Kenneth Copeland - God is Absolute Good
Hello everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland. This is the Believer's Voice of Victory Broadcast, and this is Kenneth Copeland Bible College. Praise God. Woo! Hallelujah! And second graduating class this year. Thank You, Jesus. Praise God. Thank You, Lord Jesus. We're talking about, God is a good God. And my father in the faith, Oral Roberts said it all the time. I'm not talking... but all the time. God is a good God. And you need to know that God is a good God, and you need to know that a good God cares for you, and that a good God will heal you. And then Gloria came along and starts preaching the same thing, God is a good God, and songs were written about what Brother Roberts preached.
There was a number of songs that came out of his meetings and campaigns, particularly back in the tent days. I was privileged to be in two of the last three tent meetings that Oral Roberts Ministries had and oh, oh my, my, my. Glory to God. And it was wonderful and amazing and thrilling. Praise God, and God is a good God, was the basic theme of those meetings, and that a good God is a blessing God. A good God doesn't remember your sins. It's all over the Bible, but particularly in the 43rd chapter of the book of Isaiah. He said, "I, even I, am he, that brought us out your transgression. Brought them out"! And then he shook my tree. He said, "For my own sake". I didn't get that. I struggled with that. And I talked like it happened over a few minutes, but I struggled at it over a period of time. I couldn't understand that.
And so, finally, I said, "Lord, no, it was for my sake, right"? "No"! He said, "It was for my sake". He said, "Kenneth, do you want to remember bad things about your children"? I said, "No, absolutely not". "Well," He said, "I don't want to remember bad things about my children, and besides that, if I remember your sins, then I can't bless you. And I am a blessing God, not a cursing God". Okay. Think about what that did for my wellbeing. Amen. So that I'm eager to repent, not slow to repent. I'm eager to repent because I know He loves me, and while I never had this thought, just like this before, thank You, Lord. I know, and some forms and people particularly, baby Christians who don't know any better, and then they miss it, and do something that they sure wish they hadn't done, like it's almost dangerous to repent because if I let Him know about this, then He really going to knock me in the head. Let Him know about it?
And all the praying we were doing, we never informed Him of anything. He already knew. He already knew. But He is a good God and He is long suffering. Well, that's one of the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, long suffering. What is the word that is actually translated there? Patience. He is of long patience. What's He doing? Giving us time to repent. He's always nudging me bumping in that direction. Well then, why do we have to go for Him and repent? Because it needs to come out of your mouth because it's in your heart. And repent. Repent in the second covenant is not sorrow and grief. No, no. It is a change of direction, a change of heart and mind. I was going this way with that. No, no, we're not going there anymore. And our good God says, "That's what I was waiting for," and then He just turns around and says, "How do you like what my daughter did? Isn't that wonderful"? She trusted me and knows that I care for her, and she cashed all of that care on me, and I had it, and thank God and devil, you just keep your hands off of her.
I'm going to tell you something, devil. You better watch out because he's about to resist you, and you understand that when he resists you in My name, I back him. I back her. And devil, you understand that I'm a good God and you are a bad devil. Good always overcomes the bad. Now, how can I say that? Because I'll tell you something else God is. He is light. He is light. He is light. He doesn't have good, He is good. Light always overcomes darkness. Always. So, remember now, we read through, let's go to our golden text here. And Luke, the 18th chapter, the 18th and 19th verses. A certain ruler, asking, saying, "Good master, good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life"? Jesus said, "Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, before I answer your question, just wait a minute. Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one. That is God".
And we read this whole number of scriptures and the book of Genesis and God saw that it was good and it was good and it was good. And then He saw everything that He'd made, that it was good, but then there's one thing that wasn't good. I can't lay this man alone. So what did He do? He created a woman. Now, this is another clue. When the Bible talks about this, if a man shall do this, if a man shall do that, it's talking about mankind, humankind. Male and female created He them. So, daughters are sons in the spirit, because actually the only gender there is, is in the flesh part. In the spirit part, there is no gender. What are we? We are people. We are from the human. H-U-M, H-U what? M-A-N. Amen, glory to God. We rejoice in that. And I know exactly how Adam felt.
