THE FAITH OF GOD- Introduction
Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and other Word-Faith teachers have a brand new revelation, “God operates by faith.” And we, too, ought to exercise the same kind of faith that God exercised when He created the world. Well is this new revelation really biblical?
THE FAITH OF GOD- The “Proof”
There are only two prooftexts from the Bible which are used to prove that God exercises faith, and they don’t support this doctrine at all. The first is Mark 11:22, this tell us: “Have faith in God.” Well, grammatically this could be translated, “Have faith of God,” or, “Have God’s faith.” And therefore the Word-Faith teachers commonly say that we are to have “the God kind of faith.” However, this is clearly a mistake. You see, in Greek the grammatical form here means not “faith that God has” but “faith, that has God as its object.” In context Jesus is exhorting His disciples to have faith when they pray — in other words, when they ask God for things, they are to have faith in Him [Mark 11:23-24]. It’s always object oriented.
THE FAITH OF GOD- Another “Prooftext”
The second prooftext, Hebrews 11:3, says that “by faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God.” The Word-Faith teachers here twist this to read that God by His faith created the world. In other words, God had to exercise faith in order to create the world. Again, this interpretation clearly is ruled out by the context. The whole chapter is talking about the faith exercised in God by human beings: “By faith Abel… By faith Enoch… By faith Noah… By faith Abraham… By faith Sarah…” [11:4,5,7,8,11], and so forth.
THE FAITH OF GOD- What IS Faith?
The whole idea that God has faith is completely foreign to the Bible. Biblical faith is: human beings trusting in a God they cannot see, to do things that He has promised. God sees all and knows all from all eternity. So, God doesn’t need to have faith. And since God doesn’t need to have faith, the idea that we have to imitate God’s “faith” is clearly unbiblical. Remember, faith is always object oriented: Faith in God not faith of God. And if we mix that up, we have a faulty understanding of what true biblical faith really is.
THE FAITH OF GOD- Conclusion
On the question of God having faith, that’s the CRI Perspective. I’m Hank Hanegraaff.