Does GOD Have Faith?
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?
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 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 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.
{ Back To Previous
Page }
