by Lisa Groen
I am writing this article to show plainly that Kenneth Copeland on his website is teaching the idea that Jesus was born again in hell, and the ridiculousness of this idea, and why this idea is a false teaching, and Copeland’s misunderstanding of Jesus’s authority.
I am basing this blog post on Kenneth Copeland’s online article entitled “What Happened From The Cross To The Throne Part 2” I will share screenshots to document the false teachings in his article. This screenshot below was taken near the heading entitled “The Finished Work”. Note the highlighted areas:
Copeland above says that Jesus went to hell and was born again there. This is absurd because being born again was something God provided as a rescue for mortal sinners who need forgiveness, that would give them new spiritual life with God. Jesus was never a sinner and he did not need to be forgiven, and he already had spiritual life with God. Jesus did not need the kind of salvation that God provided as a ransom for sinners. Jesus WAS the ransom. Jesus IS salvation. Let’s look at the next highlighted area in the screenshot below.
Copeland says Jesus is no longer called the only begotten Son of God from the book of Acts to John’s Revelation, but He’s called the Firstborn from the dead. Copelands definition of these two phrases are very different that what the Bible teaches. Copeland seems to say “Jesus was born again, and that he needed to be born again in order to be the leader of all Christians who need to be born again, so he could be the Firstborn of many brethren.” But the logic doesn’t follow. A Shepherd doesn’t have to become a sheep to lead the way for the sheep to be saved from danger. A Shepherd just leads them and is way above them in many ways, such as knowledge, common sense, ability and strength. A shepherd doesn’t have to eat grass to show his sheep how to keep from starving. Again the shepherd is way above the sheep but Jesus made the sheep to be drawn to eat when he created them. Jesus saves us not by being born-again himself, but by drawing us to believe in him and be saved. He stays way above us and doesn’t need to be born again to be the Firstborn of many brethren. Because He is GOD.
But Copeland says that the meaning of Jesus being begotten means Jesus was born again, but what it means Biblically is that there was only ONE conception like the conception of Jesus. That was when the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and God placed physical DNA inside of Mary, the physical material that would become Jesus’s body, and God placed the Soul and Spirit of Jesus in union with his body so that he would grow up in Mary’s womb. and become the God-man, God from God, Light from Light. Because believers in Jesus are “born from the dead”, Copeland conflates this in his thinking to mean Jesus and born again people are on the same playing field. The Bible teaches believers are born-again, from a place of deadness to God, and made alive to God, but we are not “God from God, Light from Light” as Jesus was. The believer retains many of his or her personality traits and cognitive and physical abilities after he or she becomes born again as they had before they were born again. We don’t give up our personalities to become saved. We are made in the image of God, but retain many of our traits, but what is new, is that we receive the spiritual fruit of Galatians 5, and other communicable attributes of Jesus, but we are not on the same playing field as Jesus in his incommunicable attributes. We are saved from the bondage to sin, and delivered out of the kingdom of darkness, where now Jesus is our new King in the Kingdom of Light. Jesus is way HIGH above us. But Copeland is demoting Jesus and making him as common as a born again person:
and again:
He said Jesus was just a mortal man made sin. But Jesus was the God-man, not JUST a man. The phrase Jesus “was made to be sin”, many scholars believe that it is the short way of saying Jesus became the sin offering, and that Jews of Jesus’ time would shorten the phrase “the sin offering” to “sin”. So if we plug that phrase into 2 Corinthians 5:21, it would say “For our sake he made him to be (the) sin (offering) who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” ESV parentheses mine.