And here was this, don't you know, she was something to look at. Handmade. Made in heaven, not the USA. No, no, no, no. Handmade by a God who is good. That means she couldn't have been nothing but good looking. Glory to God. And you know Adam said, "Oh yeah. This is good! This is good! Hallelujah, thank You, Jesus. This is good. This is good for me. She's wonderful to look at and she belongs to me and I belong to her, and this is good. This is good. This is good". So now, in searching for a way to describe absolute goodness, to describe anything that is absolute is difficult to the natural human mind because we don't deal in absolutes. We have such a mixture of things of all kind. But one thing that affects all of our lives in one way or another is weather, and with aviation in my background, I look for ways to use that to express what I'm attempting to say. It's easy to tell what absolute light would be.
The Word said, "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all". That's easy, but absolute good, zero bad. So we start out with the zero? Zero bad. Absolute good. Well, then what would be the temperature if there was zero heat, but still be in this atmosphere? Not everybody can understand this. When you get into outer space, there's no radiator out there, and most people don't understand that the sunshine does not heat the air. It heats the earth. The earth is a radiator that heats the air. Very simple. So, put all of those factors together, zero heat and this atmosphere would be 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Son, that's cold.
Now, I worked one time and when I was just a young man here and, well, I wasn't even much of a man, but... just right out of high school and just for a short time, and the Texas and Pacific railroad, those two big buildings right downtown now, where one of them used to be the Texas and Pacific terminal. My dad used to have offices in that building, in the office building there, which is closed now just right next to it is another very long building there. And they were both built by GNP Railroad. Over there, they had a blast freezer. Now this thing was 40 below zero. One of the reasons this is so fresh in my memory is, busy time of year, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
So, to build up for that, to be shipping chickens and turkeys all over the country, and freight cars that had to be frozen and then they put them in refrigerated cars. You can tell this is a while back. Well, this is back in the fifties and while a whole lot of you are just a dream. This was about 1956. I went in the army in '57. So, summer of '55 fits right in there. And so, they had me, you pick up, they were these big, large wax boxes. And you could have, if I remember right, either two turkeys or three chickens in there. Well, I'm talking about cold, give you some idea here. You stick your fingers in the ends of those big boxes and my job at first was to take those into that freezer. We don't stay in there very long, and I'm taking those in there. And then, later on that day... This is the first one, first or second day I was in there. Then, you feel when you stuck your fingers in there, you're right up against the meat of those birds.
And so, they said, "Now, go in there and get those other boxes over there and bring them out". Now, one thing I wanted you to know. You put those things in there, put those in that freezer. You can take them out that afternoon. They are going to be frozen hard and it's only 40 below. What is 459 below? It'd kill you when you walked in there. It'd just freeze you to death. You'd just be a slab. You'd just fall over. And I walked in there. I just reached over there and stuck my finger in that hole and pulled it. Oh, those birds shrunk up and banged that solid rock turkey into my stupid fingers for not knowing any better, and that was only 40 below.
Now, you know what absolute heat is? That's hell. Amen. God never did, and never has ever created anything that was bad. Well, Brother Copeland, what about the devil? Well, what about him? What about him? Particularly since he's zero now. But he wasn't always zero. But God did not create him bad. Let's look at Ezekiel, Chapter 28. Look at verse one. "The word of the Lord came again unto me saying, 'Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyrus. The prince of Tyrus". So, a prince is just below a king, right?
"Say unto the prince of Tyrus, thus saith the Lord God; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God: Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee: With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures: By thy great wisdom and by thy traffick, thou has increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of your riches: Therefore saith the Lord God; Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God; Behold, therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations: and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy brightness. They'll bring thee down to the pit, and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas. Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? But thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee. Thou shalt die the deaths of the uncircumcised by the hand of strangers, for I have spoken it, saith the Lord thy God". I said it, and that's the way it's going to happen to you.
Now then, verse 11. "Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, take up the lamentation against the king". This man thinks he's a God. "Take lamentation against the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty". Listen what he said. "You have been in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone that was covering, the sardius," and so forth and so on. For time's sake, we'll get into this tomorrow, verse 15. "Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, until iniquity was found in thee". The devil had no tempter. Before we get through this, we're going to find out that he was the anointed cherub. He had an anointing on him, and we're out of time. Glory to God.