Kenneth Copeland - The Prophecies About Jesus and John the Baptist
— Hello, everybody, and Merry Christmas. I've had this on my heart, and so I want to share it with you on our break this morning as we're taping these. This came up very, very powerfully in my spirit and I referred to it, but let's read it. Go to the book of Revelation. It is not the book of Revelations. It is one revelation. It's a revelation of Jesus Christ. So in the 11th chapter, this is... "There was given to me a reed" and so forth and so on. And verse five, "If an man will hurt them, fire proceeds out of their mouth". Talking about the two witnesses. Verse seven, "And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them and shall overcome them and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord crucified, and they of the people of kindred and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and a half and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves". This was a scoffing point by a lot of people. How can that... All the nations can't see it. They can now... they can now. Well we see it all the time, we see it on news broadcasts where, you know, you guys be talking about something that happened and something and all of a sudden there's a picture of it and I've commented on this before that I was watching a newscast and the man here in the United States was talking to a man in Jerusalem and I said, right then, well, we're there. This can happen now. Amen. And now I want to go to Luke four, praise God. Verse 14, "And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and there went out a fame of him through all the region round about. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all. And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up:" Well, now we have a picture of him. I mean, everybody in town knew him from the time he's two. I mean, he's a nice guy, you know, and how would you like to meet his brother or sister? He never does anything wrong. "And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias". Now, see there, a specific book, he took a text, we know it as the 61st chapter of the book of Isaiah and he stopped right at this point. And if you go over there and read it, these very same words are there. But then if you read on, it was something that didn't take place until later. He stopped right at the right point. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach..." Right there he told them, I am the one, "He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord". Now that's the great Jubilee, and that is in the book of Leviticus. And that verse in Leviticus was on the Liberty Bell. Liberty ring throughout the land. And they, I mean they rung it till they broke it. What a country we live in. And George Washington went to the 17th chapter of Genesis right there where Covenant was made and declared that this nation is one of those many nations and you'll be our God, we'll be your people. Praise God. He's the one that pushed so hard that all men are created equal. He pushed and pushed and pushed that. Amen. And now I'm on that. All slaves were not black. There were debenture slaves and the Washington family were financially well off so they'd contact him. We want to come to the new land. And I will work for you for seven years if you'll pay my way. That's a debenture slave. I'll work for you. Now, this is what happened to Jacob. And there's a whole lot to be said about that. But anyway, we need to remember that. There were debenture slaves. Some of them were black people. He bought them and then paid them a living wage. They were paid like everyone else on the place. They were family. So we need to remember that and just get the whole story like we're getting from Rick, the old story about Christmas. But I wanted you to see this. He's not a baby anymore. He's called to preach. A lot of Christians don't realize that, he's a preacher. And sometimes he shouted with a loud voice, that's the reason we do it. He got excited, amen, he's a preacher. And he preached the Great Jubilee. Thank You, Jesus. The 50th year.
— When John questioned, "Are you really the one"? What did he tell John? Go tell John the blind see, the deaf hear, he pointed him to the signs of that verse.
— Yes, she did. Yes, she did. And he knew by the Spirit that he was the lamb. He called him the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. But then he went to prison and couldn't put it together in my mind why Jesus left him in there. Because they're first cousins. But then Jesus made it clear. He said, "This is Elijah".
— Well, and John, also, to be fair, has a very strict calling given by Gabriel from God.
— Oh, yes.
— That he won't even touch a grape, Brother Copeland, like on this table. And Jesus has dinner with publicans and senators and prostitutes and... Are you really the one? You know, we would do that. Would we not do that? Wait a minute, how come you're in there with them?
— And the people he picked?
— Yeah. So when you look at that, when you're about to get your head cut off for preaching this gospel and pointing to him, then you got to wonder, listen, are you really...? And he said, "Go tell him this". You don't look at who I'm having dinner with, the blind see, the lame walk. It's his signature.
— Because these signs shall follow. And he had to precede him into the bosom of Abraham. He was the forerunner for him. And he had no idea. None of the rest of them knew that Jesus was going to come into hell. But they were watching it from the bosom of Abraham. So he was protected. He was in paradise. But there was a portal there and we see it when Jesus talked about the rich man and Lazarus. He described it. So all of this was all organized by the Father, the Son and the Spirit, because there's other things that we could go into there that...
— Let me give you a verse for... that he had a pre-runner that it was prophesied. It was prophesied in Isaiah chapter 40 and verse 3. "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God". That's prophesying John, who is going to be the forerunner. You can also find that same thing, you can find it in Malachi 3:1.
— Now, I didn't know about that.
— Well, let me just... I got a second here, Malachi Chapter three. "Behold, I will send my messenger and he shall prepare the way before me whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant".
— That's right. So those were prophesying John. That comes true then in Matthew 3, Matthew 11, John 1, Luke 1. So here we are even things surrounding... this what we're celebrating his birth, even things surrounding this child that will grow up to be a man who will fulfill the covenant because I see it right there, the Messenger of the Covenant. Even things surrounding him were prophesied. What are the odds?
— There are not any.
— The two cousins would be born at the same time in the exact same place fulfilling all of these prophecies. Some 500, some 800, some 1200 years before they come into the earth.
