Preface

Though many people believe in God, few understand what faith in God means, and what they must do to conform to God’s will. This is because, though people are familiar with the word “God” and phrases such as “the work of God,” they do not know God, and still less do they know His work. No wonder, then, that all those who do not know God are muddled in their belief of Him. People do not take belief in God seriously, and this is entirely because believing in God is too unfamiliar, too strange for them. In this way, they fall short of God’s demands. In other words, if people do not know God, and do not know His work, then they are not fit for God’s use, and still less are they able to satisfy His will. “Belief in God” means believing that there is a God; this is the simplest concept as regards believing in God. What’s more, believing that there is a God is not the same as truly believing in God; rather, it is a kind of simple faith with strong religious overtones. True faith in God means the following: On the basis of the belief that God holds sovereignty over all things, one experiences His words and His work, purges one’s corrupt disposition, satisfies the will of God, and comes to know God. Only a journey of this kind may be called “faith in God.” Yet people often see belief in God as a simple and frivolous matter. People who believe in God in this way have lost what it means to believe in God, and though they may continue to believe until the very end, they shall never gain God’s approval, because they tread upon the wrong path. There are still those today who believe in God according to words and in hollow doctrine. They do not know that they lack the essence of belief in God, and they cannot receive God’s approval. Still they pray to God for blessings of safety and sufficient grace. Let us stop, quiet our hearts, and ask ourselves: Can it be that believing in God really is the easiest thing on earth? Can it be that believing in God means nothing more than receiving much grace from God? Are people who believe in God without knowing Him or who believe in God and yet oppose Him really able to satisfy the will of God?

God and man cannot be spoken of on equal terms. His essence and His work are most unfathomable and incomprehensible to man. If God does not personally do His work and speak His words in the world of man, then man would never be able to understand the will of God. And so, even those who have devoted their entire lives to God would not be able to receive His approval. If God does not set to work, then however well man does, it will all be for naught, because God’s thoughts will always be higher than the thoughts of man, and God’s wisdom is beyond man’s comprehension. And so I say that those who claim to “fully understand” God and His work are an inept lot; they are all overweening and ignorant. Man should not define the work of God; moreover, man cannot define the work of God. In the eyes of God, man is as insignificant as an ant; so how can man fathom God’s work? Those who like to spout, “God does not work in this or that way,” or “God is like this or that”—are they not speaking arrogantly? We should all know that man, who is of the flesh, has been corrupted by Satan. Mankind’s very nature is to oppose God. Mankind cannot be on par with God, much less can mankind hope to advise the work of God. As for how God guides man, this is the work of God Himself. It is fitting that man should submit, without professing this or that view, for man is but dust. Since it is our intent to seek God, we should not superimpose our notions onto His work for God’s consideration, still less should we employ our corrupt disposition to its utmost to deliberately oppose the work of God. Would that not make us antichrists? How could such people believe in God? Since we believe that there is a God, and since we wish to satisfy Him and to see Him, we should seek the way of truth, and should look for a way to be compatible with God. We should not stand in stiff-necked opposition to Him. What good could possibly come of such actions?

Today, God has done new work. You may not be able to accept these words, and they may seem odd to you, but I would advise you not to expose your naturalness, for only those who truly hunger and thirst for righteousness before God can obtain the truth, and only those who are truly devout can be enlightened and guided by Him. Results are obtained by seeking the truth with sober tranquility, not with quarrel and contention. When I say that “today, God has done new work,” I am referring to the matter of God’s returning to the flesh. Perhaps these words do not bother you; perhaps you despise them; or even perhaps they are of great interest to you. Whatever the case, I hope that all those who truly yearn for God to appear can face this fact and give it their careful scrutiny, rather than jump to conclusions about it; that is what a wise person should do.

It is not difficult to inquire into such a thing, but it requires each of us to know this one truth: He who is God incarnate shall possess the essence of God, and He who is God incarnate shall possess the expression of God. Since God becomes flesh, He shall bring forth the work He intends to do, and since God becomes flesh, He shall express what He is, and shall be able to bring the truth to man, bestow life upon him, and point the way for him. Flesh that does not have the essence of God is decidedly not the incarnate God; of this there is no doubt. If man intends to inquire into whether it is God’s incarnate flesh, then he must corroborate this from the disposition He expresses and the words He speaks. Which is to say, to corroborate whether or not it is God’s incarnate flesh, and whether or not it is the true way, one must discriminate on the basis of His essence. And so, in determining whether it is the flesh of God incarnate, the key lies in His essence (His work, His utterances, His disposition, and many other aspects), rather than external appearance. If man scrutinizes only His external appearance, and as a result overlooks His essence, this shows that man is benighted and ignorant. External appearance cannot determine essence; what’s more, the work of God can never conform to the notions of man. Did not Jesus’ outward appearance run counter to the notions of man? Were not His countenance and dress unable to provide any clues as to His true identity? Did not the earliest Pharisees oppose Jesus precisely because they merely looked at His external appearance, and did not take to heart the words in His mouth? It is My hope that each and every brother and sister who seeks the appearance of God will not repeat the tragedy of history. You must not become the Pharisees of modern times and nail God to the cross again. You should carefully consider how to welcome the return of God, and you should have a clear mind regarding how to be someone who submits to the truth. This is the responsibility of everyone who is waiting for Jesus to return riding upon a cloud. We should rub our spiritual eyes to make them clear, and not become mired in words of exaggerated fantasy. We should think about the realistic work of God, and take a look at the practical aspect of God. Do not get carried away or lose yourselves in daydreams, always longing for the day when the Lord Jesus, riding upon a cloud, suddenly descends among you, and takes you who have never known or seen Him, and who do not know how to follow His will. It is better to think upon more practical matters!

You may have opened this book for the purpose of research, or with the intention of accepting; whatever your attitude, I hope that you will read it to the end, and will not put it aside easily. Perhaps, after reading these words, your attitude will change, but that depends on your motivation and the degree of your understanding. There is, however, one thing that you should know: The word of God cannot be made out to be the word of man, and still less can one make the word of man to be the word of God. A man used by God is not the incarnate God, and the incarnate God is not a man used by God. In this, there is an essential difference. Perhaps, after reading these words, you do not acknowledge them to be the words of God, but only as the enlightenment that man has gained. In that case, you are blinded by ignorance. How can the words of God be the same as the enlightenment that man has gained? The words of God incarnate open up a new age, guide all of mankind, reveal mysteries, and show man the direction he is to take in the new age. The enlightenment obtained by man is but simple instructions for practice or knowledge. It cannot guide all of mankind into a new age or reveal the mysteries of God Himself. When all is said and done, God is God, and man is man. God has the essence of God, and man has the essence of man. If man views the words spoken by God as simple enlightenment by the Holy Spirit, and takes the words of the apostles and prophets as words personally spoken by God, that would be man’s mistake. No matter what, you should never mix up right and wrong, or make high out to be low, or mistake the profound for the shallow; no matter what, you should never deliberately refute what you know to be the truth. Everyone who believes there is a God should inquire into problems from the correct standpoint, and accept God’s new work and His new words from the perspective of His created being; otherwise, they will be cast out by God.

After the work of Jehovah, Jesus became flesh to do His work amongst man. His work was not carried out in isolation, but was built upon the work of Jehovah. It was work for a new age that God did after He had concluded the Age of Law. Similarly, after the work of Jesus ended, God went on with His work for the next age, because the entire management of God is always progressing forward. When the old age passes, it will be replaced by a new age, and once the old work has been completed, there will be new work to continue God’s management. This incarnation is God’s second incarnation, which follows upon Jesus’ work. Of course, this incarnation does not occur independently; it is the third stage of work after the Age of Law and the Age of Grace. Every time God initiates a new stage of work, there must always be a new beginning and it must always bring a new age. So too are there corresponding changes in the disposition of God, in the manner of His working, in the location of His work, and in His name. No wonder, then, that it is difficult for man to accept the work of God in the new age. But regardless of how He is opposed by man, God is always doing His work, and is always leading the whole of mankind forward. When Jesus came into the world of man, He ushered in the Age of Grace and ended the Age of Law. During the last days, God once more became flesh, and with this incarnation He ended the Age of Grace and ushered in the Age of Kingdom. All those who are able to accept the second incarnation of God will be led into the Age of Kingdom, and will moreover become able to personally accept the guidance of God. Though Jesus did much work among man, He only completed the redemption of all mankind and became man’s sin offering; He did not rid man of all his corrupt disposition. Fully saving man from the influence of Satan not only required Jesus to become the sin offering and bear the sins of man, but it also required God to do even greater work to rid man completely of his satanically corrupted disposition. And so, now that man has been forgiven of his sins, God has returned to the flesh to lead man into the new age, and begun the work of chastisement and judgment. This work has brought man into a higher realm. All those who submit under His dominion shall enjoy higher truth and receive greater blessings. They shall truly live in the light, and they shall gain the truth, the way, and the life.

If people remain stuck in the Age of Grace, then they shall never be rid of their corrupt disposition, let alone know the inherent disposition of God. If people always live in the midst of an abundance of grace, but do not have the way of life that allows them to know God or to satisfy Him, then they will never truly gain Him in their belief in Him. This type of belief is pitiful indeed. When you have finished reading this book, when you have experienced each step of the work of God incarnate in the Age of Kingdom, you will feel that desires you have had for many years have finally been realized. You will feel that only now have you truly seen God face to face; only now have you gazed upon His countenance, heard His personal utterances, appreciated the wisdom of His work, and truly sensed how practical and almighty He is. You will feel that you have gained many things that people in times past had never seen nor possessed. At this time, you will clearly know what it is to believe in God, and what it is to conform to God’s will. Of course, if you cling to views of the past, and reject or deny the fact of the second incarnation of God, then you will remain empty-handed, acquiring nothing, and ultimately you will be pronounced guilty of opposing God. Those who are able to submit to the truth and submit to the work of God shall be claimed under the name of the second incarnate God—the Almighty. They will be able to accept God’s personal guidance, gaining more and higher truths, as well as real life. They shall behold the vision never seen before by people of the past: “And I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; And in the middle of the seven candlesticks one like to the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the breasts with a golden girdle. His head and His hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; And His feet like to fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and His voice as the sound of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth went a sharp two edged sword: and His countenance was as the sun shines in its strength” (Revelation 1:12–16). This vision is the expression of God’s entire disposition, and the expression of His entire disposition is also the expression of the work of God in His present incarnation. In the torrents of chastisements and judgments, the Son of man expresses His inherent disposition by means of utterances, allowing all those who accept His chastisement and judgment to see the true face of the Son of man, which is a faithful depiction of the face of the Son of man seen by John. (Of course, all of this will be invisible to those who do not accept the work of God in the Age of Kingdom.) The true face of God cannot be fully articulated using human language, and so God uses the means by which He expresses His inherent disposition to show His true face to man. Which is to say that all those who have appreciated the inherent disposition of the Son of man have seen the true face of the Son of man, for God is too great and cannot be fully articulated using human language. Once man has experienced each step of God’s work in the Age of Kingdom, then he shall know the true meaning of John’s words when he spoke of the Son of man among the lampstands: “His head and His hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; And His feet like to fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and His voice as the sound of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth went a sharp two edged sword: and His countenance was as the sun shines in its strength.” At that time, you shall know beyond all doubt that this ordinary flesh that has said so much is undeniably the second incarnate God. Moreover, you shall truly sense how blessed you are, and feel yourself to be the most fortunate. Are you not willing to accept this blessing?

Utterances of Christ in the Beginning—Chapter 1

Praise has come to Zion and God’s dwelling place has appeared. The glorious holy name, extolled by all peoples, spreads. Ah, Almighty God! The Head of the universe, Christ of the last days—He is the shining Sun that has risen upon Mount Zion, which towers in majesty and grandeur over all the universe …

Almighty God! We call out to You in jubilation; we dance and sing. You are truly our Redeemer, the great King of the universe! You have made a group of overcomers and fulfilled God’s management plan. All peoples shall flow to this mountain. All peoples shall kneel before the throne! You are the one and only true God and You deserve glory and honor. All glory, praise, and authority be to the throne! The spring of life flows out from the throne, watering and feeding the multitudes of God’s people. The life changes with each day; new light and revelations follow us, constantly affording new insights about God. Amidst experiences, we arrive at complete certainty about God. His words are constantly made manifest, made manifest within those who are right. We are indeed so blessed! Meeting God face to face each day, communicating with God in all things, and giving God sovereignty over everything. Carefully do we ponder God’s word, our hearts rest quiet in God, and thus do we come before God, where we receive His light. Every day, in our lives, actions, words, thoughts, and ideas, we live within God’s word, able to discriminate at all times. God’s word guides the thread through the needle; unexpectedly, the things hidden inside us come to light, one after another. Fellowship with God brooks no delay; our thoughts and ideas are laid bare by God. At every moment we are living before the seat of Christ where we undergo judgment. Every place within our bodies remains occupied by Satan. Today, in order to recover God’s sovereignty, His temple must be cleansed. To be completely possessed by God, we must engage in a life-and-death struggle. Only when our old selves have been crucified can the resurrected life of Christ reign supreme.

Now the Holy Spirit mounts a charge into our every corner to do battle for our reclamation! So long as we are ready to deny ourselves and to be willing to cooperate with God, God will surely illuminate and purify us from within at all times, and reclaim anew that which Satan has occupied, so that we may become completed by God as quickly as possible. Do not waste time—live every moment within God’s word. Be built up with the saints, be brought into the kingdom, and enter into glory together with God.

Utterances of Christ in the Beginning—Chapter 2

The church of Philadelphia has taken shape, which is entirely due to the grace and mercy of God. God-loving hearts are born in the myriad saints, who do not waver on their spiritual journey. They hold fast to their belief that the one true God has become flesh, that He is the Head of the universe, who commands all things: This is confirmed by the Holy Spirit, it is as immovable as the mountains! And it shall never change!

Oh, Almighty God! Today it is You who have opened our spiritual eyes, allowing the blind to see, the lame to walk, and lepers to be healed. It is You who have opened the window to heaven, allowing us to perceive the mysteries of the spiritual realm. Being permeated by Your holy words and saved from our humanity, which was corrupted by Satan—such is Your inestimably great work and Your inestimably great mercy. We are Your witnesses!

Long have You remained hidden, humbly and silently. You have undergone resurrection from death, the suffering of crucifixion, the joys and sorrows of human life, and persecution and adversity; You have experienced and tasted the pain of the human world, and You have been forsaken by the age. God incarnate is God Himself. For the sake of God’s will, You have saved us from the dunghill, holding us up with Your right hand, and freely giving us Your grace. Sparing no pains, You have wrought Your life into us; the price You have paid with Your blood, sweat, and tears is crystallized upon the saints. We are the product of[a] Your painstaking efforts; we are the price You have paid.

Oh, Almighty God! It is because of Your lovingkindness and mercy, Your righteousness and majesty, Your holiness and humility that all peoples shall bow down before You and worship You for all eternity.

Today You have made complete all churches—the church of Philadelphia—and thus fulfilled Your 6,000-year management plan. The saints can humbly submit themselves before You, connected in spirit and following along in love, joined to the source of the fountain. The living water of life runs without cease, washing away and purging all the mud and filthy water in the church, once again purifying Your temple. We have come to know the practical true God, walked within His words, recognized our own functions and duties, and done everything that we can to expend ourselves for the sake of the church. Ever quiet before You, we must heed the work of the Holy Spirit, lest Your will be obstructed in us. Among the saints there is mutual love, and the strengths of some will compensate for the failings of others. They are able to walk in the spirit at all times, enlightened and illuminated by the Holy Spirit. They put the truth into practice immediately upon understanding it. They keep pace with the new light, and follow God’s footsteps.

Actively cooperate with God; letting Him take control is to walk with Him. All of our own ideas, notions, opinions, and secular entanglements vanish into thin air like smoke. We let God reign supreme in our spirits, walk with Him and so gain transcendence, overcoming the world, and our spirits fly free and attain release: This is the outcome when Almighty God becomes King. How can we not dance and sing in praise, offering up our praises, offering up new hymns?

There truly are many ways to praise God: calling out His name, drawing near to Him, thinking of Him, pray-reading, engaging in fellowship, contemplating and pondering, prayer, and songs of praise. In these kinds of praise there is enjoyment, and there is anointment; there is power in praise, and there is also a burden. There is faith in praise, and there is new insight.

Actively cooperate with God, coordinate in service and become one, satisfy Almighty God’s will, hasten to become a holy spiritual body, trample over Satan, and put an end to Satan’s fate. The church of Philadelphia has been raptured into God’s presence and is made manifest in His glory.

Footnotes:

a. The original text does not contain the phrase “the product of.”

Utterances of Christ in the Beginning—Chapter 3

The triumphant King sits upon His glorious throne. He has accomplished redemption and led all His people to appear in glory. He holds the universe in His hands and with His divine wisdom and might He has built and made firm Zion. With His majesty He judges the sinful world; He has passed judgment on all nations and all peoples, the earth and the seas and all the living things in them, as well as those who are drunk on the wine of promiscuity. God shall surely judge them, and He shall surely be angry with them and therein will be revealed the majesty of God, whose judgment is instantaneous and delivered without delay. The fire of His wrath shall surely incinerate their heinous crimes and calamity befall them at any moment; they shall know no avenue of escape and have no place to hide, they shall weep and gnash their teeth, and they shall bring destruction upon themselves.

The triumphant sons, beloved of God will surely stay in Zion, never to depart from it. The multitudinous peoples shall listen closely to His voice, they will carefully heed His actions, and the sounds of their praise shall never cease. The one true God has appeared! We shall be certain about Him in spirit and follow Him closely; we shall rush forward with all our might and hesitate no more. The end of the world is unfolding before us; a proper church life as well as the people, affairs, and things that surround us are even now intensifying our training. Let us make haste to take back our hearts that so love the world! Let us make haste to take back our vision that is so obscured! Let us stay our steps, that we may not exceed the boundaries. Let us stop our mouths so that we may walk in God’s word, and no longer contest our own gains and losses. Ah, let go of it—your greedy fondness for the secular world and for wealth! Ah, free yourselves from it—your clinging attachment to husbands and daughters and sons! Ah, turn your back on them—your viewpoints and prejudices! Ah, wake up; time is short! Look up, look up, from within the spirit, and let God take control. Whatever happens, do not become another Lot’s wife. How pitiful it is to be cast aside! How pitiful indeed! Ah, wake up!

Utterances of Christ in the Beginning—Chapter 5

Mountains and rivers change, waters flow along their course, and man’s life does not endure as do the earth and the sky. Only Almighty God is life eternal and resurrected, which continues, generation after generation, forever! All things and all events are in His hands, and Satan is under His foot.

Today, it is by God’s predetermined selection that He delivers us from Satan’s grip. He is truly our Redeemer. The eternal, resurrected life of Christ has indeed been wrought inside us, destining us to connect with God’s life, that we may indeed be able to come face to face with Him, eat Him, drink Him, and enjoy Him. This is the selfless offering that God has made at the price of His heart’s blood.

The seasons come and go, passing through wind and frost, meeting with so many of life’s sufferings, persecutions, and tribulations, so many of the world’s repudiations and calumnies, so many of the government’s false accusations, yet neither God’s faith nor His resolve is diminished in the least. Wholeheartedly dedicated to God’s will, and to God’s management and plan, that they may be accomplished, He sets His own life aside. For all the multitudes of His people, He spares no pains, carefully feeding and watering them. No matter how benighted we are, or how difficult we are, we must only submit before Him, and the resurrected life of Christ will change our old nature…. For all these firstborn sons, He labors tirelessly, forgoing food and rest. How many days and nights, through how much scorching heat and freezing cold, He watches wholeheartedly in Zion.

The world, home, work and all, totally forgone, gladly, willingly, and worldly enjoyments have nothing to do with Him…. The words from His mouth strike into us, exposing things hidden deep in our hearts. How can we not be convinced? Every sentence that comes from His mouth may come true in us at any time. Whatever we do, in His presence or hidden away from Him, there is nothing He does not know, nothing He does not understand. All will indeed be revealed before Him, despite our own plans and arrangements.

Sitting before Him, feeling joy within our spirit, at ease and calm, yet feeling always empty and truly indebted to God: This is a wonder unimaginable and impossible to achieve. The Holy Spirit is sufficient to prove that Almighty God is the one true God! It is proof incontrovertible! We of this group are indescribably blessed! If not for God’s grace and mercy, we could only go to perdition and follow Satan. Only Almighty God can save us!

Ah! Almighty God, the practical God! It is You who have opened our spiritual eyes, allowing us to behold the mysteries of the spiritual realm. The prospects of the kingdom are boundless. Let us be watchful as we wait. The day cannot be too far off.

The flames of war swirl, cannon smoke fills the air, the weather turns warm, the climate shifts, a plague will spread, and people can only die, with no hope of survival.

Ah! Almighty God, the practical God! You are our impregnable fortress. You are our refuge. We huddle under Your wings, and calamity cannot reach us. Such is Your divine protection and care.

We all raise our voices in song; we sing in praise, and the sound of our praise rings throughout Zion! Almighty God, the practical God, has prepared for us that glorious destination. Be watchful—oh, be on the watch! As yet, the hour is not too late.

Utterances of Christ in the Beginning—Chapter 15

God’s appearance has already arisen in all churches. It is the Spirit that speaks; He is a raging fire, bears majesty, and is judging. He is the Son of man, clothed with a garment that hangs down to His feet, and a golden belt is tied around His chest. His head and hair are white like wool, and His eyes are like flames; His feet are akin to fine brass, as if they had been wrought in a furnace, and His voice is like the sound of many waters. He holds in His right hand seven stars and in His mouth, a sharp double-edged sword, and His countenance shines fiercely like the burning sun!

The Son of man has been witnessed, and God Himself has been openly revealed. God’s glory has issued forth, shining fiercely like the burning sun! His glorious countenance blazes with dazzling light; whose eyes dare treat Him with resistance? Resistance leads to death! Not the slightest bit of mercy is shown for anything you think in your heart, any word you utter, or anything you do. You will all come to understand and come to see what it is you have obtained—nothing but My judgment! Can I abide it when you do not put your effort into eating and drinking of My words, and instead disrupt arbitrarily and destroy My construction? I will not treat this kind of person gently! If your behavior degenerates more seriously, you will be consumed in flames! The almighty God manifests in a spiritual body, without the slightest bit of flesh or blood connecting head to toe. He transcends the universe world, seated on the glorious throne in the third heaven, administering all things! The universe and all things are within My hands. If I speak it, it will be so. If I ordain it, thus it shall be. Satan is beneath My feet; it is in the bottomless pit! When My voice issues forth, heaven and earth will pass away and come to nothing! All things will be renewed; this is an unalterable truth that is absolutely right. I have overcome the world, as well as all evil ones. I sit here talking to you, and all who have ears should listen and all who are living should accept.

The days will come to an end; all things in this world will come to nothing, and all things will be born anew. Remember this! Do not forget! There can be no ambiguity! Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall remain! Let Me exhort you once again: Do not run in vain! Wake up! Repent, and salvation is at hand! I have already appeared amongst you, and My voice has arisen. My voice has arisen before you; every day it confronts you, face-to-face, and each day it is fresh and new. You see Me and I see you; I speak to you constantly, and am face-to-face with you. Nevertheless, you reject Me and do not know Me. My sheep can hear My voice, yet still you hesitate! You hesitate! Your heart is waxed gross, your eyes have been blinded by Satan, and you cannot see My glorious countenance—how pitiful you are! How pitiful!

The seven Spirits before My throne have been sent to all corners of the earth and I will send My Messenger to speak to the churches. I am righteous and faithful; I am the God that examines the deepest parts of man’s heart. The Holy Spirit speaks to the churches, and it is My words that issue forth from inside My Son; all those who have ears should listen! All those who are living should accept! Simply eat and drink of them, and do not doubt. All those who submit and heed My words will receive great blessings! All those who seek My countenance in earnest will surely have new light, new enlightenment, and new insights; all will be fresh and new. My words will appear to you at any time, and they will open the eyes of your spirit so that you can see all the mysteries of the spiritual realm and see that the kingdom is among man. Enter the refuge, and all grace and blessings will be upon you; famine and plague will not be able to touch you, and wolves, serpents, tigers, and leopards will be unable to harm you. You will go with Me, walk with Me, and enter glory with Me!

Almighty God! His glorious body appears in the open, the holy spiritual body arises, and He is the complete God Himself! The world and the flesh are both changed, and His transfiguration on the mount is the person of God. He wears the golden crown atop His head, His clothing is pure white, across the chest is a golden belt, and the world and all things are His footstool. His eyes are like flames, He holds a sharp double-edged sword in His mouth, and He has the seven stars in His right hand. The way to the kingdom is boundlessly bright, and His glory arises and shines; the mountains are joyful and the waters laugh, and the sun, moon, and stars all revolve in their orderly arrangement, welcoming the unique, true God whose triumphant return heralds the completion of His six-thousand-year management plan. All leap and dance with joy! Cheer! The almighty God sits upon His glorious throne! Sing! The victorious banner of the Almighty is raised high upon the majestic, magnificent Mount Zion! All nations are cheering, all peoples are singing, Mount Zion is laughing joyfully, and the glory of God has arisen! I never even dreamed that I would see God’s countenance, yet today I have seen it. Face-to-face with Him every day, I lay bare my heart to Him. He bountifully provides food and drink. Life, words, actions, thoughts, ideas—His glorious light illuminates them all. He leads every step of the way, and His judgment immediately befalls any rebellious heart.

Eating, residing together, and living together with God, being together with Him, walking together, enjoying together, gaining glory and blessings together, sharing the kingship with Him, and existing together in the kingdom—oh, what a pleasure it is! Oh, how sweet it is! We are face-to-face with Him every day, speaking with Him every day and talking constantly, and being granted new enlightenment and new insights every day. Our spiritual eyes are opened, and we see everything; all the mysteries of the spirit are revealed to us. The holy life really is carefree; run fast and do not stop, and forge onward continuously—there is a more wondrous life ahead. Do not be satisfied with mere sweet taste; seek continuously to enter into God. He is all-encompassing and bountiful, and has all kinds of things that we lack. Cooperate proactively and enter into Him, and nothing will ever be the same again. Our lives will be transcendent, and no person, matter, or thing will be able to disturb us.

Transcendence! Transcendence! True transcendence! God’s transcendent life is within, and all things have become truly relaxed! We transcend the world and worldly things, feeling no attachment to husbands or children. We transcend the constraints of sickness and environments. Satan dare not disturb us. We completely transcend all disasters. This is allowing God to take the kingship! We trample Satan underfoot, stand witness for the church, and thoroughly expose the ugly face of Satan. The construction of the church is in Christ, and the glorious body has arisen—this is living in rapture!

Utterances of Christ in the Beginning—Chapter 88

People simply cannot imagine the extent to which My pace has accelerated: This is a wonder that has occurred that is unfathomable to man. My pace has continued since the creation of the world, and My work has never stopped. The entire universe world changes from day to day, and people, too, are constantly changing. These are all part of My work, all part of My plan, and, moreover, they belong to My management, and no human knows or understands these things. Only when I Myself tell you, only when I communicate with you face-to-face, do you know even the tiniest bit; otherwise, absolutely no one can have any idea of the blueprint for My management plan. Such is My great power, and moreover, such are My wondrous actions. These are things that no one can change. Therefore, what I say today goes, and this simply cannot change. Human notions do not contain even the least bit of knowledge of Me—they are all but nonsensical chatter! Do not think that you have had enough or that you are satisfied! I tell you this: You still have far to go! Of My entire management plan, you know but a little, so you must listen to what I say and do whatever I tell you to do. Act according to My wishes in everything, and you will surely have My blessings; whosoever believes can receive, whereas whosoever does not believe will have that “nothing” that they imagined fulfilled in them. This is My righteousness, and, even more, it is My majesty, My wrath, and My chastisement. I will not let anyone get away with even a single thought or action.

Upon hearing My words, most people fear and tremble, their faces creased with worried frowns. Have I actually wronged you? Could it be that you are not a child of the great red dragon? You even pretend to be good! You even pretend to be My firstborn son! Do you think I am blind? Do you think I cannot distinguish between people? I am the God who searches people’s innermost hearts: This is what I tell My sons, and what I also tell you, the children of the great red dragon. I see everything clearly, making not the slightest error. How could I not know what I do? I am crystal clear about what I do! Why do I say that I am God Himself, the Creator of the universe and all things? Why do I say that I am the God who examines people’s innermost hearts? I am well aware of every person’s situation. Do you think I do not know what to do or what to say? This is not your concern. Be careful not to be killed by My hand; you would suffer loss that way. My administrative decrees are unforgiving. Do you understand? All of the above are parts of My administrative decrees. From the day I tell them to you, if you commit any further transgressions, there will be retribution, because previously you did not understand.

Now I promulgate My administrative decrees for you (effective from the day of their promulgation, assigning different chastisements to different people):

I keep My promises, and everything is in My hands: Whosoever doubts will certainly be killed. There is no room for any consideration; they will immediately be exterminated, thus ridding My heart of hatred. (From now on it is confirmed that whosoever is killed must not be a member of My kingdom, and must be a descendent of Satan.)

As firstborn sons, you should keep your own positions and fulfill your own duties well, and not be nosy. You should offer yourselves up for My management plan, and everywhere you go, you should bear good witness to Me and glorify My name. Do not commit shameful acts; be examples for all My sons and My people. Do not be debauched even for a moment: You must always appear before everyone bearing the identity of firstborn sons, and not be servile; rather, you should stride forward with heads held high. I am asking you to glorify My name, not to disgrace My name. Those who are firstborn sons each have their own individual function, and cannot do everything. This is the responsibility I have given you, and it is not to be shirked. You must dedicate yourselves wholeheartedly, with all your mind and all your strength, to fulfilling that with which I have entrusted you.

From this day forward, throughout the universe world, the duty of shepherding all My sons and all My people will be entrusted to My firstborn sons to fulfill, and I will chastise whosoever cannot dedicate their entire heart and mind to fulfilling it. This is My righteousness. I will neither spare nor go easy on even My firstborn sons.

If there is anyone among My sons or among My people who ridicules and insults one of My firstborn sons, I will punish them harshly, for My firstborn sons represent Myself; what someone does to them, they do also to Me. This is the most severe of My administrative decrees. I will allow My firstborn sons to, according to their wishes, administer My righteousness against any of My sons and My people who violate this decree.

I will gradually abandon whosoever regards Me frivolously and focuses only on My food, clothing, and sleep, attends only to My external affairs and has no consideration for My burden, and does not pay attention to fulfilling their own functions properly. This is directed at all who have ears.

Whoever finishes doing service for Me must obediently withdraw without fuss. Be careful, or else I will sort you out. (This is a supplementary decree.)

My firstborn sons shall pick up the iron rod from now on and begin to execute My authority to govern all nations and peoples, to walk among all nations and peoples, and to carry out My judgment, righteousness, and majesty among all nations and peoples. My sons and My people shall fear Me, praise Me, cheer Me, and glorify Me without ceasing, because My management plan is fulfilled and My firstborn sons can reign with Me.

This is a part of My administrative decrees; after this, I will tell them to you as the work progresses. From the above administrative decrees, you will see the pace at which I do My work, as well as which step My work has reached. This shall be a confirmation.

I have already judged Satan. Because My will is unimpeded and because My firstborn sons have gained glory alongside Me, I have already exercised My righteousness and majesty upon the world and all things that belong to Satan. I do not lift a finger or pay attention to Satan at all (because it does not even deserve to converse with Me). I just keep doing what I want to do. My work proceeds smoothly, step by step, and My will is unimpeded across the entire earth. This has shamed Satan to a degree, and it has been completely destroyed, but this in itself has not fulfilled My will. I also allow My firstborn sons to carry out My administrative decrees over them. On the one hand, what I let Satan see is My wrath toward it; on the other hand, I let it see My glory (see that My firstborn sons are the most resounding witnesses to Satan’s humiliation). I do not punish it in person; rather, I let My firstborn sons carry out My righteousness and majesty. Because Satan used to abuse My sons, persecute My sons, and oppress My sons, today, after its service is over, I will allow My mature firstborn sons to sort it out. Satan has been powerless against the fall. The paralysis of all nations in the world is the best testimony; people fighting and countries at war are the obvious manifestations of the collapse of Satan’s kingdom. The reason I did not show any signs and wonders in the past was to bring humiliation upon Satan and glorify My name, step by step. When Satan is completely finished off, I begin to show My power: What I say comes into being, and the supernatural things that are not in conformance with human notions will be fulfilled (these refer to the blessings soon to come). Because I am the practical God Himself and I have no rules, and because I speak according to changes in My management plan, what I have said in the past is therefore not necessarily applicable in the present. Do not cling to your own notions! I am not a God who abides by rules; with Me, everything is free, transcendent, and completely released. Perhaps what was said yesterday is outdated today, or perhaps it might be cast aside today (however, My administrative decrees, since they are promulgated, will never change). These are the steps in My management plan. Do not cling to regulations. Every day there is new light and there are new revelations, and that is My plan. Every day My light will be revealed in you and My voice will be released to the universe world. Do you understand? This is your duty, the responsibility I have entrusted to you. You must not neglect it for even a moment. I will use to the end the people I approve, and this will never change. Because I am the almighty God, I know which kind of person should do which thing, as well as which kind of person is able to do which thing. This is My omnipotence.

Utterances of Christ in the Beginning—Chapter 103

A thunderous voice issues forth, shaking the entire universe. It is so deafening that people cannot dodge out of the way in time. Some are killed, some are destroyed, and some are judged. It truly is a spectacle, the likes of which no one has ever seen. Listen closely: The peals of thunder are accompanied by the sound of weeping, and this sound comes from Hades; it comes from hell. It is the bitter sound of those sons of rebellion who have been judged by Me. Those who have not listened to what I say and who have not put My words into practice have been severely judged and received the curse of My wrath. My voice is judgment and wrath; I treat no one gently and show mercy to no one, for I am the righteous God Himself, and I am possessed of wrath; I am possessed of burning, of cleansing, and of destruction. In Me, there is nothing hidden and there are no fleshly feelings; on the contrary, everything is open, righteous, and impartial. Because My firstborn sons are already with Me upon the throne, ruling over all nations and all peoples, those things and people that are unjust and unrighteous are now beginning to be judged. I will probe them one by one, missing nothing and revealing them completely. For My judgment has been fully revealed and opened up fully, and I have not kept back anything at all; I will throw out everything that does not accord with My will, and let it perish to all eternity in the bottomless pit. There I will allow it to burn forever. This is My righteousness, and this is My uprightness. No one can change this, and all must be under My command.

Most people ignore My utterances, thinking that words are just words and that facts are facts. They are blind! Do they not know that I am the faithful God Himself? My words and facts occur simultaneously. Is this not genuinely the case? People simply do not comprehend My words, and only those who have been enlightened can truly understand. This is a fact. As soon as people see My words, they become frightened out of their wits and scurry all over the place to hide. This is even more the case when My judgment falls. When I created all things, when I destroy the world, and when I make complete the firstborn sons—all these things are accomplished by a single word from My mouth. This is because My word itself is the authority; it is the judgment. It can be said that the person that I am is the judgment and the majesty; this is an unalterable fact. This is one aspect of My administrative decrees; it is but one way in which I judge people. In My eyes, everything—including all people, all affairs, and all things—is in My hands and under My judgment. No one and nothing dares to behave wildly or willfully, and all must be accomplished in accordance with the words I utter. From within human notions, everyone believes the words of the person that I am. When My Spirit gives voice, everyone is dubious. People do not have the slightest knowledge of My omnipotence, and they even make imputations against Me. I tell you now, whosoever doubts My words, and whosoever slights My words, these are the ones who shall be destroyed; they are the perpetual sons of perdition. From this it can be seen that there are very few who are firstborn sons, because this is how I work. As I have said before, I accomplish everything without moving a finger; I use only My words. This, then, is where My omnipotence lies. In My words, no one can find the source and the purpose of what I say. People cannot achieve this, and they can only act while following My lead and do everything in conformance with My will according to My righteousness, causing My family to have righteousness and peace, to live forever, and to be eternally firm and unwavering.

My judgment comes to everyone, My administrative decrees touch everyone, and My words and My person are revealed to everyone. This is the time for the great work of My Spirit (at this time, those who will be blessed and those who will suffer misfortune are distinguished from one another). As soon as My words issue forth, I have distinguished those who will be blessed, as well as those who will suffer misfortune. This is all crystal clear, and I can see it all at a glance. (I am saying this with regard to My humanity; therefore, these words do not contradict My predestination and selection.) I roam about the mountains and rivers and among all things, across the spaces of the universe, observing and cleansing every place so that those unclean locations and those promiscuous lands will all cease to exist and be incinerated into nothingness as a result of My words. For Me, everything is easy. If now were the time I had predetermined for the world’s destruction, I could swallow it up with the utterance of a single word. However, now is not the time. All must be ready before I will do this work so that My plan is not disturbed and My management is not disrupted. I know how to do this reasonably: I have My wisdom, and I have My own arrangements. People must not move one finger; be careful not to be killed at My hand. This has already touched upon My administrative decrees. From this one can see the harshness of My administrative decrees, as well as the principles behind them, which have two sides to them: On the one hand, I kill all who are not in line with My will and who violate My administrative decrees; on the other hand, in My wrath I curse all who violate My administrative decrees. These two aspects are indispensable, and are the executive principles behind My administrative decrees. Everyone is handled according to these two principles, without emotion, regardless of how loyal a person might be. This is enough to show My righteousness, My majesty, and My wrath, which will incinerate all earthly things, all worldly things, and all things that are not in line with My will. In My words are mysteries that remain hidden, and also in My words, there are mysteries that have been revealed. Thus, according to human notions, and in the human mind, My words are forever incomprehensible, and My heart is forever unfathomable. That is, I must cast humans out of their notions and thinking. This is the most important item of My management plan. I must do it this way in order to gain My firstborn sons and to accomplish the things I want to do.

The world’s disasters grow greater by the day, and in My house, catastrophic disasters grow ever more powerful. People truly have nowhere to hide, nowhere to conceal themselves. Because the transition is happening right now, people do not know where they will pass their next step. This will only become obvious after My judgment. Remember! These are the steps of My work, and it is the way in which I work. I will comfort all of My firstborn sons one by one, and uplift them one step at a time; as for the service-doers, I will cast out and abandon them all, one by one. This is one part of My management plan. After all the service-doers have been revealed, My firstborn sons will also be revealed. (For Me, this is extremely easy. After they hear My words, all those service-doers will gradually withdraw before the judgment and threat of My words, and only My firstborn sons will remain. This is not something voluntary, nor is it something that human will can change; rather, it is My Spirit working in person.) This is not a distant event, and you should, to some extent, be able to perceive it from within this phase of My work and My words. Why I would say so much, as well as the unpredictable nature of My utterances, are unfathomable to people. I speak to My firstborn sons in tones of comfort, mercy, and love (because I always enlighten these people, and I will not leave them, for I predestined them), while I treat people other than My firstborn sons with severe judgment, with threats, and with intimidation, making them feel constantly frightened to the point that their nerves are always at work. Once the situation has developed to a certain extent, they will escape from this state (when I destroy the world, these people will be in the bottomless pit), yet they will never escape My hand of judgment or break free of this situation. This, then, is their judgment; this is their chastisement. On the day that the foreigners arrive, I will reveal these people, one by one. These are the steps of My work. Do you now understand the intention behind My previous utterances of those words? In My opinion, something unfulfilled is also something that has been fulfilled, but something that has been fulfilled is not necessarily something that has been achieved. This is because I have My wisdom and My way of working, which are simply inscrutable to humans. Once I have achieved results with this step (when I have revealed all the evil ones who resist Me), I will begin the next step, for My will is unimpeded and no one dares to obstruct My management plan, and nothing dares to put up any obstacles—they must all clear the way! Children of the great red dragon, hear Me! I came from Zion and became flesh in the world to gain My firstborn sons, to humiliate your father (these words are aimed at the descendants of the great red dragon), to support My firstborn sons, and to right the wrongs done to My firstborn sons. Therefore, do not be savage again; I will let My firstborn sons deal with you. In the past, My sons were bullied and oppressed, and since the Father wields power for His sons, My sons shall return to My loving embrace, no longer to be bullied and oppressed. I am not unrighteous; this shows My righteousness, and it is truly “loving those whom I love and hating those whom I hate.” If you say I am unrighteous, then you should hurry up and get out. Do not be shameless and freeload in My house. You should go back to your home with haste so that I no longer have to see you. The bottomless pit is your destination, and that is where you will rest. If you are in My house, there will be no place for you, because you are beasts of burden; you are the tools I use. When I no longer have any use for you, I shall cast you into the fire to incinerate you. This is My administrative decree; I must do it this way, and only this shows the manner in which I work and reveals My righteousness and My majesty. More importantly, only in this way will My firstborn sons be allowed to reign in power with Me.

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 4

All of My people who serve before Me should think back on the past: Was your love for Me tainted by impurity? Was your loyalty to Me pure and wholehearted? Was your knowledge of Me true? How much of a place did I hold within your hearts? Did I fill your hearts entirely? How much did My words accomplish within you? Do not try to fool Me! These things are perfectly clear to Me! Today, as the voice of My salvation is uttered forth, has there been some increase in your love for Me? Has part of your loyalty to Me become pure? Has your knowledge of Me deepened? Did praise offered in the past lay a solid foundation for your knowledge today? How much of you is occupied by My Spirit? How much of a place does My image hold within you? Have My utterances hit home within you? Do you truly feel that you have nowhere to hide your shame? Do you truly believe that you are unqualified to be My people? If you are completely oblivious to the questions above, then this shows that you are fishing in murky waters, that you are only present to make up the numbers, and at the time preordained by Me, you will surely be cast out and knocked into the bottomless pit for a second time. These are My words of warning, and any who take them lightly will be struck by My judgment, and, at the appointed time, will meet with disaster. Is this not so? Do I still need to provide examples to illustrate this? Must I speak more plainly to provide an exemplar for you? From the time of creation until today, many people have rebelled against My words and thus have been skimmed off and cast out from My stream of recovery; ultimately, their bodies perish and their spirits are cast into Hades, and even today they are still subjected to grievous punishment. Many people have followed My words, but they have gone against My enlightenment and illumination, and have thus been kicked aside by Me, falling under the power of Satan and becoming one of those who oppose Me. (Today all those who directly oppose Me obey only the superficialities of My words, and rebel against the essence of My words.) There have been many, too, who have merely listened to the words I spoke yesterday, who have held on to the “junk” of the past and not treasured the “produce” of the present day. These people have not only been taken captive by Satan, but have become eternal sinners and become My enemies, and they directly oppose Me. Such people are the objects of My judgment at the height of My wrath, and today they are still blind, still within the dark dungeons (which is to say, such people are rotten, benumbed corpses that are controlled by Satan; because their eyes have been veiled by Me, I say that they are blind). It would be well to provide an example for your reference, so that you can learn from it:

At the mention of Paul, you will think of his history, and of some of the stories about him that are inaccurate and out of line with reality. He was taught by his parents from a young age, and received My life, and as a result of My predestination he was possessed of the caliber that I require. At the age of 19, he read various books about life; thus I do not need to go into detail about how, because of his caliber, and because of My enlightenment and illumination, he could not only speak with some insight about spiritual matters, but was also able to grasp My intentions. Of course, this does not exclude the combination of internal and external factors. Nevertheless, his one imperfection was that, because of his talents, he would often be glib and boastful. As a result, due to his rebelliousness, part of which directly represented the archangel, when I became flesh for the first time, he made every effort to defy Me. He was one of those who do not know My words, and My place in his heart had already vanished. Such people directly oppose My divinity, and are struck down by Me, and only bow down and confess their sins at the very end. Hence, after I had utilized his strong points—which is to say, after he had worked for Me for a period of time—he once more fell into his old ways, and although he did not rebel against My words directly, he rebelled against My inner guidance and enlightenment, and thus all that he had done in the past was futile; in other words, the crown of glory he spoke of had become empty words, a product of his own imagination, for even today he is still subjected to My judgment within the captivity of My bonds.

From the example above it can be seen that whoever opposes Me (by opposing not only My fleshly self but more importantly, My words and My Spirit—which is to say, My divinity), receives My judgment in their flesh. When My Spirit leaves you, you plummet downward, descending directly into Hades. And although your fleshly body is upon earth, you are like someone suffering from mental illness: You have lost your reason, and immediately feel as if you are a corpse, such that you beg Me to terminate your flesh without delay. Most of you who are possessed of the spirit have a deep appreciation of these circumstances, and I need not go into further detail. In the past, when I worked in normal humanity, most people had already measured themselves against My wrath and majesty, and already knew a little of My wisdom and disposition. Today, I speak and act directly in divinity, and there are still some people who will see My wrath and judgment with their own eyes; moreover, the main work of the second part of the era of judgment is to make all of My people know My deeds in the flesh directly, and to make all of you behold My disposition directly. Yet because I am in the flesh, I am considerate of your weaknesses. My hope is that you do not treat your spirit, soul and body as playthings, unthinkingly dedicating them to Satan. It is better to treasure all that you have, and to not treat it like a game, for such things relate to your fate. Are you really able to understand the true meaning of My words? Are you really capable of being considerate of My true feelings?

Are you willing to enjoy My blessings on earth, blessings that are akin to those in heaven? Are you willing to treasure understanding of Me, enjoyment of My words, and knowledge of Me as the most valuable and meaningful things in your life? Are you truly able to fully submit to Me, without thought to your own prospects? Are you truly able to allow yourselves to be put to death by Me, and led by Me, like a sheep? Are there any among you capable of achieving such things? Could it be that all who are accepted by Me and receive My promises are the ones who gain My blessings? Have you understood anything from these words? If I test you, can you truly put yourselves at My mercy, and, in the midst of these trials, search for My intentions and perceive My heart? I do not wish for you to be able to speak many touching words, or tell many exciting stories; rather, I ask that you are able to bear fine testimony to Me, and that you can fully and deeply enter into reality. If I did not speak directly, could you forsake everything around you and allow yourself to be used by Me? Is this not the reality that I require? Who is able to grasp the meaning in My words? Yet I ask that you no longer be weighed down by misgivings, that you be proactive in your entry and grasp the essence of My words. This will prevent you from misunderstanding My words, and from being unclear as to My meaning, and thus violating My administrative decrees. I hope that you grasp My intentions for you in My words. Think no more of your own prospects, and act as you have resolved before Me to let God orchestrate you in all things. All of those who stand within My household should do as much as they possibly can; you should offer the best of yourself to the last section of My work on earth. Are you truly willing to put such things into practice?

February 23, 1992

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 5

The voice of My Spirit is an expression of the whole of My disposition. Do you understand? To be unclear on this point would be tantamount to resisting Me directly. Have you genuinely seen the importance that lies herein? Do you really know how much effort, how much energy, I expend on you? Do you really dare to lay bare what you have done and how you have behaved before Me? And you have the nerve to call yourselves My people to My face—you have no shame, much less any sense! Sooner or later, people like you will be cast out from My house! Do not come the old soldier with Me, assuming that you have stood testimony for Me! Is this something that humanity is capable of doing? If nothing remained of your intentions and your goals, you would long since have struck out on a different path. Do you think I do not know how much the human heart can hold? From this time forth, in all things, you must enter into the reality of practice; merely flapping your gums, as you have done in the past, will no longer get you by. In the past, most of you managed to freeload under My roof; the fact that you are able to stand firm today is entirely due to the severity of My words. Do you think I speak randomly and without purpose? Impossible! I look down upon all things from on high, and exercise dominion over all things from on high. In the same way, I have put in place My salvation upon the earth. There is never a moment when I am not watching, from My secret place, humans’ every move and everything they say and do. Humans are to Me open books: I see and know them one and all. The secret place is My abode, and the entire vault of heaven is the bed on which I lie. Satan’s forces cannot reach Me, for I am overflowing with majesty, righteousness, and judgment. An ineffable mystery resides in My words. When I am speaking, you become like fowls that have just been cast into water, overwhelmed with confusion, or babies who have just had a fright, seeming to know nothing, because your spirit has fallen into a state of stupefaction. Why do I say that the secret place is My abode? Do you know the deeper meaning of My words? Who among humans are capable of knowing Me? Who are capable of knowing Me as they know their own father and mother? Resting in My abode, I observe closely: All the people on earth bustle about, “traveling around the world” and rushing back and forth, all for the sake of their destiny and their future. Not a single one, though, has the energy to spare for building My kingdom, not even so much as the effort it takes to draw breath. I created humans, and I have rescued them many times from tribulation; however, these humans are all ingrates: Not a single one among them is able to enumerate all the instances of My salvation. It has been so many years—so many centuries—from the creation of the world down to the present day; I have worked so many miracles and made My wisdom manifest so many times. Nevertheless, humans are as demented and numb as the mentally ill, and even sometimes like wild beasts flailing about in the forest, without the slightest intention of paying heed to My affairs. Many times, I have given humans the death sentence and condemned them to die, but My management plan cannot be altered by anyone. And therefore, in My hands, humans continue to reveal the old things to which they cling. Because of the steps of My work, I have, once again, rescued you beings who were born into a big family that is degenerate, depraved, filthy, and sordid.

My planned work keeps pressing forward without a moment’s surcease. Having moved into the Age of Kingdom, and having carried you into My kingdom as My people, I will have other demands to make of you; that is to say, I will begin to promulgate before you the constitution with which I will govern this era:

Since you are called My people, you should be able to glorify My name; that is, stand testimony in the midst of trial. If anyone attempts to wheedle Me and conceal the truth from Me, or engage in disreputable dealings behind My back, such people will, without exception, be chased out and removed from My house to wait for Me to deal with them. Those who have been unfaithful and unfilial to Me in the past, and who rise up again today to judge Me openly—they, too, will be chased out of My house. Those who are My people must constantly show consideration for My burdens as well as seek to know My words. Only people like this will I enlighten, and they will surely live under My guidance and enlightenment, never meeting with chastisement. Those who, failing to show consideration for My burdens, concentrate on planning for their own futures—that is, those who do not aim with their actions to satisfy My heart, but rather who look for handouts—these beggar-like creatures I absolutely refuse to use, because from the time they were born, they have known nothing of what it means to show consideration for My burdens. They are people who lack normal sense; such people are suffering from “malnutrition” of the brain, and need to go home for some “nourishment.” I have no use for such people. Among My people, everyone will be required to regard knowing Me as an obligatory duty to be seen through to the end, like eating, dressing, and sleeping, something that one never forgets about for a moment, so that in the end, knowing Me will become as familiar as eating—something you do effortlessly, with a practiced hand. As for the words I speak, every single one must be taken with the utmost faith and fully assimilated; there can be no perfunctory half-measures. Anyone who does not pay attention to My words will be regarded as directly resisting Me; anyone who does not eat of My words, or does not seek to know them, will be regarded as not paying attention to Me, and will directly be swept out the door of My house. This is because, as I have said in the past, what I want is not a great number of people, but excellence. Out of a hundred people, if only one is able to know Me through My words, then I will willingly throw away all the others to focus on enlightening and illuminating this single one. From this you can see that it is not necessarily true that greater numbers alone can manifest Me and live Me out. What I want is wheat (even though the kernels may not be full) and not tares (even when the kernels are full enough to be admired). As for those who give no regard to seeking, but who instead behave in a slack manner, they should leave of their own accord; I do not wish to see them anymore, lest they continue to bring disgrace to My name. Regarding what I require of My people, I will stop at these precepts for now, and will wait to make further sanctions, depending on how circumstances change.

In days past, the great majority of people thought I was the God Himself of wisdom, that I was the very God who saw deep into the hearts of humans; however, this was just superficial talk. If humans had truly known Me, they would not have presumed to leap to conclusions, but would instead have kept on trying to know Me through My words. Only when they had arrived at a stage where they truly saw My deeds would they have been worthy to call Me Wise and Wonderful. Your knowledge of Me is too shallow. Throughout the ages, so many people have served Me for so many years and, having seen My deeds, genuinely come to know something of Me. For this reason, they always used to have a submissive heart toward Me, not daring to harbor the least intention of opposing Me due to how difficult it is to seek out My footprints. If My guidance were absent among these people, they would not dare to act rashly. Therefore, after living through many years of experience, they eventually generalized a portion of knowledge about Me, calling Me Wise, Wonderful, and Counselor, that My words are like a double-edged sword, that My deeds are great, astounding, and wondrous, that I am robed in majesty, that My wisdom reaches higher than the firmament, and other insights. Today, however, your knowledge of Me is merely based on the foundation they have laid, so the great majority of you—like parrots—are just mouthing the words that they have spoken. It is only because I take into account how shallow is the way in which you know Me and how poor your “education” is that I have spared you so much chastisement. Even so, the great majority of you still do not know yourselves, or think you have already aspired to My will in your deeds, and for this reason have escaped judgment; or that, after having become flesh, I have completely lost track of humanity’s doings, and that for this reason you have also escaped chastisement; or that the God you believe in does not exist in the wide spaces of the universe, and so you have relegated knowing God to a chore to be done in your spare time rather than something to hold in your hearts as a duty that must be done, using belief in God as a way of beguiling the time that otherwise would be spent in idleness. If I did not take pity on your lack of qualifications, reason, and insights, then all of you would perish in the midst of My chastisement, wiped out from existence. Nevertheless, until My work on earth is finished, I will remain lenient to humankind. This is something you must all have knowledge of, and stop getting good and bad confused.

February 25, 1992

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 6

Be perceptive toward matters of the spirit, attentive toward My word, and truly capable of regarding My Spirit and My being, and My word and My being, as an inseparable whole, so that all people can satisfy Me in My presence. I have set foot upon all there is, I have looked out across the vast expanse of the universe, and I have walked among all people, tasting the sweetness and bitterness among man—yet never has man truly known Me, never has he paid Me any heed during My travels. Because I was silent, and never performed supernatural acts, no one ever truly saw Me. Today is unlike the past: I shall do things never beheld since the time of creation, shall speak words never heard throughout the ages, for I ask that all people come to know Me in the flesh. These are the steps of My management, but man has not the slightest inkling. Though I have spoken plainly, people remain addled; it is difficult to get through to them. Is this not the lowliness of man? Is it not precisely what I wish to remedy? For years, I did nothing in man; for years, despite being in direct contact with My incarnate flesh, no one ever heard the voice that issued directly from My divinity. Thus do people inevitably lack knowledge of Me, though this has not affected their love for Me through the ages. Today, however, I have performed in you miraculous work, work that is unfathomable and without measure, and I have spoken many words. And yet, under such circumstances, there are still many who resist Me directly in My presence. Let Me now give you a few examples.

Daily you pray to a vague God, trying to grasp My will and get a sense of life. Yet when faced with My words, you look at them differently; you regard My words and Spirit as a whole, yet kick aside My being, believing the person that I am fundamentally incapable of uttering such words, that they are directed by My Spirit. What of your knowledge in such circumstances? You believe in My words to a point yet have notions of varying severity toward the flesh with which I clothe Myself. You spend every day studying it, and say, “Why does He do things in that way? Do they really come from God? Impossible! He is not much different from me—He is a normal, ordinary person as well.” How can such circumstances be explained?

Who among you does not possess the above? Who is not occupied by such things? They appear to be things you hold onto like pieces of personal property, never willing to let them go. Still less do you pursue subjective efforts; instead, you wait for Me to do it Myself. Truth be told, not a single person who does not seek comes to know Me with ease. These are not frivolous words that I teach you. For I can give you another example from another perspective for your reference.

At the mention of Peter, people have no end of good things to say about him. They immediately recall the three times that he disowned God, how he tested God by giving service to Satan, and how he was ultimately crucified upside down for God, and so on. Now I am going to focus on describing to you how Peter knew Me and what his final end was. Peter was of good caliber, but his circumstances were not like those of Paul: His parents persecuted Me, they were demons that had been possessed by Satan and, as a result, they taught nothing of God to Peter. Peter was clever, gifted, and doted on by his parents from a young age. Yet as an adult, he became their enemy because he never stopped pursuing the knowledge of Me, and subsequently turned his back on them. This was because, above all else, he believed that heaven and earth and all things are in the hands of the Almighty and that all positive things come from God and are directly issued from Him without being processed by Satan. The contradistinction of Peter’s parents gave him a greater knowledge of My lovingkindness and mercy, thus heightening his desire to seek Me. He focused not just on eating and drinking My words, but, moreover, on grasping My will, and was ever vigilant in his heart. As a result, he was always sensitive in his spirit, and hence he was after My own heart in all he did. He maintained a constant focus on the failures of people in the past to spur himself on, profoundly fearful of becoming ensnared in failure. So, too, did he concentrate on assimilating the faith and love of all those who had loved God throughout the ages. In this way—not only in negative aspects, but much more importantly, in positive aspects—he grew more quickly, such that his knowledge became the greatest of all in My presence. It is not difficult to imagine, then, how he put everything he had in My hands, how he even surrendered making decisions about food, clothing, sleeping and where he lived, and instead enjoyed My riches upon the basis of satisfying Me in all things. I subjected him to countless trials—trials, naturally, that left him half-dead—but amidst these hundreds of trials, he never once lost faith in Me or felt disappointed in Me. Even when I said I had forsaken him, still he was not discouraged, and continued to love Me in a practical way and in accordance with past principles of practice. I told him that I would not praise him even though he loved Me, that I would ultimately cast him into Satan’s hands. But amid such trials, trials that did not come upon his flesh, but were of words, he still prayed to Me and said, “O God! Among heaven and earth and all things, is there any person, any thing, or any event that is not in the hands of You, the Almighty? When You are merciful toward me, my heart greatly rejoices with Your mercy. When You judge me, unworthy though I may be, I gain a greater sense of the unfathomableness of Your deeds, because You are filled with authority and wisdom. Though my flesh suffers hardship, my spirit is comforted. How could I not give praise to Your wisdom and deeds? Even if I were to die after knowing You, how could I not do so gladly and happily? Almighty One! Do You really not wish to let me see You? Am I really unfit to receive Your judgment? Could it be that there is something in me You do not wish to see?” During such trials, even though Peter was not able to accurately grasp My will, it was evident that he was proud and honored to be used by Me (even though he received My judgment so that humanity might see My majesty and wrath), and that he was not distressed by these trials. Because of his loyalty before Me, and because of My blessing of him, he has been an exemplar and model to man for thousands of years. Is this not precisely what you should emulate? Think long and hard about why I have given such a lengthy account of Peter; these should be the principles by which you act.

Though few people know Me, I do not unleash My wrath upon man, for people are too lacking, and it is hard for them to attain the level that I ask of them. Thus, I have been tolerant of man for thousands of years, right up until today, yet I hope that you will not go easy on yourselves on account of My tolerance. Through Peter, you should come to know Me and seek after Me; from all of his exploits, you should be enlightened as never before, and thus attain realms never before reached by man. Throughout the cosmos and the firmament, among everything in heaven and on earth, all things upon the earth and in heaven give their every effort to My final stage of work. Surely you do not wish to be spectators, ordered about by the forces of Satan? Satan is ever present devouring the knowledge of Me in people’s hearts, gnashing its teeth and flexing its claws in its final death throes. Do you wish to fall prey to its cunning schemes at this time? Do you wish to ruin your life at the time when My work is finally completed? Are you waiting for Me to show My tolerance once more? Pursuing knowledge of Me is key, but focusing on practice is indispensable. My words are revealed to you directly, and I hope that you can follow My guidance, and no longer have plans and ambitions for yourselves.

February 27, 1992

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 8

When My revelations reach their climax, and when My judgment draws to an end, it will be the time when all My people are revealed and made complete. I journey to all corners of the universe world in perpetual search of those who align with My intention and are fit for My use. Who can rise up and cooperate with Me? Humans’ love of Me is minuscule, and their faith in Me is also pitifully small. If I did not direct the brunt of My words at people’s weaknesses, they would boast and exaggerate, pontificating and coming up with bombastic theories, as if they were omniscient and all-knowing with regard to earthly matters. Of those who were “loyal” to Me in the past, and of those who today “stand fast” before Me, who still dares to speak boastfully? Who is not secretly delighted for their own prospects? When I did not expose people directly, they had nowhere to hide and were tormented by shame. How much more would that be so if I spoke in a different manner? People would have an even greater sense of indebtedness, believe that nothing could cure them, and would all be tightly bound by their negativity. When people lose hope, the kingdom’s salute formally rings out, which is, as people have said, “the time when the sevenfold intensified Spirit begins to work.” In other words, this is when the life of the kingdom officially begins on earth; it is when My divinity comes forth to act directly (without any mental “processing”). All people rush busily about, as though they had been revived or roused from a dream, and, on awakening, are astonished to find themselves in such circumstances. In the past, I said much about the building of the church; I revealed many mysteries, but when that work reached its peak, it came to an abrupt end. The building of the kingdom, however, is different. Only when the war in the spiritual realm reaches its final stage do I begin My work anew on earth. That is to say, it is only when all humans are on the verge of retreat that I formally begin and raise up My new work. The difference between the building of the kingdom and the building of the church is that in building the church, I worked through a humanity that was governed by divinity; I directly prune humans’ old nature, revealing directly their ugly selves and exposing their substance. As a result, they came to know themselves on this basis, and so were convinced in their hearts and in their words. In building the kingdom, I act directly through My divinity, and allow all people to know what I have and am on the foundation of their knowledge of My words, ultimately allowing them to attain knowledge of Me as flesh incarnate. Thus ends all humankind’s pursuit of the vague God, and thus do they cease holding a place in their hearts for the God in heaven; that is, I let humanity know the deeds I do while I am flesh incarnate, and so shall conclude My time on earth.

The building of the kingdom is aimed directly at the spiritual realm. That is, the state of battle of the spiritual realm is made plain directly among all My people, and this suffices to show that not only within the church, but also and more so in the Age of Kingdom, every person is constantly at war. Despite their physical bodies, the spiritual realm is revealed directly, and they come in contact with the life of the spiritual realm. Thus, when you begin to be faithful, you must prepare properly for the next part of My work. You should give over the entirety of your heart; only then can you satisfy My heart. I care nothing for what happened previously in the church; today, it is in the kingdom. In My plan, Satan has, all along, been stalking behind each step and, as the foil of My wisdom, has always been trying to find ways and means to disrupt My original plan. Yet could I succumb to its deceitful schemes? Everything in heaven and on earth serves Me; could the deceitful schemes of Satan be any different? This is precisely where My wisdom intersects; it is precisely that which is wondrous about My deeds, and it is the principle of operation for My entire management plan. During the era of the building of the kingdom, still I do not avoid the deceitful schemes of Satan, but continue to do the work I must. Among the universe and all things, I have chosen the deeds of Satan as My foil. Is this not a manifestation of My wisdom? Is this not precisely that which is wondrous about My work? On the occasion of entry into the Age of Kingdom, all things in heaven and on earth are utterly transformed, and they celebrate and rejoice. Are you any different? In whose heart is there not the sweetness of honey? Who is not bursting for joy? Who does not dance with delight? Who does not speak words of praise?

Do you grasp the aims and origin of all I have talked of and discussed above, or do you not? If I did not ask this, most people would believe I were merely prattling on, and would be unable to fathom the source of My words. If you ponder them carefully, you will know their importance. You would do well to read them closely: Which of My words are not of benefit to you? Which are not meant to cause your life to grow? Which do not speak of the reality of the spiritual realm? Most people believe there is no rhyme or reason to My words, that they lack explanation and interpretation. Are My words really so abstract and inscrutable? Do you truly submit to My words? Do you truly accept My words? Do you not treat them as toys? Do you not use them as clothing to cover your ugly appearance? In this vast world, who has personally been examined by Me? Who has personally heard the words of My Spirit? So many people grope and search in the darkness; so many pray amid adversity; so many, hungry and cold, watch in hope; and so many are bound by Satan; yet so many know not where to turn, so many betray Me in the midst of their happiness, so many are ungrateful, and so many are loyal to the deceitful schemes of Satan. Who among you is Job? Who is Peter? Why have I repeatedly mentioned Job? Why have I referred to Peter so many times? Have you ever ascertained what My hopes for you are? You should spend more time pondering such things.

Peter was faithful to Me for many years, yet he never grumbled nor had any complaint; even Job was not his equal, and, throughout the ages, the saints have all fallen far short of Peter. He not only sought to know Me, but also came to know Me during a time when Satan was enacting its deceitful schemes. This led Peter to serve Me for many years, always in line with My will, and for this reason, he was never exploited by Satan. Peter drew lessons from the faith of Job, yet also clearly perceived Job’s shortcomings. Although Job had been of great faith, he lacked knowledge of matters in the spiritual realm, so he said many words that did not correspond to reality; this shows that Job’s knowledge was shallow and incapable of perfection. Therefore, Peter focused always on gaining a sense of the spirit, and always paid attention to observing the dynamics of the spiritual realm. As a result, he not only was able to ascertain something of My wishes, but also had a modicum of knowledge of the deceitful schemes of Satan. Because of this, his knowledge of Me grew to be greater than anyone else’s throughout the ages.

From Peter’s experience, it is not hard to see that if humans wish to know Me, they must focus on giving careful consideration within their spirits. I do not ask that you “dedicate” a certain amount to Me externally; this is of secondary concern. If you do not know Me, then all the faith, love, and loyalty of which you speak are but illusions; they are froth, and you are sure to become someone who makes great boasts before Me but does not know himself. As such, you will once more be ensnared by Satan and unable to extricate yourself; you will become a son of perdition and an object of destruction. However, if you are cold and uncaring toward My words, then you undoubtedly oppose Me. This is fact, and you would do well to look through the gate of the spiritual realm at the many and varied spirits that have been chastised by Me. Which of them, faced with My words, was not negative, uncaring, and unaccepting? Which of them was not cynical about My words? Which of them did not try to find fault with My words? Which of them did not use My words as “defensive weapons” with which to “protect” themselves? They did not use the contents of My words as a way to know Me, but merely as toys to play with. In this, were they not resisting Me directly? Who are My words? Who is My Spirit? I have asked you such questions so many times, yet have you ever gotten any higher and clear insights about them? Have you ever truly experienced them? I remind you once again: If you do not know My words, nor accept them, nor put them into practice, then you will inevitably become objects of My chastisement! You will surely become victims of Satan!

February 29, 1992

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 10

The Age of Kingdom is, after all, different from times past. It does not concern how humanity acts; rather, I have descended upon the earth to personally carry out My work, which is something that human beings can neither conceive of nor accomplish. For so many years, ever since the creation of the world, the work has only been about building the church, but one never hears of building the kingdom. Even though I speak of this with My own mouth, is there anyone who knows the substance of it? I once descended into the world of humans and experienced and observed their suffering, but did so without fulfilling the purpose of My incarnation. Once the building of the kingdom got under way, My incarnate flesh formally began to perform My ministry; that is, the King of the kingdom formally took up His sovereign power. From this it is evident that the descent of the kingdom into the human world—far from being merely a literal manifestation—is one of actual reality; this is one aspect of the meaning of “the reality of practice.” Humans have never seen a single one of My acts, nor have they ever heard a single one of My utterances. Even if they had seen My acts, what would they have discovered? And should they have heard Me speak, what would they have comprehended? Throughout the world, everyone exists within My mercy and lovingkindness, but so does all humanity lie under My judgment, and likewise is subject to My trials. I have been merciful and loving to people, even when they had all been corrupted to a certain degree; I have meted out chastisement to them, even when they all had surrendered before My throne. However, is there any human being who is not in the midst of the suffering and refinement that I have dispatched? So many people are groping through the darkness for the light, and so many are struggling bitterly through their trials. Job had faith, but was he not seeking a way out for himself? Although My people can stand firm in the face of trials, is there anyone who, without uttering it aloud, deep down also has faith? Is it not rather that people voice their beliefs while still harboring doubts in their hearts? There are no human beings who have stood fast in trial or who genuinely submit when being tried. If I did not cover My face to avoid looking at this world, the entire human race would topple under My burning gaze, for I ask nothing of humanity.

When the salute to the kingdom rings out—which is also when the seven thunders peal—this sound convulses heaven and earth, shaking up the empyrean and causing the heartstrings of every human being to vibrate. The anthem to the kingdom ceremoniously rises up in the land of the great red dragon, proving that I have destroyed that nation and established My kingdom. Even more importantly, My kingdom is established upon the earth. At this moment, I begin sending My angels out to every one of the world’s nations so that they may shepherd My sons, My people; this is also to meet the requirements of the next step of My work. However, I personally come to the place where the great red dragon lies coiled, and compete with it. Once all of humanity comes to know Me in the flesh and is able to see My deeds in the flesh, the great red dragon’s lair will turn to ashes and vanish without a trace. As the people of My kingdom, since you hate the great red dragon to the bone, you must satisfy My heart with your actions, and in this way bring shame upon the dragon. Do you genuinely sense that the great red dragon is hateful? Do you truly feel that it is the enemy of the kingdom’s King? Do you really have faith that you can bear wonderful testimony for Me? Are you actually confident that you can defeat the great red dragon? This is what I ask of you; all I need is for you to be able to reach this step. Will you be able to do this? Do you have faith that you can achieve this? What exactly are humans capable of doing? Is it not rather that I do it Myself? Why do I say that I personally descend upon the location in which the battle is joined? What I want is your faith, not your deeds. Human beings are all incapable of comprehending My words in a straightforward manner, and instead just give a sideways glance at them. Has this helped you to achieve your goals? Have you come to know Me in this way? To be honest, of the humans on earth, not one is capable of looking Me straight in the face, and not one is able to comprehend the pure and unadulterated meaning of My words. I therefore have set in motion an unprecedented project upon the earth, in order to attain My goals and establish the true image of Myself in people’s hearts. In this way, I will bring to an end the era in which notions wield power over people.

Today, not only am I descending upon the nation of the great red dragon, I am also turning to face the entire universe, causing the entire empyrean to quake. Is there a single place anywhere that is not subject to My judgment? Is there a single place that does not exist under calamities that I rain down upon it? Everywhere I go, I have scattered all sorts of “seeds of disaster.” This is one of the ways in which I work, and is without doubt an act of salvation for humanity, and what I extend to them is still a kind of love. I wish to allow even more people to get to know Me and be able to see Me, and in this way, come to fear a God whom they could not see for so many years but who, right now, is practical. For what reason did I create the world? Why, after humans had become corrupt, did I not completely annihilate them? For what reason does the whole of the human race live amidst disasters? What was My purpose in donning the flesh? When I am performing My work, humanity learns the taste not only of the bitter, but also of the sweet. Of all the people in the world, who does not live within My grace? If I had not endowed human beings with material blessings, who in the world would be able to enjoy plenty? Could it be that allowing you to take up your place as My people is a blessing? Were you not My people, but rather service-doers, would you not be existing within My blessings? Not one among you is capable of fathoming the origin of My words. Humanity—far from treasuring the titles that I have conferred upon them, so many of them, on account of the title “service-doer,” nurse resentment in their hearts, and so many, on account of the title “My people,” breed love for Me in their hearts. No one should try to fool Me; My eyes are all-seeing! Who among you receives willingly, who among you gives complete submission? If the salute to the kingdom did not ring out, would you truly be able to submit to the end? What humans are capable of doing and thinking, and how far they are able to go—all these things I predetermined long ago.

The vast majority of people accept My burning in the light of My countenance. The vast majority of people, inspired by My encouragement, stir themselves to forge ahead in seeking. When the forces of Satan attack My people, I am there to fend them off; when Satan’s plots wreak havoc in their lives, I send it scampering away in a rout, once gone never to return. On earth, all manner of evil spirits are forever on the prowl for a place to rest, and are endlessly searching for human corpses that can be consumed. My people! You must remain within My care and protection. Never be dissolute! Never behave recklessly! You should offer up your loyalty in My house, and only with loyalty can you mount a countercharge against the trickery of devils. Under no circumstances should you behave as you did in the past, doing one thing in front of Me and another behind My back; if you act this way, then you are already beyond redemption. Have I not uttered more than enough words such as these? It is precisely because humanity’s old nature is incorrigible that I have had to give people repeated reminders. Do not get bored! All that I say is for the sake of ensuring your destiny! A foul and filthy place is precisely what Satan needs; the more hopelessly irredeemable and the more dissolute you are, refusing to submit to restraint, then the more those unclean spirits will avail themselves of any opportunity to infiltrate you. If you have gotten to this point, then your loyalty will be nothing but idle chatter, without any reality to it whatsoever, and the unclean spirits will gulp down your resolution and transform it into rebellion and satanic plots to be used to disrupt My work. From there, you could be smitten by Me at any time. No one understands the gravity of this situation; people all simply turn a deaf ear to what they hear, and are not the least bit cautious. I remember not what was done in the past; are you actually still waiting for Me to be lenient toward you by “forgetting” once more? Though humans have opposed Me, I will not hold it against them, for they are too small of stature, and so I have not made overly high demands of them. All I require is that they not be dissolute, and that they submit to restraint. Surely it is not beyond your capacity to meet this one stipulation, is it? Most people are waiting for Me to reveal even more mysteries for them to feast their eyes upon. However, even if you came to understand all the mysteries of heaven, exactly what could you do with that knowledge? Would it increase your love for Me? Would it arouse your love for Me? I do not underestimate humans, nor do I arrive at a verdict about them lightly. If these were not the actual circumstances of humans, I would never crown them with such labels so casually. Think back upon the past: How many times have I slandered you? How many times have I underestimated you? How many times have I looked upon you without regard for your actual circumstances? How many times have My utterances failed to win you over wholeheartedly? How many times have I spoken without striking a deeply resonant chord within you? Who among you has read My words without fear and trembling, deeply afraid that I will strike you down into the bottomless pit? Who does not endure trials from My words? Within My utterances resides authority, but this is not for passing casual judgment on humans; rather, mindful of their actual circumstances, I constantly manifest to them the meaning inherent in My words. In point of fact, is there anyone who is capable of recognizing My omnipotent might in My words? Is there anyone who can comprehend the purest gold in My words? Just how many words have I spoken? Has anyone ever treasured them?

March 3, 1992

Kingdom Anthem

The multitudes cheer Me, the multitudes praise Me; all mouths name the one true God, all people lift their eyes to watch My deeds. The kingdom descends upon the world of men, My person is rich and bountiful. Who would not rejoice at this? Who would not dance for joy? Oh, Zion! Raise your triumphant banner to celebrate Me! Sing your triumphant song of victory to spread My holy name! All creation unto the ends of the earth! Hasten to cleanse yourselves that you may be made as offerings to Me! Constellations of the heavens! Hasten back to your places to show My mighty power in the firmament! I lend My ear to the voices of the people on earth, who pour out their infinite love and reverence for Me in song! On this day, when all creation returns to life, I come down into the world of men. At this moment, at this very juncture, all flowers burst into riotous bloom, all birds sing as with one voice, all things palpitate with joy! In the sound of the kingdom’s salute, Satan’s kingdom topples down, annihilated in the thundering of the kingdom anthem, never to rise again!

Who on the earth dares to rise and resist? As I descend to earth, I bring burning, bring wrath, bring catastrophes of all kinds. The earthly kingdoms are now My kingdom! Up in the sky, the clouds tumble and billow; under the sky, lakes and rivers surge and joyously churn out a stirring melody. Resting animals emerge from their dens, and all peoples are aroused from their slumbers by Me. The day awaited by the multitudinous peoples has come at last! They offer up the most beautiful songs to Me!

At this beautiful moment, at this exhilarating time,

praise rings out everywhere, in the heavens above and earth below. Who would not be excited at this?

Whose heart would not lighten? Who would not weep at this scene?

The sky is not the sky of old, now it is the sky of the kingdom.

The earth is not the earth it was, now it is the holy land.

After a heavy rain has passed, the filthy old world is wholly made anew.

The mountains are changing … the waters changing …

people too changing … all things changing….

Ah, ye silent mountains! Arise and dance for Me!

Ah, ye still waters! Go on flowing freely!

You men dreaming dreams! Rouse yourselves and give chase!

I am come … I am King….

All mankind shall see with their own eyes My face, shall hear with their own ears My voice,

shall live for themselves the life of the kingdom….

How sweet … how beautiful….

Unforgettable … impossible to forget….

In the burning of My wrath, the great red dragon struggles;

in My majestic judgment, devils show their true forms;

at My stern words, people all feel deep shame, and have nowhere to hide themselves.

They recall the past, how they mocked and derided Me.

There was never a time when they did not show off themselves, never a time when they did not rebel against Me.

Today, who does not weep? Who does not feel remorse?

The entire universe world is filled with weeping …

filled with the sounds of rejoicing … filled with laughing voices….

Incomparable joy … joy without compare….

A small rain pattering … heavy flakes of fluttering snow….

Inside people, sorrow and joy commingling … some laughing …

some sobbing … and some cheering….

As if everyone’s forgotten … whether this is a spring rife with rain and clouds,

a summer of flowers bursting into bloom, an autumn of rich harvests,

or a winter cold as frost and ice, no one knows….

In the sky clouds are drifting, on the earth the oceans roil.

The sons wave their arms … the people move their feet in dance….

The angels are at work … the angels are shepherding….

The people on earth are all a-bustle, and all the things on earth multiply.

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 12

When lightning issues from the East, which is also precisely the moment that I begin to utter My words—when the lightning issues, the whole universe is illuminated, and a transformation occurs in all the stars. The entire human race is as if it had been sorted out. Under the glow of this shaft of light from the East, all of mankind is revealed in their original form, their eyes dazzled, unsure what to do, and less sure still how to conceal their ugly features. They are also like unto animals that flee from My light and take refuge in mountain caves—yet not one among them can be effaced from within My light. All humans are astounded, all are waiting, all are watching; with the advent of My light, all rejoice at the day they were born, and likewise all curse the day they were born. Conflicting emotions are impossible to articulate; tears of self-castigation form rivers, and are borne away in the sweeping torrent, gone without trace in an instant. Once again, My day presses close upon all humanity, once again arousing the human race, giving humanity another new beginning. My heart beats and, following the rhythms of My heartbeat, the mountains leap for joy, the waters dance with joy, and the waves beat upon the rocky reefs. It is difficult to express what is in My heart. I want to make all unclean things burn into ashes under My gaze; I want to make all the sons of rebellion disappear from before My eyes, never more to tarry in existence. Not only have I made a new beginning in the dwelling place of the great red dragon, I have also embarked on new work in the universe. Soon, the kingdoms of the earth will become My kingdom; soon, the kingdoms of the earth will forever cease to exist because of My kingdom, because I have already achieved victory, because I have returned triumphant. The great red dragon has exhausted every conceivable means to disrupt My plan, hoping to erase My work on the earth, but can I grow disheartened by its deceitful stratagems? Can I be frightened into losing confidence by its threats? There has never been a single being in heaven or on earth that I have not held in the palm of My hand; how much the more is this true of the great red dragon, this device that serves as a foil to Me? Is it not also an object to be manipulated in My hands?

During My incarnation in the human world, mankind has come, under My guidance, unwittingly to this day and has come unwittingly to know Me. But, as for how to walk the path that lies ahead, no one has an inkling, no one is aware—and less still does anyone have a clue in what direction that path will take them. Only with the Almighty watching over them will anyone be able to walk the path to the end; only guided by the lightning in the East will anyone be able to cross the threshold that leads to My kingdom. Among men, there has never been one who has seen My face, one who has seen the lightning in the East; how much the less has there been one who has heard the utterances from My throne? In fact, from ancient times, not one human being has come into direct contact with My person; only today, now that I have come into the world, do men have a chance to see Me. But even now, men still do not know Me, just as they only look upon My face and only hear My voice yet do not understand My meaning. All human beings are like this. Being one of My people, do you not feel deep pride when you see My face? And do you not feel abject shame because you do not know Me? I walk among men and I live among men, for I have become flesh and I have come into the human world. My aim is not merely to enable humanity to look upon My flesh; more importantly, it is to enable humanity to know Me. What is more, I will, through My incarnate flesh, convict humanity of their sins; I will, through My incarnate flesh, vanquish the great red dragon and annihilate its lair.

Although the human beings that populate the earth are as numerous as the stars, I know them all as clearly as the palm of My own hand. And, though the human beings that “love” Me are also as innumerable as grains of sand in the sea, only a few are chosen by Me: only those who pursue the bright light, who are apart from those who “love” Me. I do not overestimate man, nor do I underestimate him; rather, I make demands of man according to his natural attributes, and so what I require is the kind of person who seeks Me sincerely, that I may achieve My goal of choosing people. There are wild beasts without number in the mountains, but they are all as tame as sheep before Me; unfathomable mysteries lie beneath the waves, but they present themselves to Me as clearly as all things upon the face of the earth; in the heavens above are realms that man can never reach, yet I walk about freely in those inaccessible realms. Man has never recognized Me in the light, but has only seen Me in the world of darkness. Are you not in exactly the same situation today? It was at the climax of the great red dragon’s rampages that I formally assumed the flesh to do My work. When the great red dragon revealed its true form for the first time, I bore witness to My name. When I walked about on the roads of mankind, not one being nor one person was startled into wakefulness, and so when I came incarnate into the human world, nobody knew it. But when, in My incarnate flesh, I began to take up My work, humanity awoke and was startled out of their dreams by My thunderous voice, and from this moment, they commenced their life under My guidance. Among My people, I have once again begun new work. Having said My work on earth is not finished suffices to show that My people of whom I spoke are not those I require in My heart, but nevertheless, I still choose some from among them. It is evident from this that I am not only enabling My people to know the incarnate God, but also cleansing them. Due to the severity of My administrative decrees, a great majority of people are still in danger of being cast out by Me. Unless you make every effort to prune yourself, to subdue your own body—unless you do this, you will assuredly become an object that I spurn, to be cast down into hell, just as Paul received chastisement directly from My hands, from which there was no escape. Have you gleaned something from My words? As before, it is My intention to cleanse the church, to continue to purify the people I need, because I am God Himself, who is all-holy and immaculate. I will make My temple not just iridescent with the colors of the rainbow, but also spotlessly clean, with an interior to match its exterior. In My presence, you, one and all, should think back on what you have done in the past, and decide whether today you can resolve to give Me perfect satisfaction in My heart.

Man does not merely not know Me in My flesh; more than that, he has failed to understand his own self that resides in a fleshly body. For so many years, human beings have been deceiving Me, treating Me as a guest from outside. So many times, they have shut Me outside the “doors to their homes”; so many times, they have, standing before Me, paid Me no heed; so many times they have renounced Me in the midst of other men; so many times, they have denied Me in front of devils; and so many times, they have attacked Me with their bickering mouths. Yet I do not keep account of man’s weaknesses, nor do I, on account of his rebellion, ask for a tooth for a tooth. All I have done is apply medicine to his illnesses, in order to cure his incurable diseases, thereby restoring him to health, that he may come to know Me. Has not all I have done been for the sake of humanity’s survival, for the sake of giving humanity a chance at life? Many times have I come into the world of men, but men did not, because I had come in My own person into the world, pay Me any regard; instead, each acted as he saw fit and sought a way out for himself. Little do they know that every single road below the heavens comes from My hands! Little do they know that every single thing below the heavens is subject to My ordination! Which one of you dares to harbor resentment in their heart? Which one of you dares lightly to come to a settlement? I have just been quietly going about My work in humanity’s midst—that is all. If, during the period of My incarnation, I had not sympathized with man’s weakness, then all of humanity would, solely on account of My incarnation, have been frightened out of their wits and, as a result, fallen into Hades. It is only because I humbled Myself and hid Myself away that humanity has escaped catastrophe, met deliverance from My chastisement, and, in this way, arrived at today. Mindful of how difficult it was to arrive at today, should you not cherish all the more the tomorrow that is still to come?

March 8, 1992

Rejoice, All Ye People!

In My light, people see the light again. In My word, people find the things that they enjoy. I have come from the East, I hail from the East. When My glory shines forth, all nations are lighted, all is brought into the light, not one thing remains in darkness. In the kingdom, the life that God’s people live with God is happy beyond measure. The waters dance with joy at the blessed lives of the people, the mountains enjoy with the people My abundance. All men are striving, working hard, showing their loyalty in My kingdom. In the kingdom, rebellion is no more, resistance no more; the heavens and the earth depend on each other, man and I draw close in deep feeling, through life’s sweet felicities, leaning one against the other…. At this time, I formally begin My life in heaven. Satan’s disturbance is no more, and the people enter into rest. Throughout the universe, My chosen people live within My glory, blessed beyond compare, not as people living among people, but as people living with God. All humanity has gone through Satan’s corruption, and drunk the bitter and the sweet of life to the lees. Now, living in My light, how can one not rejoice? How can one lightly forgo this beautiful moment and let it slip away? Ye People! Sing the song in your hearts and dance with joy for Me! Lift your sincere hearts and offer them up to Me! Beat your drums and play joyfully for Me! I radiate My delight through all the universe! To the people I reveal My glorious face! I shall call out in a loud voice! I shall transcend the universe! Already I reign among the people! I am exalted by the people! I drift in the blue heavens above and the people go walking along with Me. I walk among the people and My people surround Me! The people’s hearts are joyous, their songs shake the universe, cracking the empyrean! The universe is no longer shrouded in fog; there is no more mud, no more sewage gathering. Holy people of the universe! Under My inspection you show your true countenance. You are not men covered in filth, but saints pure as jade, you are all My beloved, you are all My delight! All things come back to life! The saints have all returned to serve Me in heaven, entering My warm embrace, no longer weeping, no longer anxious, offering themselves up to Me, coming back to My home, and in their homeland they will love Me without surcease! Never changing in all eternity! Where is the sorrow! Where are the tears! Where is the flesh! The earth passes away, but the heavens are forever. I appear to all peoples, and all peoples praise Me. This life, this beauty, from time immemorial till the end of time, shall not change. This is the life of the kingdom.

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 26

Who has abided in My home? Who has stood up for My sake? Who has suffered on My behalf? Who has pledged his word before Me? Who has followed Me to the present and yet has not become indifferent? Why are all human beings cold and unfeeling? Why has mankind abandoned Me? Why does humanity feel averse toward Me? Why is there no warmth in the human world? While in Zion, I have tasted the warmth that is in heaven, and while in Zion I have enjoyed the blessing that is in heaven. Again, I have lived in mankind’s midst, I have tasted the bitterness of the human world, and I have seen with My own eyes all the different states that exist amongst men. Unawares, man has changed as I have “changed,” and only in this way has he arrived at the present day. I do not require that man be able to do anything for My sake, nor do I require that he make any increase on My account. I only want him to be able to act in accordance with My plan, and not to rebel against Me or be a mark of shame to Me, but to bear resounding witness unto Me. Among men, there have been those who have borne Me good witness and glorified My name, but how can man’s practices or conduct possibly satisfy My heart? How can he possibly align with My heart or satisfy My will? Of the mountains and waters on the earth, and of the flowers, grasses, and trees on the earth, all show the work of My hands, all exist for My name. Yet why can man not achieve the standard of My demand? Could this be due to his abject lowliness? Could it be due to My exaltation of him? Could it be that I am too cruel to him? Why is man always fearful of My demands? Today, among the multitudes in the kingdom, why is it you only listen to My voice but do not wish to see My face? Why do you look only at My words without matching them to My Spirit? Why do you separate Me so, to heaven and to earth? Could it be that I, when on earth, am not the same as I am in heaven? Could it be that I, when in heaven, cannot come down to the earth? Could it be that I, when on earth, am unworthy to be borne up to heaven? It is as though I, when on earth, am a lowly creature, as though I, when in heaven, am an exalted being, and as though there lies between heaven and earth an unbridgeable chasm. Yet in the world of man they seem to know nothing of the origins of these things, but have been running always against Me, as though My words have only sound and no meaning. All mankind spends effort on My words, undertaking investigations of their own into My outward semblance, but they all meet with failure, their efforts bearing no fruit, and instead are struck down by My words and dare not get up again.

When I try mankind’s faith, not one human being bears true witness, not one is capable of offering his all; rather, man continues to hide and refuses to open himself, as if I were going to ravish his heart. Even Job never truly stood firm during his trial, nor did he emanate sweetness in the midst of suffering. All people produce a faint hint of green in the warmth of springtime; they never stay green in the cold blasts of winter. With his bony and emaciated stature, man cannot fulfill My intention. In all of humanity, there is no one who can serve as a model for others, because all men are basically alike and are no different from each other, with little to distinguish them one from another. For this reason, even today men are still unable to know My works fully. Only when My chastisement descends on all mankind will they, unbeknownst to themselves, become aware of My works, and without My doing anything or compelling anyone, man will come to know Me, and thereby witness My works. This is My plan, it is the aspect of My works that is made manifest, and it is what man should know. In the kingdom, the myriad things of creation begin to revive and regain their life force. Due to changes in the state of the earth, the boundaries between one land and another also begin to shift. I have prophesied that when land is divided from land, and land unites with land, this will be the time I will smash all nations to pieces. At this time, I will renew all of creation and repartition the entire universe, thereby putting the universe in order and transforming the old into the new—this is My plan and these are My works. When the nations and the peoples of the world all return before My throne, I will then take all the bounty of heaven and confer it upon the human world, so that, thanks to Me, that world will brim with matchless bounty. But so long as the old world continues to exist, I will hurl forth My rage upon its nations, openly promulgate My administrative decrees throughout the universe, and visit chastisement upon whosoever violates them:

As I turn My face to the universe to speak, all mankind hears My voice, and thereupon sees all the works I have wrought throughout the universe. Those who set themselves against My will, that is to say, who oppose Me with the deeds of man, will fall under My chastisement. I will take the multitudinous stars in the heavens and make them anew and, thanks to Me, the sun and the moon will be renewed—the skies will no longer be as they were and the myriad things on the earth will be renewed. All will become complete through My words. The many nations within the universe will be partitioned afresh and replaced by My kingdom, so that the nations upon the earth will disappear forever and all will become a kingdom that worships Me; all the nations of the earth will be destroyed and cease to exist. Of the human beings within the universe, all those belonging to the devil will be exterminated, and all who worship Satan will be laid low by My burning fire—that is, except for those now within the stream, all will be turned to ashes. When I chastise the many peoples, those in the religious world will, to varying extents, return to My kingdom, conquered by My works, because they will have seen the advent of the Holy One riding on a white cloud. All people will be separated according to their own kind, and will receive chastisements commensurate with their actions. All those who have stood against Me will perish; as for those whose deeds on earth have not involved Me, they will, because of how they have acquitted themselves, continue to exist on the earth under the governance of My sons and My people. I will reveal Myself to the myriad peoples and the myriad nations, and with My own voice, I will sound forth upon the earth, proclaiming the completion of My great work for all mankind to see with their own eyes.

As My voice deepens in intensity, I also observe the state of the universe. Through My words, the myriad things of creation are all made new. Heaven changes, as does the earth. Humanity is exposed in its original form and, slowly, each person is separated according to their kind, and finds their way unawares back into the bosom of their families. This will please Me greatly. I am free from disturbance and, imperceptibly, My great work is accomplished, and all the myriad things of creation are transformed. When I created the world, I fashioned all things according to their kind, placing all things with forms together with their kind. As the end of My management plan draws near, I will restore the former state of creation; I will restore everything to the way it originally was, profoundly changing everything, so that everything will return to the bosom of My plan. The time has come! The last stage of My plan is about to be accomplished. Ah, unclean old world! You shall surely fall beneath My words! You shall surely be reduced to nothingness by My plan! Ah, the myriad things of creation! You will all gain new life within My words—you shall have your Sovereign! Ah, pure and unblemished new world! You shall surely revive within My glory! Ah, Mount Zion! Be silent no more—I have returned in triumph! From the midst of creation, I scrutinize the whole earth. On earth, mankind has begun a new life and has won new hope. Ah, My people! How can you not come back to life within My light? How can you not jump for joy under My guidance? The lands are shouting in jubilation, the waters are raucous with gleeful laughter! Ah, the resurrected Israel! How can you not feel pride on account of My predestination? Who has wept? Who has wailed? The Israel of old has ceased to be, and today’s Israel has risen up, erect and towering in the world, and has stood up in the hearts of all humanity. Today’s Israel shall surely attain the source of existence through My people! Ah, hateful Egypt! Surely you do not still stand against Me? How can you take advantage of My mercy and try to escape My chastisement? How can you not exist within My chastisement? All those I love will surely live for eternity, and all those who stand against Me will surely be chastised by Me for eternity. For I am a jealous God and will not lightly spare men for all that they have done. I will watch over the whole earth and, appearing in the East of the world with righteousness, majesty, wrath, and chastisement, I shall reveal Myself to the myriad hosts of humanity!

March 29, 1992

God’s Words to the Entire Universe—Chapter 29

On the day that all things were resurrected, I came among man, and I have spent wonderful days and nights with him. Only at this point does man sense a little of My approachability, and as his interaction with Me becomes more frequent, he sees some of what I have and am—as a result, he gains some knowledge of Me. Among all people, I raise My head and watch, and they all see Me. Yet when disaster befalls the world, they immediately grow anxious, and My image vanishes from their hearts; panic-stricken by the arrival of the disaster, they pay no regard to My exhortations. Many years have I passed among man, yet he has always remained unaware, and has never known Me. Today I tell him this with My own mouth, so that all people may come before Me to receive something from Me, but still they keep their distance from Me, and so they do not know Me. When My footsteps tread across the universe and to the ends of the earth, man will begin to reflect upon himself, and all people will come to Me and bow down before Me and worship Me. This will be the day I gain glory, the day of My return, and also the day of My departure. Now, I have begun My work among all mankind, have formally embarked throughout the entire universe upon the finale of My management plan. From this moment onward, any who are not cautious are liable to be plunged amid merciless chastisement, and this could happen at any moment. This is not because I am heartless; rather, it is a step of My management plan; all must proceed according to the steps of My plan, and no man can change this. When I formally begin My work, all people move as I move, such that people throughout the universe occupy themselves in step with Me, there is “jubilation” across the universe, and man is spurred onward by Me. In consequence, the great red dragon itself is whipped into a state of frenzy and bewilderment by Me, and it serves My work, and, despite being unwilling, it is unable to follow its own desires, but is left with no choice but to submit to My control. In all of My plans, the great red dragon is My foil, My enemy, and also My servant; as such, I have never relaxed My “requirements” of it. Therefore, the final stage of the work of My incarnation is completed in its household. In this way, the great red dragon is more able to do service for Me properly, through which I will conquer it and complete My plan. As I work, all angels embark upon the decisive battle with Me and resolve to satisfy My will in the final stage, so that the people on earth surrender before Me like the angels, and have no desire to oppose Me, and do nothing that betrays Me. These are the dynamics of My work throughout the universe.

The purpose and significance of My arrival among man is to save all mankind, to bring all mankind back to My household, to reunite heaven with earth, and to make man convey the “signals” between heaven and earth, for such is the inherent function of man. At the time when I created mankind, I had made all things ready for mankind, and later, I allowed mankind to receive, according to My requirements, the riches I gave him. Thus, I say that it is under My guidance that all mankind has reached today. And this is all My plan. Among all mankind, countless numbers of people exist under the protection of My love, and countless numbers live under the chastisement of My hate. Though people all pray to Me, still they are unable to change their present circumstances; once they have lost hope, they can only let nature take its course and cease to rebel against Me, for this is all that can be accomplished by man. When it comes to the state of man’s life, man has yet to find the real life, he still has not seen through to the injustice, desolation, and miserable conditions of the world—and so, were it not for the advent of disaster, most people would still embrace Mother Nature, and would still engross themselves in the flavors of “life.” Is this not the reality of the world? Is this not the voice of salvation that I speak forth to man? Why, among mankind, has no one ever truly loved Me? Why does man love Me only when amidst chastisement and trials, yet no one loves Me while being under My protection? I have bestowed My chastisement many times upon mankind. They take a look at it, but then they ignore it, and they do not study and contemplate it at this time, and so all that comes upon man is merciless judgment. This is only one of My methods of working, but it is still in order to change man and make him love Me.

I reign in the kingdom, and, moreover, I reign throughout the entire universe; I am both the King of the kingdom and the Head of the universe. From this time onward, I will assemble all those who are not the chosen ones and will begin My work among the Gentiles, and I will announce My administrative decrees to the whole universe, so that I may successfully embark upon the next step of My work. I will use chastisement to spread My work among the Gentiles, which is to say, I will use force against all those who are Gentiles. Naturally, this work will be carried out at the same time as My work among the chosen ones. When My people rule and wield power on earth, that will also be the day that all people on earth have been conquered, and, moreover, it will be the time when I rest—and only then will I appear to all those who have been conquered. I appear to the holy kingdom, and hide Myself from the land of filth. All who have been conquered and become submissive before Me are able to see My face with their own eyes, and able to hear My voice with their own ears. This is the blessing of those who are born during the last days, this is the blessing predestined by Me, and this is unalterable by any man. Today, I work in this way for the sake of the work of the future. All of My work is interrelated, in all of it, there is a call and response: Never has any step halted suddenly, and never has any step been carried out independently of any other. Is this not so? Is the work of the past not the foundation of the work of today? Are the words of the past not the precursor to the words today? Are the steps of the past not the origin of the steps of today? When I formally open the scroll, that is when people throughout the universe are chastised, when people all over the world are subjected to trials, and it is the climax of My work; all people live in a land without light, and all people live amid the threats posed by their environment. In other words, it is the life that man has never experienced from the time of creation until the present day, and no one throughout the ages has ever “enjoyed” this kind of life, and so I say that I have done work that has never been done before. This is the true state of affairs, and this is the inner meaning. Because My day draws near to all mankind, because it does not appear distant but is right before man’s eyes, who could not be fearful as a result? And who could not be delighted in this? The filthy city of Babylon has finally come to its end; man has met with a brand-new world again, and heaven and earth have been changed and renewed.

When I appear to all nations and all peoples, the white clouds churn in the sky and enshroud Me. So, too, do the birds on earth sing out and dance with joy for Me, highlighting the atmosphere on earth, and thus causing all things on earth to come alive, to no longer “drift slowly downward,” but to instead live amid an atmosphere of vitality. When I am among the clouds, man dimly perceives My face and My eyes, and at this time he feels a little afraid. In the past, he has heard historical records about Me in legends, and as a result he is only half believing and half doubtful toward Me. He knows not where I am, or just how large My face is—is it as wide as the sea, or as boundless as the green pastures? No one knows these things. It is only when man sees My face in the clouds today that man feels that the Me of legend is real, and so he becomes a little more favorably disposed toward Me, and it is only because of My deeds that his admiration for Me becomes a little greater. But man still does not know Me, and he only sees one part of Me in the clouds. Thereafter, I stretch out My arms and show them to man. Man is astonished, and claps his hands over his mouth, deeply afraid of being struck down by My hand, and so he adds a little fear to his admiration. Man fixes his eyes upon My every move, profoundly afraid that he will be struck down by Me when he is not paying attention—yet I am not restricted because of being watched by man, and I continue to do the work on My hands. It is only in all the deeds I do that man has some favor toward Me, and thus gradually comes before Me to associate with Me. When I am revealed to man in My entirety, man will see My face, and from then on I will no longer hide or obscure Myself from man. Throughout the universe, I will appear publicly to all people, and all those who are of flesh and blood will behold all of My deeds. All those who are of the spirit will surely dwell in peace in My household, and will assuredly enjoy wonderful blessings together with Me. All those whom I care for will surely escape chastisement and will certainly avoid the pain of the spirit and the agony of the flesh. I will appear publicly to all peoples and rule and wield power, so that the smell of corpses no longer will pervade the universe; instead, My crisp fragrance will spread across the whole world, because My day is drawing near, man is awakening, everything on earth is in order, and the days of survival of the earth are no more, for I have arrived!

April 6, 1992

What Viewpoint Believers Ought to Hold

What is it that man has gained since he first began believing in God? What have you come to know about God? How much have you changed because of your belief in God? Today, you all know that man’s belief in God is not solely for the salvation of the soul and the well-being of the flesh, nor is it to enrich his life through loving God, and so on. As it stands, if you love God for the sake of the well-being of the flesh or momentary pleasure, then even if, in the end, your love for God reaches its peak and you ask for nothing more, this love that you seek is still an adulterated love and not pleasing to God. Those who use love for God to enrich their dull existence and fill a void in their hearts are the kind of people who are greedy for a life of ease, not those who truly seek to love God. Love of this kind is forced, it is the pursuit of mental gratification, and God has no need of it. What kind of love, then, is yours? For what do you love God? How much true love for God is there within you right now? The love of the great majority of you is of the aforementioned kind. Such love can only maintain the status quo; it cannot achieve immutability, nor can it take root in man. This kind of love is only like a flower that blooms and withers without bearing fruit. In other words, after you have loved God once in such a way, if there is no one to lead you on the path ahead, then you will collapse. If you can only love God in the time of loving God but afterward your life disposition remains unchanged, then you will remain unable to escape from the shroud of the influence of darkness, you will remain unable to break free from Satan’s bonds and its trickery. No one such as this can be fully gained by God; in the end, their spirit, soul, and body will still belong to Satan. There can be no doubt about this. All those who cannot be fully gained by God will return to their original place, that is, back to Satan, and they will go down to the lake of fire and brimstone to accept the next step of punishment from God. Those gained by God are those who rebel against Satan and escape from its power. They are officially numbered among the people of the kingdom. This is how the people of the kingdom come to be. Are you willing to become this kind of person? Are you willing to be gained by God? Are you willing to escape from the power of Satan and return to God? Do you now belong to Satan or are you numbered among the people of the kingdom? These things should already be clear, and require no further explanation.

In the past, many sought with wild ambition and notions, they sought as a result of their own hopes. Let us put aside such issues for the moment; what is of key importance now is to find a way of practice that will enable each of you to maintain a normal condition before God and gradually break free of the shackles of Satan’s influence, so that you may be gained by God, and live out on earth what God asks of you. Only in this way can you satisfy God’s will. Many believe in God, yet know neither what it is that God wants nor what it is that Satan wants. They believe in a muddleheaded way, simply going with the flow, and so have never had a normal Christian life; what is more, they have never had normal personal relationships, much less a normal relationship with God. From this it can be seen that the difficulties and shortcomings of man, and other factors that can thwart the will of God, are many. This is sufficient to prove that man has not yet got onto the right track of belief in God, nor has he entered into the real experience of human life. So what does it mean to get on the right track of belief in God? To get on the right track means that you can quiet your heart before God at all times and enjoy normal communion with God, gradually coming to know what is lacking in man and slowly gaining a deeper knowledge of God. Through this, your spirit gains new insight and new enlightenment every day; your longing grows, you seek to enter into the truth, and every day there is new light and new understanding. Through this path, you gradually break free of the influence of Satan and grow in your life. Such people have entered the right track. Evaluate your own actual experiences and examine the path you have pursued in your faith: When you hold those up against that described above, do you find you are on the right track? In what matters have you broken free from the shackles of Satan and from the influence of Satan? If you have yet to get on the right track, then your ties with Satan have not been severed. This being the case, will your seeking to love God lead you to a love that is authentic, single-minded, and pure? You say that your love for God is unwavering and heartfelt, yet you have not broken free of the shackles of Satan. Are you not trying to make a fool of God? If you wish to attain a state in which your love for God is without adulteration, and you wish to be fully gained by God and numbered among the people of the kingdom, then you must first set yourself on the right track of belief in God.

Corrupt Man Is Incapable of Representing God

Man has ever lived beneath the shroud of the influence of darkness, held in bondage to the influence of Satan, unable to escape, and his disposition, having been processed by Satan, becomes increasingly corrupt. It can be said that man has always lived amid his corrupt satanic disposition and is incapable of truly loving God. This being so, if man wishes to love God, he must be stripped of his self-righteousness, self-importance, arrogance, conceit, and the like—everything that is of Satan’s disposition. If not, his love is an impure love, a satanic love, and one which absolutely cannot receive the approval of God. Without being directly perfected, broken, pruned, disciplined, chastened, and refined by the Holy Spirit, no one is able truly to love God. If you say that a part of your disposition represents God and therefore you are able truly to love God, then you are someone whose words are arrogant, and you are preposterous. Such people are the archangel! The inborn nature of man is incapable of directly representing God; he must shed his innate nature through the perfection of God and only then—only by caring for God’s will, satisfying God’s will, and furthermore undergoing the work of the Holy Spirit—can what he lives out be approved of by God. No one who lives in the flesh can represent God directly, unless he be a man used by the Holy Spirit. However, even for a person like this, it cannot be said that his disposition and what he lives out entirely represent God; it can only be said that what he lives out is directed by the Holy Spirit. The disposition of such a man cannot represent God.

Though the disposition of man is ordained by God—this is unquestionable and can be considered a positive thing—it has been processed by Satan, and so the whole of man’s disposition is Satan’s disposition. Some people say that God’s disposition is to be straightforward in doing things, and that this is also manifested in them, that their character is also like this, and so they say that their disposition represents God. What kind of people are these? Is the corrupt satanic disposition able to represent God? Whosoever declares that their disposition is representative of God blasphemes God and insults the Holy Spirit! The method by which the Holy Spirit works shows that God’s work on earth is solely the work of conquest. As such, the many corrupt satanic dispositions of man have yet to be cleansed, what he lives out is still the image of Satan, it is what man believes to be good, and it represents the deeds of man’s flesh; more precisely, it represents Satan, and absolutely cannot represent God. Even if someone already loves God to the extent that they are able to enjoy a life of heaven on earth, are able to make such statements as: “Oh God! I cannot love You enough,” and have reached the highest realm, still it cannot be said that they live out God or represent God, for the essence of man is unlike that of God, and man can never live out God, much less become God. What the Holy Spirit has directed man to live out is only in accordance with what God asks of man.

All of the actions and deeds of Satan are manifested in man. Today, all of the actions and deeds of man are an expression of Satan and hence cannot represent God. Man is the embodiment of Satan, and the disposition of man is unable to represent the disposition of God. Some people are of good character; God may do some work through such people’s character, and the work they do is directed by the Holy Spirit. Yet their disposition is unable to represent God. The work God does upon them is nothing more than working with and expanding on what already exists within. Be it prophets in ages past or those used by God, no one can directly represent Him. People come to love God only under the duress of circumstances, and not a single one strives to cooperate of their own volition. What are positive things? All that directly comes from God is positive; the disposition of man, however, has been processed by Satan, and cannot represent God. Only the love, the will to suffer, the righteousness, submission, and humbleness and hiddenness of the incarnate God directly represent God. This is because when He came, He came without a sinful nature and came directly from God, without having been processed by Satan. Jesus is only in the likeness of sinful flesh and does not represent sin; therefore, His actions, deeds, and words, up to the time prior to His accomplishment of the work through crucifixion (including the moment of His crucifixion), are all directly representative of God. The example of Jesus is sufficient to prove that anyone with a sinful nature cannot represent God, and that the sin of man represents Satan. Which is to say, sin does not represent God, and God is sinless. Even the work done in man by the Holy Spirit can only be considered to have been directed by the Holy Spirit, and cannot be said to be done by man on behalf of God. But, as far as man is concerned, neither his sin nor his disposition represents God. By looking at the work the Holy Spirit has done on man from the past to the present day, one sees that man has that which he lives out all because the Holy Spirit has done work upon him. Very few are able to live out the truth after being pruned and disciplined by the Holy Spirit. Which is to say, only the work of the Holy Spirit is present; cooperation on the part of man is absent. Do you see this clearly now? This being so, how will you do your utmost to cooperate with Him and fulfill your duty when the Holy Spirit works?

Religious Service Must Be Purged

Since the beginning of His work throughout the universe, God has predestined many people to serve Him, including those from every walk of life. His purpose is to satisfy His will and bring His work on earth to smooth completion; this is God’s aim in choosing people to serve Him. Every person who serves God must understand His will. This work of His makes God’s wisdom and omnipotence, and the principles of His work on earth, more evident to people. God has actually come to earth to do His work, to engage with people, so that they may know His deeds more clearly. Today you, this group of people, are fortunate to serve the practical God. This is an incalculable blessing for you—truly, you are raised up by God. In selecting a person to serve Him, God always has His own principles. Serving God is by no means, as people imagine, that it is simply a matter of enthusiasm. Today, you see that all who serve before God do so because they have the guidance of God and the work of the Holy Spirit, and because they are people who pursue the truth. These are the minimum conditions for all those who serve God.

Serving God is no simple task. Those whose corrupt disposition remains unchanged can never serve God. If your disposition has not been judged and chastised by God’s words, then your disposition still represents Satan, which proves that you serve God out of your own good intentions, that your service is based on your satanic nature. You serve God with your natural character, and according to your personal preferences. What’s more, you always think that the things you are willing to do are what are delightful to God, and that the things you do not wish to do are what are hateful to God; you work entirely according to your own preferences. Can this be called serving God? Ultimately, there will not be the slightest change in your life disposition; instead, your service will make you even more stubborn, thus deeply ingraining your corrupt disposition, and as such, there will be formed within you rules about service to God that are primarily based on your own character, and experiences derived from your service according to your own disposition. These are the experiences and lessons of man. It is man’s philosophy for worldly dealings. People like this can be classed as Pharisees and religious officials. If they never wake up and repent, then they will surely turn into the false Christs and the antichrists who mislead people in the last days. The false Christs and the antichrists that were spoken of will arise from among such people. If those who serve God follow their own character and act according to their own will, they run the risk of being cast out at any time. Those who apply their many years of experience acquired to serving God in order to win the hearts of others, to lecture them and constrain them, and to stand on high—and who never repent, never confess their sins, never renounce the benefits of position—these people shall fall before God. They are of the same kind as Paul, presuming upon their seniority and flaunting their qualifications. God will not bring people like this to perfection. Such service disrupts the work of God. People always cling to the old. They cling to the notions of the past, to everything from times gone by. This is a great obstacle to their service. If you cannot throw them off, these things will throttle your whole life. God will not commend you, not in the slightest, not even if you break your legs running or your back with labor, not even if you are martyred in your service of God. Quite the contrary: He will say that you are an evildoer.

Starting from today, God will formally perfect those who have no religious notions, who are willing to set aside their old selves, and who submit to God in a simple-hearted way. He shall perfect those who long for the words of God. These people should stand up and serve God. In God there is endless abundance and boundless wisdom. His amazing work and precious words await enjoyment by even greater numbers of people. As it stands, those with religious notions, those who assume seniority, and those who cannot put themselves aside find it hard to accept these new things. The Holy Spirit has no opportunity to perfect these people. If a person has not resolved to submit, and does not thirst for the words of God, then they have no means of understanding these new things; they will simply become more and more rebellious, more and more crafty, and will thus end up on the wrong track. In doing His work now, God will raise up more people who truly love Him and can accept the new light, and He will completely cut down the religious officials who presume upon their seniority; He does not want a single one of those who stubbornly resist change. Do you want to be one of these people? Do you perform your service according to your own preferences or what God requires? This is something you must know for yourself. Are you a religious official, or are you a newborn babe made perfect by God? How much of your service is commended by the Holy Spirit? How much of it will God not even bother to remember? How great a change in your life has there been as a result of all your years of service? Are you clear about all this? If you are truly of faith, you will cast aside your old religious notions from before, and will serve God better in a new way. It is not too late to stand up now. Old religious notions can forfeit a person’s entire life. The experience a person acquires can cause them to stray from God and do things their own way. If you do not put such things aside, they will become stumbling blocks to the growth of your life. God always perfects those who serve Him, and does not cast them out lightly. If you truly accept the judgment and chastisement of God’s words, if you can put aside your old religious practices and rules, and cease to use old religious notions as the measure of God’s words of today, only then will there be a future for you. But if you cling to old things, if you still treasure them, then there is no way you can be saved. God takes no notice of such people. If you really wish to be made perfect, then you must resolve to completely relinquish everything from before. Even if what was done before was right, even if it was God’s work, you must still be able to put it aside and stop clinging to it. Even if it was clearly the work of the Holy Spirit, done directly by the Holy Spirit, today you must put it aside. You must not hold onto it. This is what God requires. Everything must be renewed. In God’s work and God’s words, He makes no reference to the old things that went before, He does not dig into the old almanac; God is a God who is always new and never old, and does not cling even to His own words from the past—which shows that God does not follow any rules. So if you, as a human being, always cling to the things of the past, if you refuse to let them go, and rigidly apply them in a formulaic manner, while God no longer works using the means that He did before, then are your words and actions not disruptive? Have you not become an enemy of God? Are you willing to let your entire life go to wrack and ruin over these old things? These old things will make you into someone who disrupts God’s work—is that the kind of person you want to be? If you truly do not want that, then quickly stop what you are doing and turn around; start all over again. God will not remember your past service.

