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About the Book
In "God's Will is Prosperity," Gloria Copeland argues that it is God's desire for all believers to experience prosperity in all areas of their lives. She challenges readers to have faith, speak positive words, and take action to achieve abundance and success. Copeland uses biblical principles and personal testimonies to support her message that God wants his followers to be wealthy and prosperous.
Brother Yun
Brother Yun was born in February 1958 in the province of Henan. His original name was Liu Zhenying (刘振营).
Brother Yun became a believer at the age of 16. Soon after he became a Christian, God called him to be His witness in the west and south. As he was obedient to the calling, he eventually became a witness of Christ not just in the western and southern parts of China, but throughout China and in the nations beyond China as well.
Brother Yun was born into a poor family. His family’s financial situation took a turn for the worst when his father became ill with an asthmatic condition that led to lung cancer eventually. His life got worse when he became a Christian as he suffered severe trials and persecutions. In the midst of suffering for the Lord, however, he experienced miracle after miracle, which helped to strengthen his faith.
HOW BROTHER YUN BECAME A BELIEVER
In 1974, Brother Yun’s father became ill with lung cancer. His mother, who had been a Christian for many years but had become spiritually cold after the expulsion of Western missionaries during the Cultural Revolution, felt a deep sense of desperation because if her husband had died then, it would leave the family in dire straits. She thought of committing suicide. One evening, as she was lying in bed, she heard a voice saying to her that Jesus loved her. In tears and in repentance, she rededicated her life to God and gathered her family to pray for her husband. The next morning, her husband got better and as a result, everyone in the family, including Brother Yun, put their faith in God.
HIS HUNGER FOR THE WORD OF GOD
Brother Yun was 16 when he became a Christian. Soon after, he started hungering for the Word of God. However, his family did not have a Bible. He began asking his mother who Jesus was. In response, his mother would tell him that Jesus was the Son of God and that He had recorded all His teachings in the Bible.
Brother Yun wanted a Bible and his mother recalled that there was a man in another village who had one. So she brought him to see the man. The man was too afraid to show Brother Yun his Bible. So he suggested to the latter that he could pray and ask God for one.
Brother Yun decided to fast and pray for a Bible. For the next 100 days, he ate only one bowl of steamed rice everyday. One day at 4am, after fasting for 100 days, he saw a vision. In the vision, he was walking up a steep hill and trying to push a heavy cart at the same time. He was heading towards a village where he intended to beg for food for his family. He struggled greatly as he continued his climb uphill. The cart was about to roll back and fall on him when he saw three men walking down the hill in the opposite direction. One of them was a kind old man and he was pulling a large cart of fresh bread. When the old man saw Brother Yun, he asked him if he was hungry. He said ‘yes’ and started crying. The old man then took a red bag of bread from his cart and asked his two servants to give it to Brother Yun. As he put the bread into his mouth, it immediately turned into a Bible.
Upon waking up, Brother Yun began to search for the Bible. His search, however, was in vain. All of a sudden, he heard a faint knock on the door and someone was calling out his name. Immediately, he recognised the voice – it was the same voice he had heard in the vision. He quickly opened the door and standing before him were the two servants he had seen in the vision. One of them held a red bag in his hand. In this red bag was a Bible.
It was later that Brother Yun found out the names of the two men. One was Brother Wang while the other was Brother Sung. They were sent by an evangelist to give Brother Yun the Bible. The evangelist, who had suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution and had nearly died while being tortured, had received a vision from God. In the vision, God showed him Brother Yun’s house and the location of his village. He was asked to give his Bible to Brother Yun. However, he did not obey God until three months later.
Brother Yun began to devour the Word of God. Even though he could hardly read, this did not deter him at all. When he had finished reading the entire Bible, he started to memorise one chapter per day. In 28 days, he had memorised the Gospel of Matthew. Then he went on to memorise the Book of Acts and so forth.
OBEDIENT TO THE CALL OF GOD
One morning at 4am, Brother Yun had a dream. In the dream, God asked him to be His witness in the west and south. In the same dream, he saw a young man from the south coming to his house. And so at daybreak, he told his mother to expect the young man’s visit and to ask him to wait for him. Then he sat off to a village he had never heard of in the west. The people in this village had been praying for him to visit as they had heard about how he had prayed for a Bible and got it.
When the meeting at the village concluded and Brother Yun got ready to leave, the villagers refused to let him go. So he stayed on and recited to them the first twelve chapters from the Book of Acts. After that, the villagers finally let him go. From the village to his house, it could take up to 2 hours to walk. Because he did not want to make the young man from the south wait too long, he decided to run home. All of a sudden, he found himself entering his village without any apparent time lapse. What should have taken him a few hours took him just a few moments. It was as if God had supernaturally transported him back to his village.
PERSECUTIONS AND MIRACLES IN HIS LIFE
Brother Yun was arrested by security police numerous times and was thrown into prison three times for sharing the gospel in communist China.
