Kenneth Copeland - Why Judgment Comes?
— Hello, everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland. Jesus is Lord and this is the Believer's Voice of Victory broadcast. We have been talking about and studying what the Bible has to say about when sin is full, judgment comes. Now, that can be in the life of a young believer. It can be in the life of an unbeliever. That place comes where particularly if someone like me and my parents knew the Lord, but they were spiritual babies too at the time. But God in His mercy doesn't want anybody dying, going to hell, and we found out He doesn't want you without substance either.
— No.
— That's the reason for the covenants.
— Yes.
— It's to get the life back first, then the substance back and the land back and healing and wellbeing.
— That's right.
— That's God. Remember this. First of all, pray for all men, for all men, for kings and all that are in authority so that the church live in peace. For this is good in the sight of God, our Savior who would have all men to be saved...
— Yes.
— ...and come to the knowledge of the truth that there's one God and one mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus.
— Yes, sir.
— Hey, that's God. He is the God of goodness. My favorite psalm of all is the 145th psalm. He is good to all. He's full of compassion.
— Amen. Yes.
— Amen.
— Amen. That's His nature.
— Yes, it is.
— That's what He told Moses the very first time he saw Him. "Show me your glory," He said, "My hesed, my mercy, my goodness shall pass before you". That's His first ingredient. Amen.
— My driving desire to do you good.
— Absolutely right, but because of His holiness, He has to, when it reaches a certain level, do something about it. Now, not to His covenant people and He's going to prove that with Abraham in Genesis 15. When you have a covenant... See, I'm in Christ Jesus now. I've been judged with Jesus.
— Now, all you are or I have to do, need to do is judge ourselves over the communion table and be not judged with the world.
— That's exactly right.
— Amen. Now, the picture of this, the absolute picture of it is Noah's flood.
— Oh, yeah. There's a moment when inequity became full and something had to be done.
— There was nobody, eight people on earth that their mind and thinking was absolutely totally void of God. Sin was full, but He didn't allow it to destroy the earth.
— No. Well let me just... You brought it up. Let's look at it. Noah is one of those cases because Jesus will say, "As it is in the days of Noah, so shall it be". Genesis Chapter 6, now I'll just show it to you right here, beginning with Verse 5. "And God saw that the wickedness of man"...
— Wickedness. There it is.
— "...was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only on evil continually". That's iniquity.
— It is.
— That's twisted. That's coming from the spirit man. "And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth and it grieved him at his heart and the Lord said, 'I will destroy man who I've created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I've made them.'" Same definition for wicked there is that iniquity. You find it later on that Noah found grace or righteousness in his generation in the sight of the Lord. It's very interesting that he talks about that God speaks about violence in all the earth in this passage, that violence had gone through all the earth. When you read it in the Hebrew, Jesus said in the last days, it'd be like the days of Noah. Well there's an interesting word for violence in Hebrew. It's the word Hamas. Hamas. You read it in Hebrew and it's hamas. There it is. I'm like, "Hamas didn't exist," but see, it's a spiritual battle that we're battling here. What is the enemy that's battling Israel in the last day? Hamas. So I don't think that's a coincidence.
— The very name that was placed in the middle of Abram's name... No, Hashem was...
— Hashem.
— Yeah. Hamas is the terrorist organization of the Palestinians.
— Yeah. Yeah. Now, hamas goes to the four horsemen. The pale rider.
— Yes.
— That's a bad translation, very bad in the King James Bible particularly. It's green.
— Green. That's right. All the Muslim countries, you'll see...
— Oh, yeah. If you look at those four horses, those colors are the colors of different terrorist nations.
— But you have to put the green in there to make it right. That's the pale rider.
— That's right. Over here in Luke 17, I'll just show you where Jesus speaks of this in the last time, the last days. Luke 17:24, I believe it is. Okay. Yeah. "For as the lightning that lighteneth out of the one part of under heaven shineth unto the other part under heaven. So shall also the son of man be in his day. But first must he suffer many things and be rejected of this generation". Isn't that interesting? "As it was in the days of Noah, so shall also be in the days of the son of man". They did... Look at this in Verse 27. "They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage until the day that Noah entered into the ark. The flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, also it was in the days of Lot". It talks about all the things there all the way down to 30. "Even", verse 30, "Even thus shall it be in the day when the son of man is revealed". Now, what had happened, iniquity, wickedness had gotten to the level that God even repented that He made this place. That's a high level. Now, He makes a covenant with Noah and says, "I won't destroy it again". So He can't do what He did in Genesis 6 again to the earth.
— No, no.
— And He gave a covenant symbol of the rainbow. Iniquity has twisted that symbol to mean something else. So that's the days that we live in. They were marrying and giving in marriage. Marrying is where the way God did it. God made marriage. Giving in marriage is what the judges did when they said a man can marry a man. See the difference in that?
— Yes, I do.