In Your Faith in God You Should Submit to God

Why do you believe in God? Most people are confounded by this question. They always have two entirely different viewpoints about the practical God and the God in heaven, which shows that they believe in God not in order to submit to Him, but to receive certain benefits, or to escape the suffering that disaster brings; only then are they somewhat submissive. Their submission is conditional; it is for the sake of their own personal prospects, and forced upon them. So, just why do you believe in God? If it is solely for the sake of your prospects and your fate, then it would be better if you did not believe at all. Belief such as this is self-deception, self-reassurance, and self-admiration. If your faith is not built upon the foundation of submission to God, then you will ultimately be punished for opposing Him. All those who do not seek submission to God in their faith oppose Him. God asks that people seek the truth, that they thirst for His words, eat and drink His words, and put them into practice, so that they may achieve submission to God. If these are your true intentions, then God will surely raise you up, and will surely be gracious toward you. This is undoubtable and unchangeable. If your intention is not to submit to God, and you have other aims, then all that you say and do—your prayers before God, and even your every action—will be in opposition to Him. You may be soft-spoken and mild-mannered, your every action and expression may look proper, and you may appear to be one who submits, but when it comes to your intentions and your views about faith in God, everything you do is in opposition to God; everything you do is evil. People who appear as obedient as sheep, but whose hearts harbor evil intentions, are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They directly offend God, and God will not spare a single one of them. The Holy Spirit will reveal each and every one of them and show everybody that all those who are hypocrites will, with certainty, be spurned by the Holy Spirit. Worry not: God will reckon with and dispose of every last one of them in turn.

If you are unable to accept the new light from God, and cannot understand all that God does today and you do not seek it, or else you doubt it, pass judgment on it, or scrutinize and analyze it, then you have no mind to submit to God. If, when the light of the here and now appears, you still treasure the light of yesterday and oppose God’s new work, then you are nothing more than an absurd one—you are one of those who deliberately oppose God. The key to submitting to God is appreciating the new light, and being able to accept it and put it into practice. This alone is true submission. Those who lack the will to yearn for God are incapable of intentionally submitting to Him, and can only oppose God as a result of their satisfaction with the status quo. That man cannot submit to God is because he is possessed by what came before. The things that came before have given people all manner of notions and imaginings about God, and these have become the image of God in their minds. Thus, what they believe in are their own notions, and the standards of their own imagination. If you measure the God who does practical work today against the God of your own imagination, then your faith comes from Satan, and is tainted by your own preferences—God does not want this kind of faith. Regardless of how lofty their credentials, and regardless of their dedication—even if they have devoted a lifetime of efforts to His work, and have martyred themselves—God does not approve of anyone with faith such as this. He merely bestows upon them a little grace and allows them to enjoy it for a time. People such as this are incapable of putting the truth into practice. The Holy Spirit does not work within them, and God will cast out each of them in turn. Young and old alike, those who do not submit to God in their faith and have the wrong intentions are those who oppose and disrupt, and such people will unquestionably be cast out by God. Those who are without the slightest submission to God, who merely acknowledge His name, and have some sense of God’s kindness and loveliness, yet do not keep pace with the steps of the Holy Spirit, and do not submit to the present work and words of the Holy Spirit—such people live amid the grace of God, and will not be gained or made perfect by Him. God makes people perfect through their submission, through their eating, drinking, and enjoying of God’s words, and through the suffering and refinement in their lives. Only through faith such as this can people’s dispositions change, and only then can they possess the true knowledge of God. Not being satisfied with living amid God’s grace, actively yearning and searching for the truth, and seeking to be gained by God—this is what it means to consciously submit to God and this is precisely the kind of faith that He wants. People who do nothing more than enjoy God’s grace cannot be made perfect or changed; and their submission, piety, love, and patience are all superficial. Those who only enjoy God’s grace cannot truly know God, and even when they do know God, their knowledge is superficial, and they say things like “God loves man,” or “God is compassionate toward man.” This does not represent the life of man, and does not show that people truly know God. If, when God’s words refine them, or when His trials come upon them, people are unable to submit to God—if, instead, they become doubtful, and fall down—then they are not in the least bit submissive. Within them, there are many rules and restrictions about faith in God, old experiences that are the result of many years of faith, or various rules based upon the Bible. Could people such as this submit to God? These people are full of human things—how could they submit to God? Their “submission” is according to personal preference—would God want submission like this? This is not submission to God, but adherence to rules; it is the satisfaction and appeasement of themselves. If you say that this is submission to God, do you not blaspheme against Him? You are an Egyptian Pharaoh. You commit evil, and you expressly engage in the work of opposing God—is this how God wants you to serve? You’d best hasten to repent, and try to gain some self-awareness. Failing that, you would be better off going home; that would do you more good than your professed service to God. You would not disrupt and disturb; you would know your place, and live well—would that not be better? And you would not be punished for opposing God!

Promises to Those Who Have Been Perfected

What is the path through which God perfects man? What aspects does it include? Are you willing to be perfected by God? Are you willing to accept His judgment and chastisement? What do you know of these questions? If you have no knowledge to speak of, then this is proof that you still do not know God’s work, that you have not been enlightened by the Holy Spirit at all. It is impossible for such people to be perfected. They are only given a small amount of grace to enjoy briefly, and it will not last long. People cannot be perfected by God if they only enjoy His grace. Some are satisfied when their flesh has peace and enjoyment, when their life is easy and without adversity or misfortune, when their whole family lives in harmony, without contention or dispute—and they may even believe this to be the blessing of God. In truth, it is merely God’s grace. You must not be satisfied with merely enjoying the grace of God. Such thinking is so vulgar. Even if you read the words of God every day, and pray every day, and your spirit feels great enjoyment and is especially at peace, if you ultimately have nothing to say of your knowledge of God and His work, and have experienced nothing, and no matter how much of God’s word you have eaten and drunk, if all you feel is spiritual peace and enjoyment, and that the word of God is sweet beyond compare, as though you cannot enjoy it enough, but you have no practical experience whatsoever of the words of God and are utterly devoid of the reality of His words, then what can you gain from such faith in God? If you cannot live out the essence of God’s words, then your eating and drinking of these words and your prayers are nothing but religious belief. Such people cannot be perfected by God and cannot be gained by Him. People who are gained by God are those who pursue the truth. What God gains is not the flesh of man, not the things which belong to him, but the part within him that belongs to God. Thus, when God perfects people, He does not perfect their flesh, but their hearts, allowing their hearts to be gained by God; which is to say, God perfecting man is, in essence, God perfecting the heart of man so that this heart may turn to God and so that it may love Him.

The flesh of man is mortal. It serves no purpose for God to gain the flesh of man, for the flesh of man is something that inevitably decays and cannot receive His inheritance or blessings. If the flesh of man were gained, and only the flesh of man were in this stream, then though man would nominally be in the stream, his heart would belong to Satan. That being the case, not only would people be unable to become the manifestation of God, but they would also become His burden, and God’s choosing of people would thus become meaningless. Those that God intends to perfect will all receive His blessings and His inheritance. That is, they take in what God has and is so that it becomes what they have within; they have all the words of God wrought into them; whatever God is, you are able to take it all in exactly as is, and thereby live out the truth. This is the kind of person who is perfected by God and who is gained by God. Only someone such as this is eligible to receive the blessings bestowed by God:

1. Gaining the whole of God’s love.

2. Acting in accordance with the will of God in all things.

3. Gaining the guidance of God, living in the light of God, and gaining God’s enlightenment.

4. Living out on earth the image that God loves; loving God truly as Peter did, crucified for God and worthy to die in recompense for God’s love; having the same glory as Peter.

5. Being beloved, respected, and admired by everyone on earth.

6. Overcoming every aspect of the bondage of death and Hades, giving no opportunity for Satan to do its work, being possessed by God, living within a fresh and lively spirit, and not growing weary.

7. Having an ineffable sense of elation and excitement at all times throughout life, as if one has beheld the arrival of the day of God’s glory.

8. Winning glory together with God and having a countenance that resembles God’s beloved saints.

9. Becoming that which God loves on earth, that is, a beloved son of God.

10. Changing form and ascending with God to the third heaven and transcending the flesh.

Only people who can inherit the blessings of God are perfected and gained by God. Have you gained anything at present? To what extent has God perfected you? God does not perfect man at random; His perfecting man is conditional, and has clear, visible results. It is not, as man imagines, that as long as he has faith in God, he can be perfected and gained by God, and he can receive on earth the blessings and inheritance of God. Such things are exceedingly difficult—to say nothing of the changing of people’s form. At present, what you should chiefly seek is to be perfected by God in all things, and to be perfected by God through all people, matters, and things with which you are faced, so that more of what God is will be wrought into you. You must first receive the inheritance of God on earth; only then will you become eligible to inherit more, and greater, blessings from God. These are all things that you should seek, and which you should understand before all else. The more you seek to be perfected by God in all things, the more you will be able to see the hand of God in all things, as a result of which you will, through different perspectives and in different matters, actively seek to enter into the being of God’s word and enter into the reality of His word. You cannot be content with such negative states as merely not committing sins, or having no notions, no philosophy for worldly dealings, and no human will. God perfects man in a multitude of ways; in all matters lies the possibility of being perfected, and He can perfect you not only in positive terms but also in negative terms, to make what you gain more abundant. Every single day there are opportunities to be perfected and occasions to be gained by God. After experiencing thus for a time, you will be greatly changed, and will naturally understand many things of which you were previously ignorant. There will be no need for instruction from others; unbeknownst to you, God will enlighten you, so that you will receive enlightenment in all things and enter into all your experiences in detail. God will surely guide you so that you veer not to left or right, and you will thus set foot upon path to being perfected by Him.

Being perfected by God cannot be limited to perfection by eating and drinking God’s word. Such experiencing would be too one-sided, it would include too little, and could only restrict people to a very small scope. This being so, people would lack much of the spiritual nourishment they require. If you wish to be perfected by God, you must learn how to experience in all matters, and be able to gain enlightenment in everything that happens to you. Whether it be good or bad, it should bring you benefit, and should not make you negative. Regardless, you should be able to consider things while standing on the side of God, and not analyze or study them from the perspective of man (this would be a deviation in your experience). If you experience thus, then your heart will be filled with the burdens of your life; you will live constantly in the light of God’s countenance, not readily deviating in your practice. Such people have a bright future ahead of them. There are so many opportunities to be perfected by God. It all rests on whether you are someone who truly loves God and whether you possess the resolve to be perfected by God, to be gained by God, and to receive His blessings and inheritance. Mere resolve is not enough; you must have much knowledge, else you will always be deviating in your practice. God is willing to perfect each and every one of you. As it stands now, although most people have already accepted the work of God for a very long time, they have limited themselves to merely basking in the grace of God, and are only willing to allow God to give them a little comfort of the flesh, yet are unwilling to receive more, and higher, revelations. This shows that the heart of man is still always on the outside. Even though the work of man, his service, and his God-loving heart have fewer impurities, as far as his inner substance and his backward thinking are concerned, man still constantly seeks the peace and enjoyment of the flesh, and cares nothing for what the conditions for and purposes of God perfecting man may be. And so, the lives of most people are still vulgar and decadent. Their lives have not changed in the slightest; they simply do not regard faith in God as a matter of importance, it is as if they just have faith for the sake of others, going through the motions and getting by any old how, adrift in a purposeless existence. Few are those who are able to seek to enter into the word of God in all things, gaining more and richer things, becoming people of greater wealth in the house of God today, and receiving more of God’s blessings. If you seek to be perfected by God in all things, and are able to receive what God has promised on earth, if you seek to be enlightened by God in all things and do not let the years slip idly by, this is the ideal path to enter actively. Only thus will you become worthy and eligible to be perfected by God. Are you truly one who seeks to be perfected by God? Are you truly one who is earnest in all things? Do you have the same spirit of love for God as Peter did? Do you have the will to love God as Jesus did? You have had faith in Jesus for many years; have you seen how Jesus loved God? Is it truly Jesus that you believe in? You believe in the practical God of today; have you seen how the practical God in the flesh loves the God in heaven? You have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; that is because Jesus’ crucifixion for the sake of redeeming mankind and the miracles He performed are generally accepted facts. Yet the faith of man comes not from knowledge and true understanding of Jesus Christ. You believe only in the name of Jesus, but you do not believe in His Spirit, because you do not pay any heed to how Jesus loved God. Your faith in God is far too naive. Despite believing in Jesus for many years, you do not know how to love God. Does this not make you the world’s greatest fool? This is proof that for years, you have been eating the food of the Lord Jesus Christ in vain. Not only do I dislike such people, I trust that the Lord Jesus Christ—whom you venerate—would also dislike them. How can such people be perfected? Are you not crimson with embarrassment? Do you not feel ashamed? Do you still have the gall to face your Lord Jesus Christ? Do you all understand the meaning of what I have said?

The Evil Will Surely Be Punished

Look into yourselves to see whether you practice righteousness in all that you do, and whether all of your actions are being observed by God: This is the principle by which those who believe in God conduct their affairs. You will be called righteous because you are able to satisfy God, and because you accept God’s care and protection. In God’s eyes, all those who accept God’s care, protection, and perfection, and who are gained by Him, are righteous, and He regards them all as precious. The more you accept the current words of God, the more you will be able to understand and comprehend God’s will, and the more you will therefore be able to live out God’s words and satisfy His requirements. This is God’s commission for you, and it is what all of you should be able to achieve. If you use your own notions to measure and delimit God, as if God were an unchanging statue of clay, and if you completely delimit God within the parameters of the Bible and contain Him within a limited scope of work, then this proves that you have condemned God. Because the Jews in the age of the Old Testament took God to be an idol of fixed form that they held in their hearts, as if God could only be called the Messiah, and only He who was called the Messiah could be God, and because humanity served and worshiped God as if He were a (lifeless) clay statue, they nailed the Jesus of that time to the cross, sentencing Him to death—the guiltless Jesus was thus condemned to death. God was innocent of any offense, yet man refused to spare Him, and insisted on sentencing Him to death, and so Jesus was crucified. Man always believes that God is unchanging, and defines Him on the basis of one single book, the Bible, as though man has a perfect understanding of God’s management, as though man holds all that God does in the palm of his hand. People are absurd in the extreme, arrogant in the extreme, and they all have a flair for hyperbole. No matter how great your knowledge of God, I still say that you do not know God, that you are someone who opposes God the most, and that you have condemned God, because you are utterly incapable of submitting to the work of God and walking the path of being made perfect by God. Why is God never satisfied with the actions of man? Because man does not know God, because he has too many notions, and because his knowledge of God in no way agrees with reality, but instead monotonously repeats the same theme without variation and uses the same approach for every situation. And so, having come to earth today, God is once more nailed to the cross by man. Cruel mankind! The connivance and intrigue, the snatching and grabbing one from another, the scramble for fame and fortune, the mutual slaughter—when will it ever end? Despite the hundreds of thousands of words God has spoken, no one has come to their senses. People act for the sake of their families, sons and daughters, for their careers, future prospects, position, vainglory, and money, for the sake of food, clothing, and the flesh. But is there anyone whose actions are truly for the sake of God? Even among those who act for the sake of God, there are but few who know God. How many people do not act out of their own interests? How many do not oppress or ostracize others in order to protect their own position? And so, God has been forcibly sentenced to death innumerable times, and countless barbaric judges have condemned God and once more nailed Him to the cross. How many can be called righteous because they truly act for the sake of God?

Is it so easy to be perfected before God as a saint or a righteous person? It is a true statement that “there are no righteous upon this earth, the righteous are not in this world.” When you come before God, consider what you are wearing, consider your every word and action, your every thought and idea, and even the dreams that you dream every day—they are all for your own sake. Is this not the true state of affairs? “Righteousness” does not mean giving alms to others, it does not mean loving your neighbor as yourself, and it does not mean refraining from quarrels and disputes or robbing and stealing. Righteousness means taking God’s commission as your duty and submitting to God’s orchestrations and arrangements as your heaven-sent vocation, regardless of time or place, just like all that was done by the Lord Jesus. This is the righteousness of which God has spoken. That Lot could be called righteous is because he saved the two angels sent by God without considering his own gain and loss; it can only be said that what he did at that time may be called righteous, but he cannot be called a righteous man. It was only because Lot had seen God that he gave his two daughters in exchange for the angels, but not all of his behavior in the past stood for righteousness. And so I say “there are no righteous upon this earth.” Even among those who are in the stream of recovery, no one can be called righteous. No matter how good your actions, no matter how you appear to glorify the name of God, neither hitting and cursing others, nor robbing and plundering from others, you still cannot be called righteous, for this is what a normal person is capable of having. What is key right now is that you do not know God. It can only be said that at present you have a little bit of normal humanity, but no elements of the righteousness spoken of by God, and so nothing that you do is capable of proving that you know God.

Before, when God was in heaven, people dealt with God perfunctorily in their actions. Today, God has been among man—no one knows how many years it has been—yet in doing things, people are still being perfunctory in their dealings with Him. Is not man much too backward in his thinking? It was the same with Judas: Before Jesus came, Judas would tell lies to deceive his brothers and sisters, and even after Jesus came, he still did not change; he did not know Jesus in the least, and in the end he betrayed Jesus. Was this not because he did not know God? If, today, you still do not know God, then it is possible that you may become another Judas, and following upon this, the tragedy of Jesus’ crucifixion in the Age of Grace two thousand years ago would be played out again. Do you not believe this? It is a fact! At present, the majority of people are in a similar situation—I may be saying this a little too soon—and such people are all playing the role of Judas. I am not speaking nonsense, but on the basis of fact—and you cannot but be convinced. Although many people make a pretense of humility, in their hearts there is nothing but a pool of dead water, a ditch of stinking water. Right now there are too many like this in the church, and you think I am completely unaware of this. Today, My Spirit decides for Me, and bears testimony for Me. Do you think I know nothing? Do you think I understand nothing of the devious thoughts within your hearts, the things you keep within your hearts? Is it so easy to get the better of God? Do you think you can treat Him in whatever way you like? In the past, I was worried lest you become constrained, so I kept on giving you freedom, but humanity was unable to tell that I was being good to them, and when I gave an inch they took a yard. Ask around among yourselves: I have almost never pruned anyone, and have almost never lightly reprimanded anyone—yet I am very clear about the motivations and notions of man. Do you think God Himself, to whom God bears testimony, is a fool? In that case, I say you are too blind! I will not expose you, but let us see just how corrupt you can become. Let us see whether your clever little stratagems can save you, or whether trying your best to love God can save you. Today, I will not condemn you; let us wait until the time of God to see how He takes retribution upon you. I have no time for idle chitchat with you now, and I am unwilling to delay My greater work solely on your account. A maggot like you is not worthy of the time it would take God to prune you—so let us see just how dissolute you can get. People like this do not pursue knowledge of God in the least, nor do they have the least bit of God-loving heart, and still they wish for God to call them righteous—is this not a joke? Because a small number of people are actually honest, I will focus only on continuing to provide life to man. I will only get done what I should get done today, but in the future I will bring retribution upon each person according to what they have done. I have said all that there is to say, for this is precisely the work I do. I do only what I should do, and not what I should not. Nevertheless, I hope that you spend more time in reflection: Exactly how much of your knowledge of God is true? Are you someone who has once more nailed God to the cross? My final words are these: Woe be unto those who crucify God.

How to Serve in Harmony With God’s Will

When one believes in God, how, exactly, should one serve Him? What conditions should be fulfilled and what truths should be understood by those who serve God? And where might you be deviating in your service? You should know the answers to all these things. These issues touch upon how you believe in God, and how you walk onto the path led by the Holy Spirit and let God orchestrate you in all things, thus allowing you to understand every step of God’s work in you. When you reach that point, you will appreciate what faith in God is, how to properly believe in God, and what you should do to act in harmony with God’s will. This will make you completely and utterly obedient to God’s work; you will have no complaints and you will not judge, or analyze, much less research God’s work. As such, you will all be capable of submitting to God till death, allowing God to steer you and slaughter you like a sheep, so that you can all become the Peters of the 1990s, and can love God to the utmost even upon the cross, without the slightest complaint. Only then will you be able to live as Peters of the 1990s.

Everyone who has resolved to can serve God—but it must be that only those who give every care to God’s will and understand God’s will are qualified and entitled to serve God. I have discovered this among you: Many people believe that as long as they fervently spread the gospel for God, go on the road for God, expend themselves and give things up for God, and so on, then this is serving God. Even more religious people believe that serving God means running around with a Bible in their hands, spreading the gospel of the kingdom of heaven and saving people by making them repent and confess. There are also many religious officials who think that serving God consists of preaching in chapels after pursuing advanced studies and training in the seminary, and teaching people through readings of Bible scriptures. Moreover, there are people in impoverished regions who believe that serving God means healing the sick and casting out demons among their brothers and sisters or praying for them, or serving them. Amongst you, there are many who believe that serving God means eating and drinking the words of God, praying to God every day, as well as visiting and doing work in churches everywhere. There are other brothers and sisters who believe that serving God means never getting married or raising a family and dedicating their entire being to God. Yet few people know what it actually means to serve God. Although there are as many people who serve God as there are stars in the sky, the number of those who can serve directly, and who are able to serve in accordance with God’s will, is paltry—pifflingly small. Why do I say this? I say this because you do not understand the essence of the phrase “service to God,” and you understand so little of how to serve in accordance with God’s will. There is an urgent need for people to understand exactly what sort of service to God can be in harmony with His will.

If you wish to serve in accordance with God’s will, you must first understand what kind of people are pleasing to God, what kind of people are loathed by God, what kind of people are made perfect by God, and what kind of people are qualified to serve God. At the very least, you should be equipped with this knowledge. Moreover, you should know the aims of God’s work, and the work that God shall do in the here and now. After understanding this, and through the guidance of God’s words, you should first have entry, and first receive God’s commission. Once you have had actual experience of God’s words, and when you truly know God’s work, you will be qualified to serve God. And it is when you serve Him that God opens your spiritual eyes and allows you to have a greater understanding of His work and to see it more clearly. When you enter this reality, your experiences will be more profound and practical, and all those of you who have had such experiences will be able to walk among the churches and offer provision to your brothers and sisters, so that you can each draw on each other’s strengths to make up for your own deficiencies, and gain richer knowledge in your spirits. Only after achieving this effect will you be able to serve in accordance with God’s will and be made perfect by God in the course of your service.

Those who serve God should be God’s intimates, they should be pleasing to God, and capable of the utmost loyalty to God. Whether you act in private or in public, you are able to gain the joy of God before God, you are able to stand firm before God, and regardless of how other people treat you, you always walk the path you should walk, and give every care to God’s burden. Only people like this are intimates of God. That God’s intimates are able to serve Him directly is because they have been given God’s great commission and God’s burden, they are able to make God’s heart their own, and take God’s burden as their own, and they give no consideration to their future prospects: Even when they have no prospects, and they stand to gain nothing, they will always believe in God with a God-loving heart. And so, this kind of person is God’s intimate. God’s intimates are also His confidants; only God’s confidants could share His restlessness, and His thoughts, and although their flesh is painful and weak, they are able to endure pain and forsake that which they love to satisfy God. God gives more burdens to such people, and that which God desires to do is borne out in such people’s testimony. Thus, these people are pleasing to God, they are servants of God who conform to His will, and only people such as this can rule together with God. When you have truly become God’s intimate is precisely when you will rule together with God.

Jesus was able to complete God’s commission—the work of all mankind’s redemption—because He gave every care to God’s will, without making any plans or arrangements for Himself. So, too, was He the intimate of God—God Himself—which is something you all understand very well. (Actually, He was the God Himself who was testified to by God. I mention this here to use the fact of Jesus to illustrate the issue.) He was able to place God’s management plan at the very center, and always prayed to the heavenly Father and sought the will of the heavenly Father. He prayed and said: “God the Father! Accomplish that which is Your will, and act not according to My desires but according to Your plan. Man may be weak, but why should You care for him? How could man be worthy of Your concern, man who is like an ant in Your hand? In My heart, I wish only to accomplish Your will, and I would that You can do what You would do in Me according to Your own desires.” On the road to Jerusalem, Jesus was in agony, as if a knife were being twisted in His heart, yet He had not the slightest intention of going back on His word; always there was a powerful force compelling Him onward to where He would be crucified. Ultimately, He was nailed to the cross and became the likeness of sinful flesh, completing the work of the redemption of mankind. He broke free of the shackles of death and Hades. Before Him, mortality, hell, and Hades lost their power, and were vanquished by Him. He lived for thirty-three years, throughout which He always did His utmost to satisfy God’s will according to God’s work at the time, never considering His own personal gain or loss, and always thinking of the will of God the Father. Thus, after He was baptized, God said: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Because of His service before God that was in harmony with God’s will, God placed the heavy burden of redeeming all mankind upon His shoulders and made Him accomplish it, and He was qualified and entitled to complete this important task. Throughout His life, He endured immeasurable suffering for God, and He was tempted by Satan countless times, but He was never disheartened. God gave Him such an enormous task because He trusted Him, and loved Him, and thus God personally said: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” At that time, only Jesus could accomplish this commission, and this was one practical aspect of God’s completion of His work of redeeming all mankind in the Age of Grace.

If, like Jesus, you are able to give every care to God’s burden, and rebel against your flesh, God will entrust His important tasks to you, so that you will meet the conditions required to serve God. Only under such circumstances will you venture to say that you are following God’s will and completing His commission, and only then will you venture to say you are truly serving God. Compared to Jesus’ example, do you venture to say you are God’s intimate? Do you venture to say that you are following God’s will? Do you venture to say that you are truly serving God? Today, you do not understand how to serve God, do you venture to say you are God’s intimate? If you say that you serve God, do you not blaspheme against Him? Think about it: Are you serving God, or yourself? You serve Satan, yet you stubbornly say you are serving God—in this, do you not blaspheme against God? Many people behind My back covet the benefits of status, they gorge themselves on food, they love to sleep and give every care to the flesh, always afraid that there is no way out for the flesh. They do not perform their proper function in the church, but freeload off the church, or else they admonish their brothers and sisters with My words, constraining others from positions of authority. These people keep saying they are following God’s will and always say they are God’s intimates—is this not absurd? If you have the right intentions, but are unable to serve in accordance with God’s will, then you are being foolish; but if your intentions are not right, and you still say you serve God, then you are someone who opposes God, and you ought to be punished by God! I have no sympathy for such people! In the house of God, they freeload, always coveting the comforts of the flesh, and give no consideration to the interests of God. They always seek what is good for them, and they pay no heed to God’s will. They do not accept the scrutiny of God’s Spirit in anything they do. They are always being crooked and deceitful and cheating their brothers and sisters, being two-faced, like a fox in a vineyard, always stealing grapes and trampling over the vineyard. Could such people be God’s intimates? Are you fit to receive God’s blessings? You take no burden for your life and the church, are you fit to receive God’s commission? Who would dare trust someone like you? When you serve like this, could God entrust you with a greater task? Would this not cause delays to the work?

I say this so that you might know what conditions must be fulfilled in order to serve in harmony with God’s will. If you do not give your heart to God, if you do not give every care to God’s will like Jesus, then you cannot be trusted by God, and will end up being judged by God. Perhaps today, in your service to God, you always harbor the intention of deceiving God and always deal with Him in a perfunctory manner. In short, regardless of anything else, if you cheat God, ruthless judgment will come upon you. You should take advantage of having just entered onto the right track of serving God to first give your heart to God, without divided loyalties. Regardless of whether you are before God, or before other people, your heart should always be turned toward God, and you should be resolved to love God like Jesus did. In this way, God will make you perfect, so that you become a servant of God who conforms to His will. If you truly wish to be made perfect by God, and for your service to be in harmony with His will, then you should change your previous views about faith in God, and change the old way you used to serve God, so that more of you is made perfect by God. In this way, God will not abandon you, and, like Peter, you will be at the vanguard of those who love God. If you remain unrepentant, then you will meet the same end as Judas. This should be understood by all who believe in God.

Concerning God’s Use of Man

No one is capable of living independently except for those who are given special direction and guidance by the Holy Spirit, for they require the ministry and shepherding of those who are used by God. Thus, in each age God raises up different people who rush busily about shepherding the churches for the sake of His work. Which is to say, God’s work must be done through those whom He looks favorably upon and approves of; the Holy Spirit must use the part within them that is worthy of use in order for the Holy Spirit to work, and they are made fit for use by God through being made perfect by the Holy Spirit. Because man’s comprehension ability is too lacking, he must be shepherded by those who are used by God; it was the same with God’s use of Moses, in whom He found much that was suitable for use at the time, and which He used to do God’s work during that stage. In this stage, God uses a man whilst also taking advantage of the part of him that can be used by the Holy Spirit in order to work, and the Holy Spirit both directs him and simultaneously makes perfect the remaining, unusable part.

The work carried out by the one who is used by God is in order to cooperate with the work of Christ or the Holy Spirit. This man is raised up among man by God, he is there to lead all of God’s chosen ones, and he is also raised up by God in order to do the work of human cooperation. With someone such as this, who is able to do the work of human cooperation, more of God’s requirements toward man and the work that the Holy Spirit must do among man can be achieved through him. Another way of putting it is like this: God’s aim in using this man is so that all those who follow God can better understand God’s will, and can attain more of God’s requirements. Because people are incapable of directly understanding God’s words or God’s will, God has raised someone up who is used to carry out such work. This person who is used by God can also be described as a medium through which God guides people, as the “translator” who communicates between God and man. Thus, such a man is unlike any of those who work in God’s household or who are His apostles. Like them, he can be said to be someone who serves God, yet in the essence of his work and the background of his use by God he differs greatly from the other workers and apostles. In terms of the essence of his work and the background of his use, the man who is used by God is raised up by Him, he is prepared by God for God’s work, and he cooperates in the work of God Himself. No person could ever do his work in his stead—this is human cooperation that is indispensable alongside the divine work. The work carried out by other workers or apostles, meanwhile, is but the conveyance and implementation of the many aspects of the arrangements for the churches during each period, or else the work of some simple provision of life in order to maintain the church life. These workers and apostles are not appointed by God, much less can they be called those who are used by the Holy Spirit. They are selected from among the churches and, after they have been trained and cultivated for a period of time, those who are fit are kept on, while those who are unfit are sent back to where they came from. Because these people are selected from among the churches, some show their true colors after becoming leaders, and some even do many bad things and end up being cast out. The man who is used by God, on the other hand, is someone who has been prepared by God, and who possesses a certain caliber, and has humanity. He has been prepared and made perfect in advance by the Holy Spirit, and is completely led by the Holy Spirit, and, particularly when it comes to his work, he is directed and commanded by the Holy Spirit—as a result of this there is no deviation on the path of leading God’s chosen ones, for God surely takes responsibility for His own work, and God does His own work at all times.

The Commandments of the New Age

In experiencing God’s work, you must read God’s words carefully and equip yourselves with the truth. But regarding what you want to do or how you want to do it, there is no need for your earnest prayer or supplication, and indeed these things are useless. Yet at present, the problems currently facing you are that you do not know how to experience God’s work, and that there is much negativity in you. You know many doctrines, but you do not have much reality. Is this not a sign of distortion? Much distortion is visible in you, this group. Today, you are incapable of achieving such trials as “service-doers,” and you are incapable of imagining or achieving other trials and refinement related to the words of God. You must adhere to the many things you should put into practice. This is to say that people must adhere to the many duties that they should perform. This is what people should adhere to, and this is what they must carry out. Let the Holy Spirit do what must be done by the Holy Spirit; man can play no part in it. Man should adhere to what ought to be done by man, which bears no relation to the Holy Spirit. It is nothing but that which ought to be done by man, and should be adhered to as commandment, just like adherence to the law in the Old Testament. Although now is not the Age of Law, there are still many words that should be adhered to which are of the same kind as words spoken in the Age of Law. These words are not carried out merely by relying on the touch of the Holy Spirit, but rather, they are something that man should adhere to. For example:

You shall not pass judgment on the work of the practical God.

You shall not oppose the man who is testified to by God.

Before God, you shall keep your place and shall not be dissolute.

You should be moderate in speech, and your words and actions must follow the arrangements of the man testified to by God.

You should fear the testimony of God. You shall not ignore the work of God and the words from His mouth.

You shall not imitate the tone and aims of God’s utterances.

Externally, you shall not do anything that manifestly opposes the man who is testified to by God.

These are what each person should adhere to. In each age, God specifies many rules that are akin to the laws and are to be adhered to by man. Through this, He constrains man’s disposition and detects his sincerity. Consider the words “Honor your father and your mother” of the Old Testament age, for example. These words do not apply today; at the time, they merely constrained some of man’s external disposition, were used to demonstrate the sincerity of man’s belief in God, and were a mark of those who believed in God. Although now is the Age of Kingdom, there are still many rules that man must adhere to. The rules of the past do not apply, and today there are many more fitting practices for man to carry out, and which are necessary. They do not involve the work of the Holy Spirit and must be done by man.

In the Age of Grace, many of the practices of the Age of Law were discarded because these laws were not particularly effective for the work at that time. After they were discarded, many practices were set out that were suitable for the age, and which have become the many rules of today. When the God of today came, these rules were dispensed with and it was no longer required that they be adhered to, and many practices were set out that are suitable for the work of today. Today, these practices are not rules, but are instead intended to achieve effects; they are suitable for today—tomorrow, perhaps they will become rules. In sum, you should adhere to that which is fruitful for the work of today. Pay no heed to tomorrow: What is done today is for the sake of today. Maybe when tomorrow comes, there will be better practices which you will be required to carry out—but do not pay too much attention to that. Rather, adhere to that which should be adhered to today so as to avoid opposing God. Today, nothing is more crucial for man to adhere to than the following:

You must not try to wheedle the God that stands before your eyes, or conceal anything from Him.

You shall not utter filthiness or arrogant talk in front of the God before you.

You shall not deceive the God before your eyes by honeyed words and fair speeches in order to gain His trust.

You shall not act irreverently before God. You shall submit to all that is spoken from the mouth of God, and shall not resist, oppose, or dispute His words.

You shall not interpret as you see fit the words spoken from the mouth of God. You should guard your tongue to avoid it causing you to fall prey to the deceitful schemes of the evil.

You should guard your footsteps to avoid transgressing the boundaries set out for you by God. If you transgress, this will cause you to stand in the position of God and speak words which are conceited and pompous, and thus you will become loathed by God.

You shall not carelessly spread the words spoken from the mouth of God, lest others mock you and devils make a fool of you.

You shall submit to all of the work of the God of today. Even if you do not understand it, you shall not pass judgment on it; all you can do is seek and fellowship.

No person shall transgress God’s original place. You can do nothing more than serve the God of today from the position of man. You cannot teach the God of today from the position of man—to do so is misguided.

No one may stand in the place of the man testified to by God; in your words, actions, and innermost thoughts, you stand in the position of man. This is to be abided by, it is the responsibility of man, and no one may alter it; attempting to would violate the administrative decrees. This should be remembered by all.

The long time that God has spent speaking and uttering has caused man to consider reading and memorizing the words of God to be his primary task. No one pays attention to practice, and even that which you ought to abide by you do not. This has brought many difficulties and problems to your service. If, prior to practicing the words of God, you have not adhered to that which you should adhere to, then you are one of those who are spurned by God. In adhering to these practices, you should be earnest and sincere. You should not treat them like shackles, but adhere to them as commandments. Today, you ought not to concern yourself with what effects are to be achieved; in short, this is how the Holy Spirit works, and whoever commits an offense must be punished. The Holy Spirit is without fleshly feelings, and heedless of your present understanding. If you offend God today, then He will punish you. If you offend Him within the scope of His jurisdiction, then He will not spare you. He does not care how serious you are in your adherence to the words of Jesus. If you violate God’s commandments of today, He will punish you, and condemn you to death. How could it be acceptable for you not to adhere to them? You must adhere, even if it means suffering a little pain! No matter what religion, sector, nation, or denomination it is, in the future they must all adhere to these practices. None are exempt, and none will be spared! For they are what the Holy Spirit will do today, and no one may violate them. Although they are no great thing, they must be done by every person and they are the commandments set for man by Jesus, who was resurrected and who ascended to heaven. Does “The Path … (7)” not say that Jesus’ definition of whether you are righteous or sinful is according to your attitude toward God today? No one may overlook this point. In the Age of Law, generation after generation of the Pharisees believed in God, but with the arrival of the Age of Grace they did not know Jesus, and opposed Him. So it was that all they did came to nothing and was in vain, and God did not accept their deeds. If you can see through to this, then you will not easily sin. Many people, perhaps, have measured themselves against God. How does it taste to oppose God? Is it bitter or sweet? You should understand this; do not pretend that you do not know. In their hearts, perhaps, some people remain unconvinced. Yet I advise you to try it and see—see what it tastes like. This will prevent many people from always being suspicious about it. Many people read the words of God yet secretly oppose Him in their hearts. After opposing Him like this, do you not feel like a knife has been twisted in your heart? If it is not family disharmony, it is physical discomfort, or the afflictions of sons and daughters. Although your flesh is spared death, the hand of God will never leave you. Do you think it could be that simple? In particular, it is even more necessary for the many who are near to God to focus on this. As time passes, you will forget it, and, without realizing it, you will be plunged into temptation and become heedless of everything, and this will be the start of your sinning. Does this seem trivial to you? If you can do this well, then you have the chance to be made perfect—to come before God and receive His guidance from His own mouth. If you are careless, then there will be trouble for you—you will be defiant of God, your words and actions will be dissolute, and sooner or later you will be carried away by great gales and mighty waves. Every one of you should take note of these commandments. If you violate them, then although the man who is testified to by God may not condemn you, the Spirit of God will have unfinished business with you, and He will not spare you. Can you bear the consequences of your offense? Thus, no matter what God says, you must put His words into practice, and must adhere to them by any means you can. This is no simple matter!

The Millennial Kingdom Has Arrived

Have you seen what work God will accomplish in this group of people? God once said, even in the Millennial Kingdom people must still follow His utterances onward, and in the future God’s utterances will yet directly guide man’s life in the good land of Canaan. When Moses was in the wilderness, God instructed and spoke to him directly. From heaven God sent food, water and manna for the people to enjoy, and today it is still thus: God has personally sent down things to eat and drink for people to enjoy, and He has personally sent curses to chastise people. And so, every step of His work is personally carried out by God. Today, people seek the occurrence of facts, they seek signs and wonders, and it is possible that all such people will be cast away, for the work of God is becoming increasingly practical. No one knows that God has descended from heaven, they are also unaware that God has sent down food and tonics from heaven—yet God actually exists, and the rousing scenes of the Millennial Kingdom that people imagine are also the personal utterances of God. This is fact, and only this is called reigning with God on earth. Reigning with God on earth refers to the flesh. That which is not of the flesh does not exist on earth, and thus all those who focus on going to the third heaven do so in vain. One day, when the entire universe returns to God, the center of His work throughout the cosmos will follow His utterances; elsewhere, some people will use the telephone, some will take a plane, some will take a boat across the sea, and some will use lasers to receive the utterances of God. Everyone will be adoring, and yearnful, they will all come close to God, and congregate toward God, and will all worship God—and all of this will be the deeds of God. Remember this! God will certainly never start again elsewhere. God will accomplish this fact: He will make all people throughout the universe come before Him and worship the God on earth, and His work in other places will cease, and people will be forced to seek the true way. It will be like Joseph: Everyone came to him for food, and bowed down to him, for he had things to eat. In order to avoid famine, people will be forced to seek the true way. The entire religious community will suffer severe famine, and only the God of today is the wellspring of living water, possessed of the ever-flowing wellspring provided for the enjoyment of man, and people will come and depend on Him. That will be the time when the deeds of God are revealed and when God gains glory; all people throughout the universe will worship this unremarkable “human being.” Will this not be the day of God’s glory? One day, old pastors will send telegrams seeking the water from the wellspring of living water. They will be elderly, yet still they will come to worship this person, whom they despised. They will acknowledge Him with their mouths and will trust Him with their hearts—is this not a sign and a wonder? When the whole kingdom rejoices will be the day of God’s glory, and whoever comes to you and receives God’s good news will be blessed by God, and the countries and people who do so will be blessed and cared for by God. The future direction will be thus: Those who gain the utterances from God’s mouth will have a path to walk on earth, and be they businessmen or scientists, or educators or industrialists, those who are without God’s words will have a hard time taking even a single step, and will be forced to seek the true way. This is what is meant by, “With the truth you will walk the entire world; without the truth, you will get nowhere.” The facts are thus: God will use the Way (which means all of His words) to command the whole universe and govern and conquer mankind. People are always hoping for a great shift in the means by which God works. To speak plainly, it is through words that God controls people, and you must do what He says whether you wish to or not; this is an objective fact, and must be obeyed by all, and so, too, is it inexorable, and known to all.

The Holy Spirit gives people a feeling. After reading the words of God, in their hearts people feel steadfast and at peace, while those who do not obtain God’s words feel empty. Such is the power of God’s words. People have to read them, and after reading them they are nourished, and they cannot do without them. It is like when people take opium: It gives them strength, and without it they feel its powerful draw, and have no strength. Such is the tendency among people today. Reading God’s words gives people strength. If they do not read them, they feel listless, but after reading them, they immediately rise from their “sickbeds.” This is God’s word wielding power on earth and God ruling on earth. Some people want to leave, or have become averse to God’s work. Regardless, they cannot separate themselves from God’s words; no matter how weak they are, still they must live by God’s words, and no matter how rebellious they are, still they do not dare to leave God’s words. When God’s words truly show their might is when God rules and wields power; this is how God works. This, after all, is the means by which God works, and none may leave it. God’s words will spread among countless homes, they will become known to all, and only then will His work spread throughout the universe. Which is to say, if God’s work is to spread throughout the entire universe, then His words must be spread. On the day of God’s glory, God’s words will show their power and authority. Every one of His words from time immemorial until today will be accomplished and will come to pass. In this way, glory will be to God on earth—which is to say, His words will reign on earth. All evil people will be chastised by the words spoken from the mouth of God, all who are righteous will be blessed by the words spoken from His mouth, and all will be established and made complete by the words spoken from His mouth. Nor will He manifest any signs or wonders; all will be accomplished by His words, and His words will produce facts. Everyone on earth will celebrate God’s words, whether they be adults or children, male, female, old or young, all people will surrender beneath the words of God. God’s words appear in the flesh, allowing people to see them on earth, vivid and lifelike. This is what it means for the Word to become flesh. God has come to earth primarily to accomplish the fact of “the Word become flesh,” which is to say, He has come so that His words may be issued from the flesh (not like the time of Moses in the Old Testament, when God’s voice issued directly from the sky). After that, all of His words will be fulfilled during the Age of Millennial Kingdom, they will become facts visible before man’s eyes, and people will behold them using their own eyes without the slightest disparity. This is the supreme meaning of God’s incarnation. Which is to say, the work of the Spirit is accomplished through the flesh, and through words. This is the true meaning of “the Word become flesh” and “the Word’s appearance in the flesh.” Only God can speak the will of the Spirit, and only God in the flesh can speak on behalf of the Spirit; the words of God are made plain in God incarnate, and everyone else is guided by them. No one is exempt, they all exist within this scope. Only from these utterances can people become aware; those who do not gain in this way are daydreaming if they think they can gain the utterances from heaven. Such is the authority demonstrated in God’s incarnate flesh, causing all to believe in it with total conviction. Even the most venerable experts and religious pastors cannot speak these words. They must all surrender beneath them, and none will be able to make another start. God will use words to conquer the universe. He will do this not by His incarnate flesh, but through using the utterances from the mouth of God become flesh to conquer all people in the entire universe; only this is the Word become flesh, and only this is the appearance of the Word in the flesh. Perhaps, to humans, it appears as if God has not done much work—but God has but to utter His words, and they will be thoroughly convinced and awed. Without facts, people shout and scream; with the words of God, they fall silent. God will surely accomplish this fact, for this is God’s long-established plan: accomplishing the fact of the Word’s arrival on earth. Actually, there is no need for Me to explain—the arrival of the Millennial Kingdom on earth is the arrival of God’s words on earth. New Jerusalem’s descent from heaven is the arrival of God’s words to live among man, to accompany man’s every action and all his innermost thoughts. This is also a fact that God will accomplish; this is the beauty of the Millennial Kingdom. This is the plan set by God: His words will appear on earth for a thousand years, and they will manifest all of His deeds, and complete all of His work on earth, after which this stage of mankind shall come to an end.

You Should Know That the Practical God Is God Himself

What should you know about the practical God? The Spirit, the Person, and the Word make up the practical God Himself, and this is the true meaning of the practical God Himself. If you only know the Person—if you know His habits and personality—but do not know the work of the Spirit, or what the Spirit does in the flesh, and if you only pay attention to the Spirit, and the Word, and only pray before the Spirit, but do not know the work of God’s Spirit in the practical God, then this yet proves that you do not know the practical God. Knowledge of the practical God includes knowing and experiencing His words, and grasping the rules and principles of the work of the Holy Spirit and how the Spirit of God works in the flesh. It also includes knowing that every action of God in the flesh is governed by the Spirit, and that the words He speaks are the direct expression of the Spirit. Thus, to know the practical God, it is paramount to know how God works in humanity and in divinity; this, in turn, concerns the expressions of the Spirit, with which all people engage.

What are the aspects of the expressions of the Spirit? Sometimes God works in humanity, and sometimes in divinity—but in both cases the Spirit is in command. Whatever the spirit within people, thus is their external expression. The Spirit works normally, but there are two parts to His direction by the Spirit: One part is His work in humanity, and the other is His work through divinity. You should know this clearly. The Spirit’s work varies according to circumstances: When His human work is required, the Spirit directs this human work, and when His divine work is required, the divinity appears directly to carry it out. Because God works in the flesh and appears in the flesh, He works both in humanity and in divinity. His work in humanity is directed by the Spirit and done in order to satisfy people’s fleshly needs, to facilitate their engagement with Him, to allow them to behold the practicality and normality of God, and to allow them to see that the Spirit of God has come in the flesh and is among man, lives together with man, and engages with man. His work in divinity is done in order to provide for people’s lives and to guide people in everything from the positive side, changing people’s dispositions and allowing them truly to behold the Spirit’s appearance in the flesh. In the main, the growth in man’s life is directly achieved through God’s work and words in divinity. Only if people accept God’s work in divinity can they achieve changes in their disposition, and only then can they be sated in their spirit; only if, added to this, there is the work in humanity—God’s shepherding, support, and provision in humanity—can the results of God’s work be achieved fully. The practical God Himself who is spoken of today works both in humanity and in divinity. Through the appearance of the practical God, His normal human work and life and His completely divine work are achieved. His humanity and divinity are combined as one, and the work of both is accomplished through words; whether in humanity or divinity, He utters words. When God works in humanity, He speaks the language of humanity, so that people may engage and understand. His words are spoken plainly and are easy to understand, such that they can be provided to all people; regardless of whether people are possessed of knowledge or poorly educated, they can all receive God’s words. God’s work in divinity is also carried out through words, but it is full of provision, it is full of life, it is untainted by human ideas, it does not involve human preferences, and it is without human limits, it is outside the bounds of any normal humanity; it is carried out in the flesh, but it is the direct expression of the Spirit. If people only accept God’s work in humanity, then they will confine themselves to a certain scope, and so will require perennial pruning and discipline in order for there to be even a slight change in them. Without the work or presence of the Holy Spirit, though, they will always resort to their old ways; it is only through the work of divinity that these maladies and deficiencies can be rectified, and only then can people be made complete. Instead of sustained pruning, what is required is positive provision, using words to make up for all shortcomings, using words to reveal people’s every state, using words to direct their lives, their every utterance, their every action, to lay bare their intentions and motivations. This is the practical work of the practical God. Thus, in your attitude to the practical God, you should submit before His humanity at once, recognizing and acknowledging Him, and you should furthermore accept and submit to His divine work and words. God’s appearance in the flesh means that all of the work and words of the Spirit of God are done through His normal humanity and through His incarnate flesh. In other words, God’s Spirit at once directs His human work and carries out the work of divinity in the flesh, and in God incarnate you can see both God’s work in humanity and His completely divine work. This is the actual significance of the practical God’s appearance in the flesh. If you can see this clearly, you will be able to connect all the different parts of God; you will cease to attach undue importance on His work in divinity, and you will cease to view His work in humanity with undue dismissiveness, and you will not go to extremes, nor take any detours. Overall, the meaning of the practical God is that the work of His humanity and of His divinity, as directed by the Spirit, is expressed through His flesh, so that people can see that He is vivid and lifelike, real and true.

The work of God’s Spirit in humanity has transitional phases. By perfecting humanity, He enables His humanity to receive the direction of the Spirit, after which His humanity is able to provide and shepherd the churches. This is one expression of God’s normal work. Thus, if you can see clearly the principles of God’s work in humanity, then you will be unlikely to harbor notions about God’s work in humanity. Regardless of anything else, the Spirit of God cannot be wrong. He is right and without error; He does not do anything incorrectly. Divine work is the direct expression of the will of God, without the disturbance of humanity. It does not undergo perfection, but comes directly from the Spirit. However, the fact that He can work in divinity is due to His normal humanity; it is not in the least supernatural, and it seems to be carried out by a normal person. God came from heaven to earth primarily in order to express the words of God through the flesh, to complete the work of the Spirit of God by means of the flesh.

Today, people’s knowledge of the practical God remains too one-sided, and their understanding of the significance of the incarnation is still too meager. With God’s flesh, people see through His work and words that God’s Spirit includes so much, that He is so rich. Yet no matter what, God’s testimony ultimately comes from the Spirit of God: what God does in the flesh, which principles He works by, what He does in humanity, and what He does in divinity. People must have knowledge of this. Today, you are able to worship this person, while in essence you are worshiping the Spirit, and that is the very least that people should achieve in their knowledge of God incarnate: knowing the essence of the Spirit through the flesh, knowing the Spirit’s divine work in the flesh and human work in the flesh, accepting all the Spirit’s words and utterances in the flesh, and seeing how the Spirit of God directs the flesh and demonstrates His power in the flesh. This is to say that man comes to know the Spirit in heaven through the flesh; the appearance of the practical God Himself among man has dispelled the vague God in people’s notions. People’s worship of the practical God Himself has increased their submission to God, and, through the Spirit of God’s divine work in the flesh and His human work in the flesh, man receives revelation and is shepherded, and changes are achieved in man’s life disposition. This is the actual meaning of the Spirit’s arrival in the flesh, the primary purpose of which is that people may engage with God, rely on God, and arrive at knowledge of God.

In the main, what attitude should people have toward the practical God? What do you know of the incarnation, of the Word’s appearance in the flesh, of God’s appearance in the flesh, of the deeds of the practical God? What are the main topics of discussion today? The incarnation, the Word’s arrival in the flesh, and God’s appearance in the flesh are all issues that must be understood. You must come gradually to understand these issues and to have a clear knowledge of them in your life experience, based on your stature and based on the era. The process by which people experience God’s words is the same as the process by which they know the appearance of God’s words in the flesh. The more people experience God’s words, the more they know the Spirit of God; through experiencing God’s words, people grasp the principles of the Spirit’s work and come to know the practical God Himself. In fact, when God makes people perfect and gains them, He is letting them know the deeds of the practical God; He is using the work of the practical God to show people the actual significance of the incarnation, to show them that the Spirit of God has actually appeared before man. When people are gained and made perfect by God, the expressions of the practical God have conquered them; the words of the practical God have changed them and worked His own life into them, filling them with what He is (whether it be what He is in His humanity or what He is in His divinity), filling them with the essence of His words, and making people live out His words. When God gains people, He does so primarily by using the words and utterances of the practical God as a way to prune people’s deficiencies and to judge and reveal their rebellious disposition, causing them to gain what they need and showing them that God has come among man. Most important of all, the work done by the practical God is that of saving every person from the influence of Satan, taking them away from the land of filth, and dispelling their corrupt disposition. The most profound significance of being gained by the practical God is being able to live out normal humanity with the practical God as an exemplar and a model, being able to practice according to the words and requirements of the practical God without the slightest deviation or departure, practicing in whatever way He says, and being able to achieve whatever He asks. In this way, you will have been gained by God. When you are gained by God, you do not only possess the work of the Holy Spirit; principally, you are able to live out the requirements of the practical God. Merely having the work of the Holy Spirit does not mean you have life. The crux is whether you are able to act according to the practical God’s requirements of you, which relates to whether you are able to be gained by God. These are the greatest meaning of the practical God’s work in the flesh. This is to say that God gains a group of people by really and actually appearing in the flesh and being vivid and lifelike, being seen by people, actually doing the work of the Spirit in the flesh, and by acting as an exemplar for people in the flesh. God’s arrival in the flesh is primarily meant to enable people to see the practical deeds of God, to give fleshly form to the formless Spirit, and to allow people to see and touch Him. In this way, those who are made complete by Him will live Him out, will be gained by Him, and will conform to His will. If God only spoke in heaven and had not actually come onto the earth, then people would yet be incapable of knowing God; they would only be able to preach God’s deeds using empty theory and would not have God’s words as reality. God has come onto the earth primarily to act as an exemplar and a model for those whom He is to gain; only thus can people actually know God, touch God, and see Him, and only then can they truly be gained by God.

Knowing God’s Work Today

To know God’s work in these times is, for the most part, to know what the principal ministry of God incarnate is in the last days, and what He has come to do on earth. I have previously mentioned in My words that God has come to earth (during the last days) to set an exemplar before departing. How does God set this exemplar? He does so by speaking words, and by working and speaking throughout the land. This is God’s work during the last days; He only speaks, to make the earth a world of words, so that every person is provided for and enlightened by His words, and so that man’s spirit is awakened and he gains clarity about the visions. During the last days, God incarnate has come to earth chiefly in order to speak words. When Jesus came, He spread the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, and He accomplished the work of redemption of the crucifixion. He brought an end to the Age of Law and abolished all that was old. The arrival of Jesus ended the Age of Law and ushered in the Age of Grace; the arrival of God incarnate of the last days has brought an end to the Age of Grace. He has come chiefly to speak His words, to use words to make man perfect, to illuminate and enlighten man, and to remove the place of the vague God within man’s heart. This is not the stage of work that Jesus did when He came. When Jesus came, He performed many miracles, He healed the sick and cast out demons, and He did the work of redemption of the crucifixion. As a consequence, in people’s notions, they believe that this is how God should be. For when Jesus came, He did not do the work of removing the image of the vague God from man’s heart; when He came, He was crucified, He healed the sick and cast out demons, and He spread the gospel of the kingdom of heaven. In one regard, the incarnation of God during the last days removes the place held by the vague God in the notions of man, so that there is no longer the image of the vague God in man’s heart. Through His practical words and work, His movement across all lands, and the exceptionally practical and normal work that He does among man, He causes man to know the practicality of God, and removes the place of the vague God in man’s heart. In another regard, God uses the words spoken by His flesh to make man complete, and to accomplish all things. This is the work that God will accomplish during the last days.

What you must know:

1. The work of God is not supernatural, and you should not harbor notions about it.

2. You must understand the principal work that God incarnate has come to do this time.

He has not come to heal the sick, or to cast out demons, or to perform miracles, and He has not come to spread the gospel of repentance, or to grant man redemption. That is because Jesus has already done this work, and God does not repeat the same work. Today, God has come to bring an end to the Age of Grace and cast out all the practices of the Age of Grace. The practical God has come chiefly to show that He is practical. When Jesus came, He spoke few words; He primarily displayed miracles, performed signs and wonders, and healed the sick and cast out demons, or else He spoke prophecies in order to convince people and make them see that He really was God, and that He had no fleshly feelings. Ultimately, He completed the work of the crucifixion. The God of today does not display signs and wonders, nor does He heal the sick and cast out demons. When Jesus came, the work He did represented one part of God, but this time God has come to do the stage of work that is due, for God does not repeat the same work; He is the God that is always new and never old, and so all that you see today is the words and work of the practical God.

God incarnate of the last days has come chiefly in order to speak His words, to explain all that is necessary to the life of man, to point out that which man should enter into, to show man the deeds of God, and to show man the wisdom, omnipotence, and wondrousness of God. Through the many ways in which God speaks, man beholds the supremacy of God, the magnitude of God, and, moreover, the humility and hiddenness of God. Man sees that God is supreme, but that He is humble and hidden, and can become the least of all. Some of His words are spoken directly from the perspective of the Spirit, some directly from the perspective of man, and some from a third person perspective. In this, it can be seen that the manner of God’s work varies greatly, and it is through words that He allows man to see it. God’s work during the last days is both normal and practical, and thus the group of people in the last days is subjected to the greatest of all trials. Because of the normality and practicality of God, all people have entered amid such trials; that man has descended into the trials of God is because of the normality and practicality of God. During the age of Jesus, there were no notions or trials. Because most of the work done by Jesus accorded with man’s notions, people followed Him, and they had no notions about Him. The trials of today are the greatest ever faced by man, and when it is said that these people have come out of the great tribulation, this is the tribulation that is referred to. Today, God speaks to engender faith, love, acceptance of suffering, and submission in these people. The words spoken by God incarnate of the last days are spoken in accordance with the nature essence of man, the behavior of man, and that which man should enter into today. His words are both practical and normal: He does not speak of tomorrow, nor does He look back on yesterday; He speaks only of that which should be entered into, put into practice, and understood today. If, during the present day, there is to emerge a person who is able to display signs and wonders, cast out demons, heal the sick, and perform many miracles, and if this person claims that they are Jesus who has come, then this would be a counterfeit produced by evil spirits which imitate Jesus. Remember this! God does not repeat the same work. Jesus’ stage of work has already been completed, and God will never again undertake that stage of work. The work of God is irreconcilable with the notions of man; for example, the Old Testament foretold the coming of a Messiah, and the result of this prophecy was Jesus’ coming. This having already happened, it would be wrong for another Messiah to come again. Jesus has already come once, and it would be wrong if Jesus were to come again this time. There is one name for every age, and each name contains a characterization of that age. In the notions of man, God must always display signs and wonders, must always heal the sick and cast out demons, and must always be just like Jesus. Yet this time, God is not like that at all. If, during the last days, God still displayed signs and wonders, and still cast out demons and healed the sick—if He did exactly the same as Jesus—then God would be repeating the same work, and the work of Jesus would have no significance or value. Thus, God carries out one stage of work in every age. Once each stage of His work has been completed, it is soon imitated by evil spirits, and after Satan begins to follow on the heels of God, God changes to a different method. Once God has completed a stage of His work, it is imitated by evil spirits. You must be clear about this. Why is the work of God today different to the work of Jesus? Why does God today not display signs and wonders, not cast out demons, and not heal the sick? If Jesus’ work were the same as the work done during the Age of Law, could He have represented the God of the Age of Grace? Could He have completed the work of the crucifixion? If, as in the Age of Law, Jesus had entered into the temple and kept the Sabbath, then He would have been persecuted by none and embraced by all. If that were so, could He have been crucified? Could He have completed the work of redemption? What would be the point if God incarnate of the last days displayed signs and wonders, like Jesus did? Only if God does another part of His work during the last days, one that represents part of His management plan, can man gain a deeper knowledge of God, and only then can God’s management plan be completed.

During the last days, God has come chiefly in order to speak His words. He speaks from the perspective of the Spirit, from the perspective of man, and from a third person perspective; He speaks in different ways, using one way for a period of time, and He uses the method of speaking to change the notions of man and remove the image of the vague God from man’s heart. This is the main work done by God. Because man believes that God has come to heal the sick, to cast out demons, to perform miracles, and to bestow material blessings upon man, God carries out this stage of work—the work of chastisement and judgment—in order to remove such things from the notions of man, so that man may know the practicality and normality of God, and so that the image of Jesus may be removed from his heart and replaced by a new image of God. As soon as the image of God within man becomes old, then it becomes an idol. When Jesus came and carried out that stage of work, He did not represent the entirety of God. He performed some signs and wonders, spoke some words, and was ultimately crucified. He represented one part of God. He could not represent all that is of God, but rather He represented God in doing one part of God’s work. That is because God is so great, and so wondrous, and He is unfathomable, and because God only does one part of His work in every age. The work done by God during this age is chiefly the provision of the words for the life of man, the exposure of man’s nature essence and his corrupt disposition, and the elimination of religious notions, feudal thinking, and outdated thinking; the knowledge and culture of man must be cleansed through being exposed by God’s words. In the last days, God uses words, not signs and wonders, to make man perfect. He uses His words to expose man, to judge man, to chastise man, and to make man perfect, so that in the words of God, man comes to see the wisdom and loveliness of God, and comes to understand the disposition of God, and so that through the words of God, man beholds the deeds of God. During the Age of Law, Jehovah led Moses out of Egypt with His words, and spoke some words to the Israelites; at that time, part of the deeds of God were made plain, but because the caliber of man was limited and nothing could make his knowledge complete, God continued to speak and work. In the Age of Grace, man once more saw part of the deeds of God. Jesus was able to show signs and wonders, to heal the sick and cast out demons, and be crucified, three days after which He was resurrected and appeared in the flesh before man. Of God, man knew no more than this. Man knows as much as is shown to him by God, and if God were to show nothing more to man, then such would be the extent of man’s delimitation of God. Thus, God continues to work, so that man’s knowledge of Him may become deeper, and so that man may gradually come to know the essence of God. In the last days, God uses His words to make man perfect. Your corrupt disposition is disclosed by the words of God, and your religious notions are replaced by the practicality of God. God incarnate of the last days has chiefly come to fulfill the words “the Word becomes flesh, the Word comes into the flesh, and the Word appears in the flesh,” and if you do not have a thorough knowledge of this, then you will be unable to stand fast. During the last days, God primarily intends to accomplish a stage of work in which the Word appears in the flesh, and this is one part of God’s management plan. Thus, your knowledge must be clear; regardless of how God works, God does not allow man to delimit Him. If God did not do this work during the last days, then man’s knowledge of Him could go no further. You would only know that God can be crucified and can destroy Sodom, and that Jesus can be raised from the dead and appear to Peter…. But you would never say that God’s words can accomplish all, and can conquer man. Only through experiencing God’s words can you speak of such knowledge, and the more of God’s work that you experience, the more thorough your knowledge of Him will become. Only then will you cease to delimit God within your own notions. Man comes to know God by experiencing His work; there is no other correct way to know God. Today, there are many people who do nothing but wait to see signs and wonders and the time of the great disasters. Do you believe in God, or do you believe in the great disasters? When the great disasters arrive it will be too late, and if God does not send down the great disasters, is He then not God? Do you believe in signs and wonders, or do you believe in God Himself? Jesus did not display signs and wonders when He was derided by others, but was He not God? Do you believe in signs and wonders, or do you believe in the essence of God? Man’s views about belief in God are wrong! Jehovah spoke many words during the Age of Law, but even today some of them have yet to be fulfilled. Can you say that Jehovah was not God?

Today, it should be clear to all of you that, in the last days, it is principally the fact of “the Word becomes flesh” that is accomplished by God. Through His actual work on earth, He causes man to know Him and to engage with Him, and to see His practical deeds. He causes man to clearly see that He is able to display signs and wonders and that there are also times when He is unable to do so; this depends on the age. From this, you can see that God is not incapable of displaying signs and wonders, but instead changes His way of working according to the work to be done and according to the age. In the current stage of work, He does not show signs and wonders; that He showed some signs and wonders in the age of Jesus was because His work in that age was different. God does not do that work today, and some people believe Him incapable of displaying signs and wonders, or else they think that if He does not display signs and wonders, then He is not God. Is that not a fallacy? God is able to display signs and wonders, but He is working in a different age, and so He does not do such work. Because this is a different age, and because this is a different stage of God’s work, the deeds made plain by God are also different. Man’s belief in God is not the belief in signs and wonders, nor the belief in miracles, but the belief in His practical work during the new age. Man comes to know God through the manner in which God works, and this knowledge produces in man the belief in God, which is to say, the belief in the work and deeds of God. In this stage of work, God mainly speaks. Do not wait to see signs and wonders; you will not see any! This is because you were not born during the Age of Grace. If you had been, you could have seen signs and wonders, but you were born during the last days, and so you can see only the practicality and normality of God. Do not expect to see the supernatural Jesus during the last days. You are only able to see the practical God incarnate, who is no different from any normal human being. In each age, God makes plain different deeds. In each age, He makes plain part of the deeds of God, and the work of each age represents one part of the disposition of God, and one part of the deeds of God. The deeds that He makes plain vary with the age in which He works, but they all give man a knowledge of God that is deeper, a belief in God that is truer and more down-to-earth. Man believes in God because of all of the deeds of God, because God is so wondrous, so great, because He is almighty and unfathomable. If you believe in God because He is able to perform signs and wonders and can heal the sick and cast out demons, then your view is wrong, and some people will say to you, “Are not evil spirits also able to do such things?” Does this not constitute confusing the image of God with the image of Satan? Today, man’s belief in God is because of His many deeds and the great amount of work He does and the many ways in which He speaks. God uses His utterances to conquer man and make him perfect. Man believes in God because of His many deeds, not because He is able to show signs and wonders; people only get to know God by witnessing His deeds. Only by knowing the practical deeds of God, how He works, what wise methods He uses, how He speaks, and how He makes man perfect—only by knowing these aspects—can you comprehend the practicality of God and understand His disposition, knowing what He likes, what He loathes, and how He works upon man. By understanding the likes and dislikes of God, you can differentiate between that which is positive and negative, and through your knowledge of God there is progress in your life. In short, you must gain a knowledge of God’s work, and you must put straight your views about believing in God.

Is the Work of God As Simple As Man Imagines?

As believers in God, each of you should appreciate how you have truly gained the utmost exaltation and salvation by receiving the work of God in the last days and the work of His plan that He does in you today. God has made this group of people the sole focus of His work throughout all the universe. He has sacrificed all His heart’s blood for you; He has reclaimed and given to you all the work of the Spirit throughout the universe. That is why you are the fortunate ones. Moreover, He has shifted His glory from Israel, His chosen people, onto you, and He shall make the purpose of His plan fully manifest through this group. Therefore, you are the ones who will receive the inheritance of God, and even more than this, you are the heirs to God’s glory. Perhaps you all remember these words: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” You have all heard these words before, yet none of you understood their true meaning. Today, you are profoundly aware of their true significance. These words shall be fulfilled by God during the last days, and they shall be fulfilled in those who have been brutally persecuted by the great red dragon in the land where it lies coiled. The great red dragon persecutes God and is the enemy of God, and so, in this land, those who believe in God are thus subjected to humiliation and oppression, and these words are fulfilled in you, this group of people, as a result. Because it is embarked upon in a land that opposes God, all of God’s work faces tremendous obstacles, and accomplishing many of His words takes time; thus, people are refined as a result of God’s words, which is also part of suffering. It is tremendously difficult for God to carry out His work in the land of the great red dragon—but it is through this difficulty that God does one stage of His work, making manifest His wisdom and His wondrous deeds, and using this opportunity to make this group of people complete. It is through people’s suffering, through their caliber, and through all the satanic dispositions of the people of this filthy land that God does His work of purification and conquest, so that, from this, He may gain glory, and so that He may gain those who will bear witness to His deeds. Such is the entire significance of all the sacrifices that God has made for this group of people. That is, it is through those who oppose Him that God does the work of conquest, and only thus can the great power of God be made manifest. In other words, only those in the unclean land are worthy of inheriting the glory of God, and only this can highlight the great power of God. That is why it is from the unclean land, and from those who live in the unclean land, that the glory of God is gained. Such is the will of God. Jesus’ stage of work was the same: He could only gain glory among those Pharisees who persecuted Him; if not for the persecution of the Pharisees and the betrayal of Judas, Jesus would not have been ridiculed or slandered, much less crucified, and thus could not have gained glory. Where God works in each age, and where He does His work in the flesh, is where He gains glory and where He gains those He intends to gain. This is the plan of God’s work, and this is His management.

In God’s plan of several thousand years, two parts of work are done in the flesh: First is the work of the crucifixion, for which He gains glory; the other is the work of conquest and perfection in the last days, for which He gains glory. This is the management of God. So do not regard God’s work, or God’s commission to you, as a simple matter. You are all heirs to God’s far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, and this was specially ordained by God. Of the two parts of His glory, one is manifest in you; the entirety of one part of God’s glory has been bestowed upon you, that it may be your inheritance. This is God’s exaltation of you, and it is also the plan that He predetermined long ago. Given the greatness of the work God has done in the land where the great red dragon resides, if this work were moved elsewhere, it would have long ago borne great fruit and been readily accepted by man. Moreover, this work would be far too easy to accept for those clergy of the West who believe in God, for the stage of work by Jesus serves as a precedent. This is why God is unable to achieve this stage of the work of gaining glory elsewhere; when the work is supported by the people and recognized by the nations, God’s glory cannot take hold. This is precisely the extraordinary significance that this stage of work holds in this land. There is not one person among you who is protected by the law—you are, instead, sanctioned by the law. Even more problematic is that people do not understand you: Be it your relatives, your parents, your friends, or your colleagues, none of them understand you. When you are abandoned by God, it is impossible for you to continue living on earth, but even so, people cannot bear to be away from God, which is the significance of God’s conquest of people, and is the glory of God. What you have inherited this day surpasses that of the apostles and prophets throughout the ages and is greater even than that of Moses and Peter. Blessings cannot be obtained in a day or two; they must be earned through great sacrifice. Which is to say, you must possess a love that has undergone refinement, you must possess great faith, and you must have the many truths that God requires you to attain; what is more, you must turn toward justice, without being cowed or evasive, and must have a God-loving heart that is constant unto death. You must have resolve, changes must occur in your life disposition, your corruption must be healed, you must accept all of God’s orchestrations without complaint, and you must be submissive even unto death. This is what you ought to attain, this is the final aim of God’s work, and it is what God asks of this group of people. Since He gives to you, so He will surely ask of you in return, and will surely make fitting demands of you. Therefore, there is reason to all the work God does, which shows why, time and time again, God does work that sets high standards and strict requirements. It is because of this that you should be filled with faith in God. In short, all the work of God is done for your sake, so that you may become worthy of receiving His inheritance. This is not so much for the sake of God’s own glory but for the sake of your salvation and for perfecting this group of people who have been so profoundly afflicted in the unclean land. You should understand the will of God. And so, I exhort the many ignorant people who are without any insight or sense: Do not test God, and resist no more. God has already undergone suffering never endured by any man, and long ago endured even greater humiliation in man’s stead. What else can you not let go of? What could be more important than the will of God? What could be higher than God’s love? It is hard enough for God to carry out His work in this unclean land; if, on top of this, man knowingly and willfully transgresses, the work of God will have to be prolonged. In short, this is in no one’s best interest, it does not benefit anyone. God is not bound by time; His work and His glory come first. Therefore, He will pay any price for His work, no matter how long it takes. This is the disposition of God: He will not rest until His work is done. His work will only end when He gains the second part of His glory. If, in all the universe, God does not finish the second part of His work of gaining glory, His day will never come, His hand will never leave His chosen people, His glory will never descend upon Israel, and His plan will never be concluded. You should be able to see the will of God, and should see that the work of God is not as simple as the creation of the heavens and earth and all things. That is because the work of today is the transformation of those who have been corrupted, who are numb to the utmost degree, it is to purify those who were created but processed by Satan. It is not the creation of Adam or Eve, still less is it the creation of the light, or the creation of every plant and animal. God makes pure the things that have been corrupted by Satan and then gains them anew; they become things that belong to Him, and they become His glory. This is not as man imagines, it is not as simple as the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them, or the work of cursing Satan to the bottomless pit; rather, it is the work of transforming man, turning things that are negative, and do not belong to Him, into things that are positive, and do belong to Him. This is the truth behind this stage of God’s work. You must understand this, and avoid oversimplifying matters. The work of God is unlike any ordinary work. Its wonderfulness and wisdom are beyond the mind of man. God does not create all things during this stage of work, but nor does He destroy them. Instead, He transforms all the things He created, and purifies all the things that have been defiled by Satan. And thus does God embark upon a great enterprise, which is the entire significance of the work of God. Do you see in these words that the work of God is really so simple?

You Ought to Live for the Truth Since You Believe in God

The common problem that exists in all people is that they understand the truth but fail to put it into practice. This is because, on the one hand, they are unwilling to pay the price, and on the other, because their discernment is too inadequate; they are unable to see many of the difficulties of everyday lives for what they are, and do not know how to practice properly. Because people’s experiences are too shallow, their caliber too poor, and the degree to which they understand the truth limited, they have no way of resolving the difficulties they encounter in their everyday lives. They believe in God in word only, and are incapable of bringing God into their everyday lives. That is to say, God is God, life is life, and it is as if people have no relationship with God in their lives. That is what everyone thinks. Believing in God thus, people will not, in reality, be gained and perfected by Him. In fact, it is not that the word of God has not found complete expression, but rather that people’s comprehension ability is simply too inadequate. One could say that almost no one acts according to God’s original intentions; rather, their faith in God is according to their own intentions, the religious notions they held in the past, and their own way of doing things. Few are those who undergo a transformation following the acceptance of God’s word and begin to act in accordance with His will. Instead, they persist in their mistaken beliefs. When people begin to believe in God, they do so based on the conventional rules of religion, and they live and interact with others entirely on the basis of their own philosophy for worldly dealings. One could say that this is the case for nine out of every ten people. There are very few who formulate another plan and turn over a new leaf after beginning to believe in God. Humanity has failed to regard the word of God as truth, or, taking it as truth, to put it into practice.

Take, for instance, faith in Jesus. Whether someone had just started to believe or had done so for a very long time, all simply put to use whatever talents they had and demonstrated whatever skills they possessed. People simply added “faith in God,” these three words, into their usual lives, yet made no changes to their disposition, and their faith in God did not grow in the slightest. Their pursuit was neither hot nor cold. They did not say that they would give up on their faith, but neither did they consecrate all to God. They had never truly loved God or submitted to Him. Their faith in God was a mixture of the genuine and the counterfeit, they approached it with one eye open and one eye shut, and were not earnest in practicing their faith. They continued in such a state of befuddlement, and ultimately died a muddled death. What is the point of all that? Today, to believe in the practical God, you must set foot on the right track. If you believe in God, you should not only seek blessings, but to love God and know God. Through His enlightenment, through your own individual seeking, you can eat and drink His word, develop a real understanding of God, and have a real love of God that comes from your inmost heart. In other words, when your love for God is most genuine, and no one can destroy or stand in the way of your love for Him, at this time you are on the right track in your belief in God. This proves that you belong to God, for your heart is already in God’s possession and nothing else can then take possession of you. Through your experience, through the price you have paid, and through the work of God, you are able to develop an unbidden love for God—and when you do, you will become free from the influence of Satan and will come to live in the light of God’s word. Only when you have broken free from the influence of darkness can you be said to have gained God. In your belief in God, you must try to seek this goal. This is the duty of each of you. None of you should be satisfied with the current state of affairs. You cannot be of two minds toward the work of God, nor can you regard it lightly. You should think of God in all respects and at all times, and do all things for His sake. And whenever you speak or act, you should place the interests of the house of God first. Only thus can you be in line with God’s will.

In their faith in God, people’s greatest fault is that they believe in word only, and God is utterly absent from their everyday lives. All people, indeed, believe in the existence of God, yet God is not a part of their everyday lives. People’s mouths speak many prayers to God, but God has little place in their hearts, and so God tries them again and again. It is because people are impure that God has no alternative but to try them, so that they may feel ashamed and come to know themselves in the midst of these trials. If not, humanity would turn into the descendants of the archangel, and become increasingly corrupt. In the process of their faith in God, each person casts off many of their personal intentions and objectives under God’s ceaseless cleansing. If not, God would have no way of using anyone, and no way of doing in people the work that He ought. God first cleanses people, and through this process, they may come to know themselves and God may change them. Only then does God work His life into them, and only thus can their hearts be fully turned to God. And so I say, believing in God is not as simple as people say. As God sees it, if you only have knowledge but do not have His word as life, and if you are limited only to your own knowledge but cannot practice the truth or live out the word of God, then this is proof still that you do not have a God-loving heart, and it shows that your heart does not belong to God. One can come to know God by believing in Him: This is the final goal, and the goal of man’s pursuit. You must put effort into living out the words of God so that they may come to fruition in your practice. If you have only doctrinal knowledge, then your faith in God will come to naught. Only if you then also practice and live out His word can your faith be considered complete and in accord with God’s will. On this road, many people can speak of much knowledge, but at their time of death, their eyes brim with tears, and they hate themselves for having wasted a lifetime and lived to a ripe old age for naught. They merely understand doctrines, but cannot put the truth into practice or bear witness to God; instead, they simply run hither and thither, busy as a bee, and only on the brink of death do they finally see that they lack true testimony, that they do not know God at all. And is this not too late? Why do you not seize the day and pursue the truth that you love? Why wait until tomorrow? If in life you do not suffer for the truth or seek to gain it, can it be that you wish to feel regret in your dying hour? If so, then why believe in God? In truth, there are many matters in which people, if they put in just the slightest exertion, can put the truth into practice and thereby satisfy God. It is only because people’s hearts are ever possessed by demons that they cannot act for the sake of God, and constantly rush about for the sake of their flesh, with nothing to show for it in the end. For this reason, people are constantly afflicted by troubles and difficulties. Are these not the torments of Satan? Is this not the corruption of the flesh? You should not try to fool God by flapping your lips. Rather, you must take tangible action. Do not deceive yourself—what would be the point of that? What can you gain by living for the sake of your flesh and struggling for profit and fame?

The Seven Thunders Peal—Prophesying That the Gospel of the Kingdom Shall Spread Throughout the Universe

I am spreading My work among the Gentile nations. My glory flashes throughout the universe; all the star-star-dot-dot people bear My will within them, and they are all steered by My hand and set about the tasks I have assigned. From this point on, I have entered into a new age, bringing all men into another world. When I returned to My “homeland,” I commenced yet another part of the work in My original plan, so that man would come to know Me more deeply. I regard the universe in its entirety and see that[a] it is an opportune time for My work, so I hurry all about, doing My new work upon man. This is a new age, after all, and I have brought new work to take more new people into the new age and to discard more of those that I shall cast out. In the nation of the great red dragon, I have carried out a stage of work unfathomable to human beings, causing them to sway in the wind, after which many quietly drift away with the blowing of the wind. Truly, this is the “threshing floor” I am about to clear; it is what I yearn for and it is also My plan. For many evil ones have crept in while I am at work, but I am in no hurry to drive them away. Rather, I shall disperse them when the time is right. Only after that shall I be the fountain of life, allowing those who truly love Me to receive from Me the fruit of the fig tree and the fragrance of the lily. In the land where Satan sojourns, the land of dust, there remains no pure gold, only sand, and so, meeting with these circumstances, I do such a stage of work. You should know that what I gain is pure, refined gold, not sand. How can the evil remain in My house? How can I allow foxes to be parasites in My paradise? I employ every conceivable method to drive these things away. Before My will is revealed, no one is aware of what I am about to do. Taking this opportunity, I drive away those evil ones, and they are forced to leave My presence. This is what I do to the evil, but there will still be a day for them to do service for Me. The desire of men for blessings is much too strong; therefore I turn My body around and show My glorious countenance to the Gentiles, so that men may all live in a world of their own and judge themselves, while I go on saying the words that I should say, and supplying men with what they need. When men come to their senses, I will have long since spread My work. I shall then express My will to men, and begin the second part of My work upon men, letting all men follow Me closely so as to coordinate with My work, and letting men do everything in their ability to carry out with Me the work that I must do.

None have faith that they will see My glory, and I do not compel them, but rather remove My glory from mankind’s midst and take it to another world. When men once again repent, then I shall take My glory and show it to even more of those of faith. This is the principle by which I work. For there is a time when My glory leaves Canaan, and there is also a time when My glory leaves the chosen. Furthermore, there is a time when My glory leaves the whole earth, causing it to grow dim and plunging it into darkness. Even the land of Canaan shall not see the sunlight; all men will lose their faith, but none can bear to leave the fragrance of the land of Canaan. Only when I pass into the new heaven and earth do I take the other part of My glory and reveal it first in the land of Canaan, causing a glimmer of light to shine forth in the whole earth, sunk in the pitchy darkness of night, that the whole earth may come to the light; that men all over the earth may come to draw strength from the power of the light, allowing My glory to increase and appear anew to every nation; and that all humanity may realize that I have long ago come to the human world and long ago brought My glory from Israel to the East; for My glory shines from the East and it was brought over from the Age of Grace to this day. But it was from Israel that I departed and from there that I arrived in the East. Only when the light of the East gradually turns white will the darkness across the earth begin to turn to light, and only then will man discover that I have long ago gone from Israel and am rising anew in the East. Having once descended into Israel and later departed from it, I cannot again be born into Israel, because My work leads all of the universe and, what is more, the lightning flashes straight from East to West. For this reason I have descended in the East and brought Canaan to the people of the East. I shall bring people from all over the earth to the land of Canaan, and so I continue to issue forth utterances in the land of Canaan to control the entire universe. At this time, there is no light in all the earth apart from Canaan, and all men are imperiled by hunger and cold. I gave My glory to Israel and then took it away, thereby bringing the Israelites to the East and all of humanity to the East. I have brought them all to the light so that they may be reunited with it, and be in association with it, and no longer have to search for it. I shall let all who are searching see the light again and see the glory I had in Israel; I shall let them see that I have long ago come down upon a white cloud into the midst of mankind, let them see the countless clouds of white and fruits in their abundant clusters, and, what is more, let them see Jehovah God of Israel. I shall let them look upon the Master of the Jews, the longed-for Messiah, and the full appearance of Me who have been persecuted by kings throughout the ages. I shall work upon the entire universe and I shall perform great work, revealing all My glory and all My deeds to man in the last days. I shall show My glorious countenance in its fullness to those who have waited many years for Me, to those who have longed for Me to come upon a white cloud, to Israel that has longed for Me to appear once again, and to all mankind who persecute Me, so that all will know that I have long ago taken away My glory and brought it to the East, and it is no longer in Judea. For the last days have already come!

Throughout the universe I am doing My work, and in the East, thunderous crashes issue forth endlessly, shaking all nations and denominations. It is My voice that has led all men into the present. I cause all men to be conquered by My voice, to fall into this stream, and surrender before Me, for I have long since reclaimed My glory from all the earth and issued it forth anew in the East. Who does not long to see My glory? Who does not anxiously await My return? Who does not thirst for My reappearance? Who does not pine for My loveliness? Who would not come to the light? Who would not look upon the richness of Canaan? Who does not long for the return of the Redeemer? Who does not adore Him who is great in power? My voice shall spread throughout the earth; I will face My chosen people and speak more words to them, like a mighty thunder shaking the mountains and rivers. I speak My words to the whole universe and to mankind. Hence the words in My mouth have become man’s treasure, and all men cherish My words. The lightning flashes from the East all the way to the West. My words are such that man is loath to give them up and at the same time finds them unfathomable, but rejoices in them all the more. Like a newborn infant, all men are glad and joyful, celebrating My coming. By means of My voice, I shall bring all men before Me. Thenceforth, I shall formally enter into the race of men so that they will come to worship Me. With the glory that I radiate and the words in My mouth, I shall make it such that all men come before Me and see that the lightning flashes from the East and that I have also descended unto the “Mount of Olives” of the East. They will see that I have already long been on earth, no longer as the Son of the Jews but as the Lightning of the East. For I have long since been resurrected, and have departed from mankind’s midst, and then reappeared with glory among men. I am He who was worshiped countless ages before now, and I am also the infant forsaken by the Israelites countless ages before now. Moreover, I am the all-glorious Almighty God of the present age! Let all come before My throne and see My glorious countenance, hear My voice, and look upon My deeds. This is the entirety of My will; it is the end and the climax of My plan, as well as the purpose of My management: to have every nation worship Me, every tongue acknowledge Me, every man repose his faith in Me, and every people be subject unto Me!

Footnotes:

a. The original text does not contain the phrase “see that.”

The Essential Difference Between the Incarnate God and the People Used by God

Many are the years that the Spirit of God has been searching as He works on earth, and many are those whom God has used to perform His work throughout the ages. Yet for all this time, God’s Spirit has been without a suitable resting place, which is why God switches among different people to do His work. All told, it is through people that His work is done. Which is to say, for all these years, God’s work has never stopped, but it has continued to be carried forward in people, all the way to today. Although God has spoken so many words and done so much work, man still does not know God, all because God has never appeared to man and also because He has no tangible form. And so God must bring this work—the work of causing all men to know the practical significance of the practical God—to completion. To achieve this end, God must reveal His Spirit tangibly to humanity and perform His work in their midst. That is, only when God’s Spirit assumes physical form, puts on flesh and bone, and visibly walks among people, accompanying them in their lives, sometimes showing and sometimes hiding Himself, only then are people able to arrive at a deeper understanding of Him. If God only remained in the flesh, He would not be able to complete His work in its entirety. And after working in the flesh for a period of time, fulfilling the ministry that needs to be done in the flesh, God will depart the flesh and work in the spiritual realm in the image of the flesh, just as Jesus did so after He had worked for a period of time in normal humanity and completed all the work that He needed to complete. You may remember this passage from “The Path … (5)”: “I remember My Father saying to Me, ‘On earth, seek only to follow Your Father’s will and complete His commission. Nothing else concerns You.’” What do you see in this passage? When God comes to the earth, He does only His work within divinity, which is what the heavenly Spirit has entrusted to the incarnate God. When He comes, He but speaks across the land, to give voice to His utterances by different means and from different perspectives. He chiefly takes supplying man and teaching man as His goals and working principle, and does not concern Himself with such things as interpersonal relationships or the details of people’s lives. His main ministry is to speak for the Spirit. That is, when God’s Spirit appears tangibly in the flesh, He only provides for man’s life and releases the truth. He does not involve Himself in man’s work, which is to say, He does not partake in the work of humanity. Humans cannot do divine work, and God does not partake in human work. In all the years since God came to this earth to perform His work, He has always done it through people. These people, however, cannot be considered God incarnate—only those who are used by God. The God of today, meanwhile, can speak directly from the perspective of divinity, sending forth the Spirit’s voice and working on behalf of the Spirit. All those whom God has used throughout the ages are, likewise, instances of God’s Spirit working within a fleshly body—so why can’t they be called God? But today’s God is also God’s Spirit working directly in the flesh, and Jesus too was God’s Spirit working in the flesh; both of Them are called God. So what’s the difference? The people that God has used throughout the ages have all been capable of normal thought and reason. They have all understood the principles of human conduct. They have had normal human ideas, and have been possessed of all the things that normal people should possess. Most of them have had exceptional talent and innate intelligence. In working upon these people, God’s Spirit harnesses their talents, which are their God-given gifts. God’s Spirit brings their talents into play, using their strengths in God’s service. Yet the essence of God is without ideas or thought, unadulterated with human intentions, and even lacks what normal humans possess. Which is to say, He is not even conversant with the principles of human conduct. This is how it is when today’s God comes to the earth. His work and His words are unadulterated with human intentions or human thought, but they are a direct manifestation of the intentions of the Spirit, and He works directly on God’s behalf. This means that the Spirit directly speaks, that is, the divinity directly does the work, without mixing in even one bit of man’s intentions. In other words, the incarnate God embodies divinity directly, is without human thought or ideas, and has no understanding of the principles of human conduct. If only divinity were at work (meaning if only God Himself were at work), there would be no way for God’s work to be carried out on earth. So when God comes to earth, He must have a small number of people He uses to work within humanity in conjunction with the work that God does in divinity. In other words, He uses human work to uphold His divine work. If not, there would be no way for man to directly engage with the divine work. This is how it was with Jesus and His disciples. During His time in the world, Jesus abolished the old laws and established new commandments. He also spoke many words. All this work was done in divinity. The others, such as Peter, Paul, and John, all rested their subsequent work on the foundation of Jesus’ words. Which is to say, God launched His work in that age, ushering in the beginning of the Age of Grace; that is, He ushered in a new era, abolishing the old, and also fulfilling the words, “God is the Beginning and the End.” In other words, man must perform human work upon the foundation of divine work. Once Jesus had said all He needed to say and finished His work on earth, He left man. After this, all people, in working, did so according to the principles expressed in His words, and practiced according to the truths of which He spoke. All of these people worked for Jesus. If it had been Jesus alone doing the work, no matter how many words He spoke, people would have had no means of engaging with His words, because He was working in divinity and could only speak words of divinity, and He could not have explained things to the point where normal people could understand His words. And so He had to have the apostles and prophets who came after Him supplement His work. This is the principle of how God incarnate does His work—using the incarnate flesh to speak and to work so as to complete the work of divinity, and then using a few, or perhaps more, people who conform to God’s will to supplement His work. That is, God uses people who conform to His will to do the work of shepherding and watering in humanity so that God’s chosen people may enter the truth reality.

If, when He came to the flesh, God only did the work of divinity, and there were no people who conform to His will to work in concert with Him, then man would be incapable of understanding God’s will or engaging with God. God must use normal people who conform to His will to complete this work, to watch over and shepherd the churches, so that the level that man’s cognitive processes, his brain, are capable of imagining can be achieved. In other words, God uses a small number of people who conform to His will to “translate” the work that He does within His divinity, so that it can be opened up—to transform divine language into human language, so that people can comprehend and understand it. If God did not do so, no one would understand God’s divine language, because the people who conform to God’s will are, after all, a small minority, and man’s comprehension ability is weak. That is why God chooses this method only when working in the incarnate flesh. If there were only divine work, there would be no way for man to know or engage with God, because man does not understand God’s language. Man is able to understand this language only through the agency of the people who conform to God’s will, who clarify His words. However, if there were only such people working within humanity, that could only maintain man’s normal life; it could not transform man’s disposition. God’s work could not have a new starting point; there would only be the same old songs, the same old platitudes. Only through the agency of the incarnate God, who says all that needs to be said and does all that needs to be done during the period of His incarnation, after which people work and experience according to His words, only thus will their life disposition be able to change, and only thus will they be able to flow with the times. He who works within divinity represents God, while those who work within humanity are people used by God. Which is to say, the incarnate God is essentially different from the people used by God. The incarnate God is able to do the work of divinity, whereas the people used by God are not. At the beginning of each age, God’s Spirit speaks personally and launches the new era to bring man into a new beginning. When He has finished speaking, this signifies that God’s work within His divinity is done. Thereafter, people all follow the lead of those used by God to enter into their life experience. By the same token, this is also the stage in which God brings man into the new age and gives people a new starting point—at which time God’s work in the flesh concludes.

God does not come to the earth to perfect His normal humanity, nor to perform the work of normal humanity. He comes only to do the work of divinity in normal humanity. What God speaks of normal humanity is not as people imagine. Man defines “normal humanity” as having a wife, or a husband, and sons and daughters, which are proof that one is a normal person; God, however, does not see it this way. He sees normal humanity as having normal human thoughts, normal human lives, and being born of normal people. But His normality does not include having a wife, or a husband, and children in the way that man speaks about normality. That is, to man, the normal humanity that God speaks of is what man would consider the absence of humanity, almost lacking in feelings and seemingly devoid of fleshly needs, just like Jesus, who had only the exterior of a normal person and took on the appearance of a normal person, but in essence did not entirely possess all that a normal person should possess. From this it can be seen that the incarnate God’s essence does not encompass the entirety of normal humanity, but only a portion of the things which people should possess, in order to support the routines of normal human life and sustain normal human powers of reason. But these things have nothing to do with what man considers normal humanity. They are what God incarnate should possess. There are those who maintain, however, that God incarnate can be said to possess normal humanity only if He has a wife, sons and daughters, a family; without these things, they say, He is not a normal person. I ask you then, “Does God have a wife? Is it possible for God to have a husband? Can God have children?” Are these not fallacies? Yet the incarnate God cannot spring from a crack between rocks or fall down from the sky. He can only be born into a normal human family. That is why He has parents and sisters. These are the things that the normal humanity of the incarnate God should have. Such was the case with Jesus; Jesus had a father and mother, sisters and brothers, and all this was normal. But if He had had a wife and sons and daughters, then His would not have been the normal humanity that God intended for the God incarnate to possess. If this were the case, He would not have been able to work on behalf of divinity. It was precisely because He did not have a wife or children, and yet was born of normal people into a normal family, that He was able to do the work of divinity. To clarify this further, what God considers a normal person is a person born into a normal family. Only such a person is qualified to do divine work. If, on the other hand, the person had a wife, children, or a husband, that person would not be able to do divine work, because they would possess only the normal humanity that humans require but not the normal humanity that God requires. That which is deemed by God, and what people understand, are often hugely different, leagues apart. In this stage of God’s work there is much that runs counter to and vastly differs from people’s notions. One could say that this stage of God’s work consists entirely of divinity working hands-on, with humanity playing a supporting role. Because God comes to the earth to perform His work Himself, rather than allowing man to put his hand to it, He incarnates Himself in the flesh (in an incomplete, normal person) to do His work. He uses this incarnation to present mankind with a new age, to tell mankind of the next step in His work, and to ask people to practice in accordance with the path described in His words. Thus is God’s work in the flesh concluded; He is about to depart mankind, no longer residing in the flesh of normal humanity, but rather moving away from man to proceed upon another part of His work. Then, using people who conform to His will, He continues His work on earth among this group of people, but in their humanity.

The incarnate God cannot stay with man forever because God has a lot more other work to do. He cannot be bound to the flesh; He has to shed the flesh to do the work He must do, even though He does that work in the image of the flesh. When God comes to the earth, He does not wait until He has reached the form that a normal person ought to attain before dying and leaving mankind. No matter how old His flesh is, when His work is finished, He goes and leaves man. There is no such thing as age for Him, He does not count His days according to the human lifespan; instead, He ends His life in the flesh in accordance with the steps of His work. There may be those who feel that God, in coming into the flesh, must age to a certain extent, must grow into an adult, reach old age, and leave only when that body fails. This is man’s imagination; God does not work thus. He comes into the flesh only to do the work He is supposed to do, and not to live a normal man’s life of being born to parents, growing up, forming a family and starting a career, having and raising children, or experiencing life’s ups and downs—all the activities of a normal man. When God comes to earth, this is God’s Spirit putting on the flesh, coming into the flesh, but God does not live the life of a normal person. He only comes to accomplish one part in His management plan. After that He will leave mankind. When He comes into the flesh, God’s Spirit does not perfect the normal humanity of the flesh. Rather, at a time that God has predetermined, the divinity goes to work directly. Then, after doing all that He needs to do and fully completing His ministry, the work of God’s Spirit in this stage is done, at which point the life of the incarnate God also ends, regardless of whether His fleshly body has lived out its span of longevity. That is to say, whatever stage of life the fleshly body reaches, however long it lives on earth, everything is decided by the work of the Spirit. It has nothing to do with what man considers to be normal humanity. Take Jesus as an example. He lived in the flesh for thirty-three and a half years. In terms of the lifespan of a human body, He should not have died at that age, and He should not have left. But this was of no concern to God’s Spirit. His work being finished, at that point the body was taken away, disappearing along with the Spirit. This is the principle by which God works in the flesh. And so, strictly speaking, the humanity of God incarnate is not of primary importance. To reiterate, He comes to the earth not to live the life of a normal human being. He does not first establish a normal human life and then begin working. Rather, as long as He is born into a normal human family, He is able to do divine work, work that is unblemished by man’s intentions, that is not fleshly, that certainly does not adopt the ways of society or involve man’s thoughts or notions, and, moreover, that does not involve man’s philosophies for worldly dealings. This is the work that God incarnate intends to do, and it is also the practical significance of His incarnation. God comes into the flesh primarily to do a stage of the work that needs to be done in the flesh, without undergoing other trivial processes, and, as for the experiences of a normal man, He does not have them. The work that God’s incarnate flesh needs to do does not include normal human experiences. So God comes into the flesh for the sake of accomplishing the work He needs to accomplish in the flesh. The rest has nothing to do with Him; He does not go through so many trivial processes. Once His work is done, the significance of His incarnation also ends. Finishing this stage means the work that He needs to do in the flesh has concluded, and the ministry of His flesh is complete. But He cannot keep working in the flesh indefinitely. He has to move on to another place to work, a place outside of the flesh. Only thus can His work be performed fully, and advance to greater effect. God works according to His original plan. What work He needs to do and what work He has concluded, He knows as clearly as the palm of His hand. God leads every individual to walk a path that He has already predetermined. No one can escape this. Only those who follow the guidance of God’s Spirit will be able to enter into rest. It may be that, in later work, it will not be God speaking in the flesh to guide man, but a Spirit with tangible form guiding man’s life. Only then will man be able concretely to touch God, look upon God, and better enter into the reality God requires, so as to become perfected by the practical God. This is the work that God intends to accomplish, and what He planned long ago. From this, you should all see the path you should take!

In Faith, One Must Focus on Reality—Engaging in Religious Ritual Is Not Faith

How many religious practices do you observe? How many times have you turned against the word of God and gone your own way? How many times have you put God’s word into practice because you are truly considerate of His burdens and seek to satisfy His will? You should understand the word of God and put it into practice accordingly. Be principled in all your actions and deeds, though this does not mean abiding by rules or doing something grudgingly just for show; rather, it means practicing the truth and living by the word of God. Only practice such as this satisfies God. Any course of action that pleases God is not a rule, but the practice of truth. Some people have a penchant for drawing attention to themselves. In the presence of their brothers and sisters, they might say they are indebted to God, but behind their backs, they do not practice the truth and act entirely differently. Are these not religious Pharisees? A person who truly loves God and possesses the truth is one who is loyal to God but does not outwardly show off as such. Such a person is willing to practice the truth when situations arise, and does not speak or act in a way that goes against their conscience. This sort of person demonstrates wisdom when matters arise, and is principled in his or her deeds regardless of the circumstances. This kind of person can provide true service. There are some who often pay lip service to their indebtedness to God; they spend their days with brows locked in worry, putting on an affected air and pretending to be pitiable. How despicable! If you were to ask them, “Can you tell me about how you are indebted to God?” then they would be rendered speechless. If you are loyal to God, then do not talk outwardly about it; instead, demonstrate your love for God by way of actual practice, and pray to Him with a true heart. Those who just deal with God verbally and perfunctorily are all hypocrites! Some speak of indebtedness to God each time they pray, and begin to weep each time they pray, even without being moved by the Holy Spirit. People such as this are possessed by religious rituals and notions; they live by such rituals and notions, always believing that those actions please God and that He favors superficial godliness or sorrowful tears. What good can come of such absurd people? In order to demonstrate humility, some feign graciousness when speaking in the presence of others. Some are deliberately servile when in the presence of other people, acting like lambs without an ounce of strength. Is this a manner befitting people of the kingdom? People of the kingdom should be lively and free, innocent and open, honest and lovable, and be living in a state of freedom. They should have integrity and dignity and be able to stand witness wherever they go; such people are beloved by both God and man. Those who are novices in the faith have too many outward practices; they must first undergo a period of being pruned and broken. People who have faith in God deep down are not outwardly distinguishable from others, but their actions and deeds are commendable. Only such people can be deemed to be living out the word of God. If you preach the gospel every day to various people in an effort to bring them to salvation, yet in the end are still living by rules and doctrines, then you cannot bring glory to God. Such people are religious figures, as well as hypocrites. Whenever those religious people congregate, they might ask, “Sister, how have you been these days?” She might reply, “I feel I owe a debt to God, and that I am unable to satisfy His will.” Another might say, “I, too, feel indebted to God and that I am unable to satisfy Him.” These few sentences and words alone express the vile things deep within them; such words are most loathsome, and exceedingly repugnant. The nature of such people is in opposition to God. Those who focus on reality communicate whatever is on their mind, and open up their hearts in fellowship. They do not engage in a single false exercise, displaying neither such civilities nor empty pleasantries. They are always straightforward, and observe no secular rules. Some people have a penchant for outward displays, even to the point of utterly lacking sense. When someone sings, they begin to dance, not even realizing that the rice in their pots has already burned. Such people are not godly or honorable, and they are far too frivolous. All of these things are manifestations of a lack of reality. When some people fellowship about matters of spiritual life, though they speak not of owing anything to God, they do retain a true love for Him deep down. Your feeling of indebtedness to God has nothing to do with other people; you are indebted to God, not humanity. What use is it for you to constantly speak of this to others? You must place importance on entering into reality, not on any outward zeal or display. What do the superficial good deeds of humans represent? They represent the flesh, and even the best of outward practices do not represent life; they can only show your own individual temperament. The outward practices of humanity cannot satisfy the will of God. You constantly speak of your indebtedness to God, yet you cannot supply the life of others or stimulate their God-loving hearts. Do you believe that those actions of yours will satisfy God? You feel that your actions are in line with God’s will, and that they are of the spirit, but in truth, they are all absurd! You believe that what pleases you and what you are willing to do are precisely those things in which God delights. Can your likes represent God? Can a person’s character represent God? What pleases you is precisely that which God abhors, and your habits are those which God spurns. If you feel indebted, then go and pray before God; there is no need to speak of it to others. If you do not pray before God, and instead constantly draw attention to yourself in the presence of others, can this satisfy God’s will? If your actions always exist in appearance alone, then this means that you are vain in the extreme. What manner of humans are those who only carry out superficial good deeds and are devoid of reality? Such people are just hypocritical Pharisees and religious figures! If you do not shed your outward practices and are unable to make changes, then the elements of hypocrisy in you will grow even more. The greater your elements of hypocrisy, the more resistance there is toward God. In the end, such people will surely be cast out!

Only Those Who Know the Work of God Today May Serve God

To bear testimony to God and to shame the great red dragon, one must have a principle, and one must meet a condition: One must love God in their heart and enter into His words. If you do not enter into the words of God, then you will have no way of shaming Satan. Through growth in your life, you rebel against the great red dragon and bring utter humiliation upon it; only this is truly to shame the great red dragon. The more you are willing to put the words of God into practice, the greater the proof of your love of God and your loathing of the great red dragon; the more you submit to the words of God, the greater the proof of your longing for the truth. People who do not long for the words of God are people without life. Such people are those outside the words of God, who belong to religion. People who truly believe in God have a more profound knowledge of God’s words through eating and drinking His words. If you do not long for the words of God, then you cannot truly eat and drink His words, and if you have no knowledge of the words of God, then you have no means of testifying to God or satisfying God.

In believing in God, how should one know God? One should come to know God based on the words and work of God today, without deviation or fallacy, and, before all else, one should know the work of God. This is the foundation of knowing God. All those various fallacies that lack a pure understanding of the words of God are religious notions; they are distorted understandings. The greatest skill of religious figures is taking the words of God understood in the past and measuring the words of God today against them. If, when serving the God of today, you cling to the things revealed by the Holy Spirit’s enlightenment in the past, then your service will cause disruption, and your practice will be outdated, nothing more than religious ceremony. If you believe that those who serve God must outwardly be humble and patient, among other qualities, and if you put this kind of knowledge into practice today, then such knowledge is a religious notion; such practice has become a hypocritical performance. The phrase “religious notions” refers to things that are outmoded and obsolete (including the understanding of words previously spoken by God and light directly revealed by the Holy Spirit), and if they are put into practice today, then they disrupt God’s work and bring no benefit to man. If people are unable to purge those things from themselves that belong to religious notions, then these things will become a great hindrance to their serving God. People with religious notions have no way of keeping up with the steps of the Holy Spirit’s work—they fall one step behind, then two. This is because these religious notions cause man to become extraordinarily self-righteous and arrogant. God feels no nostalgia for what He said and did in the past; if something is obsolete, He eliminates it. Are you truly unable to let go of your notions? If you cling to the words that God spoke in the past, does this prove that you know the work of God? If you are unable to accept the light of the Holy Spirit today, and instead cling to the light of the past, can this prove that you follow the footsteps of God? Are you still unable to let go of religious notions? If that is the case, then you will become someone who opposes God.

If people can let go of religious notions, they will not use their minds to measure the words and work of God today, and instead will submit directly. Even though God’s work today is manifestly unlike that of the past, you are yet able to let go of the views of the past and submit to the work of God today directly. If you are capable of understanding that you must give pride of place to the work of God today, regardless of how God worked in the past, then you are someone who has let go of their notions, who submits to God, and who is able to submit to the work and words of God and follow His footsteps. In this, you will be someone who truly submits to God. You do not analyze or scrutinize the work of God; it is as if God has forgotten His previous work, and you, too, have forgotten it. The present is the present, and the past is the past, and since today, God has put aside that which He did in the past, you should not dwell on it. Only such a person is one who submits to God completely and has let go of their religious notions completely.

Because there are always new developments in God’s work, there is work that becomes obsolete and old as new work arises. These different types of work, old and new, are not contradictory, but complementary; each step follows from the last. Because there is new work, the old things must, of course, be eliminated. For example, some of the long-established practices and habitual sayings of man, coupled with man’s many years of experience and teachings, have formed all manner and form of notions in the mind of man. That God has yet fully to reveal His true face and inherent disposition to man, along with the spread, over many years, of traditional theories from ancient times have been yet more propitious to man’s formation of such notions. It may be said that, over the course of man’s belief in God, the influence of various notions has led to the continual formation and evolution of all sorts of notional understandings of God in people, which has caused many religious people who serve God to become His enemies. So, the stronger people’s religious notions are, the more they oppose God, and the more they are the enemies of God. The work of God is always new and never old; it never forms doctrine, instead continually changing and being renewed to a greater or lesser extent. Working in this way is an expression of the inherent disposition of God Himself. It is also the inherent principle of God’s work, and one of the means by which God accomplishes His management. If God did not work in this way, man would not change or be able to know God, and Satan would not be defeated. Thus, in His work, changes continually occur that appear erratic, but which are actually periodic. The way in which man believes in God, however, is quite different. He clings to old, familiar doctrines and systems, and the older they are, the more palatable they are to him. How could the foolish mind of man, a mind that is as intransigent as stone, accept so much unfathomable new work and words of God? Man abhors the God who is always new and never old; he likes only the old God, who is long of tooth, white of hair, and stuck in place. Thus, because God and man each have their own likes, man has become the enemy of God. Many of these contradictions still exist even today, at a time when God has been doing new work for almost six thousand years. They are, then, beyond remedy. Perhaps it is because of the stubbornness of man, or the inviolability of God’s administrative decrees by any man—but those clergymen and women cling still to moldy old books and papers, while God carries on with His uncompleted work of management, as if He had no one by His side. Though these contradictions make enemies of God and man, and are even irresolvable, God pays them no heed, as if they were at once there and not there. Man, however, still sticks by his beliefs and notions, and never lets go of them. Yet one thing is self-evident: Even though man does not deviate from his stance, God’s feet are always moving, and He is always changing His stance according to the environment. In the end, it is man who will be defeated without a fight. God, meanwhile, is the greatest enemy of all His defeated foes, and is also the champion of mankind, defeated and undefeated alike. Who can compete with God and be victorious? Man’s notions seem to come from God because many of them were born in the wake of God’s work. However, God does not forgive man because of this, nor, moreover, does He pour praise on man for producing batch after batch of products “for God” in the wake of His work that are outside of His work. Instead, He is extremely disgusted by man’s notions and old, pious beliefs, and does not even have a mind to acknowledge the date on which these notions first emerged. He does not accept at all that these notions are caused by His work, for the notions of man are spread by man; their source is the thoughts and mind of man—not God, but Satan. God’s intention has always been for His work to be new and alive, not old and dead, and what He has man adhere to varies with the age and period, and is not everlasting and immutable. This is because He is a God who causes man to live and be new, rather than a devil who causes man to die and be old. Do you still not understand this? You have notions about God and are incapable of letting go of them because you are close-minded. It is not because there is too little sense within God’s work, nor is it because His work is inconsiderate toward man’s feelings, nor, moreover, is it because God is always negligent in His duties. You cannot let go of your notions because you are too lacking in submission, and because you have not the slightest likeness of a created being; it is not because God is making things difficult for you. You caused all of this, and it bears no relation at all to God; all suffering and misfortune is created by man. God’s thoughts are always good: He does not wish to cause you to produce notions, but wishes for you to change and be renewed as the ages pass. Yet you do not know what is good for you, and are always either scrutinizing or analyzing. It is not that God is making things difficult for you, but that you lack a heart of fear for God, and your rebelliousness is too great. A tiny created being, daring to take some trivial part of that which was previously given by God, then turning around and using it to attack God—is this not the rebellion of man? Humans, it is fair to say, are utterly unqualified to express their views before God, and less still are they qualified to parade around their worthless, stinking, rotten, flowery language as they wish—to say nothing of those moldy notions. Are they not even more worthless?

Someone who truly serves God is someone who conforms to God’s will, who is fit for use by God, and who is able to let go of religious notions. If you wish for your eating and drinking of the words of God to be effective, then you must let go of your religious notions. If you wish to serve God, then it is even more necessary first to let go of religious notions and submit to the words of God in everything. This is what should be possessed by someone who serves God. If you lack this knowledge, then as soon as you serve, you will cause disruption and disturbances, and if you hold on to your notions, then you will inevitably be knocked down by God, never to get up again. Take the present, for example: Many of the utterances and work of today are incompatible with the Bible and with the work previously done by God, and if you have no desire to submit, then you may fall at any time. If you wish to serve in accordance with the will of God, then you must first let go of religious notions and rectify your own views. Much of what will be said will be incompatible with what was said in the past, and if you now lack the will to submit, you will be unable to walk the path that lies ahead. If one of God’s methods of working has taken root inside you and you never let it go, then this method will become your religious notion. If what God is has taken root within you, then you have gained the truth, and if the words and truth of God are capable of becoming your life, you will no longer have notions about God. Those who possess true knowledge of God will have no notions and will not abide by doctrine.

Ask these questions to keep yourself vigilant:

1. Does the knowledge within you disturb your service to God?

2. How many religious practices are there in your daily life? If you only present the appearance of piety, does this mean that your life has grown up and matured?

3. When you eat and drink the words of God, are you able to let go of your religious notions?

4. When you pray, are you able to do away with religious ceremony?

5. Are you someone who is fit for use by God?

6. How much of your knowledge of God contains religious notions?

Know God’s Newest Work and Follow His Footsteps

Now, you are to pursue becoming the people of God, and shall begin the entire entry onto the right track. To be the people of God means entering into the Age of Kingdom. Today, you officially begin to enter into the training of the kingdom, and your future lives shall cease to be as slack and sloppy as they were before; living in such a way, it is impossible to attain the standards required by God. If you do not feel any urgency, then this shows that you have no desire to improve yourself, that your pursuit is muddled and confused, and you are incapable of satisfying God’s will. Entry into the training of the kingdom means beginning the life of the people of God—are you willing to accept such training? Are you willing to feel a sense of urgency? Are you willing to live under God’s discipline? Are you willing to live under God’s chastisement? When God’s words come upon you and test you, how will you act? And what will you do when faced with all manner of facts? In the past, your focus was not on life; today, you must focus on entering into the life reality, and pursue changes in your life disposition. This is what must be achieved by the people of the kingdom. All those who are the people of God must possess life, they must accept the training of the kingdom, and pursue changes in their life disposition. This is what God requires of the people of the kingdom.

God’s requirements for the people of the kingdom are as follows:

1. They must accept God’s commissions. This is to say, they must accept all of the words spoken in God’s work of the last days.

2. They must enter into the training of the kingdom.

3. They must pursue having their hearts touched by God. When your heart has completely turned to God, and you have a normal spiritual life, you will live in the realm of freedom, which means you will live under the care and protection of God’s love. Only when you live under the care and protection of God will you belong to God.