When Brother Yun was arrested the first time, he was only 17 years old. At that time, he was ministering at a meeting far away from home. After he was caught, he was thrown into a freezing cold prison cell. There was no heat in the cell and his winter coat had been thrown into the snow by the security police who had caught him. He began to sing Psalm 150 aloud. The more he sang, the more he was filled with joy. Gradually, his frozen hands and feet regained feeling and he no longer felt cold.
During his first imprisonment in Nanyang, Brother Yun felt that God wanted him to fast without food and water until he could see his family again. This fast lasted 74 days, which was humanly impossible but yet was made possible because he chose to obey God.
During those times when Brother Yun was in the hands of government officials, he was repeatedly beaten and tortured with electric batons. He was also kicked and trampled upon. Furthermore, he had needles being jabbed underneath his fingernails.
Once, Brother Yun was paraded through the streets with a red cross tied behind him for half a day. When night fell, he was locked and left alone inside a large interrogation room. The wooden cross was taken off his back but his hands were still tied up. All of a sudden, the rope that was used to tie his hands snapped by itself. He immediately walked out of the interrogation room and walked through the courtyard in the midst of onlookers. Nobody stopped him or said anything to him. It was as if God had blinded their eyes and they did not even recognise who he was.
Because the front gate was locked, the only way Brother Yun could get out was to climb over an eight-foot high cement wall. He climbed up as much as he could manage. Then he looked over the wall and saw that there was a ten-foot wide open tank directly below. Suddenly, he felt as if someone had lifted him up and thrown him over. He was thrown so far that he did not land in the tank.
Brother Yun’s 3rd imprisonment was a very dark period in his life as the prison guards in the maximum security prison were determined to prevent his escape. So they beat his legs to cripple him permanently. They had him beaten up everyday, even in his crippled state. One day, God instructed him to escape from the prison. This was confirmed by a brother-in-Christ. Thus, on May 5, 1997, he miraculously walked past dozens of prison guards and out of the maximum security prison. It was as if he had become invisible to the guards. He did not realise that his legs had been miraculously healed until later.
Throughout all the horrendous and painful experiences that Brother Yun went through, the word of the Lord kept coming to him, encouraging him and strengthening his faith.
BROTHER YUN’S MINISTRY
Brother Yun eventually escaped China and sought asylum in Germany in 2001. Since then, he has been continuing his ministry from there and has spoken to congregations internationally. He has founded “Back to Jerusalem” Movement and has been sending missionaries out from China to share the gospel in the least-reached nations.
Brother Yun’s life and ministry have impacted many lives. Thousands of people have become Christians through his ministry. It is thus inevitable that fellow Christians have allowed themselves to be used as instruments of wickedness to attack his reputation. The co-author of The Heavenly Man, Paul Hattaway has aptly put it this way, “Many of the great Christian leaders throughout history have been the subject of brutal attacks from other Christians.”
AFTERTHOUGHT
Brother Yun’s childlike faith and his prompt obedience to God’s call are exemplary. It is incredible that he has remained faithful to God despite the tremendous suffering and persecutions he has gone through.
The Hill We All Must Die On
The doctrine of penal substitution is under attack today — and that’s an understatement. From voices outside of evangelical theology to those within, the historic Reformation view of the cross is claimed to be a “modern” invention from the cultural West. Others criticize the doctrine as sanctioning violence, privileging divine retributive justice over God’s love, condoning a form of divine child abuse, reducing Scripture’s polychrome presentation of the cross to a lifeless monochrome, being too “legal” in orientation, and so on. All of these charges are not new. All of them have been argued since the end of the 16th century, and all of them are false. Yet such charges reflect the corrosive effects of false ideas on theology and a failure to account for how the Bible, on its own terms, interprets the cross. Given the limitations of this article, I cannot fully respond to these charges. Instead, I will briefly state four truths that unpack the biblical-theological rationale of penal substitution. In so doing, my goal is to explain why penal substitution should be embraced as God’s good news for sinners. Four Questions to Get Right It is only in viewing Christ as our penal substitute that we truly understand the depth of God’s holy love for us, the horrendous nature of our sin before God, and the glory of our substitute — Jesus Christ our Lord — whose obedient life and penal death achieved our right standing before God and the full forgiveness of our sins. Let us now turn to these truths that are crucial to affirm and that lead us to glory in our Lord Jesus Christ as our penal substitute. 