One day soon, the 600 million-plus, Spirit-filled believers living on this planet are going to wake up to who they really are. They are going to wake up to the fact that through Jesus, they have been given dominion on the earth. They’re going to discover they’re the head and not the tail; they are above and not beneath; they are inheritors of THE BLESSING of God. When they do, all heaven will break loose—in their own lives and in the lives of people around them—and the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ will move forward like a steamroller, doing the will of God, walking in divine authority and crushing the works of darkness under its feet.
Before we’re raptured out of here, it’s going to happen. How can I be so sure? Because God finishes what He starts. The Bible says no purpose of His can be restrained; and from the very beginning, that was God’s purpose for His people. It wasn’t just part of His purpose, either. It wasn’t just an afterthought that came to Him sometime in the days following man’s creation. Blessing and dominion are what God had in mind for mankind from the start. That’s why the words He spoke when He created Adam were these: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26). According to Genesis 2:7, when God said those words, Adam became a living soul, or as one Hebrew commentary describes it, “a living, speaking spirit like God.” What a stunning creation Adam must have been! He had the same creative power to speak that God has. He had the ability to arrange things and bring them into order with the words of his mouth. He was crowned with the very glory and honour of God Himself (Psalm 8:5). Most folks don’t realise that God poured everything He had into man. He poured all His compassion into him. Created in the image of God, Adam was filled in every way with the very life of God. Once God had put every aspect of Himself into Adam, He blessed him and said, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion” (Genesis 1:28). In other words, from day one God created and commissioned Adam to be a king. He blessed him and gave him authority to turn this whole planet into a Garden of Eden. How was Adam supposed to accomplish that task? He was to take dominion—not through external force or manipulation but by speaking words of faith, and releasing divine love, light and life everywhere he went. He was to multiply God’s blessing until the earth was covered with it. And he was to have children and grand- children and great-grandchildren — all of them brimming with God’s love and glory—until the planet was filled with God’s fabulous family. That’s the way God designed things to be before the foundation of the world. Then the devil got involved.
We all know what happened. Adam and his wife sinned, fell from the glory of God, and took the rest of mankind with them. Because of sin, THE BLESSING that was on them was lost and the whole earth has suffered ever since. That’s why God hates sin so much. It stops THE BLESSING from functioning. Adam and Eve proved that. THE BLESSING quit working for them the moment they listened to the devil and dis- obeyed God. Sin has that effect on THE BLESSING every time. It always has…and it always will. That’s the reason God, throughout the ages, has given His people commandments and statutes to help them steer clear of sin. God gave the Ten Commandments, for example, because He wanted us to realise we weren’t created to do things like murder, lie, steal, covet or commit adultery. Our spiritual system isn’t designed to handle that kind of darkness. When we engage in it, our system shuts down and it stops THE BLESSING. That’s what happened to Adam and Eve. Their spiritual system shut down the day they sinned. They died spiritually. And since they were the parents of the human race, that was passed on through them to all mankind. Most of us understand that quite well. What we haven’t realised is this: Despite it all, God never abandoned His original plan. He didn’t discard THE BLESSING He first spoke over Adam and come up with Plan B—a second-rate, partial blessing to replace it. Instead, He made a way for that first blessing to be reinstated. He sent Jesus to earth to take on the form of man, become the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), and regain what the first Adam lost. God sent His own Son to put His original plan back in place. That was Jesus’ mission on earth and He accomplished it totally and completely. By the time He was raised from the dead, hell had taken such a whipping that Satan and his whole demonic system had been defeated. Jesus had triumphed over him and opened the way for us to be born again out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. Because Jesus succeeded where Adam failed, when we make Jesus our Lord, what happened at Creation in the Garden of Eden, happens again in us. The same words God originally spoke over His family come alive in us. The Holy Spirit hovers over us and brings them to pass in our spirit. When we are born again, we’re re-created in the image of God just as surely as Adam was created in His image in the beginning. We are made to be as much like God as Jesus Himself is. Think of it! When we got saved, Compassion Himself—the God who is love and light and life—reproduced Himself in us. He poured Himself into us and set our spirits ablaze with His own glory. Then He sent the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us into all the truth about what God has done in us. “If that’s the case, then why do I still struggle with defeat in so many areas of my life?” someone might ask. “Why is my life so unglorious?” Because you haven’t fully awakened to who you really are, as a reborn-new-creation-in-Christ believer! You’re looking on the outside—at your body or at your soul (your mind, will and emotions)—to determine your identity. But those things aren’t the real you. The real you is what the New Testament calls the hidden man of the heart, or the spirit. If you want to live in victory, you must always remember that you are a spirit; you have a soul; and you live in a body. You must be continually aware that your spirit—the real you—was re-created when you were born again. The hidden man of the heart within you was transformed into the image of God and set free from the power of sin. When you gave your life to Jesus, God didn’t just forgive you and leave you the same. He made you a new creature! Your old, death-infested, sin-enslaved nature passed away. Everything in your spirit became new. He who knew no sin was made to be sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. (See 2 Corinthians 5:17, 21.)