4. They must be gained by God.

5. They must become a manifestation of God’s glory on earth.

These five points are My commissions for you. My words are spoken unto the people of God, and if you are unwilling to accept these commissions, I will not force you—but if you truly accept them, then you will be able to follow the will of God. Today, you begin to accept God’s commissions, and pursue becoming the people of the kingdom and attaining the standards required to be the people of the kingdom. This is the first step of entry. If you wish to fully follow God’s will, then you must accept these five commissions, and if you are able to achieve them, you will be in line with God’s will and surely God will make great use of you. What is crucial today is entering into the training of the kingdom. Entry into the training of the kingdom involves the spiritual life. Previously, there was no talk of the spiritual life, but today, as you begin entry into the training of the kingdom, you officially enter into the spiritual life.

What kind of life is the spiritual life? The spiritual life is one in which your heart has completely turned to God, and is able to be mindful of God’s love. It is one in which you live in God’s words, and nothing else occupies your heart, and you are able to grasp the will of God today, and are guided by the light of the Holy Spirit today in order to do your duty. Such a life between man and God is the spiritual life. If you are unable to follow the light of today, then a distance has opened up in your relationship with God—it may even have been severed—and you are without a normal spiritual life. A normal relationship with God is built upon the foundation of accepting the words of God today. Do you have a normal spiritual life? Do you have a normal relationship with God? Are you someone who follows the work of the Holy Spirit? If you are able to follow the light of the Holy Spirit today, and can grasp God’s will within His words, and enter into these words, then you are someone who follows the stream of the Holy Spirit. If you do not follow the stream of the Holy Spirit, then you are undoubtedly someone who does not pursue the truth. The Holy Spirit has no chance of working within those who have no desire to improve themselves, and as a result, such people are never able to summon their strength, and are always negative. Today, do you follow the stream of the Holy Spirit? Are you in the stream of the Holy Spirit? Have you emerged from a negative state? All those who believe in the words of God, who take the work of God as the foundation, and follow the light of the Holy Spirit today—they are all in the stream of the Holy Spirit. If you believe that God’s words are unequivocally true and correct, and if you believe the words of God no matter what He says, then you are someone who pursues entry into the work of God, and in this way you satisfy God’s will.

To enter into the stream of the Holy Spirit, you must have a normal relationship with God, and you must first rid yourself of your negative state. Some people always follow the crowd, and their hearts stray too far from God; such people have no desire to improve themselves, and the standards they pursue are too low. Only the pursuit of loving God and being gained by God is God’s will. There are people who only use their conscience to repay God’s love, but this cannot meet God’s will; the higher the standards you pursue, the more it will be in harmony with God’s will. As someone who is normal, and who pursues the love of God, entry into the kingdom to become one of the people of God is your true future, and a life that is of the utmost value and significance; no one is more blessed than you. Why do I say this? Because those who do not believe in God live for the flesh, and they live for Satan, but today you live for God, and live to follow the will of God. That is why I say your lives are of the utmost significance. Only this group of people, who have been selected by God, are able to live out a life of the utmost significance: No one else on earth is able to live out a life of such value and meaning. Because you have been selected by God, and are raised up by God, and, moreover, because of God’s love for you, you have grasped the true life, and know how to live a life that is of the utmost value. This is not because your pursuit is good, but because of the grace of God; it was God who opened the eyes of your spirit, and it was the Spirit of God that touched your heart, giving you the good fortune to come before Him. If the Spirit of God had not enlightened you, then you would be incapable of seeing what is lovely about God, nor would it be possible for you to love God. It is wholly because the Spirit of God has touched people’s hearts that their hearts have turned to God. Sometimes, when you are enjoying the words of God, your spirit is touched, and you feel that you cannot help but love God, that there is great strength within you, and that there is nothing that you cannot put aside. If you feel like this, then you have been touched by the Spirit of God, and your heart has wholly turned to God, and you will pray to God and say: “Oh God! We truly have been predestined and chosen by You. Your glory gives me pride, and it feels glorious for me to be one of Your people. I will expend anything and give anything to follow Your will, and will devote all my years, and an entire lifetime of efforts, to You.” When you pray like this, there will be unending love and true submission toward God in your heart. Have you ever had such an experience as this? If people are often touched by the Spirit of God, then they are especially willing to devote themselves to God in their prayers: “Oh God! I wish to behold Your day of glory, and I wish to live for You—nothing is more worthy or meaningful than to live for You, and I have not the slightest desire to live for Satan and the flesh. You raise me up by enabling me to live for You today.” When you have prayed in this way, you will feel that you cannot help but give your heart to God, that you must gain God, and that you would hate to die without having gained God while you are alive. Having spoken such a prayer, there will be an inexhaustible strength within you, and you will not know from where it comes; in your heart there will be limitless power, and you will have a sense that God is so lovely, and that He is worth loving. This is when you will have been touched by God. All those who have had such an experience have been touched by God. For those who are often touched by God, changes occur in their lives, they are able to make their resolution and are willing to completely gain God, their God-loving hearts are relatively strong, and their hearts have completely turned to God. They hold no regard for family, the world, entanglements, or their future, and they are willing to devote a lifetime of efforts to God. All those who have been touched by the Spirit of God are people who pursue the truth, and who have hope of being made perfect by God.

Have you turned your heart to God? Has your heart been touched by the Spirit of God? If you have never had such an experience, and if you have never prayed in such a way, then this shows that God has no place in your heart. All those who are guided by the Spirit of God and who have been touched by the Spirit of God are possessed of the work of God, which shows that God’s words and God’s love have taken root within them. Some people say: “I am not as earnest as you in my prayers, nor am I so touched by God; sometimes—when I meditate and pray—I feel that God is lovely, and my heart is touched by God.” Nothing is more important than man’s heart. When your heart has turned to God, your entire being will have turned to God, and at that time your heart will have been touched by the Spirit of God. Most among you have had such an experience—it is just that the depths of your experiences are not the same. Some people say: “I don’t say many words of prayer, I just listen to the communion of others and the strength rises up within me.” This shows that you have been touched by God inside. People who have been touched by God inside are inspired when they hear the communion of others; if a person’s heart remains totally unmoved when they hear inspiring words, then this proves that the work of the Holy Spirit is not within them. There is no yearning inside them, which proves that they have no resolve, and thus they are without the work of the Holy Spirit. If a person has been touched by God, they will have a reaction when they hear the words of God; if they have not been touched by God, then they have not engaged with the words of God, they bear no relation to them, and they are incapable of being enlightened. Those who have heard the words of God and had no reaction are people who have not been touched by God—they are people who are without the work of the Holy Spirit. All those who are able to accept the new light are touched, and possessed of the work of the Holy Spirit.

Measure yourself:

1. Are you in the midst of the present work of the Holy Spirit?

2. Has your heart turned to God? Have you been touched by God?

3. Have God’s words taken root inside you?

4. Is your practice built upon the foundation of God’s requirements?

5. Do you live under the guidance of the present light of the Holy Spirit?

6. Is your heart ruled by old notions, or is it ruled by the words of God today?

Hearing these words, what is the reaction within you? Having believed for all these years, do you have God’s words as your life? Has there been a change in your previous, corrupt disposition? Do you, in accordance with the words of God today, know what it is to have life, and what it is to be without life? Is this clear to you? Of principal importance in following God is that everything should be according to the words of God today: Whether you are pursuing life entry or the satisfaction of God’s will, everything should be centered around the words of God today. If what you commune and pursue are not centered around the words of God today, then you are a stranger to the words of God, and totally bereft of the work of the Holy Spirit. What God wants are people who follow His footsteps. No matter how wonderful and pure what you understood before is, God does not want it, and if you are unable to put aside such things, then they will be a tremendous obstacle to your entry in the future. All those who are able to follow the present light of the Holy Spirit are blessed. The people of ages past also followed the footsteps of God, yet they could not follow until today; this is the blessing of the people of the last days. Those who can follow the present work of the Holy Spirit, and who are able to follow the footsteps of God, such that they follow God wherever He leads them—these are people who are blessed by God. Those who do not follow the present work of the Holy Spirit have not entered into the work of God’s words, and no matter how much they work, or how great their suffering, or how much they run about, none of it means anything to God, and He will not commend them. Today, all those who follow the present words of God are in the stream of the Holy Spirit; those who are strangers to the words of God today are outside of the stream of the Holy Spirit, and such people are not commended by God. Service that is divorced from the present utterances of the Holy Spirit is service that is of the flesh, and of notions, and it is impossible for it to be in accordance with God’s will. If people live among religious notions, then they are unable to do anything that is fit for God’s will, and even though they serve God, they serve in the midst of their imaginings and notions, and are totally incapable of serving in accordance with the will of God. Those who are unable to follow the work of the Holy Spirit do not understand the will of God, and those who do not understand the will of God cannot serve God. God wants service that is in line with His will; He does not want service that is of notions and the flesh. If people are incapable of following the steps of the Holy Spirit’s work, then they live amid notions. The service of such people disrupts and disturbs, and such service runs contrary to God. Thus those who are unable to follow the footsteps of God are incapable of serving God; those who are unable to follow the footsteps of God most certainly oppose God, and are incapable of being compatible with God. “Following the work of the Holy Spirit” means understanding the will of God today, being able to act in accordance with the present requirements of God, being able to submit to and follow the God of today, and entering in accordance with the newest utterances of God. Only this is someone who follows the work of the Holy Spirit and is in the stream of the Holy Spirit. Such people are not only capable of receiving God’s praise and seeing God, but can also know God’s disposition from the latest work of God, and can know man’s notions and rebellion, and man’s nature and essence, from His latest work; furthermore, they are able to gradually achieve changes in their disposition during their service. Only people such as this are those who are able to gain God, and who have genuinely found the true way. Those who are cast out by the work of the Holy Spirit are people who are incapable of following the latest work of God, and who rebel against the latest work of God. That such people openly oppose God is because God has done new work, and because the image of God is not the same as that in their notions—as a result of this, they openly oppose God and pass judgment upon God, which results in God spurning them. Possessing the knowledge of the latest work of God is no easy matter, but if people have a mind to submit to the work of God and seek the work of God, then they will have the chance to see God, and will have the chance to gain the newest guidance of the Holy Spirit. Those who intentionally oppose the work of God cannot receive the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit or the guidance of God. Thus, whether or not people can receive the latest work of God depends on the grace of God, it depends on their pursuit, and it depends on their intentions.

All who are able to submit to the present utterances of the Holy Spirit are blessed. It does not matter how they used to be, or how the Holy Spirit used to work within them—those who have gained the latest work of God are the most blessed, and those who are unable to follow the latest work today are cast out. God wants those who are able to accept the new light, and He wants those who accept and know His latest work. Why is it said that you must be a chaste virgin? A chaste virgin is able to seek the work of the Holy Spirit and understand the new things, and moreover, able to put aside old notions, and submit to the work of God today. This group of people, who accept the newest work of today, were predestined by God before the ages, and are the most blessed of people. You hear the voice of God directly, and behold the appearance of God, and so, throughout heaven and earth, and throughout the ages, none have been more blessed than you, this group of people. All this is because of God’s work, because of God’s predestination and selection, and because of God’s grace; if God did not speak and utter His words, could your conditions be as they are today? Thus, may all glory and praise be to God, for all this is because God raises you up. With these things in mind, could you still be negative? Could your strength still be unable to rise up?

That you are able to accept the judgment, chastisement, smiting, and refinement of God’s words, and, moreover, are able to accept God’s commissions, was predestined by God before the ages, and thus you must not be too distressed when you are chastised. No one can take away the work that has been done in you, and the blessings that have been bestowed upon you, and no one can take away all that has been given to you. People of religion brook no comparison with you. You are not possessed of great expertise in the Bible, and are not equipped with religious theory, but because God has worked within you, you have gained more than anyone throughout the ages—and so this is your greatest blessing. Because of this, you must be even more dedicated to God, and even more loyal to God. Because God raises you up, you must bolster your efforts, and must ready your stature to accept the commissions of God. You must stand firm in the place God has given you, pursue becoming one of the people of God, accept the training of the kingdom, be gained by God and ultimately become a glorious testimony to God. Are you possessed of these resolves? If you are possessed of such resolves, then ultimately you are sure to be gained by God, and will become a glorious testimony to God. You should understand that the principal commission is being gained by God and becoming a glorious testimony to God. This is the will of God.

The words of the Holy Spirit today are the dynamics of the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit’s continual enlightenment of man during this period is the trend of the work of the Holy Spirit. And what is the trend in the work of the Holy Spirit today? It is the leadership of the people into the work of God today, and into a normal spiritual life. There are several steps to entry into a normal spiritual life:

1. First, you must pour your heart into the words of God. You must not pursue God’s words in the past, and must not study them nor compare them with the words of today. Instead, you must completely pour your heart into the present words of God. If there are people who still wish to read the words of God, spiritual books, or other accounts of preaching from the past, and who do not follow the words of the Holy Spirit today, then they are the most foolish of people; God detests such people. If you are willing to accept the light of the Holy Spirit today, then completely pour your heart into the utterances of God today. This is the first thing you must achieve.

2. You must pray upon the foundation of the words spoken by God today, enter into the words of God and commune with God, and make your resolutions before God, establishing what standards you wish to pursue the accomplishment of.

3. You must pursue profound entry into the truth upon the foundation of the work of the Holy Spirit today. Do not hold on to outdated utterances and theories from the past.

4. You must seek to be touched by the Holy Spirit, and enter into the words of God.

5. You must pursue entry into the path walked by the Holy Spirit today.

And how do you seek being touched by the Holy Spirit? The crucial thing is to live in God’s present words, and to pray upon the foundation of God’s requirements. Having prayed in this way, the Holy Spirit is sure to touch you. If you do not seek with a basis in the foundation of the words spoken by God today, then this is fruitless. You should pray, and say: “Oh God! I oppose You, and I owe You so much; I am so rebellious, and never able to satisfy You. Oh God, I wish for You to save me, I wish to give service to You to the very end, I wish to die for You. You judge me and chastise me, and I have no complaints; I oppose You and I deserve to die, so that all people may behold Your righteous disposition in my death.” When you pray from within your heart in this way, God will hear you, and will guide you; if you do not pray upon the foundation of the words of the Holy Spirit today, then there is no possibility of the Holy Spirit touching you. If you pray according to God’s will, and according to that which God wishes to do today, you will say: “Oh God! I wish to accept Your commissions and be faithful to Your commissions, and I am willing to devote my entire life to Your glory, so that all that I do can reach the standards of the people of God. May my heart be touched by You. I wish for Your Spirit to ever enlighten me, to make all I do bring shame upon Satan, that I am ultimately gained by You.” If you pray in this way, in a way that is centered around the will of God, then the Holy Spirit will inevitably work in you. It matters not how many are the words of your prayers—what is key is whether or not you grasp the will of God. You may all have had the following experience: Sometimes, whilst praying in an assembly, the dynamics of the work of the Holy Spirit reach their peak, causing everyone’s strength to rise up. Some people cry bitterly and weep tears while praying, overcome with remorse before God, and some people show their resolve, and make vows. Such is the effect to be achieved by the work of the Holy Spirit. Today, it is crucial that all people completely pour their hearts into the words of God. Do not focus on the words that were spoken before; if you still hold on to what came before, then the Holy Spirit will not work within you. Do you see how important this is?

Do you know the path walked by the Holy Spirit today? The several points above are what is to be accomplished by the Holy Spirit today and in the future; they are the path taken by the Holy Spirit, and the entry that ought to be pursued by man. In your life entry, at the very least you must pour your heart into the words of God, and be able to accept the judgment and chastisement of God’s words; your heart must yearn for God, you must pursue profound entry into the truth, and the objectives required by God. When you are possessed of this strength, then it shows that you have been touched by God, and your heart has begun to turn to God.

The first step of life entry is to completely pour your heart into the words of God, and the second step is to accept being touched by the Holy Spirit. What is the effect to be achieved by accepting being touched by the Holy Spirit? It is to be able to yearn for, seek, and explore a more profound truth, and to be capable of cooperating with God in a positive manner. Today, you cooperate with God, which is to say there is an objective to your pursuit, to your prayers, and to your communion of God’s words, and you perform your duty in accordance with God’s requirements—only this is cooperating with God. If you only speak of letting God act, but do not take any action, neither praying nor seeking, then could this be called cooperation? If you have no trace of cooperation in you, and are bereft of training for entry that has an objective, then you are not cooperating. Some people say: “Everything depends on the predestination of God, it is all done by God Himself; if God did not do it, then how could man?” God’s work is normal, and not the slightest bit supernatural, and it is only through your active seeking that the Holy Spirit works, for God does not force man—you must give God the opportunity to work, and if you do not pursue or enter, and if there is not the slightest yearning in your heart, then God has no chance of working. By what path can you seek to be touched by God? Through prayer, and coming closer to God. But most importantly, remember, it must be upon the foundation of the words spoken by God. When you are often touched by God, you are not constrained by the flesh: Husband, wife, children, and money—they are all incapable of limiting you, and you wish only to pursue the truth and to live before God. At this time, you will be someone who lives in the realm of freedom.

God Perfects Those Who Conform to His Will

God now wants to gain a certain group of people, a group consisting of those who strive to cooperate with Him, who can submit to His work, who believe the words God speaks to be true, and who can put God’s requirements into practice; they are those who have true understanding in their hearts, they are the ones who can be perfected, and they will inevitably be able to walk the path of perfection. Those who cannot be perfected are people without a clear understanding of God’s work, who do not eat and drink of God’s words, who pay no attention to His words, and who are without any God-loving hearts. Those who doubt God incarnate, are always uncertain about Him, never treat His words seriously and always deceive Him are people who resist God and belong to Satan; there is no way to perfect such people.

If you wish to be perfected, then you must first be favored by God, for He perfects those whom He favors and who conform to His will. If you wish to conform to God’s will, then you must have a heart that submits to His work, you must strive to pursue the truth, and you must accept God’s scrutiny in all things. Has all that you do passed under God’s scrutiny? Is your intent correct? If your intent is correct, then God will commend you; if your intent is wrong, this shows that what your heart loves is not God, but the flesh and Satan. Therefore, you must use prayer as a way to accept God’s scrutiny in all things. When you pray, although I am not standing in front of you in person, the Holy Spirit is with you, and it is both Myself and the Spirit of God to whom you are praying. Why do you believe in this flesh? You believe because He has the Spirit of God. Would you believe in this person if He were without the Spirit of God? When you believe in this person, you believe in the Spirit of God. When you fear this person, you fear the Spirit of God. Faith in God’s Spirit is faith in this person, and faith in this person is also faith in the Spirit of God. When you pray, you feel the Spirit of God is with you and that God is before you, and therefore you pray to His Spirit. Today, most people are too afraid to bring their actions before God; while you may deceive His flesh, you cannot deceive His Spirit. Any matter that cannot withstand God’s scrutiny is at odds with the truth, and should be cast aside; to do otherwise is to commit a sin against God. So, you must lay your heart before God at all times, when you pray, when you speak and fellowship with your brothers and sisters, and when you perform your duty and go about your business. When you fulfill your function, God is with you, and so long as your intent is correct and is for the work of God’s house, He will accept all that you do; you should sincerely devote yourself to fulfilling your function. When you pray, if you have a God-loving heart and seek God’s care, protection and scrutiny, if these things are your intent, your prayers will be effective. For example, when you pray at meetings, if you open your heart and pray to God and tell Him what is in your heart without speaking falsehoods, then your prayers will surely be effective. If you have an earnest God-loving heart, then make an oath to God: “God, who is in the heavens and on earth and among all things, I swear to You: May Your Spirit examine all that I do and protect and care for me at all times, and make it possible for all that I do to stand in Your presence. Should my heart ever cease to love You or should it ever betray You, then chastise and curse me severely. Do not pardon me in either this world or the next!” Do you dare make such an oath? If you do not, this shows you are timid, and that you still love yourself. Do you have this resolve? If this is truly your resolve, you should make this oath. If you have the resolve to make such an oath, then God will fulfill your resolve. When you swear an oath to God, He listens. God determines whether you are sinful or righteous by the measure of your prayer and your practice. This now is the process of perfecting you, and if you truly have faith in being perfected, then you will bring all that you do before God and accept His scrutiny; if you do something outrageously rebellious or if you betray God, then He will bring your oath to fruition, and thus no matter what happens to you, be it perdition or chastisement, this is your own doing. You made the oath, so you should abide by it. If you make an oath, but do not abide by it, you will suffer perdition. Since yours was the oath, God will bring your oath to fruition. Some are afraid after they pray, and lament, “All is over! My chance of debauchery is gone; my chance to do wicked things is gone; my chance to indulge my worldly cravings is gone!” These people still love worldliness and sin, and they are certain to suffer perdition.

To be a believer in God means that all you do must be brought before Him and made subject to His scrutiny. If what you do can be brought before God’s Spirit but not before God’s flesh, this shows that you have not come under scrutiny by His Spirit. Who is the Spirit of God? Who is the person to whom God bears witness? Are They not one and the same? Most see Them as two separate beings, believing God’s Spirit is God’s Spirit, and the person to whom God bears witness is merely a human. But are you not mistaken? On whose behalf does this person work? Those who do not know God incarnate do not have spiritual understanding. God’s Spirit and His incarnate flesh are one, because God’s Spirit is materialized in the flesh. If this person is unkind to you, will God’s Spirit be kind? Are you not confused? Today, all who cannot accept God’s scrutiny cannot receive His approval, and those who do not know God incarnate cannot be perfected. Look at all that you do, and see if it can be brought before God. If you cannot bring all that you do before God, this shows that you are an evildoer. Can evildoers be perfected? All that you do, every action, every intention, and every reaction should be brought before God. Even your daily spiritual life—your prayers, your closeness to God, how you eat and drink of God’s words, your fellowship with your brothers and sisters, and your life within the church—and your service in partnership can be brought before God for His scrutiny. It is such practice that will help you achieve growth in life. The process of accepting God’s scrutiny is the process of purification. The more you can accept God’s scrutiny, the more you are purified and the more you are in accord with God’s will, so that you will not be drawn into debauchery, and your heart will live in His presence. The more you accept His scrutiny, the greater are Satan’s humiliation and your ability to rebel against the flesh. So, the acceptance of God’s scrutiny is a path of practice people should follow. No matter what you do, even when communing with your brothers and sisters, you can bring your acts before God and seek His scrutiny and aim to submit to God Himself; this will make what you practice much more correct. Only if you bring all you do before God and accept God’s scrutiny can you be someone who lives in the presence of God.

Those without understanding of God can never completely submit to God. People like this are sons of rebellion. They are too ambitious, and there is too much rebellion in them, so they distance themselves from God and are unwilling to accept His scrutiny. People like this cannot easily be perfected. Some people are selective in how they eat and drink of God’s words and in their acceptance of them. They accept certain portions of God’s words which accord with their notions while rejecting those which do not. Is this not the most blatant rebellion and resistance against God? If someone believes in God for years without gaining even a little understanding of Him, then they are a nonbeliever. Those who are willing to accept God’s scrutiny are those who pursue an understanding of Him, who are willing to accept His words. They are the ones who will receive God’s inheritance and blessings, and they are the most blessed. God curses those who have no place for Him in their hearts, and He chastises and forsakes such people. If you do not love God then He will forsake you, and if you do not listen to what I say, then I promise that God’s Spirit will forsake you. Try it if you do not believe it! Today I clarify for you a path of practice, but whether you put it into practice is up to you. If you do not believe it, if you do not put it into practice, you will see for yourself whether or not the Holy Spirit works in you! If you do not pursue understanding of God, then the Holy Spirit will not work in you. God works in those who pursue and treasure His words. The more you treasure God’s words, the more His Spirit will work in you. The more a person treasures God’s words, the greater their chance of being perfected by God. God perfects those who truly love Him, and He perfects those whose hearts are at peace before Him. To treasure all of God’s work, to treasure God’s enlightenment, to treasure God’s presence, to treasure God’s care and protection, to treasure how God’s words become your reality and provide for your life—all this accords best with God’s will. If you treasure God’s work, that is, if you treasure all the work that He has done upon you, then He will bless you and cause all that is yours to multiply. If you do not treasure God’s words, He will not work in you, but He will only grant you paltry grace for your faith, or bless you with scant wealth and your family with scant safety. You should strive to make God’s words your reality, and be able to satisfy Him and conform to His will; you should not merely strive to enjoy His grace. Nothing is more important for believers than to receive God’s work, gain perfection, and become those who follow God’s will. This is the goal you should pursue.

All that man pursued in the Age of Grace is now obsolete, because there is currently a higher standard of pursuit; what is pursued is both loftier and more practical, what is pursued can better satisfy what man requires inside. In ages past, God did not work upon people as He does today; He did not speak to them as much as He does today, and nor were His requirements of them as high as His requirements today. That God speaks of these things to you now shows that God’s ultimate intention is focused on you, on this group of people. If you truly wish to be perfected by God, then pursue it as your central goal. No matter whether you are running around, expending yourself, serving a function, or whether you have received God’s commission, the aim is always to be perfected and to satisfy God’s will, to achieve these goals. If someone says they do not pursue perfection by God or life entry, but only pursue fleshly peace and joy, then they are the blindest of men. Those who do not pursue the life reality, but only pursue eternal life in the world to come and safety in this world, are the blindest of men. So, all that you do should be done for the purpose of being perfected and gained by God.

The work God does in people is to provide for them based on their different requirements. The larger a person’s life, the more they require and the more they pursue. If at this phase you have no pursuit, this proves the Holy Spirit has forsaken you. All those who pursue life will never be forsaken by the Holy Spirit; such people always pursue, and always have yearning in their hearts. Such people are never content with things as they are at present. Each phase of the Holy Spirit’s work aims to achieve an effect in you, but if you grow complacent, if you no longer have needs, if you no longer accept the work of the Holy Spirit, then He will forsake you. People require God’s scrutiny every day; they require abundant provision from God every day. Can people cope without eating and drinking of God’s word every day? If someone always feels like they cannot eat or drink enough of God’s word, if they always seek it and hunger and thirst for it, the Holy Spirit will always work in them. The more someone yearns, the more practical things can come out of their fellowship. The more intensely someone seeks the truth, the more quickly they achieve growth in their life, making them rich in experience and wealthy denizens of the house of God.

Those Who Submit to God With a True Heart Shall Surely Be Gained by God

The work of the Holy Spirit changes from day to day. It rises higher with each step, the revelation of tomorrow higher than today’s, climbing ever higher, step after step. Such is the work by which God perfects man. If people cannot keep pace, then they could be cast out at any time. If they do not have a heart of submission, they will be unable to follow to the very end. The former age has passed; this is a new age. And in a new age, new work must be done. Particularly in the final age in which people are perfected, God will perform newer work, more quickly, so without submission in their hearts, people will find it difficult to follow the footsteps of God. God does not abide by any rules, nor does He treat any stage of His work as unchanging. Instead, the work He does is ever newer and ever higher. With each stage, His work becomes more and more practical, and increasingly in line with the actual needs of man. Only after people experience such work can they attain the final transformation of their disposition. Man’s knowledge of life reaches ever higher levels, and so, likewise, the work of God reaches ever higher levels. Only thus can man be made perfect and become fit for God’s use. God works in this way on the one hand to counter and reverse the notions of man, and on the other to lead man into a higher and more realistic state, into the highest realm of belief in God, so that in the end, the will of God can be done. All those of a rebellious nature who willfully oppose shall be cast out by this stage of God’s swift and furiously advancing work; only those who willingly submit and who gladly humble themselves can progress to the end of the road. In this kind of work, all of you should learn how to submit and how to put aside your notions. You should be cautious in every step you take. If you are careless, you will surely become one who is spurned by the Holy Spirit, one who disrupts God’s work. Prior to undergoing this stage of work, man’s rules and laws of old were so innumerable that he got carried away, and as a result, he became conceited and forgot himself. These are all obstacles that keep man from accepting the new work of God; they are the enemies of man’s knowledge of God. It is dangerous for people to have neither submission in their hearts nor a yearning for the truth. If you submit only to work and words that are simple, and are incapable of understanding anything more profound, then you are one who clings to old ways and cannot keep pace with the work of the Holy Spirit. The work done by God differs from period to period. If you are of great submission to God’s work in one phase, but in the next phase your submission toward His work is poor, or you are incapable of submission, then God shall desert you. If you keep pace with God as He takes this step, then you must continue to keep pace when He ascends the next; only then will you be someone who is submissive to the Holy Spirit. Since you believe in God, you must remain constant in your submission. You cannot simply submit when you please and do not submit when you do not. This kind of submission is not praised by God. If you cannot keep pace with the new work I fellowship, and continue to hold on to the former sayings, then how can there be progress in your life? God’s work is to supply you through His words. When you submit to and accept His words, the Holy Spirit shall surely work in you. The Holy Spirit works exactly as I speak; do as I have said, and the Holy Spirit will promptly work in you. I release a new light for you to behold, bringing you into the light of the present, and when you walk into this light, the Holy Spirit shall immediately work in you. There are some who may be recalcitrant, saying, “I simply will not carry out what You say.” In which case, I tell you that you have now come to the end of the road; you are dried up, and have no more life. Thus, in experiencing the transformation of your disposition, nothing is more crucial than keeping pace with the present light. The Holy Spirit not only works in certain people who are used by God, but, furthermore, in the church. He could be working in anyone. He may work in you during the present time, and you will experience this work. During the next period, He may work in someone else, in which case you must haste to follow; the more closely you follow the present light, the more your life can grow. No matter what manner of person someone is, if the Holy Spirit works in them, then you must follow. Take in their experiences through your own, and you will receive even higher things. In so doing you will progress more quickly. This is the path of perfection for man and the means by which life grows. The path to being made perfect is reached through your submission to the work of the Holy Spirit. You do not know through what kind of person God will work to perfect you, nor through what person, occurrence, or thing He will allow you to gain or see things. If you can set foot upon this right track, it shows that there is great hope for you to be perfected by God. If you cannot, it shows that your future is bleak, devoid of light. Once you embark upon the right track, you will gain revelation in all things. No matter what the Holy Spirit reveals to others, if you proceed on the basis of their knowledge to experience things on your own, then this experience will become a part of your life, and you will be able to supply others out of this experience. Those who supply others by parroting words are people who have not had any experiences; you must learn to find, through the enlightenment and illumination of others, a way of practice before you can begin to speak of your own actual experience and knowledge. This will be of greater benefit to your own life. You should experience thus, submitting to all that comes from God. You should seek the will of God in all things and learn the lessons in all things, that your life may grow. Such practice affords the fastest progress.

The Holy Spirit enlightens you through your practical experiences, and perfects you through your faith. Are you truly willing to be perfected? If you are truly willing to be perfected by God, then you will have the courage to cast aside your flesh, you will be able to carry out God’s words, and you will not be negative or weak. You will be able to submit to all that comes from God, and all of your actions, whether done in public or in private, will be presentable to God. If you are an honest person, and practice the truth in all things, then you will be perfected. Those deceitful people who act one way in front of others and another way behind their backs are not willing to be perfected. They are all sons of perdition and destruction; they belong not to God but to Satan. They are not the kind of people chosen by God! If your actions and behavior cannot be presented before God or looked upon by the Spirit of God, this is proof that there is something wrong with you. Only if you accept the judgment and chastisement of God, and care about the transformation of your disposition, will you be able to set foot upon the path to being perfected. If you are truly willing to be perfected by God and to follow the will of God, then you should submit to all of God’s work, without a single word of complaint, without presuming to evaluate or to judge the work of God. These are the minimal requirements for being perfected by God. The necessary requirement for those who seek to be perfected by God is this: Act with a God-loving heart in all things. What does it mean to act with a God-loving heart? It means that all of your actions and behavior can be presented before God. And because you have the right intentions, whether your actions are right or wrong, you are not afraid to show them to God or to your brothers and sisters, and you dare to swear an oath before God. You must present your every intention, thought, and idea before God for His scrutiny; if you practice and enter in this way, then progress in your life will be swift.

Since you believe in God, you must put faith in all of the words of God and in all of His work. Which is to say, since you believe in God, you must submit to Him. If you are unable to do this, then it does not matter whether you believe in God or not. If you have believed in God for many years, and yet have never submitted to Him, and do not accept the entirety of His words, and instead ask that God submit to you and act according to your notions, then you are the most rebellious of all, you are a nonbeliever. How could such people be able to submit to the work and words of God that do not conform to the notions of man? Most rebellious of all are those who intentionally defy and resist God. They are the enemies of God, the antichrists. Theirs is always an attitude of hostility toward the new work of God; they never have the slightest inclination to submit, nor have they ever gladly submitted or humbled themselves. They exalt themselves before others and never submit to anyone. Before God, they consider themselves the best at preaching the word, and the most skillful in working on others. Never do they discard the “treasures” in their possession, but treat them as family heirlooms for worship, for preaching about to others, and they use them to lecture those fools who idolize them. There are indeed a certain number of people like this in the church. It can be said that they are “indomitable heroes,” generation after generation sojourning in the house of God. They take preaching the word (doctrine) to be their highest duty. Year after year, generation after generation, they go about vigorously enforcing their “sacred and inviolable” duty. None dare touch them; not a single person dares openly reproach them. They become “kings” in the house of God, running rampant as they tyrannize others from age to age. This pack of demons seeks to join hands and demolish My work; how can I allow these living devils to exist before My eyes? Even those who are only half submissive cannot carry on until the end, much less these tyrants without the slightest submission in their hearts! The work of God is not easily gained by man. Even using all the strength they have, people can only gain a mere portion of it, ultimately allowing them to be made perfect. What, then, of the children of the archangel, who seek to destroy the work of God? Do they not have even less hope of being gained by God? My purpose in doing the work of conquest is not solely to conquer for the sake of conquest, but to conquer so as to reveal righteousness and unrighteousness, to obtain proof for the punishment of man, to condemn the evil, and, furthermore, to conquer for the sake of perfecting those who willingly submit. In the end, all will be separated according to kind, and the ones who are perfected will be the ones whose thoughts and ideas are filled with submission. This is the work that shall ultimately be accomplished. Those whose every action is rebellious, meanwhile, will be punished and sent to burn in the fires, the objects of eternal curse. When that time comes, those “great and indomitable heroes” of ages past will become the basest and most shunned “weak and impotent cowards.” Only this can illustrate every aspect of God’s righteousness, and His disposition that is unoffendable by man, and only this can appease the hatred in My heart. Do you not agree that this is entirely reasonable?

Not all those who experience the work of the Holy Spirit, nor those who are in this stream, can gain life. Life is not a common property shared by all humanity, and changes in disposition are not easily achieved by all people. Submission to the work of God must be real and actual, and it must be lived out. Superficial submission alone cannot receive God’s praise, and merely submitting to the superficial aspects of God’s word, without seeking change in one’s disposition, is not in line with God’s will. Submission to God and submission to the work of God are one and the same. Those who submit only to God but not to His work cannot be deemed submissive, much less those who do not truly submit but are outwardly sycophantic. Those who truly submit to God are all able to gain from the work and achieve understanding of the disposition and work of God. Only such people truly submit to God. Such people are able to gain new knowledge, and undergo new changes, from new work. Only these people are praised by God, only these people are perfected, and only these are the ones whose dispositions have changed. Those who are praised by God are those who gladly submit to God, and to His word and work. Only such people are in the right, only such people sincerely want God, and sincerely seek God. As for those who merely speak of their faith in God with their mouths, but in essence curse Him, they are people who mask themselves, who bear the venom of the snake; they are the most treacherous of all. Sooner or later, these scoundrels will have their vile masks ripped away. Is this not the work that is being done today? Evil men will always be evil, and will never escape the day of punishment. Good men will always be good, and will be revealed when God’s work comes to an end. Not one of the evil shall be deemed righteous, nor any one of the righteous deemed evil. Would I let any man stand wrongfully accused?

As your life progresses, you must always have new entry and new, higher insight, which grow deeper with every step. This is what all humanity should enter into. Through communing, listening to sermons, reading the word of God, or handling some matter, you will gain new insight and new enlightenment, and will not live within the rules of old and times of old; you will always live in the new light, and will not stray from the word of God. This is what is meant by embarking upon the right track. Paying a price on some superficial level will not do; day by day, the word of God enters a higher realm, and new things appear every day, and man, too, must make a new entry every day. As God speaks, so He brings to fruition all that which He has spoken, and if you cannot keep up, then you will fall behind. You must go deeper in your prayers; eating and drinking of the word of God cannot be intermittent. Deepen the enlightenment and illumination you receive, and your notions and imaginings must gradually recede. You must also strengthen your judgment, and whatever you encounter, you must have your own thoughts about it and have your own viewpoints. By understanding some things in the spirit, you must gain insight into the outward things and grasp the essence of any issue. If you are not equipped with these things, how will you be able to lead the church? If you only speak of words and doctrines without any reality and without a way of practice, you will only be able to get by for a short period of time. It may be marginally acceptable when speaking to new believers, but after a time, when new believers have had some actual experience, you will no longer be able to supply them. Then how are you fit for God’s use? Without new enlightenment, you cannot work. Those without new enlightenment are those who do not know how to experience, and such people never gain new knowledge or new experience. And, in the matter of supplying life, they can never perform their function, nor can they become fit for God’s use. This kind of person is good for nothing, a mere wastrel. In truth, such people are wholly incapable of performing their function in the work, they are all good for nothing. Not only do they fail to perform their function, but they actually place much unnecessary strain on the church. I exhort these “venerable old men” to make haste and leave the church, so that others no longer have to look upon you. Such people have no understanding of the new work and are filled with endless notions. They serve no function whatsoever in the church; rather, they make mischief and spread negativity everywhere, even to the point of engaging in all manner of misconduct and disturbance in the church, thereby throwing those who lack discrimination into confusion and disarray. These living devils, these evil spirits should leave the church as soon as possible, lest the church be blighted on your account. You may not fear the work of today, but do you not fear the righteous punishment of tomorrow? There are large numbers of people in the church who are freeloaders, and a great number of wolves that seek to disrupt the normal work of God. These things are all demons sent by the demon king, vicious wolves who seek to devour the unknowing lambs. If these so-called people are not expelled, they will become parasites on the church, moths devouring the offerings. Sooner or later, a day will come when these contemptible, ignorant, base, and repulsive maggots are punished!

The Age of Kingdom Is the Age of Word

In the Age of Kingdom, God uses words to usher in the new age, to change the means by which He works, and to do the work of the entire age. This is the principle by which God works in the Age of Word. He became flesh to speak from different perspectives, so that man could truly see God, who is the Word appearing in the flesh, and could behold His wisdom and wondrousness. Such work is done in order better to achieve the goals of conquering man, perfecting man, and casting out man, which is the true meaning of the use of words to work in the Age of Word. Through these words, people come to know the work of God, the disposition of God, the substance of man, and what man ought to enter into. Through words, the work God wishes to do in the Age of Word is brought to fruition in its entirety. Through these words, people are exposed, cast out, and tried. People have seen God’s words, heard these words, and recognized the existence of these words. As a result, they have come to believe in the existence of God, in the omnipotence and wisdom of God, as well as in God’s love for man and His desire to save man. The word “words” may be simple and ordinary, but the words spoken from the mouth of the incarnate God shake the universe, they transform people’s hearts, transform their notions and old dispositions, and transform the way the whole world used to appear. Through the ages, only the God of today has worked in this way, and only He speaks thus and comes to save man thus. From this time forward, man lives under the guidance of God’s words, shepherded and supplied by His words. People live in the world of God’s words, amid the curses and the blessings of God’s words, and there are even more people who have come to live under the judgment and chastisement of His words. These words and this work are all for the sake of man’s salvation, for the sake of fulfilling God’s will, and for the sake of changing the original appearance of the world of old creation. God created the world using words, He leads people throughout the universe using words, and He conquers and saves them using words. Ultimately, He shall use words to bring the entire world of old to an end, thus completing the entirety of His management plan. Throughout the Age of Kingdom, God uses words to do His work, and to achieve the results of His work. He does not work wonders or perform miracles, but merely does His work through words. Because of these words, man is nourished and supplied, and gains knowledge and true experience. In the Age of Word, man has been exceptionally blessed. He suffers no physical pain and simply enjoys the bountiful supply of the words of God; without needing to go blindly seeking or journeying forth blindly, from amid his ease, he sees the appearance of God, hears Him speak with His own mouth, receives that which He supplies, and watches Him personally doing His work. These are things that the people of ages past were unable to enjoy, and they are blessings that they could never receive.

God has resolved to make man complete, and regardless of the perspective from which He speaks, it is all for the sake of making people perfect. Words spoken from the perspective of the Spirit are difficult for people to understand; they have no means of finding the path to practice, for their comprehension ability is limited. The work of God achieves different effects, and in taking each step of the work He has His purpose. Moreover, it is imperative that He speak from different perspectives, for only in so doing can He perfect man. If He were only to utter His voice from the perspective of the Spirit, there would be no way to complete this stage of God’s work. From the tone with which He speaks, you can see He is determined to make this group of people complete. So what should be the first step for each of those who wish to be made perfect? Above all, you must know the work of God. Today, a new method has begun in God’s work; the age has transitioned, the way God works has also changed, and the method by which God speaks is different. Today, not only has the method of His work changed, but so too has the age. Now is the Age of Kingdom. It is also the age of loving God. It is a foretaste of the Age of Millennial Kingdom—which is also the Age of Word, and in which God uses many means of speaking to perfect man, and speaks from different perspectives to supply man. Upon entry into the Age of Millennial Kingdom, God will begin to use words to make man perfect, allowing man to enter into the life reality and leading him onto the right track. Having experienced so many steps of God’s work, man has seen that the work of God does not remain unchanged, but is evolving and deepening without cease. After people have experienced it for so long, the work has revolved repeatedly, changing again and again. However much it changes, though, it never deviates from God’s purpose of bringing salvation to humanity. Even through ten thousand changes, it never strays from its original purpose. No matter how the method of God’s work might change, this work never departs from truth or from the life. Changes in the method by which work is done merely involve a change in the format of work, and the perspective from which God speaks; there is no change in the central objective of God’s work. Changes in God’s tone of voice and the method of His work are made in order to achieve an effect. A change in tone of voice does not mean a change in the purpose or the principle behind the work. People believe in God chiefly in order to seek life; if you believe in God yet do not seek life or pursue the truth or the knowledge of God, then this is not belief in God! And is it realistic to still seek to enter the kingdom to be king? Achieving true love for God through seeking life—only this is reality; the pursuit and the practice of truth—these are all reality. Reading God’s words, and experiencing these words, you will come to grasp the knowledge of God amid actual experience, and this is what it means to truly pursue.

Now is the Age of Kingdom. Whether you have entered into this new age depends on whether you have entered into the reality of God’s words, on whether His words have become your life reality. The words of God are made known to every person so that, in the end, all people will live in the world of God’s words, and His words will enlighten and illuminate each person from within. If, during this time, you are careless in reading the words of God, and have no interest in His words, then this shows that your state is wrong. If you are unable to enter into the Age of Word, then the Holy Spirit does not work in you; if you have entered into this age, He will do His work. What can you do at the onset of the Age of Word in order to gain the work of the Holy Spirit? In this age, and among you, God shall accomplish the following fact: that every person shall live out the words of God, shall be able to put truth into practice, and shall love God earnestly; that all people shall use the words of God as a foundation and as their reality, and shall have God-fearing hearts; and that, through practicing the words of God, man shall then wield kingly power together with God. This is the work to be achieved by God. Can you go without reading the words of God? Today, there are many who feel that they cannot go even a day or two without reading His words. They have to read His words every day, and if time does not permit, listening to them will suffice. This is the feeling that the Holy Spirit gives people, and it is the way He begins to move them. That is, He governs people through words, so that they can enter into the reality of the words of God. If, after just one day without eating and drinking the words of God, you feel darkness and thirst, and cannot stand it, this shows that you have been moved by the Holy Spirit, and that He has not turned away from you. You are, then, one who is in this stream. However, if after a day or two without eating and drinking the words of God, you don’t feel a thing, if you have no thirst, and are not at all moved, this shows that the Holy Spirit has turned away from you. This means, then, that there is something wrong with the state within you; you have not entered into the Age of Word, and you are one of those who have fallen behind. God uses words to govern people; you feel good if you eat and drink the words of God, and if you do not, you have no path to follow. The words of God become people’s food, and the force that drives them. The Bible says that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Today, God will bring this work to completion, and He shall accomplish this fact in you. How is it that in the past, people could go many days without reading the words of God and yet be able to eat and work as usual, but this is not the case today? In this age, God chiefly uses words to govern all. Through the words of God, man is judged and perfected, then finally taken into the kingdom. Only the words of God can supply the life of man, and only the words of God can give man light and a path for practice, particularly in the Age of Kingdom. As long as you do not stray from the reality of God’s words, eating and drinking His words each day, God will be able to make you perfect.

Pursuit of life is not something that can be rushed; growth of life does not happen in just a day or two. The work of God is normal and practical, and there is a process that it necessarily undergoes. It took the incarnate Jesus thirty-three and a half years to complete His work of crucifixion—so what of purifying man and transforming his life, work of the utmost difficulty? It is no easy task to make a normal man who manifests God. This is particularly so for the people who are born in the nation of the great red dragon, who are of poor caliber and require a long period of God’s words and work. So do not be impatient to see results. You must be proactive in eating and drinking God’s words, and put more effort into the words of God. When you are finished reading His words, you must be able to put them into actual practice, growing in knowledge, insight, discernment, and wisdom in the words of God. Through this, you will change without realizing it. If you are able to take as your principle the eating and drinking of God’s words, reading them, coming to know them, experiencing them, and practicing them, you will come to maturity without realizing it. There are those who say that they are unable to put the words of God into practice even after reading them. What is your hurry? When you reach a certain stature, you will be able to put His words into practice. Would a four- or five-year-old child say that they are unable to support or honor their parents? You should know how great your current stature is. Put into practice what you are able to put into practice, and avoid being someone who disrupts the management of God. Just eat and drink God’s words, and take that as your principle from now on. Do not worry, for the time being, about whether God can make you complete. Do not delve into that yet. Just eat and drink God’s words as they come to you, and God will be certain to make you complete. However, there is a principle by which you must eat and drink His words. Do not do so blindly. In eating and drinking the words of God, on the one hand, seek out the words that you should come to know—that is, those that relate to visions—and on the other, seek out that which you should put into actual practice—that is, what you should enter into. One aspect has to do with knowledge, and the other with entering. Once you have grasped both—when you have grasped what you should know and what you should practice—you will know how to eat and drink the words of God.

Going forward, talk of God’s words should be the principle by which you speak. Ordinarily, when you come together, you should engage in fellowship about the words of God, taking God’s words as the content of your interactions, talking about what you know of these words, how you put them into practice, and how the Holy Spirit works. As long as you fellowship the words of God, the Holy Spirit will illuminate you. Achieving the world of God’s words requires the cooperation of man. If you do not enter into this, God will have no way of working; if you keep your mouth shut and do not talk about His words, He will have no way of illuminating you. Whenever you are not otherwise occupied, talk about the words of God, and do not just engage in idle chit chat! Let your life be filled with the words of God—only then will you be a devout believer. It does not matter if your fellowship is superficial. Without shallowness there can be no depth. There must be a process. Through your training, you will grasp the illumination of the Holy Spirit upon you, and how to effectively eat and drink the words of God. After an interval of probing, you will enter into the reality of the words of God. Only if you are resolved to cooperate will you be able to receive the work of the Holy Spirit.

Of the principles of eating and drinking the words of God, one relates to knowledge, and the other to entry. Which words should you come to know? You should come to know the words that relate to visions (such as, those relating to which age God’s work has now entered, what God wishes to achieve now, what the incarnation is, and so on; all these are related to visions). What is meant by the path that man should enter into? This refers to the words of God that man should practice and enter into. The above are the two aspects of eating and drinking the words of God. From now on, eat and drink the words of God in this way. If you have a clear understanding of His words concerning visions, then there is no need to keep reading all the time. Of primary importance is to eat and drink more of the words on entering, such as how to turn your heart toward God, how to quiet your heart before God, and how to rebel against the flesh. These are the things you should put into practice. Without knowing how to eat and drink the words of God, true fellowship is impossible. Once you know how to eat and drink His words, when you have grasped what is key, fellowship will become free, and whatever issue is raised, you will be able to fellowship and grasp the reality. If, when fellowshipping the words of God, you have no reality, then you have not grasped what is key, which shows that you do not know how to eat and drink God’s words. Some people may find reading the words of God tiresome, which is not a normal state. What is normal is never growing tired of reading God’s words, always thirsting for them, and always finding the words of God to be good. This is how one who has really entered eats and drinks the words of God. When you feel that the words of God are exceedingly practical and are exactly what man should enter into; when you feel that His words are greatly helpful and beneficial to man, and that they are the provision of man’s life—it is the Holy Spirit that gives you this feeling, and it is the Holy Spirit that moves you. This proves that the Holy Spirit is working in you and that God has not turned away from you. Some people, seeing that God is always speaking, become tired of His words, and think it of no consequence whether they read them or not—which is not a normal state. They lack a heart that thirsts to enter into reality, and such people neither thirst for nor place importance on being perfected. Whenever you find you do not thirst for the words of God, this shows that you are not in a normal state. In the past, whether God had turned away from you could be determined by whether you were at peace within, and whether you experienced enjoyment. Now the key is whether you thirst for the words of God, whether His words are your reality, whether you are faithful, and whether you are able to do all that you can for God. In other words, man is judged by the reality of the words of God. God directs His words to all of humanity. If you are willing to read them, He will enlighten you, but if you are not, He will not. God enlightens those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and He enlightens those who seek Him. Some say that God did not enlighten them even after they read His words. But in what way did you read these words? If you read His words in the way a man on horseback looks at flowers, and placed no importance on reality, how could God enlighten you? How can one who does not treasure God’s words be made perfect by Him? If you do not treasure the words of God, then you will have neither truth nor reality. If you treasure His words, then you will be able to put the truth into practice, and only then will you possess reality. This is why you must eat and drink the words of God at all times, whether you are busy or not, whether the circumstances are adverse or not, and whether you are being tried or not. All in all, the words of God are the foundation of man’s existence. No one can turn away from His words, but must eat His words as they do the three meals of the day. Could being made perfect and gained by God be that easy? Whether or not you understand at present, and whether or not you have insight into the work of God, you must eat and drink the words of God as much as possible. This is entering in a proactive way. After reading the words of God, hasten to put into practice what you can enter into, and set aside for the moment what you cannot. There may be many of the words of God that you cannot understand in the beginning, but after two or three months, perhaps even a year, you will. How can this be? It is because God cannot make people perfect in a day or two. Most of the time, when you read His words, you may not understand right away. At that time, they may seem like nothing more than mere text; you must experience them for a time before you can understand them. God having spoken so much, you should do your utmost to eat and drink His words, and then, without you realizing it, you will come to understand, and without you realizing it, the Holy Spirit will enlighten you. When the Holy Spirit enlightens man, it is often without man’s awareness. He enlightens and guides you when you thirst and seek. The principle by which the Holy Spirit works is centered around the words of God that you eat and drink. All those who place no importance on the words of God and are always of a different attitude toward His words—believing, in their befuddled thinking, it a matter of indifference whether they read His words or not—are those who do not possess reality. Neither the Holy Spirit’s work nor His enlightenment can be seen in such a person. People like this are merely coasting along, pretenders without true qualifications, like Mr. Nanguo of the parable.[a]

Without the words of God as your reality, you have no real stature. When the time comes to be tried, you will certainly fall, and then your true stature will be revealed. But those who regularly seek to enter into reality shall, when beset by trials, come to understand the purpose of God’s work. One who is possessed of conscience, and who thirsts for God, should take practical action to repay God for His love. Those who are not possessed of reality cannot stand firm in the face of even trivial matters. Such is the difference between those with real stature and those without. Why is it that, though they both eat and drink the words of God, some are able to stand firm amid trials, while others flee? The obvious difference is that some lack real stature; they do not have the words of God to serve as their reality, and His words have not taken root within them. As soon as they are tried, they reach the end of their path. Why is it, then, that some are able to stand firm amid trials? It is because they understand the truth and have a vision, and they understand God’s will and His requirements, and thus they are able to stand firm through trials. This is real stature, and this, too, is life. Some may also read the words of God, but do not put them into practice, do not take them seriously; those who do not take them seriously place no importance on practice. Those who do not have the words of God to serve as their reality are without real stature, and such people cannot stand firm through trials.

When the words of God come forth, you should immediately receive them, and eat and drink them. No matter how much you understand, the one point of view to which you must hold fast is to eat and drink, to know, and to practice His words. This is something you should be able to do. Never mind about how great your stature may become; simply focus on eating and drinking His words. This is what man should cooperate in. Your spiritual life is mainly to try to enter into the reality of eating and drinking God’s words and putting them into practice. It is not your business to focus on anything else. Church leaders should be able to guide all their brothers and sisters so that they know how to eat and drink God’s words. This is the responsibility of every single church leader. Be they young or old, all should regard the eating and drinking of God’s words as of great significance and should have His words in their hearts. Entering into this reality means entering the Age of Kingdom. Today, most people feel that they cannot live without eating and drinking the words of God, and feel that His words are fresh regardless of the time. This means that they are beginning to set upon the right track. God uses words to do His work and provide for man. When everyone yearns after and thirsts for the words of God, humanity shall enter into the world of His words.

God has spoken a great deal. How much have you come to know? How much have you entered into? If a church leader has not guided their brothers and sisters into the reality of God’s words, then they will have been derelict in their duty, and will have failed to fulfill their responsibilities! Whether your understanding is profound or superficial, regardless of the degree of your understanding, you must know how to eat and drink His words, you must pay great attention to His words, and understand the importance and the necessity of eating and drinking them. God having spoken so much, if you do not eat and drink His words, or try to seek, or put His words into practice, this cannot be called believing in God. Since you do believe in God, then you must eat and drink His words, experience His words, and live out His words. Only this can be called belief in God! If you say you believe in God with your mouth and yet are unable to put any of His words into practice or to produce any reality, this is not called believing in God. Rather, it is “seeking bread to satisfy hunger.” Speaking only of trivial testimonies, useless things, and superficial matters, without possessing even the slightest bit of reality: these do not constitute belief in God, and you have simply not grasped the right way of believing in God. Why must you eat and drink as many as possible of God’s words? If you do not eat and drink His words but seek only to ascend to heaven, is that believing in God? What is the first step one who believes in God should take? By what path does God perfect man? Can you be perfected without eating and drinking the words of God? Can you be considered a person of the kingdom without the words of God to serve as your reality? What exactly does belief in God mean? Believers in God should, at the very least, be well-behaved on the outside; most important of all is to be possessed of the words of God. No matter what, you can never turn away from His words. Knowing God and satisfying His will are all achieved through His words. In future, every nation, denomination, religion, and sector will be conquered through God’s words. God will speak directly, and all people will hold the words of God in their hands, and by means of this, humanity will be perfected. Within and without, the words of God pervade throughout: Humanity will speak God’s words with their mouths, practice in accordance with God’s words, and keep the words of God within, remaining steeped in God’s words both inside and out. Thus will humanity be perfected. Those who satisfy the will of God and are able to bear witness to Him, these are the people who possess the words of God as their reality.

Entering into the Age of Word—the Age of Millennial Kingdom—is the work that is being accomplished today. From now on, practice engaging in fellowship about the words of God. Only by means of eating and drinking as well as experiencing the words of God will you be able to live out the words of God. You must produce some practical experience in order to convince others. If you cannot live out the reality of God’s words, no one will be persuaded! All those who are used by God can live out the reality of God’s words. If you cannot produce this reality and bear testimony to God, this shows that the Holy Spirit has not worked in you, and that you have not been perfected. This is the importance of the words of God. Do you have a heart that thirsts for the words of God? Those who thirst for the words of God thirst for truth, and only people such as this are blessed by God. In the future, there are many more words that God will say to all religions and all denominations. He first speaks and utters His voice among you to make you complete before moving on to speak and utter His voice among the Gentiles to conquer them. Through His words, all will be sincerely and utterly convinced. Through the words of God and His revelations, man’s corrupt disposition diminishes, he gains the appearance of a man, and his rebellious disposition lessens. The words work upon man with authority and conquer man within the light of God. The work that God does in the present age, as well as the turning points of His work, can all be found within His words. If you do not read His words, you will understand nothing. Through your own eating and drinking His words, and through engaging in fellowship with your brothers and sisters and your actual experiences, you will gain the full knowledge of God’s words. Only then will you be able to truly live out their reality.

Footnotes:

a. The original text does not contain the phrase “of the parable.”

All Is Achieved by the Word of God

God speaks His words and does His work according to different ages, and in different ages, He speaks different words. God does not abide by rules, or repeat the same work, or feel nostalgia for the things of the past; He is a God who is always new and never old, and He speaks new words every day. You should abide by that which should be abided by today; this is the responsibility and duty of man. It is crucial that practice be centered around the light and words of God in the present day. God does not abide by rules, and is able to speak from many different perspectives to make plain His wisdom and omnipotence. It matters not whether He speaks from the perspective of the Spirit, or of man, or of the third person—God is always God, and you cannot say that He is not God because of the perspective of man from which He speaks. Among some people there have emerged notions as a result of the different perspectives from which God speaks. Such people have no knowledge of God, and no knowledge of His work. If God always spoke from one perspective, would man not lay down rules about God? Could God allow man to act in such a way? Regardless of which perspective God speaks from, He has reasons for doing so. If God were to always speak from the perspective of the Spirit, would you be able to engage with Him? Thus, sometimes He speaks in the third person to provide His words to you and guide you into reality. Everything that God does is fitting. In short, it is all done by God, and you should not doubt this. He is God, and thus no matter what perspective He speaks from, He will always be God. This is an immutable truth. However He works, He is still God, and His essence will not change! Peter so loved God and was a man who conformed to God’s will, but God did not witness him as the Lord or Christ, for a being’s essence is what it is, and it can never change. In His work, God does not abide by rules, but employs different methods to make His work effective and deepen man’s knowledge of Him. His every method of working helps man know Him, and is in order to make man perfect. No matter which method of working He employs, each is in order to build up man and make man perfect. Though one of His methods of working may have lasted for a very long time, this is in order to temper man’s faith in Him. Thus, there should be no doubt in your heart. These are all the steps of God’s work, and you must submit to them.

What is spoken of today is entry into reality—not ascending to heaven, or ruling as kings; all that is spoken of is the pursuit of entry into reality. There is no pursuit more practical than this, and to talk of ruling as kings is not practical. Man possesses great curiosity, and he still measures God’s work today by his religious notions. Having experienced so many of God’s methods of working, man still does not know the work of God, still seeks signs and wonders, and still looks to see whether God’s words have been fulfilled. Is this not stupendous ignorance? Without the fulfillment of God’s words, would you still believe that He is God? Today, many such people in the church are waiting to behold signs and wonders. They say that if God’s words are fulfilled, then He is God; if God’s words are not fulfilled, then He is not God. Do you, then, believe in God because of the fulfillment of His words, or because He is God Himself? Man’s view of belief in God must be put right! When you see that God’s words have not been fulfilled, you scamper away—is this belief in God? When you believe in God, you must leave everything to the mercy of God and submit to all the work of God. God spoke so many words in the Old Testament—which of them did you see fulfilled with your own eyes? Can you say that Jehovah is not the true God because you did not see that? Even though many words may have been fulfilled, man is incapable of seeing that clearly because man does not have the truth and understands nothing. Some wish to run away when they feel God’s words have not been fulfilled. Try it. See if you can run away. Having run away, you will still come back. God controls you with His word, and if you leave the church and the word of God, you will have no way to live on. If you do not believe this, try it yourself—do you think you can just leave? The Spirit of God controls you. You cannot leave. This is an administrative decree of God! If some people want to try, they can! You say this person is not God, so commit a sin against Him and see what He does. It is possible that your flesh will not die and you will still be able to feed and clothe yourself, but mentally it will be unbearable; you will feel stressed and tormented; nothing will be more painful. Man cannot bear the mental torment and devastation—perhaps you are able to endure the suffering of the flesh, but you are utterly incapable of enduring mental stress and long-lasting torment. Today, some people become negative because they have not been able to see any signs and wonders, yet none dare run away no matter how negative they get, for God controls man with His word. Despite there having been no advent of facts, yet still no one can flee. Are these not the actions of God? Today, God has come to earth to provide man with life. He does not, as people imagine, coax you by showing signs and wonders in order to ensure a peaceful relationship between God and man. All those whose concentration is not on life, and who instead focus on making God show signs and wonders, are Pharisees! And it was the Pharisees who nailed Jesus to the cross. If you measure God according to your own view of belief in God, believing in God if His words are fulfilled, and being doubtful and even blaspheming against God if they are not, then do you not nail Him to the cross? People such as this are negligent of their duties, and greedily revel in comfort!

On the one hand, the biggest problem with man is that he does not know the work of God. Though man’s attitude is not one of denial, it is one of doubt. Man does not deny, but he also does not fully acknowledge. If people have a thorough knowledge of God’s work, they will not run away. The other problem is that man does not know reality. Today, it is with the word of God that each person has engaged; indeed, in the future, you should not think of beholding signs and wonders. I tell you plainly: During the present stage, all you are capable of seeing are the words of God, and though there are no facts, the life of God can still be wrought into man. It is this work which is the main work of the Millennial Kingdom, and if you cannot perceive this work, then you will become weak and topple down; you will descend amid trials and, yet more grievously, be taken captive by Satan. God has come to earth principally to speak His words; what you engage with is the word of God, what you see is the word of God, what you hear is the word of God, what you abide by is the word of God, what you experience is the word of God, and this incarnation of God principally uses the word to make man perfect. He does not show signs and wonders, and especially does not do the work Jesus did in the past. Although They are God, and are both flesh, Their ministries are not the same. When Jesus came, He also did part of God’s work and spoke some words—but what was the main work He accomplished? What He mainly accomplished was the work of crucifixion. He became the likeness of sinful flesh to complete the work of crucifixion and redeem all mankind, and it was for the sake of all mankind’s sins that He served as a sin offering. This is the main work He accomplished. Ultimately, He provided the path of the cross to guide those who came later. When Jesus came, it was primarily to complete the work of redemption. He redeemed all mankind, and brought the gospel of the kingdom of heaven to man, and, furthermore, He brought forth the path to the kingdom of heaven. As a result, all those who came after said, “We should walk the path of the cross, and sacrifice ourselves for the cross.” Of course, in the beginning, Jesus also did some other work and spoke some words to make man repent and confess his sins. But His ministry was still the crucifixion, and the three and a half years He spent preaching the way were in preparation for the crucifixion that came after. The several times that Jesus prayed were also for the sake of the crucifixion. The life of a normal man that He led and the thirty-three and a half years that He lived on earth were primarily for the sake of completing the work of crucifixion; they were to give Him strength to undertake this work, as a result of which God entrusted the work of crucifixion to Him. What work will God incarnate accomplish today? Today, God has become flesh primarily to complete the work of “the Word appearing in the flesh,” to use the word to make man perfect, and make man accept the pruning of the word and the refinement of the word. In His words He causes you to gain provision and gain life; in His words you see His work and deeds. God uses the word to chastise and refine you, and thus, if you suffer hardship, it is also because of the word of God. Today, God does work not with facts, but with words. Only after His word has come upon you can the Holy Spirit work within you and cause you to suffer pain or feel sweetness. Only the word of God can bring you into reality, and only the word of God is capable of making you perfect. And so, at the very least you must understand this: The work done by God during the last days is principally the use of His word to make every person perfect and to guide man. All the work that He does is through the word; He does not use facts to chastise you. There are times when some people resist God. God does not cause you great discomfort, your flesh is not chastised, nor do you suffer hardship—but as soon as His word comes upon you, and refines you, it is unbearable for you. Is that not so? During the time of the service-doers, God said to throw man into the bottomless pit. Did man really arrive at the bottomless pit? Simply through the use of words to refine man, man entered into the bottomless pit. And so, during the last days, when God becomes flesh, He principally uses the word to accomplish all and make all clear. Only in His words can you see what He is; only in His words can you see that He is God Himself. When God incarnate comes to earth, He does no other work but the speaking of words—thus there is no need for facts; words suffice. That is because He has principally come to do this work, to allow man to behold His power and supremacy in His words, to allow man to see in His words how He humbly hides Himself, and to allow man to know His entirety in His words. All that He has and all that He is are in His words. His wisdom and wondrousness are in His words. In this are you made to see the many methods with which God speaks His words. God has worked for such a long time; it has mostly been to provision man, to expose or prune him. God does not curse a person lightly, and even when He does, it is through the word that He curses them. And so, in this age of God become flesh, do not try to see God heal the sick and cast out demons again, and stop constantly looking for signs—there is no point! Those signs cannot make man perfect! To speak plainly: Today, the practical God Himself of the flesh does not act; He only speaks. This is the truth! He uses words to make you perfect, and uses words to feed and water you. He also uses words to work, and He uses words in place of facts to make you know His practicality. If you are capable of perceiving this manner of God’s work, then it is difficult to be negative. Instead of focusing on things that are negative, you should focus only on that which is positive—which is to say, regardless of whether or not the words of God are fulfilled, or whether or not there is the advent of facts, God causes man to gain life from His words, and this is the greatest of all signs; and even more so, it is an undisputable fact. This is the best evidence through which to know God, and is an even greater sign than signs. Only these words can make man perfect.

As soon as the Age of Kingdom began, God began to release His words. In the future, these words will be gradually fulfilled, and at that time, man will grow into life. God’s use of the word to reveal the corrupt disposition of man is more practical, and more necessary, and He uses nothing but the word to do His work in order to make perfect the faith of man, for today is the Age of Word, and it requires the faith, resolution, and cooperation of man. The work of God incarnate of the last days is the use of His word to serve and provide for man. Only after God incarnate has finished speaking His words will they begin to be fulfilled. During the time that He speaks, His words are not fulfilled, because when He is in the stage of the flesh, His words cannot be fulfilled. This is so that man may see that God is flesh and not Spirit; so that man may behold the practicality of God with his own eyes. On the day that His work is complete, when all the words that should be spoken by Him on earth have been spoken, His words will begin to be fulfilled. Now is not the age of the fulfillment of God’s words, because He has not yet finished speaking His words. So, when you see that God is still speaking His words on earth, do not await the fulfillment of His words; when God stops speaking His words, and when His work on earth has been completed, that will be when His words begin to be fulfilled. In the words He speaks on earth, there is, in one regard, the provision of life, and in another, there is prophecy—the prophecy of things to come, of things that will be done, and of the things that have yet to be accomplished. There was also prophecy in the words of Jesus. In one regard, He supplied life, and in another regard, He spoke prophecy. Today, there is no talk of carrying out words and facts at the same time because there is too great a difference between that which can be seen by man’s own eyes and that which is done by God. It can only be said that once the work of God has been completed, His words will be fulfilled, and the facts will come after the words. During the last days, God incarnate performs the ministry of the word on earth, and in performing the ministry of the word, He only speaks words, and cares not for other matters. Once God’s work changes, His words will start to be fulfilled. Today, words are first used to make you perfect; when He gains glory throughout the entire universe, His work will be complete—all the words that should be spoken will have been spoken, and all words will have become facts. God has come to earth during the last days to perform the ministry of the word so that mankind may know Him, and so that mankind may see what He is, and see His wisdom and all of His wondrous deeds from His word. During the Age of Kingdom, God principally uses the word to conquer all of mankind. In the future, His word will also come upon every religion, sector, nation and denomination. God uses the word to conquer, to make all men see that His word carries authority and might—and so today, you face only the word of God.

The words spoken by God in this age are different from those spoken during the Age of Law, and so, too, do they differ from the words spoken during the Age of Grace. In the Age of Grace, God did not do the work of the word, but simply described the crucifixion in order to redeem all mankind. The Bible only describes why Jesus was to be crucified, and the suffering He was subjected to on the cross, and how man should be crucified for God. During that age, all the work done by God was centered around the crucifixion. During the Age of Kingdom, God incarnate speaks words to conquer all those who believe in Him. This is “the Word appearing in the flesh”; God has come during the last days to do this work, which is to say, He has come to accomplish the actual significance of the Word appearing in the flesh. He only speaks words, and rarely is there the advent of facts. This is the very essence of the Word appearing in the flesh, and when God incarnate speaks His words, this is the appearance of the Word in the flesh, and is the Word coming into the flesh. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh.” This (the work of the appearance of the Word in the flesh) is the work that God will accomplish in the last days, and is the final chapter of His entire management plan, and so God has to come to earth and manifest His words in the flesh. That which is done today, that which will be done in the future, that which will be accomplished by God, man’s final destination, those who will be saved, those who will be destroyed, and so on—all of this work that should be achieved in the end has all been clearly stated, and is all in order to accomplish the actual significance of the Word appearing in the flesh. The administrative decrees and constitution that were previously issued forth, those who will be destroyed, those who will enter into rest—these words must all be fulfilled. This is the work principally accomplished by God incarnate during the last days. He makes people understand where those predestined by God belong and where those not predestined by God belong, how His people and sons will be classified, what will happen to Israel, what will happen to Egypt—in the future, every one of these words will be accomplished. The pace of God’s work is accelerating. God uses the word as the means to reveal to man what is to be done in every age, what is to be done by God incarnate during the last days, and His ministry that is to be performed, and these words are all in order to accomplish the actual significance of the Word appearing in the flesh.

I have previously said that “All who focus on beholding signs and wonders will be forsaken; they are not those who will be made perfect.” I have spoken so many words, yet man has not the slightest knowledge of this work, and, having arrived at this point, still people ask for signs and wonders. Is your belief in God nothing more than the pursuit of signs and wonders, or is it in order to gain life? Jesus also spoke many words, and some of them have yet to be fulfilled. Can you say that Jesus is not God? God witnessed that He was Christ and the beloved Son of God. Can you deny this? Today, God only speaks words, and if you do not know this thoroughly, then you cannot stand fast. Do you believe in Him because He is God, or do you believe in Him based on whether or not His words are fulfilled? Do you believe in signs and wonders, or do you believe in God? Today, He does not show signs and wonders—is He really God? If the words He speaks are not fulfilled, is He really God? Is the essence of God determined by whether or not the words He speaks are fulfilled? Why is it that some people are always waiting for the fulfillment of God’s words before they will believe in Him? Does this not mean they do not know Him? All those who possess such notions are those who deny God. They use notions to measure God; if God’s words are fulfilled, they believe in Him, and if they are not, then they do not believe in Him; and they always pursue signs and wonders. Are these people not the Pharisees of modern times? Whether or not you are able to stand firm depends on whether or not you know the practical God—this is crucial! The greater the reality of God’s word in you, the greater your knowledge of the practicality of God, and the more you are able to stand fast during trials. The more you focus on seeing signs and wonders, the less you are able to stand firm, and you will fall amid trials. Signs and wonders are not the foundation; only the practicality of God is life. Some people do not know the effects that are to be achieved by God’s work. They spend their days in bewilderment, not pursuing the knowledge of God’s work. The aim of their pursuit is only ever to make God fulfill their desires, and only then will they be serious in their belief. They say that they will pursue life if the words of God are fulfilled, but that if His words are not fulfilled, then there is no possibility of them pursuing life. Man thinks that belief in God is the pursuit of beholding signs and wonders and the pursuit of ascending to heaven and the third heaven. None of them say that their belief in God is the pursuit of entry into reality, the pursuit of life, and the pursuit of being gained by God. What is the value in pursuit such as this? Those who do not pursue the knowledge of God and the satisfaction of God are those who do not believe in God; they are the ones who blaspheme God!

Now do you understand what belief in God is? Does belief in God mean beholding signs and wonders? Does it mean ascending to heaven? Believing in God is not easy in the slightest. Those religious practices should be purged; pursuing the healing of the sick and the casting out of demons, focusing on signs and wonders, coveting more of God’s grace, peace and joy, pursuing the prospects and comforts of the flesh—these are religious practices, and such religious practices are a vague kind of belief. What is real belief in God today? It is the acceptance of God’s word as your life reality and the knowing of God from His word in order to achieve a true love of Him. To be clear: Belief in God is so that you may submit to God, love God, and fulfill the duty that should be fulfilled by a created being. This is the aim of believing in God. You must achieve a knowledge of the loveliness of God, of how worthy God is of reverence, of how, in His created beings, God does the work of salvation and making them perfect—these are the bare essentials of your belief in God. Belief in God is principally the switch from a life of the flesh to a life of loving God; from living within corruption to living within the life of God’s words; it is coming out from under the power of Satan and living under the care and protection of God; it is being able to achieve submission to God and not submission to the flesh; it is allowing God to gain your entire heart, allowing God to make you perfect, and freeing yourself from the corrupt satanic disposition. Belief in God is principally so that the power and glory of God may be manifested in you, so that you may follow God’s will, and accomplish God’s plan, and be able to bear testimony to God before Satan. Belief in God should not revolve around the desire to behold signs and wonders, nor should it be for the sake of your personal flesh. It should be about the pursuit of knowing God, and being able to submit to God, and, like Peter, submitting to Him until one’s death. These are the main aims of believing in God. One eats and drinks the word of God in order to know God and satisfy Him. Eating and drinking the word of God gives you a greater knowledge of God, only after which can you submit to Him. Only with knowledge of God can you love Him, and this is the goal man should have in his belief in God. If, in your belief in God, you are always trying to behold signs and wonders, then the viewpoint of this belief in God is wrong. Belief in God is principally the acceptance of the word of God as the life reality. The aim of God is only attained by putting into practice the words of God from His mouth and carrying them out within yourself. In believing in God, man should strive to be made perfect by God, to be able to submit to God, and for complete submission to God. If you can submit to God without complaint, be mindful of God’s intentions, achieve the stature of Peter, and possess the style of Peter spoken of by God, then that will be when you have achieved success in belief in God, and it will signify that you have been gained by God.

God does His work throughout the entire universe. All those who believe in Him must accept His word, and eat and drink His word; no one can be gained by God by seeing the signs and wonders shown by God. Throughout the ages, God has always used the word to make man perfect. Thus you should not devote all your attention to signs and wonders, but should strive to be made perfect by God. In the Old Testament Age of Law, God spoke some words, and in the Age of Grace, Jesus, too, spoke many words. After Jesus had said many words, the later apostles and disciples led people to practice according to the commandments issued by Jesus and experienced according to the words and principles spoken of by Jesus. In the last days, God principally uses the word to make man perfect. He does not use signs and wonders to oppress man, or convince man; this cannot make plain the power of God. If God only showed signs and wonders, then it would be impossible to make plain the practicality of God, and thus impossible to make man perfect. God does not make man perfect by signs and wonders, but uses the word to water and shepherd man, after which is achieved the complete submission of man and man’s knowledge of God. This is the aim of the work He does and the words He speaks. God does not use the method of showing signs and wonders to make man perfect—He uses words, and uses many different methods of work to make man perfect. Whether it be the refinement, pruning, or provision of words, God speaks from many different perspectives to make man perfect, and to give man a greater knowledge of the work, wisdom and wondrousness of God. When man is made complete at the time that God concludes the age in the last days, then he will be qualified to look upon signs and wonders. When you come to know God and are able to submit to God no matter what He does, you will no longer have any notions about Him when you see signs and wonders. At the moment, you are corrupt and incapable of complete submission to God—do you think you are qualified to see signs and wonders in this state? When God shows signs and wonders, that is when God punishes man, and also when the age changes, and, moreover, when the age concludes. When God’s work is being carried out normally, He does not show signs and wonders. Showing signs and wonders is laughably simple for Him, but that is not the principle of God’s work, nor is it the aim of God’s management of man. If man saw signs and wonders, and if the spiritual body of God were to appear to man, would all people not believe in God? I have previously said that a group of overcomers are gained from the East, overcomers who come from amid the great tribulation. What is meant by these words? They mean that these people who have been gained are only truly submissive after undergoing judgment, chastisement, pruning, and all kinds of refinement. The belief of these people is not vague and abstract, but real. They have not seen any signs and wonders, or any miracles; they do not speak of abstruse words and doctrines, or profound insights; instead they have reality, and the words of God, and a true knowledge of the practicality of God. Is such a group not more capable of making plain the power of God? God’s work during the last days is practical work. During the age of Jesus, He did not come to make man perfect, but to redeem man, and so He displayed some miracles to make people follow Him. For He principally came to complete the work of crucifixion, and showing signs was not part of the work of His ministry. Such signs and wonders were work that was done in order to make His work effective; they were extra work, and did not represent the work of the entire age. During the Old Testament Age of Law, God also showed some signs and wonders—but the work God does today is practical work, and He would definitely not show signs and wonders now. If He showed signs and wonders, His practical work would be thrown into disorder, and He would be unable to do any more work. If God said to use the word to make man perfect, but also showed signs and wonders, then could it be made plain whether or not man truly believes in Him? Thus, God does not do such things. There is too much of religion within man; God has come during the last days to expel all the religious notions and supernatural things within man, and make man know the practicality of God. He has come to remove an image of a God that is abstract and fanciful—an image of a God who, in other words, does not exist at all. And so, now the only thing that is precious is for you to have a knowledge of practicality! The truth overrides everything. How much truth do you possess today? Is all that shows signs and wonders God? Evil spirits can also show signs and wonders; are they all God? In his belief in God, what man searches for is the truth, and what he pursues is life, rather than signs and wonders. This should be the goal of all those who believe in God.

Those Who Are to Be Made Perfect Must Undergo Refinement

If you believe in God, then you must submit to God, put the truth into practice, and fulfill all of your duties. Additionally, you must understand the things you should experience. If you only experience being pruned, being disciplined, and being judged, if you are only able to enjoy God but remain unable to feel when God is disciplining you or pruning you—this is unacceptable. Perhaps in this instance of refinement, you are able to stand your ground, but this is still not enough; you must still keep marching forward. The lesson of loving God never stops and has no end. People see believing in God as something that is extremely simple, but once they gain some practical experience, they then realize that belief in God is not as simple as people imagine. When God works to refine man, man suffers. The greater a person’s refinement, the more of a God-loving heart they’ll possess, and the more of God’s might will be revealed in them. Conversely, the less refinement a person receives, the less of a God-loving heart they’ll possess, and the less God’s might will be revealed in them. The greater such a person’s refinement and pain and the more torment they experience, the deeper their love of God will grow, the more genuine their faith in God will become, and the more profound their knowledge of God will be. In your experiences, you will see people who suffer greatly as they are refined, who are pruned and disciplined much, and you will see that it is those people who have a deep love for God and a more profound and penetrating knowledge of God. Those who have not experienced being pruned have but a superficial knowledge, and they can only say: “God is so good, He bestows grace upon people so that they can enjoy Him.” If people have experienced being pruned and disciplined, then they are able to speak about the true knowledge of God. So the more wondrous God’s work in man is, the more valuable and significant it is. The more impenetrable it is to you and the more incompatible it is with your notions, the more God’s work is able to conquer you, gain you, and make you perfect. How great is the significance of God’s work! If God did not refine man in this way, if He did not work according to this method, then His work would be ineffectual and without significance. It was said in the past that God would select and gain this group, and make them complete in the last days; in this, there is extraordinary significance. The greater the work He carries out within you, the deeper and purer your love for God. The greater the work of God, the more man is able to grasp something of His wisdom and the deeper is man’s knowledge of Him. During the last days, six thousand years of God’s plan for management will come to an end. Can it really end easily? Once He conquers mankind, will His work be over? Can it be so simple? People indeed imagine that it is as simple as this, but what God does is not so simple. No matter what part of God’s work you care to mention, it all is unfathomable to man. If you were able to fathom it, then God’s work would be without significance or value. The work done by God is unfathomable; it is completely counter to your notions, and the more irreconcilable it is with your notions, the more it shows that God’s work is meaningful; if it were compatible with your notions, then it would be meaningless. Today, you feel that God’s work is so wondrous, and the more wondrous you feel it is, the more you feel that God is unfathomable, and you see how great God’s deeds are. If He only did some superficial, perfunctory work to conquer man and did nothing else afterward, then man would be incapable of beholding the significance of God’s work. Although you are receiving a little refinement now, it is of great benefit to your growth in life; so it is of the utmost necessity for you to undergo such hardship. Today, you are receiving a little refinement, but afterward you will truly be able to behold the deeds of God, and ultimately you will say: “God’s deeds are so wondrous!” These will be the words in your heart. Having experienced God’s refinement for a while (the trial of the service-doers and the time of chastisement), some people ultimately said: “Believing in God is really difficult!” The fact that they used the words, “really difficult,” shows that God’s deeds are unfathomable, that God’s work is possessed of great significance and value, and that His work is highly worthy of being treasured by man. If, after I have done so much work, you had not the slightest knowledge, then could My work still have value? It will make you say: “Service to God is really difficult, the deeds of God are so wondrous, and God truly is wise! God is so lovely!” If, after undergoing a period of experience, you are able to say such words, then this proves that you have gained God’s work in you. One day, when you are spreading the gospel abroad and someone asks you: “How is your faith in God going?” you will be able to say: “God’s actions are so marvelous!” They will feel that your words speak of real experiences. This is truly bearing witness. You will say that God’s work is full of wisdom, and His work in you has truly convinced you and conquered your heart. You will always love Him because He is more than worthy of mankind’s love! If you can speak to these things, then you can move people’s hearts. All of this is bearing witness. If you are able to bear resounding witness, to move people to tears, that shows that you truly are one who loves God, for you are able to testify to loving God, and through you, God’s actions can be borne out in testimony. By your testimony, others are made to seek out God’s work, to experience God’s work, and in any environment they experience, they will be able to stand firm. This is the only genuine way of bearing witness, and this is exactly what is required of you now. You should see that God’s work is extremely valuable and worthy of being treasured by people, that God is so precious and so abundant; He can not only speak, but also judge people, refine their hearts, bring them enjoyment, gain them, conquer them, and perfect them. From your experience you will see that God is very lovable. So how much do you love God now? Can you really say these things from your heart? When you are able to express these words from the depths of your heart, then you will be able to bear witness. Once your experience has reached this level you will be capable of being a witness for God, and you will be qualified. If you do not reach this level in your experience, then you will still be too far off. It is normal for people to show weaknesses during the process of refinement, but after refinement you should be able to say: “God is so wise in His work!” If you are truly able to attain a practical understanding of these words, then it will become something you cherish, and your experience will have value.

What should you pursue now? Whether or not you are capable of bearing witness for God’s work, whether or not you are able to become a testimony and a manifestation of God, and whether or not you are fit to be used by Him—these are the things you should seek. How much work has God really done in you? How much have you seen, how much have you touched? How much have you experienced, and tasted? Regardless of whether God has tested you, pruned you, or disciplined you, His actions and His work have been carried out on you. But as a believer in God and as someone who is willing to pursue being perfected by Him, are you able to bear witness for God’s work on the basis of your practical experience? Can you live out God’s word through your practical experience? Are you able to provide for others through your own practical experience, and expend your whole life to bear witness for God’s work? To bear witness to God’s work, you must rely on your experience, knowledge, and the price you have paid. Only thus can you satisfy His will. Are you someone who bears witness to God’s work? Do you have this aspiration? If you are able to bear witness to His name, and even more, to His work, and if you can live out the image that He requires of His people, then you are a witness for God. How do you actually bear witness for God? You do it by seeking and longing to live out God’s word, and, by bearing witness with your words, allowing people to know His work and to see His actions. If you truly seek all of this, then God will perfect you. If all you seek is to be perfected by God and be blessed in the very end, then the perspective of your faith in God is not pure. You should be pursuing how to see God’s deeds in real life, how to satisfy Him when He reveals His will to you, and seeking how you ought to bear witness to His wondrousness and wisdom, and how to bear witness for how He disciplines and prunes you. All of these are things you should now be pondering. If your God-loving heart is solely so that you can share in God’s glory after He perfects you, then it is still inadequate and cannot meet God’s requirements. You need to be able to bear witness to God’s work, satisfy His demands, and experience the work He has done on people in a practical way. Whether pain, tears, or sadness, you must experience all of these things in your practice. They are meant to perfect you as one who bears witness for God. What is it, exactly, that now compels you to suffer and seek perfection? Is your present suffering truly for the sake of loving God and bearing witness for Him? Or is it for the sake of blessings of the flesh, for your future prospects and fate? All of your intentions, motivations, and the goals that you pursue must be rectified and cannot be guided by your own will. If one person seeks perfection to receive blessings and to reign in power, while another person pursues perfection to satisfy God, to bear practical witness to God’s work, which of the two means of pursuit would you choose? If you were to choose the first, then you would still be too far away from God’s standards. I once said that My actions would be openly known across the entire universe and that I would reign as King in the universe. On the other hand, what you have been entrusted with is to go out to bear witness to God’s work, not to become kings and appear to the whole universe. Let God’s deeds fill the cosmos and the firmament. Let everyone see them and acknowledge them. These words are spoken in relation to God Himself, and what human beings should do is to bear witness for God. How much of God do you know now? How much of God can you bear witness to? What is the purpose of God perfecting man? Once you understand God’s will, how should you show consideration toward His will? If you are willing to be perfected and to bear witness to God’s work through what you live out, if you have this driving force, then nothing is too difficult. What people need now is faith. If you have this driving force, then it is easy to let go of any negativity, passiveness, laziness and notions of the flesh, philosophies for worldly dealings, rebellious disposition, feelings, and so forth.

While undergoing trials, it is normal for people to be weak, or to have negativity within them, or to lack clarity on God’s will or their path for practice. But in any case, you must have faith in God’s work, and not deny God, just like Job. Although Job was weak and cursed the day of his own birth, he did not deny that all things in human life were bestowed by Jehovah, and that Jehovah is also the One to take them all away. No matter how he was tested, he maintained this belief. In your experience, no matter what refinement you undergo through God’s words, what God requires of mankind, in brief, is their faith and their God-loving heart. What He perfects by working in this way is people’s faith, love, and aspirations. God does the work of perfection on people, and they cannot see it, cannot feel it; under such circumstances, your faith is required. People’s faith is required when something cannot be seen by the naked eye, and your faith is required when you cannot let go of your own notions. When you do not have clarity about God’s work, what is required of you is to have faith and to take a firm stance and stand witness. When Job reached this point, God appeared to him and spoke to him. That is, it is only from within your faith that you will be able to see God, and when you have faith God will perfect you. Without faith, He cannot do this. God will bestow upon you whatever you hope to gain. If you do not have faith, then you cannot be perfected and you will be unable to see God’s actions, much less His omnipotence. When you have faith that you will see His actions in your practical experience, then God will appear to you, and He will enlighten and guide you from within. Without that faith, God will be unable to do that. If you have lost hope in God, how will you be able to experience His work? Therefore, only when you have faith and you do not harbor doubts toward God, only when you have true faith in Him no matter what He does, will He enlighten and illuminate you through your experiences, and only then will you be able to see His actions. These things are all achieved through faith. Faith comes only through refinement, and in the absence of refinement, faith cannot develop. What does this word, “faith,” refer to? Faith is the genuine belief and the sincere heart that humans should possess when they cannot see or touch something, when God’s work does not align with human notions, when it is beyond human reach. This is the faith that I speak of. People are in need of faith during times of hardship and refinement, and faith is something that is followed by refinement; refinement and faith cannot be separated. No matter how God works, and no matter your environment, you are able to pursue life and seek the truth, and seek knowledge of God’s work, and have an understanding of His actions, and you are able to act according to the truth. Doing so is what it is to have true faith, and doing so shows that you have not lost faith in God. You can only have true faith in God if you are able to persist in pursuing the truth through refinement, if you are able to truly love God and do not develop doubts about Him, if no matter what He does you still practice the truth to satisfy Him, and if you are able to seek in the depths for His will and be considerate of His will. In the past, when God said that you would reign as a king, you loved Him, and when He openly showed Himself to you, you pursued Him. But now God is hidden, you cannot see Him, and troubles have come upon you—do you then now lose hope in God? So, you must at all times pursue life and seek to satisfy God’s will. This is called genuine faith, and this is the truest and most beautiful kind of love.

In the past, people would all come before God to make their resolutions, and they would say: “Even if no one else loves God, I must love Him.” But now, refinement comes upon you, and since this does not align with your notions, you lose faith in God. Is this genuine love? You have read many times about the deeds of Job—have you forgotten about them? True love can only take shape from within faith. You develop real love for God through the refinements you undergo, and it is through your faith that you are able to be considerate of God’s will in your practical experiences, and it is also through faith that you rebel against your own flesh and pursue life; this is what people should do. If you do this, then you will be able to see God’s actions, but if you lack faith, then you will be unable to see God’s actions or to experience His work. If you want to be used and perfected by God, then you must be possessed of everything: the will to suffer, faith, endurance, submission, and the ability to experience the work of God, grasp His will, be considerate of His sorrow, and so forth. Perfecting a person is not easy, and every single refinement that you experience requires your faith and love. If you want to be perfected by God, it is not enough to merely rush ahead on the path, nor is it enough to merely expend yourself for God. You must possess many things to be able to become someone who is perfected by God. When you face suffering, you must be able to lay aside concern for the flesh and to not make complaints against God. When God hides Himself from you, you must be able to have the faith to follow Him, to maintain your previous love without allowing it to falter or dissipate. No matter what God does, you must submit to His design and be prepared to curse your own flesh rather than make complaints against Him. When you are faced with trials, you must satisfy God, though you may weep bitterly or feel reluctant to part with some beloved object. Only this is true love and faith. No matter what your actual stature is, you must first possess both the will to suffer hardship and true faith, and you must also have the will to rebel against the flesh. You should be willing to endure personal hardships and suffer losses to your personal interests in order to satisfy God’s will. You must also be capable of feeling regret about yourself in your heart: In the past, you were unable to satisfy God, and now, you can regret yourself. You must not be lacking in any of these regards—it is through these things that God will perfect you. If you cannot meet these criteria, then you cannot be perfected.

Someone who serves God should not only know how to suffer for Him; more than that, they should understand that the purpose of believing in God is to pursue a love of God. God makes use of you not just to refine you or for the sake of making you suffer, but rather He makes use of you so that you may know His actions, know the true significance of human life, and in particular, so that you may know that serving God is not an easy task. Experiencing God’s work is not about enjoying grace, but rather about suffering for your love of Him. Since you enjoy God’s grace, you must also enjoy His chastisement; you must experience all of this. You can experience God’s enlightenment in you, and you can also experience how He prunes you and judges you. In this way, your experience will be comprehensive. God has carried out His work of judgment and chastisement upon you. God’s word has pruned you, but not only that; it has also enlightened and illuminated you. When you are negative and weak, God worries for you. All of this work is to let you know that everything about man is within God’s orchestrations. You may think that believing in God is about suffering, or doing all manner of things for Him; you might think that the purpose of believing in God is so that your flesh may be at peace, or so that everything in your life runs smoothly, or so that you may be comfortable and at ease in all things. However, none of these are purposes that people should attach to their belief in God. If you believe for these purposes, then your perspective is incorrect, and it is simply impossible for you to be perfected. God’s actions, God’s righteous disposition, His wisdom, His words, and His wondrousness and unfathomableness are all things people ought to understand. Having this understanding, you should use it to rid your heart of all personal demands, hopes, and notions. Only by eliminating these things can you meet the conditions demanded by God, and it is only by doing this that you can have life and satisfy God. The purpose of believing in God is to satisfy Him and to live out the disposition He requires, so that His actions and glory may be manifested through this group of unworthy people. This is the correct perspective for believing in God, and this is also the goal that you should seek. You should have the right viewpoint about believing in God and you should seek to obtain God’s words. You need to eat and drink God’s words and you must be able to live out the truth, and in particular you must be able to see His practical deeds, His wonderful deeds throughout the entire universe, as well as the practical work He does in the flesh. People can, through their practical experiences, appreciate just how God does His work on them and what His will is toward them. The purpose of all of this is to eliminate people’s corrupt satanic disposition. Having cast out all the uncleanliness and unrighteousness inside you, and having cast off your wrong intentions, and having developed true faith in God—only with true faith can you truly love God. You can only genuinely love God on the foundation of your belief in Him. Can you achieve love for God without believing in Him? Since you believe in God, you cannot be muddleheaded about it. Some people become full of vigor as soon as they see that faith in God will bring them blessings, but then lose all energy as soon as they see that they have to suffer refinements. Is that believing in God? Ultimately, you must achieve complete and utter submission before God in your faith. You believe in God but still have demands of Him, have many religious notions you cannot put down, personal interests you cannot let go of, and still you seek blessings of the flesh and want God to rescue your flesh, to save your soul—these are all behaviors of people who have the wrong perspective. Even though people with religious beliefs have faith in God, they do not seek to change their dispositions and do not pursue knowledge of God, but rather seek only the interests of their flesh. Many among you have faiths that belong in the category of religious convictions; this is not true faith in God. To believe in God, people must possess a heart that is prepared to suffer for Him and the will to give themselves up. Unless people meet these two conditions, their faith in God is not valid, and they will not be able to achieve change in their disposition. Only people who genuinely pursue the truth, seek knowledge of God, and pursue life are those who truly believe in God.

When trials come upon you, how will you apply God’s work in handling those trials? Will you be negative, or will you understand God’s trial and refinement of man from a positive aspect? What will you gain through God’s trials and refinements? Will your love for God grow? When you are subject to refinement, will you be able to apply the trials of Job and engage earnestly with the work God does in you? Can you see how God tests man through the trials of Job? What kind of inspiration can Job’s trials bring to you? Will you be willing to stand witness for God in the midst of your refinements, or will you want to satisfy the flesh in a comfortable environment? What truly is your perspective on faith in God? Is it truly for Him, and not for the flesh? Do you actually have a target which you pursue in your seeking? Are you willing to undergo refinements so that you may be perfected by God, or would you rather be chastised and cursed by God? What is truly your view on the matter of bearing witness for God? What should people do in certain environments to bear true witness for God? Since the practical God has revealed so much in His practical work in you, why do you always have thoughts of leaving? Is your belief in God for God? For most of you, your belief is part of a calculation that you make on your own behalf, for pursuit of your own personal benefit. Very few people believe in God for God; is this not rebelliousness?

The purpose of the work of refinement is primarily to perfect people’s faith. In the end, what is achieved is that you want to leave but, at the same time, you cannot; some people are still able to have faith even when they are bereft of the tiniest shred of hope; and people no longer have hope at all regarding their own future prospects. Only at this time will God’s refinement be finished. Man still has not reached the stage of hovering between life and death, and they have not tasted death, so the process of refinement is not yet finished. Even those who were at the step of the service-doers were not refined to the utmost. Job underwent extreme refinement, and he had nothing to rely on. People must undergo refinements to the point that they have no hope and nothing to rely on—only this is true refinement. During the time of the service-doers, if your heart was always quiet before God, and if no matter what He did and no matter what His will for you was, you always submitted to His arrangements, then at the end of the road you would understand everything that God had done. You undergo the trials of Job, and at the same time you undergo the trials of Peter. When Job was tested, he stood witness, and in the end, Jehovah was revealed to him. Only after he stood witness was he worthy of seeing the face of God. Why is it said: “I hide from the land of filth but show Myself to the holy kingdom”? That means that only when you are holy and stand witness can you have the dignity to see the face of God. If you cannot stand witness for Him, you do not have the dignity to see His face. If you retreat or make complaints against God in the face of refinements, thus failing to stand witness for Him and becoming Satan’s laughing stock, then you will not gain the appearance of God. If you are like Job, who in the midst of trials cursed his own flesh and did not complain against God, and was able to detest his own flesh without complaining or sinning through his words, then you will be standing witness. When you undergo refinements to a certain degree and can still be like Job, utterly submissive in front of God and without other requirements of Him or your own notions, then God will appear to you. Now God does not appear to you because you have so many of your own notions, personal prejudices, selfish thoughts, individual requirements and fleshly interests, and you are not worthy of seeing His face. Were you to see God, you would measure Him through your own notions and, in so doing, He would be nailed to the cross by you. If many things come upon you that do not align with your notions but yet you are able to put them aside and gain knowledge of God’s actions from these things, and if in the midst of refinements you reveal your God-loving heart, then this is standing witness. If your home is peaceful, you enjoy comforts of the flesh, no one is persecuting you, and your brothers and sisters in the church obey you, can you display your God-loving heart? Can this situation refine you? It is only through refinement that your God-loving heart can be shown, and it is only through things occurring that do not align with your notions that you can be perfected. With the service of many contrary and negative things, and by employing all sorts of Satan’s manifestations—its actions, its accusations, its disturbances and misleading—God shows you Satan’s hideous face clearly, and thereby perfects your ability to distinguish Satan, that you may hate Satan and rebel against it.

Your many experiences of failure, of weakness, your times of negativity, can all be said to be God’s trials. This is because everything comes from God, and all things and events are in His hands. Whether you fail or whether you are weak and you stumble, it all rests on God and is within His grasp. From God’s perspective, this is a trial of you, and if you cannot recognize that, it will become temptation. There are two kinds of states that people should recognize: One comes from the Holy Spirit, and the likely source of the other is Satan. One is a state in which the Holy Spirit illuminates you and allows you to know yourself, to detest and feel regret about yourself and to be able to have genuine love for God, to set your heart on satisfying Him. The other is a state in which you know yourself, but you are negative and weak. It could be said that this state is God’s refinement, and also that it is Satan’s temptation. If you recognize that this is God’s salvation of you and if you feel that you are now deeply in His debt, and if from now on you try to repay Him and no longer fall into such depravity, if you put your effort into eating and drinking His words, and if you always consider yourself to be lacking, and have a heart of longing, then this is God’s trial. After the suffering has ended and you are once again moving forward, God will still lead, illuminate, enlighten, and nourish you. But if you do not recognize it and you are negative, simply abandoning yourself to despair, if you think in this way, then Satan’s temptation will have come upon you. When Job underwent trials, God and Satan were betting with each other, and God allowed Satan to afflict Job. Even though it was God testing Job, it was actually Satan that came upon him. For Satan, it was tempting Job, but Job was on God’s side. If that had not been the case, then Job would have fallen into temptation. As soon as people fall into temptation, they fall into danger. Undergoing refinement can be said to be a trial from God, but if you are not in a good state, it can be said to be temptation from Satan. If you are not clear about the vision, Satan will accuse you and obscure you in the aspect of vision. Before you know it, you will fall into temptation.

If you do not experience the work of God, then you will never be able to be perfected. In your experience, you must also enter into the details. For example, what things lead you to develop notions and an excess of motives, and what kind of suitable practices do you have to address these problems? If you can experience God’s work, this means that you have stature. If you only appear to have vigor, this is not true stature and you absolutely will not be able to stand firm. Only when you are able to experience God’s work and you are able to experience and ponder it at any time and in any place, when you are able to leave the shepherds and live independently in reliance upon God, and you are able to see God’s practical actions—only then will God’s will be achieved. Right now, most people do not know how to experience, and when they encounter an issue, they do not know how to take care of it; they are incapable of experiencing God’s work, and they cannot lead a spiritual life. You must take God’s words and work into your practical life.

Sometimes God gives you a certain type of feeling, a feeling that causes you to lose your inner enjoyment and lose God’s presence, such that you are plunged into darkness. This is a type of refinement. Whenever you do anything, it always goes awry, or you hit a wall. This is God’s discipline. Sometimes, when you do something that is rebellious and resistant to God, nobody else may know of it—but God does. He will not let you off, and He will discipline you. The work of the Holy Spirit is very detailed. He very carefully observes people’s every word and action, their every act and move, and their every thought and idea so that people can gain internal awareness of these things. You do something once and it goes awry, you do something again and it still goes awry, and gradually you will come to understand the work of the Holy Spirit. Through many times of being disciplined, you will know what to do to be in line with God’s will and what is not in line with His will. In the end, you will have accurate responses to the Holy Spirit’s guidance from within you. Sometimes you will be rebellious and you will be rebuked by God from within. This all comes from God’s discipline. If you do not treasure God’s word, if you slight His work, then He will pay you no mind. The more seriously you take God’s words, the more He will enlighten you. Right now, there are some people in the church who have a muddled and confused faith, and they do a lot of inappropriate things and act without discipline, and so the work of the Holy Spirit cannot be clearly seen in them. Some people leave their duties behind for the sake of earning money, going out to run a business without being disciplined; that kind of person is in even more danger. Not only do they not currently have the work of the Holy Spirit, but in the future, they will be difficult to perfect. There are many people in whom the work of the Holy Spirit cannot be seen and in whom God’s discipline cannot be seen. They are those who are not clear on God’s will and who do not know His work. Those who can stand steady in the midst of refinements, who follow God no matter what He does, and at the very least are able to not leave, or achieve 0.1% of what Peter achieved are doing fine, but they have no value in terms of God making use of them. Many people understand things quickly, have true love for God, and can exceed Peter’s level, and God does the work of perfection on them. Discipline and enlightenment come to such people, and if there is something in them that does not accord with God’s will, they can cast it off at once. Such people are gold, silver, and precious stones—their value is most high! If God has done many kinds of work but you are still like sand or stone, then you are worthless!

God’s work in the country of the great red dragon is marvelous and unfathomable. He will perfect one group of people and cast out some others, for there are all kinds of people in the church—there are those who love the truth, and those who do not; there are those who experience God’s work, and those who do not; there are those who do their duty, and those who do not; there are those who testify for God, and those who do not—and a portion of them are nonbelievers and evil men, and they will certainly be cast out. If you do not clearly know the work of God, then you will be negative; this is because God’s work can only be seen in a minority of people. At this time, it will become clear who truly loves God and who does not. Those who truly love God have the work of the Holy Spirit, while those who do not truly love Him will be revealed through each step of His work. They will become those who are to be cast out. These people will be revealed over the course of the work of conquest, and they are people who have no value for being perfected. Those who have been perfected have been gained by God in their entirety, and are capable of loving God like Peter did. Those who have been conquered do not have spontaneous love, but only passive love, and they are forced to love God. Spontaneous love is developed through understanding gained through practical experience. This love occupies a person’s heart and makes them voluntarily devoted to God; God’s words become their foundation and they are able to suffer for God. Of course, these are things possessed by someone who has been perfected by God. If you only seek to be conquered, then you cannot bear witness for God; if God only achieves His goal of salvation through conquering people, then the step of the service-doers would finish the job. However, conquering people is not God’s final goal, which is to perfect people. So rather than say that this stage is the work of conquest, say that it is the work of perfecting and casting out. Some people have not been fully conquered, and in the course of conquering them, a group of people will be perfected. These two pieces of work are carried out in unison. People have not departed even throughout such a long period of work, and this shows that the goal of conquering has been achieved—this is a fact of being conquered. Refinements are not for the sake of being conquered, but for the sake of being perfected. Without refinements, people could not be perfected. So refinements are truly valuable! Today one group of people is being perfected and gained. The ten blessings mentioned previously were all aimed at those who have been perfected. Everything about changing their image on the earth is aimed at those who have been perfected. Those who have not been perfected are not qualified to receive the promises of God.

Only by Experiencing Painful Trials Can You Know the Loveliness of God

Just how much do you love God today? And just how much do you know of all that God has done in you? These are the things you should learn. When God arrives on earth, all that He has done in man and allowed man to see is so that man will love Him and truly know Him. That man is able to suffer for God and has been able to come this far is, in one regard, because of God’s love, and in another regard, because of God’s salvation; moreover, it is because of the judgment and the work of chastisement that God has carried out in man. If you are without the judgment, chastisement, and trials of God, and if God has not made you suffer, then, in all honesty you do not truly love God. The greater God’s work in man, and the greater man’s suffering, the more apparent it is just how meaningful God’s work is, and the more that man’s heart is able to truly love God. How do you learn how to love God? Without torment and refinement, without painful trials—and if, furthermore, all that God gave man were grace, love, and mercy—would you be able to reach a point of truly loving God? On one hand, during God’s trials man comes to know his deficiencies and to see that he is insignificant, contemptible, and lowly, that he has nothing and is nothing; on the other hand, during His trials God creates different environments for man that make man more able to experience the loveliness of God. Although the pain is great, and sometimes insurmountable—even reaching the level of crushing grief—having experienced it, man sees how lovely God’s work in him is, and only upon this foundation is there born in man true love for God. Today man sees that with the grace, love, and mercy of God alone, he is incapable of truly knowing himself, and much less is he able to know the substance of man. Only through both the refinement and judgment of God, and during the process of refinement itself, can man know his deficiencies, and know that he has nothing. Thus, man’s love of God is built upon the foundation of the refinement and judgment of God. If you only enjoy the grace of God, having a peaceful family life or material blessings, then you have not gained God, and your belief in God cannot be considered successful. God has already carried out one stage of the work of grace in the flesh, and has already bestowed material blessings upon man, but man cannot be made perfect with grace, love, and mercy alone. In man’s experiences, he encounters some of God’s love and sees the love and mercy of God, yet having experienced for a period of time, he sees that God’s grace and His love and mercy are incapable of making man perfect, incapable of revealing that which is corrupt within man, and incapable of ridding man of his corrupt disposition, or making perfect his love and faith. God’s work of grace was the work of one period, and man cannot rely on enjoying the grace of God in order to know God.

By what means is God’s perfection of man accomplished? It is accomplished by means of His righteous disposition. God’s disposition primarily consists of righteousness, wrath, majesty, judgment, and curse, and He perfects man primarily by means of His judgment. Some people do not understand, and ask why it is that God is only able to make man perfect through judgment and curse. They say, “If God were to curse man, wouldn’t man die? If God were to judge man, wouldn’t man be condemned? Then how can he still be made perfect?” Such are the words of people who do not know the work of God. What God curses is the rebelliousness of man, and what He judges are the sins of man. Although He speaks harshly and relentlessly, He reveals all that is within man, revealing through these stern words that which is substantive within man, yet through such judgment, He gives man a profound knowledge of the substance of the flesh, and thus man submits before God. The flesh of man is of sin and of Satan, it is rebellious, and it is the object of God’s chastisement. Thus, in order to allow man to know himself, the words of God’s judgment must befall him and there must be employed every kind of refinement; only then can God’s work be effective.

From the words spoken by God it can be seen that He has already condemned the flesh of man. Are these words, then, not words of cursing? The words spoken by God reveal man’s true colors, and through such revelation he is judged, and when he sees that he is unable to satisfy God’s will, inside he feels grief and remorse, he feels that he is so indebted to God, and cannot attain to God’s will. There are times when the Holy Spirit disciplines you from within, and this discipline comes from God’s judgment; there are times when God reproaches you and hides His face from you, when He pays you no heed and does not work within you, soundlessly chastising you in order to refine you. God’s work in man is primarily in order to make plain His righteous disposition. What testimony does man ultimately bear to God? Man testifies that God is the righteous God, that His disposition is righteousness, wrath, chastisement, and judgment; man testifies to the righteous disposition of God. God uses His judgment to make man perfect, He has loved man, and saved man—but how much is contained within His love? There is judgment, majesty, wrath, and curse. Though God cursed man in the past, He did not completely cast man into the bottomless pit, but used that means to refine man’s faith; He did not put man to death, but acted in order to make man perfect. The substance of the flesh is that which is of Satan—God said it exactly right—but the facts carried out by God are not completed according to His words. He curses you so that you might love Him, and so that you might know the substance of the flesh; He chastises you so that you might be awakened, to allow you to know the deficiencies within you, and to know man’s utter unworthiness. Thus, God’s curses, His judgment, and His majesty and wrath—they are all in order to make man perfect. All that God does today, and the righteous disposition that He makes plain within you—it is all in order to make man perfect. Such is the love of God.

In man’s traditional notions, he believes that God’s love is His grace, mercy, and sympathy for the weakness of man. Although these things are also the love of God, they are too one-sided, and are not the primary means by which God makes man perfect. Some people begin to believe in God because of illness. This illness is God’s grace for you; without it, you would not believe in God, and if you did not believe in God then you would not have come this far—and thus even this grace is the love of God. In the time of belief in Jesus, people did much that was unbeloved by God because they did not understand the truth, yet God has love and mercy, and He has brought man this far, and although man understands nothing, still God allows man to follow Him, and, furthermore, He has led man into today. Is this not the love of God? That which is manifested in God’s disposition is the love of God—this is absolutely right! When the building of the church reached its peak, God did the step of work of the service-doers and cast man into the bottomless pit. The words of the time of the service-doers were all curses: the curses of your flesh, the curses of your corrupt satanic disposition, and the curses of the things about you that do not satisfy God’s will. The work done by God in that step was manifested as majesty, soon after which God carried out the step of the work of chastisement, and there came the trial of death. In such work, man saw the wrath, majesty, judgment, and chastisement of God, yet he also saw God’s grace, His love and His mercy. All that God did, and all that was manifested as His disposition, was God’s love for man, and all that God did was able to fulfill the needs of man. He did it in order to make man perfect, and He provided for man according to his stature. If God had not done this, man would be incapable of coming before God and would have no way of knowing the true face of God. From the time when man first began to believe in God until today, God has gradually provided for man in accordance with man’s stature, so that, inside, man has gradually come to know Him. Only having come to today does man realize just how wonderful is the judgment of God. The step of work of the service-doers was the first incidence of the work of cursing from the time of creation until today. Man was cursed into the bottomless pit. If God had not done that, today man would not have a true knowledge of God; it was only through the curse of God that man officially encountered His disposition. Man was revealed through the trial of the service-doers. He saw that his loyalty was unacceptable, that his stature was too small, that he was incapable of satisfying God’s will, and that his claims of satisfying God at all times were nothing more than words. Although God cursed man in the step of the work of the service-doers, looking back now, that step of God’s work was wonderful: It brought a great turning point for man, and caused a great change in his life disposition. Before the time of the service-doers, man understood nothing of the pursuit of life, what it means to believe in God, or the wisdom of God’s work, and nor did he understand that God’s work can test man. From the time of the service-doers through to today, man sees how wondrous is the work of God—it is unfathomable to man. Man is unable to imagine how God works by using his brain, and he also sees how small his stature is and that too much about him is rebellious. When God cursed man, it was in order to achieve an effect, and He did not put man to death. Although He cursed man, He did so through words, and His curses did not actually befall man, for what God cursed was the rebelliousness of man, and so the words of His curses were also spoken in order to make man perfect. Whether God judges man or curses him, both make man perfect: Both are done in order to make perfect that which is impure within man. Through this means man is refined, and that which is lacking within man is made perfect through His words and work. Every step of God’s work—whether it be harsh words, or judgment, or chastisement—makes man perfect, and is absolutely appropriate. Never throughout the ages has God done work such as this; today, He works within you so that you appreciate His wisdom. Although you have suffered some pain within you, your hearts feel steadfast and at peace; it is your blessing to be able to enjoy this stage of the work of God. Regardless of what you are able to gain in the future, all that you see of God’s work in you today is love. If man does not experience God’s judgment and refinement, his actions and fervor will always remain at surface level, and his disposition will always remain unchanged. Does this count as having been gained by God? Today, although there is still much within man that is arrogant and conceited, man’s disposition is much more stable than before. God’s pruning of you is done in order to save you, and although you may feel some pain at the time, the day will come when there occurs a change in your disposition. At that time, you will look back and see how wise the work of God is, and at that time you will be able to truly understand God’s will. Today, there are some people who say they understand God’s will, but that is none too realistic. In fact, they are speaking falsehoods, because at present they have yet to understand whether the will of God is to save man or to curse man. Perhaps you cannot see it clearly now, but the day will come when you see that the day God gains glory has arrived, and you will see how meaningful it is to love God, so that you will come to know the human life and your flesh will live in the world of loving God, so that your spirit will be set free, your life will be full of joy, and you will always be close to God and look to Him. At that time, you will truly know how valuable the work of God today is.