1. Who Is God? First, we must get right who God is as our triune Creator-Covenant Lord. Mark it well: debates over the nature of the atonement are first and foremost doctrine of God debates. If our view of God is sub-biblical, we will never get the cross right. From the opening verses of Scripture, God is presented as eternal, a se (life from himself), holy love, righteous, and good — the triune God who is complete in himself and who needs nothing from us (Genesis 1–2; Psalm 50:12–14; Isaiah 6:1–3; Acts 17:24–25; Revelation 4:8–11). One crucial implication of this description is that God, in his very nature, is the moral standard of the universe. This is why we must not think of God’s law as something external to him that he may relax at will. Instead, the triune God of Scripture is the law; his will and nature determine what is right and wrong. This view of God is often forgotten in today’s discussion of the atonement. Following the “New Perspective on Paul,” some argue that God’s justice/righteousness is only “God’s covenant faithfulness,” that is, God remaining true to his promises. No doubt this is true. However, what this view fails to see is that “righteousness-justice-holiness” is first tied to God’s nature as God. That is why, in light of sin, God, who is the law, cannot overlook our sin. God’s holy justice demands that he not only punish all sin, but also, if he graciously chooses to justify the ungodly (Romans 4:5), he must do so by fully satisfying his own righteous, holy moral demand. Thus, given our sin and God’s gracious choice to redeem us, the question that emerges across redemptive history is this: How will God demonstrate his holy justice and covenant love and remain true to himself? The answer is only found in the Father’s gift of his Son, Jesus’s obedient life and substitutionary death, that results in our justification before God in Christ (Romans 3:21–26). 2. Who Is Man? Second, we must get right who humans are as God’s image-sons created to be in covenant relationship with God. Specifically, we must grasp who Adam is, not only as a historic person, but also as the covenant representative/head of the human race (Romans 5:12–21; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22). Why is this significant? Because in creation, our triune Creator-Covenant God sets the conditions of the covenant and rightly demands from Adam (and all of us) total trust, love, and obedience — a truth reflected in God’s first command. But the flip side is also true: If there is covenant disobedience, given who God is, there is also his holy judgment against our sin that results in the penalty of physical and spiritual death (Genesis 2:15–17; cf. Romans 6:23). 3. How Can God Justify Sinners? Third, we must get right the serious problem of our sin before God. Sadly, Adam did not love God with full covenant devotion. Instead, he disobeyed God, thus bringing sin, death, and God’s curse into the world. In the Bible’s storyline, Adam’s sin changes everything! From Genesis 3 forward, “in Adam,” the entire human race becomes guilty, corrupted, condemned, and under the judicial sentence of death (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12–21; Ephesians 2:1–3). If God is going to redeem, which he has graciously promised to do (Genesis 3:15), how is he going to do it? Remember, given who God is in all of his moral perfection, and given that he is the standard of holy justice who will not deny himself, how will God declare sinners justified before him apart from the full satisfaction of his moral demand? God must punish sin and execute perfect justice because he is holy, just, and good. He cannot overlook our sin nor relax the demands of his justice, and in truth, thankfully so! But to justify us, our sin must be fully atoned. How, then, can God punish our sin, satisfy his own righteous demand, and justify sinners? Add to this point: To undo, reverse, and pay for Adam’s sin, we need someone who will come from the human race and identify with us (Genesis 3:15), render our required covenantal obedience, and pay the penalty for our sin. We need someone who will become our covenant representative and substitute, and by his obedient life and penal death secure our justification before God. And wonder of wonders, Scripture gloriously announces that there is one man — and only one — who can do this for us, namely our Lord Jesus Christ (Hebrews 2:5–18). 4. Who Is Jesus? Fourth, we must get right who Jesus is, what he does for us, and that he alone can redeem, reconcile, and justify us before God. Who is the Jesus of the Bible? In short, he is God the Son incarnate, the second person of the triune Godhead. He is no abused child or some third-party individual who stands independent of God. We cannot think of his atoning work apart from thinking of the entire triune God accomplishing our salvation. Furthermore, as the eternal Son, eternally loved of his Father and the Spirit, in God’s plan, he voluntarily took on the role of becoming our Redeemer. And in his incarnation, he identified with us in order to represent us before God (Hebrews 5:1). In his obedient human life, Jesus, as the Mediator of the new covenant, obeyed for us as our legal covenant representative. In his obedient death, Jesus, as the divine Son, satisfied his own righteous demand against us by bearing the penalty of our sin as our substitute (Romans 5:18–19; Philippians 2:6–11; Hebrews 5:1–10). And in doing all of this, the Father’s love was revealed in Jesus’s penal substitution because of who Jesus is as the Son incarnate, the Last Adam, and the only Mediator of God’s people (Romans 5:8–11). Don’t Get Bored with the Gospel The truth of the matter is this: penal substitution is not a view to be replaced by something “better” or dismissed as a relic of the past. There is no greater news than this: Christ Jesus, as the divine Son incarnate, perfectly meets our need before God by his obedient life and substitutionary death. In Christ the triune love of God is gloriously revealed because in Christ we receive the gift of righteousness which is now ours by faith in him. In union with his people, Christ, as our new covenant head, obeys in our place, dies our death, and satisfies divine justice, which is evidenced in his glorious resurrection. As a result, by faith alone, in Christ alone, his righteousness is ours — now and forever (Romans 8:1; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13). By faith-union in Christ, we stand complete: justified before God by the forgiveness of our sins and clothed in his righteousness (Romans 4:1–8; 5:1–2). Following the Bible’s teaching on this matter, may we learn anew to say with Paul, “For I decided to know nothing . . . except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15). Article by Stephen Wellum
