Kenneth Copeland - God Desires Only Goodness for You
Hello, everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland and this is the Believer's Voice of Victory broadcast. So give the Lord a great praise and honor this morning. This is the place where we study faith, this is the place where we learn how to become overcomers. And if you have a Victory app and Keith Moore is on there, then get Faith School, glory to God. Hallelujah. Thank You, Jesus. Amen. Now we've come to the place, and God is a good God. We made the statement, God has never created anything that was bad, He didn't. He created all of it good.
Now we know from the scripture that hell was not made for people, hell was created for the devil and his angels. Then how come people wound up going there? Well, just throw the brakes on here a minute and back up a long, long, long, long time. The fossil record does not lie, it's all there. But He didn't create this planet in six days, He refurbished it in six days. Let's open our Bibles, first of all. And I will show you, in the sixth chapter of the Book of Ephesians, because we're going to see this right now. Verse 12, "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies".
Oh, the highest ranking devils, those are the ones that cause trouble in governments. We can check that out in the book of Daniel, in the book of Ezekiel. You can find, it's all in the book. Now, when you go, you check that out. "...Principalities, powers rulers of the darkness of this world". Those are the ones that possess people on the earth. "Then wicked spirits in the heaviness". Wicked spirits, high ranking spirits, I'm going to show you who they are. Now, let's go back to the book of Isaiah for just a moment here, where Satan... Now I want you to notice: I will, I will, I will, I will. He invoked his own will, here. Verse 12, "Thou art fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer," or day star, "son of the morning". Son of the morning.
Tell me, what is Jesus called? Huh? Yeah, almost the same thing. Now, you know from the book of Revelation that Jesus has a personal angel and that angel was the one that was speaking to John on the isle of Patmos. That angel was the one that was revealing things to John concerning the end of times and concerning things that had happened all along that made sense in there. Now, our good God, John said, he desires. And he said, "I pray that you prosper and be in good health, even as your soul prospers". That's God's plan. But now, let me read this again from the book of Isaiah. "Hell from beneath," don't look down just, just listen to me because I want you to grasp this.
Genesis one, "God created the heaven and the earth". And the earth was what? Void and without form. Read that in the Hebrew, it was full of chaos. Tohubohu. Full of chaos, wiped out. It had been flooded. It had been flooded. "The Spirit of God moved on the face of the deep and over the waters, and He divided the waters". That had been a flood. He wiped out that whole race of people. "Hell from beneath is excited about you to meet you at your coming. It stirs up the dead for you, all the chiefs of the earth. It has raised upon their thrones all those kings of the nations. They shall speak and say to you, 'Have you also become weak as we are? Have you become like us? Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, all sound of your stringed instruments. The maggot is spread under you and worms over you. How you are fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning".
Morningstar. I believe we can see right here that he was Jesus' personal angel because he had the same names. He was son of the morning, and Jesus came as the bright morning star. Now, don't you know that irked him, when Jesus was born into this earth. And he's thinking, "He's in my earth. That planet belongs to me and it was taken away from me". Amen. "So I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High. Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, the place of the dead, to the lowest depths of the pit". The lowest depths of the pit. Where did Jesus go when He defeated him? To the lowest depths of the pit and busted his plate!
Now, the missing link is in the fossil record. The reason it's missing is because it never was there. That original race of people were wiped out. They followed the devil all the way. Their inequity was so great, hell was created for them. God created hell for the devil and his angels. I present to you today that all of those fallen disembodied spirits, starting from the little ones, we see it in the Madman of Gadara, who is now a preacher. He was a cutter, screamed night and day. That's a ruler of the darkness of this world. But the wicked spirits in the heavenly places are the people, the highest intelligence of all of those fallen beings. These were people, the Neanderthal man or whatever that means. But that man is in the fossil record. You cannot tie the two together. They're different.
It's obvious they were not created in the image and likeness of God; we were. And that's the reason when the word got around, what is a man? What is man? They didn't have woman yet. What is man? What is mankind? Who are these things? They look like God. Look at this man, look! Hey, he looks just like our father. He look like the great and good God. He must be good. He's good; he must be good. He must be capable of doing good because he is good, he's like God. He's like a good God. Oh! And they couldn't understand. God visited him. We've never seen him do this. Boy, he kicked that other bunch completely out. I don't blame them, they were ugly.