Today, most people do not have that knowledge. They believe that suffering is without value, they are renounced by the world, their home life is troubled, they are not beloved of God, and their prospects are bleak. The suffering of some people reaches an extreme, and their thoughts turn to death. This is not true love for God; such people are cowards, they have no perseverance, they are weak and powerless! God is eager for man to love Him, but the more man loves Him, the greater man’s suffering, and the more man loves Him, the greater man’s trials. If you love Him, then every kind of suffering will befall you—and if you do not, then perhaps everything will go smoothly for you and all will be peaceful around you. When you love God, you will feel that much around you is insurmountable, and because your stature is too small you will be refined; moreover, you will be incapable of satisfying God, and you will always feel that God’s will is too lofty, that it is beyond the reach of man. Because of all this you will be refined—because there is much weakness within you, and much that is incapable of satisfying the will of God, you will be refined internally. Yet you must clearly see that purification is only achieved through refinement. Thus, during these last days you must bear testimony to God. No matter how great your suffering, you should walk until the very end, and even at your last breath, still you must be faithful to God and at the mercy of God; only this is truly loving God, and only this is the strong and resounding testimony. When you are tempted by Satan, you should say: “My heart belongs to God, and God has already gained me. I cannot satisfy you—I must devote my all to satisfying God.” The more you satisfy God, the more God blesses you and the greater the strength of your love for God; so, too, will you have faith and resolve, and will feel that nothing is more worthy or significant than a life spent loving God. It can be said that man has but to love God to be without sorrow. Although there are times when your flesh is weak and you are beset by many real troubles, during these times you will truly rely on God, and within your spirit you will be consoled, and you will feel certainty, and that you have something to depend upon. In this way, you will be able to overcome many environments, and so you will not complain about God because of the anguish that you suffer. Instead, you will want to sing, dance, and pray, to assemble and commune, to give thought to God, and you will feel that all the people, matters, and things around you that are organized by God are fitting. If you do not love God, all that you look upon will be irksome to you and nothing will be pleasing to your eyes; in your spirit you will not be free but downtrodden, your heart will always complain about God, and you will always feel that you suffer so much torment, and that it is so unjust. If you do not pursue for the sake of happiness, but in order to satisfy God and to not be accused by Satan, then such pursuit will give you great strength to love God. Man is able to carry out all that is spoken by God, and all that he does is able to satisfy God—this is what it means to be possessed of reality. Pursuing the satisfaction of God is using your God-loving heart to put His words into practice; regardless of the time—even when others are without strength—inside of you there is still a God-loving heart, which profoundly yearns for and misses God. This is real stature. Just how great your stature is depends on how much of a God-loving heart you possess, on whether you are able to stand fast when tested, whether you are weak when a certain environment comes upon you, and whether you can stand your ground when your brothers and sisters reject you; the arrival of the facts will show just what your God-loving heart is like. It can be seen from much of God’s work that God really does love man, though the eyes of man’s spirit have yet to be completely opened and he is unable to clearly see much of the work of God and His will, nor the many things which are lovely about God; man has too little true love for God. You have believed in God throughout all this time, and today God has cut off all means of escape. Realistically speaking, you have no choice but to take the right path, the right path that you have been led onto by the harsh judgment and supreme salvation of God. Only after experiencing hardship and refinement does man know that God is lovely. Having experienced up until today, it can be said that man has come to know part of God’s loveliness, but this is still not enough, because man is so lacking. Man must experience more of God’s wondrous work, and more of all the refinement of suffering arranged by God. Only then can man’s life disposition be changed.

Only Loving God Is Truly Believing in God

Today, as you seek to love and know God, in one respect you must endure hardship and refinement, and in another, you must pay a price. No lesson is more profound than the lesson of loving God, and it can be said that the lesson people learn from a lifetime of belief is how to love God. Which is to say, if you believe in God you must love God. If you only believe in God but do not love Him and have not attained the knowledge of God, and have never loved God with a true love that comes from within your heart, then your belief in God is futile; if, in your belief in God, you do not love God, then you live in vain, and your entire life is the most lowly of all lives. If, throughout your whole life, you have never loved or satisfied God, then what is the point of you living? And what is the point of your belief in God? Is that not a waste of effort? This is to say, if people are to believe in and love God, then they must pay a price. Rather than trying to act in a certain way externally, they should seek true insight in the depths of their hearts. If you are enthusiastic about singing and dancing, but incapable of putting the truth into practice, can you be said to love God? Loving God requires seeking God’s will in all things, and that you probe deep within when anything happens to you, trying to grasp God’s will, and trying to see what God’s will is in the matter, what He asks you to achieve, and how you should be mindful of His will. For example: Something happens that requires you to endure hardship, at which time you should understand what God’s will is and how you should be mindful of His will. You must not satisfy yourself: First put yourself to one side. Nothing is more abject than the flesh. You must seek to satisfy God, and you must fulfill your duty. With such thoughts, God will bring especial enlightenment to you in this matter, and your heart will also find comfort. Be it big or small, when something happens to you, you must first put yourself to one side and regard the flesh as the most lowly of all things. The more you satisfy the flesh, the more liberties it takes; if you satisfy it this time, next time it will ask for more. As this carries on, people come to love the flesh even more. The flesh always has extravagant desires; it always asks that you satisfy it and that you gratify it within, whether it be in the things you eat, what you wear, or in losing your temper, or pandering to your own weaknesses and laziness…. The more you satisfy the flesh, the greater its desires become and the more debauched the flesh becomes, until it gets to the point when people’s flesh harbors even deeper notions, and rebels against God, and exalts itself, and becomes doubtful about the work of God. The more you satisfy the flesh, the greater the weaknesses of the flesh; you will always feel that no one sympathizes with your weaknesses, you will always believe that God has gone too far, and you will say: “How could God be so harsh? Why won’t He give people a break?” When people satisfy the flesh and cherish it too much, then they ruin themselves. If you truly love God and do not satisfy the flesh, then you will see that everything God does is so right and so good, and that His curse of your rebelliousness and judgment of your unrighteousness is justified. There will be times when God chastens and disciplines you and raises up an environment to temper you, forcing you to come before Him—and you will always feel that what God is doing is wonderful. Thus you will feel as if there is not much pain, and that God is so lovely. If you pander to the weaknesses of the flesh and say that God goes too far, then you will always feel in pain, and will always be depressed, and you will be unclear about all of the work of God, and it will seem as if God is not sympathetic to man’s weakness at all and unaware of man’s difficulties. And thus you will always feel miserable and alone, as if you have suffered great injustice, and at this time you will begin to complain. The more you pander to the weaknesses of the flesh in this way, the more you will feel that God goes too far, until it gets so bad that you deny the work of God, and begin to oppose God, and become full of rebelliousness. Thus, you must rebel against the flesh, and not pander to it: “My husband (wife), children, prospects, marriage, family—none of them matter! In my heart there is only God, and I must try my best to satisfy God and not satisfy the flesh.” You must have this resolve. If you are always possessed of such resolve, then when you put the truth into practice and put yourself aside, you will be able to do so with but a little effort. It is said that there was once a farmer who saw a snake that was frozen stiff on the road. The farmer picked it up and held it to his breast, and after the snake was revived it bit the farmer to death. Man’s flesh is like the snake: Its substance is to harm their lives—and when it completely gets its own way, your life becomes forfeit. The flesh belongs to Satan. Within it are extravagant desires, it thinks only for itself, it wants to enjoy comfort and revel in leisure, wallowing in sloth and idleness, and having satisfied it to a certain point you will ultimately be eaten up by it. Which is to say, if you satisfy it this time, next time it will come asking for more. It always has extravagant desires and new demands, and takes advantage of your pandering to the flesh to make you cherish it even more and live among its comforts—and if you do not overcome it, you will ultimately ruin yourself. Whether you can gain life before God and what your ultimate end will be, depend on how you carry out your rebellion against the flesh. God has saved you and chosen you and predestined you, yet if today you are unwilling to satisfy Him, you are unwilling to put the truth into practice, you are unwilling to rebel against your own flesh with a genuine God-loving heart, ultimately you will ruin yourself, and will thus endure extreme pain. If you always pander to the flesh, Satan will gradually swallow you up, and leave you without life, or the touch of the Spirit, until the day comes when you are completely dark inside. When you live in darkness, you will have been taken captive by Satan, you will no longer have God in your heart, and at that time you will deny God’s existence and leave Him. Thus, if people wish to love God, they must pay the price of pain and endure hardship. There is no need for external fervency and hardship, reading more and running about more; instead, they should put aside the things within them: the extravagant thoughts, personal interests, and their own considerations, notions, and intentions. Such is God’s will.

God’s pruning of people’s external disposition is also one part of His work; pruning people’s external, abnormal humanity, for example, or their lifestyle and habits, their ways and customs, as well as their external practices and their fervency. But when He asks that people put the truth into practice and change their dispositions, what is primarily being pruned are the intentions and notions within them. Just pruning your external disposition is not hard; it’s like asking you not to eat the things you love, which is easy. That which touches upon the notions inside you, however, is not easy to let go of. It requires people to rebel against the flesh, and pay a price, and suffer before God. This is particularly so with people’s intentions. Since people began to believe in God, they have harbored many incorrect intentions. When you are not putting the truth into practice, you feel that all your intentions are correct, but when something happens to you, you will see that there are many incorrect intentions within you. Thus, when God makes people perfect, He causes them to realize that there are many notions within them that are obstructing their knowledge of God. When you recognize that your intentions are wrong, if you are able to stop practicing according to your notions and intentions, and are able to bear testimony to God, and stand firm in your position in all that happens to you, this proves that you have rebelled against the flesh. When you rebel against the flesh, there will inevitably be a battle within you. Satan will try and make people follow it, will try and make them follow the notions of the flesh and uphold the interests of the flesh—but God’s words will enlighten and illuminate people within, and at this time it is up to you whether you follow God or follow Satan. God asks people to put the truth into practice primarily to prune the things inside them, to prune their thoughts and notions that are not in line with God’s will. The Holy Spirit touches people in their hearts and enlightens and illuminates them. So behind everything that happens is a battle: Every time people put the truth into practice, or put the love of God into practice, there is a great battle, and though all may seem well with their flesh, in the depths of their hearts a life-and-death battle will, in fact, be going on—and only after this intense battle, after a tremendous amount of reflection, can victory or defeat be decided. One does not know whether to laugh or cry. Because many of the intentions within people are wrong, or else because much of God’s work is at odds with their notions, when people put the truth into practice, a great battle is waged behind the scenes. Having put this truth into practice, behind the scenes, people will have shed countless tears of sadness before finally making up their mind to satisfy God. It is because of this battle that people endure suffering and refinement; this is true suffering. When the battle comes upon you, if you are able to truly stand on the side of God, you will be able to satisfy God. While practicing the truth, it is inevitable that one will suffer inside; if, when they put the truth into practice, everything within people were right, then they would not need to be made perfect by God, and there would be no battle, and they would not suffer. It is because there are many things within people that are not fit for use by God, and because there is much of the rebellious disposition of the flesh, that people need to learn the lesson of rebelling against the flesh more profoundly. This is what God calls the suffering that He asked man to undergo with Him. When you encounter difficulties, hurry up and pray to God: “O God! I wish to satisfy You, I wish to endure the final hardship to satisfy Your heart, and regardless of how great the setbacks I encounter, still I must satisfy You. Even if I have to give up my whole life, still I must satisfy You!” With this resolve, when you pray thus, you will be able to stand firm in your testimony. Each time they put the truth into practice, each time they undergo refinement, each time they are tried, and each time God’s work comes upon them, people have to endure extreme pain. All of this is a test for people, and so within all of them there is a battle. This is the actual price that they pay. Reading more of God’s words and running about more is a portion of that price. It is what people ought to do, it is their duty, and the responsibility that they should fulfill, but people must put aside that within them which needs to be put aside. If you do not, then no matter how great your external suffering, no matter how much you run around, all will be in vain! Which is to say, only the changes within you can determine whether your external hardship is of value. When your internal disposition has changed and you have put the truth into practice, then all your external suffering will gain God’s approval; if there has been no change in your internal disposition, then no matter how much suffering you endure or how much you run about on the outside, there will be no approval from God—and hardship that is not confirmed by God is in vain. Thus, whether the price you have paid is approved by God is determined by whether or not there has been a change in you, and by whether or not you put the truth into practice and rebel against your own intentions and notions to attain the satisfaction of God’s will, the knowledge of God, and loyalty to God. No matter how much you run about, if you have never known to rebel against your own intentions, but only to seek external actions and fervency, and never pay any attention to your life, then your hardship will have been in vain. If, in a certain environment, you have something you want to say, but inside you feel that saying it is not right, that saying it does not benefit your brothers and sisters and may hurt them, then you will not say it, preferring to be pained within, for these words are incapable of satisfying God’s will. At this time, there will be a battle inside you, but you will be willing to suffer pain and give up that which you love. You will be willing to endure this hardship to satisfy God, and although you will suffer pain inside, you will not pander to the flesh, and God’s heart shall have been satisfied, and so you will also be comforted inside. This is truly paying a price, and is the price desired by God. If you practice in this way, God will surely bless you; if you cannot achieve this, then no matter how much you understand, or how well you can speak, it will all be for nothing! If, on the road to loving God, you are able to stand on the side of God when He does battle with Satan, and you do not turn back to Satan, then you will have achieved the love of God, and you will have stood firm in your testimony.

In every step of work that God does within people, externally it appears to be interactions between people, as if born of human arrangements or from human disturbance. But behind the scenes, every step of work, and everything that happens, is a wager made by Satan before God, and requires people to stand firm in their testimony to God. Take when Job was tried, for example: Behind the scenes, Satan was making a bet with God, and what happened to Job was the deeds of men and the disturbance of men. Behind every step of work that God does in you is Satan’s wager with God—behind it all is a battle. For example, if you are prejudiced toward your brothers and sisters, you will have words that you want to say—words that you feel may be displeasing to God—but if you do not say them, you will feel internal discomfort, and at this moment, a battle will commence within you: “Do I speak or not?” This is the battle. Thus, in everything you encounter there is a battle, and when there is a battle within you, thanks to your actual cooperation and actual suffering, God works within you. Ultimately, you are able to put the matter aside inside of you and the anger is naturally extinguished. Such is the effect of your cooperation with God. Everything people do requires them to pay a certain price in their efforts. Without actual hardship, they cannot satisfy God; they do not even come close to satisfying God, and they are just spouting empty slogans! Can these empty slogans satisfy God? When God and Satan do battle in the spiritual realm, how should you satisfy God, and how should you stand firm in your testimony to Him? You should know that everything that happens to you is a great trial and the time when God needs you to bear testimony. Though they may seem unimportant from the outside, when these things happen they show whether or not you love God. If you do, you will be able to stand firm in your testimony to Him, and if you have not put the love of Him into practice, this shows you are not someone who puts the truth into practice, that you are without the truth, and without life, that you are chaff! Everything that happens to people happens when God needs them to stand firm in their testimony to Him. Though nothing major is happening to you at the moment and you do not bear great testimony, every detail of your daily life is a matter of testimony to God. If you can win the admiration of your brothers and sisters, your family members, and everyone around you; if, one day, the unbelievers come, and admire all that you do, and see that all that God does is wonderful, then you will have borne testimony. Although you have no insight and your caliber is poor, through God’s perfection of you, you are able to satisfy Him and be mindful of His will, showing others what great work He has done in people of the poorest caliber. When people come to know God and become overcomers before Satan, loyal to God to a great extent, then none has more backbone than this group of people, and this is the greatest testimony. Although you are incapable of doing great work, you are able to satisfy God. Others cannot put aside their notions, but you can; others cannot bear testimony to God during their actual experiences, but you can use your actual stature and actions to repay God’s love and bear resounding testimony to Him. Only this counts as actually loving God. If you are incapable of this, then you do not bear testimony among your family members, among your brothers and sisters, or before the people of the world. If you cannot bear testimony before Satan, Satan will laugh at you, it will treat you as a joke, as a plaything, it will often make a fool of you and drive you insane. In the future, great trials may befall you—but today, if you love God with a true heart, and if, regardless of how great the trials ahead, irrespective of what happens to you, you are able to stand firm in your testimony and are able to satisfy God, then your heart will be comforted, and you will be unafraid no matter how great the trials you encounter in the future. You cannot see what will happen in the future; you can only satisfy God in today’s circumstances. You are incapable of doing any great work and should focus on satisfying God by experiencing His words in real life, and bear strong and resounding testimony that brings shame upon Satan. Although your flesh will remain unsatisfied and will have suffered, you will have satisfied God and brought shame upon Satan. If you always practice in this way, God will open up a path before you. When, one day, a great trial comes, others will fall down, but you will still be able to stand firm: Because of the price you have paid, God will protect you so you can stand firm and not fall down. If, ordinarily, you are able to put the truth into practice and satisfy God with a genuine God-loving heart, then God will surely protect you during future trials. Though you are foolish and of little stature and poor caliber, God will not discriminate against you. It depends on whether your intentions are right. Today, you are able to satisfy God, in which you are attentive to the smallest detail, you satisfy God in all things, you have a genuine God-loving heart, you give your true heart to God, and although there are some things that you cannot understand, you can come before God to rectify your intentions and seek God’s will, and you do everything needed to satisfy God. Perhaps your brothers and sisters will abandon you, but your heart will be satisfying God, and you will not covet the pleasures of the flesh. If you always practice in this way, you will be protected when great trials come upon you.

What internal state in people are trials aimed at? They are targeted at the rebellious disposition in people that is incapable of satisfying God. There is much that is impure within people, and much that is hypocritical, and so God subjects people to trials in order to purify them. But if, today, you are able to satisfy God, then the trials of the future will be a perfection for you. If, today, you are unable to satisfy God, then trials of the future will tempt you, and you will unwittingly fall down, and at that time you will not be able to help yourself, for you cannot keep up with God’s work and are not possessed of real stature. And so, if you wish to be able to stand firm in the future, to satisfy God better, and to follow Him to the very end, today you must build a strong foundation. You must satisfy God by putting the truth into practice in all things and be mindful of His will. If you always practice in this way, there will be a foundation within you, and God will inspire in you a heart that loves Him, and He will give you faith. One day, when a trial truly befalls you, you may well suffer some pain and feel aggrieved to a certain point, and suffer crushing grief, as if you had died—but your God-loving heart will not change, and will become even deeper. Such are the blessings of God. If you are able to accept all that God says and does today with a heart of submission, then you will surely be blessed by God, and so you will be someone who is blessed by God and receives His promise. If, today, you do not practice, when trials befall you one day, you will be without faith or a loving heart, and at that time the trial will become temptation; you will be plunged amid Satan’s temptation and will have no means of escape. Today, you may be able to stand firm when a small trial befalls you, but you will not necessarily be able to stand firm when a major trial befalls you one day. Some people are conceited and think that they are near perfect already. If you do not go deeper at such times, and remain complacent, then you will be in danger. Today, God does not do the work of greater trials and everything appears fine, but when God tries you, you will discover that you are too lacking, for your stature is too small and you are incapable of enduring great trials. If you remain as you are and are in a state of inertia, then, when the trials come, you will fall. You should often look at how small your stature is; only in this way will you make progress. If it is only during trials that you see that your stature is so small, that your willpower is so weak, that too little within you is real, and that you are inadequate for God’s will—if you only realize these things then, it will be too late.

If you do not know God’s disposition, then you will inevitably fall during trials, because you are unaware of how God makes people perfect, by what means He makes them perfect, and when God’s trials come upon you and they do not match your notions, you will be unable to stand firm. God’s true love is His entire disposition, and when God’s entire disposition is shown to people, what does this bring to your flesh? When God’s righteous disposition is shown to people, their flesh will inevitably suffer much pain. If you do not suffer this pain, then you cannot be made perfect by God, nor will you be able to devote true love to God. If God makes you perfect, He will surely show His entire disposition to you. From the time of creation until today, God has never shown His entire disposition to man—but during the last days He reveals it to this group of people whom He has predestined and selected, and by making people perfect, He lays bare His dispositions, through which He makes complete a group of people. Such is God’s true love for people. Experiencing God’s true love requires that people endure extreme pain, and pay a high price. Only after this will they be gained by God and be able to give their true love back to God, and only then will God’s heart be satisfied. If people wish to be made perfect by God, and if they wish to follow His will, and fully give their true love to God, then they must experience much suffering and many torments from their circumstances, to suffer pain worse than death. Ultimately they will be forced to give their true heart back to God. Whether or not someone truly loves God is revealed during hardship and refinement. God purifies people’s love, and this is also only achieved amid hardship and refinement.

A Brief Talk About “The Millennial Kingdom Has Arrived”

What do you think about the vision of the Millennial Kingdom? Some people think about it a lot, and they say: “The Millennial Kingdom will last for a thousand years on earth, so if the older members of the church are unmarried, do they have to get married? My family has no money, should I start making money? …” What is the Millennial Kingdom? Do you know? People are purblind and suffer a great ordeal. In fact, the Millennial Kingdom has yet to officially arrive. During the stage of making people perfect, the Millennial Kingdom is but a fledgling; at the time of the Millennial Kingdom spoken of by God, man will have been made perfect. Previously, it was said that people would be like saints and stand firm in the land of Sinim. Only when people are made perfect—when they become the saints spoken of by God—will the Millennial Kingdom have arrived. When God makes people perfect, He purifies them, and the purer they are the more they are made perfect by God. When the impurity, rebelliousness, opposition, and things of the flesh within you are expelled, when you have been purified, then you will be beloved by God (in other words, you will be a saint); when you have been made perfect by God and become a saint, you will be in the Millennial Kingdom. Now is the Age of Kingdom. In the Age of Millennial Kingdom people will depend on the words of God to live, and all nations will come under God’s name, and all will come to read God’s words. At that time, some will call by telephone, some will fax … they will use every means to access God’s words, and you, too, will come under God’s words. All this is what happens after people are made perfect. Today, people are made perfect, refined, enlightened, and guided through words; this is the Age of Kingdom, it is the stage of people being made perfect, and it has no connection to the Age of Millennial Kingdom. During the Age of Millennial Kingdom, people will have already been made perfect and the corrupt dispositions within them will have been purified. At that time, the words spoken by God will guide people step by step, and reveal all of the mysteries of God’s work from the time of creation until today, and His words will tell people of God’s actions in every age and every day, how He guides people within, the work He does in the spiritual realm, and will tell them of the dynamics of the spiritual realm. Only then will it truly be the Age of Word; now it is merely in a fledgling state. If people are not made perfect and purified, they will have no way of living a thousand years on earth, and their flesh will inevitably decay; if people are purified inside, and they are no longer of Satan and the flesh, then they will remain alive on earth. In this stage you are still purblind, and all that you experience is loving God and bearing Him testimony for every day you live on earth.

“The Millennial Kingdom Has Arrived” is a prophecy, it is analogous to the foretelling of a prophet, one in which God prophesies what will happen in the future. The words that God speaks in the future and the words that He speaks today are not the same: The words of the future will guide the age, whereas the words He speaks today make people perfect, refine them, and prune them. The Age of Word in the future is different from the Age of Word today. Today, all words spoken by God—regardless of the means by which He speaks—are in order to make people perfect, to purify that which is dirty within them, to make them holy, and make them righteous before God. The words spoken today, and the words spoken in the future, are two separate things. The words spoken in the Age of Kingdom are to make people enter into all training, to bring people onto the correct track in everything, to expel all that is impure in them. Such is what God does in this age. He creates a foundation of His words in every person, He makes His words the life of every person, and He uses His words to constantly enlighten and guide them within. And when they are not mindful of God’s intentions, God’s words will be inside them to reproach and discipline them. The words of today are to be the life of man; they directly provide all that man needs, all that you lack inside is provided for by God’s words, and all those who accept God’s words are enlightened by eating and drinking His words. The words spoken by God in the future guide the people of the entire universe; today, these words are only spoken in China, and they do not represent those spoken throughout the entire universe. God will only speak to the entire universe when the Millennial Kingdom comes. Know that the words spoken by God today are all to make people perfect; the words spoken by God during this stage are in order to provide for people’s needs, not in order to allow you to know mysteries or see the miracles of God. That He speaks through many means is in order to provide for people’s needs. The Age of Millennial Kingdom has yet to arrive—the Age of Millennial Kingdom that is spoken of is the day of God’s glory. After Jesus’ work in Judea had been completed, God transferred His work to mainland China and created another plan. He does another part of His work in you, He does the work of making people perfect with words, and He uses words to cause people to suffer much pain as well as gain much of God’s grace. This stage of work will create a group of overcomers, and after He has made this group of overcomers, they will be able to testify to His deeds, they will be able to live out reality, and they will actually satisfy Him and be loyal to Him unto death, and in this way God will gain glory. When God gains glory—that is, when He has made this group of people perfect—that will be the Age of Millennial Kingdom.

Jesus was on earth for thirty-three and a half years, He came to do the work of crucifixion, and through the crucifixion God gained one part of His glory. When God came in the flesh, He was able to be humble and hidden, and could endure tremendous suffering. Although He was God Himself, He still endured every humiliation and every revilement, and He endured great pain in being nailed to the cross so as to complete the work of redemption. After this stage of work was concluded, although people saw that God had gained great glory, this was not the entirety of His glory; it was only one part of His glory, which He had gained from Jesus. Although Jesus was able to endure every hardship, to be humble and hidden, to be crucified for God, God only gained one part of His glory, and His glory was gained in Israel. God still has another part of glory: coming to earth to practically work and make perfect a group of people. During Jesus’ stage of work, He did some supernatural things, but that stage of work was by no means only in order to perform signs and wonders. It was primarily to show that Jesus could suffer, and be crucified for God, that Jesus was able to suffer tremendous pain because He loved God and that, although God abandoned Him, He was still willing to sacrifice His life for God’s will. After God had completed His work in Israel and Jesus was nailed to the cross, God gained glory, and He had borne testimony before Satan. You neither know nor have seen how God has become flesh in China, so how can you see that God has gained glory? When God does much work of conquest in you, and you stand firm, then this stage of God’s work is successful, and this is part of God’s glory. You see only this, and you have yet to be made perfect by God, have yet to give your heart entirely to God. You have yet to entirely see this glory; you only see that God has already conquered your heart, that you can never leave Him, and will follow God to the very end and your heart will not change, and that this is the glory of God. In what do you see God’s glory? In the effects of His work in people. People see that God is so lovely, they have God in their hearts, and are unwilling to leave Him, and this is God’s glory. When the strength of the brothers and sisters of the churches arises, and they can love God from their hearts, see the supreme might of the work done by God, the incomparable might of His words, when they see that His words carry authority and that He can embark upon His work in the ghost town of the Chinese mainland, when, though people are weak, their hearts bow down before God and they are willing to accept God’s words, and when, although they are weak and unworthy, they are able to see that God’s words are so lovable, and so worthy of their cherishment, then this is the glory of God. When the day comes on which people are made perfect by God, and are able to yield before Him, and can completely submit to God, and leave their prospects and fate in the hands of God, then the second part of God’s glory will have been entirely gained. Which is to say, when the work of the practical God has been entirely completed, His work in mainland China will come to an end. In other words, when those who were predestined and chosen by God have been made perfect, God will have gained glory. God said that He has brought the second part of His glory to the East, yet this is invisible to the naked eye. God has brought His work to the East: He has already come to the East, and this is God’s glory. Today, although His work has yet to be completed, because God has decided to work, it shall surely be accomplished. God has decided He shall complete this work in China, and He has resolved to make you complete. Thus, He gives you no way out—He has already conquered your hearts, and you have to go on whether you want to or not, and when you are gained by God, God obtains glory. Today, God has yet to obtain complete glory, because you have yet to be made perfect. Although your hearts have returned to God, there are still many weaknesses in your flesh, you are incapable of satisfying God, you are unable to be mindful of God’s intentions, and you yet possess many negative things that you must rid yourselves of and you must yet undergo many trials and refinements. Only in that way can your life dispositions change and you can be gained by God.

Only Those Who Know God Can Bear Testimony to God

To believe in God and know God is perfectly natural and justified, and today—during an age when God incarnate is doing His work in person—is an especially good time to know God. Satisfying God is something that is achieved by building on the foundation of understanding God’s will, and in order to understand God’s will, it is necessary to have some knowledge of God. This knowledge of God is the vision that one who believes in God must have; it is the basis of man’s belief in God. In the absence of this knowledge, man’s belief in God would exist in a vague state, in the midst of empty theory. Even if it is the resolution of people like this to follow God, they will gain nothing. All those who gain nothing in this stream are the ones who will be cast out—they are all freeloaders. Whichever step of God’s work you experience, you should be accompanied by a mighty vision. Otherwise, it would be difficult for you to accept each step of new work, because the new work of God lies beyond man’s capacity to imagine, and is outside the bounds of his conception. So, without a shepherd to tend to man, without a shepherd to engage in fellowship about visions, man is incapable of accepting this new work. If man cannot comprehend visions, then he cannot comprehend the new work of God, and if man cannot submit to God’s new work, then man will be unable to understand God’s will, and so his knowledge of God will amount to nothing. Before man carries out the word of God, he must know the word of God; that is, he must understand God’s will. Only in this way can God’s word be carried out accurately and in accordance with God’s will. This is something that everyone who seeks the truth must possess, and it is also the process that everyone who tries to know God must undergo. The process of coming to know the word of God is the process of coming to know God and the work of God. So, knowing visions not only refers to knowing the humanity of God incarnate, but also includes knowing the word and the work of God. From the word of God people come to understand God’s will, and from the work of God they come to know God’s disposition and what God is. Belief in God is the first step to knowing God. The process of advancing from this initial belief in God to the most profound belief in Him is the process of coming to know God, the process of experiencing the work of God. If you only believe in God for the sake of believing in God, and not for the sake of coming to know Him, then there is no reality to your faith, and your faith cannot become pure—of this there is no doubt. If, during the process by which man experiences God’s work, he gradually comes to know God, then his disposition will gradually change, and his belief will become increasingly true. In this way, when man achieves success in his belief in God, he will have completely gained God. The reason why God went to such great lengths to become flesh for the second time to do His work in person was so that man would be able to know Him and to see Him. Knowing God[a] is the final effect to be achieved at the conclusion of God’s work; it is the last requirement God makes of mankind. The reason why He does this is for the sake of His final testimony; He does this work in order that man may finally and completely turn to Him. Man can only come to love God by knowing God, and to love God he must know God. No matter how he seeks, or what he seeks to gain, he must be able to achieve knowledge of God. Only in this way can man satisfy God’s heart. Only by knowing God can man have true faith in God, and only by knowing God can he truly fear and submit to God. Those who do not know God will never arrive at true submission to and fear of God. Knowing God includes knowing His disposition, understanding His will, and knowing what He is. Yet whichever aspect one comes to know, each one requires man to pay a price and requires the will to submit, without which no one would be able to continue following to the end. The work of God is too incompatible with the notions of man. God’s disposition and what God is are too difficult for man to know, and everything that God says and does is too incomprehensible for man: If man wishes to follow God and yet is unwilling to submit to Him, then man will gain nothing. From the creation of the world until today, God has done much work that is incomprehensible to man and that man has found hard to accept, and God has said much that makes the notions of man difficult to heal. But He has never ceased His work on account of man’s having too many difficulties; rather, He has carried on working and speaking, and even though great numbers of “warriors” have fallen by the wayside, He is still doing His work, and continues without intermission to choose one group after another of people who are willing to submit to His new work. He has no pity for those fallen “heroes,” and instead treasures those who accept His new work and words. But to what end does He work in this way, step-by-step? Why is He always casting out some people and choosing others? Why is it that He always employs such a method? The aim of His work is to allow man to know Him, and thus be gained by Him. The principle of His work is to work on those who are able to submit to the work He does today, and not to work on those who submit to the work He has done in the past while opposing the work He does today. Herein lies the reason why He has been casting out so many people.

The effects of the lesson of coming to know God cannot be achieved in one or two days: Man must accumulate experiences, undergo suffering, and attain true submission. First of all, start from the work and the words of God. It is imperative that you understand what is included in the knowledge of God, how to achieve this knowledge, and how to see God in your experiences. This is what everyone must do when they have yet to know God. No one can grasp the work and the words of God in one fell swoop, and no one can achieve knowledge of God’s entirety within a short time. There is a necessary process of experience, without which no one would be able to know God or to follow Him sincerely. The more work God does, the more man knows Him. The more at odds the work of God is with man’s notions, the more man’s knowledge of Him is renewed and deepened. If the work of God were to remain forever fixed and unchanging, then there would not be much to man’s knowledge of Him. Between the time of creation and the present, what God did during the Age of Law, what He did during the Age of Grace, and what He does during the Age of Kingdom—you must be crystal clear about these visions. You must know the work of God. Only after following Jesus did Peter gradually come to know about much of the work the Spirit did in Jesus. He said, “Relying on the experiences of man is not enough to achieve complete knowledge; there must be many new things from the work of God to help us to know Him.” At the beginning, Peter believed that Jesus was one sent by God, like an apostle, and he did not see Jesus as the Christ. At this time, when he began to follow Jesus, Jesus asked him, “Simon Barjona, will you follow Me?” Peter said, “I must follow he who is sent by the heavenly Father. I must acknowledge he who is chosen by the Holy Spirit. I will follow You.” From his words, it can be seen that Peter simply had no knowledge of Jesus; he had experienced the words of God, had pruned himself, and had suffered hardship for God, but he had no knowledge of the work of God. After a period of experience, Peter saw in Jesus many of the deeds of God, he saw the loveliness of God, and he saw much of God’s being in Jesus. So too did he see that the words Jesus spoke could not have been spoken by man, and that the work Jesus did could not have been done by man. In Jesus’ words and actions, furthermore, Peter saw much of the wisdom of God, and much work of a divine nature. During his experiences, he did not merely come to know himself, but also paid close attention to Jesus’ every action, from which he discovered many new things, namely, that there were many expressions of the practical God in the work that God did through Jesus, and that Jesus differed from an ordinary man in the words He spoke and the actions He took, as well as the way in which He shepherded the churches and the work He carried out. So, Peter learned from Jesus many lessons that he was supposed to learn, and by the time Jesus was about to be nailed to the cross, he had gained a certain amount of knowledge of Jesus—knowledge that became the basis of his lifelong loyalty to Jesus and of his upside-down crucifixion which he suffered for the sake of the Lord. Although he was possessed of some notions and did not have a clear knowledge of Jesus at the beginning, such things are inevitably a part of corrupt man. As Jesus was about to depart, He told Peter that His crucifixion was the work He had come to do: It was necessary that He be forsaken by the age, and that this impure and old age should nail Him to the cross; He had come to complete the work of redemption, and, having completed this work, His ministry would be at an end. Hearing this, Peter was beset with sorrow, and became even more attached to Jesus. When Jesus was nailed to the cross, Peter wept bitterly in private. Prior to this, he had asked Jesus, “My Lord! You say You are going to be crucified. After You’re gone, when will we see You again?” Was there no element of adulteration in the words that he spoke? Were there no notions mixed into them? In his heart, he knew that Jesus had come to complete a part of God’s work, and that after Jesus left, the Spirit would be with him; even though He would be nailed to the cross and ascend to heaven, nevertheless the Spirit of God would be with him. At that time, Peter had some knowledge of Jesus: He knew that Jesus had been sent by the Spirit of God, that the Spirit of God was within Him, and that Jesus was God Himself, that He was Christ. Yet it was because of his love for Jesus, and because of his human weakness, that Peter spoke such words. If, in every step of God’s work, one can observe and painstakingly experience, then one will be able gradually to discover the loveliness of God. And what did Paul take for his vision? When Jesus appeared to him, Paul said, “Who are You, Lord?” Jesus said, “I am Jesus whom you persecute.” This was Paul’s vision. Peter took as his vision Jesus’ resurrection, His appearance for 40 days, and the teachings of Jesus’ lifetime, until the end of his journey.

Man experiences God’s work, comes to know himself, purges away his corrupt disposition, and seeks growth in life, all for the sake of knowing God. If you only seek to know yourself and to prune your own corrupt disposition, but have no knowledge of what work God does upon man, of how great His salvation is, or of how you experience God’s work and witness His deeds, then this experience of yours is fatuous. If you think that one’s life has attained maturity just because one is able to put the truth into practice and to endure, this means that you have still not grasped the true meaning of life or God’s purpose in perfecting man. One day, when you are in the religious churches, among members of the Repentance Church or of the Life Church, you will come across many devout people, whose prayers contain “visions” and who, in their pursuit of life, feel touched and are guided by words. Furthermore, they are able in many matters to endure and to forsake themselves, and not to be led by the flesh. At that time, you will not be able to tell the difference: You will believe that everything they do is right, is the natural expression of life, and that it is a great pity that the name that they believe in is wrong. Are not such views foolish? Why is it said that many people have no life? Because they do not know God, and thus it is said that they have no God in their hearts, and have no life. If your belief in God has reached a point where you are capable of thoroughly knowing the deeds of God, the practicality of God, and every stage of God’s work, then you are possessed of the truth. If you do not know the work and the disposition of God, then there is still something missing in your experience. How Jesus carried out that stage of His work, how this stage is being carried out, how God did His work in the Age of Grace and what work was done, what work is being done in this stage—if you do not have a thorough knowledge of these things, then you will never feel assured and you will always be insecure. If, after a period of experience, you are able to know the work done by God and every step of His work, and if you have gained thorough knowledge of God’s aims in speaking His words, and why so many words He has spoken have not been fulfilled, then you may boldly and without holding back pursue the road ahead, free from worry and refinement. You should see by what means God achieves so much of His work. He uses the words He speaks, refining man and transforming his notions by means of many different kinds of words. All the suffering that you have endured, all the refinement that you have undergone, the pruning that you have accepted within you, the enlightenment that you have experienced—these have all been achieved by means of the words God has spoken. On what account does man follow God? He follows because of the words of God! The words of God are deeply mysterious, and they can moreover move man’s heart, reveal things buried deep within it, make him know things that happened in the past, and allow him to penetrate into the future. So man endures suffering because of God’s words, and is also made perfect because of God’s words: Only at this time does man follow God. What man should do in this stage is accept the words of God, and regardless of whether he is made perfect or subjected to refinement, the words of God are what is key. This is the work of God, and this is also the vision that man should know today.

How does God make man perfect? What is the disposition of God? What is contained within His disposition? To clarify all of these things: one calls it spreading God’s name, one calls it bearing testimony to God, and one calls it exalting God. Man will, based upon the foundation of knowing God, ultimately become transformed in his life disposition. The more man undergoes being pruned and being refined, the more he is invigorated; the more numerous the steps of God’s work, the more man is made perfect. Today, in man’s experience, every single step of God’s work strikes back at his notions, and all lies beyond man’s intellect and outside his expectations. God provides everything that man needs, and in every respect this is at odds with his notions. God utters His words in your time of weakness; only in this way can He supply your life. By striking back at your notions, He makes you accept the pruning of God; only in this way can you rid yourself of your corruption. Today, God incarnate works within a state of divinity in one respect, but in another He works in a state of normal humanity. When you cease to be able to deny any work of God, when you are able to submit no matter what God says or does within the state of normal humanity, when you are able to submit and to understand no matter what kind of normality He manifests, and when you have gained actual experience, only then can you be sure that He is God, only then will you stop producing notions, and only then will you be able to follow Him to the end. There is wisdom to God’s work, and He knows how man can stand fast in testimony to Him. He knows where man’s vital weakness lies, and the words He speaks can strike you at your vital weakness, but He also uses His majestic and wise words to make you stand firm in testimony to Him. Such are the miraculous deeds of God. The work God does is unimaginable to the human intellect. What kinds of corruption that man, being of the flesh, is possessed of, and what constitutes the substance of man—all these are revealed through God’s judgment, which leaves man with nowhere to hide from his shame.

God does the work of judgment and chastisement so that man may gain knowledge of Him, and for the sake of His testimony. Without His judgment of man’s corrupt disposition, man could not possibly know His righteous disposition, which brooks no offense, and nor would man be able to turn his old knowledge of God into a new one. For the sake of His testimony, and for the sake of His management, He makes His entirety public, thus enabling man, through His public appearance, to arrive at knowledge of God, to be transformed in his disposition, and to bear resounding testimony to God. The transformation of the disposition of man is achieved through many different kinds of God’s work; without such changes in his disposition, man would be unable to bear testimony to God and to conform to God’s will. The transformation of man’s disposition signifies that man has freed himself from Satan’s bondage and from the influence of darkness, and has truly become a model and specimen of God’s work, a witness of God, and one who conforms to God’s will. Today, God incarnate has come to do His work on earth, and He requires that man achieve knowledge of Him, submission to Him, testimony to Him, to know His practical and normal work, to submit to all of His words and work which do not accord with the notions of man, and to bear testimony to all the work He does to save man, as well as all the deeds He accomplishes to conquer man. Those who bear testimony to God must have knowledge of God; only this kind of testimony is accurate and practical, and only this kind of testimony can shame Satan. God uses those who have come to know Him through undergoing His judgment, chastisement, and pruning, to bear testimony to Him. He uses those who have been corrupted by Satan to bear testimony to Him, and so too does He use those whose disposition has changed, and who have thus gained His blessings, to bear testimony to Him. He does not need man to praise Him with his mouth, nor does He need the praise and testimony of the ilk of Satan, who have not been saved by Him. Only those who know God are qualified to bear testimony to Him, and only those who have been transformed in their disposition are qualified to bear testimony to Him. God will not allow man intentionally to bring shame upon His name.

Footnotes:

a. The original text reads “The work of knowing God.”

How Peter Came to Know Jesus

During the time Peter spent with Jesus, he saw many lovable characteristics in Jesus, many aspects worthy of emulation, and many aspects which supplied him. Although Peter saw the being of God in Jesus in many ways, and saw many lovable qualities, he did not know Jesus at first. Peter began following Jesus when he was 20 years old, and he continued to follow Him for six years. During that time, he never came to know Jesus; Peter was willing to follow Jesus purely out of admiration for Him. When Jesus first called to him on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, He asked: “Simon Barjona, will you follow Me?” Peter said: “I must follow he who is sent by the heavenly Father. I must acknowledge he who is chosen by the Holy Spirit. I will follow You.” At the time, Peter had already heard of a man named Jesus—the greatest of the prophets and God’s beloved Son—and Peter had been constantly hoping to find Him and hoping for a chance to see Him (because that is how he was being led by the Holy Spirit). Although Peter had never seen Him and had only heard rumors about Him, gradually a yearning and adoration for Jesus grew in his heart, and he often yearned to one day look upon Jesus. And how did Jesus call upon Peter? He too had heard of a man called Peter, yet it was not the Holy Spirit who instructed Him: “Go to the Sea of Galilee, where there is one called Simon Barjona.” Jesus had heard someone say that there was one called Simon Barjona, and that people had heard his sermon, that he too preached the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, and that the people who heard him were all moved to tears. After hearing this, Jesus followed that person to the Sea of Galilee; when Peter accepted Jesus’ call, he followed Him.

During his time following Jesus, Peter formed many opinions of Him and always judged Him from his own perspective. Although Peter had a certain degree of understanding of the Spirit, his understanding was somewhat unclear, which is why he said: “I must follow he who is sent by the heavenly Father. I must acknowledge he who is chosen by the Holy Spirit.” He did not understand the things Jesus did and lacked clarity about them. After following Him for some time, Peter grew interested in what He did and said, and in Jesus Himself. He came to feel that Jesus inspired both affection and respect; he liked to associate with Him and stay beside Him, and listening to Jesus’ words rendered him supply and aid. During the time he followed Jesus, Peter observed and took to heart everything about His life: His actions, words, movements, and expressions. He gained a deep understanding that Jesus was not like ordinary men. Although His human appearance was exceedingly normal, He was full of love, compassion, and tolerance for man. Everything He did or said was of great aid to others, and Peter saw and gained things he had never before seen nor possessed from Jesus. He saw that although Jesus had neither a grand stature nor any unusual humanity, He had a truly extraordinary and uncommon air about Him. Although Peter couldn’t fully explain it, he could see that Jesus acted differently from everyone else, for the things He did were very different from that of normal men. From his time in contact with Jesus, Peter also saw that His character was different from that of an ordinary man. He always acted steadily and never with haste, never exaggerated nor underplayed a subject, and He conducted His life in a way that revealed a character which was both normal and admirable. In conversation, Jesus spoke plainly and with grace, communicating always in a cheerful yet serene manner—and yet never did He lose His dignity while carrying out His work. Peter saw that Jesus was sometimes taciturn, while other times He spoke incessantly. Sometimes He was so happy that He appeared like a frisking and frolicking dove, and other times He was so sad that He did not talk at all, appearing laden with grief as though He were a worn and weary mother. At times He was filled with anger like a brave soldier charging off to kill an enemy or, on some occasions, He even resembled a roaring lion. Sometimes He laughed; other times He prayed and wept. No matter how Jesus acted, Peter grew to have boundless love and respect for Him. Jesus’ laughter filled him with happiness, His sorrow plunged him into grief, His anger frightened him, while His mercy, forgiveness, and the strict demands He made of people made him come to truly love Jesus and develop a true fear of and longing for Him. Of course, it was not until after Peter had lived alongside Jesus for a number of years that he gradually came to realize all of this.

Peter was a particularly sensible man, born with natural intelligence, yet he did many foolish things when following Jesus. At the very start, he had some notions about Jesus. He asked: “People say You are a prophet, so when You were eight years old and started to understand things, did You know You were God? Did You know You were conceived by the Holy Spirit?” Jesus replied: “No, I didn’t. Don’t I seem just like a normal person to you? I am the same as anyone else. The person the Father sends is a normal person, not an extraordinary one. And, though the work I do represents My heavenly Father, My image, the person that I am, and this fleshly body cannot fully represent My heavenly Father—only one part of Him. Although I came from the Spirit, I am still a normal person, and My Father sent Me to this earth as a normal person, not an extraordinary one.” Only when Peter heard this did he gain a slight understanding of Jesus. And it was only after he had gone through countless hours of Jesus’ work, of His teaching, His shepherding, and His sustaining, that he gained a much deeper understanding. When Jesus was in His 30th year, He told Peter of His impending crucifixion and that He had come to do a stage of work—the work of crucifixion—to redeem all mankind. Jesus also told Peter that three days after the crucifixion, the Son of man would rise again, and that once risen, He would appear to the people for 40 days. Upon hearing these words, Peter was sad and took these words to heart; from then on, he grew ever closer to Jesus. After experiencing for some time, Peter came to realize that everything Jesus did was of the being of God, and he came to think that Jesus was exceptionally lovable. Only when he came to have this understanding did the Holy Spirit enlighten him from within. It was then that Jesus turned to His disciples and other followers and asked: “John, who do you say that I am?” John replied: “You are Moses.” He then turned to Luke: “And you, Luke, who do you say that I am?” Luke replied: “You are the greatest of the prophets.” He then asked a sister, and she replied: “You are the greatest of prophets who speaks many words from everlasting to everlasting. No one’s prophecies are as great as Yours, nor anyone’s knowledge in excess of Yours; You are a prophet.” Then Jesus turned to Peter and asked: “Peter, who do you say that I am?” Peter replied: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. You come from heaven. You are not of the earth. You are not the same as created beings. We are on earth and You are here with us, but You are of heaven and are not of the world, and You are not of the earth.” It was through his experience that the Holy Spirit enlightened him, which enabled him to come to this understanding. After this enlightenment, he admired everything Jesus had done even more, thought of Him as even more lovable, and was always in his heart reluctant to be parted with Jesus. So, the first time Jesus revealed Himself to Peter after He was crucified and resurrected, Peter cried with exceptional happiness: “Lord! You are risen!” Then, weeping, Peter caught an extremely large fish, cooked it and served it to Jesus. Jesus smiled, but did not speak. Although Peter knew Jesus had been resurrected, he did not understand the mystery of it. When he gave Jesus the fish to eat, Jesus did not refuse it, but He did not speak or sit down to eat. Instead, He suddenly vanished. This was an enormous shock to Peter, and only then did he understand that Jesus resurrected was different from the Jesus of before. Once he realized this, Peter was grieved, but he also gained comfort from knowing that the Lord had completed His work. He knew that Jesus had completed His work, that His time staying with man was over, and that man would have to walk his own path from then on. Jesus had once told him: “You too must drink of the bitter cup from which I have drunk (this is what He said after the resurrection). You too must walk the path I have walked. You must lay down your life for Me.” Unlike now, work at that time did not take the form of a face-to-face conversation. During the Age of Grace, the work of the Holy Spirit was particularly hidden, and Peter suffered through much hardship. Sometimes, Peter reached the point of exclaiming: “God! I have nothing but this life. Although it is not worth much to You, I wish to dedicate it to You. Although men are unworthy to love You, and their love and hearts are worthless, I believe You know men’s hearts’ desire. And even though the bodies of men do not meet with Your acceptance, I wish for You to accept my heart.” Uttering prayers like this gave him encouragement, especially when he prayed: “I’m willing to dedicate my heart wholly to God. Even though I’m unable to do anything for God, I’m willing to loyally satisfy God and devote myself to Him wholeheartedly. I believe God must look upon my heart.” He said: “I ask for nothing in my life but that my thoughts of love for God and my heart’s desire be accepted by God. I was with the Lord Jesus for so long, yet I never loved Him; that is my biggest debt. Even though I stayed with Him, I did not know Him, and I even said some inappropriate things behind His back. Thinking of these things makes me feel even more indebted to the Lord Jesus.” He always prayed in this manner. He said: “I am less than dust. I can do nothing but dedicate this loyal heart to God.”

There was a climax in Peter’s experiences, when his body was almost totally broken, but Jesus still gave him encouragement within. And one time, Jesus appeared to Peter. When Peter was in tremendous suffering and felt that his heart was broken, Jesus instructed him: “You were with Me on earth, and I was here with you. And though before we were together in heaven, it is, after all, of the spiritual realm. Now I am returned to the spiritual realm, and you are on earth, for I am not of earth, and though you too are not of earth, you have to fulfill your function on earth. As you are a servant, you must fulfill your duty.” Hearing that he would be able to return to God’s side gave Peter comfort. At that time, Peter was in such agony that he was almost bedridden; he felt remorse to the point of saying: “I am so corrupted that I am unable to satisfy God.” Jesus appeared to him and said: “Peter, could it be that you have forgotten the resolution you once made before Me? Have you really forgotten everything I said? Have you forgotten the resolution you made to Me?” Seeing that it was Jesus, Peter rose from his bed, and Jesus comforted him thus: “I am not of the earth, I have already told you—this you must understand, but have you forgotten something else I told you? ‘You are also not of the earth, not of the world.’ Right now, there is work that you need to do. You cannot be grieved like this. You cannot suffer like this. Although men and God cannot coexist in the same world, I have My work and you have yours, and one day when your work is finished, we will be together in one realm, and I will lead you to be with Me forever.” Peter was comforted and reassured after hearing these words. He knew that this suffering was something he had to endure and experience, and from then on, he was inspired. Jesus specially appeared to him at every key moment, giving him special enlightenment and guidance, and He did much work on him. And what did Peter regret the most? Not long after Peter had said “You are the Son of the living God,” Jesus posited another question to Peter (although it is not recorded in the Bible this way). Jesus asked him: “Peter! Have you ever loved Me?” Peter understood what He meant, and said: “Lord! I once loved the Father in heaven, but I admit I have never loved You.” Jesus then said: “If people do not love the Father in heaven, how can they love the Son on earth? And if people do not love the Son sent by God the Father, how can they love the Father in heaven? If people truly love the Son on earth, then they truly love the Father in heaven.” When Peter heard these words, he realized what he had been lacking. He always felt remorse to the point of tears over his words “I once loved the Father in heaven, but I have never loved You.” After the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, he felt even more remorse and grief over these words. Recalling his past work and his present stature, he would often come before Jesus in prayer, always feeling regret and indebted due to having not satisfied God’s will and not measuring up to God’s standards. These issues became his biggest burden. He said: “One day I will dedicate to You everything I have and everything I am, and I will give You whatever is most valuable.” He said: “God! I have only one faith and only one love. My life is worth nothing, and my body is worth nothing. I have only one faith and only one love. I have faith in You in my mind and love for You in my heart; these two things only have I to give to You, and nothing else.” Peter was greatly encouraged by Jesus’ words, because before Jesus was crucified, He had told Peter: “I am not of this world, and you too are not of this world.” Later, when Peter reached a point of great pain, Jesus reminded him: “Peter, have you forgotten? I am not of the world, and it was only for My work that I departed earlier. You too are not of the world, have you really forgotten? I have told you twice, do you not remember?” Hearing this, Peter said: “I have not forgotten!” Jesus then said: “You once spent a happy time gathered with Me in heaven and a period of time by My side. You miss Me, and I miss you. Although the created beings are not worth mentioning in My eyes, how can I not love one who is innocent and lovable? Have you forgotten My promise? You must accept My commission on earth; you must fulfill the task I entrusted to you. One day I will certainly lead you to be by My side.” After hearing this, Peter became even more encouraged and received even greater inspiration, such that when he was on the cross, he was able to say: “God! I cannot love You enough! Even if You ask me to die, I still cannot love You enough. Wherever You send my soul, whether or not You fulfill Your past promises, whatever You do afterward, I love You and believe in You.” What he held onto was his faith, and true love.

One evening, several of the disciples, including Peter, were on a fishing boat together with Jesus, and Peter asked Jesus a very naive question: “Lord! I would like to ask You a question which I have had for a very long time.” Jesus replied: “Then please ask!” Peter then asked: “Was the work done during the Age of Law Your doing?” Jesus smiled, as if saying: “This child, how naive he is!” He then continued with purpose: “It was not Mine. It was the doing of Jehovah and Moses.” Peter heard this and exclaimed: “Oh! So it was not Your doing.” Once Peter had said this, Jesus spoke no more. Peter thought to himself: “It was not You that did it, so no wonder You have come to destroy the law, as it was not Your doing.” His heart was also eased. Afterward, Jesus realized that Peter was quite naive, but because he had no understanding at the time, Jesus didn’t say anything else or directly refute him. Once Jesus gave a sermon in a synagogue where many people were present, including Peter. In His sermon, Jesus said: “The One who will come from everlasting to everlasting will do the work of redemption during the Age of Grace to redeem all of mankind from sin, but He will not be constrained by any regulation in leading man out of sin. He will walk out of the law and enter into the Age of Grace. He will redeem all of mankind. He will stride forward from the Age of Law into the Age of Grace, yet none know Him, He who came from Jehovah. The work Moses did was granted by Jehovah; Moses drafted the law because of the work Jehovah had done.” Once this was said, He continued: “Those who abolish the commandments of the Age of Grace during the Age of Grace will meet with calamity. They must stand in the temple and receive God’s destruction, and fire shall come upon them.” Hearing these words had somewhat of an effect on Peter, and throughout a period of his experience, Jesus shepherded and sustained Peter, speaking heart-to-heart with him, which gave Peter a slightly better understanding of Jesus. As Peter thought back to what Jesus had preached on that day and the question he had asked Jesus when they were on the fishing boat, the response Jesus had given, as well as how He had smiled, Peter finally came to an understanding about it all. Afterward, the Holy Spirit enlightened Peter, and only then did he understand that Jesus was the Son of the living God. Peter’s understanding came from the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, but there was a process to his understanding. It was through asking questions, hearing Jesus preach, then through receiving Jesus’ special fellowship and His special shepherding, that Peter came to realize Jesus was the Son of the living God. It was not achieved overnight; it was a process, and this became a help to him in his later experiences. Why did Jesus not do the work of perfection in other people, but just in Peter? Because only Peter understood that Jesus was the Son of the living God; no one else knew this. Though there were many disciples who knew much in their time following Him, their knowledge was superficial. This is why Peter was chosen by Jesus as the specimen of being made perfect. What Jesus said to Peter then is what He says to people today, whose knowledge and life entry must reach that of Peter. It is in accordance with this requirement and this path that God will perfect everyone. Why are people today required to have real faith and true love? You too must experience what Peter experienced; the fruits Peter gained from his experiences must also be manifested in you; and you too must experience the pain that Peter experienced. The path you walk is the same that Peter walked. The pain you suffer is the pain that Peter suffered. When you receive glory and when you live out a real life, then you live out the image of Peter. The path is the same, and one is made perfect by following it. However, your caliber is somewhat lacking in comparison to that of Peter, for times have changed, and so too has the extent of corruption of men, and because Judea was a kingdom with a long-standing and ancient culture. Hence, you must do all that you can to improve your caliber.

Peter was a very sensible person, astute in everything he did, and he was also extremely honest. He suffered many setbacks. His first contact with society came at the age of 14, when he attended school and also went to the synagogue. He had a lot of enthusiasm and was always willing to attend meetings. At the time, Jesus had not yet officially started His work; this was just the beginning of the Age of Grace. Peter started coming into contact with religious figures when he was 14; by the time he was 18, he was in contact with the religious elite, but after he saw the chaos behind the scenes of religion, he retreated from it. Seeing how crooked, deceitful, and scheming these people were, he became extremely disgusted (this was how the Holy Spirit worked at the time, to make him perfect. He especially moved him and did some special work on him), and so he withdrew from the synagogue at the age of 18. His parents persecuted him and would not let him believe (they were devils and nonbelievers). Finally, Peter left home and traveled everywhere, fishing and preaching for two years, during which time he also led quite a few people. Now you should be able to clearly see the precise path that Peter took. If you can clearly see Peter’s path, then you will be certain about the work being done today, so you will not complain or be negative, or long for anything. You should experience Peter’s mood at the time: He was stricken with sorrow; he no longer asked for a future or any blessings. He did not seek profit, happiness, fame, or fortune in the world; he only sought to live the most meaningful life, which was to repay God’s love and dedicate what he held utterly most precious to God. Then he would be satisfied in his heart. He often prayed to Jesus with the words: “Lord Jesus Christ, I once loved You, but I never truly loved You. Though I said I had faith in You, I never loved You with a true heart. I only looked up to You, adored You, and missed You, but I never loved You nor truly had faith in You.” He constantly prayed to make his resolution, and he was always encouraged by the words of Jesus and drew motivation from them. Later, after a period of experience, Jesus tested him, provoking him to yearn for Him further. He said: “Lord Jesus Christ! How I miss You, and long to look upon You. I lack too much, and cannot make up for Your love. I beg You to soon take me away. When will You have need of me? When will You take me away? When will I once again look upon Your face? I do not wish to live any longer in this body, to continue becoming corrupted, nor do I wish to rebel any further. I am ready to dedicate all I have to You as soon as I can, and I do not wish to sadden You any further.” This is how he prayed, but he did not know at the time what Jesus would perfect in him. During the agony of his test, Jesus appeared to him again and said: “Peter, I wish to make you perfect, such that you become a piece of fruit, one that is the crystallization of My perfection of you, and which I will enjoy. Can you truly testify for Me? Have you done what I ask you to do? Have you lived out the words I have spoken? You once loved Me, but though you loved Me, have you lived Me out? What have you done for Me? You recognize that you are unworthy of My love, but what have you done for Me?” Peter saw that he had done nothing for Jesus and remembered his previous oath to give his life to God. And so, he no longer complained, and his prayers from then on grew much better. He prayed, saying: “Lord Jesus Christ! I once left You, and You too once left me. We have spent time apart, and time together in company. Yet You love me more than all else. I have repeatedly rebelled against You and repeatedly grieved You. How can I forget such things? I am always bearing in mind and never forget the work You have done on me and what You have entrusted me with. I have done everything that I can for the work You have done on me. You know what I can do, and You further know what role I can play. I wish to put myself at the mercy of Your orchestrations, and I will dedicate everything I have to You. Only You know what I can do for You. Although Satan fooled me so much and I rebelled against You, I believe You do not remember me for those transgressions and that You do not treat me based on them. I wish to dedicate my entire life to You. I ask for nothing, and neither do I have other hopes or plans; I only wish to act according to Your intention and to follow Your will. I will drink from Your bitter cup, and I am Yours to command.”

You must be clear about the path you walk; you must be clear about the path you will take in the future, what it is that God will make perfect, and what has been entrusted to you. One day, perhaps, you will be tested and, when that time comes, if you are able to draw inspiration from Peter’s experiences, it will show that you are truly walking Peter’s path. Peter was commended by God for his true faith and love and for his loyalty to God. And it was for his honesty and longing for God in his heart that God made him perfect. If you truly have the same love and faith as Peter, then Jesus will surely make you perfect.

Those Who Love God Will Forever Live Within His Light

The essence of most people’s belief in God is religious conviction: They are incapable of loving God and can only follow God like a robot, unable to truly yearn for God or adore Him. They merely follow Him silently. Many people believe in God, but there are very few who love God; they only “fear” God because they are afraid of catastrophe, or else they “admire” God because He is high and mighty—but in their fear and admiration, there is no love or true yearning. In their experiences they seek the minutiae of the truth, or else some insignificant mysteries. Most people merely follow, fishing for blessings in troubled waters; they do not seek the truth, nor do they truly submit to God in order to receive God’s blessings. The life of all people’s belief in God is meaningless, it is without value, and in it are their personal considerations and pursuits; they do not believe in God in order to love God, but for the sake of being blessed. Many people act as they please; they do whatever they want and never consider the interests of God, or whether what they do is in accordance with the will of God. Such people cannot even achieve true belief, let alone the love of God. God’s essence is not just for man to believe in; it is, moreover, for man to love. But many of those who believe in God are incapable of discovering this “secret.” People do not dare to love God, nor do they try to love Him. They have never discovered that there is so much that is lovable about God; they have never discovered that God is the God who loves man, and that He is the God who is for man to love. The loveliness of God is expressed in His work: Only when they experience His work can people discover His loveliness; only in reality can they appreciate the loveliness of God; and without experiencing and observing it in real life, no one can discover God’s loveliness. There is so much to love about God, but without actually engaging with Him people are incapable of discovering it. Which is to say, if God did not become flesh, people would be incapable of actually engaging with Him, and if they were unable to actually engage with Him, they also would not be able to experience His work—and so their love of God would be tainted with much falsehood and imagination. The love of the God in heaven is not as real as the love of the God on earth, for people’s knowledge of God in heaven is built upon their imaginings, rather than upon what they have seen with their own eyes and what they have personally experienced. When God comes to earth, people are able to behold His practical deeds and His loveliness, and they can see everything of His practical and normal disposition, all of which is thousands of times more real than the knowledge of the God in heaven. Regardless of how much people love the God in heaven, there is nothing real about this love, and it is full of human ideas. No matter how little their love for the God on earth, this love is real; even if there is only a little of it, it is still real. God causes people to know Him through practical work, and through this knowledge He gains their love. It’s like Peter: If he had not lived with Jesus, it would have been impossible for him to adore Jesus. So, too, was his loyalty toward Jesus built upon his engagement with Jesus. To make man love Him, God has come among man and lives together with man, and all that He makes man see and experience is the practicality of God.

God uses practicality and the advent of facts to make people perfect; God’s words fulfill part of His perfection of people, and this is the work of guidance and opening the way. Which is to say, in God’s words you must find the path of practice and the knowledge of visions. By understanding these things, man will have a path and visions in his actual practice, and he will be able to obtain enlightenment through God’s words; he will be able to understand that these things have come from God and able to discern much. After understanding, man must immediately enter into this reality and must use God’s words to satisfy God in his actual life. God will guide you in all things and will give you a path of practice, and make you feel that He is especially lovely, and allow you to see that every step of God’s work in you is intended to make you perfect. If you wish to see God’s love, if you wish to truly experience God’s love, then you must go deep into reality, you must go deep into real life and see that everything God does is love and salvation, that all He does is to enable people to leave behind that which is unclean, and to refine the things within man that are unable to satisfy God’s will. God uses words to provide to man; He arranges the circumstances of real life for people to experience, and if people eat and drink many of God’s words, then when they actually put them into practice, they can resolve all the difficulties in their lives using many words of God. Which is to say, you must have the words of God in order to go deep into reality; if you do not eat and drink the words of God and are without the work of God, then you will have no path in real life. If you never eat or drink the words of God, then you will be confounded when something happens to you. You only know that you should love God, but you are incapable of any differentiation and have no path of practice; you are muddled and confused, and sometimes you even believe that by satisfying the flesh you are satisfying God—all of this is the consequence of not eating and drinking God’s words. Which is to say, if you are without the aid of God’s words and only grope about within reality, then you are fundamentally incapable of finding the path of practice. People such as this simply do not understand what it means to believe in God, much less do they understand what it means to love God. If, using the enlightenment and guidance of God’s words, you often pray, and explore, and seek, and through this you discover that which you ought to put into practice, find opportunities for the work of the Holy Spirit, truly cooperate with God, and are not muddled and confused, then you will have a path in real life, and will truly satisfy God. When you have satisfied God, inside you there will be the guidance of God, and you will be especially blessed by God, which will give you a sense of enjoyment: You will feel especially honored that you have satisfied God, you will feel especially bright inside, and in your heart you will be clear and peaceful. Your conscience will be comforted and free from accusations, and you will feel pleasant inside when you see your brothers and sisters. This is what it means to enjoy God’s love, and only this is truly enjoying God. People’s enjoyment of God’s love is attained through experience: By experiencing hardship, and experiencing putting the truth into practice, they gain God’s blessings. If you only say that God really loves you, that God has truly paid a heavy price for people’s sake, that He has patiently and kindly spoken so many words and always saves people, your utterance of these words is only one side of the enjoyment of God. Yet, greater enjoyment—real enjoyment—is when people put the truth into practice in their real life, after which they are peaceful and clear in their hearts. They feel greatly moved inside and feel that God is most lovable. You will feel that the price you have paid is more than fair. Having paid a great price in your efforts, you will be especially bright inside: You will feel that you are truly enjoying God’s love and you will understand that God has done the work of salvation in people, that His refinement of people is meant to purify them, and that God tries people in order to test whether they truly love Him. If you always put the truth into practice in this way, then you will gradually develop a clear knowledge of much of God’s work, and at that time you will feel that God’s words before you are as clear as crystal. If you can clearly understand many truths, you will feel that all matters are easy to put into practice, that you can overcome any issue and overcome any temptation, and you will see that nothing is a problem for you, which will greatly free you and liberate you. At this moment, you will be enjoying God’s love, and God’s true love will have come upon you. God blesses those who have visions, who have the truth, who have knowledge, and who truly love Him. If people wish to behold God’s love, they must put the truth into practice in real life, they must be willing to endure pain and forsake that which they love to satisfy God, and despite the tears in their eyes, they must still be able to satisfy God’s heart. In this way, God will surely bless you, and if you endure hardship such as this, it will be followed by the work of the Holy Spirit. Through the real life, and through experiencing God’s words, people are able to see God’s loveliness, and only if they have tasted God’s love can they truly love Him.

Those who love God are those who love the truth, and the more those who love the truth put it into practice, the more of it they have; the more they put it into practice, the more of God’s love they have; and the more they put it into practice, the more blessed they are by God. If you always practice in this way, God’s love for you will gradually enable you to see, just as Peter came to know God: Peter said that God not only has the wisdom to create the heavens and earth and all things, but, moreover, that He also has the wisdom to do practical work in people. Peter said that He is not only worthy of people’s love because of His creation of the heavens and earth and all things, but, moreover, because of His ability to create man, to save man, to make man perfect, and to bequeath His love to man. So, too, did Peter say that there is much in Him that is worthy of man’s love. Peter said to Jesus: “Is creating the heavens and earth and all things the only reason You deserve people’s love? There is more in You that is lovable. You act and move in real life, Your Spirit touches me inside, You discipline me, You reproach me—these things are even more worthy of people’s love.” If you wish to see and experience God’s love, then you must explore and seek in real life and must be willing to put aside your own flesh. You must make this resolution. You must be someone with resolve who is able to satisfy God in all things, without being lazy or coveting the enjoyments of the flesh, not living for the flesh but living for God. There may be times when you do not satisfy God. That is because you do not understand God’s will; the next time, even though it will take more effort, you must satisfy Him and must not satisfy the flesh. When you experience in this way, you will have come to know God. You will see that God can create the heavens and earth and all things, that He has become flesh so that people can actually see Him and actually engage with Him; you will see that He is able to walk among man, and that His Spirit can make people perfect in real life, allowing them to see His loveliness and experience His discipline, His chastening, and His blessings. If you always experience in this way, in real life you will be inseparable from God, and if one day your relationship with God ceases to be normal, you will be able to suffer reproach and to feel remorse. When you have a normal relationship with God, you will never wish to leave God, and if one day God says He will leave you, you will be afraid, and will say that you would rather die than be left by God. As soon as you have these emotions, you will feel that you are incapable of leaving God, and in this way, you will have a foundation, and will truly enjoy God’s love.

People often speak of letting God be their life, but their experience has not yet come to that point. You are merely saying that God is your life, that He guides you every day, that you eat and drink His words each day, and that you pray to Him each day, so He has become your life. The knowledge of those who say this is quite superficial. In many people there is no foundation; God’s words have been planted within them, but they have yet to sprout, much less have they borne any fruit. Today, to what extent have you experienced? Only now, after God has forced you to come this far, do you feel that you cannot leave God. One day, when your experience has reached a certain point, if God were to make you leave, you would not be able to. You will always feel that you cannot be without God inside you; you can be without a husband, wife, or children, without a family, without a mother or father, without the enjoyments of the flesh, but you cannot be without God. Being without God would be like losing your life; you would not be able to live without God. When you have experienced to this point, you will have hit the mark in your faith in God, and in this way, God will have become your life, He will have become the foundation of your existence. You will never again be able to leave God. When you have experienced to this extent, you will have truly enjoyed God’s love, and when you have a close enough relationship with God, He will be your life, your love, and at that time you will pray to God and say: “O God! I cannot leave You. You are my life. I can go without everything else—but without You, I cannot go on living.” This is people’s true stature; it is the real life. Some people have been forced to come as far as they have today: They have to go on whether they want to or not, and they always feel as if they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. You must experience such that God is your life, such that if God were taken away from your heart, it would be like losing your life; God must be your life, and you must be incapable of leaving Him. In this way, you will have actually experienced God, and at this time, when you love God, you will truly love God, and it will be a singular, pure love. One day, when your experiences are such that your life has reached a certain point, when you pray to God, and eat and drink the words of God, you will be unable to leave God inside, nor will you be able to forget Him even if you wanted to. God will have become your life; you can forget the world, you can forget your wife, husband, or children, but you will have trouble forgetting God—to do so would be impossible, this is your true life and your true love for God. When people’s love of God has reached a certain point, their love for nothing else is equal to their love of God; their love for God comes first. In this way you are able to give up everything else, and are willing to accept all pruning from God. When you have achieved a love of God that surpasses all else, you will live in reality and in God’s love.

As soon as God becomes the life within people, people become unable to leave God. Is this not the deed of God? There is no greater testimony! God has worked to a certain point; He has said for people to do service, to be chastised or to die, and people have not backed away, which shows that they have been conquered by God. People who have the truth are those who, in their real experiences, can stand firm in their testimony, stand firm in their position, stand on the side of God, without ever retreating, and who can have a normal relationship with people who love God, who, when things happen to them, are able to completely submit to God, and can submit to God unto death. Your practice and revelations in real life are the testimony of God, they are man’s living out and the testimony of God, and this is truly enjoying God’s love; when you have experienced to this point, the due effect will have been achieved. You are possessed of actual living out and your every action is looked upon with admiration by others. Your clothing and outward appearance are unremarkable, but you live out a life of the utmost piety, and when you communicate the words of God, you are guided and enlightened by Him. You are able to speak God’s will through your words, communicate reality, and you understand much about serving in spirit. You are candid in your speech, you are decent and upright, non-confrontational and decorous, able to submit to God’s arrangements and stand firm in your testimony when things befall you, and you are calm and composed no matter what you are dealing with. This kind of person has truly seen God’s love. Some people are still young, but they act as someone of middle age; they are mature, possessed of the truth, and admired by others—and these are the people who have testimony and are the manifestation of God. Which is to say, when they have experienced to a certain point, inside they will have an insight toward God, and their external disposition will also stabilize. Many people do not put the truth into practice and do not stand firm in their testimony. In such people there is no love of God, or testimony to God, and these are the people most loathed by God. They read the words of God in the gatherings, but what they live out is Satan, and this is dishonoring God, vilifying God, and blaspheming God. In such people, there is no sign of God’s love, and they do not have the work of the Holy Spirit at all. So, people’s words and actions represent Satan. If your heart is always at peace before God, and you always pay attention to the people and things around you, and what is going on around you, and if you are mindful of God’s burden, and always have a God-fearing heart, then God will often enlighten you within. In the church there are people who are “supervisors”: They set out to watch the failings of others and then copy and emulate them. They are incapable of differentiating, they do not hate sin and do not loathe or feel disgusted by the things of Satan. Such people are filled with the things of Satan, and they will ultimately be utterly forsaken by God. Your heart should be ever fearful before God, you should be moderate in your words and actions and never wish to oppose or upset God. You should never be willing for God’s work in you to have been for nothing, or to allow all the hardship you have endured and all that you have put into practice to come to naught. You must be willing to work harder and to love God more on the path ahead. These are the people who have a vision as their foundation. These are the people who seek progress.

If people believe in God and experience God’s words with a God-fearing heart, then in such people there can be seen God’s salvation and God’s love. These people are able to testify of God; they live out the truth, and what they testify to is also the truth, what God is and God’s disposition. They live amid God’s love and have seen God’s love. If people wish to love God, they must taste God’s loveliness and see God’s loveliness; only then can there be roused in them a God-loving heart, a heart that inspires people to give of themselves loyally for God. God does not make people love Him through words or through their imagination, and He does not force people to love Him. Instead, He lets them love Him of their own volition, and He lets them see His loveliness in His work and utterances, after which there is borne in them the love of God. Only in this way can people truly bear testimony to God. People do not love God because they have been urged to do so by others, nor is it a momentary emotional impulse. They love God because they have seen His loveliness, they have seen that there is so much of Him that is worthy of people’s love, because they have seen God’s salvation, wisdom, and wondrous deeds—and as a result, they truly praise God and truly yearn for Him, and there is roused in them such a passion that they could not survive without gaining God. The reason why those who truly testify of God are able to give a resounding testimony to Him is because their testimony rests upon the foundation of the true knowledge and true yearning for God. Such testimony is not offered according to an emotional impulse, but according to their knowledge of God and His disposition. Because they have come to know God, they feel that they must surely testify of God and make all those who yearn for God know God, and be aware of God’s loveliness and His practicality. Like people’s love for God, their testimony is spontaneous; it is real and has real significance and worth. It is not passive or hollow and meaningless. The reason only those who truly love God have the most value and meaning in their lives, the reason only they truly believe in God, is that these people are able to live in God’s light and are able to live for God’s work and management. It is because they do not live in darkness, but live in the light; they do not live meaningless lives, but lives that have been blessed by God. Only those who love God are able to testify of God, only they are God’s witnesses, only they are blessed by God, and only they are able to receive God’s promises. Those who love God are God’s intimates; they are the people beloved by God, and they can enjoy blessings together with God. Only people such as this will live to eternity, and only they will forever live under God’s care and protection. God is for people to love, and He is worthy of all people’s love, but not all people are capable of loving God, and not all people can testify of God and hold power with God. Because they are able to testify of God and devote all their efforts to God’s work, those who truly love God can walk anywhere beneath the heavens without anyone daring to oppose them, and they can wield power on earth and rule all the people of God. These people have come together from across the world. They speak different languages and have different skin colors, but their existence has the same meaning; they all have a God-loving heart, they all bear the same testimony, and have the same resolve, and the same wish. Those who love God can walk freely throughout the world, and those who testify of God can travel across the universe. These people are beloved by God, they are blessed by God, and they will forever live within His light.

The Work of the Holy Spirit and the Work of Satan

How does one come to understand the details of spirit? How does the Holy Spirit work in man? How does Satan work in man? How do evil spirits work in man? What are the manifestations? When something happens to you, does it come from the Holy Spirit, and should you submit to it or reject it? In people’s actual practice, much arises from human will that people invariably believe comes from the Holy Spirit. Some things come from evil spirits, yet still people think they have come from the Holy Spirit, and sometimes the Holy Spirit guides people from within, yet people are afraid that such guidance comes from Satan and so do not dare to submit, when in reality that guidance is the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. Thus, unless one practices differentiation, then there is no way to experience in one’s practical experience; without differentiation, there is no way of gaining life. How does the Holy Spirit do work? How do evil spirits do work? What comes from the will of man? And what is born of the guidance and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit? If you grasp the patterns of the Holy Spirit’s work within man, then, in your daily life and during your practical experiences, you will be able to grow your knowledge and draw distinctions; you will come to know God, you will be able to understand and discern Satan; you will not be confused in your submission or pursuit, and you will be someone whose thoughts are clear, who submits to the work of the Holy Spirit.

The work of the Holy Spirit is a form of proactive guidance and positive enlightenment. It does not allow people to be negative. It brings them solace, gives them faith and resolve, and enables them to pursue being made perfect by God. When the Holy Spirit works, people are able to enter actively; they are not passive or forced, but act at their own initiative. When the Holy Spirit works, people are glad and willing, willing to submit and happy to humble themselves. Even though they are pained and fragile inside, they have the resolve to cooperate; they suffer gladly, they are able to submit, and they are untainted by human will, untainted by the thinking of man, and certainly they are untainted by human desires and motivations. When people experience the work of the Holy Spirit, they are especially holy inside. Those who are possessed of the work of the Holy Spirit live out the love of God and the love of their brothers and sisters; they delight in the things that delight God and loathe the things that God loathes. People who are touched by the work of the Holy Spirit are those who have normal humanity, constantly pursue the truth and are possessed of humanity. When the Holy Spirit works within people, their condition becomes better and better, and their humanity becomes more and more normal, and though some of their cooperation may be foolish, their motivations are right, their entry is positive, they do not try to cause disruption, and there is no malevolence within them. The work of the Holy Spirit is normal and practical, the Holy Spirit works in man according to the rules of the normal life of man, and He carries out enlightenment and guidance within people according to the actual pursuit of normal people. When the Holy Spirit works in people, He guides and enlightens them according to the needs of normal people. He provides for them according to their needs, and He positively guides and enlightens them according to what they lack, and according to their deficiencies. The Holy Spirit’s work is to enlighten and guide people in real life; only if they experience God’s words in their actual lives are they able to see the work of the Holy Spirit. If, in their everyday lives, people are in a positive state and have a normal spiritual life, then they are possessed of the work of the Holy Spirit. In such a state, when they eat and drink the words of God, they have faith; when they pray, they are inspired; when they come up against something, they are not negative; and as things happen, they are able to see the lessons within those things that God requires them to learn. They are not negative or weak, and although they have real difficulties, they are willing to submit to all the arrangements of God.

What effects are achieved by the work of the Holy Spirit? You may be foolish, and you may be devoid of discernment, but the Holy Spirit has but to work and there will be faith in you, and you will always feel that you cannot love God enough. You will be willing to cooperate, no matter how great the difficulties ahead. Things will happen to you and it will not be clear to you whether they come from God or from Satan, but you will be able to wait, and you will be neither negative nor remiss. This is the normal work of the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit works within you, you still encounter real difficulties: Sometimes you will be brought to tears, and sometimes there will be things that you are incapable of overcoming, but this is all just a phase of the ordinary work of the Holy Spirit. Although you did not overcome those difficulties, and although at the time you were weak and full of complaints, afterward you were still able to love God with absolute faith. Your negativity cannot prevent you from having normal experiences, and regardless of what other people say, and how others attack you, still you are able to love God. During prayer, you always feel that in the past you were so indebted to God, and you resolve to satisfy God and rebel against the flesh whenever you encounter such things again. This strength shows that the work of the Holy Spirit is within you. This is the normal state of the work of the Holy Spirit.

What is the work that comes from Satan? In the work that comes from Satan, the visions within people are vague; people are without normal humanity, the motivations behind their actions are wrong, and although they wish to love God there are always accusations within them, and these accusations and thoughts cause constant disturbance within them, constraining the growth of their life and stopping them from coming before God in the normal condition. This is to say, as soon as the work of Satan is within people, their hearts cannot be at peace before God. Such people do not know what to do with themselves—when they see people gathering together, they want to run away, and they are unable to close their eyes when others pray. The work of evil spirits wrecks the normal relationship between man and God, and upsets people’s previous visions or their former path of life entry; in their hearts they can never draw close to God, and things always happen that cause disturbance to them and constrain them. Their hearts cannot find peace and they are left with no strength to love God and with their spirits sinking. Such are the manifestations of the work of Satan. The manifestations of the work of Satan are: being unable to stand your ground and stand witness, causing you to become someone who is at fault before God and who has no faithfulness toward God. When Satan disturbs, you lose the love and loyalty toward God within you, you are stripped of a normal relationship with God, you do not pursue the truth or the improvement of yourself; you regress and become negative, you indulge yourself, you give free rein to the spread of sin and are not hateful of sin; furthermore, the interference of Satan makes you dissolute; it causes God’s touch to disappear within you and makes you complain about God and oppose Him, leading you to question God; there is even the risk that you will abandon God. All of this comes from Satan.

When something happens to you in your daily life, how should you differentiate between whether it comes from the work of the Holy Spirit or from the work of Satan? When people’s conditions are normal, then their spiritual lives and their lives in the flesh are normal and their reason is normal and orderly. When they are in this condition, what they experience and come to know within themselves can generally be said to come from being touched by the Holy Spirit (having insights or possessing some simple knowledge when they eat and drink the words of God, or being faithful in some things, or having the strength to love God in some things—this all comes from the Holy Spirit). The Holy Spirit’s work in man is especially normal; man is incapable of feeling it, and it seems to come through man himself, although it is in fact the work of the Holy Spirit. In daily life, the Holy Spirit does work both great and small in everyone, and it is just the extent of this work that varies. Some people are of good caliber, and they understand things quickly, and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit is especially great within them. Meanwhile, some people are of poor caliber, and it takes them longer to understand things, but the Holy Spirit touches them inside and they, too, are able to achieve faithfulness to God—the Holy Spirit works in all those who pursue God. When, in daily life, people do not oppose or rebel against God, do not do things that disrupt the management of God and do not disturb the work of God, then in each one of them the Spirit of God works to a greater or lesser extent; He touches them, enlightens them, gives them faith, gives them strength, and moves them to enter proactively, not being lazy or coveting the enjoyments of the flesh, willing to practice the truth, and longing for the words of God. All of this is work that comes from the Holy Spirit.

When people’s state is not normal, they are forsaken by the Holy Spirit; in their minds they are prone to complaining, their motivations are wrong, they are lazy, they indulge in the flesh, and their hearts betray the truth. All of this comes from Satan. When people’s conditions are not normal, when they are dark inside and have lost their normal reason, have been forsaken by the Holy Spirit, and are unable to feel God within themselves, this is when Satan is working within them. If people always have strength within them and always love God, then generally, when things happen to them, those things come from the Holy Spirit, and whomever they meet, the meeting is the result of the arrangements of God. This is to say that when you are in a normal condition, when you are within the great work of the Holy Spirit, then it is impossible for Satan to make you waver. Upon this foundation it can be said that everything comes from the Holy Spirit, and although you may have incorrect thoughts, you are able to rebel against them and you do not follow them. All this comes from the work of the Holy Spirit. In what situations does Satan interfere? It is easy for Satan to work within you when your conditions are not normal, when you have not been touched by God and are without the work of God, when you are dry and barren inside, when you pray to God but grasp nothing, and when you eat and drink the words of God but are not enlightened or illuminated. In other words, when you have been abandoned by the Holy Spirit and you cannot feel God, then many things happen to you that come from the temptation of Satan. As the Holy Spirit works, Satan also is working all the while. The Holy Spirit touches the inside of man, while at the same time Satan disturbs man. However, the work of the Holy Spirit takes the leading position, and people whose conditions are normal can triumph; this is the triumph of the work of the Holy Spirit over the work of Satan. While the Holy Spirit works, a corrupt disposition still exists within people; however, during the Holy Spirit’s work, it is easy for people to discover and recognize their rebelliousness, motivations, and adulterations. Only then do people feel remorse and grow willing to repent. As such, their rebellious and corrupt dispositions are gradually cast away within God’s work. The work of the Holy Spirit is especially normal; as He works in people, they still have troubles, they still weep, they still suffer, they are still weak and there is still much that is unclear to them, yet in this state they are able to stop themselves from regressing, and they can love God, and although they weep and are distressed, they are still able to praise God; the work of the Holy Spirit is especially normal, not the slightest bit supernatural. Most people believe that, as soon as the Holy Spirit begins to work, changes occur in people’s state and the things that are substantive to them are removed. Such beliefs are distorted. When the Holy Spirit works within man, the negative things of man are still there and his stature remains the same, but he gains the illumination and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit and so his state becomes more positive, the conditions within him become normal, and he changes rapidly. In people’s real experiences, they primarily experience the work of either the Holy Spirit or Satan, and if they are unable to grasp these states and do not differentiate, then entry into real experiences is out of the question, to say nothing of changes in disposition. Thus, the key to experiencing God’s work is being able to see through to such things; in this way, it will be easier for them to experience it.

The work of the Holy Spirit allows people to make positive progress, whereas the work of Satan makes them become negative and retreat, rebel against God and resist Him, lose faith in Him, and become weak in performing their duty. Everything that stems from the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit is quite natural; it is not forced upon you. If you submit to it, then you will have peace; if you do not, then you will afterward be rebuked. With the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, nothing you do will be disturbed with or constrained; you will be set free, there will be a path to practice in your actions, and you will not be subject to any restraints, but be able to act upon the will of God. The work of Satan causes you disturbance in many things; it makes you unwilling to pray, too lazy to eat and drink the words of God, and indisposed to live the life of the church, and it estranges you from the spiritual life. The work of the Holy Spirit does not interfere with your daily life and does not interfere with your normal spiritual life. You are unable to discern many things in the very moment they occur, yet, after a few days, your heart becomes brighter and your mind clearer. You come to have some sense about things of the spirit, and slowly you can discern whether a thought has come from God or from Satan. Some things clearly make you oppose God and rebel against God, or stop you from putting the words of God into practice; these things all come from Satan. Some things are not apparent, and you cannot tell what they are in the moment; afterward, you can see their manifestations and then exercise discernment. If you can clearly discern which things come from Satan and which are directed by the Holy Spirit, then you will not easily be led astray in your experiences. Sometimes, when your condition is not good, then you have certain thoughts that take you out of your negative state. This shows that even when your condition is unfavorable, some of your thoughts can still come from the Holy Spirit. It is not the case that when you are negative, all your thoughts are sent by Satan; if that were true, then when would you be able to transition into a positive state? Having been negative for a period of time, the Holy Spirit gives you an opportunity to be made perfect; He touches you, brings you out of your negative state, and you enter into a normal state.

Knowing what the work of the Holy Spirit is and what the work of Satan is, you can compare these to your own state during your experiences, and to your own experiences, and in this way there will be many more truths relating to principle in your experiences. Having understood these truths about principle, you will be able to master your actual state, you will be able to differentiate among people and events, and you will not have to spend so much effort in gaining the work of the Holy Spirit. Of course, this depends on your motivations being right and on your willingness to seek and to practice. Language such as this—language which relates to principles—should feature in your experiences. Without it, your experiences will be full of the disturbance of Satan and foolish knowledge. If you do not understand how the Holy Spirit works, then you do not understand how to pray to God or how you ought to enter, and if you do not understand how Satan acts to mislead and disturb people, then you do not know how to reject Satan and stand firm in your witness. How the Holy Spirit works and how Satan acts are things people should understand, and they are things that must be experienced in people’s belief in God.

A Warning to Those Who Do Not Practice the Truth

Those among brothers and sisters who are always giving vent to their negativity are lackeys of Satan, and they disturb the church. Such people must one day be expelled and cast out. In their belief in God, if people do not have a God-fearing heart, if they do not have a heart of submission to God, then not only will they be unable to do any work for Him, but on the contrary will become those who disturb His work and who defy Him. Believing in God but not submitting to or fearing Him, and instead resisting Him, is the greatest disgrace for a believer. If believers are just as casual and unrestrained in their speech and conduct as unbelievers are, then they are even more wicked than unbelievers; they are archetypal demons. Those who give vent to their poisonous, malicious talk within the church, who spread rumors, foment disharmony, and form cliques among the brothers and sisters—they should have been expelled from the church. Yet because now is a different era of God’s work, these people are restricted, for they are decidedly to be cast out. All who have been corrupted by Satan have corrupt dispositions. Some have nothing more than corrupt dispositions, while others are different: Not only do they have corrupt satanic dispositions, but their nature is also extremely malicious. Not only do their words and actions reveal their corrupt, satanic dispositions; these people are, moreover, the genuine devils and Satans. Their behavior disrupts and disturbs God’s work, it disturbs the brothers’ and sisters’ life entry, and it damages the normal life of the church. Sooner or later, these wolves in sheep’s clothing must be cleansed away; an unsparing attitude, an attitude of rejection, should be adopted toward these lackeys of Satan. Only this is standing on the side of God, and those who fail to do so are wallowing in the mire with Satan. People who genuinely believe in God always have Him in their hearts, and they always carry within them a God-fearing heart, a God-loving heart. Those who believe in God should do things cautiously and prudently, and all that they do should be in accordance with God’s requirements and able to satisfy His heart. They should not be headstrong, doing whatever they please; that does not befit saintly propriety. People must not run amok, waving the flag of God all over the place while swaggering and swindling everywhere; this is the most rebellious sort of conduct. Families have their rules, and nations have their laws—and isn’t it even more so in the house of God? Does it not all the more have strict standards? Does it not all the more have administrative decrees? People are free to do what they want, but the administrative decrees of God cannot be altered at will. God is a God who does not tolerate offense from humans; He is a God who puts people to death. Do people really not know this already?

Every church has people who cause disturbance for the church or disrupt the work of God. They are all Satans who have infiltrated the house of God in disguise. Such people are good at acting: They come before Me with great reverence, bowing and scraping, living like mangy dogs, and devoting their “all” to achieve their own objectives—but in front of the brothers and sisters, they show their ugly side. When they see people who practice the truth, they strike out at them and shove them aside; when they see people more formidable than themselves, they flatter and fawn upon them. They run wild in the church. It can be said that such “local bullies,” such “lapdogs,” exist in the majority of churches. They act devilishly together, sending each other winks and secret signals, and none of them practices the truth. Whoever has the most venom is the “head demon,” and whoever has the highest prestige leads them, bearing their flag aloft. These people rampage through the church, spreading their negativity, venting death, doing as they please, saying what they please, and no one dares to stop them. They brim with the disposition of Satan. No sooner do they cause a disturbance than an air of death enters the church. Those within the church who practice the truth are spurned, unable to give their all, while those who disturb the church and spread death run rampage within—and, what’s more, most people follow them. Such churches are ruled by Satan, plain and simple; the devil is their king. If the congregants do not rise up and reject the head demons, then they, too, will sooner or later come to ruin. From now on, measures must be taken against such churches. If those who are capable of practicing a little of the truth do not seek to, then that church will be expunged. If a church contains no one who is willing to practice the truth and no one who can stand witness for God, then that church should be completely isolated, and its connections with other churches must be severed. This is called “burying death”; this is what it means to spurn Satan. If a church contains several local bullies, and they are followed by “little flies” that entirely lack discernment, and if the congregants, even after having seen the truth, are still incapable of rejecting the binds and manipulation of these bullies, then all those fools will be cast out in the end. These little flies might not have done anything terrible, but they are even more deceitful, even more slick and evasive, and everyone like this will be cast out. Not a single one shall remain! Those who belong to Satan will be returned to Satan, while those who belong to God will surely go in search of the truth; this is decided by their natures. Let all those who follow Satan perish! No pity will be shown to such people. Let those who search for the truth be provided for, and may they take pleasure in God’s word to their hearts’ content. God is righteous; He would not show favoritism to anyone. If you are a devil, then you are incapable of practicing the truth; if you are someone who searches for the truth, then it is certain that you will not be taken captive by Satan. This is beyond all doubt.

People who do not strive for progress always wish for others to be as negative and indolent as themselves. Those who do not practice the truth are jealous of those who do, and always try to mislead those who are muddleheaded and lack discernment. The things these people give vent to can cause you to degenerate, slip downward, develop an abnormal state, and be filled with darkness. They cause you to become distant from God, and to cherish the flesh and indulge yourself. People who do not love the truth and who are always perfunctory toward God have no self-awareness, and the disposition of such people seduces others into committing sins and defying God. They do not practice the truth, nor do they allow others to practice it. They cherish sin and have no loathing of themselves. They do not know themselves, and they stop others from knowing themselves; they also stop others from desiring the truth. Those they mislead cannot see the light. They fall into darkness, do not know themselves, are unclear about the truth, and become more and more distant from God. They do not practice the truth and they stop others from practicing the truth, bringing all those fools before them. Rather than say that they believe in God, it would be better to say that they believe in their ancestors, or that what they believe in are the idols in their hearts. It would be best for those people who claim to follow God to open their eyes and take a good look to see exactly who they believe in: Is it really God that you believe in, or Satan? If you know that what you believe in is not God, but your own idols, then it would be best if you did not claim to be a believer. If you really do not know who you believe in, then, again, it would be best if you did not claim to be a believer. To say so would be blasphemy! No one is forcing you to believe in God. Do not say you believe in Me; I have had enough of such talk, and do not wish to hear it again, because what you believe in are the idols in your hearts and the local bullies among you. Those who shake their heads when they hear the truth, who grin when they hear talk of death, are all the spawn of Satan, and they are the ones who will be cast out. Many in the church have no discernment. When something misleading occurs, they unexpectedly stand on the side of Satan; they even take offense at being called Satan’s lackeys. Though people might say they have no discernment, they always stand on the side without truth, they never stand on the side of the truth at the critical time, they never stand up and argue for the truth. Do they truly lack discernment? Why do they unexpectedly take the side of Satan? Why do they never say one word that is fair and reasonable in support of the truth? Has this situation genuinely arisen as a result of their momentary confusion? The less discernment people have, the less able they are to stand on the side of truth. What does this show? Does it not show that people without discernment love sin? Does it not show that they are the loyal spawn of Satan? Why is it that they are always able to stand on the side of Satan and speak its language? Their every word and deed, the expressions on their faces, are all sufficient to prove that they are not any kind of lovers of the truth; rather, they are people who detest the truth. That they can stand on the side of Satan is enough to prove that Satan really loves these petty devils who spend their lives fighting for Satan’s sake. Are all these facts not abundantly clear? If you truly are a person who loves the truth, then why have you no regard for those who practice the truth, and why do you immediately follow those who do not practice the truth at the slightest look from them? What kind of problem is this? I do not care whether you have discernment or not. I do not care how great a price you have paid. I do not care how great your forces are, and I do not care whether you are a local bully or a flag-bearing leader. If your forces are great, then that is only with the help of Satan’s strength. If your prestige is high, then that is merely because there are too many around you who do not practice the truth. If you have not been expelled, then that is because now is not the time for the work of expelling; rather, it is time for the work of casting out. There is no rush to expel you now. I am simply waiting for the day when I will punish you after you have been cast out. Whoever does not practice the truth will be cast out!

People who genuinely believe in God are those who are willing to put God’s word into practice and are willing to practice the truth. People who are truly able to stand firm in their testimony to God are also those who are willing to put His word into practice and can genuinely stand on the side of the truth. People who resort to trickery and injustice all lack the truth, and they all bring shame to God. Those who cause disputes in the church are Satan’s lackeys, they are the embodiment of Satan. Such people are so malicious. Those who have no discernment and are incapable of standing on the side of the truth all harbor evil intentions and tarnish the truth. More than that, they are the archetypal representatives of Satan. They are beyond redemption, and shall naturally be cast out. God’s family does not allow those who do not practice the truth to remain, nor does it allow to remain those who deliberately dismantle the church. However, now is not the time to do the work of expulsion; such people will simply be exposed and cast out in the end. No more useless work is to be expended on these people; those who belong to Satan cannot stand on the side of the truth, whereas those who seek the truth can. People who do not practice the truth are unworthy of hearing the way of the truth and unworthy of bearing witness to the truth. The truth is simply not for their ears; rather, it is directed at those who practice it. Before every person’s end is revealed, those who disturb the church and disrupt God’s work will first be left aside for now, to be dealt with later. Once the work is complete, these people will each be exposed, and then they will be cast out. For the time being, while the truth is being provided, they will be ignored. When the whole truth is revealed to humanity, those people should be cast out; that will be the time when all people will be classed according to their kind. The petty tricks of those without discernment will lead to their destruction at the hands of the evil, they will be lured away by them, never to return. And such treatment is what they deserve, because they do not love the truth, because they are incapable of standing on the side of the truth, because they follow evil people and stand on the side of evil people, and because they collude with evil people and defy God. They know perfectly well that what those evil people radiate is evil, yet they harden their hearts and turn their backs on the truth to follow them. Are these people who do not practice the truth but who do destructive and abominable things not all committing evil? Although there are those among them who style themselves as kings and others who follow them, are their God-defying natures not all the same? What excuse can they have to claim that God does not save them? What excuse can they have to claim that God is not righteous? Is it not their own evil that is destroying them? Is it not their own rebelliousness that is dragging them down into hell? People who practice the truth will, in the end, be saved and made perfect because of the truth. Those who do not practice the truth will, in the end, bring destruction upon themselves because of the truth. These are the ends that await those who practice the truth and those who do not. I advise those who are not planning on practicing the truth to leave the church as soon as possible to avoid committing even more sins. When the time comes, it will be too late for regret. In particular, those who form cliques and create schisms, and those local bullies within the church, must leave even sooner. Such people, who have the nature of evil wolves, are incapable of change. It would be better if they left the church at the earliest opportunity, never again to disturb the normal life of the brothers and sisters, and thereby avoid God’s punishment. Those of you who have gone along with them would do well to make use of this opportunity to reflect upon yourselves. Will you leave the church along with the evil ones, or remain and follow obediently? You must consider this matter carefully. I give you this one more opportunity to choose, and I await your answer.

Are You Someone Who Has Come to Life?

Only when you have cast off your corrupt dispositions and achieved the living out of normal humanity will you be made perfect. Although you will be unable to speak prophecy, nor of any mysteries, you will be living out and revealing the image of a human. God created man, but then man was corrupted by Satan, such that people became “dead men.” So, after you have changed, you will no longer be like these “dead men.” It is the words of God that set people’s spirits alight and cause them to be reborn, and when people’s spirits are reborn, then they will have come to life. When I speak of “dead men,” I am referring to corpses that have no spirit, to people whose spirits have died within them. When the spark of life is lit in people’s spirits, then people come to life. The saints that were spoken of before refer to people who have come to life, those who were under Satan’s influence but defeated Satan. The chosen people of China have endured the cruel and inhumane persecution and trickery of the great red dragon, which has left them mentally ravaged and without the slightest bit of courage to live. Thus, the awakening of their spirits must begin with their essence: Bit by bit, in their essence, their spirits must be awakened. When they one day come to life, there will be no more obstructions, and all will proceed smoothly. At present, this remains unachievable. Most people live in a way that brings forth many deathly currents; they are shrouded in an aura of death, and there is so much that they lack. Some people’s words carry death, their actions carry death, and almost everything they bring forth in the way they live consists of death. If, today, people publicly bear testimony to God, then they will fail in this task, for they have yet to come fully to life, and there are too many dead among you. Today, some people ask why God does not show some signs and wonders so that He can quickly spread His work among the Gentiles. The dead cannot bear testimony to God; that is something only the living can do, and yet most people today are “dead men”; too many live under a shroud of death, under the influence of Satan, and are unable to gain victory. This being so, how could they bear testimony to God? How could they spread the work of the gospel?

All those who live under the influence of darkness are those who live amid death, those who are possessed by Satan. Without being saved by God and judged and chastised by God, people are unable to escape the influence of death; they cannot become the living. These “dead men” cannot bear testimony to God, and nor can they be used by God, much less enter the kingdom. God wants the testimony of the living, not the dead, and He asks that the living, not the dead, work for Him. “The dead” are those who oppose and rebel against God; they are those who are numb in spirit and do not understand God’s words; they are those who do not put the truth into practice and have not the slightest loyalty to God, and they are those who live under the power of Satan and are exploited by Satan. The dead manifest themselves by standing in opposition to the truth, by rebelling against God, and by being lowly, contemptible, malicious, brutish, deceitful, and insidious. Even if such people eat and drink the words of God, they are unable to live out the words of God; though they are alive, they are just walking, breathing corpses. The dead are totally incapable of satisfying God, much less of being utterly submissive to Him. They can only deceive Him, blaspheme against Him, and betray Him, and all that they bring forth by the way they live reveals the nature of Satan. If people wish to become living beings and to bear testimony to God, and to be approved of by God, then they must accept God’s salvation; they must gladly submit to His judgment and chastisement and must gladly accept the pruning of God. Only then will they be able to put all of the truths required by God into practice, and only then will they gain God’s salvation and truly become living beings. The living are saved by God; they have been judged and chastised by God, they are willing to devote themselves and are happy to lay down their lives for God, and they would gladly dedicate their whole lives to God. Only when the living bear testimony to God can Satan be shamed; only the living can spread the gospel work of God, only the living are in line with God’s will, and only the living are real people. Originally the man made by God was alive, but because of Satan’s corruption man lives amid death and lives under the influence of Satan, and so, in this way, people have become the spiritless dead, they have become enemies who oppose God, they have become the tools of Satan, and they have become the captives of Satan. All the living people created by God have become dead people, and so God has lost His testimony, and He has lost mankind which He created and which is the only thing that has His breath. If God is to take back His testimony and take back those who were made by His own hand but who have been taken captive by Satan, then He must resurrect them so that they become living beings, and He must reclaim them so that they live in His light. The dead are those who have no spirit, those who are numb in the extreme and who oppose God. They are foremost those who do not know God. These people have not the slightest intention of submitting to God; they only rebel against Him and oppose Him and have not the slightest loyalty. The living are those whose spirits have been reborn, who know to submit to God, and who are loyal to God. They are possessed of the truth, and of testimony, and these people alone are pleasing to God in His house. God saves those who can come to life, who can see God’s salvation, who can be loyal to God and who are willing to seek God. He saves those who believe in God’s incarnation and in His appearance. Some people can come to life, and some people cannot; this depends on whether their nature can be saved or not. Many people have heard a lot of God’s words yet do not understand God’s will, and are still incapable of putting them into practice. Such people are incapable of living out any truth and also deliberately disturb God’s work. They are incapable of doing any work for God, they cannot devote anything to Him, and they also secretly spend the church’s money and eat in the house of God for free. These people are dead and they will not be saved. God saves all those who are amid His work, but there is a portion of people who cannot receive His salvation; only a small number can receive His salvation. This is because most people have been corrupted too deeply and have become the dead, and they are beyond salvation; they have been totally exploited by Satan, and they are too malicious in their nature. That minority of people is also unable to submit to God fully. They are not those who have been absolutely faithful to God since the beginning, or who have had the utmost love for God since the beginning; rather, they have become submissive to God because of His work of conquest, they see God because of His supreme love, there are changes in their disposition because of God’s righteous disposition, and they come to know God because of His work, His work which is both practical and normal. Without this work of God, no matter how good these people are, they would still be of Satan, they would still be of death, and they would still be dead. The fact that these people can today receive God’s salvation is purely because they are willing to cooperate with God.

Because of their loyalty to God, the living shall be gained by God and live amid His promises, and because of their opposition to God, the dead shall be spurned by God and live amid His punishment and curses. Such is the righteous disposition of God, which is unchangeable by any man. Because of their own seeking, people receive God’s approval and live in the light; because of their cunning schemes, people are cursed by God and descend into punishment; because of their evildoing, people are punished by God, and because of their yearning and loyalty, people receive God’s blessings. God is righteous: He blesses the living, and curses the dead so that they are always amid death and will never live in God’s light. God will take the living into His kingdom and into His blessings, to be with Him forever. But for the dead, He will smite them and deliver them into eternal death; they are the object of His destruction and will always belong to Satan. God treats no one unjustly. All those who truly seek God will surely remain in the house of God, and all those who are rebellious against God and incompatible with Him will surely live amid His punishment. Perhaps you are unsure about God’s work in the flesh—but one day, God’s flesh will not directly arrange man’s end; instead, His Spirit will arrange man’s destination, and at that time people will know that God’s flesh and His Spirit are one, that His flesh cannot commit error, and that His Spirit is even more incapable of error. Ultimately, He will surely take those who have come to life into His kingdom; not one more nor one less. As for the dead, who have not come to life, they will be tossed into the lair of Satan.

To Have an Unchanged Disposition Is to Be in Enmity to God

After several thousand years of corruption, man is numb and dull-witted; he has become a demon that opposes God, to the extent that man’s rebelliousness toward God has been documented in the books of history, and even man himself is incapable of giving a full account of his rebellious behavior—for man has been profoundly corrupted by Satan, and has been led astray by Satan such that he knows not where to turn. Even today, man still betrays God: When man sees God, he betrays Him, and when he cannot see God, so too does he betray Him. There are even those who, having witnessed God’s curses and God’s wrath, still betray Him. And so I say that man’s sense has lost its original function, and that man’s conscience, too, has lost its original function. The man that I look upon is a beast in human attire, he is a venomous snake, and no matter how pitiable he tries to appear before My eyes, I will never be merciful toward him, for man has no grasp of the difference between black and white, of the difference between truth and non-truth. Man’s sense is so benumbed, yet still he wishes to gain blessings; his humanity is so ignoble yet still he wishes to possess the sovereignty of a king. Who could he be the king of, with sense such as that? How could he with such a humanity sit atop a throne? Man truly has no shame! He is a conceited wretch! For those of you who wish to gain blessings, I suggest you first find a mirror and look at your own ugly reflection—do you have what it takes to be a king? Do you have the face of one who could gain blessings? There has not been the slightest change in your disposition and you have not put any of the truth into practice, yet still you wish for a wonderful tomorrow. You are deluding yourself! Born into such a filthy land, man has been severely blighted by society, he has been influenced by feudal ethics, and he has been taught at “institutes of higher learning.” The backward thinking, corrupt morality, mean view on life, despicable philosophy for worldly dealings, utterly worthless existence, and depraved lifestyle and customs—all of these things have severely intruded upon man’s heart, and severely undermined and attacked his conscience. As a result, man is ever more distant from God, and ever more opposed to Him. Man’s disposition becomes more vicious by the day, and there is not a single person who will willingly give up anything for God, not a single person who will willingly submit to God, nor, moreover, a single person who will willingly seek the appearance of God. Instead, under the power of Satan, man does nothing but pursue pleasure, giving himself over to the corruption of the flesh in the land of mud. Even when they hear the truth, those who live in darkness give no thought to putting it into practice, nor are they inclined to seek out God even if they have beheld His appearance. How could a mankind so depraved have any chance of salvation? How could a mankind so decadent live in the light?

Changing man’s disposition starts with knowledge of his essence and through changes in his thinking, nature, and mental outlook—through fundamental changes. Only in this way will true changes be achieved in the disposition of man. The root cause of corrupt dispositions arising in man is Satan’s misleading, corruption, and poison. Man has been bound and controlled by Satan, and he suffers the egregious harm that Satan has inflicted upon his thinking, morality, insight, and sense. It is precisely because the fundamental things of man have been corrupted by Satan, and are utterly unlike how God originally created them, that man opposes God and cannot accept the truth. Thus, changes in man’s disposition should begin with changes in his thinking, insight, and sense that will change his knowledge of God and his knowledge of the truth. Those who were born in the most deeply corrupted of all lands are even more ignorant of what God is, or what it means to believe in God. The more corrupted people are, the less they know the existence of God, and the poorer their sense and insight. The source of man’s opposition and rebelliousness against God is his corruption by Satan. Because of Satan’s corruption, man’s conscience has grown numb; he is immoral, his thoughts are degenerate, and he has a backward mental outlook. Before he was corrupted by Satan, man naturally submitted to God and submitted to His words after hearing them. He was naturally of sound sense and conscience, and of normal humanity. After being corrupted by Satan, man’s original sense, conscience, and humanity grew dull and were impaired by Satan. Thus, he has lost his submission and love toward God. Man’s sense has become aberrant, his disposition has become the same as that of an animal, and his rebelliousness toward God is ever more frequent and grievous. Yet man still neither knows nor recognizes this, and merely opposes and rebels blindly. Man’s disposition is revealed in expressions of his sense, insight, and conscience; because his sense and insight are unsound, and his conscience has grown supremely dull, thus his disposition is rebellious against God. If man’s sense and insight cannot change, then changes in his disposition are out of the question, as is conforming to God’s will. If man’s sense is unsound, then he cannot serve God and is unfit for use by God. “Normal sense” refers to submitting to and being faithful to God, to yearning for God, to being absolute toward God, and to having a conscience toward God. It refers to being of one heart and mind toward God, and not deliberately opposing God. Having an aberrant sense is not like this. Since man was corrupted by Satan, he has come up with notions about God, and he has had no loyalty to God or yearning for Him, to say nothing of a conscience toward God. Man deliberately opposes God and passes judgments on Him, and, furthermore, hurls invective at Him behind His back. Man passes judgment on God behind His back, with clear knowledge that He is God; man has no intention of submitting to God, and merely makes blind demands and requests of Him. Such people—people who have aberrant sense—are incapable of knowing their own despicable behavior or of regretting their rebelliousness. If people are capable of knowing themselves, then they have regained a little of their sense; the more rebellious against God people who cannot yet know themselves are, the less are they sound of sense.

The revelation of man’s corrupt disposition has its source in nothing more than man’s dulled conscience, his malicious nature, and his unsound sense; if man’s conscience and sense are able to become normal again, then he will become someone fit for use before God. It is simply because man’s conscience has always been numb, and because man’s sense, which has never been sound, is growing ever duller that man is increasingly rebellious toward God, such that he even nailed Jesus to the cross and refuses God’s incarnation in the last days entry into his home, and condemns God’s flesh, and sees God’s flesh as lowly. If man had but a little humanity, he would not be so cruel in his treatment of God’s incarnate flesh; if he had but a little sense, he would not be so vicious in his treatment of the flesh of God incarnate; if he had but a little conscience, he would not “give thanks” to God incarnate in this way. Man lives in the era of God become flesh, yet he is incapable of thanking God for giving him such a good opportunity, and instead curses the coming of God, or completely ignores the fact of God’s incarnation, and is seemingly against it and averse to it. Regardless of how man treats the coming of God, God, in short, has always carried on patiently with His work—even though man has not been the slightest bit welcoming toward Him, and blindly makes requests of Him. Man’s disposition has become supremely vicious, his sense has grown supremely dull, and his conscience has been completely trampled by the evil one and long ago ceased to be the original conscience of man. Man is not only ungrateful to God incarnate for bestowing so much life and grace upon mankind, but has even become resentful toward God for giving him the truth; it is because man has not the slightest interest in the truth that he has grown resentful toward God. Not only is man unable to lay down his life for God incarnate, but he also tries to extract favors from Him, and claims an interest that is dozens of times greater than what man has given to God. People of such conscience and sense think this is no great matter, and still believe that they have expended so much of themselves for God, and that God has given them too little. There are people who, having given Me a bowl of water, hold out their hands and demand I pay them for two bowls of milk, or, having given Me a room for one night, demand I pay rent for several. With such a humanity and such a conscience, how could you still wish to gain life? What contemptible wretches you are! This sort of humanity in man and this sort of conscience in man are what cause God incarnate to wander across the land, with no place to find shelter. Those who are truly possessed of conscience and humanity should worship and wholeheartedly serve God incarnate not because of how much work He has done, but even if He were to do no work at all. This is what should be done by those who are of sound sense, and it is the duty of man. Most people even speak of conditions in their service to God: They do not care whether He is God or man, and they only talk of their own conditions, and only seek to satisfy their own desires. When you cook for Me, you demand a service fee, when you run for Me, you ask for running fees, when you work for Me you demand work fees, when you wash My clothes you demand laundry fees, when you provide for the church you demand recuperation costs, when you speak you demand speaker’s fees, when you give out books you demand distribution fees, and when you write you demand writing fees. Those I have pruned even demand recompense from Me, while those who have been sent home demand reparations for the damage to their name; those who are unmarried demand a dowry, or compensation for their lost youth; those who kill a chicken demand butcher’s fees, those who fry food demand frying fees, and those who make soup demand payment for that, too…. This is your lofty and mighty humanity, and these are the actions your warm conscience dictates. Where is your sense? Where is your humanity? Let Me tell you! If you carry on like this, I will cease to work among you. I will not work among a pack of beasts in human attire, I will not suffer thus for such a group of people whose fair faces hide feral hearts, I will not endure for such a pack of animals that has not the slightest possibility of salvation. The day I turn My back on you is the day you die, it is the day that darkness comes upon you, and the day that you are forsaken by the light. Let Me tell you! I will never be benevolent to a group such as yours, a group which is beneath even animals! There are limits to My words and actions, and with your humanity and conscience as they are, I will do no more work, for you are too lacking in conscience, you have caused Me too much pain, and your despicable behavior disgusts Me too much. People who are so lacking in humanity and conscience will never have a chance at salvation; I would never save such heartless and ungrateful people. When My day comes, I will rain down My scorching flames for all eternity upon the sons of rebellion that once provoked My fierce wrath, I will impose My everlasting punishment upon those animals that once hurled invective at Me and forsook Me, I will burn for all time with the fires of My anger the sons of rebellion who once ate and lived together with Me but did not believe in Me, who insulted and betrayed Me. I will subject all those who provoked My anger to My punishment, I will rain down the entirety of My anger upon those beasts that once wished to stand beside Me as My equals yet did not worship or submit to Me; the rod with which I strike man will fall upon those animals who once enjoyed My care and once enjoyed the mysteries that I spoke, and who once tried to take material enjoyments from Me. I will be forgiving of no person who tries to take My place; I will spare none of those who attempt to wrest food and clothes from Me. For now, you remain free from harm and continue to overreach in the demands you make of Me. When the day of wrath arrives, you will not make any more demands of Me; at that time, I will let you “enjoy” yourselves to your heart’s content, I will force your face into the earth, and you will never be able to get up again! Sooner or later, I am going to “repay” this debt to you—and I hope you patiently await the arrival of this day.