— Marrying is what God did, one man with one woman. Giving in marriage is what the courts did. So He's pointing some things out. You got to pay attention to the details...
— Yes, you do.
— ...of what is being said.
— Now, we're pushing him. We have over the years in this nation. I'm talking as a nation as a whole. We've pushed Him and pushed Him and pushed Him and pushed Him and pushed Him and pushed Him until now. As we stated earlier in the week, abortion has just become everybody's right.
— Let me show you again. Listen to this in Genesis 6:11, "The earth was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with hamas," violence.
— Yeah, hamas.
— "The earth was corrupt". That word corruption in the Hebrew is charat and it means sexual immorality. In the days of Noah, sexual immorality had just exploded. Marrying and giving in marriage is not the same thing as described there.
— Now, Sodom and Gomorrah.
— And He mentions Lot, doesn't He, after that?
— Right. So sin had become full in those cities.
— It says later on in there that the sons of God chose wives whomever they would choose. In that day, they would exchange wives, and what happens is you begin to see people as objects rather than people created in His image. It's a form of, Brother Copeland, pornography...
— Yeah.
— ... which has just gone rampant in the day that we live in. The phrase in Hebrew is... and it means the generation of the flood or that's why I said this generation, the generation of the flood. They had casual acts of lawlessness and it led to promiscuity and it keep getting worse and it kept getting worse. It's going to corrupt the seed to the point that Jesus can't be born into the earth. This is why He had to protect the seed. God always protects a seed. Jesus will teach about giving and He'll talk about a seed. He watches over the seeds. I'm telling you it's an important thing even sowing an offering in church as compared to natural seed that we're talking about here. They had lost the sanctity of life. They were led by the physical and emotional and not by the spirit in the days of Noah. Jesus calls this out and this is a time when it got to the full. There were three groups of people in Noah. There was Noah and his family who went into the ark and they were saved. I'm going to call them the remnant. There was all the other people that perished, were totally unaware, living life as normal, totally oblivious. Lot was one of those guys. He's 24 hours... Lot's righteous because of Abraham and he's 24 hours away from destruction and is oblivious to it. Jesus will tell a parable about the virgins, five being ready and five not. They're all in the wedding party, but they're oblivious that He's coming. Now's the day and hour that we need to be aware of the times we live in and see what the Word says and be prepared at all times. So in this, there was the group of people that perished, there was the group, eight people, that was in the ark, and there was one that left before it all happened. There was one guy that was raptured.
— That's right. Enoch.
— Enoch was raptured, wasn't he? It said that. So there will be one body that'll be raptured before all this happens, and that's the time we live in and we're the body of Christ. That was all a mystery. That's a picture of the church.
— Now, let me tell you something. Let me tell you something right now. If a perversion spirit is driving your life and hurting you and you know it's wrong, Jesus bore that. You don't have to come under the pressure of that. "Oh, yeah, but Brother Copeland, I was born this way". No, baby, you weren't. Now, for some... Because...
— We were all born in Adam.
— Well yeah.
— So we're all...
— I've heard...
— Keith Moore said that.
— I've heard people say, "Well it was God that created me this way". That phrase bothered me, but then my father in the faith, Oral Roberts said this. He said, "God has never created anybody to be something He has already forbidden".
— He never created you to be a thief.
— He never created you to be a murderer. He never created you to be homosexual or lesbian. He didn't do that. That's deception from the devil. God understands that. Just go before Him. Go before Jesus. "Well I'm so embarrassed". Listen, He already knew it. It's like I was talking about yesterday. He already knew what I said. I just called the guy and asked his name and then wished I hadn't, but He said, "Kenneth, when you confessed that sin was not when I found out about it". He knew it already.
— That's when He forgot it.
— That's when He forgot it.
— Praise God.
— So understand that. God loves people and people foul up and get deceived and pushed around by the devil. God loves you.
— Yes.
— Always has and always will.
— What's happened is you believed a lie somewhere. Truth is grounded in the value of something. I heard Bill Winston say this one time. It's just stuck with me. When the purpose of a thing is not known, abuse will follow.
— Sure.
— If the purpose of a thing is not known, abuse will follow. Probably the greatest car ever built is a Corvette. That's my opinion.
— I agree with that.
— Yeah, but if I take a Corvette and try to go off-road racing with it, it'll do it for a while. But it's not the purpose of it.
— No.
— Likewise, if I take a Jeep off-road vehicle of some kind, Land Rover or whatever, and try to run it on the Texas Motor Speedway, I'd drive it around it, but it's not its purpose. It's when you know the purpose of something...