— Well, the thing of it is they had to come into the earth. Those prophecies had to happen because of what happened in the Garden of Eden and what God said to the serpent. He nailed him right there in the garden.
— Genesis 3, from the woman seed, that started it.
— That started it right there.
— Now, those messengers, what you just read in Revelation, are two messengers before this thing all winds up and the whole world will see them.
— Yeah, just like it said.
— Just like it said.
— Just like it said.
— And then we'll cover it.
— And since we now have the technology to do that and it's not new technology and we can know now why the Spirit of God chose one Spirit-filled man and woman to make that first satellite track with the Earth, was because of what's prophesied in the book of Revelation.
— That's exactly right.
— So it wasn't just so you can find the street you're looking for in your car. It's amazing that you do that and have the street numbers come up. But it wasn't before that.
— Well we're talking about the laws of probability. It's a law. Probability is a mathematical equation, computation of how likely is something to happen. So being hit by lightning in one year, it's 7 to 10 to the fifth power, one in 700,000 chance you'll get hit by lightning in the year. Becoming president of the United States is one to the 10th of the seventh power, which is one in 10 million. A meteorite hitting your house is one in 180th billion. It's just astronomical. But the 355 prophecies talking about one person and the people that surround him in the places he would do would fulfill that in 33 years... I did a little number checking.
— I knew you would.
— We're talking in the hundred billion of trillions to one that one person could do that. Some of them Jesus, that it might be fulfilled. He will do it because he knows what the Word says. An example, go into the town and get there's a colt tied. Tell the man that it might be fulfilled. He knew so I need to do this to fulfill this. Daniel will prophesy that day to the day hundreds of years before it ever happened to the day, because they'll give him a specific day. Gabriel will say a specific day. But the list of this being able to be done 100%. I mean, it's just proof that this book is true. And if God is that accurate with whatever he promised, where Jesus is concerned, what has he promised you? Because he watches, we say that verse all the time. We say it all the time, we just say it. He watches over his Word to perform it. If he has said it, it has to come to pass. Those two witnesses will be killed in Jerusalem exactly like Revelation 11 said. The earth will see it. And whatever he's promised you has to happen. There are two men in heaven right now, in natural flesh, blood, bone, bodies, two. But that's all it calls for is two.
— Elijah, Enoch,
— Two of the most powerful prophets, and Rick Renner has been reading out of the book of Enoch. And that's most exciting. But this book is just miraculous to start with from verse one, and we have the privilege of owning this, and that's the reason it is so vitally important that it be translated in all languages and to help people get this and prepare themselves. And that's why we do these broadcast, so now...
— 66 books, 40 authors over thousands of years with the same theme. The odds of that happening just... you sir.
— Well, it goes out beyond reason because it is not reasonable.
— It was outside of time and brought into time.
— That's right, and Kellie was interviewing a young man and he stopped at a railroad crossing and suddenly in the Spirit he was caught up and he had God's eye view of that train. He could see both ends of the train. Where he was he couldn't because it's one of those long, long freight trains. He couldn't see the ends, but here he could. And he said the Spirit of God said to him, "That's the way I see time". He said, "I see it from the beginning to the end," glory to God.
— See, at the very beginning of this, we get clues to it. Genesis one, verse three, and God said, "Let there be light. And there was light, light be," that started this whole thing. So when Jesus gets into the Earth and 27 times, 27 verses, he refers to himself as the light of the world. That's talking... See we're not talking about the sun, the moon and the stars that was made later.
— That was light energy. When he called for light, it moves at 186,000 miles a second. Sunshine was four days later. So that's what set the universe into motion. And it's still moving at the speed of light.
— And that's the power he used in the earth.
— And you think about it, on the seventh day he rested and I've been guilty of saying, well, he wasn't tired, he was finished. I was mistaken about that, I was mistaken about that. He released so much power... So much power that he rested from it. He rested from it. He was finished.
— And that power's still going.
— It's still going. Can you imagine the force that that took out of him to speak that powerfully. It would have been a universal roar had somebody been able to hear it.
— I had this in my spirit just recently, and I haven't asked you this, but I'll throw this out here. I heard that in me, the healing power of God went in you. Just like the universe is continuing to grow, that healing power God is in you, still doing it. I did pull it back. It's still going. When he spoke healing into my life and I received it by faith. It hadn't stopped. And I can't stop it.
— Well, you can.
— I can... I'm not going to allow myself to stop it.
— You could stop. That's the reason the angel had to stop Zacharias' tongue.
— Bang!
— Cause you can stop it. So the course of nature had to begin, now in questioning God about this, about his power being released. And I said, of course, the creation... No, no. He said, "That was easy... No one was against me".
— Oh wow. He said, "The hard part, the power release was to push my glory into hell itself with my Son and raised him up from the dead because he said, 'Everybody was against me.'" He said that was one of the hardest on him. But you think about the power of release when he said that and such power that created all of these planets and this rolled them out there. I am totally, absolutely convinced the New Heavens and the New Earth that we will be involved in the creation and population.
— Oh, absolutely.
— ... Of the planets.
— Absolutely,
— Absolutely and we're out of time again. Well, we got 15 seconds.
— I was going to show you... I have to show you another verse, another time. We'll do it later.
— We'll be back in just a moment. Praise God.