Copeland believes there are similarities between Jesus’s resurrection and the believer’s resurrection. The Bible does too. But Copeland makes up similarities between the believer and Jesus that don’t exist. Note the words below, “…the only difference…”:
When Copeland says “the only difference was, you got yours on this side of hell” I believe he is talking about the resurrection. The believers were raised up from spiritual death when they are born again on this side of heaven. True, but Copeland’s statement that Jesus went to the very pit of hell and “nailed it up for you. He stopped Satan’s authority over you. He stopped it by conquest” has tremendous problems. Copeland is talking about a conquest in hell between Satan and Jesus that we can safely say Copeland imagined, because it is no were in the Bible. In the Bible Jesus paid our sin debt in full on the cross, and then he said “it is finished” before he died. Jesus was awarded resurrection because the full wrath of God had been exhausted upon him and paid for. The righteous wrath of God had been poured out on Jesus and was satisfied, so, there was no punishment for Jesus left nor for those who would believe upon Him for him to have to go to the very PIT of hell. After Jesus died, he could go to paradise and lead captivity captive specifically because of the victory of the cross. This was the place of Abraham’s bosom. This was the place where the righteous saints who died before the resurrection of Jesus would go. So there was no conquest between Jesus and Satan in the PIT of hell.
The pit of hell would be a place of suffering and torment for those punished by God. God was the one who punished Jesus in our place on the cross. Jesus didn’t go as someone’s prisoner when he died, because “death could not hold him”, and Satan by that point was defeated, so he didn’t go to the pit of hell, but to Abraham’s bosom, or Sheol to lead captivity captive. And when he went and took captivity captive, he certainly wasn’t kept in the pit of hell by Satan, or by God but Jesus had full authority over himself after he died because he had full authority over himself while he lived each day of his life. He never gave Satan a foothold. Satan had no hold on him, and the very pit of Hell was only for those who live in sin and refuse to follow God. Jesus was successful in paying for our sins before he died. He said “It is finished, then breathed his last.” Copeland has nullified the power of the Cross:
The conquest Jesus won, was on the cross, by humbling himself, dying in our place, and taking our sins upon himself and bearing them away as the sinless lamb of God. There was no conquest between Jesus and Satan after he died because while he was on the earth, there was no physical conquest between Jesus and Satan on the earth. Satan also couldn’t lie to Jesus and be successful. Jesus just spoke the truth and resisted Satan. And Satan fled. When Jesus was crucified it was God’s plan to save the lost. Here is the victory Jesus had on earth in never sinning. Jesus’s authority over himself was in tact all the time and that was how he won the conquest against Satan:
John 8:46: “Which of you convicts me of sin? And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe Me?” (NKJV).
2 Corinthians 5:21: “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (NKJV).
1 Peter 2:22: “Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth” (NKJV).
1 John 3:5: “And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin” (NKJV).
Hebrews 4:15: “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (NKJV).
In the shot above after the Colossians scripture Copeland writes that Jesus took authority over Satan and said “I am He that was once dead, but I’m now alive and I hold the keys to death, hell and the grave. All power has been given me, both in heaven and in earth.” Those are 2 scriptures from Revelation 1:18, and Matthew 28:18. But Revelation gives no proof or indication that this happened when Jesus was between the cross and the throne, nor that these scriptures were spoken one after the other, nor that Jesus spoke them to Satan. Rather, when the wrath of God was paid in full, and Jesus said it is finished, Jesus went to the place of the dead to cause several old testament saints to rise with him when he would rise from the dead. There is no evidence in the Bible that Jesus spoke to Satan between the cross and the throne. Rather, the evidence seems to point to the opposite because on the cross Jesus said “It is finished”, and these words signify that he spoiled the principalities and powers by the cross. Colossians 2:15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” The Devil was not in charge of anything anymore because the atonement was paid in full, and Jesus broke the power of death, hell, and the grave, but did this on the cross, not in hell.
Was it not the sheer righteousness Jesus offered, and shed blood and what he suffered on the cross with the full wrath of God being poured out on him in the atonement and those things together were indeed the fullness of all authority to clear the sinner of sin, when Jesus said the words “It is finished”? Those 3 words were spoken after the wrath of God was poured on him to signify to us no more atonement needed to be paid. Jesus had no need for a conquest or words with the devil–the atonement was God’s business, not the devil’s, and the resurrection was God’s business demonstrating Jesus’s full authority was unstained, in tact and I believe unchallenged between the cross and the throne. *LG
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