could never have been.
The prosperity gospel makes a promise the Bible never makes: that faithfulness will protect you from the road Christ himself walked. It then charges you for the promise and blames you when it fails. What Bosworth built, what Hagin systematised, and what Copeland monetised is not a version of Christianity with some theological peculiarities. It is a religion constructed to insulate its teachers from accountability and its followers from the actual gospel, which has never promised the removal of suffering and has always promised something far harder and far better: the presence of God inside it, working through it, toward purposes that could not have been reached any other way.
Plan B is not God’s concession to human failure. It is, across the full sweep of Scripture and supremely at the cross, his chosen method. The broken place is where he works. The failure is load-bearing. The comfort that comes from inside the suffering is the only comfort that lasts. You have not missed the plan. You are in it.