If these contemptible people can truly set aside their extravagant desires and return to God, then they still have the chance of salvation; if man has a heart that truly yearns for God, then he will not be abandoned by God. Man fails to gain God not because God has fleshly feelings, or because God is unwilling to be gained by man, but because man does not want to gain God, and because man does not seek God urgently. How could one of those who truly seek God be cursed by God? How could one of sound sense and sensitive conscience be cursed by God? How could one who truly worships and serves God be consumed by the fires of His wrath? How could one who is happy to submit to God be kicked out of God’s house? How could one who could not love God enough live in God’s punishment? How could someone who is happy to forsake everything for God be left with nothing? Man is unwilling to pursue God, unwilling to expend his possessions for God, and unwilling to devote a lifetime’s effort to God; instead, he says that God has gone too far, that too much about God is at odds with man’s notions. With a humanity like this, even if you were unstinting in your efforts you would still be unable to gain God’s approval, to say nothing of the fact that you do not seek God. Do you not know that you are the defective goods of mankind? Do you not know that no humanity is lowlier than yours? Do you not know what others call you to honor you? Those who truly love God call you the father of the wolf, the mother of the wolf, the son of the wolf, and the grandson of the wolf; you are the descendants of the wolf, the people of the wolf, and you should know your own identity and never forget it. Do not think that you are some superior figure: You are the most vicious group of non-humans among mankind. Do you not know any of this? Do you know how much of a risk I have taken by working among you? If your sense cannot become normal again, and your conscience cannot work normally, then you will never cast off the name of “wolf,” you will never escape the day of curse and will never escape the day of your punishment. You were born inferior, a thing without any worth. You are by nature a pack of hungry wolves, a pile of debris and rubbish, and, unlike you, I do not work upon you in order to gain favors, but because of the need of work. If you carry on being rebellious in this way, then I will stop My work, and will never work upon you again; on the contrary, I will transfer My work to another group that pleases Me, and in this way will leave you forever, because I am unwilling to look upon those who are in enmity to Me. So then, do you wish to be compatible with Me, or in enmity against Me?

All People Who Do Not Know God Are People Who Oppose God

To grasp the purpose of God’s work, the effect His work achieves in man, and what exactly is His will for man: this is what every person who follows God should attain to. Nowadays knowledge of God’s work is just what all people are lacking. The deeds that God has worked upon people, the entirety of the work of God, and what exactly is God’s will for man, from the creation of the world to the present time—these are things that man neither knows nor comprehends. Not only is this inadequacy seen throughout the religious world, but also in all those who believe in God. When the day comes that you truly behold God, when you really appreciate His wisdom, when you behold all the deeds that God has worked, when you recognize what God is and has—when you have seen His bounty, wisdom, wonder, and all that He has worked upon people—it is then you will have achieved success in your faith in God. When God is said to be all-encompassing and all-bountiful, in what way exactly is He all-encompassing, and in what way is He all-bountiful? If you do not understand this, then you cannot be deemed to believe in God. Why do I say that those in the religious world are not believers in God but are evildoers, of the same ilk as devils? When I say they are evildoers, it is because they do not understand the will of God and are unable to see His wisdom. God at no time reveals His work to them. They are blind; they cannot see the deeds of God, they have been forsaken by God, and they completely lack the care and protection of God, not to mention the work of the Holy Spirit. Those without the work of God are all evildoers and opponents of God. The opponents of God of which I speak refer to those who do not know God, those who acknowledge God with their lips and yet do not know Him, those who follow God and yet do not submit to Him, and those who revel in the grace of God and yet are unable to stand witness to Him. Without an understanding of the purpose of God’s work or an understanding of the work that God does in man, he cannot be in accord with the will of God, nor can he stand witness to God. The reason why man opposes God stems, on the one hand, from his corrupt disposition, and on the other hand, from ignorance of God and lack of understanding of the principles by which God works and of His will for man. These two aspects, taken together, constitute a history of man’s resistance to God. Novices in the faith oppose God because such opposition lies within their nature, while the opposition to God of those with many years in the faith results from their ignorance of Him, in addition to their corrupt disposition. In the time before God became flesh, the measure of whether a man opposed God was based on whether he kept the decrees set forth by God in heaven. For instance, in the Age of Law, whoever did not keep the laws of Jehovah was regarded as one who opposed God; whoever stole the offerings to Jehovah, or whoever stood against those favored by Jehovah, was regarded as one who opposed God and would be stoned to death; whoever did not respect his father and mother, and whoever struck or cursed another, was regarded as one who did not keep the laws. And all who did not keep the laws of Jehovah were regarded as standing against Him. This was no longer so in the Age of Grace, when whoever stood against Jesus was regarded as one who stood against God, and whoever did not submit to the words uttered by Jesus was regarded as one who stood against God. At this time, the way in which opposition to God was defined became both more accurate and more practical. In the time when God had not yet become flesh, the measure of whether man opposed God was based on whether man worshiped and looked up to the invisible God in heaven. The way in which opposition to God was defined at that time was not all that practical, for man could not see God, nor did he know what the image of God was like, or how He worked and spoke. Man had no notions about God whatsoever, and he believed in God vaguely, because God had not yet appeared to man. Therefore, no matter how man believed in God in his imagination, God did not condemn man or make too many demands of him, because man was completely unable to see God. When God becomes flesh and comes to work among men, all behold Him and hear His words, and all see the deeds that God works from within His body of flesh. At that moment, all man’s notions become foam. As for those who have seen God appearing in the flesh, they shall not be condemned if they willingly submit to Him, whereas those who purposefully stand against Him shall be deemed an opponent of God. Such people are antichrists, enemies who willfully stand against God. Those who harbor notions regarding God but are still ready and willing to submit to Him will not be condemned. God condemns man on the basis of man’s intentions and actions, never for his thoughts and ideas. If He were to condemn man on the basis of his thoughts and ideas, then not a single person would be able to escape from the wrathful hands of God. Those who willfully stand against the incarnate God shall be punished for their lack of submission. With regard to these people that willfully stand against God, their opposition stems from the fact that they harbor notions about God, which leads them in turn into actions that disturb God’s work. These people intentionally resist and destroy the work of God. They do not merely have notions about God, but they also engage in activities that disturb His work, and for this reason people of this kind shall be condemned. Those who do not willfully disturb God’s work shall not be condemned as sinners, because they are able to willingly submit and not engage in activities that cause disruption and disturbance. People like this shall not be condemned. However, when people have experienced God’s work for many years, if they continue to harbor notions about God and remain unable to know the work of the incarnate God, and if, no matter how many years they have experienced His work, they continue to be filled with notions about God and are still unable to come to know Him, then even if they do not engage in disturbing activities, their hearts are nevertheless filled with many notions about God, and even if these notions do not become apparent, people like this are of no help whatsoever to the work of God. They are unable to spread the gospel for God or stand witness to Him. People like this are good-for-nothings and imbeciles. Because they do not know God and are moreover wholly incapable of casting away their notions about Him, they are therefore condemned. It can be said like this: It is normal for novices in the faith to hold notions about God or to know nothing of Him, but for one who has believed in God for many years and experienced a good deal of His work, it would not be normal for such a person to continue to hold notions, and it would be even less normal for someone like this to have no knowledge of God. It is because this is not a normal state that they are condemned. These abnormal people are all garbage; they are the ones who oppose God the most and who have enjoyed the grace of God for nothing. All such people shall be cast out in the end!

Anyone who does not understand the purpose of God’s work is one who opposes Him, and one who has come to understand the purpose of God’s work but still does not seek to satisfy God is even more to be deemed an opponent of God. There are those who read the Bible in grand churches and recite it all day long, yet not one among them understands the purpose of God’s work. Not one among them is able to know God; still less can any one among them accord with God’s will. They are all worthless, vile people, each standing on high to lecture God. They willfully oppose God even as they carry His banner. Claiming faith in God, still they eat the flesh and drink the blood of man. All such people are devils that devour the soul of man, head demons that deliberately disturb those trying to step onto the right path, and stumbling blocks impeding those who seek God. They may appear of “sound constitution,” but how are their followers to know that they are none other than antichrists who lead people to stand against God? How are their followers to know that they are living devils dedicated to the devouring of human souls? Those who hold themselves in high esteem in God’s presence are the most abject of men, while those who think themselves lowly are the most honored. And those who think they know the work of God and who are, moreover, capable of proclaiming the work of God to others with great fanfare even as they look directly at Him—these are the most ignorant of men. Such people are without the testimony of God, arrogant and full of conceit. Those who believe that they have too little knowledge of God, despite having actual experience and practical knowledge of Him, are those most beloved by Him. Only such people truly have testimony and are truly capable of being perfected by God. Those who do not understand the will of God are opponents of God; those who understand the will of God and yet do not practice the truth are opponents of God; those who eat and drink the words of God, and yet go against the essence of God’s words, are opponents of God; those who have notions about the incarnate God, and moreover have a mind to engage in rebellion, are opponents of God; those who pass judgment on God are opponents of God; and whoever is unable to know God or to bear witness to Him is an opponent of God. So I urge you: If you really have faith that you can walk this path, then keep on following it. But if you are unable to refrain from opposing God, then you had best walk away before it is too late. Otherwise, the chances of things turning out badly for you run extremely high, because your nature is simply too corrupt. Of loyalty or submission, or a heart that thirsts for righteousness and truth, or love for God, you have not one jot or iota. It may be said that your situation before God is an utter shambles. You cannot abide by what you ought to abide by, and are unable to say what ought to be said. What you ought to put into practice, you have failed to put into practice; and the function that you ought to fulfill, you have been unable to fulfill. You do not have the loyalty, conscience, submission, or resolution that you ought. You have not endured the suffering that it behooves you to endure, and you do not have the faith that you ought. Quite simply, you are completely devoid of any merit: Are you not ashamed to go on living? Let Me persuade you that you would be better off closing your eyes in eternal rest, thereby sparing God from worrying on your account and suffering for your sake. You believe in God and yet do not know His will; you eat and drink the words of God and yet are unable to keep to what God demands of man. You believe in God and yet do not know Him, and you stay alive without a goal to strive for, without any values, without any meaning. You live as a human being and yet have no conscience, integrity, or credibility in the slightest degree—can you still call yourselves human beings? You believe in God and yet deceive Him; what is more, you take God’s money and eat up the offerings that are made to Him. And yet, in the end you still fail to show the slightest consideration for God’s feelings or the faintest conscience toward Him. Not even the most trivial of God’s demands can you meet. Can you still call yourselves human beings? Eating the food God provides you and breathing the oxygen He gives you, enjoying His grace, yet, in the end, you do not have the slightest knowledge of God. On the contrary, you have become good-for-nothings that oppose God. Does that not make you a beast even lower than a dog? Among animals, are there any that are more malicious than you?

Those pastors and elders who stand in the high pulpit teaching others are opponents of God and allies of Satan; would not those of you who do not stand in the high pulpit teaching others be even greater opponents of God? Are you not, even more than they, in cahoots with Satan? Those who do not understand the purpose of God’s work do not know how to accord with the will of God. Surely, it cannot be that those who do understand the purpose of His work would not know how to accord with God’s will. The work of God is never in error; rather, it is man’s pursuit that is flawed. Are not those degenerates who willfully oppose God even more sinister and malevolent than those pastors and elders? Many are those who oppose God, but among them there are also many different ways in which they oppose God. As there are all manner of believers, so too are there all manner of those who oppose God, each unlike the other. Not a single one of those who fail to recognize clearly the purpose of God’s work can be saved. Regardless of how man may have opposed God in the past, when man comes to understand the purpose of God’s work and dedicates his efforts to satisfying God, God will wipe clean all of his former sins. As long as man seeks the truth and practices the truth, God will not keep in mind what he has done. Moreover, it is on the basis of man’s practice of the truth that God justifies him. This is the righteousness of God. Before man has seen God or experienced His work, regardless of how man acts toward God, He does not keep it in mind. However, once man has seen God and experienced His work, all the deeds and actions of man will be entered by God into the “annals,” for man has seen God and lived amid His work.

When man has truly seen what God has and is, when he has seen His supremacy, and when he has truly come to know the work of God, and furthermore, when the old disposition of man is changed, then man will have completely cast away his rebellious disposition that opposes God. It can be said that everyone has at some time opposed God and everyone has at some time rebelled against God. However, if you willingly submit to the incarnate God, and from this point satisfy God’s heart with your loyalty, practice the truth that you ought, perform your duty as you ought, and keep the regulations that you ought, then you are one who is willing to cast away your rebelliousness to satisfy God and one who can be perfected by God. Should you stubbornly refuse to see your errors and have no intention of repenting yourself, should you persist in your rebellious conduct without the least intention of cooperating with God and satisfying Him, then such an obstinate and incorrigible person as you will certainly be punished and will certainly never be one to be perfected by God. This being so, you are the enemy of God today and tomorrow you will also be the enemy of God, and so too will you remain the enemy of God the day after; you will forever be an opponent of God and the enemy of God. In that case, how could God possibly let you off? It is in the nature of man to oppose God, but man must not seek out on purpose the “secret” of opposing God just because changing his nature is an insurmountable task. If that were the case, then you had better walk away before it were too late, lest your chastisement in the future become more severe, and lest your brutish nature erupt and become ungovernable, until your fleshly body were terminated by God in the end. You believe in God to receive blessings; but if in the end only misfortune befell you, would not that be a shame? I urge you, you had better make another plan. Anything that you can do would be better than believing in God: Surely it cannot be that there is just this one path. Would you not go on surviving if you did not seek the truth? Why must you be at odds with God in this way?

The Vision of God’s Work (1)

John worked seven years for Jesus, and had already paved the way when Jesus arrived. Before this, the gospel of the kingdom of heaven as preached by John was heard throughout the land, so that it spread across Judea, and everyone called him a prophet. At the time, King Herod wished to kill John, yet he did not dare, for the people held John in high regard, and Herod feared that if he killed John they would revolt against him. The work done by John took root among the common people, and he made believers of the Jews. For seven years he paved the way for Jesus, right until the time that Jesus began to perform His ministry. For this reason, John was the greatest of all the prophets. It was only after John was imprisoned that Jesus began His official work. Before John, there had never been a prophet who had paved the way for God, because prior to Jesus, God had never before become flesh. So, of all the prophets up until John, he was the only one to pave the way for God incarnate, and in this way, John became the greatest prophet of the Old and New Testaments. John began to spread the gospel of the kingdom of heaven seven years before the baptism of Jesus. To the people, the work he did seemed above the subsequent work of Jesus, yet he was, nevertheless, still only a prophet. He worked and spoke not within the temple, but in the towns and villages outside of it. This he did, of course, among the people of the Jewish nation, particularly those who were impoverished. Rarely did John come into contact with people from the upper echelons of society, and he would only spread the gospel among the ordinary people of Judea. This was in order to prepare the right people for the Lord Jesus, and to prepare suitable places for Him to work in. With a prophet such as John to pave the way, the Lord Jesus was able to directly embark upon His way of the cross as soon as He arrived. When God became flesh to do His work, He did not have to do the work of choosing people, and nor did He need to personally seek people, or a place in which to work. He did not do such work when He came; the right person had already prepared such things for Him before He arrived. John had already completed this work before Jesus began His work, for when God incarnate arrived to do His work, He got straight to work on those who had long been waiting for Him. Jesus had not come to do man’s work of rectification. He had come only to perform the ministry that was His to perform; everything else bore no relation to Him. When John came, he did nothing but bring out from the temple and among the Jews a group of those who accepted the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, in order that they might become the objects of the work of the Lord Jesus. John worked for seven years, which is to say he spread the gospel for seven years. During his work, John did not perform many miracles, for his work was to pave the way; his work was the work of preparation. All other work, the work Jesus was going to do, was unrelated to him; he only asked man to confess his sins and repent, and baptized people, so that they could be saved. Though he did new work and opened a path that man had never walked upon before, still he only paved the way for Jesus. He was merely a prophet that did the preparation work, and he was incapable of doing the work of Jesus. Though Jesus was not the first to preach the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, and though He continued along the path that John had embarked upon, still there was no one else who could do His work, and it was above the work of John. Jesus could not prepare His own way; His work was carried out directly on behalf of God. And so, no matter how many years John worked, he was still a prophet, and still one who paved the way. The three years of work done by Jesus surpassed the seven years of work by John, for the essence of His work was not the same. When Jesus began to perform His ministry, which is also when the work of John came to an end, John had prepared enough people and places for use by the Lord Jesus, and they were sufficient for the Lord Jesus to begin three years of work. And so, as soon as the work of John was finished, the Lord Jesus officially began His own work, and the words spoken by John were cast aside. That is because the work done by John was only for the sake of the transition, and his words were not the words of life that would lead man to new growth; ultimately, his words were only of temporary use.

The work that Jesus did was not supernatural; there was a process to it, and it all progressed according to the normal laws of things. By the last six months of His life, Jesus knew with certainty that He had come to do this work, and He knew that He had come to be nailed to the cross. Before He was crucified, Jesus continually prayed to God the Father, just as He prayed three times in the Garden of Gethsemane. After He was baptized, Jesus performed His ministry for three and a half years, and His official work lasted two and a half years. During the first year, He was accused by Satan, disturbed by man, and subjected to the temptation of man. He overcame many temptations while He carried out His work. In the last six months, when Jesus was soon to be crucified, from the mouth of Peter came the words that He was the Son of the living God, that He was Christ. Only then did His work become known to all, and only then was His identity revealed to the public. After that, Jesus told His disciples that He was to be crucified for the sake of man, and that three days later He would rise again; that He had come to carry out the work of redemption, and He was the Savior. Only in the last six months did He reveal His identity and the work that He intended to do. This was also the time of God, and this was how the work was to be carried out. At the time, part of Jesus’ work was in accordance with the Old Testament, as well as with the laws of Moses and the words of Jehovah during the Age of Law. All these things, Jesus used to do part of His work. He preached to the people and taught them in the synagogues, and He employed the predictions of the prophets in the Old Testament to rebuke the Pharisees that were in enmity with Him, and used the words from the Scriptures to reveal their rebelliousness and thus condemn them. For they despised what Jesus had done; in particular, much of Jesus’ work was not done according to the laws in the Scriptures, and, furthermore, what He taught was higher than their own words, and even higher than that which had been foretold by the prophets in the Scriptures. The work of Jesus was only for the sake of man’s redemption and for the crucifixion, and so there was no need for Him to say more words in order to conquer any man. Much of what He taught man was drawn from the words of the Scriptures, and even if His work did not exceed the Scriptures, still He was able to accomplish the work of the crucifixion. His was not the work of the word, nor work done for the sake of conquering mankind, but work done in order to redeem mankind. He only acted as the sin offering for mankind, and did not act as the source of the word for mankind. He did not do the work of the Gentiles, which was the work of conquering man, but the work of the crucifixion, work that was done among those who believed there was a God. Even though His work was carried out upon the foundation of the Scriptures, and even though He used that which had been foretold by the old prophets to condemn the Pharisees, this was sufficient to complete the work of the crucifixion. If the work of today were still carried out upon the foundation of the predictions of the old prophets in the Scriptures, then it would be impossible to conquer you, for the Old Testament contains no record of the rebelliousness and sins of you Chinese people, and there is no history of your sins. So, if this work still lingered in the Bible, you would never yield. The Bible records only a limited history of the Israelites, one which is incapable of establishing whether you are evil or good, or of judging you. Imagine that I were to judge you according to the history of the Israelites—would you still follow Me as you do today? Do you know how difficult you are? If no words were spoken during this stage, then it would be impossible to complete the work of conquest. Because I have not come to be nailed to the cross, I must speak words that are separate from the Bible, so that you may be conquered. The work done by Jesus was merely a stage higher than the Old Testament; it was used to begin an age, and to lead that age. Why did He say, “I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill the law”? Yet in His work there was much that differed from the laws practiced and the commandments followed by the Israelites of the Old Testament, for He did not come to obey the law, but to fulfill it. The process of fulfilling it included many practical things: His work was more practical and realistic, and, furthermore, it was more alive, and was not blind adherence to rules. Did the Israelites not keep the Sabbath? When Jesus came, He did not observe the Sabbath, for He said that the Son of man was the Lord of the Sabbath, and when the Lord of the Sabbath arrived, He would do as He wished. He had come to fulfill the laws of the Old Testament and to change the laws. All that is done today is based upon the present, yet it still rests upon the foundation of the work of Jehovah in the Age of Law, and it does not transgress this scope. To watch your tongue, and not commit adultery, for example—are these not the laws of the Old Testament? Today, what is required of you is not only limited to the Ten Commandments, but consists of commandments and laws of a higher order than those that came before. Yet this does not mean that what came before has been abolished, for each stage of God’s work is carried out upon the foundation of the stage that came before. As for the work that Jehovah then did in Israel, such as requiring people to offer up sacrifices, honor their parents, not to worship idols, not to assault or curse others, not to commit adultery, not to smoke or drink, and not to eat dead things or drink blood—does this not form the foundation for your practice even today? It is upon the foundation of the past that the work has been carried out up until today. Though the laws of the past are no longer mentioned and new demands have been made of you, these laws, far from being abolished, have instead been raised higher. To say that they have been abolished means that the previous age is outdated, whereas there are some commandments that you must honor for all eternity. The commandments of the past have already been put into practice, have already become the being of man, and there is no need to place special emphasis on such commandments as “Do not smoke,” and “Do not drink,” and so on. Upon this foundation, new commandments are laid down according to your needs today, according to your stature, and according to the work of today. Decreeing commandments for the new age does not mean abolishing the commandments of the old age, but lifting them higher upon this foundation, to make the actions of man more complete, and more in line with reality. If, today, you were only required to follow the commandments and abide by the laws of the Old Testament in the same way as the Israelites, and if you were even required to memorize the laws laid down by Jehovah, there would be no possibility that you could change. If you were only to abide by those few limited commandments or memorize innumerable laws, your old disposition would remain deeply embedded, and there would be no way to uproot it. Thus you would become increasingly depraved, and not one of you would become submissive. This is to say that a few simple commandments or countless laws are incapable of helping you know the deeds of Jehovah. You are not the same as the Israelites: By following the laws and memorizing the commandments, they were able to witness the deeds of Jehovah and give their devotion to Him alone. But you are unable to achieve this, and a few commandments of the Old Testament age are not only incapable of making you give over your heart, or of protecting you, but will instead make you lax, and will make you fall down into Hades. For My work is the work of conquest, and it is aimed at your rebelliousness and your old disposition. The kind words of Jehovah and Jesus fall far short of the severe words of judgment today. Without such severe words, it would be impossible to conquer you “experts,” who have been rebellious for thousands of years. The laws of the Old Testament lost their power on you long ago, and the judgment of today is far more formidable than the old laws. What is most suitable for you is judgment, and not the trifling restrictions of laws, for you are not the mankind of the very beginning, but a mankind that has been corrupt for thousands of years. What man must achieve now is in line with the real state of man today, according to the caliber and actual stature of present-day man, and it does not require that you follow rules. This is so that changes may be achieved in your old disposition, and in order that you may cast aside your notions. Do you think the commandments are rules? They are, it can be said, normal requirements of man. They are not rules that you must follow. Take prohibiting smoking, for example—is that a rule? It is not a rule! It is required by normal humanity; it is not a rule, but something stipulated for the whole of mankind. Today, the dozen or so commandments that have been set forth are also not rules; they are what is required to achieve normal humanity. People did not possess or know of such things in the past, and so people are required to achieve them today, and such things do not count as rules. Laws are not the same as rules. The rules that I speak of are in reference to ceremonies, formalities or the distorted practices of man; they are the regulations that are of no help to man, no benefit to him; they form a course of action that holds no meaning. This is the epitome of rules, and such rules must be discarded, for they offer no benefit to man. It is that which is of benefit to man that must be put into practice.

The Vision of God’s Work (2)

The gospel of repentance was preached in the Age of Grace, and provided that man believed, then he would be saved. Today, in place of salvation, there is only talk of conquest and perfection. Never is it said that if one person believes, their whole family will be blessed, or that once saved always saved. Today, no one speaks these words, and such things are outdated. At the time, Jesus’ work was the work to redeem all mankind. The sins of all who believed in Him were forgiven; as long as you believed in Him, He would redeem you; if you believed in Him, you were no longer of sin, you were relieved of your sins. This is what it meant to be saved, and to be justified by faith. Yet in those who believed, there remained that which was rebellious and opposed God, and which still had to be slowly removed. Salvation did not mean man had been completely gained by Jesus, but that man was no longer of sin, that he had been forgiven his sins. Provided you believed, you would never more be of sin. At the time, Jesus did much work that was incomprehensible to His disciples and said much that people did not understand. This is because, at the time, He did not give any explanation. Thus, several years after He departed, Matthew created a genealogy for Jesus, and others also did much work that was of the will of man. Jesus did not come to perfect and gain man, but to do one stage of work: bringing forth the gospel of the kingdom of heaven and completing the work of the crucifixion. And so, once Jesus was crucified, His work came to a complete end. But in the current stage—the work of conquest—more words must be spoken, more work must be done, and there must be many processes. So too must the mysteries of the work of Jesus and Jehovah be revealed, so that all people may have understanding and clarity in their belief, for this is the work of the last days, and the last days are the end of God’s work, the time of the work’s conclusion. This stage of work will elucidate for you the law of Jehovah and the redemption of Jesus, and is principally so that you may understand the entire work of God’s six-thousand-year management plan, and appreciate all the significance and essence of this six-thousand-year management plan, and understand the purpose of all the work done by Jesus and the words He spoke, and even your blind credence in and adoration of the Bible. All this it will allow you to understand thoroughly. You will come to understand both the work done by Jesus, and the work of God today; you will understand and behold all of the truth, the life, and the way. In the stage of work done by Jesus, why did Jesus depart without doing the concluding work? Because the stage of Jesus’ work was not the work of conclusion. When He was nailed to the cross, His words also came to an end; after His crucifixion, His work completely finished. The current stage is different: Only after the words are spoken to the end and God’s entire work is concluded will His work have finished. During Jesus’ stage of work, there were many words that remained unsaid, or which were not fully articulated. Yet Jesus cared not what He did or did not say, for His ministry was not a ministry of words, and so after He was nailed to the cross, He departed. That stage of work was chiefly for the sake of the crucifixion, and is unlike the current stage. This current stage of work is principally for the sake of completion, of clearing up, and of bringing all work to a conclusion. If the words are not spoken to their very end, there will be no way of concluding this work, for in this stage of work all work is brought to an end and accomplished using words. At the time, Jesus did much work that was incomprehensible to man. He departed quietly, and today there are still many who do not understand His words, whose understanding is erroneous yet still they believe it to be correct, and do not know that they are wrong. The final stage will bring God’s work to a complete end and will provide its conclusion. All will come to understand and know of God’s management plan. The notions within man, his intentions, his fallacious understanding, his notions about the work of Jehovah and Jesus, his views about the Gentiles, and all his other distortions will be corrected. And man will understand all the right paths of life, and all the work done by God, and the entire truth. When that happens, this stage of work will come to an end. The work of Jehovah was the creation of the world, it was the beginning; this stage of work is the end of work, and it is the conclusion. At the start, God’s work was carried out among the chosen ones of Israel, and it was the dawn of a new epoch in the most holy of all places. The last stage of work is carried out in the most impure of all countries, to judge the world and bring the age to an end. In the first stage, God’s work was done in the brightest of all places, and the last stage is carried out in the darkest of all places, and this darkness will be driven out, the light brought forth, and all the people conquered. When the people of this most impure and darkest of all places have been conquered, and the entire population has acknowledged that there is a God, who is the true God, and every person has been utterly convinced, then this fact will be used to carry out the work of conquest throughout the entire universe. This stage of work is symbolic: Once the work of this age has been finished, the work of six thousand years of management will come to a complete end. Once those in the darkest of all places have been conquered, it goes without saying that it will also be so everywhere else. As such, only the work of conquest in China carries meaningful symbolism. China embodies all forces of darkness, and the people of China represent all those who are of the flesh, of Satan, and of flesh and blood. It is the Chinese people who have been most corrupted by the great red dragon, who have the strongest opposition to God, whose humanity is most base and impure, and so they are the archetype of all corrupt humanity. This is not to say that other countries have no problems at all; the notions of man are all the same, and although the people of these countries may be of good caliber, if they do not know God, then it must be that they oppose Him. Why did the Jews also oppose and rebel against God? Why did the Pharisees also oppose Him? Why did Judas betray Jesus? At the time, many of the disciples did not know Jesus. Why, after Jesus was crucified and rose again, did people still not believe in Him? Is man’s rebelliousness not all the same? It is merely that the people of China are made an example of, and when they are conquered they will become models and specimens, and will serve as references for others. Why have I always said that you are an adjunct to My management plan? It is in the people of China that corruption, impurity, unrighteousness, opposition, and rebelliousness are manifested most completely and revealed in all their varied forms. On the one hand, they are of poor caliber, and on the other, their lives and mindset are backward, and their habits, social environment, family of birth—all are poor and the most backward. Their status, too, is low. The work in this place is symbolic, and after this test work has been carried out in its entirety, God’s subsequent work will be much easier. If this step of work can be completed, then the subsequent work goes without saying. Once this step of work has been accomplished, great success will have been fully achieved, and the work of conquest throughout the entire universe will have come to a complete end. In fact, once the work among you has been successful, this will be equivalent to the success throughout the entire universe. This is the significance of why I have you act as a model and a specimen. Rebelliousness, opposition, impurity, unrighteousness—all are found in these people, and in them is represented all the rebelliousness of mankind. They are really something. Thus, they are held up as the epitome of conquest, and once they have been conquered they will naturally become specimens and models for others. Nothing was more symbolic than the first stage being carried out in Israel: The Israelites were the most holy and least corrupt of all peoples, and so the dawn of the new epoch in this land held the utmost significance. It can be said that mankind’s forefathers came from Israel, and that Israel was the birthplace of God’s work. In the beginning, these people were the most holy, and they all worshiped Jehovah, and God’s work in them was able to yield the greatest results. The entire Bible records the work of two ages: One was the work of the Age of Law, and one was the work of the Age of Grace. The Old Testament records Jehovah’s words to the Israelites and His work in Israel; the New Testament records Jesus’ work in Judea. But why does the Bible not contain any Chinese names? Because the first two parts of God’s work were carried out in Israel, because the people of Israel were the chosen ones—which is to say that they were the first to accept the work of Jehovah. They were the least corrupt of all mankind, and in the beginning, they were of a heart to look up to God and fear Him. They obeyed the words of Jehovah, and always served in the temple, and wore priestly robes or crowns. They were the earliest people to worship God, and the earliest object of His work. These people were the specimens and models for the whole of mankind. They were specimens and models of holiness, of righteous men. People such as Job, Abraham, Lot, or Peter and Timothy—they were all Israelites, and the most holy of specimens and models. Israel was the earliest country to worship God among mankind, and more righteous people came from here than anywhere else. God worked in them in order that He could better manage mankind throughout the land in the future. Their achievements and their righteous deeds in worshiping Jehovah were recorded, so that they could serve as specimens and models to the people beyond Israel during the Age of Grace; and their actions have upheld several thousand years of work, right up until today.

After the foundation of the world, the first stage of God’s work was carried out in Israel, and thus Israel was the birthplace of God’s work on earth, and the base of God’s work on earth. The scope of Jesus’ work covered the whole of Judea. During His work, very few of those outside of Judea knew of it, for He did not do any work beyond Judea. Today, God’s work has been brought to China, and it is carried out purely within this scope. During this phase, no work is launched outside of China; its spread beyond China is work that will come later. This stage of work follows on from the stage of Jesus’ work. Jesus did the work of redemption, and this stage is the work that follows on from that work; the work of redemption has been completed, and in this stage there is no need for conception by the Holy Spirit, because this stage of work is unlike the last stage, and, moreover, because China is unlike Israel. Jesus did one stage of the work of redemption. Man beheld Jesus, and not long after, His work began to spread to the Gentiles. Today, there are many who believe in God in America, the UK and Russia, so why are there fewer people who believe in China? Because China is the most closed nation. As such, China was the last to accept the way of God, and even now it has been less than a hundred years since it did—much later than America and the UK. The last stage of God’s work is carried out in the land of China in order to bring His work to an end, and in order that all His work may be accomplished. The people in Israel all called Jehovah their Lord. At the time, they considered Him the head of their family, and the whole of Israel became a great family in which everyone worshiped their Lord Jehovah. The Spirit of Jehovah often appeared to them, and He spoke and uttered His voice to them, and used a pillar of cloud and sound to guide their lives. At that time, the Spirit provided His guidance in Israel directly, speaking and uttering His voice to the people, and they beheld the clouds and heard the peals of thunder, and in this way He guided their lives for several thousands of years. Thus, only the people of Israel have always worshiped Jehovah. They believe that Jehovah is their God, and that He is not the God of the Gentiles. This is not surprising: Jehovah, after all, had worked among them for close to four thousand years. In the land of China, after thousands of years of lethargic slumber, only now have the degenerates come to know that the heavens and earth and all things were not formed naturally, but made by the Creator. Because this gospel has come from abroad, those feudal, reactionary minds believe that all those who accept this gospel are treacherous, they are the curs who have betrayed the Buddha, their ancestor. Moreover, many of these feudal minds ask, “How can Chinese people believe in the God of foreigners? Are they not betraying their ancestors? Are they not committing evil?” Today, people have long since forgotten that Jehovah is their God. They have long since pushed the Creator to the back of their minds, and they instead believe in evolution, meaning that man evolved from apes, and that the natural world came about as a matter of course. All the good food enjoyed by mankind is provided by nature, there is order to the life and death of man, and there does not exist a God who rules over it all. Moreover, there are many atheists who believe that God ruling over everything is superstition and is not scientific. But can science replace the work of God? Can science rule over mankind? Preaching the gospel in a country ruled by atheism is no easy task, and it involves great obstacles. Today, are there not many who oppose God in this way?

When Jesus came to do His work, many people compared His work against the work of Jehovah, and, finding them inconsistent, they nailed Jesus to the cross. Why did they find no consistencies between Their work? It was, in part, because Jesus did new work, and also because, before Jesus began His work, no one had written His genealogy. It would have been good if someone had—who would then have nailed Jesus to the cross? If Matthew had written Jesus’ genealogy several decades earlier, then Jesus would not have suffered such great persecution. Is this not so? As soon as people read of Jesus’ genealogy—that He was the son of Abraham, and the progeny of David—then they would have ceased their persecution of Him. Is it not a pity that His genealogy was written too late? And what a pity it is that the Bible only records two stages of God’s work: one stage that was the work of the Age of Law, and one that was the work of the Age of Grace; one stage that was the work of Jehovah, and one that was the work of Jesus. How much better it would have been if a great prophet had foretold the work of today. There would have been an extra section to the Bible entitled “The Work of the Last Days”—would that not have been much better? Why should man be subjected to so much hardship today? You have had such a difficult time! If anyone deserves to be hated, it is Isaiah and Daniel for not foretelling the work of the last days, and if anyone is to blame, it is the apostles of the New Testament who did not list the genealogy of the second incarnation of God earlier. What a shame that is! You have to search all over for evidence, and even after finding some fragments of small words you still cannot tell whether they really are proof. How embarrassing! Why is God so secretive in His work? Today, many people have yet to find conclusive evidence, yet they are also unable to deny it. So what should they do? They cannot resolutely follow God, yet neither can they move forward in such doubt. And so, many “clever and gifted scholars” embrace an attitude of “try and see” when they follow God. This is too much trouble! Would things not have been so much easier if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had been able to foretell the future? It would have been better if John had beheld the inner truth of life in the kingdom—what a pity that he only saw visions and did not see real, material work on earth. It is such a shame! What is wrong with God? Why, after His work went so well in Israel, has He now come to China, and, why did He have to become flesh, and personally work and live among the people? God is too inconsiderate to man! Not only did He not tell people in advance, but suddenly He brought His chastisement and judgment. It really makes no sense! The first time God became flesh, He suffered much hardship as a result of not telling man in advance of all the inner truth. Surely He cannot have forgotten that? And so why does He still not tell man this time? Today, how unfortunate it is that there are only sixty-six books in the Bible. There just needs to be one more foretelling the work of the last days! Do you not think? Even Jehovah, Isaiah and David made no mention of the work of today. They were further removed from the present, separated in time by over four thousand years. Neither did Jesus fully foretell the work of today, speaking just a little of it, and still man finds insufficient evidence. If you compare the work of today with before, how can the two tally with each other? Jehovah’s stage of work was directed at Israel, so if you compare the work of today with it there will be even greater dissonance; the two of them simply cannot be compared. Neither are you of Israel, nor are you a Jew; your caliber and everything about you are lacking—how can you compare yourself against them? Is this possible? Know that today is the Age of Kingdom, and it is different from the Age of Law and the Age of Grace. In any case, do not try and apply a formula; God cannot be found in any such formulas.

How did Jesus live during the 29 years after His birth? The Bible records nothing of His childhood and youth; do you know what they were like? Could it be that He had no childhood or youth, and that when He was born He was already 30 years old? You know too little, so do not be so careless in airing your views. It does you no good! The Bible only records that before Jesus’ 30th birthday, He was baptized and was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to undergo the devil’s temptation. And the Four Gospels record His three and a half years of work. There is no record of His childhood and youth, but this does not prove that He had no childhood and youth; it is just that, in the beginning, He did not do any work, and was a normal person. Could you say, then, Jesus had lived for 33 years without a youth or a childhood? Could He have suddenly reached the age of 33 and a half? All this man thinks about Him is supernatural and unrealistic. There is no doubt that God incarnate is possessed of ordinary and normal humanity, but when He carries out His work it is directly with His incomplete humanity and complete divinity. It is because of this that people have doubts about the work of today, and even about the work of Jesus. Although God’s work differs between the two times He became flesh, His essence does not. Of course, if you read the records of the Four Gospels, the differences are great. How can you return to Jesus’ life during His childhood and youth? How can you comprehend the normal humanity of Jesus? Maybe you have a strong understanding of the humanity of today’s God, yet you have no grasp of Jesus’ humanity, much less do you understand it. If it had not been recorded by Matthew, you would have no inkling of the humanity of Jesus. Maybe, when I tell you of Jesus’ stories during His life, and tell you of the inner truths of Jesus’ childhood and youth, you will shake your head and say, “No! He couldn’t be like that. He can’t have any weakness, much less should He possess any humanity!” You will even shout and scream. It is because you do not understand Jesus that you have notions about Me. You believe Jesus to be too divine, to have nothing of the flesh about Him. But the facts are still the facts. No one wishes to speak in defiance of the truth of the facts, for when I speak it is in relation to the truth; it is not speculation, nor is it prophecy. Know that God can rise to great heights, and, moreover, that He can hide in great depths. He is not something you concoct in your mind—He is the God of all created beings, not a personal God conceived by one particular person.

The Vision of God’s Work (3)

The first time God became flesh was through conception by the Holy Spirit, and this was relevant to the work He intended to do. The Age of Grace began with Jesus’ name. When Jesus began to perform His ministry, the Holy Spirit began to testify to the name of Jesus, and the name of Jehovah was no longer spoken of; instead, the Holy Spirit undertook the new work principally under the name of Jesus. The testimony of those who believed in Him was borne for Jesus Christ, and the work they did was also for Jesus Christ. The conclusion of the Old Testament Age of Law meant that the work principally conducted under the name of Jehovah had come to an end. Henceforth, the name of God was no longer Jehovah; instead He was called Jesus, and from here on the Holy Spirit began the work principally under the name of Jesus. So, people who still today eat and drink the words of Jehovah, and still do everything according to the work of the Age of Law—are you not blindly conforming to rules? Are you not stuck in the past? You know now that the last days have arrived. Can it be that, when Jesus comes, He will still be called Jesus? Jehovah told the people of Israel that a Messiah would be coming, and yet when He did come, He was not called Messiah but Jesus. Jesus said that He would come again, and that He would arrive as He had departed. These were the words of Jesus, but did you see the way in which Jesus departed? Jesus left riding on a white cloud, but can it be that He will personally return among men on a white cloud? If that were so, would He not still be called Jesus? When Jesus comes again, the age will have already changed, so could He still be called Jesus? Is it that God can only be known by the name of Jesus? May He not be called by a new name in a new age? Can the image of one person and one particular name represent God in His entirety? In each age, God does new work and is called by a new name; how could He do the same work in different ages? How could He cling to the old? The name of Jesus was taken for the sake of the work of redemption, so would He still be called by the same name when He returns in the last days? Would He still be doing the work of redemption? Why is it that Jehovah and Jesus are one, yet They are called by different names in different ages? Is it not because the ages of Their work are different? Could a single name represent God in His entirety? This being so, God must be called by a different name in a different age, and He must use the name to change the age and to represent the age. For no one name can fully represent God Himself, and each name is able only to represent the temporal aspect of God’s disposition in a given age; all it needs to do is to represent His work. Therefore, God can choose whatever name befits His disposition to represent the entire age. Regardless of whether it is the age of Jehovah, or the age of Jesus, each age is represented by a name. At the end of the Age of Grace, the final age has arrived, and Jesus has already come. How could He still be called Jesus? How could He still assume the form of Jesus among men? Have you forgotten that Jesus was no more than the image of a Nazarene? Have you forgotten that Jesus was only the Redeemer of mankind? How could He take on the work of conquering and perfecting man in the last days? Jesus left riding on a white cloud—this is fact—but how could He return on a white cloud among men and still be called Jesus? If He really did arrive on a cloud, how would man fail to recognize Him? Would people all over the world not recognize Him? In that case, would Jesus alone not be God? In that case, the image of God would be the appearance of a Jew and would moreover be the same forever. Jesus said that He would arrive as He had departed, but do you know the true meaning of His words? Can it be that He told this group of you? All you know is that He will arrive as He departed, riding on a cloud, but do you know exactly how God Himself does His work? If you were truly able to see, then how are the words that Jesus spoke to be explained? He said: When the Son of man comes in the last days, He Himself will not know, the angels will not know, the messengers in heaven will not know, and all humanity will not know. Only the Father will know, that is, only the Spirit shall know. Even the Son of man Himself does not know, yet you are able to see and know? If you were capable of knowing and seeing with your own eyes, would these words not have been spoken in vain? And what did Jesus say at the time? “But of that day and hour knows no man, not the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but My Father only. But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. … Therefore be you also ready: for in such an hour as you think not the Son of man comes.” When that day comes, the Son of man Himself will not know it. The Son of man refers to the incarnate flesh of God, a normal and ordinary person. Even the Son of man Himself does not know, so how could you know? Jesus said that He would arrive as He had departed. When He arrives, even He Himself does not know, so can He inform you in advance? Are you able to see His arrival? Is that not a joke? Each time God comes to earth, He changes His name, His gender, His image, and His work; He does not repeat His work. He is a God who is always new and never old. When He came before, He was called Jesus; can He still be called Jesus this time when He comes again? When He came before, He was male; can He be male again this time? His work when He came during the Age of Grace was to be nailed to the cross; when He comes again, can He still redeem mankind from sin? Can He be nailed to the cross again? Would that not be to repeat His work? Did you not know that God is always new and never old? There are those who say that God is immutable. That is correct, but it refers to the immutability of God’s disposition and His essence. Changes in His name and work do not prove that His essence has altered; in other words, God will always be God, and this will never change. If you say that the work of God is unchanging, then would He be able to finish His six-thousand-year management plan? You only know that God is forever unchanging, but do you know that God is always new and never old? If the work of God is unchanging, then could He have led mankind all the way to the present day? If God is immutable, then why is it that He has already done the work of two ages? His work never ceases to move forward, which is to say that His disposition is gradually revealed to man, and what is revealed is His inherent disposition. In the beginning, God’s disposition was hidden from man, He never openly revealed His disposition to man, and man simply had no knowledge of Him. Because of this, He uses His work to gradually reveal His disposition to man, but working in this way does not mean that God’s disposition changes in every age. It is not the case that God’s disposition is constantly changing because His will is always changing. Rather, it is that, because the ages of His work are different, God takes His inherent disposition in its entirety and, step by step, reveals it to man, so that man may be able to know Him. But this is by no means proof that God originally has no particular disposition or that His disposition has gradually changed with the passing of the ages—such an understanding would be fallacious. God reveals to man His inherent and particular disposition—what He is—according to the passing of the ages; the work of a single age cannot express the entire disposition of God. And so, the words “God is always new and never old” refer to His work, and the words “God is immutable” refer to what God inherently has and is. Regardless, you cannot make the work of six thousand years hinge upon a single point, or circumscribe it with dead words. Such is the stupidity of man. God is not as simple as man imagines, and His work cannot linger in any one age. Jehovah, for example, cannot always stand for the name of God; God can also do His work under the name of Jesus. This is a sign that God’s work is always progressing in a forward direction.

God is always God, and He will never become Satan; Satan is always Satan, and it will never become God. God’s wisdom, God’s wondrousness, God’s righteousness, and God’s majesty shall never change. His essence and what He has and is shall never change. As for His work, however, it is always progressing in a forward direction, always going deeper, for He is always new and never old. In every age God assumes a new name, in every age He does new work, and in every age He allows His created beings to see His new will and new disposition. If, in a new age, people fail to see the expression of God’s new disposition, would they not nail Him to the cross forever? And by doing so, would they not define God? If God came into the flesh only as a male, people would define Him as male, as the God of men, and would never believe Him to be the God of women. Men would then hold that God is of the same gender as men, that God is the head of men—but what then of women? This is unfair; is it not preferential treatment? If this were the case, then all those whom God saved would be men like Him, and not one woman would be saved. When God created mankind, He created Adam and He created Eve. He did not only create Adam, but made both male and female in His image. God is not only the God of men—He is also the God of women. God enters upon a new stage of work in the last days. He will reveal even more of His disposition, and it will not be the compassion and love of the time of Jesus. Since He has new work in hand, this new work will be accompanied by a new disposition. So, if this work were done by the Spirit—if God did not become flesh, and instead the Spirit spoke directly through thunder so that man had no way to have contact with Him, would man be able to know His disposition? If it were solely the Spirit that did the work, then man would have no way of coming to know God’s disposition. People can only behold God’s disposition with their own eyes when He becomes flesh, when the Word appears in the flesh, and He expresses His entire disposition through the flesh. God really and truly lives among men. He is tangible; man can actually engage with His disposition, engage with what He has and is; only in this way can man truly come to know Him. At the same time, God has also completed the work in which “God is the God of men and the God of women,” and accomplished the entirety of His work in the flesh. He does not duplicate the work in any age. Since the last days have arrived, He will do the work that He does in the last days and reveal the entire disposition that is His in the last days. In speaking of the last days, this refers to a separate age, one in which Jesus said you will surely encounter disaster, and encounter earthquakes, famines, and plagues, which will show that this is a new age, and is no longer the old Age of Grace. Supposing that, as people say, God is forever unchanging, His disposition is always compassionate and loving, that He loves man as Himself, and He offers every man salvation and never hates man, would His work ever be able to come to an end? When Jesus came and was nailed to the cross, sacrificing Himself for all sinners and offering Himself upon the altar, He had already completed the work of redemption and brought the Age of Grace to an end. So what would be the point of repeating the work of that age in the last days? Would doing the same thing not be a denial of the work of Jesus? If God did not do the work of crucifixion when He came in this stage, but remained loving and compassionate, then would He be able to bring the age to an end? Would a loving and compassionate God be able to bring the age to an end? In His final work of concluding the age, God’s disposition is one of chastisement and judgment, in which He reveals all that is unrighteous, in order to publicly judge all peoples, and to perfect those who love Him with a sincere heart. Only a disposition such as this can bring the age to an end. The last days have already arrived. All things in creation will be separated according to their kind, and divided into different categories based on their nature. This is the moment when God reveals humanity’s outcome and their destination. If people do not undergo chastisement and judgment, then there will be no way of exposing their rebelliousness and unrighteousness. Only through chastisement and judgment can the outcome of all creation be revealed. Man only shows his true colors when he is chastised and judged. Evil shall be put with evil, good with good, and all humanity shall be separated according to their kind. Through chastisement and judgment, the outcome of all creation will be revealed, so that the evil may be punished and the good rewarded, and all people surrender to the dominion of God. All this work must be achieved through righteous chastisement and judgment. Because man’s corruption has reached its peak and his rebelliousness become exceedingly severe, only God’s righteous disposition, one that is principally compounded of chastisement and judgment and is revealed during the last days, can fully transform and complete man. Only this disposition can expose evil and thus severely punish all the unrighteous. Therefore, a disposition such as this is imbued with the significance of the age, and the revelation and exhibition of His disposition is made manifest for the sake of the work of each new age. It is not that God reveals His disposition arbitrarily and without significance. Supposing that, in revealing the outcome of man during the last days, God were still to bestow upon man infinite compassion and love and continue to be loving toward him, not subjecting man to righteous judgment but rather showing him tolerance, patience, and forgiveness, and pardoning man no matter how grave his sins, without any jot of righteous judgment: when then would all of God’s management ever be brought to a close? When would a disposition such as this be able to lead people into mankind’s appropriate destination? Take, for example, a judge who is always loving, a judge with a kindly face and a gentle heart. He loves people irrespective of the crimes they may have committed, and he is loving to and forbearing with them whoever they may be. In that case, when will he ever be able to reach a just verdict? During the last days, only righteous judgment can separate man according to their kind and bring man into a new realm. In this way, the entire age is brought to an end through God’s righteous disposition of judgment and chastisement.

The work of God throughout all of His management is perfectly clear: The Age of Grace is the Age of Grace, and the last days are the last days. There are distinct differences between each age, for in each age God does work which is representative of that age. For the work of the last days to be done, there must be burning, judgment, chastisement, wrath, and destruction to bring the age to an end. The last days refer to the final age. During the final age, will God not bring the age to an end? To end the age, God must bring chastisement and judgment with Him. Only in this way can He bring the age to an end. Jesus’ purpose was so that man might continue to survive, to live on, and that he might exist in a better way. He saved man from sin so that he might cease his descent into depravity and no longer live in Hades and hell, and by saving man from Hades and hell, Jesus allowed him to go on living. Now, the last days have arrived. God shall annihilate man and completely destroy the human race, that is, He shall transform mankind’s rebellion. For this reason, it would be impossible, with the compassionate and loving disposition of the past, for God to end the age or to bring His six-thousand-year management plan to fruition. Every age features a special representation of God’s disposition, and every age contains work that should be done by God. So, the work done by God Himself in each age contains the expression of His true disposition, and both His name and the work that He does change along with the age—they are all new. During the Age of Law, the work of guiding mankind was done under the name of Jehovah, and the first stage of work was initiated on earth. At this stage, the work consisted of building the temple and the altar, and using the law to guide the people of Israel and to work in their midst. By guiding the people of Israel, He launched a base for His work on earth. From this base, He expanded His work beyond Israel, which is to say that, starting from Israel, He extended His work outward, so that later generations gradually came to know that Jehovah was God, and that it was Jehovah who created the heavens and earth and all things, and that it was Jehovah who made all created beings. He spread His work through the people of Israel outward beyond them. The land of Israel was the first holy place of Jehovah’s work on earth, and it was in the land of Israel that God first went to work on earth. That was the work of the Age of Law. During the Age of Grace, Jesus was the God who saved man. What He had and was was grace, love, compassion, forbearance, patience, humility, care, and tolerance, and so much of the work that He did was for the sake of the redemption of man. His disposition was one of compassion and love, and because He was compassionate and loving, He had to be nailed to the cross for man, in order to show that God loved man as Himself, so much so that He offered up Himself in His entirety. During the Age of Grace, the name of God was Jesus, that is to say, God was a God who saved man, and He was a compassionate and loving God. God was with man. His love, His compassion, and His salvation accompanied each and every person. Only by accepting the name of Jesus and His presence was man able to gain peace and joy, to receive His blessing, His vast and numerous graces, and His salvation. Through the crucifixion of Jesus, all those who followed Him received salvation and were forgiven their sins. During the Age of Grace, Jesus was the name of God. In other words, the work of the Age of Grace was done principally under the name of Jesus. During the Age of Grace, God was called Jesus. He undertook a stage of new work beyond the Old Testament, and His work ended with the crucifixion. This was the entirety of His work. Therefore, during the Age of Law Jehovah was the name of God, and in the Age of Grace the name of Jesus represented God. During the last days, His name is Almighty God—the Almighty, who uses His power to guide man, conquer man, and gain man, and in the end, bring the age to its close. In every age, at every stage of His work, God’s disposition is evident.

In the beginning, guiding man during the Old Testament Age of Law was like guiding the life of a child. Earliest mankind was newly born of Jehovah; they were the Israelites. They had no understanding of how to fear God or how to live on earth. Which is to say, Jehovah created mankind, that is, He created Adam and Eve, but He did not give them the faculties to understand how to fear Jehovah or follow the laws of Jehovah on earth. Without the direct guidance of Jehovah, no one could know this directly, for in the beginning man did not possess such faculties. Man only knew that Jehovah was God, but as for how to fear Him, what kind of conduct could be called fearing Him, with what kind of mind one was to fear Him, or what to offer up in fear of Him, man had absolutely no idea. Man only knew how to enjoy that which could be enjoyed among all the things created by Jehovah, but as for what kind of life on earth was worthy of a created being, man had no inkling whatsoever. Without someone to instruct them, without someone to guide them personally, this mankind would never have led a life properly befitting humanity, but would only have been furtively held captive by Satan. Jehovah created mankind, that is to say, He created the ancestors of mankind, Eve and Adam, but He did not bestow upon them any further intellect or wisdom. Although they were already living on earth, they understood almost nothing. And so, Jehovah’s work in creating mankind was only half finished, and was far from complete. He had only formed a model of man from clay and given it His breath, but without bestowing unto man sufficient willingness to fear Him. In the beginning, man did not possess a heart of fear or fright for Him. Man only knew how to listen to His words but was ignorant of the basic knowledge for life on earth and of the normal rules of human life. And so, although Jehovah created man and woman and finished the project of seven days, He by no means completed the creation of man, for man was but a husk, and lacked the reality of being human. Man only knew that it was Jehovah who had created mankind, but he had no inkling of how to abide by the words or the laws of Jehovah. And so, after mankind came into being, the work of Jehovah was far from over. He still had to fully guide mankind to come before Him, so that they might be able to live together on earth and fear Him, and so that they might be able, with His guidance, to enter upon the right track of a normal human life on earth. Only in this way was the work that had been principally conducted under the name of Jehovah fully completed; that is, only in this way was Jehovah’s work of creating the world fully concluded. And so, having created mankind, He had to guide mankind’s life on earth for several thousand years, in order that mankind might be able to abide by His decrees and laws, and partake in all the activities of a normal human life on earth. Only then was Jehovah’s work fully complete. He undertook this work after creating mankind and continued it until the era of Jacob, at which time He made the twelve sons of Jacob into the twelve tribes of Israel. From that time onward, all the people of Israel became the human race that was officially led by Him on earth, and Israel became the particular location on earth where He did His work. Jehovah made these people the first group of people on whom He officially did His work on earth, and He made the entire land of Israel the point of origin for His work, using them as the beginning of even greater work, so that all people born from Him on earth would know how to fear Him and how to live on earth. And so, the deeds of the Israelites became an example to be followed by the people of Gentile nations, and that which was said among the people of Israel became words to be listened to by the people of Gentile nations. For they were the first to receive the laws and commandments of Jehovah, and so too were they the first to know how to fear the ways of Jehovah. They were the ancestors of the human race who knew the ways of Jehovah, as well as the representatives of the human race chosen by Jehovah. When the Age of Grace arrived, Jehovah no longer guided man in this way. Man had sinned and abandoned himself to sin, and so He began to rescue man from sin. In this way, He reproached man until man had been thoroughly delivered from sin. In the last days, man has sunk to such a degree of depravity that the work of this stage can only be carried out through judgment and chastisement. Only in this way can the work be accomplished. This has been the work of several ages. In other words, God uses His name, His work, and the different images of God to divide age from age and make the transition between them; the name of God and His work represent His age and represent His work in every age. Supposing that the work of God in every age is always the same, and He is always called by the same name, how would man know Him? God must be called Jehovah, and apart from a God called Jehovah, anyone called by any other name is not God. Or else God can only be Jesus, and apart from the name of Jesus He may not be called by any other name; apart from Jesus, Jehovah is not God, and Almighty God is not God either. Man believes it is true that God is almighty, but God is a God who is with man, and He must be called Jesus, for God is with man. To do this is to conform to doctrine, and to confine God to a certain scope. So, in every age, the work that God does, the name by which He is called, and the image that He assumes—the work He does in every stage all the way down to today—these do not follow a single regulation, and are not subject to any limitations whatsoever. He is Jehovah, but He is also Jesus, as well as Messiah, and Almighty God. His work can undergo gradual transformation, with corresponding changes in His name. No single name can fully represent Him, but all the names by which He is called are able to represent Him, and the work that He does in every age represents His disposition. Suppose that, when the last days arrive, the God that you behold is still Jesus, and He is moreover riding upon a white cloud, and He still has the appearance of Jesus, and the words that He speaks are still the words of Jesus: “You should love your neighbor as yourselves, you should fast and pray, love your enemies as you cherish your own life, forbear with others, and be patient and humble. You must do all of these things before you can become My disciples. And by doing all of these things, you may enter My kingdom.” Would this not belong to the work of the Age of Grace? Would what He says not be the way of the Age of Grace? How would you feel if you were to hear these words? Would you not feel that this is still the work of Jesus? Would this not be duplicating it? Could man find enjoyment in this? You would feel that the work of God can only remain as it is now and progress no further. He has only so much power, and there is no more new work to do, and He has taken His power to its limit. Two thousand years before now was the Age of Grace, and two thousand years later He is still preaching the way of the Age of Grace, and is still making people repent. People would say, “God, You have only so much power. I believed You to be so wise, and yet You know only forbearance and are concerned only with patience. You know only how to love Your enemy, and nothing more.” In the mind of man, God would forever be as He was in the Age of Grace, and man would always believe that God is loving and compassionate. Do you think the work of God will always tread the same old ground? And so, in this stage of His work He shall not be crucified, and everything that you see and touch shall be unlike anything you have imagined or heard tell of. Today, God does not engage with the Pharisees, nor does He allow the world to know, and those who know Him are only you who follow Him, for He will not be crucified again. During the Age of Grace, Jesus preached openly throughout the land for the sake of His gospel work. He engaged with the Pharisees for the sake of the work of crucifixion; if He had not engaged with the Pharisees and those in power had never known of Him, how could He have been condemned, and then betrayed and nailed to the cross? And so, He engaged with the Pharisees for the sake of the crucifixion. Today, He does His work in secret in order to avoid temptation. In the two incarnations of God, the work and the significance are different, and the setting is also different, so how could the work He does be entirely the same?

Could the name of Jesus—“God with us”—represent God’s disposition in its entirety? Could it fully articulate God? If man says that God can only be called Jesus and may not have any other name because God cannot change His disposition, these words are blasphemy indeed! Do you believe that the name Jesus, God with us, alone can represent God in His entirety? God may be called by many names, but among these many names, there is not one that is able to encapsulate all of God, not one that can fully represent God. And so, God has many names, but these many names cannot fully articulate God’s disposition, for God’s disposition is so rich that it simply exceeds man’s capacity to know Him. There is no way for man, using the language of mankind, to encapsulate God fully. Mankind has but a limited vocabulary with which to encapsulate all that they know of God’s disposition: great, honored, wondrous, unfathomable, supreme, holy, righteous, wise, and so on. So many words! This limited vocabulary is incapable of describing the little that man has witnessed of God’s disposition. Over time, many others added words that they thought better able to describe the fervor in their hearts: God is so great! God is so holy! God is so lovely! Today, human sayings such as these have reached their peak, yet man is still incapable of clearly expressing himself. And so, for man, God has many names, yet He has no one name, and this is because God’s being is so bountiful, and the language of man so impoverished. One particular word or name does not have the capacity to represent God in His entirety, so do you think His name can be fixed? God is so great and so holy, yet you will not permit Him to change His name in each new age? Therefore, in every age in which God personally does His own work, He uses a name that befits the age in order to encapsulate the work that He intends to do. He uses this particular name, one that possesses temporal significance, to represent His disposition in that age. This is God using the language of mankind to express His own disposition. Even so, many people who have had spiritual experiences and have personally seen God nevertheless feel that this one particular name is incapable of representing God in His entirety—alas, this cannot be helped—so man no longer addresses God by any name, but simply calls Him “God.” It is as though the heart of man is full of love and yet also beset with contradictions, for man does not know how to explain God. What God is is so bountiful that there is simply no way to describe it. There is no single name that can summarize God’s disposition, and there is no single name that can describe all that God has and is. If someone asks Me, “Exactly what name do You use?” I will tell them, “God is God!” Is that not the best name for God? Is it not the best encapsulation of God’s disposition? This being so, why do you spend so much effort seeking after the name of God? Why should you cudgel your brains, going without food and sleep, all for the sake of a name? The day will arrive when God is not called Jehovah, Jesus, or Messiah—He will simply be the Creator. At that time, all the names that He has taken on earth shall come to an end, for His work on earth will have come to an end, after which His names shall be no more. When all things come under the dominion of the Creator, what need has He of a highly appropriate yet incomplete name? Are you still seeking after God’s name now? Do you still dare to say that God is only called Jehovah? Do you still dare to say that God can only be called Jesus? Are you able to bear the sin of blasphemy against God? You should know that God originally had no name. He only took on one, or two, or many names because He had work to do and had to manage mankind. Whatever name He is called by—did He not freely choose it Himself? Would He need you—a created being—to decide it? The name by which God is called is a name that accords with what man is capable of apprehending, with the language of mankind, but this name is not something that man can encompass. You can only say that there is a God in heaven, that He is called God, that He is God Himself with great power, who is so wise, so exalted, so wondrous, so mysterious, and so almighty, and then you can say no more; this little bit is all you can know. This being so, can the mere name of Jesus represent God Himself? When the last days come, even though it is still God who does His work, His name has to change, for it is a different age.

God being the greatest throughout the universe and in the realm above, could He fully explain Himself using the image of a flesh? God clothes Himself in this flesh in order to do one stage of His work. There is no particular significance to this image of the flesh, it bears no relation to the passing of ages, nor does it have anything to do with God’s disposition. Why did Jesus not allow the image of Him to remain? Why did He not let man paint His image so that it could be passed on to later generations? Why did He not allow people to acknowledge that His image was the image of God? Although the image of man was created in the image of God, would it have been possible for the appearance of man to represent the exalted image of God? When God becomes flesh, He merely descends from heaven into a particular flesh. It is His Spirit that descends into a flesh, through which He does the work of the Spirit. It is the Spirit that is expressed in the flesh, and it is the Spirit who does His work in the flesh. The work done in the flesh fully represents the Spirit, and the flesh is for the sake of the work, but that does not mean that the image of the flesh is a substitute for the true image of God Himself; this is not the purpose or the significance of God become flesh. He becomes flesh only so that the Spirit may find a place to reside that suits His working, the better to achieve His work in the flesh, so that people can see His deeds, understand His disposition, hear His words, and know the wonder of His work. His name represents His disposition, His work represents His identity, but He has never said that His appearance in the flesh represents His image; that is merely a notion of man. And so, the crucial aspects of the incarnation of God are His name, His work, His disposition, and His gender. These are used to represent His management in this age. His appearance in the flesh bears no relation to His management, being merely for the sake of His work at the time. Yet it is impossible for God incarnate to have no particular appearance, and so He chooses the appropriate family to determine His appearance. If the appearance of God were to have representative significance, then all those who possess facial features similar to His would also represent God. Would that not be an egregious mistake? The portrait of Jesus was painted by man in order that man might worship Him. At the time, the Holy Spirit gave no special instructions, and so man passed that imagined portrait on until today. In truth, according to God’s original intention, man should not have done this. It is only the zeal of man that has caused the portrait of Jesus to remain until this day. God is Spirit, and man will never be capable of encompassing what His image is in the final analysis. His image can only be represented by His disposition. As for the appearance of His nose, of His mouth, of His eyes, and of His hair, these are beyond your capacity to encompass. When revelation came to John, he beheld the image of the Son of man: Out of His mouth was a sharp double-edged sword, His eyes were like flames of fire, His head and hair were white like wool, His feet were like polished bronze, and there was a golden sash around His chest. Although his words were extremely vivid, the image of God he described was not the image of a created being. What he saw was only a vision, and not the image of a person from the material world. John had seen a vision, but he had not witnessed the true appearance of God. The image of God’s incarnate flesh, being the image of a created being, is incapable of representing God’s disposition in its entirety. When Jehovah created mankind, He said He did so in His own image and created male and female. At that time, He said He made male and female in the image of God. Although the image of man resembles the image of God, this cannot be construed as meaning that the appearance of man is the image of God. Nor can you use the language of mankind to fully epitomize the image of God, for God is so exalted, so great, so wondrous and unfathomable!

When Jesus came to do His work, it was under the direction of the Holy Spirit; He did as the Holy Spirit wanted, and not according to the Old Testament Age of Law or according to the work of Jehovah. Although the work that Jesus came to do was not to abide by the laws of Jehovah or the commandments of Jehovah, Their source was one and the same. The work that Jesus did represented the name of Jesus, and it represented the Age of Grace; as for the work done by Jehovah, it represented Jehovah, and it represented the Age of Law. Their work was the work of one Spirit in two different ages. The work that Jesus did could only represent the Age of Grace, and the work that Jehovah did could only represent the Old Testament Age of Law. Jehovah only guided the people of Israel and of Egypt, and of all the nations beyond Israel. The work of Jesus in the New Testament Age of Grace was the work of God under the name of Jesus as He guided the age. If you say that the work of Jesus was based upon that of Jehovah, that He did not initiate any new work, and that all He did was according to the words of Jehovah, according to the work of Jehovah and the prophecies of Isaiah, then Jesus would not be God become flesh. If He had conducted His work in this way, He would have been an apostle or a worker of the Age of Law. If it is as you say, then Jesus could not have launched an age, nor could He have done any other work. In the same way, the Holy Spirit must principally do His work through Jehovah, and except through Jehovah the Holy Spirit could not have done any new work. It is wrong for man to understand the work of Jesus in this way. If man believes that the work done by Jesus was done according to the words of Jehovah and the prophecies of Isaiah, then was Jesus God incarnate, or was He one of the prophets? According to this view, there would be no Age of Grace, and Jesus would not be the incarnation of God, for the work that He did could not represent the Age of Grace and could only represent the Old Testament Age of Law. There could only be a new age when Jesus came to do new work, to launch a new age, to break through the work previously done in Israel, and to conduct His work not in accordance with the work done by Jehovah in Israel, or with His old rules, or in conformity to any regulations, but rather to do the new work that He should do. God Himself comes to launch the age, and God Himself comes to bring the age to an end. Man is incapable of doing the work of beginning the age and concluding the age. If Jesus did not bring the work of Jehovah to an end after He came, then that would be proof that He was merely a man and incapable of representing God. Precisely because Jesus came and concluded the work of Jehovah, continued the work of Jehovah and, moreover, carried out His own work, a new work, it proves that this was a new age, and that Jesus was God Himself. They did two distinctly different stages of work. One stage was carried out in the temple, and the other was conducted outside of the temple. One stage was to lead the life of man according to the law, and the other was to offer up a sin offering. These two stages of work were markedly different; this divides the new age from the old, and it is absolutely correct to say that they are two different ages. The location of Their work was different, and the content of Their work was different, and the objective of Their work was different. As such, they can be divided into two ages: the New and the Old Testaments, which is to say, the new and the old ages. When Jesus came He did not go into the temple, which proves that the age of Jehovah had ended. He did not enter the temple because the work of Jehovah in the temple had finished, and did not need to be done again, and to do it again would be to repeat it. Only by leaving the temple, beginning a new work and launching a new path outside of the temple, was He able to bring God’s work to its zenith. If He had not gone out of the temple to do His work, the work of God would have stagnated upon the foundations of the temple, and there would never have been any new changes. And so, when Jesus came, He did not enter the temple, and did not do His work in the temple. He did His work outside of the temple, and, leading the disciples, went about His work freely. God’s departure from the temple to do His work meant that God had a new plan. His work was to be conducted outside of the temple, and it was to be new work that was unconstrained in the manner of its implementation. As soon as Jesus arrived, He brought the work of Jehovah during the age of the Old Testament to an end. Although They were called by two different names, it was the same Spirit that accomplished both stages of work, and the work that was done was continuous. As the name was different, and the content of the work was different, the age was different. When Jehovah came, that was the age of Jehovah, and when Jesus came, that was the age of Jesus. And so, with each coming, God is called by one name, He represents one age, and He launches a new path; and on each new path, He assumes a new name, which shows that God is always new and never old, and that His work never ceases to progress in a forward direction. History is always moving forward, and the work of God is always moving forward. For His six-thousand-year management plan to reach its end, it must keep progressing in a forward direction. Each day He must do new work, each year He must do new work; He must launch new paths, launch new eras, begin new and greater work, and along with these, bring new names and new work. From moment to moment, the Spirit of God is doing new work, never clinging to old ways or rules. Nor has His work ever stopped, but is coming to pass with each passing moment. If you say that the work of the Holy Spirit is immutable, then why did Jehovah ask the priests to serve Him in the temple, yet Jesus did not enter the temple despite the fact that, when He came, people also said that He was the high priest, and that He was of the house of David and also the high priest and the great King? And why did He not offer sacrifices? Entering the temple or not entering the temple—is all this not the work of God Himself? If, as man imagines, Jesus will come again and, in the last days, still be called Jesus, and still come on a white cloud, descending among men in the image of Jesus: would that not be a repetition of His work? Is the Holy Spirit capable of clinging to the old? All that man believes are notions, and all that man understands is according to the literal meaning, and also according to his imagination; they are at odds with the principles of the work of the Holy Spirit, and do not conform to the intentions of God. God would not work in that way; God is not so foolish and stupid, and His work is not so simple as you imagine. Based on everything that man imagines, Jesus will come riding on a cloud and descend in your midst. You shall behold Him who, riding a cloud, shall tell you that He is Jesus. You shall also behold the nail marks in His hands, and shall know Him to be Jesus. And He shall save you again, and shall be your mighty God. He shall save you, bestow upon you a new name, and give each of you a white stone, after which you shall be allowed to enter the kingdom of heaven and be received into paradise. Are such beliefs not the notions of man? Does God work according to the notions of man, or does He work counter to the notions of man? Do not the notions of man all derive from Satan? Has not all of man been corrupted by Satan? If God did His work according to the notions of man, would He not then become Satan? Would He not be of the same kind as created beings? Since created beings have now been so corrupted by Satan that man has become Satan’s embodiment, if God were to work in accordance with the things of Satan, would He not then be in league with Satan? How can man fathom the work of God? Therefore, God would never work according to the notions of man, and would never work in the ways you imagine. There are those who say that God Himself said that He would arrive on a cloud. It is true that God said so Himself, but do you not know that no man can fathom the mysteries of God? Do you not know that no man can explain the words of God? Are you certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you were enlightened and illuminated by the Holy Spirit? Surely it was not that the Holy Spirit showed you in such a direct manner? Was it the Holy Spirit who instructed you, or did your own notions lead you to think so? You said, “This was said by God Himself.” But we cannot use our own notions and minds to measure the words of God. As for the words spoken by Isaiah, can you with absolute certainty explain his words? Do you dare to explain his words? Since you do not dare to explain the words of Isaiah, why do you dare to explain the words of Jesus? Who is more exalted, Jesus or Isaiah? Since the answer is Jesus, why do you explain the words spoken by Jesus? Would God tell you of His work in advance? Not a single created being can know, not even the messengers in heaven, nor the Son of man, so how could you know? Man is too lacking. What is crucial for you now is to know the three stages of work. From the work of Jehovah to that of Jesus, and from the work of Jesus to that of this current stage, these three stages cover in a continuous thread the entire gamut of God’s management, and they are all the work of one Spirit. Since the creation of the world, God has always been at work managing mankind. He is the Beginning and the End, He is the First and the Last, and He is the One who begins an age and the One who brings the age to an end. The three stages of work, in different ages and different locations, are unmistakably the work of one Spirit. All those who separate these three stages stand in opposition to God. Now, it behooves you to understand that all the work from the first stage until today is the work of one God, the work of one Spirit. Of this there can be no doubt.

The Mystery of the Incarnation (1)

In the Age of Grace, John paved the way for Jesus. John could not do the work of God Himself but merely fulfilled the duty of man. Though John was the forerunner of the Lord, he was unable to represent God; he was only a man used by the Holy Spirit. After Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him like a dove. He then began His work, that is, He began to perform the ministry of Christ. That is why He assumed the identity of God, for it was from God that He came. No matter what His faith was like before this—it may have been weak at times, or strong at times—that all belonged to the normal human life He led before performing His ministry. After He was baptized (that is, anointed), the power and the glory of God were immediately with Him, and so He began to perform His ministry. He could work signs and wonders, perform miracles, and He had power and authority, for He was working directly on behalf of God Himself; He was doing the work of the Spirit in His stead and expressing the voice of the Spirit. Therefore, He was God Himself; this is indisputable. John was someone who was used by the Holy Spirit. He could not represent God, nor was it possible for him to represent God. If he had wished to do so, the Holy Spirit would not have allowed it, for he was unable to do the work that God Himself intended to accomplish. Perhaps there was much in him that was of man’s will, or something that was deviant; under no circumstances could he directly represent God. His mistakes and absurdity represented only himself, but his work was representative of the Holy Spirit. Yet, you cannot say that all of him represented God. Could his distortions represent God as well? To represent man in a distorted way is normal, but if one is deviant in representing God, then would that not dishonor God? Would that not be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit does not lightly allow man to stand in God’s place, even if he is exalted by others. If he is not God, he would be unable to stand fast in the end. The Holy Spirit does not allow man to represent God as man pleases! For instance, it was the Holy Spirit that bore witness to John and it was also the Holy Spirit that revealed him to be the one to pave the way for Jesus, but the work done upon him by the Holy Spirit was well measured. All that was asked of John was to be the way-paver for Jesus, to prepare the way for Him. That is to say, the Holy Spirit only upheld his work in paving the way and allowed him only to do such work—he was allowed to do no other work. John represented Elijah, and he represented a prophet who paved the way. The Holy Spirit upheld him in this; as long as his work was to pave the way, the Holy Spirit upheld him. However, if he had laid claim to being God Himself and said that he had come to finish the work of redemption, the Holy Spirit would have had to discipline him. No matter how great the work of John, and even though it was upheld by the Holy Spirit, his work was not without boundaries. Granted that the Holy Spirit did indeed uphold his work, the power given him at the time was limited to his paving the way. He could not, at all, do any other work, for he was only John who paved the way, and not Jesus. Therefore, the testimony of the Holy Spirit is key, but the work that the Holy Spirit permits man to do is even more crucial. Had not John received resounding witness at the time? Was his work not also great? But the work he did could not surpass that of Jesus, for he was no more than a man used by the Holy Spirit and could not directly represent God, and so the work he did was limited. After he finished the work of paving the way, the Holy Spirit no longer upheld his testimony, no new work followed him, and he departed as the work of God Himself began.

There are some who are possessed by evil spirits and cry out vociferously, “I am God!” Yet, in the end, they are revealed, for they are wrong in what they represent. They represent Satan, and the Holy Spirit pays them no heed. However highly you exalt yourself or however strongly you cry out, you are still a created being and one that belongs to Satan. I never cry out, “I am God, I am the beloved Son of God!” But the work I do is God’s work. Need I shout? There is no need for exaltation. God does His own work Himself and does not need man to accord Him a status or give Him an honorific title: His work represents His identity and status. Prior to His baptism, was not Jesus God Himself? Was He not the incarnate flesh of God? Surely it cannot be said that it was only after receiving witness that He became the only Son of God? Long before He began His work, was there not already a man by the name of Jesus? You are unable to bring forth new paths or to represent the Spirit. You cannot express the work of the Spirit or the words that He speaks. You are unable to do the work of God Himself, and that of the Spirit you are unable to do. The wisdom, wonder, and unfathomability of God, and the entirety of the disposition by which God chastises man—all of these are beyond your capacity to express. It would therefore be useless to try to claim to be God; you would have only the name and none of the substance. God Himself has come, but no one recognizes Him, yet He continues on in His work and does so in representation of the Spirit. Whether you call Him man or God, the Lord or Christ, or call Her sister, it does not matter. But the work He does is that of the Spirit and represents the work of God Himself. He does not care about the name by which man calls Him. Can that name determine His work? Regardless of what you call Him, as far as God is concerned, He is the incarnate flesh of the Spirit of God; He represents the Spirit and is approved by the Spirit. If you are unable to make way for a new age, or to bring the old to an end, or to usher in a new age, or to do new work, then you cannot be called God!

Even a man who is used by the Holy Spirit cannot represent God Himself. This is not only to say that such a man cannot represent God, but also that the work he does cannot directly represent God. In other words, human experience cannot be placed directly within the management of God, and it cannot represent the management of God. The work that God Himself does is entirely the work He intends to do in His own management plan and it pertains to the great management. The work done by man consists of supplying their individual experience. It consists of finding out a new path of experience beyond that trodden by those who have gone before, and of guiding their brothers and sisters while under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. What these people supply is their individual experience or the spiritual writings of spiritual people. Although these people are used by the Holy Spirit, the work they do is unrelated to the great work of management in the six-thousand-year plan. They are merely those who have been raised up by the Holy Spirit in different periods to lead the people in the stream of the Holy Spirit, until the functions they can perform are at an end or until their lives come to an end. The work they do is only to prepare an appropriate path for God Himself or to continue a certain aspect of the management of God Himself on earth. In themselves, these people are unable to do the greater work of His management, nor can they open up new ways out, even less can any of them bring to a conclusion all of God’s work from the former age. Therefore, the work they do represents only a created being performing his function and cannot represent God Himself performing His ministry. This is because the work they do is unlike that done by God Himself. The work of ushering in a new age is not something that can be done by man in God’s place. It cannot be done by any other than God Himself. All the work done by man consists of performing his duty as a created being and is done when he is moved or enlightened by the Holy Spirit. The guidance that these people provide consists entirely of showing man the path of practice in daily life and how he should act in harmony with the will of God. The work of man neither involves the management of God nor represents the work of the Spirit. As an example, the work of Witness Lee and Watchman Nee was to lead the way. Be the way new or old, the work was premised upon the principle of remaining within the Bible. Whether it was to restore the local church or build the local church, their work had to do with establishing churches. The work they did carried on the work that Jesus and His apostles had left unfinished or had not further developed in the Age of Grace. What they did in their work was to restore what Jesus had, in His work of the time, asked of the generations coming after Him, such as keeping their heads covered, receiving baptism, breaking bread, or drinking wine. It could be said that their work was to keep to the Bible and to seek paths within the Bible. They made no new advances of any kind. Therefore, one can see in their work only the discovery of new ways within the Bible, as well as better and more realistic practices. But one cannot find in their work the present will of God, much less find the new work that God in the last days plans to do. This is because the path they walked was still an old one—there was no renewal and no advancement. They continued to hold onto the fact of the crucifixion of Jesus, to observe the practice of asking people to repent and confess their sins, to adhere to the sayings that he who endures to the end shall be saved and that man is the head of woman, and woman must obey her husband, and even more to the traditional notion that sisters cannot preach, but only obey. If such manner of leadership had continued to be observed, the Holy Spirit would never have been able to carry out new work, to set people free from rules, or to lead them into a realm of freedom and beauty. Therefore, this stage of work, which changes the age, requires that God Himself work and speak; otherwise no man can do so in His stead. Thus far, all the work of the Holy Spirit outside of this stream has come to a standstill, and those who were used by the Holy Spirit have lost their bearings. Therefore, since the work of the people used by the Holy Spirit is unlike the work done by God Himself, their identities and the subjects on behalf of whom they act are likewise different. This is because the work the Holy Spirit intends to do is different, and on this account those who alike do work are accorded different identities and statuses. The people used by the Holy Spirit may also do some work that is new and may also eliminate some work done in the former age, but what they do cannot express the disposition and the will of God in the new age. They work only to do away with the work of the former age, and not in order to do new work for the purpose of directly representing the disposition of God Himself. Thus, no matter how many outdated practices they abolish or how many new practices they introduce, they still represent man and created beings. When God Himself carries out work, however, He does not openly declare the abolishment of the practices of the old age or directly declare the commencement of a new age. He is direct and straightforward in His work. He is forthright in performing the work He intends to do; that is, He directly expresses the work that He has brought about, directly does His work as originally intended, expressing His being and disposition. As man sees it, His disposition and so too His work differ from those in ages past. However, from the perspective of God Himself, this is merely a continuation and further development of His work. When God Himself works, He expresses His word and directly brings the new work. In contrast, when man works, it is through deliberation and study, or it is an extension of knowledge and systematization of practice founded on the work of others. That is to say, the essence of the work done by man is to follow an established order and to “walk old paths in new shoes.” This means that even the path walked by the people used by the Holy Spirit is built upon that launched by God Himself. So, when all is said and done, man is still man, and God is still God.

John was born by promise, much as Isaac was born to Abraham. He paved the way for Jesus and did much work, but he was not God. Rather, he was one of the prophets, because he only paved the way for Jesus. His work was also great, and it was only after he had paved the way that Jesus officially began His work. In essence, he simply labored for Jesus, and the work he did was in service to the work of Jesus. After he had finished paving the way, Jesus began His work, work that was newer, more concrete, and more detailed. John did only the initial portion of the work; the greater part of the new work was done by Jesus. John did new work as well, but he was not the one who ushered in a new age. John was born by promise, and his name was given by the angel. At the time, some wanted to name him after his father Zechariah, but his mother spoke out, saying, “This child cannot be called by that name. He should be called John.” This was all at the behest of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was also named at the behest of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Holy Spirit, and He was promised by the Holy Spirit. Jesus was God, Christ, and the Son of man. But, the work of John also being great, why was he not called God? Exactly what was the difference between the work done by Jesus and that done by John? Was the only reason that John was the one who paved the way for Jesus? Or because this had been predestined by God? Though John also said, “Repent you: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and he too preached the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, his work was not further developed and merely constituted a beginning. In contrast, Jesus ushered in a new age as well as bringing the old to an end, but He also fulfilled the law of the Old Testament. The work He did was greater than that of John, and what is more He came to redeem all mankind—He accomplished that stage of work. As for John, he simply prepared the way. Though his work was great, his words many, and those disciples who followed him numerous, his work did no more than bring to man a new beginning. Never did man receive from him life, the way, or deeper truths, nor did man gain through him an understanding of the will of God. John was a great prophet (Elijah) who opened up new ground for Jesus’ work and prepared the chosen; he was the forerunner of the Age of Grace. Such matters cannot be discerned simply by observing their normal human appearances. This is all the more apt as John also did work that was quite considerable and, moreover, he was promised by the Holy Spirit, and his work was upheld by the Holy Spirit. This being so, it is only through the work that they do that one can distinguish between their respective identities, for there is no way to tell a man’s essence from his outward appearance, nor is there any way for man to ascertain what is the testimony of the Holy Spirit. The work done by John and that done by Jesus were dissimilar and were of different natures. It is from this that one may determine whether or not John was God. The work of Jesus was to initiate, to continue, to conclude, and to bring to fruition. He carried out each of these steps, whereas the work of John was no more than making a beginning. In the beginning, Jesus spread the gospel and preached the way of repentance, and then went on to baptize man, heal the sick, and cast out demons. In the end, He redeemed mankind from sin and completed His work for the entire age. He also went about in every place, preaching to man and spreading the gospel of the kingdom of heaven. In this regard He and John were alike, the difference being that Jesus ushered in a new age and brought the Age of Grace to man. From His mouth came the word on what man should practice and the way that man should follow in the Age of Grace, and in the end, He finished the work of redemption. John could never have carried out this work. And so it was Jesus who did the work of God Himself, and it is He who is God Himself, and who directly represents God. The notions of man say that all those who are born by promise, born of the Spirit, upheld by the Holy Spirit, and who open up new ways out are God. According to this reasoning, John too would be God, and Moses, Abraham, and David…, they too would all be God. Is this not a consummate joke?

Prior to performing His ministry, Jesus too was only a normal man who acted in accordance with whatever the Holy Spirit did. Regardless of whether He was aware of His own identity at the time, He submitted to all that came from God. The Holy Spirit never revealed His identity before His ministry commenced. It was only after He began His ministry that He abolished those rules and those laws, and it was not until He officially began performing His ministry that His words became imbued with authority and power. Only after He commenced His ministry did His work to bring forth a new age begin. Prior to this, the Holy Spirit remained hidden within Him for 29 years, during which time He represented only a man and was without the identity of God. God’s work began with Him working and performing His ministry, He did His work according to His inward plan without regard for how much man knew of Him, and the work He did was the direct representation of God Himself. At that time, Jesus asked those around Him, “Who do you say I am?” They replied, “You are the greatest of prophets and our excellent physician.” And some replied, “You are our high priest,” and so on. All kinds of answers were given, some even saying that He was John, that He was Elijah. Jesus then turned to Simon Peter and asked, “Who do you say I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” From then on, the people became aware that He was God. When His identity was made known, it was Peter who first became aware of this and it was from his mouth that it was spoken. Then Jesus stated, “What you said was not revealed by flesh and blood, but by My Father.” Following His baptism, whether or not others knew of this, the work He did was on behalf of God. He came in order to carry out His work, not to reveal His identity. It was only after Peter spoke of it that His identity became openly known. Whether or not you were aware that He was God Himself, when the time came, He began His work. And whether or not you knew of that, He went on with His work as before. Even if you denied it, He would still perform His work and would carry it out when it was time to do so. He came in order to do His work and perform His ministry, not so that man might know His flesh, but for man to understand His work. If you have failed to recognize that the stage of the work on this day is the work of God Himself, it is because you lack vision. Still, you cannot deny this stage of the work; your failure to recognize it does not prove that the Holy Spirit is not working or that His work is wrong. There are those who even check the work of the present against that of Jesus in the Bible and use any inconsistencies to deny this stage of the work. Is this not the action of the blind? The things that are recorded in the Bible are limited; they cannot represent the work of God in its entirety. The Four Gospels have fewer than one hundred chapters altogether, in which are written a finite number of happenings, such as Jesus cursing the fig tree, Peter’s three denials of the Lord, Jesus appearing to the disciples following His crucifixion and resurrection, teaching about fasting, teaching about prayer, teaching about divorce, the birth and genealogy of Jesus, Jesus’ appointment of the disciples, and so forth. However, man values them as treasures, even comparing the work of today against them. They even believe that all the work Jesus did in His life amounted only to so much, as if God were only capable of doing this much and nothing further. Is this not absurd?

The time that Jesus had on earth was thirty-three and a half years, that is, He lived on earth for thirty-three and a half years. Only three and a half years of this time was spent in performing His ministry; the rest of the time He just lived a normal human life. In the beginning, He attended services in the synagogue and there He listened to the priests’ exposition of the Scriptures and to the preaching of others. He gained much knowledge of the Bible: He was not born with such knowledge, and only gained it through reading and listening. It is clearly recorded in the Bible that He asked questions of the teachers in the synagogue at the age of twelve: What were the prophecies of the ancient prophets? What of the laws of Moses? The Old Testament? And what of man serving God in priestly robes in the temple? … He asked many questions, for He had neither knowledge nor understanding. Though He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, He was born as an entirely normal man; notwithstanding certain special characteristics that He had, He was still a normal man. His wisdom grew continuously in proportion with His stature and His age, and He passed through the phases of a normal man’s life. In people’s imagination, Jesus experienced no childhood and no adolescence; He began to live the life of a thirty-year-old man as soon as He was born, and He was crucified upon the completion of His work. He probably did not pass through the phases in the life of a normal man; He neither ate nor associated with other people, and it was not easy for people to catch a glimpse of Him. He was probably an aberration, who would frighten those who saw Him, because He was God. People believe that God who comes in the flesh definitely does not live as a normal person does; they believe that He is clean without having to brush His teeth or wash His face, because He is a holy person. Are not these purely the notions of man? The Bible makes no record of the life of Jesus as a man, only of His work, but this does not prove that He did not have normal humanity or that He did not live a normal human life prior to the age of thirty. He officially commenced His work at the age of 29, but you cannot write off His entire life as a man prior to that age. The Bible merely omitted that period from its records; as it was His life as a normal man and not the period of His divine work, there was no need for it to be written down. For prior to the baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit did not work directly, but merely maintained Him in His life as a normal man until the day Jesus was due to perform His ministry. Though He was God incarnate, He underwent the process of maturing as a normal man does. This process of maturation was omitted from the Bible. It was omitted because it could provide no great assistance to man’s growth in life. The period before His baptism was a hidden period, one in which He worked no signs and wonders. Only after the baptism of Jesus did He begin all the work of mankind’s redemption, work that is abundant and full of grace, truth, and of love and mercy. The beginning of this work was precisely also the commencement of the Age of Grace; for this reason, it was written down and passed down to the present. It was to open up a way out and bring all to fruition for those in the Age of Grace to tread the path of the Age of Grace and the path of the cross. Although it comes out of records written down by man, everything is fact, except that here and there small errors are to be found. Even so, these records cannot be said to be untruthful. The matters recorded are entirely factual, only in writing them down did people make errors. There are some who will say that, if Jesus was one with normal and ordinary humanity, how could it be that He was capable of working signs and wonders? The forty days of temptation that Jesus underwent was a miraculous sign, one that a normal man would have been incapable of achieving. His forty days of temptation was in the nature of the Holy Spirit’s working; how then can one say that there was not a bit of the supernatural in Him? His ability to work signs and wonders does not prove that He was a transcendent man and no normal man; it is merely that the Holy Spirit worked in a normal man such as Him, thus making it possible for Him to perform miracles and do even greater work. Prior to Jesus performing His ministry, or as the Bible says, prior to the Holy Spirit descending upon Him, Jesus was but a normal man and in no way supernatural. When the Holy Spirit descended upon Him, that is, when He commenced the performance of His ministry, He became imbued with the supernatural. In this way, man comes to believe that God’s incarnate flesh does not have normal humanity; moreover, he mistakenly thinks that God incarnate has only divinity, not humanity. Certainly, when God comes to earth to do His work, all man sees is supernatural events. What they behold with their eyes and what they hear with their ears are all supernatural, for His work and His words are incomprehensible and unattainable to them. If something of heaven is brought to earth, how can it be anything but supernatural? When the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven are brought to earth, mysteries that are incomprehensible and unfathomable to man, that are too wondrous and wise—are they not all supernatural? However, you should know, no matter how supernatural it is, everything is carried out within His normal humanity. God’s incarnate flesh is imbued with humanity; if He were not, then He would not be God’s incarnate flesh. Jesus performed a great many miracles in His time. What the Israelites of the time saw was full of supernatural things; they beheld angels and messengers, and they heard the voice of Jehovah. Were these not all supernatural? Certainly, there are today some evil spirits that mislead man with supernatural things; that is nothing but imitation on their part, to mislead man through work that is not presently done by the Holy Spirit. Many people perform miracles and heal the sick and drive out demons; these are nothing but the work of the evil spirits, for the Holy Spirit no longer does such work in the present day, and all those who have imitated the work of the Holy Spirit from that time onward are evil spirits indeed. All the work carried out in Israel at that time was work of a supernatural nature, though the Holy Spirit does not now work in such a manner, and any such work now is the imitation and disguise of Satan and its disturbance. But you cannot say that whatsoever is supernatural comes from evil spirits—this would depend on the age of God’s work. Consider the work done by the incarnate God in the present day: What aspect of it is not supernatural? His words are incomprehensible and unattainable to you, and the work He does can be done by no man. What He understands man has no way of understanding, and as for His knowledge, man knows not whence it comes. There are some who say, “I too am normal in the same way as You are, but how is it that I do not know what You know? I am older and richer in experience, yet how can You know of that which I do not?” All of this, as far as man is concerned, is something that man has no way of attaining. Then there are those who say, “No one knows of the work that was carried out in Israel, and even expositors of the Bible can offer no explanation; how come You know?” Are these not all matters of the supernatural? He has no experience of wonders, yet He knows all; He speaks and expresses the truth with the greatest of ease. Is this not supernatural? His work transcends that which flesh can attain to. It is unattainable to the thought of any man with a body of flesh and utterly inconceivable to the reasoning of the mind of man. Though He has never read the Bible, He understands the work of God in Israel. And though He stands on earth as He speaks, He speaks of the mysteries of the third heaven. When man reads these words, this feeling will overcome him: “Is this not the language of the third heaven?” Are these not all matters that exceed what a normal man is capable of achieving? At that time, when Jesus underwent forty days of fasting, was that not supernatural? If you say that forty days of fasting is in all cases supernatural, an act of evil spirits, then have you not condemned Jesus? Prior to performing His ministry, Jesus was like a normal man. He too went to school; how else could He have learned to read and write? When God became flesh, the Spirit lay hidden within the flesh. Nevertheless, being a normal man, it was necessary for Him to undergo a process of growth and maturation, and not until His cognitive ability had matured, and He was able to discern things, could He be considered a normal man. It was only after His humanity had matured that He could perform His ministry. How could He perform His ministry while His normal humanity was yet immature and His reasoning unsound? Surely He could not be expected to perform His ministry at the age of six or seven! Why did God not manifest Himself openly when He first became flesh? It was because the humanity of His flesh was as yet immature; the cognitive processes of His flesh, as well as the normal humanity of this flesh, were not fully in His possession. For this reason, it was of absolute necessity for Him to be possessed of the normal humanity and the common sense of a normal man—to the point where He was sufficiently equipped to undertake His work in the flesh—before He could begin His work. If He were not equal to the task, it would have been necessary for Him to continue to grow and mature. Had Jesus begun His work at the age of seven or eight, would not man have regarded Him as a prodigy? Would not all people have thought Him a child? Who would have found Him convincing? A child of seven or eight no taller than the podium He stood behind—would He have been fit to preach? Before His normal humanity matured, He was not up to the task. As far as His humanity which was as yet immature was concerned, a goodly portion of the work was simply unattainable. The work of God’s Spirit in the flesh is also governed by its own principles. Only when He is equipped with the normal humanity can He undertake the work and assume the charge of the Father. Only then may He begin His work. In His childhood, Jesus simply could not comprehend anything about much of what had occurred in ancient times, and only through asking the teachers in the synagogue did He come to understand. If He had begun His work as soon as He learned to speak, how would it have been possible for Him not to make mistakes? How could God possibly make missteps? Therefore, it was only after He was able to work that He began His work; He did not carry out any work until He was fully capable of undertaking it. At the age of 29, Jesus was already quite mature and His humanity sufficient to undertake the work He was to do. It was only then that the Spirit of God officially began to work in Him. At that time, John had prepared for seven years in order to open up the way for Him, and upon concluding his work, he was thrown into prison. The burden then fell entirely to Jesus. If He had undertaken this work at the age of 21 or 22, at a time when His humanity was still lacking, when He had only just entered young adulthood, and there were many things He still did not understand, then He would have been incapable of taking control. At that time, John had already carried out his work for some time before Jesus began His work, by which time He was already in middle age. At that age, His normal humanity was sufficient to undertake the work that He should do. Now, the incarnate God also has normal humanity and, though far from mature in comparison to the older among you, this humanity is already sufficient as it is to undertake His work. The circumstances surrounding today’s work are not completely the same as those in the time of Jesus. Why did Jesus choose the twelve apostles? It was all in support of His work and in concert with it. On the one hand, it was to lay the foundation for His work at the time, while on the other it was to lay the foundation for His work in the days to follow. In accordance with the work at that time, it was Jesus’ will to choose the twelve apostles, as it was the will of God Himself. He believed that He should choose the twelve apostles and then lead them to preach in every place. But today there is no need for this among you! When God incarnate works in the flesh, there are many principles, and there are many matters that man simply does not understand; man constantly uses his own notions to take His measure, or to make excessive demands of God. Yet to this day, many people are totally unaware that their knowledge is comprised solely of their own notions. Whatever the age or the place in which God is incarnated, the principles for His work in the flesh remain unchanged. He cannot become flesh and yet transcend the flesh in His work; even less can He become flesh and yet not work within the normal humanity of the flesh. Otherwise, the significance of God’s incarnation would dissolve into nothing, and the Word become flesh would become entirely meaningless. Moreover, only the Father in heaven (the Spirit) knows of God’s incarnation, and none other, not even the flesh Himself or the messengers of heaven. This being so, God’s work in the flesh is all the more normal and all the better able to demonstrate that the Word has indeed become flesh, and the flesh means an ordinary and normal man.

Some may wonder, “Why must the age be ushered in by God Himself? Cannot a created being stand in His stead?” You are all aware that God becomes flesh for the express purpose of ushering in a new age, and, of course, when He ushers in a new age, He will have concluded the former age at the same time. God is the Beginning and the End; it is He Himself who sets His work in motion and so it must be He Himself who concludes the former age. That is the proof of His defeat of Satan and of His conquest of the world. Each time He Himself works among man, it is the start of a new battle. Without the beginning of new work, there would naturally be no conclusion of the old. And when there is no conclusion of the old, this is proof that the battle with Satan is yet to come to an end. Only if God Himself comes, and carries out new work among man, can man break completely free of the power of Satan and gain a new life and a new beginning. Otherwise, man shall forever live in the old age and forever live under the old influence of Satan. With every age led by God, a part of man is set free, and thus man advances along with the work of God toward the new age. The victory of God means a victory for all those who follow Him. If the race of created human beings were charged with concluding the age, then be it from the viewpoint of man or of Satan, this would be no more than an act of opposing or betraying God, not one of submission to God, and the work of man would become a tool for Satan. Only if man submits to and follows God in an age ushered in by God Himself can Satan be fully convinced, for that is the duty of a created being. Therefore, I say that you need only follow and submit, and no more is required of you. This is what is meant by each keeping to his duty and each performing his respective function. God does His own work and has no need for man to do it in His stead, nor does He participate in the work of created beings. Man performs his own duty and does not participate in the work of God. Only this is submission, and proof of Satan’s defeat. After God Himself has finished ushering in the new age, He no longer comes down to work in the midst of mankind Himself. It is only then that man officially steps into the new age to perform his duty and carry out his mission as a created being. These are the principles by which God works, which no one may transgress. Only working in this way is sensible and reasonable. The work of God is to be done by God Himself. It is He who sets His work in motion, and it is He who concludes His work. It is He who plans the work, and it is He who manages it, and even more, it is He who brings the work to fruition. As stated in the Bible, “I am the Beginning and the End; I am the Sower and the Reaper.” All that pertains to the work of His management is done by God Himself. He is the Ruler of the six-thousand-year management plan; no one can do His work in His stead and no one can bring His work to a close, for it is He who holds everything in His hand. Having created the world, He will lead the entire world to live in His light, and He will also conclude the entire age, thereby bringing His entire plan to fruition!

The Mystery of the Incarnation (2)

At that time when Jesus worked in Judea, He did so openly, but now, I work and speak among you in secret. The unbelievers are completely unaware of it. My work among you is closed to those on the outside. These words, these chastisements and judgments, are known only to you and no others. All of this work is carried out in your midst and unveiled only to you; none among the unbelievers knows of this, for the time has not yet come. These people here are near to being made complete after enduring chastisements, but those on the outside know nothing of this. This work is much too hidden! To them, God become flesh is hidden, but to those in this stream, one can say that He is open. Although in God all is open, all is revealed, and all is set free, this is only true for those who believe in Him; as far as the rest, the unbelievers, are concerned, nothing is made known. The work that is currently being done among you and in China is strictly closed off, in order to keep them from knowing. Should they become aware of this work, then all they would do is condemn it and subject it to persecution. They would not believe in it. To work in the nation of the great red dragon, this most backward of places, is no easy task. If this work were to be put out into the open, it would be impossible to continue. This stage of work simply cannot be carried out in this place. If this work were to be carried out in the open, how could they allow it to go forward? Would this not put the work under even greater risk? If this work were not concealed, but rather carried out as in the time of Jesus, when He spectacularly healed the sick and cast out demons, then would it not have long ago been “seized upon” by the devils? Would they be able to tolerate the existence of God? If I were to now enter into the synagogues to preach and lecture man, then would I not have long ago been dashed to pieces? And if this had happened, how could My work have continued to be carried out? The reason that no signs and wonders are openly manifested at all is for the sake of concealment. So, to unbelievers, My work cannot be seen, known, or discovered. If this stage of work were to be done in the same manner as that of Jesus in the Age of Grace, it could not be so steady as it now is. So, to work secretly in this way is of benefit to you and to the work as a whole. When God’s work on earth comes to an end, that is, when this secret work concludes, then this stage of work will burst into the open. All will know that there are a group of overcomers in China; all will know that God become flesh is in China and that His work has come to an end. Only then will it dawn on man: Why is it that China has yet to show decline or collapse? It turns out that God is personally carrying out His work in China and has perfected a group of people into overcomers.

God become flesh only manifests Himself to a portion of the people who follow Him during this period when He personally carries out His work, and not to all created beings. He became flesh only to complete one stage of His work, and not for the sake of showing man His image. However, His work must be carried out by Himself, thus it is necessary for Him to do so in the flesh. When this work concludes, He will depart from the human world; He cannot remain for the long term among mankind for fear of standing in the way of the work to come. What He manifests to the multitude is only His righteous disposition and all His deeds, and not the image of when He twice became flesh, for the image of God can only be shown through His disposition, and cannot be replaced by the image of His incarnate flesh. The image of His flesh is shown only to a limited number of people, only to those who follow Him as He works in the flesh. This is why the work being carried out now is done so in secret. In the same way, Jesus only showed Himself to the Jews when He did His work, and never publicly showed Himself to any other nation. Thus, once He had completed His work, He promptly departed from the human world and did not stay; afterward, it was not He, this image of man, who showed Himself to man, but the Holy Spirit who carried out the work directly. Once the work of God become flesh is completely finished, He will depart from the mortal world, and never again will He do any work similar to what He did when He was in flesh. After this, the work is all done directly by the Holy Spirit. During this period, man is hardly able to see the image of His fleshly body; He does not show Himself to man at all, but remains forever hidden. The time for the work of God become flesh is limited. It is carried out in a specific age, period, nation, and among specific people. This work represents only the work during the period of God’s incarnation; it is representative of an age, and it represents the work of the Spirit of God in one particular age, and not the entirety of His work. Therefore, the image of God become flesh will not be shown to all peoples. What is shown to the multitude is the righteousness of God and His disposition in its entirety, rather than His image when He twice became flesh. It is neither the one single image that is shown to man, nor the two images combined. Therefore, it is imperative that God’s incarnate flesh should depart the earth upon completion of the work that He needs to do, for He comes only to do the work He ought to do, and not to show people His image. Even though the significance of the incarnation has already been fulfilled by God twice becoming flesh, still He will not openly manifest Himself to any nation that has never before seen Him. Jesus will never again show Himself to the Jews as the Sun of righteousness, nor will He stand atop the Mount of Olives and appear to all peoples; all the Jews have seen is the portrait of Jesus during His time in Judea. This is because the work of Jesus in His incarnation ended two thousand years ago; He will not return to Judea in the image of a Jew, much less show Himself in the image of a Jew to any of the Gentile nations, for the image of Jesus become flesh is merely the image of a Jew, and not the image of the Son of man that John saw. Even though Jesus promised His followers that He would come again, He will not simply show Himself in the image of a Jew to all those in Gentile nations. You ought to know that the work of God become flesh is to open up an age. This work is limited to a few years, and He cannot complete all the work of the Spirit of God, just as the image of Jesus as a Jew could represent only the image of God as He worked in Judea, and He could only do the work of crucifixion. During the period when Jesus was in the flesh, He could not do the work of bringing the age to an end or destroying mankind. Therefore, after He had been crucified and had concluded His work, He ascended to the highest height and forever concealed Himself from man. From then on, those faithful believers from the Gentile nations were unable to see the manifestation of the Lord Jesus, but only the portrait of Him that they had pasted on the wall. This portrait is but one drawn by man, and not the image of God as He shows Himself to man. God will not openly show Himself to the multitude in the image of when He twice became flesh. The work He does among mankind is to allow them to understand His disposition. All this is shown to man by means of the work of the different ages; it is accomplished through the disposition He has made known and the work that He has done, rather than through the manifestation of Jesus. That is to say, the image of God is made known to man not through the incarnate image, but rather through the work carried out by the incarnate God who has both image and form; and through His work, His image is shown and His disposition is made known. This is the significance of the work He wishes to do in the flesh.

Once the work of God’s two incarnations comes to an end, He will begin to show His righteous disposition throughout all the nations of unbelievers, allowing the multitude to see His image. He will manifest His disposition and by this means make clear the ends of the different categories of man, thereby bringing the old age entirely to an end. The reason why His work in the flesh does not extend over a great expanse (just as Jesus worked only in Judea, and today I work only among you) is because His work in the flesh has boundaries and limits. He is merely carrying out a short period of work in the image of an ordinary and normal flesh; He is not using this incarnate flesh to do the work of eternity or the work of appearing to the peoples of the nations of unbelievers. The work in the flesh can only be limited in scope (such as working only in Judea or only among you), and then, by means of the work carried out within these boundaries, its scope can then be expanded. Of course, the work of expansion is to be carried out directly by His Spirit and will then no longer be the work of His incarnate flesh. For the work in the flesh has boundaries and does not extend to all corners of the universe—this it cannot accomplish. Through the work in the flesh, His Spirit carries out the work that is to follow. Therefore, the work done in the flesh is of an inaugural nature that is carried out within certain boundaries; after this, it is His Spirit that carries on with this work, and He does so moreover in an expanded scope.

God comes to work on earth only in order to guide the age; He means only to open up a new age and bring the old one to an end. He has not come to live out the course of a man’s life on earth, to experience for Himself the joys and sorrows of life of the human world, or to perfect a certain person by His hand or personally watch a certain person as he grows. This is not His work; His work is merely to begin the new age and bring an end to the old. That is, He will in person begin an age, in person bring the other to an end, and defeat Satan by carrying out His work in person. Each time He carries out His work in person, it is as if He is putting a foot onto the battleground. First, He vanquishes the world and prevails over Satan while in the flesh; He takes possession of all glory and raises the curtain on the entirety of the work of the two thousand years, making it so that all people on earth have the right path to tread and a life of peace and joy to live. However, God cannot live with man on earth for long, for God is God, and unlike man after all. He cannot live the lifetime of a normal person, that is, He cannot reside on earth as a person who is nothing out of the ordinary, for He has only a minimal part of the normal humanity of a normal person to sustain His human life. In other words, how could God start a family, have a career, and raise children on earth? Would this not be a disgrace to Him? That He is endowed with normal humanity is only for the purpose of carrying out work in a normal manner, not to enable Him to have a family and career as a normal person would. His normal sense, normal mind, and the normal feeding and clothing of His flesh are sufficient to prove that He has a normal humanity; there is no need for Him to have a family or a career in order to prove that He is furnished with a normal humanity. This would be completely unnecessary! God’s coming to earth is the Word becoming flesh; He is simply allowing man to understand His word and to see His word, that is, allowing man to see the work carried out by the flesh. His intention is not for people to treat His flesh in a certain way, but only for man to be submissive to the end, that is, to submit to all words that issue forth from His mouth, and to submit to all the work that He does. He is merely working in the flesh; He is not intentionally asking for man to exalt the greatness and holiness of His flesh, but is instead showing man the wisdom of His work and all the authority He wields. Therefore, even though He has an outstanding humanity, He makes no announcements, and focuses only on the work that He should do. You should know why it is that God became flesh and yet does not publicize or testify to His normal humanity, but instead simply carries out the work that He wishes to do. Therefore, all that you can see from the incarnate God is what He divinely is; this is because He never proclaims what He humanly is for man to emulate. Only when man leads people does he speak of what he humanly is, the better to gain their admiration and conviction and thereby attain leadership of others. In contrast, God conquers man through His work alone (that is, work unattainable to man); it is immaterial whether He is admired by man or makes man adore Him. All He does is to instill in man a feeling of fear for Him or a sense of His unfathomability. God has no need of impressing man; all He needs is for you to fear Him once you have witnessed His disposition. The work God does is His own; it cannot be done by man in His stead, nor can it be attained by man. Only God Himself can do His own work and usher in a new age to lead man into new lives. The work He does is to enable man to come into possession of a new life and enter into a new age. The rest of the work is handed over to those with normal humanity who are admired by others. Therefore, in the Age of Grace, He completed the work of two thousand years in just three and a half years out of His thirty-three years in the flesh. When God comes to earth to carry out His work, He always completes the work of two thousand years or of an entire age within the shortest span of a few years. He does not tarry, and He does not delay; He simply condenses the work of many years so that it is completed within just a few short years. This is because the work He does in person is wholly for the sake of opening up a new way out and leading a new age.

The Mystery of the Incarnation (3)

When God carries out His work, He comes not to engage in any building or movements, but to fulfill His ministry. Each time He becomes flesh, it is only to accomplish a stage of work and to launch a new age. Now the Age of Kingdom has arrived, as has the training of the kingdom. This stage of work is not the work of man, and it is not to work man to a particular degree, but is only to complete a portion of God’s work. What He does is not the work of man, it is not to achieve a certain result in working man before leaving earth; it is to fulfill His ministry and finish the work that He ought to do, which is to make proper arrangements for His work on earth, and thereby gain glory. The work of the incarnate God is unlike that of the people used by the Holy Spirit. When God comes to do His work on earth, He is only concerned with the fulfillment of His ministry. As for all other matters unrelated to His ministry, He takes almost no part, even to the extent of turning a blind eye. He simply carries out the work that He ought to do, and least of all is He concerned about the work that man ought to do. The work He does is solely that which pertains to the age He is in and to the ministry that He ought to fulfill, as if all other matters lie outside His purview. He does not furnish Himself with more basic knowledge about living as one among mankind, nor does He learn more social skills, nor equip Himself with anything else that man understands. All that man ought to possess concerns Him not at all and He simply does the work that is His duty. And so, as man sees it, the incarnate God is deficient in so much that He even pays no heed to many of the things that man ought to possess, and He has no understanding of such matters. Such things as common knowledge about life, as well as the principles governing personal conduct and interaction with others, appear to bear no relation to Him. But you simply cannot sense from the incarnate God the slightest hint of abnormality. That is to say, His humanity only maintains His life as a normal person and the normal reasoning of His brain, giving Him the ability to discern between right and wrong. However, He is not furnished with anything else, all of which is what man (created beings) alone should possess. God becomes flesh only to fulfill His own ministry. His work is directed at an entire age, not at any one person or place, but at the entire universe. This is the direction of His work and the principle by which He works. No one can alter this, and man has no way of becoming involved in it. Each time God becomes flesh, He brings with Him the work of that age, and has no intention of living alongside man for twenty, thirty, forty, or even seventy or eighty years in order that he may better understand and gain insight into Him. There is no need for that! To do so would in no way deepen the knowledge man has of God’s inherent disposition; instead, it would only add to his notions and cause his notions and thoughts to become fossilized. It therefore behooves you all to understand exactly what the work of the incarnate God is. Surely you cannot fail to have understood the words I spoke to you: “It was not to experience the life of a normal human that I have come”? Have you forgotten the words: “God comes to earth not to live the life of a normal human”? You do not understand God’s purpose in becoming flesh, nor do you know the meaning of “How could God come to earth with the intent of experiencing the life of a created being?” God comes to earth solely to complete His work, and so His work on earth is short-lived. He comes to earth not with the intent of causing the Spirit of God to cultivate His fleshly body into a superior human who will lead the church. When God comes to earth, it is the Word becoming flesh; man, however, does not know of His work and forcibly attributes things to Him. But you should all realize that God is the Word become flesh, not a fleshly body that has been cultivated by the Spirit of God to assume the role of God for the moment. God Himself is not the product of cultivation, but is the Word become flesh, and today He officially carries out His work among you all. You all know, and acknowledge, that the incarnation of God is a factual truth, yet you act as though you understand it. From the work of the incarnate God to the significance and essence of His incarnation, you are unable to grasp these in the least and only follow others in glibly reciting words from memory. Do you believe the incarnate God to be as you imagine?

