Kenneth Copeland - Faith Is the Creative Power of God
— Hello everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland. And this is the Believer's Voice of Victory broadcast. Now, for those of you that don't know yet, this is Professor Greg Stephens. He is associate pastor at EMIC and also the professor of First Covenant Teaching and Survey in Kenneth Copeland Bible College. So welcome, Gregory. It's good to have you.
— Thank you. It's an honor. Always an honor.
— Man. Praise God. And welcome class. So give yourselves a hand. Amen. Thank You, Jesus. Now then, Father, we thank You today. We give You praise and honor and thanksgiving, Sir. You are El Shaddai. You are Elohim. You are the great God of the universe, the Creator of all things. And we praise You today. And we thank You for this broadcast. And I'm asking You to bless all the people in the sound of our voices today, and that not one person goes untouched by the power of the Living God in this broadcast. We thank You for it. And we praise You for Your work all over this planet. And we bless You this morning in Jesus' name. Amen. Now then, let's go back. We're talking about introducing the spirit of power. And in book one, the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings, in the beginning, God. Now we said something there. In the beginning, God. And as we were discussing before the broadcast, our finite minds have a hard time with nothing. Nothing. That's hard.
— It is.
— In the beginning, God. Well, where was the beginning of God? Don't mess me up like that. No, that doesn't work. But that's where we, as human beings must believe that he is. And we must believe that he is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him. That's the definition of faith. And we find that in the 11th chapter of the book of Hebrews, actually in the 10th chapter, the just shall live by faith.
— That's a quote from Habakkuk.
— Yes, it is. And it is written now, what, three different times?
— Galatians does it, Hebrews does it, Romans does it.
— Romans does it. So actually four. The just shall live by faith. Now, chapter one. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void". God did not create it like that. There's a lot of time involved in these first three or four verses because the fossil record doesn't lie. And people have tried to jerk it and mess it around, but it doesn't. So the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. So it had been flooded. It had been flooded. Now this isn't our main topic here, but it's in the Bible. And you can find it in different places. And we touched on it when we were talking about everything he did was good. But then we find out that Lucifer, the archangel Lucifer was perfect in the day he was created, but iniquity was found in him. So he has no redemption. He invented it. And he is the father of the lie. And he was cast out and down.
— It happened that fast.
— Yes, it did.
— Happened like lightning.
— And there was a creation before this one, and that's where the Neanderthal man, the cave man. Adam never lived in a cave, but those people did. And that's where the saber tooth tiger and the dinosaurs and all of those came. And it's all in the Word, it's all in the book. So anyway, God said, "Let there be light. There was light". Now Greg, you and I discussed this at some length in the beginning years of this ministry, the first meeting we actually held outside of church and so forth. And we didn't have any place for our morning service. So Aileen Arnold, the woman, she was in the real estate business, and so she was looking all over town for a place for the morning service and couldn't find one. And so she went to a synagogue and the rabbi was excited about it. "Oh," he said, "absolutely you can use the synagogue. You are welcome to it". And he took me in his study and he said, "Mr. Copeland, just help yourself". And I was just... I found in his studies this translation. "God said, 'Light be. Light was.'" I didn't write it down. I didn't write that translation down. I may have, but that's been a long, long, long time ago. But anyway...
— I went and looked it up in the Hebrew. It's the same root word. So it does no damage. "Light be, light was". Because whenever God says something, it has to conform, it conforms to whatever he says. Whatever he says, is. "I am. I will be what I will be". And so anything that he speaks out has to do exactly what it was sent to do. His Word does not return to him void. So if he says, "Light be," then light was. There's no choice. Beautiful.
— And that, the sun was created four days later. He's talking about light.
— Yes. He is.
— Light energy. Ooh. 186,000 miles a second. Glory to God.
— And it never deviates.
— No.
— It's consistent because that's what he said it would be. Now all the sun, the natural sun and all the things we see in the galaxy, as marvelous as it is, it's temporary because there'll be a new heaven and a new earth. That was given to us, he said, for us to be able to know the seasons. But that's not the light we're talking about.
— And that's when time began.
— That's when time began.
— So you can't judge the time.