— You cannot make a racehorse out of a mule. You can trim his ears. I mean you can raise him with racehorses and anyway you look at it when you put him in the starting gate, he's still a mule. I was in a men's Bible class. I was preaching in a town and the pastor said, "They're having a... I've been invited to ask you if you would come over and teach the men's Bible class in a certain church". I said sure and got over there and it's a large men's Bible class. I mean there was probably 100 men in that class. When I got there, there was a bunch of them standing out in front of the church smoking. You got to put a cigarette out before you go in the church house. After all, it's holy in there. Bless their hearts. Anyway, I won't go any further with that, but I used that analogy. I talked about the new birth and victory in Christ Jesus and being born again. I used that analogy. I said, "Now, you can fix a mule up, raise him with a thoroughbred, but he'll never ever be a racehorse. I want you men to know that when you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you become a thoroughbred," but it was just that simple little thing. But that's what happened. The new birth makes somebody out of nobody.
— I was an absolute nobody in 1962. The first wonderful thing I did was marry Gloria Jean Neece. I mean that's the smartest thing I'd ever done up until then. Praise God. She got born again two weeks before I did, and that night, oh, it's just etched in my memory right now when God took a nobody and I just became somebody, the son of a King. I didn't know it at the time.
— He took that twisted, perverted...
— Yes, He did.
— ...iniquity out of you that didn't belong to you. It belonged to Lucifer. You inherited it from Adam, and He put a new created spirit that never existed before in you. Now, everything... This is why you learn to live from the spirit, not from the flesh. For the sons of God are led by the Spirit of God. I'm paraphrasing that, but we live now from the inside out.
— Yes, yes, yes.
— Now, you can understand a little bit about when John writes if you say you have no sin, you're a liar, missing the mark.
— That's right.
— Because even born again believer can miss the mark, but if I'm continually doing this, Paul's going to argue if I'm continually doing this, that person's never saved. That person never had a regenerated spirit in them. They've never learned to operate from that place of where we are now in Christ Jesus.
— Now, listen to what he said. This is the apostle John.
— Yes.
— This is the one that outlived them all.
— Yes, closest to Jesus.
— In 1 John 1:5, "This then is the message we have heard of him and declared you. God is light and in him is no darkness at all".
— Yes.
— "If we have". We, if we. "If we have"...
— Talking about himself.
— "...fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. But if we walk in light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he's faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and the word is not in us".
— Right.
— We, we, we.
— Talking about himself in that.
— Yeah.
— Including himself in all of that, but that's giving you an understanding because it goes right into Chapter 2 where he talks about...
— Yes.
— "My little children, these things right under you that you sin not," that you don't miss the mark. All right? If any man sinned, we have an advocate, the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
— We have an attorney.
— Sitting right there.
— Advocate. We have an attorney.
— He missed the mark. The spirit will convict him. He's going to change this. He's interceding on my behalf in that, and that's why I've got to go back and do what David did.
— Now, that takes us back to someone that is in a lifestyle that is considered seriously, seriously wrong. Well it is seriously wrong, but that's not the only lifestyle that is seriously, seriously wrong.
— Overeating, there's one.
— It's seriously wrong. It'll kill you.
— Yes.
— There's other things that people condemn and that's bad.
— Right.
— People condemn. Condemnation is the devil's, one of his most powerful tools. I remember... Oh, my dear Lord. Greg, when I tried to quit smoking, I mean I tried to quit smoking, I tried to quit smoking. I'd break down and I thought, "Well"... And I'd hear this, "Well you might as well go buy you a whole carton now". Well now that's stupid. Well the devil is stupid.
— Yeah, he pushes you.
— Well let me rephrase that. He's not stupid. He's wicked.
— Yes.
— There's no good about him.
— No truth in him.
— And he will push you to kill yourself with that, but the moment... Even after I was born again and filled with the spirit, I mean that dogged my tracks. I got into a meeting where the Word was being preached.
— The truth.
— Before I got out of my car and I put those cigarettes up over the sun visor, I thought, "I don't want to go in there with these things". That meeting lasted for six weeks and just a little ways into it, this man walked up to me and said, "Copeland," handed me a wad of money, "Go home and get your wife. She needs to be in these meetings". This was two weeks after I'd been in there. I went out and got in the car and I looked up there and I said, "Well look at you".
— Done.
— Done. The Word separated me from that.
— Yes.
— I didn't quit it. The Word separated. The Word will separate you from sin, sickness, disease. It'll separate you from a lifestyle of worry and care. Worry will kill you.
— Yeah.
— It's sinful.
— Right. He talks about the truth. He talks about light. God will tell Abraham about the difference between light and darkness. People who are devoid... I wrote this down. People who are devoid of conscience are unable to reason in truth. You're trying to reason with people who have no truth in them. So what they will do, and we see it today in America, they will try to suppress the truth. They did it with Peter and John. "Speak no more in that name". This is exactly the way the church started and that's the way the church is going to go out. We're seeing the same thing. You can't be upset about this. You got to know what spirit it is.
— Praise God.
— Know what spirit you're dealing with.
— Well we moved over into side issues, very important side issues, but let's pull back now where we are today and look at as a nation. I've been following politics a long time. I'm 84 years old. I've been highly... I like it. We're out of time, but I've never seen a time like this in this country.
— Silence the truth-tellers.
— Yeah.