God becomes flesh solely to lead the age and set in motion new work. It is necessary for you to understand this point. This is much different from the function of man, and the two cannot be mentioned in the same breath. Man needs to be cultivated and perfected over a long period before he can be used to carry out work, and the kind of humanity that is needed is of an especially high order. Not only must man be able to sustain the sense of normal humanity, but he must further understand many of the principles and rules governing his conduct in relation to others, and, moreover, he must commit to studying even more about the wisdom and ethical knowledge of man. This is what man should be furnished with. However, this is not so for God become flesh, for His work neither represents man nor is the work of man; it is, rather, a direct expression of His being and a direct implementation of the work that He ought to do. (Naturally, His work is carried out at the appropriate time, not casually or at random, and it is begun when it is time to fulfill His ministry.) He does not take part in the life of man or the work of man, that is, His humanity is not furnished with any of these (although this does not affect His work). He only fulfills His ministry when it is time for Him to do so; whatever His status, He simply forges ahead with the work that He ought to do. Whatever man knows of Him and whatever man’s opinion of Him, His work is wholly unaffected. For example, when Jesus carried out His work, no one knew exactly who He was, but He simply forged ahead in His work. None of this hindered Him in carrying out the work that He ought to do. Therefore, He did not at first confess or proclaim His own identity, and merely had man follow Him. Naturally this was not only the humility of God, but was also the way in which God worked in the flesh. He could only work in this way, for man had no way of recognizing Him with the naked eye. And even if man had recognized Him, he would not have been able to help in His work. Furthermore, He did not become flesh in order to have man come to know His flesh; it was to carry out work and fulfill His ministry. For this reason, He placed no importance on making His identity public. When He had completed all the work that He ought to do, His entire identity and status naturally became clear to man. God become flesh keeps silent and never makes any proclamations. He pays mind neither to man nor to how man is getting along in following Him, but simply forges ahead in fulfilling His ministry and carrying out the work that He ought to do. No one is able to stand in the way of His work. When the time comes for Him to conclude His work, it will without fail be concluded and brought to an end, and no one is able to dictate otherwise. Only after He departs from man on completing His work will man understand the work that He does, though still not entirely clearly. And it will take a long time for man to fully understand the intent with which He first carried out His work. In other words, the work of the age of the incarnate God is divided into two parts. One part consists of the work that the incarnate flesh of God Himself does and the words that the incarnate flesh of God Himself speaks. Once the ministry of His flesh is completely fulfilled, the other part of the work remains to be carried out by those who are used by the Holy Spirit. It is at this time that man should fulfill his function, for God has already opened up the way, and it needs to be walked by man himself. That is to say, God become flesh carries out one part of the work, and then the Holy Spirit and those used by the Holy Spirit will succeed to this work. Therefore, man should know what the work that is primarily carried out by God become flesh at this stage entails, and he must understand exactly what the significance of God becoming flesh is and what the work that He ought to do is, and not make demands of God according to the demands made upon man. Herein lie man’s mistake, his notion, and even more, his rebelliousness.

God becomes flesh not with the intention of allowing man to know His flesh, or to allow man to distinguish the differences between the flesh of God incarnate and that of man; nor does God become flesh to train man’s powers of discernment, and still less does He do so with the intention of allowing man to worship the incarnate flesh of God, thereby winning great glory. None of these things is the intention of God in becoming flesh. Nor does God become flesh in order to condemn man, nor deliberately to reveal man, nor to make things difficult for him. None of these things is the intention of God. Every time God becomes flesh, it is a form of work that is unavoidable. It is for the sake of His greater work and His greater management that He acts as He does, and not for the reasons that man imagines. God comes to earth only as His work requires, and only as necessary. He does not come to earth with the intention of simply looking around, but to carry out the work that He ought to do. Why else would He assume such a heavy burden and take such great risks to carry out this work? God becomes flesh only when He has to, and always with unique significance. If it were only for the sake of allowing people to have a look at Him and to broaden their horizons, then He would, with absolute certainty, never come among people so lightly. He comes to earth for the sake of His management and His greater work, and in order that He might obtain more of mankind. He comes to represent the age, He comes to defeat Satan, and He clothes Himself in flesh in order to defeat Satan. Even more, He comes in order to guide the entire human race in living their lives. All of this concerns His management, and it concerns the work of the whole universe. If God became flesh merely to allow man to come to know His flesh and to open up people’s eyes, then why would He not travel to every nation? Would this not be an exceedingly easy matter? But He did not do so, instead choosing a suitable place in which to settle and begin the work that He ought to do. Just this flesh alone is of considerable significance. He represents an entire age, and also carries out the work of an entire age; He both brings the former age to an end and ushers in the new. All of this is an important matter that concerns God’s management, and all of this is the significance of one stage of work that God comes to earth to carry out. When Jesus came to earth, He only spoke some words and carried out some work; He did not concern Himself with the life of man, and He departed as soon as He had completed His work. Today, when I have finished speaking and passing on My words to you, and when you have all understood, this step in My work will have concluded, no matter how your life will be. There must in future be some people to continue this step in My work and to continue to work on earth in accordance with these words; at that time, man’s work and man’s construction will begin. But, at present, God only does His work in order to fulfill His ministry and to complete one step of His work. God works in a manner unlike that of man. Man likes congregations and forums, and places importance on ceremony, whereas what God detests the most are precisely the congregations and meetings of man. God converses and speaks with man informally; this is the work of God, which is exceptionally liberated and also sets you free. However, I utterly detest congregating with you, and I am unable to become accustomed to a life so regimented as yours. I detest rules the most; they put constraints on man to the point of making him afraid to make a move, afraid to speak, and afraid to sing, his eyes staring straight ahead at you. I utterly detest your manner of congregating and I utterly detest large congregations. I simply refuse to congregate with you in this way, for this manner of living makes one feel shackled and you observe too much ceremony and too many rules. If you were allowed to lead you would lead people all into the domain of rules, and they would have no way of casting aside the rules under your leadership; instead the atmosphere of religion would only become ever more intense, and the practices of man would only keep proliferating. Some people keep on talking and speaking when they congregate and they never feel weary, and some can go on preaching for a dozen days without stopping. These are all considered large congregations and the meetings of man; they have nothing to do with a life of eating and drinking, of enjoyment, or of the spirit being set free. These are all meetings! Your co-worker meetings, as well as congregations large and small, are all abhorrent to Me, and I have never felt any interest in them. This is the principle by which I work: I am not willing to preach during congregations, nor do I wish to proclaim anything in a big public assembly, and even less to convene you all for a few days of a special conference. I do not find it agreeable that you should all sit, prim and proper, at a gathering; I loathe seeing you live within the confines of any given ceremony, and even more, I refuse to take part in such a ceremony of yours. The more you do this, the more abhorrent I find it. I have not the slightest interest in these ceremonies and rules of yours; no matter how good a job you make of them, I find them all abhorrent. It is not that your arrangements are unsuitable or that you are too low; it is that I detest your manner of living and, even more, I am unable to become accustomed to it. You do not understand in the least the work I wish to do. When Jesus did His work back then, after giving a sermon in some place, He would lead His disciples out of the city and speak with them about the ways that it behooved them to understand. He often worked in such a manner. His work among the multitude was few and far between. In accordance with what you ask of Him, God become flesh should not have the life of a normal human; He must carry out His work, and, whether He is sitting, standing, or walking, He must speak. He must work at all times and can never cease “operations,” otherwise He would be neglecting His duties. Are these demands of man appropriate to human sense? Where is your integrity? Do you not ask too much? Do I need you to examine Me as I work? Do I need you to supervise as I fulfill My ministry? I know well what work I ought to do and when I ought to do it; there is no need for others to intervene. It may perhaps seem to you as if I have not done much, but by then My work is at an end. Take for instance the words of Jesus in the Four Gospels: Were they not limited as well? At that time, when Jesus entered the synagogue and preached a sermon, He was finished within a few minutes at the most, and when He was done speaking, He led His disciples onto the boat and departed without any explanation. At the very most, those within the synagogue discussed this amongst themselves, but Jesus had no part in it. God does only the work that He ought to do, and nothing over and above this. Now, many want Me to speak more and talk more, at least several hours a day. As you see it, God ceases to be God unless He speaks, and only He who speaks is God. You are all blind! All brutes! You are all ignorant things that have no sense! You have too many notions! Your demands go too far! You are inhuman! You do not understand in the least what God is! You believe that all speakers and orators are God, and that anyone who is willing to supply you with words is your father. Tell Me, do all of you, with your well-formed features and uncommon appearance, still have even the slightest bit of sense? Do you yet know the heavensun! Each of you is like a greedy and corrupt official, so how can you see sense? How can you discriminate between right and wrong? I have bestowed much upon you, but how many among you have placed value on it? Who is fully in possession of it? You do not know who it is that opened the way along which you walk this day, so you continue to make demands of Me, making of Me these ridiculous and absurd demands. Are you not crimson with embarrassment? Have I not spoken enough? Have I not done enough? Who among you can truly cherish My words as a treasure? You flatter Me when in My presence, but you lie and cheat when you are not! Your actions are too despicable, and they revolt Me! I know that you ask Me to speak and work for no other reason than to feast your eyes and broaden your horizons, not for the sake of transforming your lives. I have spoken so much to you. Your lives should have changed long ago, so why then do you still keep relapsing into your old states even now? Could it be that My words have been robbed from you and you did not receive them? To tell the truth, I do not wish to say any more to degenerates like you—it would be in vain! I do not wish to do so much futile work! You only wish to broaden your horizons or to feast your eyes, and not to gain life! You are all deceiving yourselves! I ask you, how much of what I have spoken to you face-to-face have you put into practice? All you do is play tricks to deceive others! I detest those among you who enjoy looking on as spectators, and I find your curiosity deeply abhorrent. If you are not here to pursue the true way or thirst for the truth, then you are the objects of My detestation! I know that you listen to Me speak solely to satisfy your curiosity or to fulfill one or another of your greedy desires. You have no thought of seeking the existence of truth, or of exploring the right track for entering into life; these demands simply do not exist among you. All you do is treat God like a plaything that you study and admire. You have too little passion for pursuing life, but plenty of desire to be curious! Explaining the way of life to such people is tantamount to talking to thin air; I may as well not speak at all! Let Me tell you: If you are merely looking to fill the void within your heart, then you had best not come to Me! You ought to place importance on gaining life! Do not fool yourselves! You had best not take your curiosity as the basis for your pursuit of life or use it as a pretext for asking Me to speak to you. These are all tricks at which you are highly adept! I ask you again: How much of what I ask you to enter into have you actually entered into? Have you grasped all that I have spoken to you? Have you managed to put into practice all that I have spoken to you?

The work of every age is initiated by God Himself, but you should know that, whatever the way in which God works, He does not come to start a movement, or to hold special conferences, or to establish any sort of organization on your behalf. He comes solely to carry out the work that He ought to do. His work does not suffer the constraint of any man. He does His work however He wishes; no matter what man thinks or knows of it, He is concerned only with carrying out His work. From the creation of the world to the present, there have already been three stages of work; from Jehovah to Jesus, and from the Age of Law to the Age of Grace, God has never convened a special conference for man, nor has He ever assembled all mankind together in order to convene a special global working conference and thereby extend the domain of His work. All He does is to carry out the initial work of an entire age at an appropriate time and in an appropriate place, thereby ushering in the age and leading the human race in how to live their lives. Special conferences are the congregations of man; assembling people together to celebrate holidays is the work of man. God does not observe holidays and, moreover, finds them abhorrent; He does not convene special conferences and, furthermore, He finds them abhorrent. Now you should understand exactly what is the work that is done by the incarnate God!

The Mystery of the Incarnation (4)

You should know of the story behind the Bible and of its making. This knowledge does not belong to those who have not accepted the new work of God. They do not know. If you were to speak plainly of these matters of essence to them, they would no longer be sticklers about the Bible with you. They are constantly digging into what has been prophesied: Has this statement come to pass? Has that statement come to pass? Their acceptance of the gospel is in accordance with the Bible, and they preach the gospel according to the Bible. Their belief in God rests on the words of the Bible; without the Bible, they will not believe in God. This is the manner in which they live, subjecting the Bible to petty scrutiny. When they once again come digging into the Bible and ask you for explanations, you say, “First, let us not verify each statement. Instead, let us look at how the Holy Spirit works. Let us take the path we walk and compare it with the truth to see if this path is indeed the work of the Holy Spirit, and let us use the work of the Holy Spirit to check whether such a path is correct. As for whether this statement or that statement has come to pass as foretold, we humans should not stick our noses into it. It is better for us to speak instead of the work of the Holy Spirit and the latest work that God has been doing.” The prophecies in the Bible are words of God transmitted at the time by the prophets and words written by men whom God used, having obtained inspiration; only God Himself can explain those words, only the Holy Spirit can make known the meaning of those words, and only God Himself can break the seven seals and open the scroll. You say: “You are not God, and neither am I, so who dares lightly to explain the words of God? Do you dare to explain those words? Even if the prophets Jeremiah, John and Elijah were to come, they would not dare to try and explain those words, for they are not the Lamb. Only the Lamb can break the seven seals and open the scroll, and none other can explain His words. I dare not usurp the name of God, much less attempt to explain God’s words. I can only be one who submits to God. Are you God? None of the created beings dare to open the scroll or explain those words, and so I dare not explain them either. You had better not attempt to explain them. No one should try to explain them. Let us talk about the work of the Holy Spirit; this much man can do. I know a little of the work of Jehovah and Jesus, but as I have no personal experience of such work, I can only speak of it to a slight extent. As for the meaning of the words that Isaiah or Jesus spoke in their time, I will make no explanation. I do not study the Bible, but rather I follow the present work of God. You actually regard the Bible as the little scroll, but is it not something that only the Lamb can open? Apart from the Lamb, who else can open it? You are not the Lamb, and even less do I dare claim to be God Himself, so let us not analyze the Bible or subject it to petty scrutiny. Far better to discuss the work done by the Holy Spirit, that is, the present work done by God Himself. Let us see what the principles by which God works are and what the essence of His work is, using these to verify whether the path we walk on today is right, and in this way make certain of it.” If you wish to preach the gospel, particularly to those in the religious world, you must understand the Bible and have a mastery of its inside story; otherwise, there is no way for you to preach the gospel. Once you have mastered the bigger picture, and cease to scrutinize the dead words of the Bible in a petty way, but speak only of the work of God and the life truth, then you shall be able to gain those who seek with a true heart.

Jehovah’s work, the laws He put in place, and the principles by which He guided men in living their lives, the content of the work He did in the Age of Law, the significance of Him putting His laws in place, the significance of His work to the Age of Grace, and what work God does in this final stage: these are things that you should understand. The first stage is the work of the Age of Law, the second the work of the Age of Grace, and the third the work of the last days. You must be clear about these stages of God’s work. From beginning to end, there are three stages in total. What is the essence of each stage of work? How many stages are carried out in the work of the six-thousand-year management plan? How are these stages carried out, and why is each carried out in its particular way? These are all crucial questions. The work of each age has representational value. What work did Jehovah carry out? Why did He do it in that particular way? Why was He called Jehovah? Again, what work did Jesus carry out in the Age of Grace, and in what manner did He do it? Which aspects of God’s disposition are represented by each stage of work and each age? Which aspects of His disposition were expressed in the Age of Law? And which in the Age of Grace? And which in the final age? These are essential questions that you must be clear about. The whole of God’s disposition has been revealed in the course of the six-thousand-year management plan. It is not revealed only in the Age of Grace, nor only in the Age of Law, even less so only in this period of the last days. The work carried out in the last days represents judgment, wrath, and chastisement. The work carried out in the last days cannot replace the work of the Age of Law or that of the Age of Grace. However, the three stages, interconnecting, form one entity, and all are the work of one God. Naturally, the execution of this work is divided into separate ages. The work done in the last days brings everything to a close; that done in the Age of Law was the work of commencement; and that done in the Age of Grace was the work of redemption. As for the visions of the work in this entire six-thousand-year management plan, no one is able to gain insight or understanding, and these visions remain riddles. In the last days, only the work of the word is carried out in order to usher in the Age of Kingdom, but it is not representative of all the ages. The last days are no more than the last days and no more than the Age of Kingdom, and they do not represent the Age of Grace or the Age of Law. It is just that, during the last days, all the work in the six-thousand-year management plan is revealed to you. This is the unveiling of the mystery. This kind of mystery is something that can be unveiled by no man. No matter how great an understanding man has of the Bible, it remains nothing more than words, for man does not understand the essence of the Bible. In reading the Bible, man may comprehend some truths, explain some words, or subject some famous passages and chapters to his petty scrutiny, but he will never be able to extricate the meaning contained within those words, for all man sees are dead words, not the scenes of the work of Jehovah and of Jesus, and man has no way of unraveling the mystery of this work. Therefore, the mystery of the six-thousand-year management plan is the greatest mystery, the most profoundly hidden, and wholly unfathomable to man. No one can directly grasp the will of God, unless God Himself explains and reveals it to man; otherwise, these things will forever remain riddles to man, remaining forever sealed mysteries. Never mind those in the religious world; if you had not been told today, you would not have grasped it either. This work of six thousand years is more mysterious than all the prophecies of the prophets. It is the greatest mystery from creation to the present, and no one among the prophets throughout the ages has ever been able to fathom it, for this mystery is only unveiled in the final age and has never before been revealed. If you can grasp this mystery, and if you are able to comprehend it in its entirety, then all religious persons will be vanquished by this mystery. Only this is the greatest of visions; it is that which man longs most keenly to grasp but it is also that which is most unclear to him. When you were in the Age of Grace, you did not know what the work done by Jesus or that done by Jehovah was about. People did not understand why Jehovah set forth laws, why He asked the multitude to keep the laws or why the temple had to be built, and still less did people understand why the Israelites were led from Egypt into the wilderness and then on to Canaan. It was not until this day that these matters have been revealed.

The work in the last days is the final stage of the three. It is the work of another new age and does not represent the entirety of the work of management. The six-thousand-year management plan is divided into three stages of work. No one stage alone can represent the work of the three ages, but only one part of a whole. The name Jehovah cannot represent the whole of God’s disposition. The fact that He carried out His work in the Age of Law does not prove that God can only be God under the law. Jehovah set forth laws for man and handed down commandments to him, asking man to build the temple and the altars; the work He did represents only the Age of Law. This work that He did does not prove that God is only a God who asks man to keep the law, or that He is the God in the temple, or that He is the God before the altar. To say this would be untrue. The work done under the law can only represent one age. Therefore, if God only did the work in the Age of Law, then man would confine God within the following definition, saying, “God is the God in the temple, and, in order to serve God we must put on priestly robes and enter the temple.” If the work in the Age of Grace had never been carried out and the Age of Law had continued until the present, man would not know that God is also merciful and loving. If the work in the Age of Law had not been done, and instead only the work in the Age of Grace, then all man would know is that God can only redeem man and forgive man’s sins. Man would know only that He is holy and innocent, and that for man’s sake He is able to sacrifice Himself and be crucified. Man would know only these things but have no understanding of anything else. Each age therefore represents one part of God’s disposition. As for which aspects of God’s disposition are represented in the Age of Law, which in the Age of Grace, and which in this present stage: only when all three stages have been integrated into one whole can they reveal the entirety of God’s disposition. Only when man has come to know all three stages can he understand it fully. None of the three stages can be omitted. You will only see the disposition of God in its entirety after coming to know these three stages of work. The fact that God completed His work in the Age of Law does not prove that He is only the God under the law, and the fact that He completed His work of redemption does not mean that God will forever redeem mankind. These are all conclusions drawn by man. The Age of Grace having come to an end, you cannot then say that God belongs only to the cross and that the cross alone represents the salvation of God. To do so would be to define God. In the present stage, God is mainly doing the work of the word, but you cannot say then that God has never been merciful to man and that all He has brought is chastisement and judgment. The work in the last days lays bare the work of Jehovah and Jesus and all mysteries not understood by man, so as to reveal the destination and the end of mankind and end all the work of salvation among mankind. This stage of work in the last days brings everything to a close. All mysteries not understood by man need to be unraveled to allow man to plumb them to their depths and have a completely clear understanding in his heart. Only then can the human race be classed according to kind. Only after the six-thousand-year management plan is completed will man come to understand the disposition of God in its entirety, for His management will then have come to an end. Now that you have experienced the work of God in the final age, what is the disposition of God? Do you dare say that God is the God who merely speaks words and no more? You would not dare render such a conclusion. Some would say that God is the God who unveils mysteries, that God is the Lamb and the One who breaks the seven seals. But no one dares to render such a conclusion. Others might say that God is the incarnate flesh, but this would still not be correct. Still others might say that God incarnate only speaks words and does not work signs and wonders, but you would dare even less to speak in this way, for Jesus became flesh and worked signs and wonders, so you would not dare to define God so lightly. All of the work done throughout the six-thousand-year management plan has only now come to a close. Only after all of this work has been revealed to man and carried out in the midst of mankind will humanity know all of God’s disposition and what He has and is. When the work of this stage has been fully completed, all mysteries not understood by man shall have been revealed, all truths previously not understood shall have been made clear, and the human race shall have been told of their future path and destination. This is the whole of the work that is to be done in the present stage. Even though the path that man walks today is also the path of the cross and the path of suffering, what man practices, and what he eats, drinks and enjoys today are greatly different from that which fell to man under the law and in the Age of Grace. What is asked of man this day is unlike that in the past and even more unlike that asked of man in the Age of Law. Now, what was asked of man under the law when God was doing His work in Israel? It was no more than that man should keep the Sabbath and the laws of Jehovah. No one was to labor on the Sabbath or transgress the laws of Jehovah. But it is not so now. On the Sabbath, man works, gathers, and prays as usual, and no restrictions are imposed on him. Those in the Age of Grace had to be baptized, and they were further asked to fast, break bread, drink wine, cover their heads and wash the feet of others for them. Now, these rules have been abolished, but greater demands are made of man, for the work of God grows ever deeper and the entry of man reaches ever higher. In the past, Jesus laid His hands upon man and prayed, but now that everything has been said, what is the use of the laying on of hands? Words alone can achieve results. When He laid His hands upon man in the past, it was to bless man and also to heal him of his diseases. This was how the Holy Spirit worked at that time, but it is not so now. Now the Holy Spirit uses words in order to work and achieve results. His words have been made clear to you, and you should put them into practice just as you have been told. His words are His will; they are the work He wishes to do. Through His words, you will understand His will and that which He asks you to attain, and you may just put His words into practice directly without any need for the laying on of hands. Some may say, “Lay Your hands upon me! Lay Your hands upon me that I may receive Your blessing and that I may partake of You.” All these are outdated practices from the past, now obsolete, for the age has changed. The Holy Spirit works in accordance with the age, neither at random nor in conformity to set rules. The age has changed, and a new age necessarily brings with it new work. This is true of every stage of work, and so His work is never repeated. In the Age of Grace, Jesus did a fair amount of that kind of work, such as healing sickness, casting out demons, laying His hands upon man to pray for him, and blessing man. However, to do so again would be meaningless in the present day. The Holy Spirit worked in that way at the time, for it was the Age of Grace, and there was sufficient grace for man to enjoy. No payment of any kind was asked of him, and so long as he had faith, he would receive grace. All were treated very graciously. Now the age has changed, and the work of God has progressed further; it is through chastisement and judgment that the rebelliousness of man and the unclean things within man will be purged away. That stage being the stage of redemption, it behooved God to work in that way, showing enough grace for man to enjoy, so that man might be redeemed from sin and, by means of grace, be forgiven his sins. This present stage is to expose the unrighteousness within man by means of chastisement, judgment, the smiting of words, as well as the discipline and revelation of words, so that humanity may afterward be saved. This is work more in-depth than redemption. The grace in the Age of Grace was sufficient for man’s enjoyment; now that man has already experienced this grace, he is no longer to enjoy it. This work is now past its time and is no longer to be done. Now man is to be saved through the judgment of the word. After man is judged, chastised, and refined, his disposition is thereby changed. Is this not all because of the words I have spoken? Each stage of work is done in line with the progress of the whole human race and with the age. The work is all significant, and it is all done for the sake of the final salvation, that mankind may have a good destination in the future, and that humanity may be classed according to kind in the end.

The work of the last days is to speak words. Great changes can be effected in man by means of words. The changes now effected in these people upon their accepting these words are much greater than those effected in people upon their accepting the signs and wonders of the Age of Grace. For, in the Age of Grace, the demons were cast out from man with the laying on of hands and prayer, but the corrupt dispositions within man still remained. Man was healed of his sickness and forgiven his sins, but as for just how man was to be purged of the corrupt satanic dispositions within him, this work had yet to be done. Man was only saved and forgiven his sins for his faith, but the sinful nature of man was not extirpated and still remained within him. The sins of man were forgiven through the agency of the incarnate God, but this did not mean that man no longer had sin within him. The sins of man could be forgiven through the sin offering, but as for just how man can be made to sin no more, and how his sinful nature may be extirpated completely and transformed, he has no way of solving this problem. The sins of man were forgiven, and this is because of the work of God’s crucifixion, but man continued to live within his corrupt satanic disposition of old. This being so, man must be completely saved from his corrupt satanic disposition, so that his sinful nature may be completely extirpated, never to develop again, thus enabling the disposition of man to be transformed. This would require man to grasp the path of growth in life, to grasp the way of life, and to grasp the way to change his disposition. Furthermore, it would require man to act in accordance with this path, so that his disposition may gradually be changed and he may live under the shining of the light, so that all that he does may be in accord with the will of God, so that he may cast away his corrupt satanic disposition, and so that he may break free from Satan’s influence of darkness, thereby emerging fully from sin. Only then will man receive complete salvation. At the time that Jesus was doing His work, man’s knowledge of Him was still vague and unclear. Man always believed Him to be the son of David, and proclaimed Him to be a great prophet, the benevolent Lord who redeemed man’s sins. Some, on the strength of their faith, were healed just from touching the edge of His garment; the blind could see and even the dead could be restored to life. However, man was unable to discover the corrupt satanic disposition deeply rooted within himself, neither did he know how to cast it away. Man received much grace, such as the peace and happiness of the flesh, the faith of one member bringing blessing on an entire family, the healing of sickness, and so on. The rest were the good deeds of man and his godly appearance; if someone could live on the basis of these, they were considered an acceptable believer. Only believers of this kind could enter heaven after death, which meant that they were saved. But, in their lifetime, these people did not understand at all the way of life. All they did was to commit sins and then confess their sins in a constant cycle without any path to change their disposition: Such was the condition of man in the Age of Grace. Has man received complete salvation? No! Therefore, after that stage of work was finished, there still remained the work of judgment and chastisement. This stage is to make man pure by means of the word, and thereby give him a path to follow. This stage would not be fruitful or meaningful if it continued with the casting out of demons, for it would fail to extirpate man’s sinful nature, and man would come to a standstill at the forgiveness of his sins. Through the sin offering, man has been forgiven his sins, for the work of the crucifixion has already come to an end and God has prevailed over Satan. But the corrupt disposition of man still remaining within him, man can still sin and resist God, and God has not gained mankind. That is why in this stage of work God uses the word to expose the corrupt disposition of man, causing him to practice in accordance with the right path. This stage is more meaningful than the previous one, as well as more fruitful, for now it is the word that directly supplies man’s life and enables the disposition of man to be completely renewed; it is a much more thorough stage of work. Therefore, the incarnation in the last days has completed the significance of God’s incarnation and completely finished God’s management plan for man’s salvation.

God’s saving of man is not done directly using the method of the Spirit and the identity of the Spirit, for His Spirit can neither be touched nor seen by man, neither can man draw near. If He tried to save man directly using the perspective of the Spirit, man would be unable to receive His salvation. If God did not put on the outward form of a created man, there would be no way for man to receive this salvation. For man has no way of approaching Him, much as no one was able to go near the cloud of Jehovah. Only by becoming a created human being, that is, only by putting His word into the body of flesh that He is about to become, can He personally work the word into all who follow Him. Only then can man personally see and hear His word, and moreover enter into possession of His word, and by this means come to be fully saved. If God did not become flesh, no one of flesh and blood would be able to receive such great salvation, nor would a single person be saved. If the Spirit of God worked directly in the midst of mankind, all humanity would be struck down, or else, with no way of coming into touch with God, they would be completely carried away captive by Satan. The first incarnation was to redeem man from sin, to redeem him by means of the fleshly body of Jesus, that is, He saved man from the cross, but the corrupt satanic disposition still remained within man. The second incarnation is no longer to serve as a sin offering but rather to save fully those who were redeemed from sin. This is done so that those who have been forgiven may be delivered from their sins and made fully clean, and by attaining a changed disposition, break free of Satan’s influence of darkness and return before the throne of God. Only in this way can man be fully sanctified. After the Age of Law had come to an end, and beginning with the Age of Grace, God began the work of salvation, which continues until the last days when, in judging and chastising the human race for their rebelliousness, He will completely purify mankind. Only then will God conclude His work of salvation and enter into rest. Therefore, in the three stages of work, only twice has God become flesh to carry out His work among man Himself. That is because only one in the three stages of work is to guide men in leading their lives, while the other two consist of the work of salvation. Only by becoming flesh can God live alongside man, experience the suffering of the world, and live in a normal body of flesh. Only in this way can He supply men with the practical way that they need as created beings. It is through the incarnation of God that man receives full salvation from God, and not directly from heaven in answer to his prayers. For, man being of flesh and blood, he has no way of seeing the Spirit of God, much less of approaching His Spirit. All that man can come into contact with is God’s incarnate flesh, and only by means of this is man able to grasp all the ways and all the truths and receive full salvation. The second incarnation will be sufficient to purge away the sins of man and to fully purify him. Hence, with the second incarnation, the entirety of God’s work in the flesh will be brought to a close and the significance of God’s incarnation be made complete. Thenceforth, the work of God in the flesh will have entirely come to an end. After the second incarnation, He will not become flesh a third time for His work. For His entire management will have come to an end. The incarnation of the last days will have fully gained His chosen people, and humanity in the last days will all have been classed according to kind. He will no longer do the work of salvation, nor will He return to the flesh to carry out any work. In the work of the last days, the word is mightier than the manifestation of signs and wonders, and the authority of the word surpasses that of signs and wonders. The word exposes all the corrupt dispositions buried deep in the heart of man. You have no way of recognizing them on your own. When they are laid bare before you through the word, you will naturally come to discover them; you will not be able to deny them, and you will be utterly convinced. Is this not the authority of the word? This is the result achieved by the work of the word today. Therefore, it is not through the healing of sickness and casting out of demons that man can be fully saved from his sins, nor can he be made fully complete by the manifestation of signs and wonders. The authority to heal sickness and cast out demons only gives man grace, but the flesh of man still belongs to Satan and the corrupt satanic disposition still remains within man. In other words, that which has not been made clean still pertains to sin and to filth. Only after he has been made clean through the agency of the word can man be gained by God and become sanctified. When the demons were cast out of man and he was redeemed, this meant only that he was wrested out of Satan’s hands and returned to God. However, without being made clean or changed by God, he remains as corrupt man. Within man still exist filth, opposition, and rebelliousness; man has only returned to God through His redemption, but he has not the slightest knowledge of God and is still capable of resisting and betraying Him. Before man was redeemed, many of Satan’s poisons had already been planted within him and, after thousands of years of being corrupted by Satan, he has within him an established nature that resists God. Therefore, when man has been redeemed, it is nothing more than a case of redemption in which man is bought at a high price, but the poisonous nature within him has not been eliminated. Man that is so defiled must undergo a change before becoming worthy to serve God. By means of this work of judgment and chastisement, man will fully come to know the filthy and corrupt essence within his own self, and he will be able to change completely and become clean. Only in this way can man become worthy to return before the throne of God. All the work done this day is so that man can be made clean and be changed; through judgment and chastisement by the word, as well as through refinement, man can purge away his corruption and be made pure. Rather than deeming this stage of work to be that of salvation, it would be more apt to say it is the work of purification. In truth, this stage is that of conquest as well as the second stage in the work of salvation. It is through judgment and chastisement by the word that man arrives at being gained by God, and it is through the use of the word to refine, judge, and disclose that all of the impurities, notions, motives, and individual aspirations within man’s heart are completely revealed. For all that man may have been redeemed and forgiven of his sins, it can only be considered as God not remembering the transgressions of man and not treating man in accordance with his transgressions. However, when man, who lives in a body of flesh, has not been set free from sin, he can only continue to sin, endlessly revealing his corrupt satanic disposition. This is the life that man leads, an endless cycle of sinning and being forgiven. The majority of mankind sin in the day only to confess in the evening. This way, even though the sin offering is forever effective for man, it will not be able to save man from sin. Only half the work of salvation has been completed, for man still has a corrupt disposition. For instance, when people realized that they were descended from Moab, they brought forth words of complaint, ceased to pursue life, and became utterly negative. Does this not show that humanity is still unable to fully submit under the dominion of God? Is this not precisely their corrupt satanic disposition? When you were not being subjected to chastisement, your hands were raised higher than all others, even that of Jesus. And you cried out in a loud voice: “Be a beloved son of God! Be an intimate of God! We would rather die than bow down to Satan! Rebel against the old Satan! Rebel against the great red dragon! May the great red dragon fall abjectly from power! May God make us complete!” Your cries were louder than all others. But then came the time of chastisement and, once again, the corrupt disposition of humanity was revealed. Then, their cries ceased, and their resolution failed. This is the corruption of man; running deeper than sin, it is something planted by Satan and deeply rooted within man. It is not easy for man to become aware of his sins; he has no way of recognizing his own deeply rooted nature, and he must rely on judgment by the word in order to achieve this result. Only thus can man gradually be changed from this point onward. Man shouted thus in the past because he had no understanding of his inherent corrupt disposition. These are the impurities that exist within man. Throughout such a long period of judgment and chastisement, man lived in an atmosphere of tension. Was this not all achieved through the agency of the word? Did you not also cry out with a very loud voice prior to the trial of the service-doers? “Enter the kingdom! All those who accept this name shall enter into the kingdom! All shall partake of God!” When the trial of the service-doers came, you no longer cried out. At the very beginning, all cried out, “Oh God! Wherever You place me, I shall submit to being steered by You.” Upon reading the words of God, “Who will be My Paul?” people said, “I am willing!” Then they saw the words, “And what of the faith of Job?” and said, “I am willing to take upon myself the faith of Job. God, please put me to the test!” When the trial of the service-doers came, they collapsed at once and could hardly stand up again. After that, little by little, the impurities in their heart gradually diminished. Was this not achieved through the word? So, what you have experienced today are results achieved through the word, even greater than those achieved through Jesus’ working of signs and wonders. The glory of God that you see and the authority of God Himself that you see are not merely seen by means of the crucifixion, by means of the healing of sickness and the casting out of demons, but even more so by means of the judgment of His word. This shows you that the authority and power of God do not consist only of the working of signs, the healing of sickness, and the casting out of demons, but that the judgment of God’s word is better able to represent the authority of God and to reveal His almightiness.

What man has achieved now—his present stature, knowledge, love, loyalty, submission, and insight—these are results attained through the judgment of the word. That you are able to have loyalty and to remain standing until this day is attained through the agency of the word. Now man sees that the work of God incarnate is indeed extraordinary, and there is much in it that cannot be attained by man, and that are mysteries and wonders. Therefore, many have submitted. Some have never submitted to any man since the day of their birth, yet when they see the words of God this day, they fully submit without noticing they have done so, and they do not venture to scrutinize or say anything else. Humanity has fallen under the word and lies prostrate under the judgment of the word. If the Spirit of God spoke directly to man, mankind would all submit to the voice, falling down without words of revelation, much in the way that Paul fell to the ground in the light on the road to Damascus. If God continued to work in this way, man would never be able to come to know his own corruption through the judgment of the word and thereby attain salvation. Only through becoming flesh can God personally deliver His words into the ears of each and every human being, so that all who have ears may hear His words and receive His work of judgment by the word. Only this is the result achieved by His word, rather than the Spirit becoming manifest to frighten man into submission. It is only through this practical and yet extraordinary work that the old disposition of man, hidden deep within for many years, can be fully exposed, so that man may recognize it and have it changed. These things are all the practical work of God incarnate, in which, speaking and executing judgment in a practical manner, He achieves the results of judgment upon man by the word. This is the authority of God incarnate and the significance of God’s incarnation. It is done to make known the authority of God incarnate, to make known the results achieved by the work of the word, and to make known that the Spirit has come in the flesh and demonstrates His authority through judging man by the word. Although His flesh is the outward form of an ordinary and normal humanity, it is the results His words achieve that show to man He is full of authority, that He is God Himself, and that His words are the expression of God Himself. By this means all humanity is shown that He is God Himself, that He is God Himself who became flesh, that He is to be offended by none, and that no one can surpass His judgment by the word, and no force of darkness can prevail over His authority. Man submits to Him entirely because He is the Word become flesh, because of His authority, and because of His judgment by the word. The work brought by His incarnate flesh is the authority that He possesses. The reason why He becomes flesh is because the flesh can also possess authority, and He is capable of carrying out work in a practical manner among mankind, in such a way that it is visible and tangible to man. This work is much more practical than the work done directly by the Spirit of God, who possesses all authority, and its results are also apparent. This is because God’s incarnate flesh can speak and work in a practical way. The outward form of His flesh holds no authority, and can be approached by man, whereas His essence does carry authority, but His authority is visible to none. When He speaks and works, man is unable to detect the existence of His authority; this facilitates Him in doing work of a practical nature. All this practical work can achieve results. Even though no man realizes that He holds authority, or sees that He is not to be offended, or sees His wrath, He achieves the intended results of His words through His veiled authority, His hidden wrath, and the words He openly speaks. In other words, through His tone of voice, the sternness of His speech, and all the wisdom of His words, man is utterly convinced. In this way, man submits to the word of God incarnate, who seemingly has no authority, thereby fulfilling God’s aim of saving man. This is another aspect of the significance of His incarnation: to speak in a more practical way and allow the reality of His words to have an effect upon man, so that man may witness the power of the word of God. Therefore, were this work not done by means of the incarnation, it would not achieve the slightest results and would not be able to fully save sinful people. If God did not become flesh, He would remain the Spirit who is both invisible and intangible to man. Man being a creature of flesh, he and God belong to two different worlds and are possessed of different natures. The Spirit of God is incompatible with man, who is of flesh, and there is simply no way of establishing relations between them, not to mention that man is incapable of turning into a spirit. This being so, the Spirit of God must become a created being in order to do His original work. God can both ascend to the highest place and humble Himself to become a human creature, doing work among mankind and living in their midst, but man cannot ascend to the highest place and become a spirit, and even less can he descend to the lowest place. This is why God must become flesh to carry out His work. By the same token, during the first incarnation, only the flesh of God incarnate could redeem man through His crucifixion, whereas there would have been no way for the Spirit of God to be crucified as a sin offering for man. God could directly become flesh to serve as a sin offering for man, but man could not directly ascend to heaven to take the sin offering that God had prepared for him. This being so, all that is possible would be to ask God to run back and forth a few times between heaven and earth, not to have man ascend to heaven to take this salvation, for man had fallen and, moreover, man simply could not ascend to heaven, much less obtain the sin offering. Therefore, it was necessary for Jesus to come among mankind and personally do the work that simply could not be accomplished by man. Every time God becomes flesh, it is out of absolute necessity. If any of the stages could have been carried out directly by the Spirit of God, He would not have submitted to the indignity of being incarnated.

In this final stage of work, results are achieved through the agency of the word. Through the word, man comes to understand many mysteries and the work that God has done through generations past; through the word, man is enlightened by the Holy Spirit; through the word, man comes to understand the mysteries never before unraveled by past generations, as well as the work of prophets and apostles of times past, and the principles by which they worked; through the word, man also comes to understand the disposition of God Himself, as well as the rebelliousness and resistance of man, and he comes to know his own essence. Through these steps of work and through all the words spoken, man comes to know the work of the Spirit, the work God’s incarnate flesh does, and even more, His entire disposition. Your knowledge of God’s work of management over six thousand years was also gained through the word. Was not the knowledge of your former notions and your success in putting them aside also attained through the word? In the previous stage, Jesus worked signs and wonders, but there are no signs and wonders in this stage. Was not your understanding of why God does not reveal signs and wonders also achieved through the word? Therefore, the words spoken in this stage surpass the work done by the apostles and prophets of generations past. Even the prophecies told by the prophets could not have achieved this result. The prophets spoke only prophecies, they spoke of what would happen in the future, but not of the work God wished to do at the time. Nor did they speak to guide mankind in their lives, or to bestow truths upon mankind, or to reveal mysteries to them, much less to bestow life. Of the words spoken in this stage, there is prophecy and truth, but mainly these words serve to bestow life upon man. The words at present are unlike the prophecies of the prophets. This is a stage of work for the life of man, to change man’s life disposition, and not for the sake of speaking prophecy. The first stage was the work of Jehovah: His work was to prepare a path for man to worship God on earth. It was the work of commencement to find a place of origin for the work on earth. At that time, Jehovah taught the Israelites to observe the Sabbath, honor their parents, and live peaceably with one another. This was because the people of that time did not understand what constituted man, nor did they understand how to live on earth. It was necessary for Him in the first stage of work to guide mankind in leading their lives. All that Jehovah spoke to them had not previously been known to mankind or been in their possession. At that time, God raised up many prophets to speak prophecies, and they all did so under the guidance of Jehovah. This was simply one item in the work of God. In the first stage, God did not become flesh, and so He instructed all tribes and nations through the prophets. When Jesus worked in His time, He did not speak as much as in the present day. This stage of the work of the word in the last days has never been done before in ages and generations past. Though Isaiah, Daniel and John spoke many prophecies, their prophecies were entirely different from the words spoken now. What they spoke were only prophecies, but the words spoken now are not. If I turned all I speak of now into prophecies, would you be able to understand? Supposing that what I spoke of was about matters after I had gone, how could you then gain understanding? The work of the word was never done in the time of Jesus or in the Age of Law. Perhaps some will say, “Did not Jehovah also speak words in the time of His work? Did Jesus not, in addition to healing sickness, casting out demons, and working signs and wonders, also speak words at that time He was working?” There are differences between the things that are said. What was the essence of the words uttered by Jehovah? He was only guiding mankind to lead their lives on earth, which did not touch on spiritual matters in life. Why is it said that, when Jehovah spoke, it was to instruct the people of all places? The word “instruct” means to tell explicitly and command directly. He did not supply man with life; rather, He simply took man by the hand and taught man how to fear Him, without too much in the way of parables. The work Jehovah did in Israel was not to prune or discipline man or to deliver judgment and chastisement, it was to guide him. Jehovah commanded Moses to tell His people to gather manna in the wilderness. Every morning before sunrise, they were to gather manna, just enough for them to eat that day. The manna could not be kept until the next day, as it would then become moldy. He did not lecture people or expose their natures, nor did He expose their ideas and thoughts. He did not change people but rather guided them in leading their lives. The people of that time were like children, understanding nothing and capable only of some basic mechanical movements, and so Jehovah only decreed laws to guide the multitudes.

In order to spread the gospel, so that all who seek with a true heart may gain knowledge of the work done this day and be thoroughly convinced, you must arrive at a clear understanding of the inside story, the essence, and the significance of the work done in each stage. Make it so that, by listening to your fellowship, others may understand the work of Jehovah, the work of Jesus and, even more, all the work of the God of today, as well as the connections and the differences between the three stages of work. Make it so that, after they have finished listening, others will see that the three stages do not disrupt one another, but that all are the work of the same Spirit. Although They work in different ages, the content of the work They carry out is different, and the words They speak are different, yet the principles by which They work are one and the same. These things are the greatest visions that all people who follow God should understand.

The Two Incarnations Complete the Significance of the Incarnation

Each stage of work done by God has its own practical significance. Back then, when Jesus came, He came in male form, and when God comes this time, His form is female. From this, you can see that God’s creation of both men and women can be of use in His work, and with Him there is no distinction of gender. When His Spirit comes, He can take on any flesh He pleases, and that flesh can represent Him; whether male or female, it can represent God as long as it is His incarnate flesh. If Jesus had appeared as a female when He came, in other words, if an infant girl, and not a boy, had been conceived by the Holy Spirit, that stage of work would have been completed all the same. If that had been the case, then the present stage of work would have to be completed by a male instead, but the work would be completed all the same. The work done in each stage has its significance; neither stage of work is repeated, nor does it conflict with the other. At the time, Jesus, in doing His work, was called the only Son, and “Son” implies the male gender. Why is the only Son not mentioned in this current stage? Because the requirements of the work have necessitated a change in gender from that of Jesus. With God there is no distinction of gender. He does His work as He wishes, and in doing His work He is not subject to any restrictions, but is especially free. Yet every stage of work has its own practical significance. God became flesh twice, and it is self-evident that His incarnation during the last days is the final time. He has come to make known all His deeds. If in this stage He did not become flesh in order personally to do work for man to witness, man would forever cling to the notion that God is only male, not female. Before this, all humanity believed that God could only be male and that a female could not be called God, for all humanity regarded men as having authority over women. They believed that no woman could take on authority, only men. What is more, they even said that man was the head of woman and that woman must obey man and could not surpass him. In times past, when it was said that man was woman’s head, this was directed at Adam and Eve, who had been beguiled by the serpent—not at man and woman as they had been created by Jehovah in the beginning. Of course, a woman must obey and love her husband, and a husband must learn to feed and support his family. These are the laws and decrees set forth by Jehovah that humankind must abide by in their lives on earth. Jehovah said to woman, “Your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.” He spoke thus only so that humankind (that is, both man and woman) might live normal lives under the dominion of Jehovah, and so that the lives of humankind might have a structure, and not fall out of their proper order. Therefore, Jehovah made appropriate rules for how man and woman should act, though this was only in regard to all the created beings living on the earth, and bore no relation to God’s incarnate flesh. How could God be the same as His created beings? His words were directed only toward the humankind of His creation; it was in order for humankind to live normal lives that He established rules for man and woman. In the beginning, when Jehovah created humankind, He made two kinds of human being, both male and female; and so there is the division of male and female in His incarnate fleshes. He did not decide His work based on the words He spoke to Adam and Eve. The two times He has become flesh have been determined entirely according to His thinking at the time He first created humankind; that is, He has completed the work of His two incarnations based on the male and the female before they were corrupted. If humanity took the words spoken by Jehovah to Adam and Eve, who had been beguiled by the serpent, and applied them to the work of God’s incarnation, would not Jesus also have to love His wife as He ought? This way, would God still be God? And this being so, would He still be able to complete His work? If it be wrong for God’s incarnate flesh to be female, then would it not also have been an error of the greatest magnitude for God to have created woman? If people still believe that it would be wrong for God to be incarnated as female, then would not Jesus, who did not get married and was therefore unable to love His wife, be as much in error as the present incarnation? Since you use the words spoken to Eve by Jehovah to measure the truth of God’s incarnation in the present day, then you must use Jehovah’s words to Adam to judge the Lord Jesus who became flesh in the Age of Grace. Are these not one and the same? Since you take the measure of the Lord Jesus according to the male who had not been beguiled by the serpent, then you may not judge the truth of today’s incarnation according to the female who had been beguiled by the serpent. This would be unfair! Measuring God in this way proves that you lack rationality. When Jehovah twice became flesh, the gender of His flesh was related to the male and the female who had not been beguiled by the serpent; it was in accordance with the male and the female who had not been beguiled by the serpent that He twice became flesh. Do not think that the maleness of Jesus was the same as that of Adam, who was beguiled by the serpent. The two are completely unrelated, they are males of two different natures. Surely it cannot be that the maleness of Jesus proves He is the head of all women but not of all men? Is He not the King of all the Jews (including both men and women)? He is God Himself, not just the head of woman but the head of man as well. He is the Lord of all created beings and the head of all created beings. How could you determine the maleness of Jesus to be the symbol of the head of woman? Would this not be blasphemy? Jesus is a male who has not been corrupted. He is God; He is Christ; He is the Lord. How could He be a male like Adam who was corrupted? Jesus is the flesh worn by the most holy Spirit of God. How could you say He is a God who possesses the maleness of Adam? In that case, would not all of God’s work have been wrong? Would Jehovah have incorporated within Jesus the maleness of Adam who was beguiled by the serpent? Is not the incarnation of the present time another instance of the work of God incarnate, who is different in gender from Jesus but like Him in nature? Do you still dare say that God incarnate could not be female, because woman was the first to be beguiled by the serpent? Do you still dare say that, as woman is the most unclean and the source of the corruption of humankind, God could not possibly become flesh as a female? Do you dare to persist in saying that “woman shall always obey man and may never manifest or directly represent God”? You did not understand in the past, but can you now go on blaspheming the work of God, especially the incarnate flesh of God? If this is not clear to you, best mind your tongue, lest your foolishness and ignorance be revealed and your ugliness exposed. Do not think that you understand everything. I tell you that all you have seen and experienced is insufficient for you to understand even a thousandth of My management plan. So why then do you act so haughty? That little bit of talent and tiny bit of knowledge you have are insufficient for Jesus to use in even a single second of His work! How much experience do you actually possess? What you have seen and all that you have heard in your lifetime and what you have imagined are less than the work I do in a single moment! You had best not nitpick and find fault. You can be as arrogant as you want, but you are nothing more than a created being not even the equal of an ant! All that you hold within your belly is less than what is in an ant’s belly! Do not think, just because you have gained some experience and seniority, that this entitles you to gesticulate wildly and talk big. Are not your experience and your seniority the product of the words I have uttered? Do you believe that they were in exchange for your own labor and toil? Today, you see that I have become flesh, and on this account alone there is in you a glut of concepts, and no end of notions therefrom. If not for My incarnation, even if you were possessed of extraordinary talents, you would not have so many concepts; and is it not from these that your notions arise? If Jesus had not become flesh that first time, would you even know of the incarnation? Is it not because the first incarnation gave you knowledge that you have the impudence to try to judge the second incarnation? Why, instead of being a submissive follower, are you subjecting it to study? When you have entered into this stream and come before the incarnate God, would He allow you to research Him? You can research your own family history, but if you try to research the “family history” of God, would the God of today allow you to conduct such a study? Are you not blind? Do you not bring contempt upon yourself?

If only the work of Jesus was done, and was not complemented by work in this stage of the last days, man would forever cling to the notion that Jesus alone is the only Son of God, that is, that God has only one son, and that anyone who comes thereafter by another name would not be the only Son of God, much less God Himself. Man has the notion that anyone who serves as a sin offering or who assumes power on God’s behalf and redeems all humankind, is the only Son of God. There are some who believe that as long as the One who comes is a male, He may be deemed the only Son of God and God’s representative. There are even those who say that Jesus is the Son of Jehovah, His only Son. Are such notions not overblown? If this stage of work were not done in the final age, then toward God the whole of humankind would be veiled under a dark shadow. If this were the case, man would think himself higher than woman, and women would never be able to hold their heads up, and then not even a single woman could be saved. People always believe that God is male, and moreover that He has always despised woman and would not grant her salvation. If this were the case, would it not be true that all women, who were created by Jehovah and who have also been corrupted, would never have the opportunity to be saved? Then would it not have been pointless for Jehovah to have created woman, that is, to have created Eve? And would not woman perish for eternity? For this reason, the stage of work in the last days is undertaken in order to save the whole of humankind, not just woman. If anyone should think that were God to be incarnated as female, it would solely be for the sake of saving woman, then that person would indeed be a fool!

The work of today has pushed forward the work of the Age of Grace; that is, the work under the entire six-thousand-year management plan has moved forward. Though the Age of Grace has ended, there has been progress in God’s work. Why do I say time and again that this stage of work builds upon the Age of Grace and the Age of Law? Because the work of this day is a continuation of the work done in the Age of Grace, and an advance over that done in the Age of Law. The three stages are tightly interconnected, with each link in the chain closely tied to the next. Why do I also say that this stage of work builds on that done by Jesus? Supposing that this stage did not build on the work done by Jesus, another crucifixion would have to take place in this stage, and the redemptive work of the previous stage would have to be done all over again. This would be meaningless. And so it is not that the work is completely finished, but that the age has moved forward and the level of the work has been raised higher than before. It can be said that this stage of work is built on the foundation of the Age of Law and upon the rock of Jesus’ work. God’s work is built stage by stage, and this stage is not a new beginning. Only the combination of the three stages of work may be deemed the six-thousand-year management plan. The work of this stage is done on the foundation of the work of the Age of Grace. If these two stages of work were unrelated, then why is the crucifixion not repeated in this stage? Why do I not bear the sins of man, but instead come to judge and chastise man directly? If My work to judge and chastise man did not follow the crucifixion, with My coming now not conceived of the Holy Spirit, then I would not be qualified to judge and chastise man. It is precisely because I am one with Jesus that I come directly to chastise and judge man. The work at this stage is built entirely on the work in the preceding stage. That is why only work of this kind can bring man, step by step, into salvation. Jesus and I come from one Spirit. Even though We are unrelated in Our fleshes, Our Spirits are one; even though the content of what We do and the work that We take on are not the same, We are alike in essence; Our fleshes take different forms, but this is due to the change in era and the differing requirements of Our work; Our ministries are not alike, so the work We bring forth and the dispositions We reveal to man are also different. That is why what man sees and understands this day is unlike in the past, which is because of the change in era. For all that They are different in the gender and the form of Their fleshes, and that They were not born of the same family, still less in the same time period, Their Spirits are nonetheless one. For all that Their fleshes share neither blood nor physical kinship of any kind, it cannot be denied that They are the incarnate fleshes of God in two different time periods. That They are the incarnate fleshes of God is an irrefutable truth. However, They are not of the same bloodline and do not share a common human language (one was a male who spoke the language of the Jews and the other a female who only speaks Chinese). It is for these reasons that They have lived in different countries to do the work that it behooves each one to do, and in different time periods too. Despite the fact that They are the same Spirit, possessed of the same essence, there are no absolute similarities between the outward shells of Their fleshes. All They share is the same humanity, but as far as external appearance of Their fleshes and the circumstances of Their birth are concerned, They are not alike. These things have no impact on Their respective work or on the knowledge that man has of Them, for, in the final analysis, They are the same Spirit and none can separate Them. Even though They are not related by blood, Their entire beings are in the charge of Their Spirits, which allocate to Them different work in different time periods, and Their fleshes are of different bloodlines. The Spirit of Jehovah is not the father of the Spirit of Jesus, and the Spirit of Jesus is not the son of the Spirit of Jehovah: They are one and the same Spirit. Similarly, the incarnate God of today and Jesus are not related by blood, but They are one, this is because Their Spirits are one. God can do the work of mercy and lovingkindness, as well as that of the righteous judgment and of chastisement of man, and that of calling down curses on man; and in the end, He can do the work of destroying the world and punishing the evil. Does He not do all of this Himself? Is this not the omnipotence of God? He was able both to promulgate laws for man and to issue him commandments, and He was also able to lead the early Israelites in living their lives on earth, and to guide them in building the temple and altars, holding all the Israelites under His dominion. Because of His authority, He lived on earth with the people of Israel for two thousand years. The Israelites dared not rebel against Him; all feared Jehovah and observed His commandments. Such was the work that was done by virtue of His authority and His omnipotence. Then, during the Age of Grace, Jesus came to redeem the whole of fallen humankind (not only the Israelites). He showed mercy and lovingkindness to man. The Jesus that man saw in the Age of Grace was filled with lovingkindness and was always loving toward man, for He had come to save humanity from sin. He was able to forgive men their sins until His crucifixion completely redeemed humankind from sin. During this period, God appeared before man with mercy and lovingkindness; that is, He became a sin offering for man and was crucified for the sins of man, so that they might forever be forgiven. He was merciful, compassionate, patient, and loving. And all those who followed Jesus in the Age of Grace likewise sought to be patient and loving in all things. They were long-suffering, and never fought back even when beaten, cursed, or stoned. But during the final stage it can no longer be so. The work of Jesus and Jehovah was not entirely the same even though They were of one Spirit. The work of Jehovah did not bring the age to an end, but guided the age, ushering in the life of humankind on earth, and the work of today is to conquer those in the Gentile nations who have been deeply corrupted, and to lead not only God’s chosen people in China, but the entire universe and all humankind. It may appear to you that this work is being done only in China, but in fact it has already begun to spread abroad. Why is it that people outside China seek the true way, time and time again? It is because the Spirit has already set to work, and the words spoken today are directed toward people throughout the universe. With this, half of the work is already under way. From the creation of the world to the present, the Spirit of God has set this great work in motion, and has moreover done different work in different ages and among different nations. The people of each age see a different disposition of His, which is naturally revealed through the different work that He does. He is God, filled with mercy and lovingkindness; He is the sin offering for man and man’s shepherd; but He is also man’s judgment, chastisement, and curse. He could lead man to live on earth for two thousand years, and He could also redeem corrupted humankind from sin. Today, He is also able to conquer humankind, who does not know Him, and to prostrate them under His dominion, so that all submit to Him fully. In the end, He will burn away all that is unclean and unrighteous within people throughout the universe, to show them that He is not only a merciful and loving God, not only a God of wisdom and wonders, not only a holy God, but furthermore, a God who judges man. To the evil ones among humankind, He is burning, judgment, and punishment; to those who are to be perfected, He is tribulation, refinement, and trials, as well as comfort, sustenance, the provision of words, and pruning. And to those who are cast out, He is punishment and retribution. Tell Me, is God not almighty? He is capable of any and all work, not just the crucifixion, as you imagine. You think too little of God! Do you believe that all He can do is redeem the whole of humankind through His crucifixion, and that’s it? And after that, you will follow Him up to heaven to eat of the fruit from the tree of life and drink from the river of life? … Could it be that simple? Tell Me, what have you accomplished? Do you have the life of Jesus? You were indeed redeemed by Him, but the crucifixion was the work of Jesus Himself. What duty have you fulfilled as a human being? You have only outward piety, but you do not understand His way. Is that how you manifest Him? If you have not attained the life of God or seen the entirety of His righteous disposition, then you cannot claim to be one that has life, and you are not worthy to pass through the gate of the kingdom of heaven.

Not only is God a Spirit, He can also become flesh. He is, moreover, a body of glory. Jesus, though you have not seen Him, was witnessed by the Israelites—the Jews of that time. He was at first a fleshly body, but after He was crucified, He became the body of glory. He is the all-encompassing Spirit and can do work in every place. He can be Jehovah, or Jesus, or Messiah; in the end, He can also become Almighty God. He is righteousness, judgment, and chastisement; He is curse and wrath; but He is also mercy and lovingkindness. All the work He has done is capable of representing Him. What manner of God do you say He is? You cannot explain. If you truly cannot explain, you should not come to conclusions about God. Do not draw the conclusion that God is forever a God of mercy and lovingkindness just because He did the work of redemption in one stage. Can you be certain that He is only a merciful and loving God? If He is merely a merciful and loving God, why will He bring the age to an end in the last days? Why will He send down so many disasters? According to people’s notions and thoughts, God should be merciful and loving to the very end, so that every last member of humankind can be saved. But why, in the last days, does He send down such great disasters as earthquake, pestilence, and famine to destroy this evil humankind, which regards God as an enemy? Why does He allow man to suffer these disasters? As for what manner of God He is, no one among you dares to say, and none is able to explain. Can you be certain that He is the Spirit? Do you dare say that He is none other than the flesh of Jesus? And do you dare say that He is a God who will forever be crucified for man’s sake?

Does the Trinity Exist?

After the truth of Jesus become flesh came to be, man believed that in heaven, there is not only the Father, but also the Son, and even the Spirit. This is the conventional notion man holds, that there is a God such as this in heaven: a triune God who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All mankind has these notions: God is one God, but comprises three parts, what all those grievously entrenched in conventional notions deem to be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Only those three parts made one is all of God. Without the Holy Father, God would not be whole. Similarly, neither would God be whole without the Son or the Holy Spirit. In their notions, they believe that neither the Father alone nor the Son alone can be deemed God. Only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit together can be deemed God Himself. Now, all religious believers, and even each follower among you, hold this belief. Yet, as for whether this belief is correct, none can explain, for you are always in a fog of confusion about the matters of God Himself. Though these are notions, you do not know whether they are right or wrong, for you have become too grievously infected by religious notions. You have accepted too deeply these conventional notions of religion, and this poison has seeped too deep within you. Therefore, so too in this matter have you succumbed to this pernicious influence, for the triune God simply does not exist. That is, the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit simply does not exist. These are all conventional notions of man, and the fallacious beliefs of man. Throughout many centuries, man has believed in this Trinity, conjured up by notions in the mind of man, fabricated by man, and never before seen by man. Throughout these many years, there have been many Bible expositors who have explained the “true meaning” of the Trinity, but such explanations of the triune God as three distinct consubstantial persons have been vague and unclear, and people are all befuddled by the “construct” of God. No great man has ever been able to offer a thorough explanation; most explanations pass muster in terms of reasoning and on paper, but not a single man has a fully clear understanding of its meaning. This is because this great Trinity man holds in the heart simply does not exist. For none have ever seen the true countenance of God, nor have any been fortunate enough to ascend to the abode of God for a visit so as to examine what items are present in the place where God lies, to determine exactly how many tens of thousands or hundreds of millions of generations are in the “house of God” or to investigate just how many parts compose the inherent construct of God. What mainly needs to be examined is this: the age of the Father and the Son, as well as the Holy Spirit; the respective appearances of each person; exactly how it is that They split up, and how it is that They are made one. Unfortunately, in all these many years, not a single man has been able to determine the truth of these matters. They all simply conjecture, for not a single man has ever ascended to heaven for a visit and returned with an “investigative report” for all mankind in order to report on the truth of the matter to all those fervent and devout religious believers concerned about the Trinity. Of course, the blame cannot be put on man for forming such notions, for why did Jehovah the Father not have Jesus the Son accompany Him when He created mankind? If, in the beginning, all had gone by the name of Jehovah, it would have been better. If blame must be laid, let it be laid on the momentary lapse of Jehovah God, who did not call the Son and the Holy Spirit before Him in the time of creation, but rather carried out His work alone. If They had all worked simultaneously, then would They not have become one? If, from the very beginning until the end, there was only the name Jehovah and not the name of Jesus from the Age of Grace, or if He had then still been called Jehovah, then would God not have been spared the suffering of this division by mankind? To be sure, Jehovah cannot be blamed for all this; if blame must be laid, let it be laid on the Holy Spirit, who for thousands of years continued His work by the name of Jehovah, of Jesus, and even of the Holy Spirit, befuddling and confusing man such that man could not know exactly who God is. If the Holy Spirit Himself had worked without form or image, and moreover, without a name such as Jesus, and man could neither touch nor see Him, only hearing the sounds of thunder, then would not this kind of work have been of more benefit to mankind? So what can be done now? The notions of man have amassed high as a mountain and wide as the sea, to the extent that the God of the present day can no longer endure them and is at a complete loss. In the past when it was only Jehovah, Jesus, and between Them, the Holy Spirit, man was already at a loss as to how to cope, and now there is the addition of the Almighty, who is even said to also be a part of God. Who knows who He is and in which person of the Trinity He has been intermingled with or hidden within for however many years? How can man bear this? The triune God alone was enough to take man a lifetime to explain, but now there is “one God in four persons.” How can this be explained? Can you explain it? Brothers and sisters! How have you believed in such a God until this day? I take My hat off to you. The triune God was already enough to bear; how could you continue to have such unshakable faith in this one God in four persons? You have been urged to get out, yet you refuse. How inconceivable! You are really something! A person can actually go so far as to believe in four Gods and make nothing of it; do you not think this is a miracle? To look at you, no one would know you are able to work such a great miracle! Let Me tell you that, in truth, the triune God does not exist anywhere in this universe. God has no Father and no Son, and much less is there a concept that the Father and Son jointly use the Holy Spirit as an instrument. All of this is the greatest fallacy in this world and simply does not exist! Yet even such a fallacy has its origin and is not entirely without basis, for your minds are not so simple, and your thoughts are not without reason. Rather, they are quite appropriate and ingenious, so much so that they are impregnable even to any Satan. The pity is that these thoughts are all fallacies and simply do not exist! You have not seen the real truth at all; you are merely making conjectures and imaginings, then fabricating it all into a story to deceitfully gain others’ trust and to gain dominance over those most foolish of people without wit or reason, so that they believe in your great and renowned “expert teachings.” Is this truth? Is this the way of life that man should comprehend? It is all nonsense! Not a single word is appropriate! Throughout these many years, God has been split by you in this way, being split finer and finer with each generation, to the extent that one God has been openly split into three Gods. And now it is simply impossible for man to rejoin God as one, for you have split Him up too finely! If not for My prompt work before it was too late, it is hard to say how long you would have brazenly continued this way! To continue splitting God in this way, how can He still be your God? Would you still recognize God? Would you still find your origins? If I had arrived any later, it is likely that you would have sent the “Father and Son,” Jehovah and Jesus, back to Israel and claimed that you yourselves are a part of God. Fortunately, it is now the last days. Finally, this day I have long awaited has come, and only after I carried out this stage of work by My own hand has your splitting of God Himself been halted. If not for this, you would have escalated, even placing all the Satans among you onto your tables for worship. This is your artifice! This is your means of splitting God! Will you continue to do so now? Let Me ask you: How many Gods are there? Which God will bring you salvation? Is it the first God, the second, or the third that you always pray to? Which do you always believe in? Is it the Father? Or the Son? Or is it the Spirit? Tell Me who it is that you believe in. Though with every word you say you believe in God, what you actually believe is your own brain! You simply do not have God in your hearts! And yet in your minds are a number of such Trinities! Do you not agree?

If the three stages of work are assessed in accordance with this concept of the Trinity, then there must be three Gods as the work carried out by each is not the same. If any among you says that the Trinity indeed exists, then explain what exactly this one God in three persons is. What is the Holy Father? What is the Son? What is the Holy Spirit? Is Jehovah the Holy Father? Is Jesus the Son? Then what of the Holy Spirit? Is not the Father a Spirit? Is not the essence of the Son also a Spirit? Was not the work of Jesus the work of the Holy Spirit? Was not the work of Jehovah at the time carried out by a Spirit the same as Jesus’? How many Spirits can God have? According to your explanation, the three persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one; if this be so, then there are three Spirits, but to have three Spirits means there are three Gods. This means that there is no one true God; how can this kind of God still have the inherent essence of God? If you accept that there is only one God, then how can He have a son and be a father? Are these not all simply your notions? There is only one God, only one person in this God, and only one Spirit of God, much as it is written down in the Bible that “There is only one Holy Spirit and only one God.” Regardless of whether the Father and the Son of which you speak exist, there is only one God after all, and the essence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit you believe in is the essence of the Holy Spirit. In other words, God is a Spirit, but He is able to become flesh and live among men, as well as to be above all things. His Spirit is all-inclusive and omnipresent. He can simultaneously be in the flesh and in and above the universe. Since all people say that God is the only one true God, then there is a single God, divisible at will by none! God is only one Spirit, and only one person; and that is the Spirit of God. If it is as you say, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then are They not three Gods? The Holy Spirit is one matter, the Son another, and the Father yet another. Their persons are different and Their essences are different, so how then can They each be part of a single God? The Holy Spirit is a Spirit; this is easy for man to understand. If this be so, then the Father is even more so a Spirit. He has never descended onto earth and has never become flesh; He is Jehovah God in the heart of man, and He is certainly a Spirit as well. Then what is the relationship between Him and the Holy Spirit? Is it the relationship between Father and Son? Or is it the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Father? Is the essence of each Spirit the same? Or is the Holy Spirit an instrument of the Father? How can this be explained? And then what is the relationship between the Son and the Holy Spirit? Is it a relationship between two Spirits or the relationship between a man and a Spirit? These are all matters that can have no explanation! If They are all one Spirit, then there can be no talk of three persons, for They are possessed of a single Spirit. If They were distinct persons, then Their Spirits would vary in strength, and They simply could not be one single Spirit. This concept of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is most absurd! This segments God and splits Him into three persons, each with a status and Spirit; how then can He still be one Spirit and one God? Tell Me, were the heavens and earth, and all things created by the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit? Some say that They created it all together. Then who redeemed mankind? Was it the Holy Spirit, the Son, or the Father? Some say it was the Son who redeemed mankind. Then who is the Son in essence? Is He not the incarnation of the Spirit of God? The incarnation calls God in heaven by the name of Father from the perspective of a created man. Are you not aware that Jesus was born through the conception of the Holy Spirit? Within Him is the Holy Spirit; whatever you say, He is still one with God in heaven, for He is the incarnation of the Spirit of God. This idea of the Son is simply untrue. It is one Spirit who carries out all of the work; only God Himself, that is, the Spirit of God carries out His work. Who is the Spirit of God? Is it not the Holy Spirit? Is it not the Holy Spirit who works in Jesus? If the work had not been carried out by the Holy Spirit (that is, the Spirit of God), then could His work have represented God Himself? When Jesus called God in heaven by the name of Father as He prayed, this was done only from the perspective of a created man, only because the Spirit of God had put on an ordinary and normal flesh and had the exterior cover of a created being. Even if within Him was the Spirit of God, His exterior appearance was still that of a normal man; in other words, He had become the “Son of man” of which all men, including Jesus Himself, spoke. Given that He is called the Son of man, He is a person (whether man or woman, in any case one with the exterior shell of a human being) born into a normal family of ordinary people. Therefore, Jesus calling God in heaven by the name of Father was the same as how you at first called Him Father; He did so from the perspective of a created man. Do you still remember the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught you to memorize? “Our Father in heaven….” He asked all men to call God in heaven by the name of Father. And since He too called Him Father, He did so from the perspective of one who stands on an equal footing with you all. Since you called God in heaven by the name of Father, Jesus saw Himself to be on equal footing with you, and as a man on earth chosen by God (that is, the Son of God). If you call God Father, is this not because you are a created being? However great the authority of Jesus on earth, prior to the crucifixion, He was merely a Son of man, governed by the Holy Spirit (that is, God), and one of the earth’s created beings, for He had yet to complete His work. Therefore, His calling God in heaven Father was solely His humility and submission. His addressing God (that is, the Spirit in heaven) in such a manner, however, does not prove that He was the Son of the Spirit of God in heaven. Rather, it was simply that His perspective was different, not that He was a different person. The existence of distinct persons is a fallacy! Prior to His crucifixion, Jesus was a Son of man bound by the limitations of the flesh, and He did not fully possess the authority of the Spirit. That is why He could only seek the will of God the Father from the perspective of a created being. It is as He thrice prayed in Gethsemane: “Not as I will, but as You will.” Before He was laid on the cross, He was but the King of the Jews; He was Christ, the Son of man, and not a body of glory. That is why, from the standpoint of a created being, He called God Father. Now, you cannot say that all who call God Father are the Son. If this were so, then would you not have all become the Son once Jesus taught you the Lord’s Prayer? If you are still not convinced, then tell Me, who is the one that you call Father? If you are referring to Jesus, then who is the Father of Jesus to you? After Jesus went away, this idea of the Father and the Son was no more. This idea was only appropriate for the years when Jesus became flesh; under all other circumstances, the relationship is one between the Lord of creation and a created being when you call God Father. There is no time at which this idea of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can stand; it is a fallacy rarely seen through the ages and it does not exist!

This may call to mind for most people the words of God from Genesis: “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Given that God says “let Us make man in Our image,” then “Us” indicates two or more; since He stated “Us,” then there is not just one God. In this way, man began to think in the abstract of distinct persons, and from these words arose the idea of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What then is the Father like? What is the Son like? And what is the Holy Spirit like? Could it possibly be that the mankind of today was made in the image of one joined together from three? Then is the image of man like that of the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit? Which of the persons of God is man in the image of? This idea of man’s is simply incorrect and nonsensical! It can only split one God into several Gods. At the time that Moses wrote Genesis, it was after mankind was created following the creation of the world. In the very beginning, when the world began, Moses did not exist. And it was not until much later that Moses wrote the Bible, so how could he have possibly known what it was that God in heaven spoke? He had not an inkling of how God created the world. In the Old Testament of the Bible, there is no mention of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, only of the one true God, Jehovah, carrying out His work in Israel. He is called by different names as the age changes, but this cannot prove that each name refers to a different person. If this were so, then would there not be innumerable persons in God? What is written in the Old Testament is the work of Jehovah, a stage of work of God Himself for commencement in the Age of Law. It was the work of God, where as He spoke, it was, and as He commanded, it stood. At no time did Jehovah say that He was the Father come to carry out work, nor did He ever prophesy the Son coming to redeem mankind. When it came to the time of Jesus, it was only said that God had become flesh to redeem all mankind, not that it was the Son who had come. Because the ages are not alike and the work that God Himself does also differs, He needs to carry out His work within different realms. In this way, the identity He represents also differs. Man believes that Jehovah is the Father of Jesus, but this was actually not acknowledged by Jesus, who said: “We were never distinguished as Father and Son; I and the Father in heaven are one. The Father is in Me and I am in the Father; when man sees the Son, they are seeing the heavenly Father.” When all has been said, be it the Father or the Son, They are one Spirit, not divided into separate persons. Once man attempts to explain, matters are complicated with the idea of distinct persons, as well as the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. When man speaks of separate persons, does this not materialize God? Man even ranks the persons as first, second, and third; these are all but the imaginings of man, not worthy of reference, and utterly unrealistic! If you asked him: “How many Gods are there?” he would say that God is the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: the one true God. If you asked further: “Who is the Father?” he would say: “The Father is the Spirit of God in heaven; He is in charge of all, and is the Master of heaven.” “Then is Jehovah the Spirit?” He would say: “Yes!” If you then asked him, “Who is the Son?” he would say that Jesus is the Son, of course. “Then what is the story of Jesus? From whence did He come?” He would say: “Jesus was born to Mary through the conception of the Holy Spirit.” Then is His essence not the Spirit as well? Is not His work also representative of the Holy Spirit? Jehovah is the Spirit, and so too is the essence of Jesus. Now in the last days, there is less need to say that it is still the Spirit; how could They be different persons? Is it not simply the Spirit of God carrying out the work of the Spirit from different perspectives? As such, there is no distinction between persons. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and indubitably, His work was precisely that of the Holy Spirit. In the first stage of work carried out by Jehovah, He neither became flesh nor appeared to man. So man never saw His appearance. No matter how great and how tall He was, He was still the Spirit, God Himself who created man in the beginning. That is, He was the Spirit of God. He spoke to man from among the clouds, merely a Spirit, and none witnessed His appearance. Only in the Age of Grace when the Spirit of God came into the flesh and was incarnated in Judea did man see for the first time the image of the incarnation as a Jew. There was nothing of Jehovah about Him. However, He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, that is, conceived by the Spirit of Jehovah Himself, and Jesus was still born as the embodiment of the Spirit of God. What man first saw was the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon Jesus; it was not the Spirit exclusive to Jesus, but rather the Holy Spirit. Then can the Spirit of Jesus be separated from the Holy Spirit? If Jesus is Jesus, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, then how could They be one? The work could not be carried out if so. The Spirit within Jesus, the Spirit in heaven, and the Spirit of Jehovah are all one. It is called the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the sevenfold intensified Spirit, and the all-inclusive Spirit. The Spirit of God can carry out much work. He is able to create the world and destroy it by flooding the earth; He can redeem all mankind, and moreover, He can conquer and destroy all mankind. This work is all carried out by God Himself and cannot be done by any of the personhoods of God in His stead. His Spirit can be called by the name of Jehovah and Jesus, as well as the Almighty. He is the Lord, and Christ. He can also become the Son of man. He is in the heavens and also on the earth; He is on high above the universes and among the multitude. He is the only Master of the heavens and earth! From the time of creation until now, this work has been carried out by the Spirit of God Himself. Be it the work in the heavens or in the flesh, all is carried out by His own Spirit. All creatures, whether in heaven or on earth, are in the palm of His almighty hand; all of this is the work of God Himself and can be done by no other in His stead. In the heavens, He is the Spirit but also God Himself; among men, He is flesh but remains God Himself. Though He may be called by hundreds of thousands of names, He is still Himself, the direct expression of His Spirit. The redemption of all mankind through His crucifixion was the direct work of His Spirit, and so too is the proclamation unto all nations and all lands during the last days. At all times, God can only be called the almighty and one true God, the all-inclusive God Himself. The distinct persons do not exist, much less this idea of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is only one God in heaven and on earth!

The management plan of God spans six thousand years and is divided into three ages based on the differences in His work: The first age is the Old Testament Age of Law; the second is the Age of Grace; and the third is that of the last days—the Age of Kingdom. In each age a different identity is represented. This is only because of the difference in the work, that is, the requirements of the work. The first stage of work during the Age of Law was carried out in Israel, and the second stage of concluding the work of redemption was carried out in Judea. For the work of redemption, Jesus was born through the conception of the Holy Spirit and as the only Son. All of this was due to the requirements of the work. In the last days, God wishes to expand His work into the Gentile nations and conquer the people there, so that His name may be great among them. He wishes to guide man in understanding and entering into all the truth. All of this work is carried out by one Spirit. Though He may do so from different standpoints, the nature and principles of the work remain the same. Once you observe the principles and nature of the work They have carried out, then you will know that it is all done by one Spirit. Still some may say: “The Father is the Father; the Son is the Son; the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, and in the end, They will be made one.” Then how should you make Them one? How can the Father and the Holy Spirit be made one? If They were inherently two, then no matter how They are joined together, would They not remain two parts? When you talk about making Them one, is that not simply joining two separate parts to make one whole? But were They not two parts before being made whole? Each spirit has a distinct essence, and two spirits cannot be made into a single one. A spirit is not a material object and is unlike anything else in the material world. As man sees it, the Father is one Spirit, the Son another, and the Holy Spirit yet another, then the three Spirits mix like three glasses of water into one whole. Is not that then the three made one? This is purely a fallacious explanation! Is this not splitting up God? How can the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all be made one? Are They not three parts each of different natures? There are others who say, “Did not God expressly state that Jesus was His beloved Son?” Jesus is the beloved Son of God, in whom He is well pleased—this was certainly spoken by God Himself. That was God bearing witness to Himself, but merely from a different perspective, that of the Spirit in heaven bearing witness to His own incarnation. Jesus is His incarnation, not His Son in heaven. Do you understand? Do not the words of Jesus, “I am in the Father, and the Father in Me,” indicate that They are one Spirit? And is it not because of the incarnation that They were separated between heaven and earth? In reality, They are still one; no matter what, it is simply God bearing witness to Himself. Owing to the change in ages, the requirements of the work, and the differing stages of His management plan, the name by which man calls Him also differs. When He came to carry out the first stage of work, He could only be called Jehovah, who is the shepherd of the Israelites. In the second stage, the incarnate God could only be called Lord, and Christ. But at that time, the Spirit in heaven stated only that He was the beloved Son of God and made no mention of His being the only Son of God. This simply did not happen. How could God have an only child? Then would God not have become man? Because He was the incarnation, He was called the beloved Son of God, and, from this, came the relationship between Father and Son. It was simply because of the separation between heaven and earth. Jesus prayed from the perspective of the flesh. Since He had put on a flesh of such normal humanity, it is from the perspective of the flesh that He said: “My outer shell is that of a created being. Since I put on a flesh to come to this earth, I am now a long, long way from heaven.” For this reason, He could only pray to God the Father from the perspective of the flesh. This was His duty, and it was that which the incarnate Spirit of God should be furnished with. It cannot be said that He was not God simply because He prayed to the Father from the perspective of the flesh. Though He was called the beloved Son of God, He was still God Himself, for He was but the incarnation of the Spirit, and His essence was still the Spirit. People wonder why He prayed if He was God Himself. This is because He was the incarnate God, God living within the flesh, and not the Spirit in heaven. As man sees it, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all God. Only the three all made as one can be deemed the one true God, and, in this way, His power is exceptionally great. There are those who say that only in this way is He the sevenfold intensified Spirit. When the Son prayed after His coming, it was that Spirit to whom He prayed. In reality, He was praying from the perspective of a created being. For the flesh is not whole, He was not whole and had many weaknesses when He came into the flesh, and He was much disturbed as He carried out His work in the flesh. That is why He thrice prayed to God the Father prior to His crucifixion, as well as many times even before that. He prayed among His disciples; He prayed alone upon a mountain; He prayed aboard the fishing boat; He prayed among a multitude of people; He prayed when breaking bread; and He prayed when blessing others. Why did He do so? It was the Spirit to whom He prayed; He was praying to the Spirit, to God in heaven, from the perspective of the flesh. Therefore, from man’s standpoint, Jesus became the Son in that stage of work. In this stage, however, He does not pray. Why is this? This is because what He brings forth is the work of the word, and the judgment and chastisement of the word. He has no need for prayers, and His ministry is to speak. He is not put upon the cross, and He is not turned over by man to those in power. He simply carries out His work. At the time when Jesus prayed, He was praying to God the Father for the descent of the kingdom of heaven, for the will of the Father to be done, and for the work to come. In this stage, the kingdom of heaven has already descended, so does He still need to pray? His work is to bring the age to an end, and there are no more new ages, so is there a need to pray for the next stage? I am afraid there is not!

There are many contradictions in the explanations of man. Indeed, these are all the notions of man; without further scrutiny, you would all believe they are correct. Do you not know that such ideas as a triune God are but the notions of man? No knowledge of man is full and thorough. There are always impurities, and man has too many ideas; this demonstrates that a created being simply cannot explain the work of God. There is too much in the mind of man, all coming from logic and thought, that conflicts with the truth. Can your logic thoroughly analyze the work of God? Can you gain an insight into all the work of Jehovah? Is it you as a man who can see through to it all, or is it God Himself who is able to see from everlasting to everlasting? Is it you who can see from everlasting long ago to the everlasting to come, or is it God who can do so? What do you say? How are you worthy to explain God? On what basis is your explanation? Are you God? The heavens and earth, and all things were created by God Himself. It was not you who did this, so why are you giving incorrect explanations? Now, do you continue to believe in the triune God? Do you not think it is too burdensome this way? It would be best for you to believe in one God, not in three. It is best to be light, for the burden of the Lord is light.

The Inside Truth of the Work of Conquest (1)

Mankind, so profoundly corrupted by Satan, knows not that there is a God, and has stopped worshiping God. In the beginning, when Adam and Eve were created, Jehovah’s glory and testimony were ever present. But after being corrupted, man lost the glory and the testimony, for everyone rebelled against God and ceased to fear Him altogether. Today’s work of conquest is to recover all the testimony and all the glory, and to have all men worship God, so that there is testimony among the created beings; this is the work to be done during this stage. How, exactly, is mankind to be conquered? By using the work of words of this stage to fully convince man; by using disclosure, judgment, chastisement, and merciless curse to persuade him utterly; by disclosing man’s rebelliousness and judging his resistance so he may know the unrighteousness and filth of mankind, and thus using these things as a foil to God’s righteous disposition. It is chiefly through these words that man is conquered and fully convinced. Words are the means to the ultimate conquering of mankind, and all who accept God’s conquest must accept the smiting and judgment of His words. The process of speaking today is precisely the process of conquering. And just how should people cooperate? By knowing how to eat and drink these words, and achieving an understanding of them. As to how people are conquered, this is not something they can do by themselves. All you can do is, through eating and drinking these words, to come to know your corruption and filth, your rebelliousness and your unrighteousness, and fall down before God. If, after grasping God’s will, you are able to put it into practice, and if you have visions and are able to completely submit to these words, and not make any choices by yourself, then you will have been conquered—and it will have been as a result of these words. Why did mankind lose the testimony? Because no one has faith in God, because God has no place in people’s hearts. The conquest of mankind is the restoration of the faith of mankind. People always want to run headlong into the mundane world, they harbor too many hopes, want too much for their future, and have too many extravagant demands. They are always thinking of the flesh, planning for the flesh, and have no interest in seeking the way of belief in God. Their hearts have been snatched away by Satan, they have lost their God-fearing hearts, and they are fixated on Satan. But man was created by God. Thus, man has lost the testimony, meaning he has lost the glory of God. The purpose of conquering mankind is to reclaim the glory of man’s fear of God. It can be put this way: There are many people who do not pursue life; even if there are some who do pursue life, they are only a handful in number. People are preoccupied with their futures and do not pay any attention to life. Some rebel against and resist God, judge Him behind His back, and do not practice the truth. These people are ignored for now; for the moment, nothing is done to these sons of rebellion, but in the future you will live in darkness, weeping and gnashing your teeth. You do not feel the preciousness of light when you are living in it, but you will realize that preciousness once you are living in the dark night, and you will be sorry then. You feel fine now, but the day will come when you are sorry. When that day comes, and darkness descends and light is nevermore, it will be too late for regrets. It is because you still do not understand the work of today that you fail to cherish the time you have now. Once the work of the entire universe begins, meaning when everything I am saying today has come true, many people will hold their heads and weep tears of anguish. And in so doing, will they not have fallen into the darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth? All who truly pursue life and are made complete can be used, while all the sons of rebellion who are unfit to be used will fall into the darkness. They will be bereft of the work of the Holy Spirit, and incapable of making sense of anything. Thus will they be racked with sobbing, having been plunged into punishment. If you are well equipped in this phase of work, and you have grown in your life, then you are fit to be used. If you are ill-equipped, then even if you are summoned for the next phase of work, you will be unfit for use—at this point you will not have another chance even if you wish to equip yourself. God will have left; where could you go to find the kind of opportunity that is before you now? Where could you go to receive exercise that is personally provided by God? By then, God will not be personally speaking or giving His voice; all you will be able to do is read the things that today are being spoken—how will understanding come easily then? How could life in the future be better than it is today? At that point, will you not be suffering a living death as you weep and gnash your teeth? Blessings are being granted to you now, but you do not know how to enjoy them; you are living in blessedness, yet you remain unaware. This proves that you are doomed to suffer! Today, some people resist, some rebel, some do this or that, and I simply ignore it—but do not think that I am unaware of what you are up to. Do I not understand your essence? Why keep clashing against Me? Do you not believe in God in order to pursue life and blessings for your own sake? Is it not for your own sake that you have faith? In the present moment, I am performing the work of conquest only by speaking, and once this work of conquest comes to an end, your end will be obvious. Do I have to tell you explicitly?

Today’s work of conquest is intended to make it obvious what man’s end will be. Why is it said that today’s chastisement and judgment are judgment before the great white throne of the last days? Do you not see this? Why is the work of conquest the final stage? Is it not precisely to make manifest what kind of ending each class of man will meet? Is it not to allow everyone, in the course of the work of conquest of chastisement and judgment, to show their true colors and then afterward to be classified according to their kind? Rather than saying this is conquering mankind, it might be better to say that this is showing what kind of ending there will be for each class of person. This is about judging people’s sins and then revealing the various classes of person, thereby deciding whether they are evil or righteous. After the work of conquest, then comes the work of rewarding good and punishing evil. People who submit completely—meaning the thoroughly conquered—will be placed in the next step of spreading God’s work to the entire universe; the unconquered will be placed in darkness and will meet with calamity. Thus will man be classified according to kind, the evil grouped with evil, to be without the light of the sun ever again, and the righteous grouped with good, to receive light and live forever in the light. The end is near for all things; man’s end has been clearly shown to his eyes, and all things will be classified according to kind. How, then, can people escape the anguish of each being classed according to kind? The end of every kind of person is revealed when the end is near for all things, and this is done during the work of conquering the entire universe (including all the work of conquest, starting with the current work). The revelation of the end of all mankind is done before the seat of judgment, in the course of the chastisement, and in the course of the work of conquest of the last days. Classifying people according to kind is not returning people to their original classes, for when man was made at the time of creation, there was only one kind of human, the only division being between male and female. There were not many different kinds of people. It is only after several thousand years of corruption that different classes of humans have emerged, with some under the power of filthy devils, some under the power of evil devils, and some, those who pursue the way of life, under the dominion of the Almighty. Only in this way do classes gradually come into being among people, and only thus do people separate into classes within the large family of man. People all come to have different “fathers”; it is not the case that everyone is completely under the dominion of the Almighty, for man is too rebellious. Righteous judgment discloses the true self of each type of person, leaving nothing hidden. Everyone shows their true face in the light. At this point, man is no longer the way he was originally, his ancestors’ original likeness has long vanished, because countless descendants of Adam and Eve have long been captured by Satan, never again to know the heavensun, and because people have been filled with all manner of Satan’s venom. Thus, people have their appropriate destinations. Moreover, it is on the basis of their differing venoms that they are classified according to kind, meaning they are sorted by the extent to which they are conquered today. Man’s end is not something that has been predestined since the creation of the world. That is because in the beginning, there was only one class, which was collectively called “mankind,” and man was not corrupted by Satan at first, and people all lived in God’s light, with no darkness befalling them. But after man was corrupted by Satan, all types and kinds of people spread out all over the earth—all types and kinds of people who came from the family collectively named “mankind” that was made up of males and females. They were all led by their ancestors to stray from their oldest ancestors—the mankind which consisted of male and female (that is, the Adam and Eve in the beginning, their oldest ancestors). At the time, the Israelites were the only people whose lives on earth were guided by Jehovah. The various types of people who emerged from the whole of Israel (meaning from the original family clan) then lost the guidance of Jehovah. These early people, completely ignorant of matters of the human world, subsequently went along with their ancestors to live in the territories they claimed, which has continued up to the present day. Thus do they remain ignorant of how they strayed from Jehovah, and of how they have been corrupted to this day by all manner of filthy devils and evil spirits. Those who have been profoundly corrupted and poisoned up to now—those who ultimately cannot be rescued—will have no choice but to go with their ancestors, the filthy devils who corrupted them. Those who can ultimately be saved will go to mankind’s appropriate destination, meaning to the end reserved for the saved and conquered. Everything will be done to save all those who can be saved—but for people who are insensitive and incurable, their only choice will be to follow their ancestors into the bottomless pit of chastisement. Do not think that your end was predestined in the beginning and has only now been revealed. If you think in that way, then have you forgotten that during the initial creation of mankind, no separate satanic class was created? Have you forgotten that only one mankind made up of Adam and Eve was created (meaning only male and female were created)? If you had been Satan’s descendant in the beginning, would this not mean that when Jehovah created man, He included a satanic group in His creation? Could He have done something like that? He created man for the sake of His testimony; He created man for the sake of His glory. Why would He have intentionally created a class of Satan’s progeny to deliberately resist Him? How could Jehovah have done such a thing? If He had, who would say that He is a righteous God? When I say now that some of you will go with Satan in the end, it does not mean you were with Satan from the beginning; rather, it means you have sunk so low that even if God has tried to save you, you have still failed to gain that salvation. There is no choice but to classify you with Satan. This is only because you are beyond salvation, not because God is unrighteous to you and intentionally fixed your fate as an embodiment of Satan and then classifies you with Satan and purposely wants you to suffer. That is not the inside truth of the work of conquest. If that is what you believe, then your understanding is very one-sided! The final stage of conquest is meant to save people, and also to reveal their endings. It is to disclose people’s degeneration through judgment, thereby causing them to repent, to rise up, and to pursue life and the right path of human life. It is to wake up the hearts of the numb and obtuse people and to show, through judgment, their inner rebelliousness. However, if people are still unable to repent, still unable to pursue the right path of human life and unable to cast off these corruptions, then they are beyond salvation, and will be devoured by Satan. Such is the significance of God’s conquest: to save people, and also to show their endings. Good endings, bad endings—they are all revealed by the work of conquest. Whether people will be saved or cursed is all revealed during the work of conquest.

The last days are when all things will be classified according to kind through conquering. Conquering is the work of the last days; in other words, judging each person’s sins is the work of the last days. Otherwise, how could people be classified? The work of classification that is done among you is the start of such work in the entire universe. After this, those of all lands and all peoples will also be subjected to the work of conquest. This means every person in creation will be classified according to kind, surrendering before the seat of judgment to be judged. No person and no thing can escape suffering this chastisement and judgment, nor is any person or thing not classified by kind; every person will be classed, for the end of all things draws near, and all heaven and earth has reached its conclusion. How could man escape the final days of human existence? And thus, how much longer can your acts of rebellion continue for? Do you not see that your last days are imminent? How can those who fear God and long for Him to appear not see the day of the appearance of God’s righteousness? How can they not receive the final reward for goodness? Are you one who does good, or one who does evil? Are you one who accepts righteous judgment and then submits, or are you one who accepts righteous judgment and then is cursed? Do you live before the seat of judgment in light, or do you live in Hades amidst the darkness? Are you yourself not the one who knows most clearly whether your end will be one of reward, or one of punishment? Are you not the one who knows most clearly and understands most deeply that God is righteous? So just what are your conduct and heart like? As I conquer you today, do you really need Me to spell out for you whether your behavior is good or evil? How much have you given up for Me? How deeply do you worship Me? Do you yourself not know most clearly how you behave toward Me? You should know better than anyone what end you will ultimately meet! Truly, I tell you: I only created mankind, and I created you, but I did not hand you to Satan; neither did I intentionally make you rebel against or resist Me and therefore be punished by Me. Are all these calamities and afflictions not because your hearts are too hard and your conduct too despicable? So is the end you will meet not determined by you yourselves? Do you not know better than anyone, in your hearts how you will end? The reason I conquer people is to reveal them, and the better to bring you salvation. It is not to make you commit evil, nor is it to deliberately make you walk into the hell of destruction. When the time comes, all your great suffering, your weeping and gnashing of teeth—will it not all be because of your sins? Thus, is not your own goodness or your own evil the best judgment of you? Is it not the best proof of what your end will be?

Today, I work in God’s chosen people in China to reveal all their rebellious dispositions and unmask all their ugliness, and this provides the context for saying everything I need to say. Afterward, when I carry out the next step of work of conquering the entire universe, I shall use My judgment of you to judge the unrighteousness of everyone in the entire universe, for you people are the representatives of the rebellious among mankind. Those who cannot step up will become merely foils and serving objects, whereas those who can step up will be put to use. Why do I say that those who cannot step up will only serve as foils? It is because My present words and work all target your background, and because you have become the representatives and the epitome of the rebellious among all of mankind. Later, I will take these words that conquer you to foreign countries and use them to conquer the people there, yet you will not have gained them. Would that not make you a foil? The corrupt dispositions of all mankind, the rebellious acts of man, and the ugly images and faces of man—these are all recorded today in the words used to conquer you. I will then use these words to conquer the people of every nation and every denomination, because you are the archetype, the precedent. However, I did not set out to intentionally abandon you; if you fail to do well in your pursuit and therefore you prove to be incurable, would you not simply be a serving object and a foil? I once said that My wisdom is exercised based on Satan’s schemes. Why did I say that? Is that not the truth behind what I am saying and doing right now? If you cannot step up, if you are not perfected but are instead punished, would you not become a foil? Maybe you have suffered a good deal in your time, but you still understand nothing; you are ignorant of everything about life. Even though you have been chastised and judged, you have not changed at all, and deep within, you have not gained life. When the time comes to test your work, you will experience a trial as fierce as fire and even greater tribulation. This fire will turn your entire being into ashes. As someone who does not possess life, someone without an ounce of pure gold inside, someone still stuck with the old corrupt disposition, and someone who cannot even do a good job at being a foil, how could you not be cast out? Can a person worth less than a penny, and who does not possess life, be of any use for the work of conquest? When that time comes, your days will be harder than those of Noah and Sodom! Your prayers will do you no good then. How can you come back later and start to repent anew, when the work of salvation has already ended? Once all the work of salvation has been done, there will be no more; what there will be is the start of the work of punishing those who are evil. You resist, you rebel, and you do things that you know are evil. Are you not the target of severe punishment? I am spelling this out for you today. If you choose not to listen, then when disaster befalls you later, will it not be too late if you only then start to feel regret and start to believe? I am giving you a chance to repent today, but you are unwilling to do so. How long do you want to wait? Until the day of chastisement? I do not remember your past transgressions today; I forgive you again and again, turning away from your negative side to look only at your positive side, because all My present words and work are meant to save you and I have no ill intention toward you. Yet you refuse to enter; you cannot tell good from bad and do not know how to appreciate kindness. Do such people not merely await the arrival of punishment and righteous retribution?

When Moses struck the rock, and the water bestowed by Jehovah sprang forth, it was because of his faith. When David played the lyre in praise of Me, Jehovah—with his heart filled with joy—it was because of his faith. When Job lost his livestock that filled the mountains and untold masses of wealth, and his body became covered in sore boils, it was because of his faith. When he could hear the voice of Me, Jehovah, and see the glory of Me, Jehovah, it was because of his faith. That Peter could follow Jesus Christ was down to his faith. That he could be nailed to the cross for My sake and give glorious testimony was also down to his faith. When John saw the glorious image of the Son of man, it was down to his faith. When he saw the vision of the last days, it was all the more because of his faith. The reason why the so-called multitudes of the Gentile nations have obtained My revelation, and have come to know that I have returned in the flesh to do My work among man, is also because of their faith. All those who are smitten by My harsh words and yet are brought solace by them and are saved—have they not done so because of their faith? People have received so much because of their faith, and it is not always a blessing. They may not receive the kind of happiness and joy that David felt, or have water bestowed by Jehovah as Moses did. For example, Job was blessed by Jehovah because of his faith, but he also suffered disaster. Whether you are blessed or suffer disaster, both are blessed events. Without faith, you would not be able to receive this work of conquest, much less see Jehovah’s deeds displayed before your eyes today. You would not be able to see, much less would you be able to receive. These scourges, these calamities, and all the judgments—if they did not befall you, would you be able to see Jehovah’s deeds today? Today, it is faith that allows you to be conquered, and it is being conquered that allows you to believe in Jehovah’s every deed. It is only because of faith that you receive such chastisement and judgment. Through this chastisement and judgment, you are conquered and perfected. Without the kind of chastisement and judgment you are receiving today, your faith would be in vain, because you would not know God; no matter how much you believed in Him, your faith would remain but empty words ungrounded in reality. It is only after you receive this work of conquest, work which makes you completely submissive, that your faith becomes true, and reliable, and your heart turns toward God. Even if you suffer great judgment and curse because of this word, “faith,” you nonetheless have true faith and you receive the truest, most real, and most precious thing. This is because it is only in the course of judgment that you see the final destination of the created beings; it is in this judgment that you see that the Creator is to be loved; it is in such work of conquest that you behold the arm of God; it is in this conquest that you come to fully understand human life; it is in this conquest that you gain the right path of human life and come to understand the true meaning of “man”; it is only in this conquest that you see the righteous disposition of the Almighty and His beautiful, glorious countenance; it is in this work of conquest that you learn of man’s origin and understand all mankind’s “immortal history”; it is in this conquest that you come to comprehend mankind’s ancestors and the origin of mankind’s corruption; it is in this conquest that you receive joy and comfort as well as endless chastening, discipline, and words of reproach from the Creator to the mankind He created; it is in this work of conquest that you receive blessings, as well as the calamities that are man’s due…. Is this not all because of your little bit of faith? And did your faith not grow after you gained these things? Have you not gained a tremendous amount? Not only have you heard God’s word and seen God’s wisdom, but you have also personally experienced each step of His work. Maybe you would say that if you did not have faith, then you would not suffer this kind of chastisement or this kind of judgment. But you should know that without faith, not only would you be unable to receive this kind of chastisement or this kind of care from the Almighty, but you would also forever lose the opportunity to meet the Creator. You would never know the origin of mankind and never comprehend the significance of human life. Even if your body died and your soul departed, you still would not understand all the Creator’s deeds, much less would you know that the Creator did such great work on earth after He made mankind. As a member of this mankind that He made, are you willing to ignorantly fall into darkness in this way, and suffer eternal punishment? If you separate yourself from today’s chastisement and judgment, what is it that you will meet with? Do you think that once separated from the present judgment, you will be able to escape from this difficult life? Is it not true that if you leave “this place,” what you will encounter is painful torment or cruel abuses inflicted by the devils? Might you encounter unendurable days and nights? Do you think that just because you escape this judgment today, you can forever evade that future torture? What will come your way? Can it really be the Shangri-La that you hope for? Do you think you can escape that future eternal chastisement simply by running away from reality as you do now? After today, will you ever be able to find this kind of opportunity and this kind of blessing again? Will you be able to find them when disaster befalls you? Will you be able to find them when all of mankind enters into rest? Your present happy life and that harmonious little family of yours—can they substitute for your future eternal destination? If you have true faith, and if you gain a great deal because of your faith, then all of that is what you—a created being—should gain and also what you should have had in the first place. Nothing is more beneficial to your faith and life than such conquest.

Today, you need to understand what God asks of those who are conquered, what His attitude is toward those who are perfected, and what you should enter into at present. Some things you need only understand a little. You do not have to scrutinize some words of mystery; they are not much help to life, and they only require a quick look. You can read mysteries such as the mystery of Adam and Eve: what Adam and Eve were all about back then, and what work God wants to do today. You need to understand that in conquering and perfecting man, God wishes to return man to the way Adam and Eve were. In your heart, you should have a good idea of the level of perfection that must be attained in order to meet God’s standards, and then you must strive to achieve it. This relates to your practice, and this is something you should understand. It is enough for you to seek to enter according to God’s words about these matters. When you read that “It has taken tens of thousands of years of history for mankind to get where it is today,” you become curious, and so you try to find an answer with the brothers and sisters. “God says mankind’s development goes back six thousand years, right? What is this about tens of thousands of years?” What use is it trying to find an answer to this question? Whether God Himself has been working for tens of thousands of years or hundreds of millions of years—does He really need you to know about this? This is not something that you, as a created being, need to know about. Just allow yourself to briefly consider this kind of talk, and do not try to understand it as if it were a vision. You need to be aware of what you should enter into and understand today, and then you need to have a firm grasp on it. Only then will you be conquered. After reading the above, there should be a normal reaction in you: God is burning with anxiety, He wants to conquer us and gain glory and testimony, so how should we cooperate with Him? What must we do to be completely conquered by Him and become His testimony? What must we do to enable God to gain glory? What must we do to allow ourselves to live under God’s dominion and not under Satan’s power? This is what people should be thinking about. Every one of you should be clear about the significance of God’s conquest. That is your responsibility. Only after gaining this clarity will you have entry, will you know this stage of work, and will you become completely submissive. Otherwise, you will not achieve true submission.

The Inside Truth of the Work of Conquest (3)

The intended effect of the work of conquest is, above all, for man’s flesh to no longer rebel; that is, for man’s mind to gain a new knowledge of God, for man’s heart to thoroughly submit to God, and for man to aspire to be for God. People do not count as having been conquered when their temperament or flesh changes; when man’s thinking, man’s consciousness, and man’s sense change, which is to say, when your whole mental attitude changes—that will be when you have been conquered by God. When you have resolved to submit and have adopted a new mentality, when you no longer bring any of your own notions or intentions to God’s words and work, and when your brain can think normally—which is to say, when you can exert yourself for God with all your heart—then you are the type of person who is fully conquered. In religion, many people suffer a great deal throughout their lives: They subdue their bodies and bear their cross, and they even continue to suffer and endure when on the very verge of death! Some are still fasting on the morning of their death. All their lives they deny themselves nice food and clothing, focusing only on suffering. They are able to subdue their body and rebel against their flesh. Their spirit for enduring suffering is commendable. But their thinking, their notions, their mental attitude, and indeed their old nature, have not been pruned in the slightest. They lack any true knowledge of themselves. Their mental image of God is that traditional one of a vague God. Their resolve to suffer for God comes from their zeal and the good character of their humanity. Even though they believe in God, they neither understand Him nor know His will. They merely work and suffer blindly for God. They place no value whatsoever on discernment, care little about how to ensure that their service actually fulfills God’s will, and much less are they aware of how to achieve the knowledge of God. The God they serve is not God in His inherent image, but a God they have imagined, a God of whom they have only heard, or of whom they have only read legends in writing. They then use their fertile imaginations and piousness to suffer for God and undertake God’s work that God wants to do. Their service is too inexact, such that practically none of them are truly able to serve in accordance with God’s will. Regardless of how gladly they suffer, their original perspective on service and their mental image of God remain unchanged, because they have not undergone God’s judgment, chastisement, refinement and perfection, and nor has anyone guided them using the truth. Even if they believe in Jesus the Savior, none of them has ever seen the Savior. They only know of Him through legend and hearsay. As a result, their service amounts to no more than serving randomly with eyes closed, like a blind man serving his own father. What, ultimately, can be achieved by such service? And who would approve of it? From beginning to end, their service remains the same throughout; they receive only man-made lessons and base their service only on their naturalness and their own preferences. What reward could this bring? Not even Peter, who saw Jesus, knew how to serve in accordance with God’s will; he only came to know this in the end, in his old age. What does this say about those blind people who have not experienced the slightest bit of being pruned, and who have had no one guiding them? Is not the service of many among you today like that of these blind people? All those who have not received judgment, not received pruning, and who have not changed—are they not all incompletely conquered? Of what use are such people? If your thinking, your knowledge of life, and your knowledge of God show no new change and you do not truly gain anything, then you will never achieve anything remarkable in your service! Without a vision and a new knowledge of God’s work, you are not conquered. Your way of following God will then be like those who suffer and fast: of little value! It is precisely because there is little testimony in what they do that I say their service is futile! Throughout their lives, those people suffer and spend time in prison; they are ever forbearing, loving, and they ever bear the cross, they are ridiculed and rejected by the world, they experience every hardship, and although they are obedient to the very end, they are still not conquered, and can offer no testimony to being conquered. They have suffered a great deal, but inside they do not know God at all. None of their old thinking, old notions, religious practices, man-made knowledge, and human ideas have been pruned. There is not the slightest hint of new knowledge in them. Not one bit of their knowledge of God is true or accurate. They have misunderstood God’s will. Does this serve God? Whatever your knowledge of God in the past, if it stays the same today and you continue to base your knowledge of God on your own notions and ideas no matter what God does, which is to say that if you possess no new, true knowledge of God and if you fail to know God’s true image and disposition, if your knowledge of God is still guided by feudal, superstitious thinking and is still born of human imagination and notions, then you have not been conquered. All the many words I now speak to you are meant to let you know, to have this knowledge lead you to a newer, accurate knowledge; they are also meant to prune away the old notions and the old knowledge in you, so that you may possess new knowledge. If you truly eat and drink My words, then your knowledge will change considerably. As long as you eat and drink God’s words with a heart of submission, then your perspective will be reversed. As long as you are able to accept the repeated chastisements, your old mentality will gradually change. As long as your old mentality is thoroughly replaced with the new, your practice will also change accordingly. In this way, your service will become increasingly on-target, increasingly able to fulfill God’s will. If you can change your life, your knowledge of human life, and your many notions about God, then your naturalness will gradually diminish. This, and nothing short of this, is the effect when God conquers people, it is the change that occurs in people. If, in your faith in God, all you know about is subduing your body and enduring and suffering, and you do not know whether that is right or wrong, much less for whose sake it is done, then how can such practice lead to change?

Understand that what I ask of you is not for you to hold your flesh in bondage or to stop your brain from thinking arbitrary thoughts. This is neither the goal of the work, nor the work that needs to be done right now. Right now, you must have knowledge from the positive aspect so that you may change yourselves. The most necessary action is that you equip yourselves with God’s words, meaning to fully equip yourselves with the truth and vision of the present, and then go forth and put them into practice. This is your responsibility. I am not asking you to seek and gain even greater illumination. At present, you simply do not have the stature for that. What is required of you is to do all you can to eat and drink God’s words. You must understand God’s work and know your nature, your essence, and that old life of yours. In particular, you need to know those past fallacious practices and those human doings you engaged in. To change, you must start by changing your thinking. First, replace your old thinking with the new, and let your new thinking govern your words and actions and your life. This is what is asked of each of you today. Do not practice blindly or follow blindly. You should have a basis and a target. Do not fool yourselves. You should know what exactly your faith in God is for, what should be gained from it, and what you should enter into right now. It is imperative that you know all this.

What you should enter into at present is elevating your life and raising your caliber. In addition, you need to change those old perspectives from your past, change your thinking, and change your notions. Your whole life needs renewal. When your knowledge of God’s deeds changes, when you have a new knowledge of the truth of everything God says, and when the knowledge within you is elevated, then your life will take a turn for the better. All the things that people do and say now are practical. These are not doctrines but rather the things that people need for their life and what they should possess. This is the change that takes place in people during the work of conquest, the change that people should experience, and it is the effect after they are conquered. When you have changed your thinking, adopted a new mental attitude, overturned your notions and intentions and your past logical reasonings, discarded those deep-rooted things inside you, and gained a new knowledge of faith in God, then the testimonies you give will be elevated, and your whole being will have truly changed. All these are the most practical, most realistic, and the most fundamental of things—things that people could not grasp in the past, and things they were incapable of engaging with. They are the true work of the Spirit. How exactly did you understand the Bible in the past? Subject this to comparison today and you will know. In the past you mentally elevated Moses, Peter, Paul, or all those biblical statements and perspectives, and put them on a pedestal. Now, if you were asked to put the Bible up on a pedestal, would you do it? You would see that the Bible contains too many records written by man, and that the Bible is but man’s account of two stages of God’s work. It is a history book. Does this not mean that your knowledge of it has changed? If you looked at the genealogy of Jesus given in the Gospel of Matthew today, you would say, “The genealogy of Jesus? Nonsense! This is Joseph’s genealogy, not Jesus’. There is no relationship between Jesus and Joseph.” When you look at the Bible now, your knowledge of it is different, meaning your perspective has changed, and you bring a higher level of knowledge to it than senior scholars of religion. Were someone to say that there is something to this genealogy, you would respond, “What is there to it? Go ahead and explain. Jesus and Joseph are not related. Do you not know that? Can Jesus have a genealogy? How can Jesus have ancestors? How can He be the descendant of man? His flesh was born of Mary; His Spirit is the Spirit of God, not the spirit of a man. Jesus is the beloved Son of God, so can He have a genealogy? While on earth He was not a member of mankind, so how can He have a genealogy?” When you analyze the genealogy and explain the inside truth clearly, sharing what you have understood, that person will be left speechless. Some people will reference the Bible and ask you, “Jesus had a genealogy. Does your God of today have a genealogy?” You will then tell them of your knowledge, which is the most real of all, and in this way, your knowledge will have achieved an effect. In truth, Jesus was no relation of Joseph, much less of Abraham; He was simply born in Israel. God, however, is not an Israelite or a descendant of the Israelites. Having been born in Israel does not necessarily mean that God is the God of the Israelites only. It was only for the sake of His work that He carried out the work of incarnation. God is the God of all creation throughout the universe. He simply carried out a stage of His work in Israel first, after which He began to work among the Gentile nations. People, however, considered Jesus the God of the Israelites, and furthermore placed Him among the Israelites and among David’s descendants. The Bible says that at the end of days, Jehovah’s name will be great among Gentile nations, meaning God will work among the Gentile nations during the last days. That God was incarnated in Judea does not indicate that God only loves Jews. That happened only because the work required it; it is not the case that God could only have been incarnated in Israel (because the Israelites were His chosen people). Are not God’s chosen people found among the Gentile nations, too? It was after Jesus finished working in Judea that the work expanded to Gentile nations. (The Israelites called all nations except for Israel “Gentile nations.”) In truth, there were God’s chosen people in those Gentile nations as well; it was just that no work was being done there yet at that time. People put such emphasis on Israel because the first two stages of work took place in Israel while no work was being done in Gentile nations. The work among the Gentile nations is only beginning today, which is why people find it so difficult to accept. If you can clearly understand all of this, if you are able to assimilate and regard it correctly, then you will have an accurate knowledge of the God of today and of the past, and this new knowledge will be higher than the knowledge of God possessed by all the saints throughout history. If you experience today’s work and hear God’s personal utterances today, yet have no knowledge of God’s entirety, and your pursuit remains as it always was and is not replaced with anything new, especially if you experience all this work of conquest, yet ultimately no change whatsoever can be seen in you, then is your faith not like that of those who only seek bread to satisfy their hunger? In that case, the work of conquest will not have achieved any effect in you. Will you then not become one of those who are to be cast out?

