How convenient that the latest New Age “path of enlightenment,” called “The Secret” and profiled just the other night on Larry King Live for its phenomenal DVD/book sales, is focused on using the universe’s “law of attraction” to make a person’s bank account swell.

As a recent Newsweek magazine article criticized, “On an ethical level, ‘The Secret’ appears deplorable. It concerns itself almost entirely with a narrow range of middle-class concerns—houses, cars, vacations, followed by health and relationships, with the rest of humanity a very distant sixth.”

Get a load of just how intellectually deep this Secret barf is by this little outtake from King’s show:

KING: An e-mail question from Donna in Baltimore: "How do you explain the person who wins the Lotto but says he never, ever believed he'd win versus somebody who practices the law of attraction every day to attract large sums of money, truly believes he'll receive it, who can feel it, see it passionately, but gets no results?”

What is he doing wrong?

LISA NICHOLS, AUTHOR, MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER, FEATURED IN ‘THE SECRET’ DVD: Well, the Lotto winner is lucky, period.

KING: Luck is around, too?

NICHOLS: Yes, luck is around. And some people get lucky. And, again, many of the Lotto winners -- I think 100 percent of them, actually -- you know, are in more debt than they were before they started, because they weren't prepared for that.

But the person that believes in that they'll get wealth, are they applying action to it?

You can't just believe it; you can't just sit back and think it's going to happen. You have to get up and do.

You know, on "The Secret” you see Jack Canfield visualizing a $100,000 bill on the ceiling. Well, it was in the shower, as he was getting dressed, on his way to go to work to make that happen, that he got the idea of how to create that form of wealth.

So it's not just a hokey-pokey, sprinkle fairy dust, you know, come with a magic wand concept. It is something where, when you ask the universe to give you something, you ask God to give you an idea, you have to do something with that idea.

KING: The new issue of "People” magazine has an article entitled: "The Secret: Salvation or Hype?”

How would you answer that?

NICHOLS: You know, I believe that...

KING: Which one?

NICHOLS: I believe that -- that The Secret breathes hope. And what I do know is that in Proverbs it talks about "so a man thinketh, he is.” In Matthew, it says "if you ask and you believe in your prayers, then you will receive it.”

So it is, one, absolutely from the base of what god has planned for us, that we have the right to live an abundant life. That's not non-negotiable. That's a fact.

Now, if we choose to have that life, that's on us.

Now, I believe that when we choose to live a life of abundance and joy, peace, happiness, then that feels much better than if we choose to life a life in scarcity.”

*****

Here’s a good passage from Jordan on the reality of God’s input on personal prosperity.

“As far as God’s concerned, your financial situation today is not an issue in your spiritual life. It’s not a gauge whereby you measure God’s love for you and God’s blessings in your life. The love of God is tied to one thing and that’s the Crosswork.

“It’s not tied to how much money you make or how much money you give. That demonstrates something about your attitude, not God’s.

“Now, how does God prosper us? How does He make us successful in material things? One is what I call the natural things. There’s that verse in I Timothy where we read that God’s given us all things to richly enjoy.

“Folks, God gave you creation so you can richly enjoy the bounty of it. As Paul says to the pagans there in Lystra in Acts 14, ‘We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein: Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.’

“In other words, God has fixed a creation out here that provides for your needs whether you’re a Believer or unbeliever. Jesus said in Matthew 5 that He causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.

“You know what, the planet works. The creation works, and it provides for your necessities and what you need to be successful in life.

“Paul, in Acts 17, again talking to some pagans on Mars’ hill, says, “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.”

“Folks, God’s prospered you by putting you in a creation that was designed to sustain you and designed to make you rich. In economics they talk about the zero-sum. There’s no zero-sum; there’s an ever-expanding pie. This is not a lesson in economics but it tells you which economic philosophy to follow if you know anything about that.

*****

Paul writes in Ephesians 4:28, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.”

Jordan reasons, “You know punctuation’s real important in that verse. It’s not, ‘Let him that stole steal—no more let him labor with his hands.’ Paul says in another verse, ‘But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’

“When you go to work to provide for your house, you are confirming the faith as much as any preacher does on Sunday morning standing behind a pulpit preaching. And when you don’t do that, you deny the faith just like some guy out here denying the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection.

“I saw a Dilbert cartoon the other day where Dilbert says, ‘I hate my job.’ His boss replies, ‘Well, I got a support group for you to join.’ In the next panel you see Dilbert going into a room marked above the door, ‘EVERYBODY.’

“Can I tell you how to have a different attitude about your job? It might not be the one you want to spend your life in, and it might not be the one that’s best for your future, but it’s the one you’ve got right now and you need to be grateful; it’s a spiritual service.

“You see, people try to get their identity and self-worth out of their job. If you get your self-worth and identity out of Jesus Christ, your job won’t be where you get your personal value. Your job will be a place where you go serve God.”

*****

When Jesus Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, talks about “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” it’s not intended as a personal injunction.

“The idea isn’t that if a guy knocks out my tooth, I can go knock one of his teeth out,” explains my pastor, Richard Jordan. “That was never the idea, even in Deuteronomy. If you suffered a loss from someone, meaning they came along and knocked out your tooth or your eye, you were to take them to court and allow the civil government of the nation and its judges pass a sentence against them of equal restitution.

“In other words, the payment was to match the crime. And by the way, do you know that in Israel they never put people in jails? They didn’t have jails. If you stole something from somebody, the regulation was you had to pay them back four times what you stole.

“As you might imagine, it wouldn’t take a person long to understand it’d be better for them to get a job and make the money to buy a thing for themselves once rather than make the money and buy it for someone else four times.

“But when it came to capital things like bodily harm and so forth, it was the ‘eye for the eye’—the government was to restore that to you. ‘Bearing the sword’ was also a penal thing. And the verse about, ‘he that lives by the sword dies by the sword,’ is not a matter of going out and whacking people, it’s talking about self-defense.”