— He's pre-time and post-time at the same time. I mean, because he is. So if you've got a loved one that's gone on before you, now faith is. God is always now. Now back then and now for... I know, it's starting to... but if you've got a loved one that's gone before, they can already, they've already gone to when you're there. It's not a problem. They're not limited by the time that we are.
— We think like this, linear.
— Linear.
— God is like this.
— Circular. That's correct.
— No beginning and no end.
— That's correct.
— And all of this was in him before it ever existed.
— That's correct.
— And so he made a decision and carried it out.
— I teach them in Bible school three types of time. Linear time that we're used to, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But God can interrupt that and stop the sun. He did it.
— Yes, he did.
— So time stopped in the linear progression. If he says that today is Monday on this broadcast, but he says, "No, this is the Thursday broadcast," it became Thursday because that's the way it works. So we think linear time too much. There's ascending and descending time in the scripture. Takes you from glory to glory. So small faith... or no faith, small faith, great faith, ascending time. And then the other one is the circular time, that the former and the latter rain coming together. So there in the Bible, we see all three types of time that is operating in the scripture.
— Praise God. Really is. So when you understand that, you then begin to understand. See, they don't see, the Jewish mind doesn't see prophecy necessarily as something I predict will come about and it has to happen on a certain day. They see pattern as prophecy. So this pattern that started in Genesis will flow all the way through into the book of Revelation, and it does. The books are book ends of each other. You're going to start, you're going to have a new heaven and a new earth. You're going to have a creation. They work backwards. If you take Genesis 1:6 forward and take 21 backward, they're mirror images of each other.
— Yes, they are.
— And it's a beautiful thing.
— I hadn't thought about that, but they are.
— They are absolute mirror images of one another. So that's the beauty of the Word and the prophetic thing. Now in Daniel's day, there's an angel that watches over time. He made sure that Jesus got to Bethlehem with his mother at the right time. He made sure Jesus rode into Jerusalem exactly on the day that he had told Daniel he would. So he's watching over his Word to perform it. So if God's promised you anything, if he's going to go to that length to make sure that Jesus, that a pregnant woman gets to Bethlehem in time to have this baby, he's going to watch over whatever he has promised you to do because he's the same.
— And she's moving very slowly on a donkey 90 miles, exactly...
— What had been.
— ...where and when the prophet Micah said it by the Spirit and said, "Bethlehem Ephrathah". He will be born there.
— So God will move on a Roman Caesar to make a decree to get them in the right place. That's why we've got to be careful when we get upset at a president or get upset at something else because you don't know that God's not spinning up something that we don't like. Joseph didn't want to do that. He didn't like doing that. Had to do that. And so as a result of that though, it's fulfilling what needs to happen for him to come. And so I believe we're seeing things now that we may not like, but it's spinning things for him to come back.
— I believe that.
— I absolutely believe that.
— And particularly when it comes, war and conflict, on this planet and in this planet, the way it functions now and the way governments function now, it's a difficult thing to just get up some morning and just go attack somebody. You and I have no earthly idea what was in the heart of Vladimir Putin nor in his mind. And should this be the 38th chapter of Ezekiel, then God said he would do it. And it has all the earmarks of that. That spot on this planet, this is not the first war that ever started there. World War II started right there.
— Which is another little pattern indicator in time. Here we go.
— World War II began right there, when Adolf Hitler feigned an attack from Poland, claimed they did so he could attack them. And he attacked, and Poland couldn't stand up against him, and they immediately fell and the Holocaust began right there at Krakow.
— Auschwitz, all of them are right there. You look at, even go back further, World War I doesn't happen far from there, but you've got the same players. And well, you would say after World War II, you're going to see Israel become a nation and be established as a result, large result of that. That's not the main reason. World War I, though, gets Turkey out of the Middle East, gets the Turks out. Allenby, he goes in and establishes, and that's starting the path for Israel to become a nation, which has to happen for all of these things. So in all of these things, we're not predicting when Jesus is coming back, but in all of these things, these are all things, indicators in time to watch how he does things and what he's doing.
— Jesus said in 24th chapter of Matthew that these are the beginning of sorrows. Well, if that was the beginning of sorrows, 2,200 years ago, where are we now? We have to be at the end of sorrows.
— Or close to it. I believe we're in the, excuse me, the last of the last days.
— I do too.