“But Brother Copeland, what good does it do for me to be all glorious and made in God’s image in my inner man, when on the outside I’m still a mess?” It doesn’t do much good at all. That’s why the Apostle Paul wrote to believers and said: “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calls you, who also will do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24). God never intended just to redeem one part of us. He didn’t plan just to save our spirit. He re-created us so we could become image-of-God men and image-of-God women—wholly, in every part of our being—spirit, soul and body. He planned for us to keep renewing our minds with His Word, and bringing our bodies into subjection to our spirit until we are totally transformed, and become on the outside what He has made us on the inside: glorious, victorious sons and daughters of the living God. Most people find it hard to even imagine such a thing. We’ve spent so many years living like beggars on the earth instead of kings we find it difficult to envision ourselves living any other way. We’ve gotten so familiar with being the tail instead of the head, being under the circumstances instead of over them, we have no idea what that kingly life of blessing and dominion would look like. How do we find out? By opening the New Testament and studying the life of Jesus. His earthly life provided us with a living demonstration of THE BLESSING of God. Jesus exercised dominion everywhere He went. He lived every moment by faith in that blessing and expected it to function in every situation. When someone with sickness reached out to Him, He healed them. When someone oppressed by demonic spirits looked to Him for help, He took dominion over those spirits and set the person free. When the elements of the earth—the wind and the waves—got unruly and tried to hinder Him, He used His authority and commanded them to be still. When Lazarus died, He brought him to life again. All of that was THE BLESSING in operation— and as joint heirs of that blessing, you and I have the capacity to function in it the same way.
“How can that be?” you might ask. “I’m nobody special. I’m just an ordinary person.” Believe it or not, some people asked the same question about Jesus during His earthly ministry. When He told the people of Nazareth that the Spirit of the Lord was on Him and that He’d been anointed to bless them, they said, “How can that be? We’ve known you all our lives! You’re nobody special. You’re just Jesus, Joseph’s son. We know your kinsfolk.” Those people wouldn’t believe that someone they were so familiar with—someone so human—could be anointed with THE BLESSING of God. As a result, that blessing couldn’t operate among them. Their unbelief stopped it from working and Jesus “could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them” (Mark 6:5). When Jesus went to places like Capernaum, however, just the opposite happened. People there had such faith in THE BLESSING of God that operated through Him, they followed Him around for days. Sometimes they wouldn’t even leave His meetings to go eat because they wanted to hear more of what He had to say. As a result, those people got healed and delivered and blessed in multitudes! “Yeah, but I don’t see how that relates to us as believers today. We can’t follow Jesus around the countryside and receive THE BLESSING from Him. He isn’t here any more.” Oh, yes, He is! He is not only with us, He is in us. He said He’d never leave us nor forsake us. He said He’d be with us even to the end of the age. If Jesus is with us and in us, that means THE BLESSING is with us and in us. It means we can not only live in THE BLESSING ourselves but extend it to others just like He did. In fact, that’s what Jesus has commissioned us to do (John 20:21). Up to now, most of us haven’t really believed we’re capable of blessing people like Jesus did. But, praise God, we’re starting to get it. We’re beginning to develop our faith not just in Jesus Himself as the resurrected King of kings and Lord of lords; we’re learning to believe in Jesus who lives on the inside of us. We’re learning to believe in the One who made us kings and priests like Himself, the Jesus who releases THE BLESSING of God through our bodies and our lives just like He released that blessing through His body and His life when He walked the earth. Instead of saying, “I’m just an old sinner saved by grace,” we’re starting to say, “I’m the blessed! The same blessing that was on Adam and given to Abraham is mine! THE BLESSING is flowing through my body and everywhere I go, I am a blessing to people!” As we keep meditating on those things, as we keep saying them and developing our faith, THE BLESSING will manifest in us and through us more and more. It will empower us to speak words of life, to release divine love and light everywhere we go, and bring others into God’s fabulous family by tens, hundreds, thousands and even millions. When we fully wake up to the fact that we are THE BLESSED, we will rock the world with God’s power. We will put Satan under our feet where he belongs, and bring heaven into manifestation on earth just like Jesus did. It’s already beginning to happen. Look out, devil. Here we come!
Article by Kenneth Copeland, Believers Voice of Victory Magazine October 2007