When all of the work of conquest comes to an end, it is imperative that you all understand that God is not only the God of Israelites, but of all created beings. He created all mankind, not just the Israelites. If you say that God is the God of Israelites only or that it is impossible for God to be incarnated in any nation outside of Israel, then you have yet to acquire any knowledge during the course of the work of conquest, and you do not acknowledge in even the smallest way that God is your God; you merely recognize that God moved from Israel to China and is being forced to be your God. If this is still how you see things, then My work has been fruitless in you, and you have not understood a thing I have said. If, ultimately, you write another genealogy for Me as Matthew did, locating a suitable ancestor for Me, finding My correct progenitor—such that God has two genealogies for His two incarnations—would that not then be the biggest joke in the world? Would not you, this “well-intentioned person” who found Me a genealogy, have become someone who divided God? Are you able to take on the burden of this sin? After all this work of conquest, if you still do not believe that God is the God of all created beings, if you still think that God is the God of Israelites only, are you not someone who openly resists God? The purpose of conquering you today is to have you acknowledge that God is your God and also the God of others, and most importantly He is the God of all who love Him, and the God of all created beings. He is the God of the Israelites and the God of the people of Egypt. He is the God of the British and the God of Americans. He is not just the God of Adam and Eve, but also the God of all their descendants. He is the God of everything in the heavens and everything on earth. All families, be they Israelite or Gentile, are all in the hands of one God. Not only did He work in Israel for several thousand years and was once born in Judea, but today He descends in China, this place where the great red dragon lies coiled. If being born in Judea makes Him the King of the Jews, then does not descending among all of you today make Him the God of all of you? He led the Israelites and was born in Judea, and He has also been born in a Gentile land. Is not all His work done for the whole of the mankind that He created? Does He love Israelites a hundred fold and loathe Gentiles a thousand fold? Is that not your notion? It is not the case that God was never your God, but rather just that you do not acknowledge Him; it is not the case that God is unwilling to be your God, but rather just that you reject Him. Who among the created is not in the hands of the Almighty? In conquering you today, is not the goal to have you acknowledge that God is none other than your God? If you still maintain that God is the God of Israelites only, and still maintain that the house of David in Israel is the origin of God’s birth, and that no nation other than Israel is qualified to “produce” God, much less is any Gentile family able to personally receive Jehovah’s work—if you still think this way, then does that not make you an obstinate holdout? Do not always fixate on Israel. God is right here among you today. Nor should you keep looking heavenward. Stop pining for your God in heaven! God has come into your midst, so how can He be in heaven? You have not believed in God for very long, yet you have a lot of notions about Him, to the point that you dare not for a second think that the God of the Israelites would deign to grace you with His presence. Even less do you dare to think about how you could see God make a personal appearance, given how unbearably filthy you are. Neither have you ever thought about how God could personally descend into a Gentile land. He ought to descend on Mount Sinai or the Mount of Olives and appear to Israelites. Are not the Gentiles (that is, people outside of Israel) all objects of His loathing? How could He personally work among them? All these are the deep-rooted notions that you have developed over many years. The purpose of conquering you today is to shatter these notions of yours. Thus do you behold God’s personal appearance among you—not on Mount Sinai or on the Mount of Olives, but among people He has never led before. After God carried out His two stages of work in Israel, Israelites and all Gentiles alike came to harbor the notion that while it is true that God created all things, He is only willing to be the God of Israelites, not the God of Gentiles. Israelites believe the following: God can only be our God, not the God of you Gentiles, and because you do not fear Jehovah, therefore Jehovah—our God—loathes you. Those Jewish people also believe the following: The Lord Jesus assumed the image of us Jewish people and is a God who bears the mark of the Jewish people. It is among us that God works. God’s image and our image are similar; our image is close to God’s. The Lord Jesus is the King of us Jews; Gentiles are not qualified to receive such great salvation. The Lord Jesus is the sin offering for us Jews. It was merely on the basis of those two stages of work that Israelites and the Jewish people formed all these notions. They domineeringly claim God for themselves, not allowing that God is also the God of the Gentiles. In this way, God became a lacuna in the hearts of Gentiles. This is because everyone came to believe that God does not want to be the God of the Gentiles and that He only likes Israelites—His chosen people—and the Jewish people, especially the disciples who followed Him. Do you not know that the work that Jehovah and Jesus did is for the survival of all mankind? Do you now acknowledge that God is the God of all of you born outside of Israel? Is God not right here in your midst today? This cannot be a dream, can it? Do you not accept this reality? You dare not believe it or think about it. Regardless of how you see it, is not God right here in your midst? Are you still afraid to believe these words? From this day on, are all conquered people and all who wish to be God’s followers not God’s chosen people? Are not all of you, who are followers today, the chosen people outside of Israel? Is your status not the same as the Israelites? Is not all this what you should recognize? Is this not the goal of the work of conquering you? Since you can see God, He will be your God forever, from the beginning and into the future. He will not abandon you, so long as all of you are willing to follow Him and to be His loyal, submissive creatures.

Regardless of how much people aspire to love God, they have generally been submissive in following Him until today. Not until the end, when this stage of work concludes, will they thoroughly repent. That is when people will truly be conquered. Right now, they are only in the process of being conquered. The moment the work ends, they will be completely conquered, but that is not the case right now! Even if everyone is convinced, that does not mean they have been thoroughly conquered. This is because, at present, people have seen only words and not factual events, and they remain uncertain, no matter how deeply they believe. That is why it is only with that last factual event, the words becoming reality, that people will be thoroughly conquered. Right now, these people are conquered because they hear many mysteries that they never heard of before. But inside each and every one of them, they are still looking on and waiting for some factual events that allow them to see every word of God being actualized. Only then will they be completely convinced. Only when, in the end, all have seen these actualized factual realities, and these realities have caused them to feel certain, will they show conviction in their hearts, their speech, and their eyes, and be thoroughly convinced from the bottom of their hearts. Such is the nature of man: You need to see the words all coming true, you need to see some factual events happening and see disaster befalling some people, and then you will be completely convinced deep down inside. Like the Jews, you are preoccupied with seeing signs and miracles. Yet you continually fail to see that there are signs and miracles and that realities are happening which are meant to greatly open your eyes. Whether it is someone descending from the sky, or a pillar of clouds speaking to you, or My performing an exorcism on one of you, or My voice booming like thunder among you, you have always wanted to and will always want to see this kind of event. One can say that in believing in God, your greatest wish is to see God come and personally show you a sign. Then you will be satisfied. To conquer you people, I have to perform work similar to the creation of the heavens and earth, and then in addition, show you some kind of sign. Then, your hearts will be completely conquered.

The Inside Truth of the Work of Conquest (4)

What does it mean to be perfected? What does it mean to be conquered? What criteria must be met in order for people to be conquered? And what criteria must be met for them to be perfected? Conquering and perfecting are both for the purpose of making man complete so that he may be restored to his original likeness, and be freed of his corrupt satanic disposition and the influence of Satan. This conquering comes early in the process of working man; indeed, it is the first step of the work. Perfecting is the second step, and it is the concluding work. Every human being must undergo the process of being conquered. If not, they would have no way of knowing God, nor would they be aware that there is a God, which is to say, it would be impossible for them to acknowledge God. And if people do not acknowledge God, it is also impossible for them to be made complete by God, since you do not meet the criteria for this completion. If you do not even acknowledge God, then how can you know Him? How can you pursue Him? You will not be able to bear witness to Him, either, and much less will you have the faith to satisfy Him. So, for anyone who wants to be made complete, the first step must be to undergo the work of conquest. This is the first condition. But both conquering and perfecting are in order to work people and to change them, and each is part of the work of managing man. Both steps are required to make someone whole, and neither can be neglected. It is true that “being conquered” does not sound very nice, but in fact, the process of conquering someone is the process of changing them. Once you have been conquered, your corrupt disposition may not have been completely eradicated, but you will have known it. Through the work of conquest, you will have come to know your lowly humanity, as well as much of your own rebelliousness. Although you will be unable to discard or to change these things within the short period of the work of conquest, you will come to know them, and this will lay the foundation for your perfection. As such, conquering and perfecting are both done in order to change people, to rid them of their corrupt satanic dispositions so that they can give themselves fully to God. Being conquered is merely the first step in changing people’s dispositions, as well as the first step in people fully giving themselves to God, and it is lower than the step of being perfected. A conquered person’s life disposition changes far less than a perfected person’s. Being conquered and being perfected are conceptually different from each other because they are different phases of work and because they hold people to different standards; conquest holds people to lower standards, while perfection holds them to higher ones. The perfected are righteous people, people made holy; they are crystallizations of the work of managing humanity, or end products. Although they are not perfect humans, they are people who seek to live meaningful lives. The conquered, meanwhile, acknowledge God’s existence in word only; they acknowledge that God has been incarnated, that the Word has appeared in the flesh, and that God has come to the earth to do the work of judgment and chastisement. They also acknowledge that God’s judgment and chastisement, and His smiting and refinement, are all beneficial to man. They have only recently begun to have a somewhat human likeness. They have some insights into life, but still it remains hazy to them. In other words, they are just starting to possess humanity. Such are the effects of being conquered. When people set foot on the path to perfection, their old dispositions are capable of change. Further, their lives continue to grow, and they gradually enter more deeply into the truth. They are able to loathe the world and all those who do not pursue the truth. They especially loathe themselves, but more than that, they clearly know themselves. They are willing to live by the truth and they make it their goal to pursue the truth. They are unwilling to live within the thoughts generated by their own brains, and they feel loathing for man’s self-righteousness, haughtiness, and self-conceit. They speak with a strong sense of propriety, handle things with discernment and wisdom, and are loyal and submissive to God. If they experience an instance of chastisement and judgment, not only do they not become negative or weak, but they are grateful for this chastisement and judgment from God. They believe that they cannot be without God’s chastisement and judgment, that it protects them. They do not pursue a faith of peace and joy and of seeking bread to satisfy hunger. Neither do they pursue fleeting fleshly enjoyments. This is what occurs in those who are perfected. After people are conquered, they acknowledge that there is a God, but that acknowledgment is manifested in them in a limited number of ways. What does the Word appearing in the flesh actually mean? What does incarnation mean? What has God incarnate done? What is the goal and significance of His work? After experiencing so much of His work, after experiencing His deeds in the flesh, what have you gained? Only after understanding all of these things will you be someone who is conquered. If you merely say that you acknowledge there is a God, but do not forsake what you ought to forsake, and fail to give up the fleshly enjoyments that you should give up, but instead continue to covet fleshly comforts as you always have, and if you are unable to let go of any prejudices against the brothers and sisters, and do not pay any price in carrying out many simple practices, then this proves you have yet to be conquered. In that case, even if there is much that you understand, it will all be for nothing. The conquered are people who have achieved some initial changes and initial entry. Experiencing God’s judgment and chastisement gives people an initial knowledge of God, and an initial comprehension of the truth. You may be incapable of fully entering into the reality of deeper, more detailed truths, but in your actual life you are able to put into practice many rudimentary truths, such as those involving your fleshly enjoyments or your personal status. All of this is the effect achieved in people during the process of being conquered. Changes in disposition can also be seen in the conquered; for example, the way they dress and present themselves, and how they live—these can all change. Their perspective on belief in God changes, they are clear about the goals of their pursuit, and they have higher aspirations. During the work of conquest, corresponding changes also occur in their life disposition. There are changes, but they are shallow, preliminary, and far inferior to the changes in disposition and goals of pursuit of those who have been perfected. If, in the course of being conquered, a person’s disposition does not change at all, and they do not gain any truth, then this person is trash, and completely useless! People who have not been conquered cannot be perfected! If a person only seeks to be conquered, then they cannot be fully made complete, even if their dispositions exhibit certain corresponding changes during the work of conquest. They will also lose the initial truths they gained. There is a vast difference between the change in dispositions in those who are conquered and those who are perfected. But being conquered is the first step in change; it is the foundation. Lack of this initial change is proof that a person does not actually know God at all, since this knowledge comes from judgment, and such judgment is a major part of the work of conquest. As such, all who are made perfect must first be conquered; if not, there is no way for them to be perfected.

You say that you acknowledge God incarnate, and that you acknowledge the Word’s appearance in the flesh, yet you do certain things behind His back, things that go against what He asks, and in your heart you are not frightened of Him. Is this acknowledging God? You acknowledge what He says, but you do not practice what you are able to, nor do you abide by His way. Is this acknowledging God? And though you acknowledge Him, you harbor a heart of wariness for Him, never a heart of fear. If you have seen and acknowledged His work and know that He is God, yet you remain tepid and completely unchanged, then you are the kind of person who still has not been conquered. Those who have been conquered must do all they can, and though they are not able to enter higher truths, and these truths may be beyond them, such people are willing in their hearts to attain to this. It is because there are limits to what they can comprehend that there are bounds and limits to what they are able to practice. At the very least, however, they must do all they can, and if you can achieve that, this is an effect that has been achieved because of the work of conquest. Suppose you say, “Given that He can put forth so many words that man cannot, if He is not God, who is?” Such thinking does not mean you acknowledge God. If you acknowledge God, you must demonstrate it through your actual actions. If you lead a church, yet do not practice righteousness, if you crave money and wealth, and always pocket the church’s funds for yourself, is this acknowledging that there is a God? God is almighty, and He is worthy of fear. How can you not be afraid if you truly acknowledge that there is a God? If you are capable of committing such despicable acts, do you truly acknowledge Him? Is it God that you believe in? What you believe in is a vague God; that is why you are not afraid! Those who truly acknowledge and know God are all afraid of Him and don’t dare to do anything that opposes Him or which violates their consciences; they are especially afraid to do anything that they know is against God’s will. Only this can be considered acknowledging God’s existence. What should you do when your parents try to stop you from believing in God? How should you love God when your unbelieving husband is good to you? And how should you love God when the brothers and sisters loathe you? If you acknowledge Him, then in these matters you will act appropriately and live out reality. If you fail to take concrete actions but only say that you acknowledge God’s existence, then you are just a talker! You say you believe in Him and acknowledge Him, but in what way do you acknowledge Him? In what way do you believe in Him? Are you frightened of Him in your heart? Do you fear Him? Do you possess a heart of love for Him deep down inside? When you are distressed and have no one to lean on, you sense the loveliness of God, but afterward you forget all about it. That is not loving God, and nor is it believing in God! What, ultimately, does God wish for man to achieve? All the states that I mentioned, such as feeling very impressed by your own importance, feeling you are quick to understand things, constraining others, looking down on others, judging people by their appearance, bullying guileless people, coveting church money, and so forth—only when all of these corrupt satanic dispositions have been, in part, removed from you, will your conquest be made manifest.

The work of conquest done on you people is of the deepest significance: In one regard, the purpose of this work is to perfect a group of people, which is to say, to perfect them, that they may become a group of overcomers—as the first group of people made complete, meaning the firstfruits. In another regard, it is to let created beings enjoy God’s love, receive God’s full and greatest salvation, to let man enjoy not only mercy and lovingkindness, but more importantly chastisement and judgment. From the creation of the world until now, all that God has done in His work is love, without any hatred for man. Even the chastisement and judgment you have seen are also love, a truer and more real love, a love that leads people onto the right path of human life. In yet another regard, it is to bear testimony before Satan. And in still another, it is to lay a foundation for spreading future gospel work. All the work He has done is for the purpose of leading people onto the right path of human life, so that they may live as normal people, for people do not know how to live, and without this guidance, you will only live empty lives; your life will be devoid of value or meaning, and you will be utterly incapable of being a normal person. This is the deepest significance of conquering man. You are all descendants of Moab; when the work of conquest is carried out in you, it is great salvation. All of you live in a land of sin and licentiousness, and you are all licentious and sinful. Today you are not just able to look upon God, but more importantly, you have received chastisement and judgment, you have received truly profound salvation, which is to say, you have received God’s greatest love. In all that He does, God is truly loving toward you. He has no ill intention. It is because of your sins that He judges you, so that you will examine yourselves and receive this tremendous salvation. All this is done for the purpose of making man complete. From beginning to end, God has been doing His utmost to save man, and has no desire to completely destroy the men He created with His own hands. Today, He has come among you to work; is this not salvation all the more? If He hated you, would He still do work of such magnitude in order to personally guide you? Why should He suffer so? God does not hate you or have any ill intentions toward you. You should know that God’s love is the truest love. It is only because people are rebellious that He has to save them through judgment; if not for this, saving them would be impossible. Because you do not know how to live and are not even aware of how to live, and because you live in this licentious and sinful land and are yourselves licentious and filthy devils, He cannot bear to let you become even more depraved, He cannot bear to see you living in this filthy land as you do now, trampled on by Satan at will, and He cannot bear to let you fall into Hades. He only wants to gain this group of people and thoroughly save you. This is the main purpose of doing the work of conquest on you—it is just for salvation. If you cannot see that everything done on you is love and salvation, if you think it is just a method, a way to torment man, and something untrustworthy, then you might as well go back to your world to suffer pain and hardship! If you are willing to be in this stream, and to enjoy this judgment and this immense salvation, to enjoy all of these blessings, blessings that cannot be found anywhere in the human world, and to enjoy this love, then be good: Stay in this stream to accept the work of conquest so you can be made perfect. Today, you may suffer a little pain and refinement because of God’s judgment, but there is value and meaning to suffering this pain. Though people are refined and mercilessly exposed by God’s chastisement and judgment—the aim being to punish them for their sins, to punish their flesh—none of this work is intended to condemn their flesh to destruction. The severe disclosures by the word are all for the purpose of leading you onto the right path. You have personally experienced so much of this work and, clearly, it has not led you onto an evil path! It is all in order to make you live out normal humanity, and it is all achievable by your normal humanity. Every step of God’s work is based upon your needs, according to your weaknesses, and according to your actual stature, and no unbearable burden is placed on you. This is not clear to you today, and you feel as if I am being hard on you, and indeed you always believe that the reason I chastise, judge and reproach you every day is because I hate you. But although what you suffer is chastisement and judgment, this is actually love for you, and it is the greatest protection. If you cannot grasp the deeper meaning of this work, it will be impossible for you to continue experiencing. This salvation should bring you comfort. Do not refuse to come to your senses. Having come this far, the significance of the work of conquest should be clear to you, and you should no longer hold opinions about it one way or another!

How Should You Attend to Your Future Mission?

Are you able to communicate the disposition expressed by God in each age in a concrete way, with language that suitably conveys the significance of the age? Are you, who experience God’s work of the last days, able to describe God’s righteous disposition in detail? Can you testify about God’s disposition clearly and accurately? How will you pass on what you have seen and experienced to those pitiable, poor, and devout religious believers who hunger and thirst for righteousness and are waiting for you to shepherd them? What kind of people are waiting for you to shepherd them? Can you imagine? Are you aware of the burden on your shoulders, your commission, and your responsibility? Where is your sense of historic mission? How will you adequately serve as a master in the next age? Do you have a strong sense of masterhood? How would you explain the master of all things? Is it really the master of all living creatures and of all physical things in the world? What plans do you have for the progress of the next phase of the work? How many people are waiting for you to be their shepherd? Is your task a heavy one? They are poor, pitiable, blind, and at a loss, wailing in the darkness—where is the way? How they yearn for the light, like a shooting star, to suddenly descend and dispel the forces of darkness that have oppressed man for so many years. Who can know the full extent to which they anxiously hope, and how they pine, day and night, for this? Even on a day when the light flashes past, these deeply suffering people remain imprisoned in a dark dungeon without hope of release; when will they weep no longer? Terrible is the misfortune of these fragile spirits who have never been granted rest, and long have they been kept bound in this state by merciless bonds and frozen history. And who has heard the sound of their wailing? Who has looked upon their miserable state? Has it ever occurred to you how grieved and anxious God’s heart is? How can He bear to see innocent mankind, whom He created with His own hands, suffering such torment? Human beings, after all, are the victims who have been poisoned. And although man has survived to this day, who would have known that mankind has long been poisoned by the evil one? Have you forgotten that you are one of the victims? Are you not willing to strive, out of your love for God, to save these survivors? Are you not willing to devote all of your energy to repaying God, who loves mankind like His own flesh and blood? When all is said and done, how would you interpret being used by God to live your extraordinary life? Do you really have the resolve and confidence to live the meaningful life of a pious, God-serving person?

What Is Your Understanding of Blessings?

Though the people born in this era have been corrupted by Satan and the filthy demons, such corruption has also brought them the utmost salvation, salvation even greater than the mountains and plains of livestock and vast wealth of Job, and greater, too, than the blessing of beholding Jehovah that Job received following his trials. It was only after Job underwent the trial of death that he heard Jehovah speak and heard Jehovah’s voice in the whirlwind. Yet he did not see Jehovah’s face, and he did not know His disposition. What Job gained was merely material wealth that provided physical pleasures and the most beautiful children of all the cities around, as well as the protection of the angels of heaven. He never saw Jehovah, and though he was called righteous, he never knew Jehovah’s disposition. And though the material pleasures of the people of today are, it can be said, temporarily meager, or the environment of the outside world is hostile, I show My disposition, which I have never revealed to man since antiquity and which has always been secret, as well as the mysteries of eons past to the people, who are most lowly of all but to whom I have given My greatest salvation. Moreover, this is the first time I have revealed these things; I have never done such work before. Though you are far inferior to Job, what you have gained and what you have seen have far surpassed him. Though you have undergone all kinds of suffering and experienced all manner of torment, that suffering is not at all like the trials of Job; it is, instead, the judgment and chastisement received by people because of their rebelliousness, because of their resistance, and because of My righteous disposition; it is righteous judgment, chastisement, and curse. Job, on the other hand, was a righteous man among the Israelites who received Jehovah’s great love and tenderness. He had committed no evil acts, and he did not resist Jehovah; rather, he was faithfully devoted to Jehovah. Because of his righteousness, he was subjected to trials, and he underwent fiery trials because he was a faithful servant of Jehovah. The people of today are subjected to My judgment and curse because of their filthiness and unrighteousness. Though their suffering is nothing like what Job went through when he lost his livestock, his property, his servants, his children, and all of those dear to him, what they suffer is fiery refinement and burning. And what makes it more serious than what Job experienced is that such trials are not lessened or removed because people are weak; instead, they are long-lasting, and continue until people’s final day of life. This is punishment, judgment, and curse; it is merciless burning, and even more, it is humankind’s rightful “inheritance.” It is what people deserve, and it is where My righteous disposition is expressed. This is a known fact. Nevertheless, what people have gained greatly surpasses the suffering they endure today. The suffering you endure is merely a setback resulting from your foolishness, while what you have gained is a hundred times greater than your suffering. According to the laws of Israel in the Old Testament, all those who resist Me, all those who openly judge Me, and all those who do not follow My way, and instead boldly offer profane sacrifices to Me, will surely be destroyed by fire in the temple or be stoned to death by some of the chosen ones, and even the descendants of their own clans and other direct kin will suffer My curse. In the lives to come, they will not be free, but will be the slaves of My slaves, and I will drive them into exile among the Gentiles, and they will be unable to return to their homeland. Based on their actions and behavior, the suffering endured by the people of today is not nearly as grave as the punishment suffered by the Israelites. Saying that what you are currently suffering is retribution is not without justification, because you really have crossed the line. If you had been in Israel, you would have become eternal sinners, and you would have been cut to pieces by the Israelites long ago and burnt by the fire from heaven in Jehovah’s temple. What is it that you have now gained? What have you received, and what have you enjoyed? I have revealed My righteous disposition in you, but most important is that I have revealed My patience for redeeming humankind. One could say that the work I have done in you is but the work of patience; it is done for the sake of My management and, moreover, is done for the sake of humanity’s enjoyment.

Although Job underwent the trials of Jehovah, he was merely a righteous man who worshiped Jehovah. Despite undergoing those trials, he did not complain about Jehovah, and he treasured his encounter with Him. Not only do the people of today not cherish Jehovah’s presence, but they reject, detest, complain about, and mock His appearance. Have you not gained more than a little? Has your suffering really been so great? Have you not been more fortunate than Mary and James? And has your resistance really been so trivial? Could it be that what I have required of you and what I have asked from you has been too great and too much? My wrath was only unleashed upon those Israelites who resisted Me, not directly upon you; what you have gained has been merely My merciless judgment and revelations, as well as relentless fiery refinement. In spite of this, people continue to resist and refute Me, and they do so without a shred of submission. There are even some who distance themselves from Me and deny Me; such people are no better than the band of Korah and Dathan who opposed Moses. People’s hearts are too hardened, and their natures are too stubborn. They never change their old ways. I say they are laid bare like prostitutes in broad daylight, and My words are harsh to the point that they even might be “offensive to the ears,” exposing people’s natures to the light of day—yet they merely nod their heads, shed a few tears, and force themselves to feel a bit sad. Once this has passed, they are as fierce as the king of wild beasts in the mountains, and they have not the slightest awareness. How can people with such a disposition know that they have been a hundred times more fortunate than Job? How can they realize that what they enjoy are blessings that have hardly been seen throughout the ages, and that no one has ever enjoyed before? How can people’s consciences sense such blessings, blessings that contain punishment? Frankly speaking, all I require of you is so that you can be models for My work, witnesses for My entire disposition and all of My actions, and so that you may be freed from the afflictions of Satan. Yet people are always repelled by My work and are intentionally hostile to it. How could such people not incite Me to bring back the laws of Israel, and to bring upon them the wrath I brought upon Israel? Although there are many among you who are “obedient and submissive” toward Me, there are even more who are of the ilk of the band of Korah. Once I have attained My full glory, I will use the fire from heaven to burn them to ashes. You should know that I will no longer chastise people with My words; rather, before doing the work of Israel, I will completely incinerate “the band of Korah” who resist Me and whom I long ago cast out. Humankind will no longer have the opportunity to enjoy Me; instead, all that they see will be My wrath and flames from heaven. I will reveal the various outcomes of all sorts of people, and I will divide them all into categories. I will take note of their every rebellious act and then finish My work, so that people’s outcomes will be determined based on My verdict while on the earth as well as by their attitudes toward Me. When that time comes, there will be nothing that can change their outcomes. Let people reveal their own outcomes! Then I will hand people’s outcomes over to the heavenly Father.

What Is Your Understanding of God?

People have long believed in God, yet most of them have no understanding of what the word “God” means, and merely follow in bewilderment. They have no clue as to why exactly man should believe in God, or what God is. If people know only to believe in and follow God, but not what God is, and if they also do not know God, then is this not just a great big joke? Even though, having come this far, people have witnessed many heavenly mysteries, and have heard much profound knowledge never before understood by man, they are ignorant of many of the most elementary truths never before contemplated by man. Some might say, “We have believed in God for many years. How could we not know what God is? Does this question not belittle us?” In reality, however, though people follow Me today, they know nothing of any of the work of today, and fail to grasp even the most obvious and easiest of questions, let alone such highly complex ones as those about God. Know that the questions that you have no concern for, that you have not identified, are the ones that are most important for you to understand, for you know only to follow the crowd, paying no attention and giving no care to what you should be equipping yourself with. Do you truly know why you should have faith in God? Do you really know what God is? Do you truly know what man is? As a person who has faith in God, if you fail to understand these things, do you not lose the dignity of a believer of God? My work today is this: to have people understand their essence, understand all that I do, and know the true face of God. This is the closing act of My management plan, the last stage of My work. That is why I am telling you all of life’s mysteries in advance, so that you can accept them from Me. As this is the work of the final age, I must tell you all the life truths that you have never been receptive to before, even though you are incapable of comprehending or bearing it due to being simply too deficient and too ill-equipped. I shall conclude My work; I shall complete the work I am supposed to do, and shall tell you of all I have commissioned of you, lest you again stray and fall for the evil one’s schemes when darkness descends. There are many ways that you do not understand, many matters of which you have no knowledge. You are so ignorant; I know full well your stature and your shortcomings. Therefore, though there are many words you are incapable of comprehending, I am still willing to tell you all these truths that you have never been receptive to before, because I keep worrying whether, in your current stature, you are able to stand firm in your testimony to Me. It is not that I think little of you; you are all beasts that have yet to undergo My formal training, and I absolutely cannot see how much glory is within you. Though I have expended much energy working on you, the positive elements in you seem practically nonexistent, and the negative elements can be counted on one’s fingers and serve only as testimonies that bring shame on Satan. Just about everything else in you is Satan’s poison. You look to Me like you are beyond salvation. As matters stand, I look at your various expressions and demeanors, and finally, I know your true stature. This is why I am always fretting over you: Left to live life on their own, would humans really be better off than or comparable to how they are today? Does your infantile stature not make you anxious? Can you truly be like the chosen people of Israel—loyal to Me, and to Me alone, at all times? What is revealed in you is not the mischievousness of children who have strayed from their parents, but the beastliness that bursts forth from animals that are out of reach of their masters’ whips. You should know your nature, which is also the weakness that you all share; it is an ailment common to you all. Thus, My only exhortation to you today is to stand firm in your testimony to Me. Do not, under any circumstances, allow the old ailment to flare up again. Bearing testimony is what’s most important—it is the heart of My work. You should accept My words just as Mary accepted Jehovah’s revelation that came to her in a dream: by believing, and then submitting. Only this qualifies as being chaste. For you are the ones who hear My words the most, the ones most blessed by Me. I have given you all My valuable possessions, I have bestowed everything upon you, yet you are of such vastly different status to the people of Israel; you are simply worlds apart. But compared to them, you have received so much more; while they desperately await My appearance, you pass pleasant days with Me, sharing My bounty. Given this difference, what gives you the right to squawk and squabble with Me and demand your share of My possessions? Have you not gained much? I give you so much, but what you give Me in return is just heartrending sadness and anxiety, irrepressible resentment and discontent. You are so repugnant—yet you are also pitiable, so I have no choice but to swallow all My resentment and voice My objections to you again and again. Over thousands of years of work, I have never remonstrated with mankind because I have discovered that, throughout humanity’s development, it is only the “hoaxes” among you that have become the most renowned, like precious inheritances left to you by famous ancestors of ancient times. How I hate those subhuman swine and dogs. You are too lacking in conscience! You are of too base a character! Your hearts are too hardened! If I had taken such words and work to the Israelites, I would have gained glory long ago. But among you this is unattainable; among you, there is only cruel neglect, your cold shoulder, and your excuses. You are too unfeeling, and utterly worthless!

You should devote your all to My work. You should do work that benefits Me. I am willing to explain to you everything that you do not understand so that you can gain from Me all that you lack. Even though your defects are too numerous to count, I am willing to keep doing the work that I should be doing on you, granting you My final mercy so that you may benefit from Me and gain the glory that is absent in you and which the world has never seen. I have worked for so many years, yet no human has ever known Me. I wish to tell you secrets that I have never told anyone else.

Among humans, I was the Spirit that they could not see, the Spirit that they could never engage with. Because of My three stages of work on earth (creation of the world, redemption, and destruction), I appear in their midst at different times (never publicly) to do My work amongst them. The first time I came among humans was during the Age of Redemption. Of course, I came into a Jewish family; as such, the first to see God’s coming to earth were the Jews. The reason I did this work in person was that I wanted to use My incarnate flesh as a sin offering in My work of redemption. Thus, the first to see Me were the Jews in the Age of Grace. That was the first time I worked in the flesh. In the Age of Kingdom, My work is to conquer and perfect, so I again do My shepherding work in the flesh. This is My second time working in the flesh. In the final two stages of work, what people engage with is no longer the invisible, intangible Spirit, but a person who is the Spirit realized as flesh. Thus, in the eyes of man, I again become a human, with none of the look and feel of God. Moreover, the God that people see is not only male, but also female, which is most astounding and puzzling to them. Time and time again, My extraordinary work has shattered old beliefs held for many, many years. People are stunned! God is not merely the Holy Spirit, the Spirit, the sevenfold intensified Spirit, or the all-encompassing Spirit, but is also a human—an ordinary human, an exceptionally common human. He is not only male, but also female. They are similar in that They are both born to humans, and dissimilar in that one was conceived by the Holy Spirit and the other was born to a human, though derived directly from the Spirit. They are similar in that both incarnate fleshes of God carry out the work of God the Father, and dissimilar in that one performed the work of redemption while the other does the work of conquest. Both represent God the Father, but one is the Redeemer, filled with lovingkindness and mercy, and the other is the God of righteousness, filled with wrath and judgment. One is the Supreme Commander who launched the work of redemption, while the other is the righteous God who accomplishes the work of conquest. One is the Beginning, the other the End. One is sinless flesh, while the other is flesh that completes the redemption, continues the work, and is never sinful. Both are the same Spirit, but They dwell in different fleshes and were born in different places, and They are separated by several thousand years. However, all Their work is mutually complementary, never conflicting, and can be spoken of in the same breath. Both are people, but one was a baby boy and the other was an infant girl. For all these many years, what people have seen is not only the Spirit and not only a human, a male, but also many things that do not jibe with human notions; as such, humans are never able to fully fathom Me. They keep half-believing and half-doubting Me—as if I do exist, yet am also an illusory dream—which is why, to this day, people still do not know what God is. Can you really sum Me up in one simple sentence? Do you truly dare to say, “Jesus is none other than God, and God is none other than Jesus”? Are you really so bold as to say, “God is none other than the Spirit, and the Spirit is none other than God”? Are you comfortable saying, “God is just a human clothed in flesh”? Do you truly have the courage to assert, “The image of Jesus is the great image of God”? Are you able to use your eloquence to thoroughly explain God’s disposition and image? Do you really dare to say, “God created males only, not females, after His own image”? If you say this, then no female would be among My selected, much less would females be one class of humankind. Now do you truly know what God is? Is God a human? Is God a Spirit? Is God really a male? Can only Jesus complete the work I am to do? If you choose only one of the above to sum up My essence, then you are an exceedingly ignorant loyal believer. If I worked as incarnate flesh once, and only once, would you delimit Me? Can you really understand Me thoroughly at a single glance? Can you really sum Me up completely based on what you have been exposed to during your lifetime? If I did similar work in both My incarnations, how would you perceive Me? Would you leave Me forever nailed to the cross? Could God be as simple as you claim?

Although your faith is very sincere, none among you is able to give a full account of Me, none can give full testimony to all of the facts you see. Think about it: Today, most of you are derelict in your duties, instead pursuing the flesh, satiating the flesh, and greedily enjoying the flesh. You possess little truth. How, then, can you bear testimony to all that you have seen? Are you really confident that you can be My witnesses? If a day comes when you are unable to testify to all that you have seen today, then you will have lost the function of created beings, and there will be no meaning whatsoever to your existence. You will be unworthy of being human. It could even be said that you will not be human! I have done immeasurable work on you, but because you are currently learning nothing, aware of nothing, and ineffective in your labors, when it is time for Me to expand My work, you will just stare blankly, tongue-tied and utterly useless. Will that not make you a sinner for all time? When that time comes, will you not feel the deepest regret? Will you not sink into dejection? All of My work today is not done out of idleness and boredom, but to lay a foundation for My future work. It is not that I am at an impasse and need to come up with something new. You should understand the work I do; it is not something done by a child playing in the street, but is a work done in representation of My Father. You should know that it is not Me doing all this Myself; rather, I represent My Father. Your role, meanwhile, is strictly to follow, submit, change, and testify. What you should understand is why you should believe in Me; this is the most important question for each of you to understand. My Father, for the sake of His glory, predestined all of you for Me from the moment He created the world. It was for the sake of My work, and for the sake of His glory, that He predestined you. It is because of My Father that you believe in Me; it is because of My Father’s predestination that you follow Me. None of this is of your own choosing. Even more important is that you understand that you are the ones My Father bestowed upon Me for the purpose of testifying to Me. Because He granted you to Me, you should abide by the ways I bestow upon you, as well as the ways and the words I teach you, for it is your duty to abide by My way. This is the original purpose of your faith in Me. Therefore, I say to you this: You are merely people that My Father bestowed upon Me to abide by My ways. However, you only believe in Me; you are not of Me because you are not of the Israelite family, and are instead ilk of the ancient serpent. All I am asking you to do is to bear witness for Me, but today you must follow My way. All of this is for the sake of future testimony. If you function only as people who listen to My ways, then you will be without value, and the significance of My Father’s having bestowed you upon Me will be lost. What I insist on telling you is this: You should follow My way.

What It Means to Be a Real Person

It has always been My duty to manage man. Furthermore, the conquest of man is what I ordained when I created the world. People may not know that I shall completely conquer man in the last days, or that the conquest of the rebellious ones among mankind is the evidence of My defeat of Satan. But, when My enemy joined battle with Me, I already told it that I would conquer those that Satan had taken captive and made into its children, into the loyal servants that watched over its home. The original meaning of conquer is to defeat, to subject to humiliation; in the language of the Israelites, it means to utterly defeat, destroy, and render incapable of further resistance against Me. But today, when used among you, its meaning is to conquer. You should know that My intention has always been to completely extinguish and put to rout the evil ones of mankind, so that they can no longer betray Me, much less have the breath to disrupt or disturb My work. Thus, as far as man is concerned, this word has come to mean conquest. Whatever the connotations of the term, My work is to defeat humans. For while it is true that mankind is an adjunct to My management, to put it more precisely, humans are none other than My enemies. Humans are the evil ones who oppose and rebel against Me. Humans are none other than the progeny of the evil one accursed by Me. Humans are none other than the descendants of the archangel that betrayed Me. Humans are none other than the legacy of the devil who, spurned by Me long ago, has been My irreconcilable enemy ever since. For the sky above all mankind is turbid and dark, without the slightest impression of clarity, and the human world is plunged into pitchy darkness, so that one living in it cannot even see his outstretched hand before his face or the sun when he lifts up his head. The road beneath his feet, muddy and rife with potholes, meanders tortuously; the whole land is littered with corpses. The dark corners are filled with the remains of the dead, and in the cool and shady corners crowds of demons have taken up residence. And everywhere in the world of men demons come and go in hordes. The progeny of all manner of beasts, covered in filth, are locked in pitched battle, the sound of which strikes terror to the heart. At such times, in such a world, such an “earthly paradise,” where does one go to seek out life’s felicities? Where could one go to find his life’s destination? Mankind, long since trampled under Satan’s feet, has from the first been an actor taking on Satan’s image—more than that, mankind is the embodiment of Satan, and serves as the evidence that bears witness to Satan, loud and clear. How can such a human race, such a bunch of degenerate scum, such offspring of this corrupt human family, bear witness to God? Whence comes My glory? Where can one begin to speak of My testimony? For the enemy that, having corrupted mankind, stands against Me, has already taken mankind—the mankind that I created long ago and that was filled with My glory and My living out—and soiled them. It has snatched away My glory, and all it has imbued man with is poison heavily laced with the ugliness of Satan, and juice from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the beginning, I created mankind; that is, I created mankind’s ancestor, Adam. He was endowed with form and image, brimming with vigor, brimming with vitality, and was, furthermore, in the company of My glory. That was the glorious day when I created man. After that, Eve was produced from the body of Adam, and she too was the ancestor of man, and so the people that I created were filled with My breath and brimming with My glory. Adam was originally born from My hand and was the representation of My image. Thus the original meaning of “Adam” was a being created by Me, imbued with My vital energy, imbued with My glory, having form and image, having spirit and breath. He was the only created being, possessed of a spirit, who was capable of representing Me, of bearing My image, and receiving My breath. In the beginning, Eve was the second human endowed with breath whose creation I had ordained, so the original meaning of “Eve” was a created being who would continue My glory, filled with My vitality and furthermore endowed with My glory. Eve came from Adam, so she also bore My image, for she was the second human to be created in My image. The original meaning of “Eve” was a living human, with spirit, flesh, and bone, My second testimony as well as My second image among mankind. They were mankind’s ancestors, man’s pure and precious treasure, and, from the first, living beings endowed with spirit. However, the evil one trampled and took captive the progeny of mankind’s ancestors, plunging the human world into complete darkness, and making it so that the progeny no longer believe in My existence. Even more abominable is that, even as the evil one corrupts people and tramples all over them, it is cruelly wresting away My glory, My testimony, the vitality I bestowed on them, the breath and the life I blew into them, all My glory in the human world, and all the heart’s blood I have expended on mankind. Mankind is no longer in the light, people have lost everything I bestowed upon them, and they have cast away the glory I gave. How can they acknowledge that I am the Lord of all created beings? How can they continue to believe in My existence in heaven? How can they discover the manifestations of My glory upon the earth? How can these grandsons and granddaughters take the God their own ancestors feared as the Lord who created them? These pitiful grandsons and granddaughters have generously “presented” to the evil one the glory, the image, and the testimony that I bestowed upon Adam and Eve, as well as the life I bestowed upon mankind and on which they depend to exist; and they are utterly unmindful of the evil one’s presence, and give all My glory to it. Is this not the very source of the term “scum”? How can such a mankind, such evil demons, such walking corpses, such figures of Satan, such enemies of Mine be possessed of My glory? I will repossess My glory, repossess My testimony that exists among men, and all that once belonged to Me and that I gave to mankind long ago—I will completely conquer mankind. However, you should know that the humans I created were holy men who bore My image and My glory. They did not belong to Satan, nor were they subject to its trampling, but were purely a manifestation of Mine, free of the slightest trace of Satan’s poison. And so, I inform humanity that I want only that which is created by My hand, the holy ones that I love and that belong to no other entity. Furthermore, I will take pleasure in them and consider them as My glory. However, what I want is not the mankind that has been corrupted by Satan, that belongs to Satan today, and that is no longer My original creation. Because I intend to repossess My glory that exists in the human world, I shall completely conquer the survivors among mankind, as proof of My glory in defeating Satan. I take only My testimony as a crystallization of My self, as the object of My enjoyment. This is My will.

It has taken tens of thousands of years of history for mankind to get where it is today, yet the mankind I created in the beginning has long since sunk into degeneracy. Humanity is no longer the humanity I desire, and thus, in My eyes, people no longer deserve the name of mankind. They are, rather, the scum of mankind that Satan has taken captive, the rotten walking corpses that are inhabited by Satan and with which Satan clothes itself. People have no trust in My existence, nor do they welcome My coming. Mankind only begrudgingly responds to My requests, temporarily acceding to them, and does not sincerely share in life’s joys and sorrows with Me. Since people see Me as inscrutable, they give Me begrudging smiles, their attitude one of cozying up to one in power, for people have no knowledge of My work, much less of My will at present. I will be honest with you: When the day comes, the suffering of anyone who worships Me will be easier to bear than yours. The degree of your faith in Me does not, in actuality, exceed that of Job—even the faith of the Jewish Pharisees surpasses yours—and so, if the day of fire descends, your suffering will be more grave than that of the Pharisees when rebuked by Jesus, than that of the 250 leaders who opposed Moses, and than that of Sodom under the scorching flames of its destruction. When Moses struck the rock, and the water bestowed by Jehovah sprang forth, it was because of his faith. When David played the lyre in praise of Me, Jehovah—with his heart filled with joy—it was because of his faith. When Job lost his livestock that filled the mountains and untold masses of wealth, and his body became covered in sore boils, it was because of his faith. When he could hear the voice of Me, Jehovah, and see the glory of Me, Jehovah, it was because of his faith. That Peter could follow Jesus Christ was down to his faith. That he could be nailed to the cross for My sake and give glorious testimony was also down to his faith. When John saw the glorious image of the Son of man, it was down to his faith. When he saw the vision of the last days, it was all the more because of his faith. The reason why the so-called multitudes of the Gentile nations have obtained My revelation, and have come to know that I have returned in the flesh to do My work among man, is also because of their faith. All those who are smitten by My harsh words and yet are brought solace by them and are saved—have they not done so because of their faith? Those who believe in Me but who yet suffer hardships, have they not also been rejected by the world? Those who live outside My word, fleeing the suffering of trial, are they all not drifting through the world? They are akin to autumn leaves fluttering here and there, with no place to rest, much less My words of consolation. Although My chastisement and refinement do not follow them, are they not beggars drifting from place to place, wandering the streets outside the kingdom of heaven? Is the world really your place of rest? Can you really, by avoiding My chastisement, attain the faintest smile of gratification from the world? Can you truly use your fleeting enjoyment to cover up the emptiness in your heart, the emptiness that cannot be concealed? You might be able to fool everyone in your family, but you can never fool Me. Because your faith is too meager, you are still, to this day, powerless to find any of the delights life has to offer. I urge you: better to sincerely spend half your life for My sake than your whole life in mediocrity and busywork for the flesh, enduring all the suffering a man can hardly bear. What purpose does it serve to treasure yourself so much and flee from My chastisement? What purpose does it serve to hide yourself from My momentary chastisement only to reap an eternity of embarrassment, an eternity of chastisement? I do not, in fact, bend anyone to My will. If someone is truly willing to submit to all My plans, I would not treat them poorly. But I require that all people believe in Me, just as Job believed in Me, Jehovah. If your faith exceeds that of Thomas, then your faith will attain My commendation, in your loyalty you will find My bliss, and you will surely find My glory in your days. However, people who believe in the world and believe in the devil have hardened their hearts, just like the masses of the city of Sodom, with grains of windblown sand in their eyes and offerings from the devil in their mouths, whose beclouded minds have long ago been possessed by the evil one that has usurped the world. Their thoughts have almost wholly fallen captive to the devil of ancient times. And so, mankind’s faith has gone with the wind, and they are unable even to take notice of My work. All they can do is to make a feeble attempt at treating My work perfunctorily or to analyze it roughly, because they have long since been possessed by Satan’s poison.

I will conquer mankind because people were created by Me and have, moreover, enjoyed all the bountiful objects of My creation. But people have also rejected Me; I am absent from their hearts, and they see Me as a burden on their existence, even to the point where, having truly beheld Me, they still reject Me, and wrack their brains thinking up every possible way to defeat Me. People do not allow Me to treat them seriously or to make strict demands of them, nor do they permit Me to judge or chastise their unrighteousness. Far from being engaged by this, they find it annoying. And so My work is to take the mankind that eats, drinks, and revels in Me but does not know Me, and defeat them. I will disarm humanity, and then, taking My angels, taking My glory, I will return to My dwelling place. For people’s actions have long since broken My heart and shattered My work into pieces. I intend to repossess the glory that the evil one has taken away before happily walking away, letting mankind continue to live their lives, continue “living and working in peace and contentment,” continue “cultivating their own fields,” and I will no longer interfere in their lives. But now I intend fully to repossess My glory from the hand of the evil one, take back the entirety of the glory I wrought into man at the creation of the world. Never again will I bestow it upon the human race on earth. For people have not only failed to preserve My glory, but they have exchanged it for the image of Satan. People do not treasure My coming, nor do they prize the day of My glory. They are not glad to receive My chastisement, much less are they willing to return My glory to Me, nor are they willing to cast away the evil one’s poison. Humanity continues to deceive Me in the same old way, people still wear bright smiles and happy faces in the same old way. They are unaware of the depths of gloom that will descend on mankind after My glory leaves them. In particular, they are unaware that when My day comes to the whole of mankind, it will go even harder for them than for the people in the time of Noah, for they do not know how dark Israel became when My glory departed from it, for man forgets at dawn how difficult the pitch-dark night was to get through. When the sun goes back into hiding again and darkness descends upon man, he will again lament and gnash his teeth in darkness. Have you forgotten, when My glory departed from Israel, how difficult it was for the Israelites to endure those days of suffering? Now is the time when you see My glory, and it is also the time when you share the day of My glory. Man will lament amid the darkness when My glory leaves the filthy land. Now is the day of glory when I do My work, and it is the day when I exempt mankind from suffering, for I will not share the times of torment and tribulation with them. I want only to conquer mankind completely, and to completely defeat the evil ones of mankind.

What Do You Know of Faith?

In man exists only the uncertain word of faith, yet man knows not what constitutes faith, much less why he has faith. Man understands too little, and man himself is too lacking; his faith in Me is but mindless and ignorant. Though he knows not what faith is, nor why he has faith in Me, he continues to believe in Me obsessively. What I ask of man is not merely for him to obsessively call upon Me in this way or to believe in Me in a desultory fashion, for the work I do is so that man may see Me, and know Me, not so that man is impressed and looks at Me in a new light. I once manifested many signs and wonders and performed many miracles, and the Israelites of the time showed Me great admiration and greatly revered My exceptional ability to heal the sick and exorcise demons. At the time, the Jews thought My healing powers to be masterly, extraordinary—and because of My many deeds, they all venerated Me, and felt great admiration for all of My powers. Thus, all who saw Me perform miracles followed Me closely, such that thousands surrounded Me to watch Me heal the sick. I manifested so many signs and wonders, yet people merely looked upon Me as a masterly physician; so, too, did I speak many words of teaching to people at the time, yet they merely regarded Me as a teacher superior to his disciples. Even today, after men have seen the historical records of My work, their interpretation continues to be that I am a great physician who heals the sick and a teacher to the ignorant, and they have defined Me as the merciful Lord Jesus Christ. Those who interpret the scriptures may have surpassed My skills in healing, or may even be disciples who have now surpassed their teacher, yet such men of great renown, whose names are known around the world, consider Me so lowly to be a mere physician. My deeds are greater in number than the grains of sand on the beaches, and My wisdom surpasses all the sons of Solomon, yet people merely think of Me as a physician of little account and an unknown teacher of man. So many believe in Me only that I might heal them. So many believe in Me only that I might use My powers to drive unclean spirits out from their bodies, and so many believe in Me simply that they might receive peace and joy from Me. So many believe in Me only to demand from Me greater material wealth. So many believe in Me just to spend this life in peace and to be safe and sound in the world to come. So many believe in Me to avoid the suffering of hell and to receive the blessings of heaven. So many believe in Me only for temporary comfort, yet do not seek to gain anything in the world to come. When I brought down My fury upon man and seized all the joy and peace he once possessed, man became doubtful. When I gave unto man the suffering of hell and reclaimed the blessings of heaven, man’s shame turned into anger. When man asked Me to heal him, I paid him no heed and felt abhorrence toward him; man departed from Me to instead seek the way of evil medicine and sorcery. When I took away all that man had demanded from Me, everyone disappeared without a trace. Thus, I say that man has faith in Me because I give too much grace, and there is far too much to gain. The Jews believed in Me for My grace and followed Me wherever I went. These ignorant men of limited knowledge and experience sought only to behold the signs and wonders I manifested. They regarded Me as the head of the house of the Jews who could perform the greatest miracles. And so when I exorcised demons from men, it caused much discussion among them: They said that I was Elijah, that I was Moses, that I was the most ancient of all prophets, that I was the greatest of all physicians. Apart from Myself saying that I am the life, the way, and the truth, none could know My being or My identity. Apart from Myself saying that heaven is the place where My Father lives, none knew that I am the Son of God, and also God Himself. Apart from Myself saying that I shall bring redemption to all mankind and ransom mankind, none knew that I am the Redeemer of mankind, and men only knew Me as a benevolent and compassionate man. And apart from Myself being able to explain all there is of Me, none knew Me, and none believed that I am the Son of the living God. Such is people’s faith in Me, and the way they try to fool Me. How could they bear witness to Me when they hold such views of Me?

People believe in Me, but they are incapable of bearing testimony to Me, nor can they testify for Me before I make Myself known. People see only that I surpass created beings and all holy men, and see that the work I do cannot be done by men. Thus, from the Jews to the people of the present day, all who behold My glorious deeds have been filled with nothing more than curiosity toward Me, and not a single created being’s mouth has been able to bear witness to Me. Only My Father bore witness to Me, and made a path for Me among all created beings; if He had not, no matter how I worked, man would never have known that I am the Lord of creation, for man knows only to take from Me and does not have faith in Me as a result of My work. Man knows Me only because I am innocent and in no part a sinner, because I can explain numerous mysteries, because I am above the multitude, or because man has profited much from Me, yet few believe I am the Lord of creation. This is why I say that man knows not why he has faith in Me; he knows not the purpose or significance of having faith in Me. The reality of man is lacking, such that he is barely fit to bear Me witness. You have too little true faith, and have gained too little, so you have too little testimony. Moreover, you understand too little and lack too much, such that you are nearly unfit to bear witness to My deeds. Your resolution is indeed considerable, but are you certain that you will be able to successfully testify to the essence of God? What you have experienced and seen surpasses that of the saints and prophets from all ages, but are you able to provide testimony greater than the words of these saints and prophets of times past? What I now bestow upon you surpasses Moses and eclipses David, so likewise I ask that your testimony surpass Moses and that your words be greater than David. I give you a hundredfold—so I likewise ask you to repay Me in kind. You must know I am the One who bestows life unto mankind, and it is you who receive life from Me and must bear witness for Me. This is your duty which I send down upon you and which you ought to do for Me. I have bestowed all My glory unto you, I have bestowed unto you the life that the chosen people, the Israelites, never received. By rights, you ought to bear witness to Me and devote to Me your youth and lay down your life. Whomsoever I bestow My glory unto shall bear Me witness and give their life for Me. This has long been predestined by Me. It is your good fortune that I bestow My glory upon you, and your duty is to testify to My glory. If you were to believe in Me only to gain blessings, then My work would bear little significance, and you would not be performing your duty. The Israelites saw only My mercy, love, and greatness, and the Jews witnessed only My patience and redemption. They saw very, very little of the work of My Spirit, to the point that they understood but one-ten-thousandth of what you have heard and seen. What you have seen exceeds even the chief priests among them. The truths you understand today surpass theirs; what you have seen today exceeds what was seen in the Age of Law, as well as the Age of Grace, and what you have experienced surpasses even Moses and Elijah. For what the Israelites understood was only the law of Jehovah, and what they saw was only the sight of Jehovah’s back; what the Jews understood was only the redemption of Jesus, what they received was only the grace bestowed by Jesus, and what they saw was only the image of Jesus within the house of the Jews. What you see this day is the glory of Jehovah, the redemption of Jesus, and all My deeds of this day. So, too, have you heard the words of My Spirit, appreciated My wisdom, come to know My wonder, and learned of My disposition. I have also told you all of My management plan. What you have seen is not merely a loving and merciful God, but a God filled with righteousness. You have seen My wondrous work and known that I brim with majesty and wrath. Furthermore, you know that I once brought down My raging fury upon the house of Israel, and that today, it has come upon you. You understand more of My mysteries in heaven than Isaiah and John; you know more of My loveliness and venerableness than all the saints of ages past. What you have received is not merely My truth, My way, and My life, but a vision and revelation greater than that of John. You understand many more mysteries, and have also looked upon My true countenance; you have accepted more of My judgment and know more of My righteous disposition. And so, though you were born in the last days, your understanding is that of the former and the past, and you have also experienced the things of today, and this was all personally done by Me. What I ask of you is not excessive, for I have given you so much, and you have seen much in Me. Thus, I ask you to bear witness for Me to the saints of ages past, and this is My heart’s only desire.

It was My Father who first bore witness for Me, but I wish to receive greater glory, and for words of testimony to come from the mouths of created beings—so I give My all to you, that you may fulfill your duty, bringing My work among man to an end. You should understand why you believe in Me; if you only want to be My apprentice or My patient, or to become one of My saints in heaven, then your following Me will be meaningless. To follow Me in such a manner would simply be a waste of energy; to have this kind of faith in Me would be merely whiling away your days, squandering your youth. And in the end, you would receive nothing. Would that not be a labor in vain? I have long departed from among the Jews and am no longer a physician of man nor the medicine for man. I am no longer a beast of burden for man to drive or butcher at will; rather, I have come among man to judge and chastise man, so that man may know Me. You should know that I once did the work of redemption; I was once Jesus, but I could not remain Jesus forever, much as I was once Jehovah but later became Jesus. I am the God of mankind, the Lord of creation, but I cannot forever remain Jesus or Jehovah. I have been what man considers a physician, but it cannot be said that God is merely a physician for mankind. So, if you hold the views of old in your faith in Me, then you will attain nothing. No matter how you praise Me today: “How loving God is of man; He heals me and gives me blessings, peace, and joy. How good God is to man; if we just have faith in Him, then we need not worry about money and wealth…,” I still cannot disrupt My original work. If you believe in Me today, you will receive only My glory and be worthy to bear Me witness, and everything else will be secondary. This you must clearly know.

Now do you truly know why you believe in Me? Do you truly know the purpose and significance of My work? Do you truly know your duty? Do you truly know My testimony? If you merely believe in Me, yet there is no sign of My glory or testimony in you, then I have long ago cast you out. As for those who know it all, they are even more thorns in My eye, and in My house, they are nothing more than obstacles in My way, they are tares to be completely winnowed out in My work, they have no use, they are worthless, and I have long abhorred them. Often does My wrath befall all who are bereft of testimony, and never does My rod stray from them. I have long since turned them over to the hands of the evil one; they are bereft of My blessings. When the day comes, their chastisement will be more grievous even than that of foolish women. Today, I do only the work that is My duty to do; I will bind all the wheat into bundles, together along with those tares. This is My work today. Those tares shall all be winnowed out in the time of My winnowing, then the grains of wheat shall be gathered into the storehouse, and those tares that have been winnowed out shall be placed in the fire to be burned to dust. My work now is merely to bind all men into bundles; that is, to utterly conquer them. Then shall I begin winnowing to reveal the end of all men. And so you ought to know how you should satisfy Me now, and how you ought to set upon the right track in your faith in Me. What I desire is your loyalty and submission now, your love and testimony now. Even if you do not know at this moment what testimony is or what love is, you should bring to Me your all, and turn over to Me the only treasures you have: your loyalty and submission. You should know that the testimony to My defeat of Satan lies within the loyalty and submission of man, as does the testimony to My complete conquest of man. The duty of your faith in Me is to bear witness to Me, to be loyal to Me and none other, and to be submissive to the end. Before I begin the next step of My work, how will you bear witness to Me? How will you be loyal and submissive to Me? Do you devote all your loyalty to your function, or will you simply give up? Would you rather submit to My every arrangement (even if it be death or destruction), or flee midway to avoid My chastisement? I chastise you so that you will bear witness to Me, and be loyal and submissive to Me. What’s more, the chastisement at present is to unfold the next step of My work and to allow the work to progress unimpeded. Hence, I exhort you to be wise and treat neither your life nor the significance of your existence as worthless sand. Can you know exactly what My work to come will be? Do you know how I will work in the days to come, and how My work will unfold? You should know the significance of your experience of My work, and furthermore, the significance of your faith in Me. I have done so much; how could I give up halfway, as you imagine? I have done such extensive work; how could I destroy it? Indeed, I have come to bring this age to an end. This is true, but moreover you must know that I am to begin a new age, to begin new work, and, most of all, to spread the gospel of the kingdom. So you should know that the present work is only to begin an age and to lay the foundation for spreading the gospel in the time to come and bringing the age to an end in the future. My work is not so simple as you think, nor is it as worthless or meaningless as you may believe. Therefore, I still must say to you: You ought to give your life to My work, and moreover, you ought to devote yourself to My glory. Long have I yearned for you to bear witness to Me, and even longer have I yearned for you to spread My gospel. You ought to understand what is in My heart.

When Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots, You Will Regret All the Evil You Have Done

You all have seen with your own eyes the work I have done amongst you, you yourselves have listened to the words I have spoken, and you have all known My attitude toward you, so you should know why I am doing this work in you. I tell you in all honesty, you are nothing but tools for My work of conquest in the last days, the implements for expanding My work among the Gentile nations. I speak through your unrighteousness, filthiness, resistance, and rebelliousness in order to better expand My work and spread My name among the Gentile nations, that is, to spread it among any of the nations outside of Israel. This is so that My name, My deeds, and My voice may be disseminated throughout the Gentile nations, and thus all of those nations who are not of Israel may be conquered by Me and may worship Me, becoming My holy lands outside of the lands of Israel and Egypt. Expanding My work is actually expanding My work of conquest and expanding My holy land; it is the expansion of My foothold on the earth. You should be clear that you are merely the created beings among the Gentile nations that I conquer. Originally, you had neither status nor any value for utilization, and were no use at all. It is only because I uplifted the maggots from the dung heap to be specimens of My conquering of the whole land, to be the only “reference materials” for My conquering of the whole land, that you have been fortunate enough to come in contact with Me, and to assemble with Me now. It is because of your low status that I have selected you to be the specimens and models of My work of conquest. It is only for this reason that I work and speak among you, and that I live and sojourn with you. You should know that it is only because of My management and due to My extreme abhorrence of the maggots in the dung heap that I am speaking amongst you—it has reached the point that I am furious. My working amongst you is not at all the same as Jehovah’s working in Israel, and, in particular, it is not the same as the work Jesus did in Judea. It is with great tolerance that I speak and work, and it is with anger as well as judgment that I conquer these degenerates. It is nothing like Jehovah leading His people in Israel. His work in Israel was to bestow food and living water, and He was full of compassion and love for His people while providing for them. Today’s work is done among a cursed nation of people who are not chosen. There is no abundant food, nor is there the thirst-quenching nourishment of living water, and much less is there a supply of ample material goods; there is only a supply of ample judgment, curse, and chastisement. These maggots living in the dung heap are absolutely unworthy of gaining the mountains-full of cattle and sheep, the great wealth, and the most beautiful children in all the land, such as I bestowed upon Israel. Contemporary Israel offers upon the altar the cattle and sheep and gold and silver items with which I nourish its people, surpassing the one-tenth required by Jehovah under the law, and so I have given them even more—more than one hundred times that was to be gained by Israel under the law. That with which I nourish Israel surpasses all that Abraham gained, and all that Isaac gained. I will make the family of Israel fruitful and multiply, and I will make My people of Israel spread throughout the earth. Those I bless and care for are still the chosen people of Israel—that is, the people who dedicate everything to Me and who have gained everything from Me. It is because they keep Me in mind that they sacrifice their newborn calves and lambs on My holy altar and offer up everything they have before Me, even to the point of offering up their newborn first sons in anticipation of My return. And what about you? You arouse My anger, make demands of Me, and steal the sacrifices of those who offer things up to Me, and you do not know that you are offending Me; thus, all you gain is weeping and punishment in darkness. You have provoked My anger many times, and I have rained down My burning fires to the point that quite a few people have met with a tragic end, and happy homes have become desolate tombs. All I have for these maggots is unending anger, and I have no intention of blessing them. It is only for the sake of My work that I have made an exception and uplifted you, and endured great humiliation and worked amongst you. If not for the will of My Father, how could I live in the same house with the maggots rolling around in the dung heap? I feel extreme loathing for all of your actions and words, and anyhow, because I have some “interest” in your filthiness and rebelliousness, this has become a great collection of My words. Otherwise I absolutely would not have remained among you for so long. Therefore, you should know that My attitude toward you is merely one of sympathy and pity; I do not have even a drop of love for you. What I have for you is mere tolerance, because I only do this for the sake of My work. And you have seen My deeds only because I have selected filthiness and rebelliousness as “raw materials”; otherwise, I absolutely would not reveal My deeds to these maggots. I work in you only with reluctance, not at all like the readiness and willingness with which I did My work in Israel. I am bearing My anger while forcing Myself to speak among you. If not for My greater work, how could I tolerate the continued sight of such maggots? If not for the sake of My name, I would long ago have ascended to the highest heights and completely incinerated these maggots along with their dung heap! If not for the sake of My glory, how could I allow these evil demons to openly resist Me with their heads wagging before My eyes? If not to have My work carried out smoothly without the slightest obstruction, how could I allow these maggot-like people to wantonly abuse Me? If one hundred people in a village in Israel rose up to resist Me like this, even if they made sacrifices to Me, I would still obliterate and cast them down into cracks in the ground so as to prevent people in other cities from opposing ever again. I am an all-consuming fire and I do not tolerate offense. Because humans were all created by Me, whatever I say and do, they must submit, and they may not oppose. People do not have the right to meddle in My work, and much less are they qualified to analyze what is right or wrong in My work and in My words. I am the Lord of creation, and the created beings should achieve everything that I require with a heart of fear for Me; they should not try to reason with Me, and they especially should not resist. With My authority I govern My people, and all those who are part of My creation should submit to My authority. Though today you are bold and presumptuous before Me, though you rebel against the words with which I teach you and do not know to be afraid, I only meet your rebelliousness with tolerance; I will not lose My temper and impact My work because tiny, insignificant maggots have stirred up the dirt in the dung heap. I tolerate the ongoing existence of everything that I loathe and all the things that I abhor for the sake of My Father’s will, and I will do so until My utterances are complete, until My very last moment. Do not worry! I cannot sink to the same level as a nameless maggot, and I will not compare My degree of skill with you. I loathe you, but I am able to endure. You rebel against Me, but you cannot escape the day when I will chastise you, which was promised to Me by My Father. Can a created maggot compare to the Lord of creation? In autumn, falling leaves return to their roots; you will return to the home of your “father,” and I will return to My Father’s side. I will be accompanied by His tender affection, and you will be followed by the trampling of your father. I will have the glory of My Father, and you will have the shame of yours. I will use the chastisement that I have long held back to accompany you, and you will meet My chastisement with your rancid flesh that has been corrupt for tens of thousands of years. I will have concluded My work of words in you, accompanied with tolerance, and you will begin to fulfill the role of suffering disaster from My words. I will greatly rejoice and work in Israel; you will weep and gnash your teeth, existing and dying in the mud. I will regain My original form and no longer remain in the filth with you, while you will regain your original ugliness and continue to burrow around in the dung heap. When My work and words are done, it will be a day of joy for Me. When your resistance and rebelliousness are done, it will be a day of weeping for you. I will not sympathize with you, and you will never see Me again. I will no longer engage in dialogue with you, and you will never encounter Me again. I will hate your rebelliousness, and you will miss My loveliness. I will strike you, and you will pine for Me. I will gladly depart from you, and you will be aware of your debt to Me. I will never see you again, but you will always hope for Me. I will hate you because you currently resist Me, and you will miss Me because I currently chastise you. I will be unwilling to live alongside you, but you will bitterly yearn for it and weep into eternity, for you will regret all that you have done to Me. You will feel remorse for your rebelliousness and resistance, you will even lay face-down on the ground with regret and fall down before Me and swear to never rebel against Me again. In your heart, however, you will only love Me, yet you will never be able to hear My voice. I will make you ashamed of yourself.

Now I am looking at your indulgent flesh that would wheedle Me, and I only have a small warning for you, though I will not “serve” you with chastisement. You should know what role you play in My work, and then I will be satisfied. In matters beyond this, if you resist Me or spend My money, or eat the sacrifices for Me, Jehovah, or if you maggots bite each other, or if you dog-like creatures have conflicts or violate one another—I am not concerned with any of that. You need only know what sort of things you are, and I will be satisfied. Aside from all of this, if you wish to draw weapons on each other or battle each other with words, that is fine; I have no desire to meddle in such things, and am not the least bit involved in human matters. It is not that I do not care about conflicts between you; it is that I am not one of you, and therefore do not participate in matters that lie between you. I Myself am not a created being and am not of the world, so I loathe the bustling life of people and the messy, improper relationships between them. I particularly loathe the clamorous crowds. However, I have a profound knowledge of the impurities in the hearts of each created being, and before I created you, I already knew of the unrighteousness that existed deep in the human heart, and I knew all the deceitfulness and crookedness in the human heart. Therefore, even though there are no traces at all when people do unrighteous things, I still know that the unrighteousness harbored within your hearts surpasses the richness of all things that I created. Every one of you has risen to the pinnacle of the multitudes; you have ascended to be the ancestors of the masses. You are extremely arbitrary, and you run amok among all of the maggots, seeking a place of ease and attempting to devour the maggots that are smaller than you. You are malicious and sinister in your hearts, surpassing even the ghosts that have sunk to the bottom of the sea. You reside in the bottom of the dung, disturbing the maggots from top to bottom until they have no peace, fighting each other for a while and then calming down. You do not know your place, yet still you battle with each other in the dung. What can you gain from such struggle? If you truly had hearts of fear for Me, how could you fight with each other behind My back? No matter how high your status, are you not still a stinking little worm in the dung? Will you be able to sprout wings and become a dove in the sky? You stinking little worms steal offerings from the altar of Me, Jehovah; in doing so, can you rescue your ruined, failed reputation and become the chosen people of Israel? You are shameless wretches! Those sacrifices on the altar were offered up to Me by people, as an expression of benevolent feelings from those who fear Me. They are for My control and for My use, so how can you possibly rob Me of the little turtledoves people have given Me? Do you not fear becoming a Judas? Are you not afraid that your land might become a field of blood? You shameless thing! Do you think that the turtledoves offered up by people are to nourish the belly of you maggot? What I have given you is what I am content and willing to give you; what I have not given you is at My disposal. You may not simply steal My offerings. The One who works is Me, Jehovah—the Lord of creation—and people offer sacrifices because of Me. Do you think this is recompense for all the running about you do? You really are shameless! Who do you run about for? Is it not for yourself? Why do you steal My sacrifices? Why do you steal money from My money bag? Are you not the son of Judas Iscariot? The sacrifices to Me, Jehovah, are to be enjoyed by priests. Are you a priest? You dare to smugly eat My sacrifices, and even lay them out on the table; you are worth nothing! You worthless wretch! My fire, the fire of Jehovah, will incinerate you!

No One Who Is of the Flesh Can Escape the Day of Wrath

Today, I admonish you thus for the sake of your own survival, in order for My work to progress smoothly, and so that My inaugural work throughout the entire universe may be carried out more appropriately and perfectly, revealing My words, authority, majesty and judgment to the people of all countries and nations. The work I do among you is the beginning of My work throughout the whole universe. Although now is already the time of the last days, know that the “last days” is but a name for an age; just like the Age of Law and the Age of Grace, it refers to an age, and it indicates an entire age, rather than the final few years or months. Yet the last days are quite unlike the Age of Grace and the Age of Law. The work of the last days is not carried out in Israel, but among the Gentiles; it is the conquest before My throne of people from all nations and tribes outside of Israel, so that My glory throughout the universe can fill the cosmos and the firmament. It is so that I can gain greater glory, so that all creatures on earth can pass on My glory to every nation, forever down the generations, and all creatures in heaven and on earth can see all the glory that I have gained on earth. The work carried out during the last days is the work of conquest. It is not the guidance of the lives of all the people on earth, but the conclusion of mankind’s imperishable, millennia-long life of suffering on earth. As a consequence, the work of the last days cannot be like the several thousand years of work in Israel, nor can it be like the mere several years of work in Judea which continued on for two millennia until the second incarnation of God. The people of the last days encounter only the reappearance of the Redeemer in the flesh, and they receive the personal work and words of God. It will not be two thousand years before the last days come to an end; they are brief, like the time when Jesus carried out the work of the Age of Grace in Judea. This is because the last days are the conclusion of the entire era. They are the completion and the ending of God’s six-thousand-year management plan, and they conclude mankind’s life journey of suffering. They do not take the whole of mankind into a new age or allow mankind’s life to continue; that would hold no significance for My management plan or for the existence of man. If mankind carried on like this, then sooner or later they would be entirely devoured by the devil, and those souls that belong to Me would ultimately be ruined by its hands. My work lasts for but six thousand years, and I promised that the evil one’s control over the whole of mankind would also last for no more than six thousand years. So, now the time is up. I will neither continue nor delay any longer: During the last days I will vanquish Satan, I will take back all My glory, and I will reclaim all the souls that belong to Me on earth so that these distressed souls may escape from the sea of suffering, and thus will be concluded My entire work on earth. From this day onward, never again will I become flesh on earth, and never again will My all-controlling Spirit work upon the earth. I will do but one thing on earth: I will remake mankind, a mankind that is holy and which is My faithful city on earth. But know that I will not annihilate the entire world, nor will I annihilate the whole of mankind. I will keep that remaining third—the third that loves Me and has been thoroughly conquered by Me, and I will cause this third to be fruitful and multiply on earth just as the Israelites did under the law, nourishing them with copious sheep and cattle and all the riches of earth. This mankind will remain with Me forever, yet it will not be the deplorably filthy mankind of today, but a mankind that is an assembly of all those who have been gained by Me. Such a mankind will not be damaged, disturbed, or besieged by Satan, and will be the only mankind that exists on earth after I have triumphed over Satan. It is the mankind that has today been conquered by Me and has gained My promise. And so, the mankind that has been conquered during the last days is also the mankind that will be spared and will gain My everlasting blessings. It will be the only evidence of My triumph over Satan, and the only spoils of My battle with Satan. These spoils of war are saved by Me from the power of Satan, and are the only crystallization and fruit of My six-thousand-year management plan. They come from every nation and denomination, from every place and country throughout the universe. They are of different races, have different languages, customs and skin colors, and they are spread across every nation and denomination of the globe, and even every corner of the world. Eventually, they will come together to form a complete mankind, an assembly of man that is unreachable by the forces of Satan. Those among mankind who have not been saved and conquered by Me will sink silent to the depths of the sea, and will be burned by My consuming flames for all eternity. I will annihilate this old, supremely filthy mankind, just as I annihilated the firstborn sons and cattle of Egypt, leaving only the Israelites, who ate lamb’s meat, drank lamb’s blood, and marked their door lintels with lamb’s blood. Are the people who have been conquered by Me and are of My family not also the people who eat the meat of the Lamb that is Me and drink the blood of the Lamb that is Me, and have been redeemed by Me and worship Me? Are such people not always accompanied by My glory? Have not those who are without the meat of Lamb that is Me already sunk silently into the depths of the sea? Today you oppose Me, and today My words are just like those spoken by Jehovah to the sons and grandsons of Israel. Yet the hardness in the depths of your hearts is causing My wrath to accumulate, bringing more suffering upon your flesh, more judgment upon your sins, and more wrath upon your unrighteousness. Who could be spared on My day of wrath, when you treat Me like this today? Whose unrighteousness could escape My eyes of chastisement? Whose sins could elude the hands of Me, the Almighty? Whose defiance could escape the judgment of Me, the Almighty? I, Jehovah, speak thus unto you, the descendants of the Gentile family, and the words I speak to you surpass all the utterances of the Age of Law and the Age of Grace, yet you are harder than all the people of Egypt. Do you not store up My wrath as I reposefully do My work? How could you escape unharmed from the day of Me, the Almighty?

I have worked and spoken in this way among you, I have expended so much energy and effort, yet when have you ever listened to what I plainly tell you? Where have you bowed down to Me, the Almighty? Why do you treat Me like this? Why does everything you say and do provoke My anger? Why are your hearts so hard? Have I ever struck you down? Why do you do nothing but make Me sorrowful and anxious? Are you waiting for the day of wrath of Me, Jehovah, to come upon you? Are you waiting for Me to send forth the anger provoked by your rebelliousness? Is everything I do not for you? Yet always have you treated Me, Jehovah, in this way: stealing My sacrifices, taking the offerings of My altar home to the wolf’s lair to feed the cubs and the cubs of the cubs; people fight against each other, facing one another with angry glares and swords and spears, tossing the words of Me, the Almighty, into the latrine to become as filthy as excrement. Where is your integrity? Your humanity has become beastliness! Your hearts have long since turned to stone. Do you not know that the time when My day of wrath arrives will be the time when I judge the evil you commit against Me, the Almighty, today? Do you think that by fooling Me in this way, by casting My words into the mire and not listening to them—do you think that by acting like this behind My back you can escape My wrathful gaze? Do you not know that you were already seen by the eyes of Me, Jehovah, when you stole My sacrifices and coveted My possessions? Do you not know that when you stole My sacrifices, you did so before the altar to which sacrifices are offered? How could you believe yourselves clever enough to deceive Me in this way? How could My wrath depart from your heinous sins? How could My raging fury pass over your evildoings? The evil that you commit today does not open a way out for you, but stores up chastisement for your tomorrow; it provokes the chastisement of Me, the Almighty, toward you. How could your evildoings and evil words escape from My chastisement? How could your prayers reach My ears? How could I open up a way out for your unrighteousness? How could I let go of your evildoings in rebelling against Me? How could I not sever your tongues that are as venomous as the serpent’s? You do not call on Me for the sake of your righteousness, but instead store up My wrath as a result of your unrighteousness. How could I forgive you? In the eyes of Me, the Almighty, your words and actions are filthy. The eyes of Me, the Almighty, see your unrighteousness as unrelenting chastisement. How could My righteous chastisement and judgment depart from you? Because you do this to Me, making Me sorrowful and wrathful, how could I let you escape from My hands and depart from the day that I, Jehovah, chastise and curse you? Do you not know that all your evil words and utterances have already reached My ears? Do you not know that your unrighteousness has already besmirched My holy robe of righteousness? Do you not know that your rebelliousness has already provoked My vehement anger? Do you not know that you have long since left Me seething, and have long since tried My patience? Do you not know that you have already damaged My flesh, reducing it to rags? I have endured until now, such that I release My anger, tolerant toward you no longer. Do you not know that your evildoings have already reached My eyes, and that My cries have already reached the ears of My Father? How could He allow you to treat Me like this? Is any of the work I do in you not for your sake? Yet who among you has become more loving of the work of Me, Jehovah? Could I be unfaithful to the will of My Father because I am weak, and because of the anguish I have suffered? Do you not understand My heart? I speak to you as Jehovah did; have I not dedicated so much for you? Even though I am willing to bear all of this suffering for the sake of My Father’s work, how could you be freed from the chastisement that I bring upon you as a result of My suffering? Have you not enjoyed so much of Me? Today, I have been bestowed upon you by My Father; do you not know that you enjoy so much more than My bounteous words? Do you not know that My life was exchanged for your life and the things you enjoy? Do you not know that My Father used My life to do battle with Satan, and that He also bestowed My life upon you, causing you to receive a hundredfold, and allowing you to avoid so many temptations? Do you not know that it is only through My work that you have been exempt from many temptations, and from many fiery chastisements? Do you not know that it is only because of Me that My Father allows you to enjoy until now? How could you remain so hard and unyielding today, such that it is as if callouses have grown upon your hearts? How could the evil that you commit today escape the day of wrath that shall follow My departure from earth? How could I allow those who are so hard and unyielding to escape the anger of Jehovah?

Think back on the past: When has My gaze been angry, and My voice stern, toward you? When have I split hairs with you? When have I reprimanded you unreasonably? When have I reprimanded you to your face? Is it not for the sake of My work that I call on My Father to keep you from every temptation? Why do you treat Me like this? Have I ever used My authority to strike down your flesh? Why do you repay Me thus? After blowing hot and cold toward Me, you are neither hot nor cold, and then you try to wheedle Me and hide things from Me, and your mouths are full of the spit of the unrighteous. Do you think your tongues can cheat My Spirit? Do you think that your tongues can escape My wrath? Do you think your tongues may pass judgment on the deeds of Me, Jehovah, however they wish? Am I the God whom man passes judgment on? Could I allow a little maggot to blaspheme Me thus? How could I place such sons of rebellion among My eternal blessings? Your words and actions have long since exposed and condemned you. When I stretched out the heavens and created all things, I did not allow any created being to participate as they pleased, much less did I allow any thing to disrupt My work and My management however it wished. I tolerated no man or object; how could I spare those who are cruel and inhumane toward Me? How could I forgive those who betray My words? How could I spare those who rebel against Me? Is the destiny of man not in the hands of Me, the Almighty? How could I consider your unrighteousness and rebelliousness holy? How could your sins defile My holiness? I am not defiled by the impurity of the unrighteous, nor do I enjoy the offerings of the unrighteous. If you were loyal toward Me, Jehovah, could you take for yourself the sacrifices at My altar? Could you use your venomous tongue to blaspheme My holy name? Could you betray My words in this way? Could you treat My glory and holy name as a tool with which to serve Satan, the evil one? My life is provided for the enjoyment of the holy ones. How could I allow you to play with My life however you wish, and use it as a tool for conflict among yourselves? How could you be so heartless, and so lacking in the way of the good, in how you are toward Me? Do you not know I have already written your evildoings in these words of life? How could you escape the day of wrath when I chastise Egypt? How could I allow you to oppose and rebel against Me in this way, time and time again? I tell you plainly, when the day comes, your chastisement will be more unbearable than that of Egypt! How can you escape My day of wrath? I tell you truly: My endurance was prepared for your evildoings, and exists for your chastisement on that day. Are you not the ones who will suffer wrathful judgment once I have reached the end of My endurance? Are not all things in the hands of Me, the Almighty? How could I allow you to rebel against Me thus, beneath the heavens? Your lives will be very hard because you have met the Messiah, of whom it was said that He would come, yet who never came. Are you not His enemies? Jesus has been friends with you, yet you are the enemies of the Messiah. Do you not know that although you are friends with Jesus, your evildoings have filled the vessels of those who are detestable? Though you are very close to Jehovah, do you not know that your evil words have reached Jehovah’s ears and provoked His wrath? How could He be close to you, and how could He not burn those vessels of yours, which are filled with evildoings? How could He not be your enemy?

The Savior Has Already Returned Upon a “White Cloud”

For several millennia, man has longed to be able to witness the arrival of the Savior. Man has longed to behold Jesus the Savior riding a white cloud as He descends, in person, among those who have pined and yearned for Him for thousands of years. Man has also longed for the Savior to return and be reunited with them; that is, longed for Jesus the Savior, who has been separated from people for thousands of years, to come back, and to once again carry out the work of redemption that He did among the Jews, to be compassionate and loving toward man, to forgive the sins of man and bear the sins of man, and even bear all of man’s transgressions and deliver man from sin. What man longs for is for Jesus the Savior to be the same as before—a Savior who is lovable, kind, and venerable, who is never wrathful toward man, and who never reproaches man, but who forgives and takes on all of man’s sins, and who will even, as before, die upon the cross for man. Since Jesus departed, the disciples who followed Him, as well as all of the saints who were saved in His name, have been desperately pining for Him and awaiting Him. All those who were saved by the grace of Jesus Christ during the Age of Grace have been longing for that exultant day in the last days when Jesus the Savior descends on a white cloud to appear before all people. Of course, this is also the collective wish of all those who accept the name of Jesus the Savior today. Everyone in the universe who knows of the salvation of Jesus the Savior has been desperately yearning for Jesus Christ to suddenly arrive to fulfill what Jesus said while on earth: “I shall arrive just as I departed.” Man believes that, following the crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus went back to heaven upon a white cloud to take His place at the Most High’s right hand. In like manner, Jesus shall descend again upon a white cloud (this cloud refers to the cloud that Jesus rode upon when He returned to heaven), among those who have desperately yearned for Him for thousands of years, and He shall bear the image and wear the clothing of the Jews. After appearing to man, He shall bestow food upon them, and cause living water to gush forth for them, and shall live among man, full of grace and full of love, vivid and real. All such notions are what people believe. Yet Jesus the Savior did not do this; He did the opposite of what man conceived. He did not arrive among those who had yearned for His return, and He did not appear to all people while riding upon the white cloud. He has already arrived, but man does not know, and remains ignorant. Man is merely awaiting Him aimlessly, unaware that He has already descended upon a “white cloud” (the cloud which is His Spirit, His words, His entire disposition and all that He is), and is now among a group of overcomers that He will make during the last days. Man does not know this: Despite all the affection and love the holy Savior Jesus has for man, how can He work in those “temples” inhabited by filth and impure spirits? Though man has been awaiting His arrival, how could He appear to those who eat the flesh of the unrighteous, drink the blood of the unrighteous, and wear the clothes of the unrighteous, who believe in Him but do not know Him, and who constantly extort Him? Man knows only that Jesus the Savior is full of love and overflowing with compassion, and that He is the sin offering, filled with redemption. However, man has no idea that He is God Himself, who is brimming with righteousness, majesty, wrath, and judgment, possessed of authority, and full of dignity. Therefore, even though man eagerly yearns for and craves the return of the Redeemer, and even their prayers move “Heaven,” Jesus the Savior does not appear to those who believe in Him but do not know Him.

“Jehovah” is the name that I took during My work in Israel, and it means the God of the Israelites (God’s chosen people) who can take pity on man, curse man, and guide the life of man; the God who possesses great power and is full of wisdom. “Jesus” is Emmanuel, which means the sin offering that is full of love, full of compassion, and which redeems man. He did the work of the Age of Grace, and He represents the Age of Grace, and can only represent one part of the work of the management plan. That is to say, only Jehovah is the God of the chosen people of Israel, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Moses, and the God of all the people of Israel. And so, in the current age, all the Israelites, apart from the Jewish people, worship Jehovah. They make sacrifices to Him on the altar and serve Him in the temple wearing priests’ robes. What they hope for is the reappearance of Jehovah. Only Jesus is the Redeemer of mankind, and He is the sin offering that redeemed mankind from sin. Which is to say, the name of Jesus came from the Age of Grace and came into existence because of the work of redemption in the Age of Grace. The name of Jesus came into existence to allow the people of the Age of Grace to be reborn and saved, and is a particular name for the redemption of the whole of mankind. Thus, the name Jesus represents the work of redemption, and denotes the Age of Grace. The name Jehovah is a particular name for the people of Israel who lived under the law. In each age and each stage of work, My name is not baseless, but holds representative significance: Each name represents one age. “Jehovah” represents the Age of Law and is the honorific by which the people of Israel called the God whom they worshiped. “Jesus” represents the Age of Grace, and is the name of the God of all those who were redeemed during the Age of Grace. If man still longs for the arrival of Jesus the Savior during the last days, and still expects Him to arrive in the image He bore in Judea, then the entire six-thousand-year management plan would have stopped in the Age of Redemption, and could not have progressed any further. The last days, furthermore, would never arrive, and the age would never be brought to an end. This is because Jesus the Savior is only for the redemption and salvation of mankind. I took the name of Jesus only for the sake of all the sinners in the Age of Grace, but it is not the name by which I shall bring the whole of mankind to an end. Although Jehovah, Jesus, and the Messiah all represent My Spirit, these names only denote the different ages of My management plan, and do not represent Me in My entirety. The names by which people on earth call Me cannot articulate My entire disposition and all that I am. They are merely different names by which I am called during different ages. And so, when the final age—the age of the last days—arrives, My name shall change again. I shall not be called Jehovah, or Jesus, much less the Messiah—I shall be called the powerful Almighty God Himself, and under this name I shall bring the entire age to an end. I was once known as Jehovah. I was also called the Messiah, and people once called Me Jesus the Savior with love and esteem. Today, however, I am no longer the Jehovah or Jesus that people knew in times past; I am the God who has returned in the last days, the God who shall bring the age to an end. I am the God Himself that rises up from the end of the earth, replete with My entire disposition, and full of authority, honor, and glory. People have never engaged with Me, never known Me, and have always been ignorant of My disposition. From the creation of the world until today, not one person has seen Me. This is the God who appears to man in the last days but is hidden among man. He resides among man, true and real, like the burning sun and the blazing flame, filled with power and brimming with authority. There is not a single person or thing that shall not be judged by My words, and not a single person or thing that shall not be purified through the burning of fire. Eventually, all nations shall be blessed because of My words, and also smashed to pieces because of My words. In this way, all people during the last days shall see that I am the Savior returned, and that I am the Almighty God that conquers all of mankind. And all shall see that I was once the sin offering for man, but that in the last days I also become the flames of the sun that incinerate all things, as well as the Sun of righteousness that reveals all things. This is My work in the last days. I took this name and am possessed of this disposition so that all people may see that I am a righteous God, the burning sun, the blazing flame, and so that all may worship Me, the one true God, and so that they may see My true face: I am not only the God of the Israelites, and I am not just the Redeemer; I am the God of all creatures throughout the heavens and the earth and the seas.

If the Savior arrived during the last days and were still called Jesus, and were once again born in Judea and did His work there, then this would prove that I only created the people of Israel and only redeemed the people of Israel, and that I have nothing to do with the Gentiles. Would this not contradict My words that “I am the Lord who created the heavens and earth and all things”? I left Judea and do My work among the Gentiles because I am not merely the God of the people of Israel, but the God of all created beings. I appear among the Gentiles during the last days because I am not only Jehovah, the God of the people of Israel, but, moreover, I am the Creator of all My chosen ones among the Gentiles. I not only created Israel, Egypt, and Lebanon, but all the Gentile nations beyond Israel. Because of this, I am the Lord of all created beings. I merely used Israel as the starting point for My work, employed Judea and Galilee as the strongholds of My work of redemption, and now I use the Gentile nations as the base from which I will bring the entire age to an end. I did two stages of work in Israel (these two stages of the work being the Age of Law and the Age of Grace), and I have been carrying out two further stages of work (the Age of Grace and the Age of Kingdom) throughout the lands beyond Israel. Among the Gentile nations, I will do the work of conquest, and so conclude the age. If man always calls Me Jesus Christ, but does not know that I have begun a new age during the last days and have embarked upon new work, and if man continues to obsessively await the arrival of Jesus the Savior, then I shall call people like this the ones who do not believe in Me; they are people who do not know Me, and their belief in Me is false. Could such people witness the arrival of Jesus the Savior from heaven? What they await is not My arrival, but the arrival of the King of the Jews. They do not yearn for Me to annihilate this impure old world, but instead long for the second coming of Jesus, whereupon they will be redeemed. They look forward to Jesus once more redeeming all of mankind from this defiled and unrighteous land. How can such people become ones who complete My work in the last days? The desires of man are incapable of fulfilling My wishes or accomplishing My work, for man merely admires or cherishes the work that I have done before, and has no idea that I am the God Himself who is always new and never old. Man only knows that I am Jehovah, and Jesus, and has no inkling that I am the One of the last days who shall bring mankind to an end. All that man yearns for and knows comes from their own notions, and is merely that which they can see with their own eyes. It is not in line with the work I do, but in disharmony with it. If My work were conducted according to the ideas of man, then when would it end? When would mankind enter rest? And how would I be able to enter the seventh day, the Sabbath? I work according to My plan and according to My purpose—not according to the intentions of man.

The Work of Spreading the Gospel Is Also the Work of Saving Man

All people need to understand the aims of My work on earth, that is, what I ultimately wish to gain, and what level I must achieve in this work before it can be complete. If, after walking with Me to this day, people do not understand what My work is all about, then have they not walked with Me in vain? If people follow Me, they should know My will. I have been working on earth for thousands of years, and to this day, I continue to carry out My work thus. Although My work contains many projects, its purpose remains unchanged; though I am filled with judgment and chastisement toward man, for example, what I do is still for the sake of saving him, and for the sake of better spreading My gospel and further expanding My work among all the Gentile nations once man has been made complete. So today, at a time when many people have long since sunk deep into dismay, I still continue with My work, I continue the work I must do to judge and chastise man. Despite the fact that man is fed up with what I say, and he has no desire to concern himself with My work, I am still carrying out My duty, for the purpose of My work remains unchanged, and My original plan will not be broken. The function of My judgment is to enable man to better submit to Me, and the function of My chastisement is to allow man to more effectively be changed. Though what I do is for the sake of My management, I have never done anything that was without benefit to man, for I wish to make all the nations beyond Israel as submissive as the Israelites, to make them into real human beings, that I might have a foothold in the lands outside Israel. This is My management; it is the work I am accomplishing among the Gentile nations. Even now, many people still do not understand My management, because they have no interest in such things, and care only for their own futures and destinations. No matter what I say, they remain indifferent to the work that I do, instead focusing exclusively on their destinations of tomorrow. If things go on in this way, how can My work expand? How can My gospel be spread throughout the world? Know that when My work spreads, I will scatter you, and smite you just as Jehovah smote each of the tribes of Israel. All this will be done so that My gospel may spread across the earth, so that My work may expand to the Gentile nations, so that My name may be great among adults and children alike, and My holy name exalted in the mouths of people from all tribes and nations. It is so that, in this final era, My name may be great among the Gentile nations, so that My deeds may be seen by the Gentiles and they will call Me the Almighty on account of My deeds, and so that My words may soon come to pass. I will make all people know that I am not only the God of the Israelites, but also the God of all the nations of the Gentiles, even those that I have cursed. I will let all people see that I am the God of all created beings. This is My greatest work, the purpose of My work plan for the last days, and the only work to be fulfilled in the last days.

It is only during the last days that the work I have been managing for thousands of years is entirely revealed to man. It is only now that I have disclosed the full mystery of My management to man, and man has learned the purpose of My work and, moreover, has come to understand all My mysteries. I have already told man everything of the destination about which he is concerned. I have already uncovered for man all of My mysteries, mysteries that were hidden for over 5,900 years. Who is Jehovah? Who is the Messiah? Who is Jesus? You should know all this. My work turns upon these names. Have you understood that? How should My holy name be proclaimed? How should My name be spread to any of the nations that have called upon Me by any of My names? My work is expanding, and I will spread the fullness of it to any and all nations. Since My work has been carried out in you, I will smite you just as Jehovah smote the shepherds of the house of David in Israel, causing you to be scattered among every nation. For in the last days, I will crush all the nations into smithereens and cause their people to be distributed anew. When I return again, the nations will have already been divided along boundaries set by My burning flames. At that time, I will manifest Myself anew to humanity as the scorching sun, showing Myself openly to them in the image of the Holy One whom they have never seen, walking among the multitudinous nations, just as I, Jehovah, once walked among the Jewish tribes. From then on, I will lead humanity in their lives upon the earth. There they will surely behold My glory, and they will also surely behold a pillar of cloud in the air to lead them in their lives, for I shall make My appearance in holy places. Man will see My day of righteousness, and also My glorious manifestation. That will happen when I reign on all the earth and bring My many sons into glory. Everywhere on earth, men will bow down, and My tabernacle will be firmly erected amidst humanity, upon the rock of the work I carry out today. People will serve Me, too, in the temple. The altar, covered with filthy and loathsome things, I will smash into pieces and build anew. Newborn lambs and calves will be piled upon the holy altar. I will tear down the temple of today and build a new one. The temple that stands now, full of abhorrent people, will collapse, and the one that I build will be filled with servants loyal to Me. They will once again stand up and serve Me for the sake of the glory of My temple. You will surely see the day on which I receive great glory, and you will also surely see the day when I tear down the temple and build a new one. Also, you will surely see the day of the coming of My tabernacle into the world of men. As I smash the temple, so will I bring My tabernacle into the world of men, just as they behold My descent. After I crush all the nations, I will gather them together anew, thenceforth building My temple and establishing My altar, that all may offer sacrifice to Me, serve Me in My temple, and faithfully devote themselves to My work in the Gentile nations. They will be as Israelites of the present day, decked out in a priestly robe and crown, with the glory of Me, Jehovah, in their midst, and My majesty hovering over them and abiding with them. My work in the Gentile nations will also be executed in the same way. As My work in Israel was, so will My work in the Gentile nations be, because I will expand My work in Israel and spread it to the nations of the Gentiles.

Now is the time when My Spirit performs great work, and the time when I commence My work among the Gentile nations. More than that, it is the time when I classify all created beings, putting each one into their respective category, so that My work may proceed more swiftly and effectively. And so, what I ask of you is still that you offer up your whole being to all My work, and, furthermore, that you clearly discern and make certain of all the work I have done in you, and put all your strength into My work so it can become more effective. This is what you must understand. Desist from fighting amongst yourselves, looking for a way back, or seeking fleshly comforts, which would delay My work, and delay your wonderful future. Far from protecting you, doing so would bring destruction upon you. Wouldn’t this be foolish of you? That which you greedily enjoy today is the very thing that is ruining your future, whereas the pain you suffer today is the very thing that is protecting you. You must be clearly aware of these things, so as to avoid falling prey to temptations from which you will be hard put to extricate yourself, and to evade blundering into the dense fog and being unable to find the sun. When the dense fog clears, you will find yourself amid the judgment of the great day. By that time, My day will be drawing near to mankind. How will you escape My judgment? How will you be able to endure the scorching heat of the sun? When I bestow My abundance on man, he does not cherish it in his bosom, but casts it aside to a place where no one will notice it. When My day descends upon man, he will no longer be able to discover My abundance, or find the bitter words of truth I spoke unto him long ago. He will wail and cry, because he has lost the brightness of the light and fallen into darkness. What you see today is merely the sharp sword of My mouth. You have not seen the rod in My hand or the flame with which I burn man, and that is why you are still haughty and intemperate in My presence. That is why you still fight with Me in My home, disputing with your human tongue that which I have spoken with My mouth. Man is not frightened of Me, and though he continues to cast himself in enmity to Me even today, he remains completely unafraid. You have the tongue and the teeth of the unrighteous in your mouths. Your words and deeds are like those of the serpent that enticed Eve to sin. You demand from each other an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and you struggle in My presence to wrest position, fame, and profit for yourselves, yet you do not know that I am secretly watching your words and deeds. Before you even come into My presence, I have sounded the very bottom of your hearts. Man always wishes to escape the grasp of My hand and elude the observation of My eyes, but I have never dodged away from his words or deeds. Instead, I purposefully allow those words and deeds to enter My eyes, that I may chastise man’s unrighteousness and execute judgment on his rebelliousness. Thus, man’s words and deeds in secret remain always before My judgment seat, and My judgment has never left man, for his rebelliousness is too much. My work is to burn and purify all the words and deeds of man that were uttered and done in the presence of My Spirit. In this way,[a] when I leave the earth, people will still maintain their loyalty to Me, and will still serve Me as My holy servants do in My work, allowing My work on earth to continue until the day it is complete.

Footnotes:

a. The original text does not contain the phrase “In this way.”

The Work in the Age of Law

The work that Jehovah did upon the Israelites established among humanity God’s earthly place of origin, which was also the sacred place where He was present. He confined His work to the people of Israel. At first, He did not work outside of Israel, but instead, He chose people He found suitable in order to restrict the scope of His work. Israel is the place where God created Adam and Eve, and out of the dust of that place Jehovah made man; this place became the base of His work on earth. The Israelites, who were the descendants of Noah and also the descendants of Adam, were the human foundation of Jehovah’s work on earth.

At this time, the significance, purpose, and steps of Jehovah’s work in Israel were to initiate His work on the whole earth, which, taking Israel as its center, gradually spread into the Gentile nations. This is the principle according to which He works throughout the universe—to establish a model and then broaden it until all people in the universe shall have received His gospel. The first Israelites were the descendants of Noah. These people were endowed only with the breath of Jehovah, and understood enough to take care of the basic necessities of life, but they did not know what kind of God Jehovah was, or His will for man, much less how they should fear the Lord of all creation. As for whether there were rules and laws to be obeyed,[a] or whether there was a duty that created beings should perform for the Creator, Adam’s descendants knew nothing of these things. All they knew was that the husband should sweat and labor to provide for his family, and that the wife should submit to her husband and perpetuate the race of humans that Jehovah had created. In other words, such people, who had only Jehovah’s breath and His life, knew nothing of how to follow God’s laws or how to satisfy the Lord of all creation. They understood far too little. So even though there was nothing crooked or deceitful in their hearts and jealousy and contention seldom arose among them, nevertheless they had no knowledge or understanding of Jehovah, the Lord of all creation. These ancestors of man knew only to eat the things of Jehovah, and to enjoy the things of Jehovah, but they did not know to fear Jehovah; they did not know that Jehovah was the One they should worship on bended knees. So how could they be called His created beings? If this were so, would not the words, “Jehovah is the Lord of all creation” and “He created man in order that man might manifest Him, glorify Him, and represent Him” have been spoken in vain? How could people who lacked hearts of fear for Jehovah become a testimony to His glory? How could they become manifestations of His glory? Would not Jehovah’s words “I created man in My image” then become a weapon in the hands of Satan, the evil one? Would these words not then become a mark of humiliation to Jehovah’s creation of man? In order to complete that stage of work, Jehovah, after creating mankind, did not instruct or guide them from Adam to Noah. Rather, it was not until after the flood destroyed the world that He formally began to guide the Israelites, who were the descendants of Noah and also of Adam. His work and utterances in Israel gave guidance to all the people of Israel as they lived their lives throughout the land of Israel, thereby showing humanity that Jehovah was not only able to blow breath into man, so that he might have life from Him and rise up from the dust into a created human being, but that He could also incinerate mankind, and curse mankind, and use His rod to govern mankind. So, too, did they see that Jehovah could guide man’s life on earth, and speak and work among humanity according to the hours of the day and of the night. The work He did was only so that His created beings might know that man came from dust picked up by Him, and moreover that man had been made by Him. Not only this, but He first did His work in Israel so that other peoples and nations (who in fact were not separate from Israel, but rather had branched off from the Israelites, yet were still descended from Adam and Eve) might receive the gospel of Jehovah from Israel, so that all created beings in the universe might be able to fear Jehovah and honor Him as great. Had Jehovah not begun His work in Israel, but instead, having created mankind, let them live carefree lives on the earth, then in that case, owing to man’s physical nature (nature means that man can never know the things he cannot see, which is to say that he would not know that it was Jehovah who created mankind, and even less why He did so), he would never know that it was Jehovah who created mankind or that He is the Lord of all creation. If Jehovah had created man and placed him on the earth, and simply dusted off His hands and left, rather than remaining among mankind to give them guidance for a period of time, then all humanity would have returned to nothingness; even heaven and earth and all the myriad things of His making, and all of humanity, would have returned to nothingness and moreover would have been trampled upon by Satan. In this way Jehovah’s wish that “On the earth, that is, in the midst of His creation, He should have a place to stand, a holy place” would have been shattered. And so, after creating mankind, that He was able to remain in their midst to guide them in their lives, and speak to them from within their midst—all of this was in order to realize His desire, and to achieve His plan. The work He did in Israel was meant only to execute the plan He had made before His creation of all things, and therefore His working first among the Israelites and His creation of all things were not at odds with each other, but were done both for the sake of His management, His work, and His glory, and were done in order to deepen the meaning of His creation of mankind. He guided the life of mankind on earth for two thousand years after Noah, during which He taught humanity to understand how to fear Jehovah, the Lord of all creation, how to conduct their lives, and how to go on living, and most of all, how to act as a witness for Jehovah, submit to Him, and fear Him, even praising Him with music as did David and his priests.

Prior to the two thousand years during which Jehovah did His work, man knew nothing, and almost all humanity had fallen into depravity, until, before the destruction of the world by the flood, they had reached a depth of promiscuity and corruption in which their hearts were entirely devoid of Jehovah, and further wanting of His way. They never understood the work Jehovah was going to do; they lacked reason, had even less knowledge, and, like machines that breathed, were consummately ignorant of man, God, the world, life, and so on. On earth, they engaged in many seductions, like the serpent, and said many things that were offensive to Jehovah, but because they were ignorant, Jehovah did not chastise or discipline them. Only after the flood, when Noah was 601 years old, did Jehovah formally appear to Noah and guide him and his family, leading the birds and beasts that had survived the flood along with Noah and his descendants, until the end of the Age of Law, lasting a total of 2,500 years. He was at work in Israel, that is, formally at work, for a total of 2,000 years, and at work simultaneously in Israel and outside of it for 500 years, together making 2,500 years. During this period, He instructed the Israelites that to serve Jehovah, they should build a temple, put on priestly robes, and walk barefoot into the temple at dawn, lest their shoes sully the temple and the fire be sent down on them from the pinnacle of the temple and burn them to death. They performed their duties and submitted to Jehovah’s plans. They prayed to Jehovah in the temple, and after receiving Jehovah’s revelation, that is, after Jehovah had spoken, they led the multitudes and taught them that they should show fear to Jehovah—their God. And Jehovah told them that they should build a temple and an altar, and at the time set by Jehovah, that is, on Passover, they should prepare newborn calves and lambs to place on the altar as sacrifices to serve Jehovah, so as to restrain them and put fear for Jehovah in their hearts. Whether they obeyed this law became the measure of their loyalty to Jehovah. Jehovah also ordained the Sabbath day for them, the seventh day of His creation. The day after the Sabbath, He made the first day, a day for them to praise Jehovah, to offer Him sacrifices, and to make music for Him. On this day, Jehovah called together all the priests to divide the sacrifices on the altar for the people to eat, so that they could enjoy the sacrifices on Jehovah’s altar. And Jehovah said that they were blessed, that they shared a portion with Him, and that they were His chosen people (which was Jehovah’s covenant with the Israelites). This is why, up to this day, the people of Israel still say that Jehovah is only their God, and not the God of the Gentiles.

During the Age of Law, Jehovah laid down many commandments for Moses to pass on to the Israelites who followed him out of Egypt. These commandments were given by Jehovah to the Israelites and bore no relation to the Egyptians; they were meant to restrain the Israelites, and He used the commandments to make demands of them. Whether they observed the Sabbath, whether they respected their parents, whether they worshiped idols, and so forth—these were the principles by which they were judged sinful or righteous. Among them, there were some who were struck by Jehovah’s fire, some who were stoned to death, and some who received Jehovah’s blessing, and this was determined according to whether or not they obeyed these commandments. Those who did not observe the Sabbath were stoned to death. Those priests who did not observe the Sabbath were struck by Jehovah’s fire. Those who did not show respect to their parents were also stoned to death. This was all commended by Jehovah. Jehovah established His commandments and laws so that, as He led them in their lives, the people would listen to and submit to His word and not rebel against Him. He used these laws to keep the newborn human race under control, the better to lay the foundation for His future work. And so, based on the work that Jehovah did, the first age was called the Age of Law. Though Jehovah made many utterances and did much work, He only guided the people positively, teaching these ignorant people how to be human, how to live, how to understand Jehovah’s way. For the most part, the work He did was to cause the people to observe His way and follow His laws. The work was done on people who were shallowly corrupted; it did not extend as far as transforming their disposition or progress in life. He was only concerned with using laws to restrict and control the people. For the Israelites at that time, Jehovah was merely a God in the temple, a God in the heavens. He was a pillar of cloud, a pillar of fire. All Jehovah required them to do was obey what people today know as His laws and commandments—one could even say rules—because what Jehovah did was not meant to transform them, but to give them more things that man ought to have and to instruct them from His own mouth because, after being created, man had nothing that he ought to possess. And so, Jehovah gave to the people the things they ought to possess for their lives on earth, making the people that He had led surpass their ancestors, Adam and Eve, because what Jehovah gave them surpassed what He had given Adam and Eve in the beginning. Regardless, the work Jehovah did in Israel was only to guide humanity and make humanity recognize their Creator. He did not conquer them or transform them, but merely guided them. This is the sum of Jehovah’s work in the Age of Law. It is the background, the true story, the essence of His work in the whole land of Israel, and the beginning of His six thousand years of work—to keep mankind under the control of Jehovah’s hand. Out of this was born more work in His six-thousand-year management plan.

Footnotes:

a. The original text does not contain the phrase “to be obeyed.”

The True Story Behind the Work of the Age of Redemption

My entire management plan, the six-thousand-year management plan, consists of three stages, or three ages: the Age of Law of the beginning; the Age of Grace (which is also the Age of Redemption); and the Age of Kingdom of the last days. My work in these three ages differs in content according to the nature of each age, but at each stage this work befits the needs of man—or, to be more precise, is done according to the tricks that Satan employs in the war that I wage against it. The purpose of My work is to defeat Satan, to make manifest My wisdom and omnipotence, to expose all of Satan’s tricks, and thereby to save the entire human race, which lives under Satan’s power. It is to show My wisdom and omnipotence, and to reveal the unbearable hideousness of Satan; even more than that, it is to allow created beings to discriminate between good and evil, to know that I am the Sovereign of all things, to see clearly that Satan is the enemy of humanity, a degenerate, the evil one, and to allow them to tell, with absolute certainty, the difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, holiness and filth, and what is great and what is ignoble. Thus will ignorant humanity become able to bear witness to Me that it is not I who corrupt humanity, and only I—the Creator—can save humanity, can bestow upon people the things that they can enjoy; and they will come to know that I am the Sovereign of all things and Satan is merely one of the beings that I created and that later betrayed Me. My six-thousand-year management plan is divided into three stages, and I work thus to achieve the effect of enabling created beings to bear witness to Me, and comprehend My will, and know that I am the truth. Thus, during the early work of My six-thousand-year management plan, I performed the work of the law, which was the work in which Jehovah led the people. The second stage ushered in the work of the Age of Grace in the villages of Judea. Jesus represents all the work of the Age of Grace; He was incarnated in the flesh, and nailed to the cross, and He also began the Age of Grace. He was crucified in order to complete the work of redemption, to end the Age of Law and begin the Age of Grace, and so He was called the “Supreme Commander,” the “Sin Offering,” and the “Redeemer.” As a result, the work of Jesus differed in content from the work of Jehovah, although they were the same in principle. Jehovah began the Age of Law, establishing the base—the point of origin—for God’s work on earth, and issuing the laws and commandments. These are the two pieces of work He carried out, and they represent the Age of Law. The work Jesus did in the Age of Grace was not to issue laws, but to fulfill them, thereby ushering in the Age of Grace and concluding the Age of Law that had lasted two thousand years. He was the trailblazer, who came in order to begin the Age of Grace, yet the main part of His work lay in redemption. And so His work was also twofold: opening up a new age, and completing the work of redemption through His crucifixion, after which He departed. And henceforth was the Age of Law ended and the Age of Grace begun.

The work Jesus did was in accordance with the needs of man in that age. His task was to redeem humanity, to forgive them their sins, and so His disposition was wholly one of humility, patience, love, piety, forbearance, mercy, and lovingkindness. He brought to humanity abundant grace and blessings, and all the things that people could possibly enjoy, He gave to them for their enjoyment: peace and happiness, His tolerance and love, His mercy and lovingkindness. At the time, the abundance of things to enjoy that people were faced with—the sense of peace and security within their hearts, the feeling of reassurance within their spirits, and their dependence on Jesus the Savior—was all down to the age in which they lived. In the Age of Grace, man had already been corrupted by Satan, and so to achieve the work of redeeming all humanity required an abundance of grace, infinite forbearance and patience, and even more than that, an offering sufficient to atone for humanity’s sins, in order to have an effect. What humanity saw in the Age of Grace was merely My offering of atonement for the sins of humanity: Jesus. All they knew was that God could be merciful and forbearing, and all they saw was the mercy and lovingkindness of Jesus. This was entirely because they were born in the Age of Grace. And so, before they could be redeemed, they had to enjoy the many kinds of grace that Jesus bestowed on them in order to benefit from it. This way, they could be forgiven of their sins through their enjoyment of grace, and could also have the chance to be redeemed through enjoying Jesus’ forbearance and patience. Only through Jesus’ forbearance and patience did they win the right to receive forgiveness and enjoy the abundance of grace bestowed by Jesus. Just as Jesus said: I have come to redeem not the righteous but sinners, to allow sinners to be forgiven of their sins. If, when He became flesh, Jesus had brought the disposition of judgment, curse, and intolerance of man’s offenses, then man would never have had the chance to be redeemed, and would have remained forever sinful. Had this been so, the six-thousand-year management plan would have come to a stop in the Age of Law, and the Age of Law would have been prolonged for six thousand years. Man’s sins would only have grown more numerous and more grievous, and the creation of humanity would have been for naught. Men would only have been able to serve Jehovah under the law, but their sins would have exceeded those of the first created humans. The more Jesus loved mankind, forgiving them their sins and bringing unto them sufficient mercy and lovingkindness, the more mankind was entitled to be saved by Jesus, to be called the lost lambs that Jesus bought back at a great price. Satan could not meddle in this work, for Jesus treated His followers as a loving mother treats the infant at her bosom. He did not grow angry or disdainful toward them, but was full of comfort; He never flew into a rage among them, but forbore with their sins and turned a blind eye to their foolishness and ignorance, to the point of saying, “Forgive others seventy times seven times.” Thus were the hearts of others transformed by His heart, and only thus did people receive forgiveness of their sins through His forbearance.