— In the very beginning of this, in the Hebrew you'd say, be-re-SHIYT ba-RA eh-lo-HIYM In the beginning, be-re-SHIYT ba-RAc created, Elohim. That's that word for God at Elohim is the name for God there. And it's one of the El names. All of the El names have to do with creation or the creative power of God. El Shaddai, Elohim, El Elyon. But you have the Spirit, you have all three of them working together here. El is the root of this. We talked about it earlier that El in Paleo Hebrew is the head of a bull. It's the head with the shepherd staff. So it's the head being with authority. So all of this authority, he's using his authority to create these things. So when the Spirit is moving over the waters, that's the Ruach El Kadesh is what it's called. is the breath of God when you speak. And El Elohim literally means spirit of power. And so you see all of that at work in that creation. And he's at work in us today. Now he gave, Jesus came in the fullness of that, and he will give that to us in the book of Acts, that same Spirit now will come back into the earth.
— And too here, the basic principle of faith is carried out here.
— Right there. Yeah.
— Because God, the Spirit of God was moving upon the face of the waters. And God said. So the Spirit of God was moving, but nothing happened until God spoke it. Now just for reference point, I'm going to flip over here to the 11th chapter of the book of Hebrews. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it, the elders obtained a good report. Through faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear". You couldn't see it, but it was faith. Faith is the name of the creative power of God. It is a spiritual force. And that happened at that moment. And so faith produced in 24 hours, 16,074,764,800 miles of universe.
— In a moment, the moment he spoke it.
— The moment he said it.
— And it continues to go. So now this is all Elohim. So this creative, this power created Adam. And the Spirit, he breathed, Ruach he breathed into him. You saw that in a vision.
— Yes, I did.
— Now, we don't get introduced to a Jehovah until much later because that's a redemptive name. That's after the treason of Adam. Everything Adam received was the creative power was inside of him. So Adam then had that same ability to speak. He had the ability to speak and correct things real quick if he would've in the garden.
— In the Chumash, he became a living, speaking spirit like God, a living, speaking spirit like God. Jesus said, "God is a Spirit".
— Angels can't do that. They don't have that ability to do what we do. They're messengers. Matter of fact, you'll see Jesus in his ministry, we'll talk about this later in the week, rebuking things. But an angel can't say, "I rebuke you". He says, "The Lord rebuke you". He didn't have the authority, but mankind does.
— Because of the name.
— Because of the name, and because that was breathed into us, wasn't breathed into them.
— He was talking to the woman at the well and he said, "Salvation is of the Jews". And he said to her, "God is a Spirit. Those that worship him, worship him in spirit and in truth. And he is looking for those to do the same". That would be us.
— That is us. And the earth is looking for the same.
— He was referring to us.
— Absolutely.
— He was looking beyond the cross to see what would happen when born again, spirit baptized people would begin to worship him in spirit and in the word, truth. Glory to God.
— "And even creation groaneth to see the sons of God be made manifest". The planet even wants to see that. I mean, it desires that because the planet has ears. It can hear because it was spoken to, that's how it was made, by hearing these things. So if you want proof of that, Jesus with the fig tree, Mark chapter 11. And the tree heard him.
— Yes, it did. And he also said, "This mountain will hear you". And water heard him.
— The storm heard him.
— The water turned to wine. I thought about this silly thing about a highway patrolman pulled this guy over. And he said, "You've been drinking". "Whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No," he said, "I'm a preacher. No, I don't do that". "What's that in that sack there"? He said, "Hand me that". So he handed it to him, and he smelled of it. He said, "That's wine". He said, "He did it again". No, no. That's a lie. That whole thing was a lie. That didn't actually happen.
— That's funny though.
— It is funny. I know people that have tried to get away with things like that. No, no it doesn't work. This was the day time began. Greg's dad, Pastor Stephens wrote a book, The Day that Death Died. The day Jesus conquered death and gave us victory over death.
— That was a glorious...
— If you don't do something with that book in a hurry.
— It's yours.
— I want to read that.
— I'll bring you one.
— Okay, good.
— It's good.
— Yes, it is good. I know from the time.
— It was a revelation. The Day that Death Died.
— The Day that Death Died. And life lived.
— And Paul got that revelation later.
— We're out of time.
— Let's do it again.
— Okay. Greg and I'll be back in just a few moments.