Now all of the other stuff, all of the artist renderings are like a naval for Adam and Eve. They're just something somebody dreamed up about living in caves and all of that. No, no, no. There were kings among them. The place was not a wilderness. Now, this is me, but it's the Holy Spirit in me. Are you listening? I have reason to believe that this whole earth looked like the Garden of Eden and Lucifer, we read it, he turned it into a wilderness. So between Genesis one and Genesis two, "In the beginning, God, created the heaven and the earth". There's myriad, an enormous amount of time between those two verses. It's all there. Amen? Now, study this thoroughly. Read about it and study it because when you begin to teach it and don't be all that quick to teach it because you'll stir up more than you can fix. This doesn't have anything to do with your salvation. It's just exciting and good and informative information. Amen? And it's a good opportunity to just blame everything on the devil, but don't do that, don't blame it all on him because he couldn't do anything. I've never found a way...
Charles Capps, one of my very most special friends, we flew airplanes together and Charles is one of the most talented pilots I've ever flown with, and we tend to talk in aviation terms because aviation is an applied science and it doesn't violate the spiritual laws. When I began to learn how to walk by faith, not by sight, I told Gloria, I said, "Hey, I already know how to do this because I'm an instrument pilot. I had to learn not to believe in my feelings". Well, what does that mean, Brother Copeland? Well, if you try to believe your feelings and believe your own sight and get into certain situations, you can get vertigo so bad, you turn the airplane, overthink you're flying straight. And I had to learn I couldn't do that. I got in vertigo one time and got in trouble. And thank God I knew how to get out of it.
I just shut my eyes and put my head down like this and looked up the panel and got my eyes on the instruments, and then wouldn't take them off. Just sat there and looked at it until my inner ear straightened out. Can't believe what you feel when flying instruments. It'll kill you. I said, "Gloria, I already know how to do this". But listen to what Charles Capps said, "This, your body, is your earth suit. You have to have one to live here". You have to have a space suit to live in space. You have to have an earth suit to live on the earth, because when you get out of your earth suit, you're gone. You're gone. You just can't stay here without an earth suit. And like Gloria said, you make your arrangements which direction you're going while you're in your earth suit, because if you don't and you step out of your earth suit, your lodging will be chosen for you.
I've never been able to improve on it. But now it is so vitally important to understand how all this got started because people can't understand hell and how could a loving God send someone to hell. He never has yet. He created that place for the devil and that whole bunch that were on this earth. He created it for them, the Bible says so. He never intended for people to go there in the first place. But Jesus had to go there because we fouled it up. But thank God we don't have to go. And where the devil? To the lowest part of the pit. See, that was Isaiah prophesying of Jesus. Did you ever notice Jesus found Himself in the book of Isaiah? He quoted Isaiah more than any other. That's where He found Himself. He preached in His own hometown, the 61st chapter of Isaiah. And He stopped at exactly the right place, where it would continue and vengeance shall come. No, uh-huh. No, not yet. Not yet. He stopped. The Book of Isaiah. Amen.
Ain't this a wonderful book? It is such a wonderful book. Glory to God. And it's not just an old book written by a bunch of white guys. No, it is not. One of the apostle Paul's most important teachers was a black man and it makes a point of that fact. Listen, you think God didn't understand that the races were going to persecute one another? All it has to be is a difference. The only thing of it is, color difference just sticks out. And the difference in the way people are raised sticks out. It's different. One group raised one way and another group is raised another way and it sticks out. But there are places in the Bible where God speaks specifically to that. And in the 13th chapter of the book of Acts, one of the teachers and prophets there, his name's Simeon called Niger.
Look it up for yourself in Strong's concordance. He was called Niger. That is Greek for "black". Ain't that amazing? God, I love this book. Amen. So one of the most important teachers for Paul and Barnabas alike. It doesn't say how long they were there, and that was home base. They always went back there where they were originally taught. They were originally taught. The Bible also points out the fact that a man of color stepped up and carried His cross. Now that should thrill you. That ought to thrill your bones, man. God, mighty in His Word. The El-Shaddai God, the God who's more than enough. Hallelujah. Lucifer, because his beauty, in all these years... Well, the beginning, God just heard the Lord say it, but because of his beauty, what is considered the most beautiful of all colors? Ebony. Ebony.
I'm totally convinced that his rage against the Black race is for two reasons. Number one: quick to worship, quick to praise and really quick to love God and to sing and worship, "Hey, come on! Come on"! The most beautiful of all of the angels was the musician of praise. And that is Phil Driscoll's calling. And he pointed out to me, he said, "Brother Kenneth, you noticed there was no horns? Only the stringed instruments and the flutes because God reserved the horn for himself".
Now that, phew. If that didn't set your wood on fire, you're wet. I mean, come on. Ain't that good? Because that's what Phil's called to do. And he was racking the body of Christ and causing the devil so much horror and so much terror that Phil Driscoll is the only man I ever knew in my life that was given a year in prison for something that was not against the law. They made it against the law after his trial. And the judge said it himself, "Mr. Driscoll is not a bad man. We're just going to make an example out of him". And we're out of time. Did we get anywhere today? Come on and give the Lord a praise!