Though Jesus in His incarnation was utterly without fleshly feelings, He always comforted His disciples, provided for them, helped them, and supported them. However much work He did, or however much suffering He endured, He never made excessive demands of people, but was always patient and forbearing of their sins, such that the people of the Age of Grace affectionately called Him “the lovable Savior Jesus.” To the people of that time—to all people—what Jesus had and was, was mercy and lovingkindness. He never remembered people’s transgressions, and His treatment of them was never based on their transgressions. Because that was a different age, He often bestowed plentiful food upon people so that they could eat their fill. He treated all His followers with grace, healing the sick, driving out demons, raising the dead. In order that people might believe in Him and see that all that He did was done earnestly and sincerely, He went so far as to resurrect a rotting corpse, showing them that in His hands even the dead could come back to life. In this way He endured silently and carried out His work of redemption among them. Even before He was nailed to the cross, Jesus had already taken upon Himself the sins of humanity and become a sin offering for mankind. Even before being crucified, He had opened the way to the cross in order to redeem mankind. Ultimately, He was nailed to the cross, sacrificing Himself for the sake of the cross, and He bestowed all of His mercy, lovingkindness, and holiness upon mankind. Toward humanity, He was always tolerant, never vengeful, forgiving them their sins, exhorting them to repent, and teaching them to have patience, forbearance, and love, to follow in His footsteps and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the cross. His love for the brothers and sisters exceeded His love for Mary. The work that He did took as its principle healing the sick and driving out demons, all for the sake of His redemption. No matter where He went, He treated all who followed Him with grace. He made the poor rich, the lame walk, the blind see, and the deaf hear. He even invited the lowliest, destitute ones, the sinners, to sit at the same table with Him, never shunning them but always being patient, even saying: When a shepherd loses one sheep out of a hundred, he will leave behind the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep, and when he finds it he will rejoice greatly. He loved His followers as a ewe loves her lambs. Though they were foolish and ignorant, and were sinners in His eyes, and furthermore were the humblest members of society, He considered these sinners—men whom others despised—as the apple of His eye. Since He favored them, He gave up His life for them, as a lamb was offered up on the altar. He went about in their midst as if He were their servant, letting them use Him and slaughter Him, obeying them unconditionally. To His followers He was the lovable Savior Jesus, but to the Pharisees, who lectured people from a high pedestal, He showed not mercy and lovingkindness, but loathing and resentment. He did not do much work among the Pharisees, only occasionally lecturing and rebuking them; He did not go about in their midst doing the work of redemption, nor did He perform signs and wonders. He bestowed all His mercy and lovingkindness upon His followers, enduring for the sake of these sinners till the very end, when He was nailed to the cross, and suffering every humiliation until He had fully redeemed all humanity. This was the sum total of His work.

Without Jesus’ redemption, mankind would forever have lived in sin and become the progeny of sin, the descendants of demons. Continuing thus, the whole world would have become the land where Satan dwells, the place of its habitation. The work of redemption, however, required showing mercy and lovingkindness toward mankind; only by such means could mankind receive forgiveness and ultimately win the right to be made complete and fully gained by God. Without this stage of work, the six-thousand-year management plan would not have been able to progress. If Jesus had not been crucified, if He had only healed the sick and exorcised demons, then people could not have been completely forgiven of their sins. In the three and a half years that Jesus spent doing His work on earth, He completed only half of His work of redemption; then, by being nailed to the cross and becoming the likeness of sinful flesh, by being handed over to the evil one, He completed the work of crucifixion and mastered the destiny of mankind. Only after He was delivered into Satan’s hands did He redeem mankind. For thirty-three and a half years He suffered on earth, being ridiculed, slandered, and forsaken, even to the point where He had no place to lay His head, no place of rest, and He was later crucified, with His whole being—a holy and innocent body—nailed to the cross. He endured every kind of suffering there is. Those in power mocked and whipped Him, and the soldiers even spat in His face; yet He remained silent and endured until the end, submitting unconditionally to the point of death, whereupon He redeemed all of humanity. Only then was He permitted to rest. The work that Jesus did represents only the Age of Grace; it does not represent the Age of Law, nor is it a substitute for the work of the last days. This is the essence of Jesus’ work in the Age of Grace, the second age that mankind has passed through—the Age of Redemption.

You Should Know How the Whole of Humanity Has Developed to the Present Day

The entirety of the work carried out over six thousand years has gradually changed as different eras have come and gone. The shifts in this work have been based on the world’s overall situation and on the developmental trends of humanity as a whole; the work of management has only gradually changed accordingly. It was not all planned out from the beginning of creation. Before the world was created, or very soon thereafter, Jehovah had not yet planned the first stage of work, that of law; the second stage of work, that of grace; or the third stage of work, that of conquest, in which He would first begin with some of the descendants of Moab, and through this conquer the entire universe. After creating the world, He never spoke these words, nor did He ever speak them after Moab; indeed, prior to Lot, He never uttered them. All of God’s work is done spontaneously. This is exactly how His entire six-thousand-year work of management has developed; by no means had He, before creating the world, written out such a plan in the form of something like a “Summary Chart for Humanity’s Development.” In God’s work, He expresses what He is directly; He does not rack His brains to formulate a plan. Of course, quite a few prophets have spoken a great many prophecies, but it still cannot be said that God’s work has always been one of precise planning; those prophecies were made according to God’s work at that time. All the work He does is the most actual work. He carries it out in accordance with the development of each era, and bases it on how things change. For Him, carrying out work is akin to suiting the medicine to the illness; while doing His work, He observes, and continues His work according to His observations. In every stage of His work, God is capable of expressing His ample wisdom and ability; He reveals His abundant wisdom and authority according to the work of any particular age, and allows all of those people brought back by Him during that age to see His entire disposition. He provides for people’s needs in accordance with the work that needs to be done in each age, doing whatever work He should do. He supplies people with what they need based on the degree to which Satan has corrupted them. It is like how, when Jehovah initially created Adam and Eve, He did it to enable them to manifest God upon the earth and so that they could bear God’s witness among creation. However, Eve sinned after being tempted by the serpent, and Adam did the same; in the garden, they both ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, Jehovah had additional work to perform on them. Seeing their nakedness, He covered their bodies with clothing made from animal hides. Afterward, He said to Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree, of which I commanded you, saying, You shall not eat of it: cursed is the ground for your sake … till you return to the ground; for out of it were you taken: for dust you are, and to dust shall you return.” To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.” From then on, He banished them from the Garden of Eden and made them live outside of it, just as modern man now lives upon the earth. When God created man in the very beginning, it was not His plan to let man be tempted by the serpent after being created and then to curse man and the serpent. He had not actually had such a plan; it was simply the way things developed that gave Him new work to do among His creation. After Jehovah had carried out this work among Adam and Eve upon the earth, humanity continued to develop for several thousand years, until “Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented Jehovah that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart. … But Noah found grace in the eyes of Jehovah.” At this time Jehovah had more new work to do, for the humanity He had created had grown too sinful after being tempted by the serpent. Given these circumstances, among all of humanity, Jehovah selected Noah’s family to be spared, and then He carried out His work of destroying the world with a flood. Humanity has continued to develop in this manner to this very day, growing increasingly corrupt, and when the time comes that human development reaches its pinnacle, it will spell humanity’s end. From the very beginning right up until the end of the world, the inside truth of His work has always been and always will be this way. It is the same as how people will be classed according to their kind; it is far from the case that each and every person is predestined in the very beginning to belong to a certain category; rather, everyone is gradually categorized only after undergoing a process of development. In the end, anyone who cannot be brought complete salvation will be returned to their “ancestors.” None of God’s work among humanity had already been prepared upon the creation of the world; rather, it is the development of things that has allowed God to perform His work among humanity step by step and in a more realistic and practical manner. For example, Jehovah God did not create the serpent in order to tempt the woman; that was not His specific plan, nor was it something that He had intentionally predestined. One could say that this was an unexpected occurrence. Thus, it was because of this that Jehovah expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and vowed to never again create man. However, people only discover God’s wisdom upon this foundation. It is just as I said earlier: “I exercise My wisdom based upon Satan’s plots.” No matter how corrupt humanity grows or how the serpent tempts them, Jehovah still has His wisdom; as such, He has been engaged in new work ever since He created the world, and none of the steps of this work has ever been repeated. Satan has continuously put plots into motion, humanity has constantly been corrupted by Satan, and Jehovah God has unceasingly carried out His wise work. He has never failed, nor has He ever stopped working, ever since the world was created. After humans were corrupted by Satan, He has kept working amongst them to defeat it, the enemy that was the source of their corruption. This battle has raged since the beginning, and will continue until the world’s end. In doing all this work, Jehovah God has not only allowed humans, who have been corrupted by Satan, to receive His great salvation, but also allowed them to see His wisdom, almightiness, and authority. Furthermore, in the end, He will let them see His righteous disposition—punishing the evil and rewarding the good. He has battled Satan to this very day and has never been defeated. This is because He is a wise God, and He exercises His wisdom based upon Satan’s plots. Therefore, God not only makes everything in heaven submit to His authority, but He also has everything upon earth rest below His footstool and, not least, He makes the evil ones who invade and harass humanity fall within His chastisement. The results of all this work are brought about because of His wisdom. He had never revealed His wisdom prior to the existence of humanity, for He had no enemies in heaven, upon earth, or anywhere in the entire universe, and there were no dark forces invading anything among nature. After the archangel betrayed Him, He created humanity upon the earth, and it was because of humanity that He formally began His millennia-long war with Satan, the archangel—a war that grows more heated with every successive stage. His almightiness and wisdom are present in each of these stages. Only then has everything in heaven and upon earth witnessed God’s wisdom, almightiness, and, in particular, God’s practicality. He still carries out His work in this same practical manner to this day; in addition, as He carries out His work, He also reveals His wisdom and almightiness. He allows you to see the inside truth of each stage of work, to see exactly how to explain God’s almightiness, and, moreover, to see a definitive explanation of God’s practicality.

Regarding Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, some people wonder: Had this not been preordained prior to the creation of the world? Actually, the Holy Spirit planned this based on the reality of the time. It just so happened that there was someone by the name of Judas who was always embezzling funds, so this person was chosen to play this role and to be of service in this way. This was a true example of making use of local resources. Jesus was unaware of this at first; He only learned about it later on, after Judas had been exposed. Had someone else been capable of playing this role, then that person would have done it instead of Judas. That which had been predestined was, in fact, something that the Holy Spirit did in that moment. The Holy Spirit’s work is always done spontaneously; He can plan His work at any time, and carry it out at any time. Why do I always say that the work of the Holy Spirit is realistic, and that it is always new, never old, and always fresh to the highest degree? His work had not already been planned when the world was created; that is not at all what happened! Every step of work attains its proper effect for its respective time, and the steps do not disrupt one another. A lot of the time, the plans you might have in mind are simply no match for the Holy Spirit’s latest work. His work is not as simple as man reasons it to be, nor is it as complex as man imagines—it consists of supplying people at any time and any place in accordance with their needs at the time. No one is clearer about the essence of humans than He is, and it is precisely for this reason that nothing can suit people’s realistic needs as well as His work does. Therefore, from a human perspective, His work seems to have been planned several millennia in advance. As He works among you now, all the while working and speaking as He watches the states you are in, He has just the right words to say upon encountering each and every sort of state, speaking words that are precisely what people need. Take the first step of His work: the time of chastisement. After that, God conducted His work based on what people manifested, their rebelliousness, the positive states that emerged from them and the negative states, as well as the lowest limit to which people could fall when those negative states reached a certain point; and He seized upon these things to achieve a much better result from His work. That is, He does sustaining work among people based on whatever their current state is at any given time; He carries out every step of His work according to people’s actual states. All created beings are in His hands; how could He not know them? God carries out the next step of work that should be done, anytime and anywhere, in accordance with people’s states. By no means was this work planned thousands of years beforehand; that is a human notion! He works as He observes the effects of His work, and His work continuously deepens and develops; each time, after observing the results of His work, He implements the next step of His work. He uses many things to transition gradually and to make His new work visible to people over time. This manner of working can provide for people’s needs, for God knows people all too well. This is how He carries out His work from heaven. Likewise, God incarnate does His work in the same way, making arrangements and working among humans according to actual circumstances. None of His work had been arranged before the world was created, nor had it been meticulously planned beforehand. Two thousand years after the world was created, Jehovah saw that humanity had become so corrupt that He used the mouth of the prophet Isaiah to foretell that, after the Age of Law had ended, Jehovah would carry out His work of redeeming humanity in the Age of Grace. This was Jehovah’s plan, of course, but this plan was also made according to the circumstances He was observing at the time; He certainly did not think of it immediately after having created Adam. Isaiah merely voiced a prophecy, but Jehovah had not made advance preparations for this work during the Age of Law; rather, He put it into motion at the beginning of the Age of Grace, when the messenger appeared in Joseph’s dream to enlighten him with the message that God would become flesh, and only then did His work of incarnation begin. God had not, as people imagine, prepared for His work of incarnation right after creating the world; it was only decided based on the degree to which humanity had developed and the status of His war against Satan.

When God becomes flesh, His Spirit descends upon a man; in other words, the Spirit of God clothes Himself with a physical body. He comes to do His work upon the earth not to bring with Him certain limited steps; His work is absolutely unlimited. The work that the Holy Spirit does in the flesh is still determined by the results of His work, and He uses such things to determine the length of time for which He will do work while in the flesh. The Holy Spirit directly reveals each step of His work, examining His work as He goes along; this work is nothing so supernatural as to stretch the limits of the human imagination. This is like Jehovah’s work in creating the heavens and earth and all things; He planned and worked simultaneously. He separated the light from the darkness, and morning and evening came into being—this took one day. On the second day, He created the sky, and that also took one day; He then created the earth, the seas, and all the creatures that populated them, which required yet another day. This continued until the sixth day, when God created man and let him manage all the things upon the earth. Then, on the seventh day, when He had finished creating all things, He rested. God blessed the seventh day and designated it as a holy day. He only decided to establish this holy day after He had already created all things, not before creating them. This work was also carried out spontaneously; before creating all things, He had not decided to create the world in six days and then rest on the seventh; such is not at all in line with the facts. He had not voiced such a thing, nor had He planned it. By no means had He said that the creation of all things would be completed on the sixth day and that He would rest on the seventh; rather, He created according to what seemed good to Him at the time. Once He had finished creating everything, it was already the sixth day. If it had been the fifth day when He finished creating everything, He would therefore have designated the sixth day as a holy day. However, He did in fact finish creating everything on the sixth day, and thus the seventh day became a holy day, which has been passed down to this very day. Therefore, His current work is being carried out in this same manner. He speaks and provides for your needs in accordance with your situations. That is, the Spirit speaks and works according to people’s circumstances; He keeps watch over all and works at any time and any place. That which I do, say, place upon you, and bestow upon you is, without exception, that which you need. Thus, none of My work is separate from reality; it is all practical, for you all know that “God’s Spirit keeps watch over all.” If this had all been decided ahead of time, would it not have been too cut-and-dried? You think that God worked out plans for six whole millennia and then predestined humanity to be rebellious, resistant, crooked and deceitful, and to possess the corruption of the flesh, a satanic disposition, the lust of the eyes, and individual indulgences. None of that was predestined by God, but rather it all happened as a result of Satan’s corruption. Some might say, “Was Satan not also within God’s grasp? God had predestined that Satan would corrupt man in this manner, and after that, God carried out His work among man.” Would God actually predestine Satan to corrupt humanity? God is only too eager to allow humanity to live normally, so would He really disturb their lives? If so, would not defeating Satan and saving humanity be a futile effort? How could humanity’s rebelliousness have been predestined? It is something that has happened due to Satan’s disturbance, so how could it have been predestined by God? The Satan within God’s grasp of which you conceive is very different from the Satan within God’s grasp of which I speak. According to your statements that “God is almighty, and Satan is within His hands,” Satan could never betray Him. Did you not say that God is almighty? Your knowledge is too abstract, and is not in touch with reality; man can never fathom God’s thoughts, nor can man ever comprehend His wisdom! God is almighty; this is not a falsehood at all. The archangel betrayed God because God initially gave it a share of authority. Of course, this was an unexpected event, just as when Eve succumbed to the serpent’s temptation. However, no matter how Satan carries out its betrayal, it still is not as almighty as God. As you have said, Satan is merely mighty; no matter what it does, God’s authority will always defeat it. This is the true meaning behind the saying, “God is almighty, and Satan is within His hands.” Therefore, the war with Satan must be carried out one step at a time. Moreover, God plans His work in response to Satan’s ruses—that is, He brings salvation to humanity and reveals His almightiness and wisdom in a manner befitting the age. Likewise, the work of the last days was not predestined early on, before the Age of Grace; predestinations are not made in such an orderly manner as this: first, making man’s external disposition change; second, subjecting man to His chastisement and trials; third, causing man to undergo the trial of death; fourth, having man experience the time of loving God and express the resolution of a created being; fifth, allowing man to see God’s will and know Him completely, and finally completing man. He did not plan all these things during the Age of Grace; rather, He began planning them in the present age. Satan is at work, as is God. Satan expresses its corrupt disposition, whereas God speaks straightforwardly and reveals some essential things. This is the work being done today, and there is the same working principle that was used long ago, after the creation of the world.

First God created Adam and Eve, and He also created a serpent. Of all things, this serpent was the most poisonous; its body contained venom, which Satan utilized to take advantage of it. It was the serpent that tempted Eve to sin. Adam sinned after Eve did, and the two of them were then able to distinguish between good and evil. If Jehovah had known that the serpent would tempt Eve and that Eve would tempt Adam, then why did He place them all inside a garden? If He had been able to predict these things, then why did He create a serpent and place it within the Garden of Eden? Why did the Garden of Eden contain fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Had He meant for them to eat the fruit? When Jehovah came, neither Adam nor Eve dared to confront Him, and it was only then that Jehovah knew that they had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and fallen prey to the serpent’s trickery. In the end, He cursed the serpent, and He cursed Adam and Eve as well. When the two of them ate of the fruit of the tree, Jehovah was not at all aware that they were doing it. Humanity became corrupted to the point of being wicked and sexually promiscuous, going even so far that everything they harbored in their hearts was evil and unrighteous; it was all filth. Jehovah therefore regretted having creating humanity. After that, He carried out His work of destroying the world with a flood, which Noah and his sons survived. Some things are not actually as advanced and supernatural as people might imagine. Some ask, “Since God knew the archangel would betray Him, why did He create it?” These are the facts: Before the earth existed, the archangel was the greatest of heaven’s angels. It had jurisdiction over all the angels in heaven; this was the authority God had granted it. With the exception of God, it was the greatest of heaven’s angels. Later, after God had created humanity, down on earth the archangel carried out an even greater betrayal against God. I say it betrayed God because it wanted to manage humanity and to surpass God’s authority. It was the archangel that tempted Eve into sin, and it did so because it wished to establish its kingdom upon earth and to get humans to betray God and obey the archangel instead. The archangel saw that so many things could obey it—the angels could, as could the people upon the earth. The birds and beasts, trees, forests, mountains, rivers, and all things upon the earth were under the care of humans—that is, Adam and Eve—while Adam and Eve obeyed the archangel. The archangel therefore desired to surpass God’s authority and to betray God. After that, it led many angels to betray God, which later became various sorts of unclean spirits. Has not humanity’s development to this day been caused by the archangel’s corruption? Humans are only the way they are today because the archangel betrayed God and corrupted humanity. This step-by-step work is nowhere near as abstract and simple as people might imagine. Satan carried out its betrayal for a reason, yet people are unable to comprehend such a simple fact. Why did God, who created the heavens and earth and all things, also create Satan? Since God despises Satan so much, and Satan is His enemy, why did He create Satan? By creating Satan, was He not creating an enemy? God did not actually create an enemy; rather, He created an angel, and later that angel betrayed Him. Its status had grown so great that it wished to betray God. One could say that this was a coincidence, but it was also an inevitability. It is similar to how a person will inevitably die after maturing to a certain point; things have just developed to that stage. Some absurd fools say, “Since Satan is Your enemy, why did You create it? Did You not know that the archangel would betray You? Can You not gaze from eternity to eternity? Did You not know the archangel’s nature? Since You clearly knew that it would betray You, why did You make it into an archangel? Not only did it betray You, it also led so many other angels with it and descended to the world of mortals to corrupt humanity, yet to this day, You still have been unable to complete Your six-thousand-year management plan.” Are those words correct? When you think in this way, are you not putting yourself through more trouble than is necessary? There are others who say, “Had Satan not corrupted humanity through to the present day, God would not have brought humanity salvation like this. As such, God’s wisdom and almightiness would have been invisible; where would His wisdom have been revealed? God therefore created a human race for Satan so that He could later reveal His almightiness—otherwise, how could man discover God’s wisdom? If man did not resist God or rebel against Him, it would be unnecessary for His acts to be revealed. If all created beings were to worship Him and obey Him, God would have no work to do.” This is even further from reality, for there is nothing filthy about God, so He cannot create filth. He reveals His acts now only in order to defeat His enemy, to save the humans He created, and to defeat the demons and Satan, which hate, betray, and resist God, and which were under His dominion and belonged to Him in the very beginning. God wants to defeat these demons and, in doing so, reveal His almightiness to all things. Humanity and everything on earth are now under Satan’s power and lie under the power of the evil ones. God wants to reveal His acts to all things so that people may know Him, and thereby defeat Satan and thoroughly vanquish His enemies. The entirety of this work is accomplished through revealing His acts. All of His created beings are under Satan’s power, so God wishes to reveal His almightiness to them, thereby defeating Satan. If there were no Satan, He would not need to reveal His deeds. If not for Satan’s disturbance, God would have created humanity and led them to live in the Garden of Eden. Why, prior to Satan’s betrayal, did God never reveal all His deeds to the angels or to the archangel? If, in the beginning, all the angels and the archangel had known God and had submitted to Him, then God would not have carried out those meaningless acts of work. Because of the existence of Satan and demons, humans, too, have resisted God, and are filled to the brim with rebellious disposition. God therefore wishes to reveal His acts. Because He wishes to do war with Satan, He must use His own authority and all His acts to defeat it; in this way, the work of salvation that He performs among humans will allow them to see His wisdom and almightiness. The work God is doing today is meaningful, and in no way resembles that to which some people refer when they say, “Is not the work You do contradictory? Is not this succession of work merely an exercise in making disturbance for Yourself? You created Satan, and then allowed it to betray and resist You. You created humans, and then handed them over to Satan, allowing Adam and Eve to be tempted. Since You did all these things on purpose, why do You still detest humanity? Why do You loathe Satan? Are these not all of Your own making? What is there for You to hate?” Quite a few absurd people say such things. They wish to love God, but deep down, they complain about God. What a contradiction! You do not understand the truth, you have too many supernatural thoughts, and you even claim that God made a mistake—how absurd you are! It is you who are fiddling with the truth; it is not the case that God has made a mistake! Some people even complain over and over, “It was You who created Satan, and You who cast Satan down among humans and handed them over to it. Once humans possessed satanic disposition, You did not forgive them; on the contrary, You hated them to a certain degree. At first You loved them to a certain degree, but now You detest them. It is You who has hated humanity, yet You are also the one who has loved humanity. What exactly is going on here? Is this not a contradiction?” Regardless of how you look at it, this is what happened in heaven; this was the manner in which the archangel betrayed God and humanity was corrupted, and this is how humans have continued to this day. Regardless of how you phrase it, that is the entire story. However, you must understand that the whole purpose behind this work God is doing today is to save you and to defeat Satan.

Because the angels were particularly frail and possessed no abilities to speak of, they grew arrogant as soon as they were given authority. This was especially true of the archangel, whose status was higher than that of any other angel. A king among angels, it led millions of them, and under Jehovah, its authority surpassed that of any of the other angels. It wanted to do this and that, and to lead the angels down among humans to control the world. God said that He is the One who is in charge of the universe; but the archangel claimed that it was in charge of the universe—thenceforth, the archangel betrayed God. God had created another world in heaven, and the archangel wished to control this world and also to descend to the mortal realm. Could God allow it to do so? Thus, He struck the archangel and cast it down into midair. Ever since it corrupted humans, God has waged war with the archangel in order to save them; He has used these six millennia toward its defeat. Your conception of an almighty God is incompatible with the work God is currently carrying out; it is absolutely impractical, and is very much a fallacy! Actually, it was only after the archangel’s betrayal that God declared it to be His enemy. It was only due to its betrayal that the archangel trampled upon humanity after arriving in the mortal realm, and it is for this reason that humanity has developed to this point. After that happened, God vowed to Satan, “I will defeat you and bring salvation to all of the humans I created.” Unconvinced at first, Satan replied, “What can You honestly do to me? Can You really strike me down into midair? Can You truly defeat me?” After God cast it down into midair, He paid the archangel no further attention, and later on began to save humanity and carry out His own work in spite of Satan’s ongoing disturbances. Satan was able to do this and that, but it was all thanks to the powers God had previously given to it; it took them with it into midair, and has kept them to this day. When striking the archangel down into midair, God did not take back its authority, and so Satan continued to corrupt humanity. God, on the other hand, began saving humanity, whom Satan had corrupted soon after their creation. God did not reveal His acts while in heaven; however, prior to creating the earth, He allowed people in the world He created in heaven to see His acts, thus guiding those people above heaven. He gave them wisdom and intelligence, and led those people to live in that world. Naturally, none of you has ever heard of this before. Later, after God created humans, the archangel began to corrupt them; on earth, all of humanity fell to chaos. It was only then that God began His war against Satan, and it was only at this time that humans began to see His deeds. In the beginning, such acts had been concealed from humanity. After Satan was cast down into midair, it did its own things and God continued to do His own work, continuously waging war against Satan, right up until the last days. Now is the time in which Satan should be destroyed. In the beginning, God gave it authority, and He later struck it down into midair, yet it remained defiant. After that, it corrupted humanity upon earth, but God was there managing humanity. God uses His management of humans to defeat Satan. By corrupting people, Satan brings their fate to a close and disturbs God’s work. On the other hand, God’s work is the salvation of humanity. Which step of the work God does is not meant to save humanity? Which step is not meant to cleanse people, and to make them behave righteously and live out the image of ones who can be loved? Satan, however, does not do this. It corrupts humanity; it continuously carries out its work of corrupting humanity throughout the universe. Of course, God also does His own work, paying no attention to Satan. No matter how much authority Satan has, that authority was still given to it by God; God simply did not actually give it all His authority, and so no matter what Satan does, it can never surpass God and will always be within God’s grasp. God did not reveal any of His acts while in heaven. He merely gave Satan a small portion of authority and allowed it to exercise control over the other angels. Therefore, no matter what Satan does, it cannot surpass God’s authority, because the authority that God originally granted it is limited. As God works, Satan disturbs. In the last days, its disturbances will be finished; likewise, God’s work will also be finished, and the kind of humans God wishes to complete will be completed. God directs people positively; His life is living water, immeasurable and boundless. Satan has corrupted man to a certain degree; in the end, the living water of life will complete man, and it will be impossible for Satan to interfere and carry out its work. Thus, God will be able to gain these people completely. Even now, Satan still refuses to accept this; it continuously pits itself against God, but He pays it no attention. God has said, “I will be victorious over all of Satan’s dark forces and over all dark influences.” This is the work that is to be done in the flesh, and it is also what makes becoming flesh significant: that is, to complete the stage of work of defeating Satan in the last days, and to wipe out all things that belong to Satan. God’s victory over Satan is inevitable! Actually, Satan already failed long ago. When the gospel began to spread throughout the land of the great red dragon—that is, when God incarnate began His work and this work was set in motion—Satan was utterly defeated, for the very purpose of the incarnation was to vanquish Satan. As soon as Satan saw that God had once again become flesh and begun to carry out His work, which no force could stop, it therefore became dumbfounded at the sight of this work, and did not dare to do any further mischief. At first Satan thought that it, too, was endowed with plenty of wisdom, and it disrupted and disturbed God’s work; however, it did not expect that God would once again become flesh, or that in His work, God would use Satan’s rebelliousness to serve as a revelation and judgment for humanity, thereby conquering humans and defeating Satan. God is wiser than Satan, and His work far exceeds it. Therefore, as I have previously stated, “The work that I do is carried out in response to Satan’s ruses; in the end, I will reveal My almightiness and Satan’s powerlessness.” God will do His work in the forefront, while Satan will trail behind, until, in the end, it is finally destroyed—it will not even know what hit it! It will only realize the truth once it has already been smashed and crushed, and by then, it will already have been incinerated in the lake of fire. Will it not be completely convinced then? For Satan will then have no more schemes to employ!

It is this step-by-step, realistic work that often weighs God’s heart down with grief for humanity, so His war with Satan has lasted for six thousand years, and God has said, “I will never again create humanity, nor will I again bestow authority upon angels.” From then on, when the angels came to work on earth, they merely followed God to do some work; He has never again given them any authority. How did the angels that the Israelites saw carry out their work? They revealed themselves in dreams and conveyed the words of Jehovah. When Jesus was resurrected three days after being crucified, the angels were the ones who pushed the boulder to the side; God’s Spirit did not do this work personally. The angels only did this sort of work; they played supporting roles, but had no authority, for God would never again bestow any authority upon them. After working for some time, the people whom God used on earth assumed God’s position and said, “I wish to surpass the universe! I want to stand in the third heaven! We want to hold the reigns of sovereign power!” They would become arrogant after several days of work; they wished to possess sovereign authority upon the earth, to establish another nation, to have all things under their feet, and to stand in the third heaven. Do you not know that you are merely a man used by God? How could you ascend to the third heaven? God comes to earth to work, silently and without crying out, and then leaves after stealthily completing His work. He never cries out as humans do, but rather is practical in the carrying out of His work. Nor does He ever enter a church and cry, “I will wipe you all out! I will curse you and chastise you!” He merely continues doing His own work, and leaves once He is finished. Those religious pastors who heal the sick and cast out demons, lecture others from the pulpit, give long and pompous speeches, and discuss unrealistic matters are all arrogant to the core! They are but descendants of the archangel!

After having carried out His six thousand years of work through the present day, God has already revealed many of His acts, the primary purpose of which has been to defeat Satan and bring salvation to all of humanity. He is using this opportunity to allow everything in heaven, everything upon the earth, everything within the seas, and every last object of God’s creation on earth to see His almightiness and to witness all of His acts. He is seizing the opportunity provided by His defeat of Satan to reveal all of His deeds to humans, and to enable them to praise Him and exalt His wisdom in defeating Satan. Everything on earth, in heaven, and within the seas brings God glory, praises His almightiness, praises every one of His deeds, and shouts His holy name. This is proof of His defeat of Satan; it is proof of His vanquishing of Satan. More importantly, it is proof of His salvation of humanity. The whole of God’s creation brings Him glory, praises Him for defeating His enemy and returning victoriously, and extols Him as the great victorious King. His purpose is not merely to defeat Satan, which is why His work has continued for six thousand years. He uses Satan’s defeat to save humanity; He uses Satan’s defeat to reveal all His acts and all of His glory. He will obtain glory, and all the multitude of angels will see all His glory. The messengers in heaven, the humans upon earth, and all of His creation upon earth will see the glory of the Creator. This is the work that He does. His creation in heaven and on earth will all witness His glory, and He will return triumphantly after utterly defeating Satan, and allow humanity to praise Him, thus achieving a double victory in His work. In the end, all of humanity will be conquered by Him, and He will wipe out anyone who resists or rebels; in other words, He will wipe out all those who belong to Satan. You are currently witnessing so many acts of God, yet still you resist, are rebellious, and do not submit; you harbor many things within you, and do whatever you wish. You follow your own lusts and preferences; this is all rebelliousness and resistance. Any belief in God for the sake of the flesh and one’s lusts, as well as for the sake of one’s own likes, the world, and Satan, is filthy; it is resistant and rebellious in nature. Nowadays, there are all different kinds of faith: Some seek shelter from disaster, and others seek to obtain blessings; some wish to understand mysteries, while still others seek money. These are all forms of resistance and they are all blasphemy! To say that one resists or rebels—does that not refer to such behaviors? Many people these days grumble, complain, or make judgments. Those are all things done by the evil; they are examples of human resistance and rebelliousness. Such people are possessed and occupied by Satan. Those whom God obtains are those who submit to Him completely; they are people who have been corrupted by Satan but have been saved and conquered by God’s current work, who have endured tribulations, and who, in the end, have been utterly obtained by God, who no longer live under Satan’s power, who have broken free from unrighteousness, and who are willing to live out holiness—such are the holiest of people; they are indeed the holy ones. If your current actions are not in line with even one part of God’s requirements, then you will be cast out. This is incontrovertible. Everything depends on what happens now; even though you have been predestined and chosen, your actions today will still determine your outcome. If you cannot keep up now, you will be cast out. If you cannot keep up now, how can you keep up later? Such a great miracle has appeared before you, yet you still do not believe. How, then, will you believe in God later, when He has finished His work and will no more do such work? By then, it will be even more impossible for you to follow Him! Later on, God will rely on your attitude, your knowledge toward the work of God incarnate, and your experience to determine whether you are sinful or righteous, or to determine whether you are perfected or cast out. You must see clearly now. The Holy Spirit works thusly: He determines your outcome according to your behavior today. Who speaks today’s words? Who does today’s work? Who decides you will be cast out today? Who decides to perfect you? Is this not what I do Myself? I am the One who speaks these words; I am the One who carries out such work. Cursing, chastising, and judging people are all parts of My work. In the end, it will also be up to Me to cast you out. All these things are My business! Making you perfect is My business, and allowing you to enjoy blessings is also My business. This is all work that I do. Your outcome was not predestined by Jehovah; it is being determined by the God of today. It is being determined right now; it was not determined way back before the world was created. Some absurd people say, “Perhaps there is something wrong with Your eyes, and You do not see me the way You should. In the end, You will see just what the Spirit reveals!” Jesus originally chose Judas as His disciple. People ask: “How could He choose a disciple who would betray Him?” At first, Judas had no intention of betraying Jesus; this merely happened later. At the time, Jesus had looked upon Judas quite favorably; He had caused the man to follow Him, and had given him responsibility over their financial matters. Had Jesus known that Judas would embezzle money, He would never have left him in charge of such matters. It can be said that Jesus did not originally know that this man was crooked and deceitful, or that he would cheat his brothers and sisters. Later on, after Judas had been following Jesus for some time, Jesus saw him wheedle his brothers and sisters and wheedle God. People also discovered that Judas had a habit of taking money from the money bag, and they then told Jesus about it. It was only then that Jesus became aware of everything that was going on. Because Jesus was to carry out the work of the crucifixion and needed someone to betray Him, and because Judas just so happened to be the right kind of person to carry out this role, Jesus said, “There will be one among us who will betray Me. The Son of man will use this betrayal to be crucified, and after three days will be resurrected.” At the time, Jesus had not actually selected Judas so that he would betray Him; on the contrary, He had hoped that Judas would be a loyal disciple. Unexpectedly, Judas turned out to be an avaricious degenerate who betrayed the Lord, so Jesus used this situation to select Judas for this work. If all of Jesus’ twelve disciples had been loyal and none like Judas had been among them, then the person to betray Jesus would have ultimately been someone who was not one of the disciples. However, at the time, it just so happened that there was one among the disciples who enjoyed taking bribes: Judas. Jesus therefore used this man to complete His work. How simple this was! Jesus had not predetermined it at the beginning of His work; He only made this decision once things had developed to a certain point. This was Jesus’ decision, which is to say that it was the decision of God’s Spirit Himself. Originally, it was Jesus who had chosen Judas; when Judas later betrayed Jesus, this was something the Holy Spirit did in order to serve His own ends. It was the Holy Spirit’s work carried out at that time. When Jesus had chosen Judas, He had had no idea that Judas would betray Him. He only knew that the man was Judas Iscariot. Your outcomes, too, are determined according to your level of submission today and according to your life’s level of growth, not according to any human notion that your outcomes were predestined upon the creation of the world. You must perceive these things clearly. None of this work is done the way you imagine it to be.

Concerning Appellations and Identity

If you wish to be fit for use by God, you must know the work of God, you must know the work that He did previously (in the New and Old Testaments), and, moreover, you must know His work of today; which is to say, you must know the three stages of God’s work performed over 6,000 years. If you are asked to spread the gospel, then you will not be able to do so without knowing the work of God. Someone may ask you about what your God has said about the Bible, the Old Testament, and Jesus’ work and words of that time. If you cannot speak of the inside story of the Bible, then they will not be convinced. At that time, Jesus talked much of the Old Testament with His disciples. Everything they read was from the Old Testament; the New Testament was only written several decades after Jesus was crucified. To spread the gospel, you should principally grasp the inner truth of the Bible, and God’s work in Israel, which is the work done by Jehovah, and you also have to understand the work done by Jesus. These are the issues that all people are most concerned about, and the inside story of those two stages of work is what they have not heard. When spreading the gospel, first put aside talk of the Holy Spirit’s work of today. This stage of work is beyond their reach, because what you pursue is that which is most lofty of all—a knowledge of God, and a knowledge of the work of the Holy Spirit—and nothing is more exalted than these two things. If you first talk about that which is lofty, it will be too much for them, for no one has experienced such work by the Holy Spirit; it has no precedent, and it is not easy for man to accept. Their experiences are old things from the past, with some occasional work by the Holy Spirit. What they experience is not the Holy Spirit’s work today, or God’s will today. They still act according to old practices, with no new light, and no new things.

In the age of Jesus, the Holy Spirit mainly did His work in Jesus, whilst those who served Jehovah wearing priestly robes in the temple did so with unwavering loyalty. They also had the work of the Holy Spirit, but were unable to grasp God’s present will, and merely remained faithful to Jehovah in accordance with the old practices, and were without new guidance. Jesus came and brought new work, yet those who served in the temple did not have new guidance, nor did they have new work. Serving in the temple, they could merely uphold the old practices, and without leaving the temple, they were simply incapable of having any new entry. The new work was brought by Jesus, and Jesus did not go into the temple to do His work. He only did His work outside the temple, for the scope of God’s work had changed long ago. He did not work within the temple, and when man served God there it served only to keep things as they were, and could not bring about any new work. Likewise, religious people today still worship the Bible. If you spread the gospel to them, they will throw at you petty details of the Bible’s words, and they will find much evidence, rendering you dumbfounded and speechless; then they will put a label on you and think you foolish in your faith. They will say, “You don’t even know the Bible, the word of God, so how can you say that you believe in God?” Then they will look down on you, and will also say, “Since the One you believe in is God, why doesn’t He tell you all about the Old and New Testament? Since He has brought His glory from Israel to the East, why doesn’t He know the work done in Israel? Why doesn’t He know the work of Jesus? If you don’t know, then that proves that you haven’t been told; since He is the second incarnation of Jesus, how could He not know these things? Jesus knew the work done by Jehovah; how could He not?” When the time comes, they will all ask you such questions. Their heads are full of such things; how could they not ask? Those of you who are within this stream do not focus on the Bible, for you have kept abreast of the step-by-step work done by God today, you have witnessed this step-by-step work with your own eyes, and you have clearly beheld the three stages of work, and so you have had to put down the Bible and cease to study it. But they cannot not study it, for they have no knowledge of this step-by-step work. Some people will ask, “What is the difference between the work done by God incarnate and that of the prophets and apostles of times past? David was also called the Lord, and so too was Jesus; although the work they did was different, they were called the same thing. Tell me, why were their identities not the same? What John witnessed was a vision, one that also came from the Holy Spirit, and he was able to say the words that the Holy Spirit intended to say; why was the identity of John different from that of Jesus?” The words spoken by Jesus were able to fully represent God, and they fully represented the work of God. What John saw was a vision, and he was incapable of completely representing the work of God. Why is it that John, Peter, and Paul spoke many words, as Jesus did, and yet they did not have the same identity as Jesus? It is chiefly because the work they did was different. Jesus represented the Spirit of God and was the Spirit of God working directly. He did the work of the new age, the work that no one had done before. He opened up a new way, He represented Jehovah, and He represented God Himself, whereas with Peter, Paul, and David, regardless of what they were called, they only represented the identity of a created being, and were sent by Jesus or Jehovah. So no matter how much work they did, no matter how great the miracles they performed, they were still just created beings, and incapable of representing the Spirit of God. They worked in the name of God or worked after being sent by God; furthermore, they worked in the ages begun by Jesus or Jehovah, and they did no other work. They were, after all, merely created beings. In the Old Testament, many prophets spoke predictions, or wrote books of prophecy. No one said that they were God, but as soon as Jesus started to work, the Spirit of God bore testimony to Him as God. Why is that? At this point you should already know! Before, the apostles and prophets wrote various epistles, and made many prophecies. Later on, people chose some of them to put in the Bible, and some were lost. Since there are people who say that everything spoken by them came from the Holy Spirit, why is some of it considered good, and some of it considered bad? And why were some chosen, and others not? If they were indeed the words spoken by the Holy Spirit, would it be necessary for people to choose them? Why are the accounts of the words spoken by Jesus and the work He did different in each of the Four Gospels? Is this not the fault of those who recorded them? Some people will ask, “Since the epistles written by Paul and the other authors of the New Testament and the work that they did partly arose from the will of man, and were adulterated by the notions of man, then does there not exist human impurity in the words that You (God) speak today? Do they really contain none of the notions of man?” This stage of the work done by God is completely different from that done by Paul and the many apostles and prophets. Not only is there a difference in identity, but, principally, there is a difference in the work that is carried out. After Paul was struck down and fell before the Lord, he was led by the Holy Spirit to work, and he became one who had been sent. He therefore wrote epistles to the churches, and these epistles all followed the teachings of Jesus. Paul was sent by the Lord to work in the name of the Lord Jesus, but when God Himself came, He did not work in any name, and represented none but the Spirit of God in His work. God came to do His work directly: He was not perfected by man, and His work was not carried out upon the teachings of any man. In this stage of work God does not lead by talking of His personal experiences, but instead carries out His work directly, according to what He has. For example, the trial of the service-doers, the time of chastisement, the trial of death, the time of loving God…. This is all work that has never been done before, and is work that is of the present age, rather than of the experiences of man. In the words I have spoken, which are the experiences of man? Do they not all come directly from the Spirit, and are they not issued forth by the Spirit? It is just that your caliber is so poor that you are unable to see through to the truth! The practical way of life that I speak of is to guide the path, and has never been spoken by anyone before, nor has anyone ever experienced this path, or known of this reality. Before I uttered these words, no one had ever spoken them. No one had ever talked of such experiences, nor had they ever spoken such details, and, furthermore, no one had ever pointed out such states to reveal these things. No one had ever led the path that I lead today, and if it were led by man, then it would not be a new way. Take Paul and Peter, for example. They did not have their own personal experiences before Jesus led the path. It was only after Jesus led the path that they experienced the words spoken by Jesus, and the path led by Him; from this they gained many experiences, and they wrote the epistles. And so, the experiences of man are not the same as the work of God, and the work of God is not the same as the knowledge described by the notions and experiences of man. I have said, time and again, that today I am leading a new path, and doing new work, and My work and utterances are different from those of John and all the other prophets. Never do I first gain experiences and then speak of them to you—that is not the case at all. If it was, would that not have delayed you long ago? In the past, the knowledge that many spoke of was also exalted, but all of their words were only spoken based upon those of the so-called spiritual figures. They did not guide the way, but came from their experiences, came from what they had seen, and from their knowledge. Some were of their notions, and some consisted of experience that they had summarized. Today, the nature of My work is totally different from theirs. I have not experienced being led by others, nor have I accepted being perfected by others. Furthermore, all that I have spoken and fellowshipped is unlike that of anyone else and has never been spoken by anyone else. Today, regardless of who you are, your work is carried out upon the basis of the words I speak. Without these utterances and work, who would be capable of experiencing these things (the trial of the service-doers, the time of chastisement…), and who would be able to speak of such knowledge? Are you really incapable of seeing this? Regardless of the step of work, as soon as My words are spoken, you begin to fellowship in accordance with My words, and work according to them, and it is not a way that any one of you has thought of. Having come this far, are you incapable of seeing such a clear and simple question? It is not a way that someone has thought up, nor is it based on that of any spiritual figure. It is a new path, and even many of the words once spoken by Jesus no longer apply. What I speak is the work of opening a new epoch, and it is work that stands alone; the work that I do, and the words that I speak, are all new. Is this not the new work of today? The work of Jesus was also like this. His work was also different from that of the people in the temple, and so too did it differ from the work of the Pharisees, nor did it bear any resemblance to that done by all the people of Israel. After witnessing it, people could not make up their minds: “Was it really done by God?” Jesus did not hold to the law of Jehovah; when He came to teach man, all that He spoke was new and different to what was said by the ancient saints and prophets of the Old Testament, and because of this, people remained uncertain. This is what makes man so hard to deal with. Prior to accepting this new stage of work, the path that the majority of you walked was to practice and enter upon the foundation of that of those spiritual figures. But today, the work that I do is greatly different, and so you are unable to decide whether it is right or not. I care not what path you walked before, nor am I interested in whose “food” you ate, or whom you took as your “father.” Since I have come and brought new work to guide man, all who follow Me must act in accordance with what I say. No matter how powerful the “family” you hail from, you must follow Me, you must not act according to your former practices, your “foster father” should step down, and you should come before your God to seek your rightful share. The entirety of you is in My hands, and you should not devote too much blind belief to your foster father; he cannot completely control you. The work of today stands alone. All that I say today is obviously not based upon a foundation from the past; it is a new beginning, and if you say that it is created by the hand of man, then you are one who is so blind as to be beyond saving!

Isaiah, Ezekiel, Moses, David, Abraham, and Daniel were leaders or prophets among the chosen people of Israel. Why were they not called God? Why did the Holy Spirit not bear testimony to them? Why did the Holy Spirit bear testimony to Jesus as soon as He began His work and started to speak His words? And why did the Holy Spirit not bear testimony to others? They, men who were of flesh, were all called “Lord.” Regardless of what they were called, their work represents their being and essence, and their being and essence represent their identity. Their essence is not related to their appellations; it is represented by what they expressed, and what they lived out. In the Old Testament, there was nothing out of the ordinary in being called Lord, and a person might be called in any which way, but his essence and inherent identity were immutable. Among those false Christs, false prophets, and misleaders, are there not also those who are called “God”? And why are they not God? Because they are incapable of doing the work of God. At root they are human, misleaders of people, not God, and so they do not have the identity of God. Was David not also called Lord among the twelve tribes? Jesus was also called Lord; why was Jesus alone called God incarnate? Was Jeremiah not also known as the Son of man? And was Jesus not known as the Son of man? Why was Jesus crucified on behalf of God? Is it not because His essence was different? Is it not because the work that He did was different? Does a title matter? Although Jesus was also called the Son of man, He was the first incarnation of God, He had come to assume power, and accomplish the work of redemption. This proves that the identity and essence of Jesus were different from others who were also called the Son of man. Today, who among you dare to say that all the words spoken by those who were used by the Holy Spirit came from the Holy Spirit? Does anyone dare to say such things? If you do say such things, then why was Ezra’s book of prophecy discarded, and why was the same thing done to the books of those ancient saints and prophets? If they all came from the Holy Spirit, then why do you dare to make such capricious choices? Are you qualified to choose the work of the Holy Spirit? Many stories from Israel were also discarded. And if you believe that these writings of the past all came from the Holy Spirit, then why were some of the books discarded? If they all came from the Holy Spirit, they should all have been kept, and sent to the brothers and sisters of the churches to read. They should not have been chosen or discarded by human will; it is wrong to do that. Saying that the experiences of Paul and John were mixed with their personal insights does not mean that their experiences and knowledge came from Satan, but only that they had things that came from their personal experiences and insights. Their knowledge was according to the background of their actual experiences at the time, and who could confidently say that all of it came from the Holy Spirit? If the Four Gospels all came from the Holy Spirit, then why is it that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each said something different about the work of Jesus? If you do not believe this, then look at the accounts in the Bible of how Peter denied the Lord three times: They are all different, and they each have their own characteristics. Many who are ignorant say, “God incarnate is also a man, so can the words He speaks completely come from the Holy Spirit? If the words of Paul and John were mixed with human will, then are the words that He speaks really not mixed with human will?” People who say such things are blind and ignorant! Carefully read the Four Gospels; read what they recorded about the things that Jesus did, and the words He spoke. Each account is quite simply different, and each has its own perspective. If what was written by the authors of these books all came from the Holy Spirit, then it should all be the same and consistent. Why then are there discrepancies? Is man not extremely foolish, to be unable to see this? If you are asked to bear testimony to God, what kind of testimony can you provide? Can such a way of knowing God bear testimony to Him? If others ask you, “If the records of John and Luke were mixed with human will, then are the words spoken by your God not mixed with human will?” would you be able to give a clear answer? After Luke and Matthew had heard the words of Jesus, and seen the work of Jesus, they spoke of their own knowledge, in the manner of reminiscences detailing some of the facts of the work done by Jesus. Can you say that their knowledge was completely revealed by the Holy Spirit? Outside of the Bible, there were many spiritual figures with a higher knowledge than them, so why were their words not taken up by later generations? Were they not also used by the Holy Spirit? Know that in the work of today, I am not speaking of My own insights based upon the foundation of Jesus’ work, nor am I speaking of My own knowledge against the background of Jesus’ work. What work did Jesus do at that time? And what work am I doing today? What I do and say have no precedent. The path that I walk today has never been trodden before, it has never been walked by the people of ages and generations past. Today, it has been launched, and is this not the work of the Spirit? Even though it was the work of the Holy Spirit, the leaders of the past all carried out their work upon the foundation of others; however, the work of God Himself is different. The stage of Jesus’ work was the same: He opened up a new way. When He came, He preached the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, and said that man should repent and confess. After Jesus completed His work, Peter and Paul and others began to carry on the work of Jesus. After Jesus was nailed to the cross and ascended to heaven, they were sent by the Spirit to spread the way of the cross. Even though the words of Paul were exalted, they were also based upon the foundation laid by what Jesus had said, such as patience, love, suffering, head-covering, baptism, or other doctrines to be followed. All this was spoken upon the foundation of the words of Jesus. They were incapable of opening a new way, for they were all men used by God.

Jesus’ utterances and work at the time did not hold to doctrine, and He did not carry out His work according to the work of the law of the Old Testament. It was carried out according to the work that should be done in the Age of Grace. He labored according to the work that He had brought forth, according to His own plan, and according to His ministry; He did not work according to the law of the Old Testament. Nothing that He did was according to the law of the Old Testament, and He did not come to work to fulfill the words of the prophets. Each stage of God’s work was not performed expressly in order to fulfill the predictions of the ancient prophets, and He did not come to abide by doctrine or deliberately realize the predictions of the ancient prophets. Yet His actions did not disrupt the predictions of the ancient prophets, nor did they disturb the work that He had previously done. The salient point of His work was not abiding by any doctrine, and instead doing the work that He Himself should do. He was not a prophet or a seer, but a doer, who actually came to do the work He was supposed to do, and He came to launch His new era and carry out His new work. Of course, when Jesus came to do His work, He also fulfilled many of the words spoken by the ancient prophets in the Old Testament. So too has the work of today fulfilled the predictions of the ancient prophets of the Old Testament. It is just that I do not hold up that “old almanac,” that is all. For there is more work that I must do, there are more words that I must speak to you, and this work and these words are of far greater importance than explaining passages from the Bible, because work such as that has no great significance or value for you, and cannot help you, or change you. I intend to do new work not for the sake of fulfilling any passage from the Bible. If God only came to earth to fulfill the words of the ancient prophets of the Bible, then who is greater, God incarnate or those ancient prophets? After all, are the prophets in charge of God, or is God in charge of the prophets? How do you explain these words?

At the beginning, when Jesus had yet to officially perform His ministry, like the disciples that followed Him, sometimes He also attended meetings, and sang hymns, gave praise, and read the Old Testament in the temple. After He was baptized and arose, the Spirit officially descended upon Him and began to work, revealing His identity and the ministry that He was to undertake. Prior to this, no one knew His identity, and apart from Mary, not even John knew. Jesus was 29 when He was baptized. After His baptism was completed, the heavens were opened, and a voice said: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Once Jesus had been baptized, the Holy Spirit began to bear testimony to Him in this way. Before being baptized at the age of 29, He had lived the life of a normal person, eating when He was supposed to eat, sleeping and dressing normally, and nothing about Him was different from others, though of course, this was only to the fleshly eyes of man. Sometimes He too was weak, and sometimes He too could not discern things, just as it is written in the Bible: His intelligence grew together with His age. These words merely show that He had an ordinary and normal humanity, and that He was not especially different from other normal people. He had also grown up as a normal person, and there was nothing special about Him. Yet He was under the care and protection of God. After being baptized, He began to be tempted, after which He began to perform His ministry and to work, and became possessed of power, wisdom, and authority. This is not to say that the Holy Spirit did not work in Him before His baptism, or was not inside Him. Before His baptism the Holy Spirit also dwelt inside Him but had not officially begun to work, for there are limits to when God does His work and, moreover, normal people have a normal process of growing up. The Holy Spirit had always lived within Him. When Jesus was born, He was different from others, and a morning star appeared; prior to His birth, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him that Mary was to give birth to a male infant, and that the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. After Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit began His work, but this did not mean that the Holy Spirit had only just descended upon Jesus. The saying that the Holy Spirit descended like a dove upon Him is in reference to the official start of His ministry. The Spirit of God had been within Him before, but He had not yet begun to work, for the time had not arrived, and the Spirit did not begin to work rashly. The Spirit bore testimony to Him through baptism. When He arose from the water, the Spirit began to officially work in Him, which signified that God’s incarnate flesh had begun to fulfill His ministry, and had begun the work of redemption, that is, the Age of Grace had officially begun. And so, there is a time to God’s work, no matter what work He does. After His baptism, there were no particular changes in Jesus; He was still in His original flesh. It was just that He started His work and revealed His identity, and He was full of authority and power. In this regard He was different from before. His identity was different, which is to say that there was a significant change in His status; this was the testimony of the Holy Spirit and was not the work done by man. At the beginning, people did not know, and they only came to know a little once the Holy Spirit bore testimony to Jesus in such a way. If Jesus had done great work before the Holy Spirit bore testimony to Him, but without the testimony of God Himself, then regardless of how great His work, people would never have known of His identity, for the human eye would have been incapable of seeing it. Without the step of the Holy Spirit’s testimony, no one could have recognized Him as God incarnate. If, after the Holy Spirit had borne testimony to Him, Jesus had continued to work in the same way, without any difference, then it would not have had that effect, and in this is mainly demonstrated the work of the Holy Spirit as well. After the Holy Spirit bore testimony, the Holy Spirit had to show Himself, so that you could clearly behold that He was God, that there was the Spirit of God within Him; God’s testimony was not wrong, and this could prove that His testimony was correct. If His work before and after the Holy Spirit’s testimony had been the same, then His incarnate ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit would not have been accentuated, and thus man would have been incapable of recognizing the work of the Holy Spirit, for there would have been no clear difference. After bearing testimony, the Holy Spirit had to uphold this testimony, and so He had to manifest His wisdom and authority in Jesus, which was different from in times past. Of course, this was not the effect of the baptism—baptism is merely a ceremony—it is just that baptism was the way to show that it was time to perform His ministry. Such work was in order to make plain the great power of God, to make plain the testimony of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit would take responsibility for this testimony until the very end. Before performing His ministry, Jesus also listened to sermons, preached and spread the gospel in various places. He did not do any great work because the time had not yet come for Him to perform His ministry, and also because God Himself humbly hid in the flesh, and did not do any work until the time was ripe. He did not do work before the baptism for two reasons: One, because the Holy Spirit had not officially descended upon Him to work (which is to say, the Holy Spirit had not bestowed upon Jesus the power and authority to do such work), and even if He had known His own identity, Jesus would have been incapable of doing the work He intended to do later on, and would have had to wait until the day of His baptism. This was God’s time, and no one was capable of contravening it, even Jesus Himself; Jesus Himself could not disrupt His own work. Of course, this was the humbleness of God, and also the law of God’s work; if God’s Spirit did not work, none could do His work. Secondly, before He was baptized, He was just a very common and ordinary man, and no different from other normal and ordinary people; this is one aspect of how God incarnate was not supernatural. God incarnate did not contravene the arrangements of the Spirit of God; He worked in an orderly way and He worked very normally. It was only after the baptism that His work had authority and power. Which is to say, even though He was God incarnate, He did not carry out any supernatural acts, and He grew up in the same way as other normal people. If Jesus had already known His own identity, had done great work all over the land prior to His baptism, and had been different from normal people, showing Himself to be extraordinary, then not only would it have been impossible for John to do his work, but there would also have been no way for God to start the next step of His work. This would therefore have proved that what God did had gone wrong, and to man, it would have appeared that the Spirit of God and the incarnate flesh of God did not come from the same source. So, the work of Jesus recorded in the Bible is work that was carried out after He was baptized, work which was done over the course of three years. The Bible does not record what He did before He was baptized because He did not do this work before He was baptized. He was merely an ordinary man and represented an ordinary man; before Jesus began to perform His ministry, He was no different from normal people, and others could see no difference in Him. It was only after He reached 29 that Jesus knew He had come to complete a stage of God’s work; before, He Himself did not know this, for the work done by God was not supernatural. When He attended a meeting in the synagogue at the age of twelve, Mary was looking for Him, and He just said one sentence, in the same manner as any other child: “Mother! Do you not know that I must place My Father’s will above all else?” Of course, since He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, could Jesus not have been special in some way? But His specialness did not mean that He was supernatural, but merely that He loved God more than any other young child. Although He was human in appearance, His essence was still special and different from others. It was only after the baptism, however, that He really sensed the Holy Spirit working in Him, sensed that He was God Himself. It was only when He reached the age of 33 that He truly realized that the Holy Spirit intended to carry out the work of crucifixion through Him. At the age of 32, He had come to know some inside truths, just as it is written in the Gospel of Matthew: “And Simon Peter answered and said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), and “From that time forth began Jesus to show to His disciples, how that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day” (Matthew 16:21). He did not know beforehand what work He was to do, but at a specific time. He did not fully know that as soon as He was born; the Holy Spirit worked gradually in Him, and there was a process to the work. If, at the very beginning, He had known that He was God, and Christ, and the incarnate Son of man, that He was to accomplish the work of crucifixion, then why did He not work before? Why was it only after telling His disciples about His ministry that Jesus felt sorrow, and prayed earnestly for this? Why did John open the way for Him and baptize Him before He had come to understand many things that He had not understood? What this proves is that it was the work of God incarnated in the flesh, and so for Him to understand, and achieve, there was a process, for He was God’s incarnate flesh, whose work was different from that done directly by the Spirit.

Every step of God’s work follows one and the same stream, and so in God’s six-thousand-year management plan, each step has been closely followed by the next, from the foundation of the world right up until today. If there were no one to pave the way, then there would be no one to come after; since there are those who come after, there are those who pave the way. In this way the work has been passed down, step-by-step. One step follows the other, and without someone to open the way, it would be impossible to begin the work, and God would have no means of taking His work forward. No step disrupts the other, and each follows the other in sequence to form a stream; this is all done by the same Spirit. But regardless of whether someone opens the way or carries on the work of another, this does not determine their identity. Is this not right? John opened the way, and Jesus carried on his work, so does this prove that the identity of Jesus is lower than that of John? Jehovah carried out His work before Jesus, so can you say that Jehovah is greater than Jesus? Whether they paved the way or carried on the work of others is not important; what is most important is the essence of their work, and the identity that it represents. Is this not right? Since God intended to work among man, He had to raise up those who could do the work of paving the way. When John had just begun to preach, he said, “Prepare you the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.” “Repent you: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He spoke thus from the very beginning, and why was he able to say these words? In terms of the order in which these words were spoken, it was John who first spoke the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus who spoke afterward. According to the notions of man, it was John who opened up the new path, and so of course John was greater than Jesus. But John did not say he was Christ, and God did not bear testimony to him as the beloved Son of God, but merely used him to open up the way and prepare the way for the Lord. He paved the way for Jesus, but he could not work on behalf of Jesus. All the work of man was also maintained by the Holy Spirit.

In the age of the Old Testament, it was Jehovah who led the way, and the work of Jehovah represented the entire age of the Old Testament, and all of the work done in Israel. Moses merely upheld this work on earth, and his labors are considered to be the cooperation provided by man. At the time, it was Jehovah who spoke, calling to Moses, and He raised Moses up among the people of Israel, and made him lead them into the wilderness and on to Canaan. This was not the work of Moses himself, but that which was personally directed by Jehovah, and so Moses cannot be called God. Moses also set down the law, but this law was personally decreed by Jehovah. It was just that He had Moses express it. Jesus also made commandments, and He abolished the law of the Old Testament and set out the commandments for the new age. Why is Jesus God Himself? Because there is a difference. At the time, the work done by Moses did not represent the age, nor did it open a new way; he was directed ahead by Jehovah and was merely one who was used by God. When Jesus came, John had carried out a step of work of paving the way and had begun to spread the gospel of the kingdom of heaven (the Holy Spirit had started this). When Jesus came, He directly did His own work, but there was a great difference between His work and Moses’ work. Isaiah also spoke many prophecies, yet why was he not God Himself? Jesus did not speak so many prophecies, yet why was He God Himself? No one dared to say that the work of Jesus at that time all came from the Holy Spirit, nor did they dare to say it all came from the will of man, or that it was totally the work of God Himself. Man had no way of analyzing such things. It can be said that Isaiah did such work, and spoke such prophecies, and they all came from the Holy Spirit; they did not come directly from Isaiah himself, but were revelations from Jehovah. Jesus did not do a great amount of work, and did not say many words, nor did He speak many prophecies. To man, His preaching did not seem particularly exalted, yet He was God Himself, and this is inexplicable by man. No one has ever believed in John, or Isaiah, or David, nor has anyone ever called them God, or David the God, or John the God; no one has ever spoken thus, and only Jesus has ever been called Christ. This classification is made according to God’s testimony, the work He undertook, and the ministry He performed. With regard to the great men of the Bible—Abraham, David, Joshua, Daniel, Isaiah, John and Jesus—through the work they did, you can tell who is God Himself, and which kinds of people are prophets, and which are apostles. Who was used by God, and who was God Himself, is differentiated and determined by the essence and kind of work they did. If you are unable to tell the difference, then this proves that you do not know what it means to believe in God. Jesus is God because He spoke so many words, and did so much work, in particular His demonstration of many miracles. Likewise, John, too, did much work, and spoke many words, as did Moses; why were they not called God? Adam was created directly by God; why was he not called God, instead of only being called a created being? If someone says to you, “Today, God has done so much work, and spoken so many words; He is God Himself. Then, since Moses spoke so many words, he too must have been God Himself!” you should ask them in return, “At that time, why did God bear testimony to Jesus, and not John, as God Himself? Did John not come before Jesus? Which was greater, the work of John or Jesus? To man, John’s work appears greater than Jesus’, but why did the Holy Spirit bear testimony to Jesus, and not John?” The same thing is happening today! At that time, when Moses led the people of Israel, Jehovah spoke to him from amongst the clouds. Moses did not speak directly, but instead was guided directly by Jehovah. This was the work of the Israel of the Old Testament. Within Moses there was not the Spirit, nor God’s being. He could not do that work, and so there is a great difference between the work done by him and the work done by Jesus. And that is because the work they did was different! Whether someone is used by God, or is a prophet, an apostle, or God Himself, can be discerned by the nature of his work, and this will put an end to your doubts. In the Bible it is written that only the Lamb can open the seven seals. Throughout the ages, there have been many expositors of the scriptures among those great figures, and so can you say that they are all the Lamb? Can you say that their explanations all come from God? They are merely expositors; they do not have the identity of the Lamb. How could they be worthy to open the seven seals? It is true that “Only the Lamb can open the seven seals,” but He does not only come to open the seven seals; there is no necessity to this work, it is done incidentally. He is perfectly clear about His own work; is it necessary for Him to spend much time interpreting the scriptures? Must “the Age of the Lamb Interpreting the Scriptures” be added to the six thousand years of work? He comes to do new work, but He also provides some revelations about the work of times past, making people understand the truth of six thousand years of work. There is no need to explain too many passages from the Bible; it is the work of today that is key, that is important. You should know that God does not come to especially break the seven seals, but to do the work of salvation.

You only know that Jesus shall descend during the last days, but how exactly will He descend? A sinner such as you, who has just been redeemed, and has not been changed, or been perfected by God, can you conform to God’s will? For you, you who are still of your old self, it is true that you were saved by Jesus, and that you are not counted as a sinner because of the salvation of God, but this does not prove that you are not sinful, and are not impure. How can you be saintly if you have not been changed? Within, you are beset by impurity, selfish and mean, yet you still wish to descend with Jesus—you should be so lucky! You have missed a step in your belief in God: You have merely been redeemed, but you have not been changed. For you to conform to God’s will, God must personally do the work of changing and cleansing you; if you are only redeemed, you will be incapable of attaining sanctity. In this way you will be unqualified to share in the good blessings of God, for you have missed out a step in God’s work of managing man, which is the key step of changing and perfecting. You, a sinner who has just been redeemed, are therefore incapable of directly inheriting God’s inheritance.

Without the start of this new stage of work, who knows how far you evangelists, preachers, expositors and so-called great spiritual men would go! Without the start of this new stage of work, what you talk of would be obsolete! It is either about ascending to the throne, or preparing the stature of becoming a king; either denying the self or subduing one’s body; either being patient or learning lessons from all things; either humility or love. Is this not singing the same old tune? It is just a case of calling the same thing by a different name! Either covering one’s head and breaking bread, or laying hands and praying, and healing the sick and casting out demons. Could there be any new work? Could there be any prospect of development? If you continue to lead in this way, you will blindly follow doctrine, or abide by convention. You believe your work to be so lofty, but do you not know that it was all passed and taught by those “old men” of ancient times? Is all that you say and do not the last words of those old men? Is it not what was charged by these old men before they passed away? Do you think that your actions surpass those of the apostles and prophets of past generations, and even surpass all things? The beginning of this stage of work has brought an end to your adoration of Witness Lee’s work of seeking to become a king and ascend to the throne, and it has arrested your arrogance and bluster, so that you are unable to meddle in this stage of work. Without this stage of work, you would sink ever deeper until you were irredeemable. There is too much that is old among you! Fortunately, the work of today has brought you back; otherwise, who knows what direction you would take! Since God is a God who is always new and never old, why do you not seek new things? Why do you always stick to the old things? And so, knowing the work of the Holy Spirit today is of the utmost importance!

You Should Put Aside the Blessings of Status and Understand God’s Will to Bring Salvation to Man

From a human point of view, it is not possible for the descendants of Moab to be made complete, nor are they qualified to be made so. The children of David, on the other hand, certainly have hope, and can indeed be made complete. If someone is a descendant of Moab, they cannot be made complete. Even now, you still do not know the significance of the work being done amongst you; at this stage, you still hold your future prospects in your hearts, and are loath to relinquish them. No one cares why today God has just chosen to work on a most unworthy group of people such as yourselves. Could it be that He has made a mistake in this work? Is this work a momentary oversight? Why has God, who has always known you are the children of Moab, come down precisely to work in your midst? Does this never occur to you? Does God never consider this when doing His work? Does He behave in a brash manner? Did He not know from the start that you are the descendants of Moab? Do you not know to consider these things? Where have your notions gone? Has that healthy thinking of yours become maladjusted? Where have your cleverness and wisdom gone? Is it that you have such a magnanimous bearing that you do not take heed of such small matters? Your minds are most sensitive to such things as your future prospects and your own fate, but when it comes to anything else, they are numb, dull-witted, and utterly ignorant. What on earth is it that you believe in? Your future prospects? Or God? Is everything you believe in not your beautiful destination? Is it not your future prospects? How much of the way of life do you now understand? How much have you attained? Do you think that the work being done now on the descendants of Moab is done to humiliate you? Is it done deliberately to expose your ugliness? Is it done intentionally to make you accept chastisement, and then to toss you into the lake of fire? I never said that you have no future prospects, much less that you have to be destroyed or suffer perdition. Have I publicly announced such things? You say you are without hope, but is this not a conclusion you yourself have drawn? Is this not the effect of your own mindset? Do your own conclusions count? If I say you are not blessed, then you will certainly be the object of ruination; and if I say you are blessed, then you will definitely not be destroyed. I am only saying that you are the descendant of Moab; I did not say that you would be destroyed. It is simply that the descendants of Moab have been cursed, and are one breed of corrupt humans. Sin was mentioned earlier; are you not all sinful? Have not sinners all been corrupted by Satan? Do sinners not all defy and rebel against God? Are those who defy God not to be cursed? Must sinners not all be destroyed? In that case, who among people of flesh and blood can be saved? How can you have survived to this day? You have grown negative because you are the descendants of Moab; do you not also count as humans, who are sinners? How have you lasted to this day? When perfection is mentioned, you become happy. After hearing that you must experience the great tribulation, you feel that this makes you even more blessed. You think that you can become overcomers after emerging from the tribulation, and that this, moreover, is God’s great blessing and His great exaltation of you. Upon mention of Moab, tumult arises among you; adults and children alike feel unspeakable sadness and you have absolutely no joy in your hearts, and you regret being born. You do not understand the significance of this stage of work being done on the descendants of Moab; you only know to seek high positions, and whenever you perceive that there is no hope, you backslide. Upon mention of perfection and the future destination, you feel happy; you have put your faith in God in order to gain blessings and so that you can have a good destination. Some people now feel apprehension because of their status. Because they are of low worth and low status, they do not wish to seek to be perfected. First, perfection was spoken about, and then mention was made of Moab’s descendants, so people negated the path of perfection mentioned previously. This is because from start to finish, you have never known the significance of this work, nor do you care about its significance. You are too small of stature, and cannot endure even the slightest disturbance. When you see that your own status is too low, you become negative and lose the confidence to go on seeking. People merely regard the attainment of grace and the enjoyment of peace as symbols of faith, and see the seeking of blessings as the basis for their belief in God. Very few people seek to know God or seek a change in their disposition. In their faith, people seek to make God give them a suitable destination and all the grace they need, to make Him their servant, to have Him maintain a peaceful, friendly relationship with them so that, no matter when, there would never be any conflict between them. That is, their belief in God demands that He promise to meet all their requirements and to bestow upon them whatever they pray for, in keeping with the words they have read in the Bible, “I will listen to all your prayers.” They expect God not to judge or prune anyone, for He has always been the merciful Savior Jesus who keeps a good relationship with people at all times and in all places. Here is how people believe in God: They just shamelessly make demands of God, believing that whether they are rebellious or obedient, He would just grant everything to them blindly. They just continually “collect debts” from God, believing He must “repay” them without any resistance and, moreover, pay double; they think, whether God has gotten anything from them or not, He can only be manipulated by them, and He cannot arbitrarily orchestrate people, much less reveal to people His wisdom and righteous disposition, which have been hidden for many years, whenever He wants and without their permission. They simply confess their sins to God, believing God would just absolve them, that He would not get sick of doing so, and that this will go on forever. They just order God about, believing He would just obey them, because it is recorded in the Bible that God did not come to be served by humans, but to serve them, and that He is here to be their servant. Have you not always believed in this way? Whenever you are unable to gain something from God, you wish to run away; when you do not understand something, you grow so resentful, and even go so far as to hurl all kinds of abuse at Him. You simply will not allow God Himself to fully express His wisdom and wonder; instead, you just want to enjoy temporary ease and comfort. Until now, your attitude in your belief in God has merely consisted of the same old views. If God shows you just a slight bit of majesty, you become unhappy. Do you see now exactly how great your stature is? Do not assume that you are all loyal to God when in fact your old views have not changed. When nothing befalls you, you believe that everything is going smoothly, and your love for God reaches a high point. When something minor happens to you, you fall down into Hades. Is this being loyal to God?

If the final stage of the work of conquest were to begin in Israel, then such work of conquest would have no meaning. The work is most significant when done in China, and when it is done on you people. You are the lowliest of people, the people with the least status; you are the ones at the lowest level of this society, and you are those who least acknowledged God in the beginning. You are the people who have strayed farthest from God and who have been harmed most severely. Because this stage of work is only for the sake of conquest, is it not most suitable for you to be chosen to bear the future witness? If the first step of the work of conquest were not to be done on you people, then it would become difficult to advance the work of conquest that is to come, for the work of conquest that will follow will achieve results based on the fact of this work being done today. The current work of conquest is only the beginning of the overall work of conquest. You are the first batch to be conquered; you are representatives of all humankind that will be conquered. People who genuinely possess knowledge will see that all the work God does today is great, and that He not only allows people to know their own rebelliousness, but also reveals their status. The purpose and meaning of His words is not to make people negative, nor is it to topple them. It is for them to attain enlightenment and salvation through His words; it is to awaken their spirit by way of His words. Ever since the world’s creation, man has lived under Satan’s power, neither knowing nor believing that there is a God. That these people can be included in God’s great salvation and can be greatly raised up by God indeed shows God’s love; all those who truly understand will believe this. What about those who have no such knowledge? They will say, “Ah, God says we are the descendants of Moab; He said this with His own words. Can we still obtain a good outcome? We are the descendants of Moab, and we have resisted Him in the past. God has come to condemn us; do you not see how He has always judged us, right from the start? Since we have resisted God, this is how we should be chastised.” Are these words correct? Today God judges you, chastises you, and condemns you, but you must know that the point of your condemnation is for you to know yourself. He condemns, curses, judges, and chastises so that you might know yourself, so that your disposition might change, and, moreover, so that you might know your worth, and see that all of God’s actions are righteous and in accordance with His disposition and the requirements of His work, that He works in accordance with His plan for man’s salvation, and that He is the righteous God who loves, saves, judges, and chastises man. If you only know that you are of lowly status, that you are corrupt and rebellious, but do not know that God wishes to make plain His salvation through the judgment and chastisement that He does in you today, then you have no way of gaining experience, much less are you capable of continuing forward. God has not come to kill or destroy, but to judge, curse, chastise, and save. Until His 6,000-year management plan comes to a close—before He reveals the outcome of each category of man—God’s work on earth will be for the sake of salvation; its purpose is purely to make those who love Him complete—thoroughly so—and to bring them to surrender under His dominion. No matter how God saves people, it is all done by making them break away from their old satanic nature; that is, He saves them by having them seek life. If they do not do so, then they will have no way to accept God’s salvation. Salvation is the work of God Himself, and the seeking for life is something that man must take on in order to accept salvation. In the eyes of man, salvation is the love of God, and the love of God cannot be chastisement, judgment, and curses; salvation must contain love, compassion, and, moreover, words of solace, as well as boundless blessings bestowed by God. People believe that when God saves man, He does so by moving them with His blessings and grace, so that they can give their hearts to God. That is to say, His touching man is His saving them. This sort of salvation is done by striking a deal. Only when God grants them a hundredfold will man come to surrender before God’s name and strive to do well for Him and bring Him glory. This is not what God intends for mankind. God has come to work on earth in order to save corrupt mankind; there is no falsehood in this. If there were, He would certainly not have come to do His work in person. In the past, His means of salvation involved showing the utmost love and compassion, such that He gave His all to Satan in exchange for the whole of mankind. The present is nothing like the past: The salvation bestowed upon you today occurs at the time of the last days, during the classification of each according to kind; the means of your salvation is not love or compassion, but chastisement and judgment, in order that man may be more thoroughly saved. Thus, all that you receive is chastisement, judgment, and merciless smiting, but know this: In this heartless smiting there is not the slightest punishment. Regardless of how harsh My words might be, what befall you are but a few words that might appear utterly heartless to you, and no matter how angry I might be, what rain upon you are still words of teaching, and I do not mean to harm you or put you to death. Is this not all fact? Know that nowadays, whether it be righteous judgment or heartless refinement and chastisement, everything is for the sake of salvation. Regardless of whether today each is classified according to kind or the categories of man are laid bare, the purpose of all of God’s words and work is to save those who truly love God. Righteous judgment is brought to purify man, and heartless refinement is done to cleanse them; harsh words or chastening are both done to purify and are for the sake of salvation. Thus, today’s method of salvation is unlike that of the past. Today, you are brought salvation through righteous judgment, and this is a good tool for classifying you each according to kind. Moreover, ruthless chastisement serves as your utmost salvation—and what have you to say in the face of such chastisement and judgment? Have you not always enjoyed salvation, from start to finish? You have seen God incarnate and realized His omnipotence and wisdom; in addition, you have experienced repeated smiting and discipline. However, have you not also received supreme grace? Are your blessings not greater than those of anyone else? Your graces are more bounteous even than the glory and riches enjoyed by Solomon! Think about it: If My intention in coming were to condemn and punish you rather than save you, could your days have lasted so long? Could you sinful beings of flesh and blood have survived until today? If My goal were merely to punish you, then why would I have become flesh and embarked upon such a great enterprise? Could punishing you mere mortals not simply be done by uttering a single word? Would I still need to destroy you after purposely condemning you? Do you still not believe these words of Mine? Could I save man merely through love and compassion? Or could I only use the crucifixion to save man? Is My righteous disposition not more conducive to making man completely submissive? Is it not more capable of thoroughly saving man?

Though My words may be stern, they are all said for man’s salvation, as I am only speaking words and not punishing man’s flesh. These words cause man to live in the light, to know that the light exists, to know that the light is precious, and, even more so, to know how beneficial these words are to them, as well as to know that God is salvation. Though I have uttered many words of chastisement and judgment, what they represent has not been done unto you in deed. I have come to do My work and to speak My words, and though My words may be strict, they are spoken in judgment of your corruption and your rebelliousness. The purpose of My doing this remains to save man from Satan’s power; I am using My words to save man. My purpose is not to harm man with My words. My words are stern in order to achieve results in My work. Only through such work can man come to know themselves and break away from their rebellious disposition. The greatest significance of the work of words is allowing people to put the truth into practice after having understood it, to achieve changes in their disposition, and to gain knowledge of themselves and of the work of God. Only doing the work by way of speaking words can make possible the communication between God and man, and only words can explain the truth. Working in this way is the best means of conquering man; apart from the utterance of words, no other method is capable of giving people a clearer understanding of the truth and the work of God. Thus, in His final stage of work, God speaks to man in order to unlock for them all the truths and mysteries that they do not yet understand, allowing them to gain from God the true way and the life, thereby satisfying His will. The purpose of God’s work on man is to enable them to satisfy God’s will, and it is done to bring them salvation. Therefore, during the time of His salvation of man, He does not do the work of punishing them. While bringing salvation to man, God does not punish evil or reward good, nor does He reveal the destinations of various kinds of people. Rather, only after the final stage of His work is complete will He do the work of punishing evil and rewarding good, and only then will He reveal the ends of all the different sorts of people. Those who are punished will be those who are actually unable to be saved, while those who are saved will be those who have obtained God’s salvation during the time of His salvation of man. While God’s work of salvation is being done, every single person who can be saved will be saved as far as possible, and none of them discarded, for the purpose of God’s work is to save man. All those who, during the time of God’s salvation of man, are unable to achieve a change in their disposition—as well as all those who are unable to submit to God completely—will become objects for punishment. This stage of work—the work of words—will unlock for people all of the ways and mysteries that they do not understand, so that they can understand the will of God and God’s requirements of them, and so that they can have the prerequisites to put God’s words into practice and achieve changes in their disposition. God uses only words to do His work and does not punish people for being a little rebellious; this is because now is the time of the work of salvation. If anyone who acts rebelliously were punished, then no one would have the opportunity to be saved; everyone would be punished and fall into Hades. The purpose of words that judge man is to allow them to know themselves and submit to God; it is not to punish them with such judgment. During the time of the work of words, many people will expose their rebelliousness and defiance, as well as their lack of submission toward the incarnate God. Nevertheless, He will not punish all these people as a result, but instead will only cast aside those who are corrupt to the core and who cannot be saved. He will give their flesh to Satan, and, in a few cases, terminate their flesh. Those remaining will continue to follow and experience being pruned. If, while following, these people still are unable to accept being pruned, and become more and more degenerate, then they will have lost their chance for salvation. Each person who has accepted being conquered by God’s words will have ample opportunity for salvation; God’s salvation of each of these people will show His utmost leniency. In other words, they will be shown the utmost tolerance. As long as people turn back from the wrong path, and as long as they can repent, God will give them opportunities to obtain His salvation. When humans first rebel against God, He has no desire to put them to death; rather, He does all He can to save them. If someone really has no room for salvation, then God will cast them aside. The reason God is slow to punish certain people is that He wishes to save everyone who can be saved. He judges, enlightens, and guides people only with words, and does not use a rod to put them to death. Employing words to bring humans salvation is the purpose and significance of the final stage of work.

How Can Man Who Has Delimited God in His Notions Receive the Revelations of God?

The work of God is always moving forward, and though the purpose of His work does not change, the method by which He works constantly changes, which means that those who follow God are constantly changing, too. The more work God does, the more thorough man’s knowledge of God is. Corresponding changes occur, too, in man’s disposition in the wake of God’s work. However, it is because the work of God is ever-changing that those who do not know the work of the Holy Spirit and those absurd people who do not know the truth become people who resist God. Not ever does the work of God conform to the notions of man, for His work is always new and never old, and never does He repeat old work, but rather forges ahead with work never done before. As God does not repeat His work, and man invariably judges God’s current work by the work He did in the past, it has become exceedingly difficult for God to carry out each stage of work of the new age. Man has far too many difficulties! He is too conservative in his thinking! No one knows the work of God, yet everyone delimits it. When he leaves God, man loses life, truth, and God’s blessings, yet neither does he accept life nor truth, much less the greater blessings God bestows upon mankind. All men wish to gain God, yet are unable to tolerate any changes in God’s work. Those who do not accept God’s new work believe that the work of God is immutable, that it forever remains at a standstill. In their belief, all that is needed to gain eternal salvation from God is to observe the law, and as long as they repent and confess their sins, the will of God will always be satisfied. They are of the opinion that God can only be the God under the law and the God who was nailed to the cross for man; it is their opinion, too, that God should not and cannot exceed the Bible. It is precisely these opinions that have shackled them firmly to the laws of old and nailed them to dead rules. There are even more who believe that whatever the new work of God might be, it has to be substantiated by prophecies, and that in each stage of such work, all those who follow Him with a “true” heart must also be shown revelations; if not, such work could not be the work of God. It is already no easy task for man to come to know God. Taken in addition to man’s absurd heart and his rebellious nature of self-importance and self-conceit, it becomes all the more difficult for him to accept God’s new work. Man neither gives careful scrutiny to the new work of God, nor accepts it with humility; instead, he adopts an attitude of contempt as he awaits revelations and guidance from God. Is this not the behavior of those who rebel against and resist God? How can such people gain God’s approval?

Jesus said that the work of Jehovah had fallen behind in the Age of Grace, just as I say today, that the work of Jesus has also fallen behind. If there had been only the Age of Law and not the Age of Grace, then Jesus would not have been crucified and could not have redeemed all mankind. If there had only been the Age of Law, could mankind ever have gotten as far as today? History moves forward, and is not history the natural law of God’s work? Is this not a depiction of His management of man throughout the entire universe? History moves forward, and so does the work of God. God’s will is constantly changing. He could not remain at a single stage of work for six thousand years, for as everyone knows, God is always new and never old, and He could not possibly keep doing work like the crucifixion, being nailed to the cross once, twice, three times…. It would be ridiculous to think thus. God does not keep on doing the same work; His work is ever-changing and always new, much as how I speak new words to you and do new work each day. This is the work I do, and what is key are the words “new” and “wondrous.” “God is immutable, and God will always be God”: this saying is indeed true; the substance of God does not change, God is always God, and He could never become Satan, but this does not prove that His work is as constant and invariable as His substance. You declare God is immutable, but how, then, can you explain that God is always new and never old? The work of God continuously spreads and constantly changes, and His will is continuously manifested and made known to man. As man experiences God’s work, his disposition changes without cease, as does his knowledge. Whence, then, does this change arise? Is it not from the ever-changing work of God? If the disposition of man can change, why cannot man allow My work and My words to continuously change also? Must I be subject to the restrictions of man? In this, are you not using forced arguments and perverted logic?

Following His resurrection, Jesus appeared to the disciples and said, “I send the promise of My Father on you: but tarry you in the city of Jerusalem, until you be endued with power from on high.” Do you know how these words can be explained? Are you, now, endued with His power? Do you understand what “power” refers to? Jesus proclaimed that the Spirit of truth would be bestowed upon man during the last days. The last days are here now; do you understand how the Spirit of truth expresses words? Where does the Spirit of truth appear and work? In the book of prophecy of the prophet Isaiah, there was never any mention that a child named Jesus would be born in the age of the New Testament; it was merely written that a male infant named Emmanuel would be born. Why was the name “Jesus” not mentioned? Nowhere in the Old Testament does this name appear, so why, then, do you still believe in Jesus? Surely you did not only start believing in Jesus after seeing Him with your own eyes, did you? Or did you begin to believe upon receiving a revelation? Would God really show you such grace? Would He bestow such great blessings upon you? What is the basis of your belief in Jesus? Why do you not believe that God has become flesh today? Why do you say that the absence of a revelation to you from God proves that He has not incarnated in the flesh? Must God inform people prior to commencing His work? Must He first receive their approval? Isaiah merely proclaimed that a male infant would be born in a manger; he never prophesied that Mary would give birth to Jesus. What exactly do you base your belief in Jesus born of Mary on? Surely your belief is not muddled? Some say that the name of God does not change. Why, then, did the name of Jehovah become Jesus? It was prophesied that the Messiah would come, so why then did a man by the name of Jesus come? Why did the name of God change? Was such work not carried out long ago? May God not do newer work today? The work of yesterday can be altered, and the work of Jesus can follow on from that of Jehovah. Cannot, then, the work of Jesus be succeeded by other work? If the name of Jehovah can be changed to Jesus, then cannot the name of Jesus also be changed? None of this is odd; it is just that people are too simple-minded. God will always be God. No matter how His work changes, and regardless of how His name might change, His disposition and wisdom will never change. If you believe that God can only be called by the name of Jesus, then your knowledge is far too limited. Do you dare assert that Jesus will forever be the name of God, that God will forever and always go by the name of Jesus, and that this will never change? Dare you assert with certainty that it is the name of Jesus that concluded the Age of Law and will also conclude the final age? Who can say that the grace of Jesus can bring the age to an end? If you lack a clear understanding of these truths, then not only will you be incapable of preaching the gospel, but you yourself will be unable to stand firm. When the day comes on which you resolve all the difficulties of those religious people and refute all their fallacies, that shall be proof that you are absolutely certain of this stage of work and have not the slightest doubt. If you are unable to refute their fallacies, then they will frame you and slander you. Would that not be disgraceful?

The Jews all read the Old Testament and knew of Isaiah’s prophecy that a male infant would be born in a manger. Why, then, despite being fully aware of this prophecy, did they still persecute Jesus? Was it not because of their rebellious nature and ignorance of the work of the Holy Spirit? At the time, the Pharisees believed the work of Jesus to be different from what they knew of the prophesied male infant, and people today reject God because the work of God incarnate does not conform to the Bible. Is not the essence of their rebelliousness toward God the same? Can you accept, without question, all the work of the Holy Spirit? If it is the work of the Holy Spirit, then it is the right stream, and you should accept it without any misgivings; you should not pick and choose what to accept. If you gain more insight into God and exercise more caution toward Him, then is this not uncalled for? You need not look for further substantiation from the Bible; if it is the work of the Holy Spirit, then you must accept it, for you believe in God to follow God, and you should not investigate Him. You should not seek further evidence of Me to prove that I am your God, but should be able to discern whether I am of benefit to you—this is what is most crucial. Even if you find much irrefutable proof within the Bible, it cannot bring you fully before Me. You merely live within the confines of the Bible, and not before Me; the Bible cannot help you know Me, nor can it deepen your love for Me. Though the Bible prophesied that a male infant would be born, none could fathom upon whom that prophecy would come to pass, for man did not know the work of God, and this is what caused the Pharisees to stand against Jesus. Some know that My work is in man’s interests, yet they continue to believe that Jesus and I are two entirely separate, mutually incompatible beings. At the time, Jesus only gave His disciples a series of sermons in the Age of Grace on such subjects as how to practice, how to gather together, how to supplicate in prayer, how to treat others, and so forth. The work He carried out was that of the Age of Grace, and He expounded only on how the disciples and those who followed Him ought to practice. He only did the work of the Age of Grace, and none of the work of the last days. When Jehovah set down the Old Testament law in the Age of Law, why did He not then do the work of the Age of Grace? Why did He not make clear in advance the work of the Age of Grace? Would this not have helped man to accept it? He only prophesied that a male infant would be born and come to power, but He did not carry out in advance the work of the Age of Grace. The work of God in each age has clear boundaries; He does only the work of the current age, and never carries out the next stage of work in advance. Only thus can His representative work of each age be brought to the fore. Jesus spoke only of the signs of the last days, of how to be patient and how to be saved, of how to repent and confess, and of how to bear the cross and endure suffering; never did He speak of how man in the last days should achieve entry, nor of how he should seek to satisfy God’s will. As such, is it not ridiculous to search the Bible for God’s work of the last days? What can you see by merely clutching the Bible? Be it an expositor of the Bible or a preacher, who could have seen the work of today in advance?

“He that has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” Have you now heard the words of the Holy Spirit? The words of God have come upon you. Do you hear them? God does the work of words in the last days, and such words are those of the Holy Spirit, for God is the Holy Spirit and can also become flesh; therefore, the words of the Holy Spirit, as spoken of in the past, are the words of God incarnate today. There are many absurd people who believe that since it is the Holy Spirit talking, His voice should speak from the heavens for people to hear. Anyone who thinks this way does not know the work of God. In truth, the utterances spoken by the Holy Spirit are those spoken by God become flesh. The Holy Spirit cannot speak directly to man; even in the Age of Law, Jehovah did not speak directly to the people. Would it not be far less likely that He would do so in this age today? For God to speak utterances to carry out work, He must become flesh; otherwise, His work would not be able to accomplish its goals. Those who deny God incarnate are those who do not know the Spirit or the principles by which God works. Those who believe that now is the age of the Holy Spirit, yet do not accept His new work, are those who live amid a vague and abstract faith. Such people shall never receive the work of the Holy Spirit. Those who ask only for the Holy Spirit to speak and carry out His work directly, and do not accept the words or work of God incarnate, shall never be able to step into the new age or be brought complete salvation by God!

Only Those Who Know God and His Work Can Satisfy God

The work of God incarnate includes two parts. When He became flesh for the first time, people did not believe in Him or know Him, and they nailed Jesus to the cross. Then, when He became flesh for the second time, people still did not believe in Him, much less know Him, and once again they nailed Christ to the cross. Is man not the enemy of God? If man does not know Him, how could man be the intimate of God? How could he be qualified to bear testimony to God? Are man’s claims of loving God, serving God, and glorifying God not all deceitful lies? If you devote your life to these unrealistic, impractical things, do you not labor in vain? How could you be God’s intimate when you do not even know who God is? Is such a pursuit not vague and abstract? Is it not deceitful? How can one be an intimate of God? What is the practical significance of being an intimate of God? Can you be an intimate of God’s Spirit? Can you see how great and exalted the Spirit is? To be the intimate of an invisible, intangible God—is that not vague and abstract? What is the practical significance of such a pursuit? Is it not all a deceitful lie? What you pursue is to become God’s intimate, yet in fact you are Satan’s lapdog, for you do not know God, and you pursue the non-existent “God of all things,” which is invisible, intangible, and a product of your own notions. Vaguely speaking, such a “God” is Satan, and practically speaking, it is you yourself. You seek to be your own intimate, yet still say you pursue to become the intimate of God—is that not blasphemy? What is the value of such a pursuit? If the Spirit of God does not become flesh, then the essence of God is merely an invisible, intangible Spirit of life, formless and amorphous, of the nonmaterial kind, unapproachable and incomprehensible to man. How could man be the intimate of an incorporeal, wondrous, unfathomable Spirit such as this? Is this not a joke? Such absurd reasoning is invalid and impractical. Created man is of an inherently different kind to the Spirit of God, so how could the two of them be intimates? If the Spirit of God were not realized in the flesh, if God did not become flesh and humble Himself by becoming a created being, then created man would be both unqualified and unable to be His intimate, and apart from those godly believers who may have the chance to be God’s intimates after their souls have entered into heaven, most people would be unable to become the intimates of God’s Spirit. And if people wish to become the intimates of God in heaven under the guidance of God incarnate, are they not astonishingly foolish non-humans? People merely pursue “faithfulness” to an invisible God, and pay not the slightest attention to the God that can be seen, for it is so easy to pursue an invisible God. People may do this however they like, but the pursuit of the visible God is not so easy. The person that seeks a vague God is absolutely unable to gain God, for things that are vague and abstract are all imagined by man, and incapable of being gained by man. If the God that came among you were a lofty and exalted God who was inaccessible to you, then how could you grasp His will? And how could you know and understand Him? If He only did His work, and had no normal contact with man, or was possessed of no normal humanity and unapproachable to mere mortals, then, even if He did much work for you but you had no contact with Him, and were unable to see Him, how could you know Him? If it were not for this flesh possessed of normal humanity, man would have no way of knowing God; it is only because of God’s incarnation that man is qualified to be the intimate of God in the flesh. People become God’s intimates because they come into contact with Him, because they live together with Him and keep Him company, and so gradually come to know Him. If it were not thus, would man’s pursuit not be in vain? That is to say, it is not all because of God’s work that man is able to be God’s intimate, but because of the practicality and normality of God incarnate. It is only because God becomes flesh that people have the chance to perform their duty, and the chance to worship the true God. Is this not the most realistic and practical truth? Now, do you still wish to be the intimate of God in heaven? Only when God humbles Himself to a certain point, which is to say, only when God becomes flesh, can man be His intimate and confidant. God is of the Spirit: How are people qualified to be the intimates of this Spirit, who is so exalted and unfathomable? Only when the Spirit of God descends into the flesh, and becomes a created being with the same exterior as man, can people understand His will and be gained by Him in a practical way. He speaks and works in the flesh, shares in the joys, sorrows, and tribulations of humankind, lives in the same world as humankind, protects humankind, and guides them, and through this He cleanses people and allows them to gain His salvation and His blessing. Only when people have gained these things and truly understood God’s will can they be the intimates of God. Only this is practical. If God were invisible and intangible to people, how then could they be His intimates? Is this not empty doctrine?

Having believed in God till now, many people still pursue that which is vague and abstract. They have no grasp of the practicality of God’s work today, and still live among words and doctrines. Moreover, most have yet to enter into the reality of new phrases such as the “new generation of those who love God,” the “intimate of God,” the “exemplar and model of loving God,” and the “style of Peter”; instead, their pursuit is still vague and abstract, they still grope around in doctrine, and they have no comprehension of the reality of these words. When the Spirit of God becomes flesh, you can see and touch His work in the flesh. Yet if you are still incapable of becoming His intimate, if you are still unable to be His confidant, then how could you be the confidant of the Spirit of God? If you do not know the God of today, how can you be one of the new generation of those who love God? Are these phrases not empty words and doctrines? Are you able to see the Spirit and grasp His will? Are these phrases not empty? It is not enough for you to simply speak these phrases and terms, and nor can you achieve God’s satisfaction through resolution alone. You are satisfied with only speaking these words, and you do so to satisfy your own desires, to satisfy your own unrealistic ideals, and to satisfy your own notions and thinking. If you do not know the God of today, then regardless of what you do, you will be unable to satisfy God’s will. What does it mean to be a confidant of God? Do you still not understand this? Since God’s intimate is man, so God is also man. That is, God has become flesh, and has become man. Only those who are of the same kind can call each other confidants, only then can they be considered intimates. If God were of the Spirit, how could created man become His intimate?

Your belief in God, your pursuit of the truth, and even the way you conduct yourself should all be based on reality: Everything you do should be practical, and you should not pursue things that are illusory and fanciful. There is no value to behaving in this way, and, moreover, no meaning to such a life. Because your pursuit and life are spent amid nothing more than falsehood and deceit, and because you do not pursue things that have value and significance, the only things you gain are absurd reasoning and doctrine that are not of the truth. Such things bear no relation to the significance and value of your existence, and can only bring you to a hollow realm. In this way, your whole life will be without any value or meaning—and if you do not pursue a life of meaning, then you could live a hundred years and it would all be for nothing. How could that be called a human life? Is it not actually the life of an animal? Likewise, if you try to follow the path of belief in God, yet make no attempt to pursue the God that can be seen and instead worship an invisible and intangible God, then is such pursuit not even more futile? In the end, your pursuit will become a pile of ruins. Of what benefit is such a pursuit to you? The biggest problem with man is that he only loves things that he cannot see or touch, things that are supremely mysterious and wondrous, and that are unimaginable by man and unattainable by mere mortals. The more unrealistic these things, the more they are analyzed by people, and people even pursue them heedless of all else, and attempt to obtain them. The more unrealistic they are, the more closely people scrutinize and analyze them, even going so far as to make up their own exhaustive ideas about them. On the contrary, the more realistic things are, the more dismissive people are toward them; they simply look down their noses at them, and are even contemptuous of them. Is this not precisely your attitude toward the realistic work I do today? The more realistic such things are, the more prejudiced you are against them. You do not spare any time to examine them, but simply ignore them; you look down your noses at these realistic, low-standard requirements, and even harbor numerous notions about this God who is most practical, and are simply incapable of accepting His practicality and normality. In this way, do you not hold to a vague belief? You have an unshakable belief in the vague God of times past, and no interest in the practical God of today. Is this not because the God of yesterday and the God of today are from two different eras? Is it not also because the God of yesterday is the exalted God of heaven, whereas the God of today is a tiny human being on earth? Is it not, moreover, because the God worshiped by man is the one produced by his notions, whereas the God of today is of tangible flesh, produced on earth? When all is said and done, is it not because the God of today is too realistic that man does not pursue Him? For what the God of today asks of people is precisely that which people are most unwilling to do, and which makes them feel ashamed. Is this not making things difficult for people? Does this not lay bare people’s scars? In this way, many people do not pursue the realistic God, the practical God, and so they become enemies of the incarnate God, which is to say, antichrists. Is this not an obvious fact? In the past, when God had yet to become flesh, you may have been a religious figure, or a devout believer. After God became flesh, many such devout believers unwittingly became antichrists. Do you know what is going on here? In your belief in God, you do not concentrate on reality or pursue the truth, but instead obsess over falsehoods—is this not the clearest source of your enmity to God incarnate? God incarnate is called Christ, so are not all those who do not believe in God incarnate antichrists? So, is the one you believe in and love truly this God in the flesh? Is it really this living, breathing God who is most realistic and extraordinarily normal? What, exactly, is the objective of your pursuit? Is it in heaven or on earth? Is it a notion or is it the truth? Is it God or is it some supernatural being? In fact, the truth is the most practical of life’s aphorisms, and the highest of such aphorisms among all mankind. Because it is the requirement that God makes of man, and is the work personally done by God, thus it is called “life’s aphorism.” It is not an aphorism summed up from something, nor is it a famous quote from a great figure. Instead, it is the utterance to mankind from the Sovereign of the heavens and earth and all things; it is not some words summed up by man, but the inherent life of God. And so it is called “the highest of all life’s aphorisms.” People’s pursuit of putting the truth into practice is the performance of their duty—that is to say, it is the pursuit of satisfying God’s requirement. The essence of this requirement is the most realistic of all truths, rather than empty doctrine achievable by no man. If your pursuit is nothing but doctrine and contains no reality, do you not rebel against the truth? Are you not someone who attacks the truth? How could such a person be someone who seeks to love God? People who are without reality are those who betray the truth, and they are all inherently rebellious!

Regardless of how you pursue, you must, above all else, understand the work that God does today, and you must know the significance of this work. You must understand and know what work God brings when He comes in the last days, what disposition He brings, and what will be made complete in man. If you do not know or understand the work that He has come to do in the flesh, then how can you grasp His will, and how can you become His intimate? In fact, being the intimate of God is not complicated, but neither is it simple. If people can understand it thoroughly and put it into practice, then it becomes uncomplicated; if people cannot understand it thoroughly, then it becomes a lot harder, and, furthermore, they become prone to having their pursuit lead them into vagueness. If, in the pursuit of God, people do not have their own position to stand by, and do not know what truth they should hold to, then this means that they have no foundation, and so it becomes difficult for them to stand firm. Today, there are so many who do not understand the truth, who cannot distinguish between good and evil or tell what to love or hate. Such people can hardly stand firm. Key to the belief in God is being able to put the truth into practice, to care for God’s will, to know God’s work on man when He comes in the flesh and the principles by which He speaks. Do not follow the masses. You must have principles in what you should enter into, and you must hold to them. Holding firm to those things within you that are brought by God’s enlightenment will be of help to you. If you do not, today you will veer one way, tomorrow you will veer the other, and you will never gain anything practical. To be like this is of no benefit to your own life. Those who do not understand the truth always follow others: If people say that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, then you, too, say it is the work of the Holy Spirit; if people say it is the work of an evil spirit, then you, too, become doubtful, or also say it is the work of an evil spirit. You always parrot the words of others, and are incapable of distinguishing anything by yourself, nor are you able to think for yourself. This is someone without a position, who is unable to differentiate—such a person is a worthless wretch! You always repeat the words of others: Today it is said that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, but there is a probability that one day someone will say it is not the work of the Holy Spirit, and that it is in fact nothing but the deeds of man—yet you cannot discern this, and when you witness it being said by others, you say the same thing. It is actually the work of the Holy Spirit, but you say it is the work of man; have you not become one of those who blaspheme against the work of the Holy Spirit? In this, have you not opposed God because you cannot differentiate? Perhaps one day some fool will appear who says that “this is the work of an evil spirit,” and when you hear these words you will be at a loss, and once again you will be constrained by the words of others. Every time someone stirs up disturbance, you are incapable of standing by your position, and this is all because you do not possess the truth. Believing in God and seeking to know God is no simple matter. These things cannot be achieved simply by gathering together and listening to preaching, and you cannot be perfected by passion alone. You must experience, and know, and be principled in your actions, and gain the work of the Holy Spirit. When you have undergone experiences, you will be able to discern many things—you will be able to distinguish between good and evil, between justice and wickedness, between what is of flesh and blood and what is of the truth. You should be able to distinguish between all these things, and in so doing, no matter the circumstances, you will never be lost. Only this is your real stature.

Knowing the work of God is no simple matter. You should have standards and an objective in your pursuit, you should know how to seek the true way, how to measure whether or not it is the true way, and whether or not it is the work of God. What is the most basic principle in seeking the true way? You have to look at whether or not there is the work of the Holy Spirit in this way, whether or not these words are the expression of the truth, who is testified to, and what it can bring you. Distinguishing between the true way and the false way requires several aspects of basic knowledge, the most fundamental of which is to tell whether or not the work of the Holy Spirit is present therein. For the essence of people’s belief in God is the belief in the Spirit of God, and even their belief in God incarnate is because this flesh is the embodiment of the Spirit of God, which means that such belief is still belief in the Spirit. There are differences between the Spirit and the flesh, but because this flesh comes from the Spirit, and is the Word become flesh, thus what man believes in is still the inherent essence of God. So, in distinguishing whether or not it is the true way, above all you must look at whether or not it has the work of the Holy Spirit, after which you must look at whether or not there is truth in this way. The truth is the life disposition of normal humanity, which is to say, that which was required of man when God created him in the beginning, namely, normal humanity in its entirety (including human sense, insight, wisdom, and the basic knowledge of being man). That is, you need to look at whether or not this way can lead people into a life of normal humanity, whether or not the truth that is spoken of is required according to the reality of normal humanity, whether or not this truth is practical and realistic, and whether or not it is most timely. If there is truth, then it is able to lead people into normal and real experiences; people, furthermore, become ever more normal, their human sense becomes ever more complete, their life in the flesh and the spiritual life become ever more orderly, and their emotions become ever more normal. This is the second principle. There is one other principle, which is whether or not people have an increasing knowledge of God, and whether or not experiencing such work and truth can inspire a God-loving heart in them and bring them ever closer to God. In this it can be measured whether or not this way is the true way. Most fundamental is whether this way is realistic rather than supernatural, and whether or not it is able to provide for the life of man. If it conforms to these principles, the conclusion can be drawn that this way is the true way. I say these words not to make you accept other ways in your future experiences, nor as a prediction that there will be the work of another new age in the future. I say them so that you may be certain that the way of today is the true way, so that you will not only be partially sure in your belief in the work of today and unable to gain insight into it. There are even many who, despite being certain, still follow in confusion; such certainty has no principle to it, and such people must be cast out sooner or later. Even those who are especially ardent in their following are three parts sure and five parts unsure, which shows that they have no foundation. Because your caliber is too poor and your foundation too shallow, you have no understanding of differentiation. God does not repeat His work, He does not do work that is not realistic, He does not make excessive requirements of man, and He does not do work that is beyond the sense of man. All the work He does is within the scope of man’s normal sense, and does not exceed the sense of normal humanity, and His work is done according to man’s normal requirements. If it is the work of the Holy Spirit, people become ever more normal, and their humanity becomes ever more normal. People gain an increasing knowledge of their corrupt satanic disposition, and of the substance of man, and they also gain an ever greater longing for the truth. That is to say, the life of man grows and grows, and the corrupt disposition of man becomes more and more capable of change—all of which is the meaning of God becoming the life of man. If a way is incapable of revealing those things that are the substance of man, is incapable of changing the disposition of man, and, moreover, is incapable of bringing people before God or giving them a true understanding of God, and even causes their humanity to become ever more lowly and their sense ever more abnormal, then this way must not be the true way, and it may be the work of an evil spirit, or the old way. In short, it cannot be the present work of the Holy Spirit. You have believed in God for all these years, yet you have no inkling of the principles for differentiating between the true way and the false way, or for seeking the true way. Most people are not even interested in these matters; they merely go where the majority go, and repeat what the majority say. How is this someone who seeks the true way? And how can such people find the true way? If you grasp these several key principles, then whatever happens, you will not be misled. Today, it is crucial that people be able to make distinctions; this is what should be possessed by normal humanity, and this is what people must possess in their experience. If, even today, people still distinguish nothing in the process of following, and if their human sense still has not grown, then people are too foolish, and their pursuit is mistaken and deviated. There is not the slightest differentiation in your pursuit today, and while it is true, as you say, that you have found the true way, have you gained it? Have you been able to distinguish anything? What is the essence of the true way? In the true way, you have not gained the true way; you have not gained anything of the truth. This is to say, you have not achieved that which God requires of you, and thus there has been no change in your corruption. If you continue to pursue in this way, you will ultimately be cast out. Having followed to this day, you should be certain that the way that you have taken is the right way, and should have no further doubts. Many people are always uncertain and stop pursuing the truth because of some small matters. Such people are those who have no knowledge of God’s work; they are those who follow God in confusion. People who do not know God’s work are incapable of being His intimates, or of bearing testimony to Him. I advise those who only seek blessings and only pursue that which is vague and abstract to pursue the truth as soon as possible, so that their life may have meaning. Do not fool yourselves anymore!

The Difference Between the Ministry of God Incarnate and the Duty of Man

You must come to know the visions of God’s work and grasp the general direction of His work. This is positive entry. Once you have accurately mastered the truth of visions, your entry will be secure; no matter how God’s work changes, you will remain steadfast in your heart, be clear about the visions, and have a goal for your entry and your pursuit. In this way, all the experience and knowledge within you will grow deeper and become more detailed. Once you have grasped the bigger picture in its entirety, you will suffer no losses in life, nor will you go astray. If you do not come to know these steps of work, you shall suffer loss at each step, and it will take you more than a few days to turn things around, nor will you be able to set upon the right track in even a couple of weeks. Will this not cause delays? There is much in the way of positive entry and practice that you must master. As for the visions of God’s work, you must grasp the following points: the significance of His work of conquest, the future path to being made perfect, what must be achieved through experiencing trials and tribulations, the significance of judgment and chastisement, the principles behind the work of the Holy Spirit, and the principles behind perfection and conquest. These all belong to the truth of visions. The rest are the three stages of work in the Age of Law, the Age of Grace, and the Age of Kingdom, as well as future testimony. These, too, are the truth of visions, and they are what is most fundamental as well as most crucial. At present, there is so much that you should enter into and practice, and it is now more layered and more detailed. If you have no knowledge of these truths, this proves that you have yet to achieve entry. Most of the time, people’s knowledge of the truth is too shallow; they are unable to put into practice certain basic truths and do not know how to handle even trivial matters. The reason that people are unable to practice truth is because their disposition is rebellious, and because their knowledge of the work of today is too superficial and one-sided. Thus, it is no easy task for people to be made perfect. You are much too rebellious, and you retain too much of your old self; you are unable to stand on the side of truth, and you are unable to practice even the most self-evident of truths. Such people cannot be saved and are those who have not been conquered. If your entry has neither detail nor objectives, growth will be slow in coming to you. If there is not the slightest reality to your entry, then your pursuit will be in vain. If you are unaware of the essence of truth, you will remain unchanged. Growth in man’s life and changes in his disposition are achieved by entering into reality and, moreover, through entering into detailed experiences. If you have many detailed experiences during your entry, and you have much actual knowledge and entry, your disposition shall quickly change. Even if, at present, you are not completely clear about practice, you must at the very least be clear about the visions of God’s work. If not, you shall be incapable of entry; entry is only possible once you have knowledge of the truth. Only if the Holy Spirit enlightens you in your experience will you gain a deeper understanding of the truth, and deeper entry. You must come to know the work of God.

In the beginning, after the creation of mankind, it was the Israelites who served as the basis of God’s work. The whole of Israel was the base of Jehovah’s work on earth. The work of Jehovah was to lead and shepherd man directly by setting forth the laws, so that man could live a normal life and worship Jehovah in a normal manner on earth. God in the Age of Law could be neither seen nor touched by man. Because all He did was to guide the earliest people corrupted by Satan, teaching and shepherding them, His words contained nothing but laws, statutes, and the norms of human behavior, and did not provide them with the truths of life. The Israelites under His leadership had not been profoundly corrupted by Satan. His work of law was only the very first stage in the work of salvation, the very beginning of the work of salvation, and had practically nothing to do with changes in the life disposition of man. Therefore, there was no need at the beginning of the work of salvation for Him to assume flesh for His work in Israel. This is why He required a medium—a tool—through which to engage with man. Thus, there arose among created beings those who spoke and worked on behalf of Jehovah, which is how the sons of man and prophets came to work among man. The sons of man worked among man on behalf of Jehovah. To be called “sons of man” by Jehovah means that such people set forth the laws on behalf of Jehovah. They were also priests among the people of Israel, priests who were watched over and protected by Jehovah, and in whom the Spirit of Jehovah worked; they were leaders among the people and directly served Jehovah. The prophets, on the other hand, were dedicated to speaking, on behalf of Jehovah, to the people of all lands and tribes. They also prophesied the work of Jehovah. Be they the sons of man or the prophets, all were raised up by the Spirit of Jehovah Himself and had the work of Jehovah in them. Among the people, they were the ones who directly represented Jehovah; they did their work only because they were raised up by Jehovah and not because they were the flesh in which the Holy Spirit Himself was incarnated. Therefore, though they were alike in speaking and working on behalf of God, those sons of man and prophets in the Age of Law were not the flesh of God incarnate. God’s work in the Age of Grace and the last stage was precisely the opposite, for the work of salvation and judgment of man were both done by God incarnate Himself, and so there was simply no need to raise up once more the prophets and sons of man to work on His behalf. In the eyes of man, there are no essential differences between the essence and the method of their work. And it is for this reason that people are constantly confusing the work of God incarnate with that of the prophets and sons of man. The appearance of God incarnate was basically the same as that of the prophets and sons of man. And God incarnate was even more normal and more practical than the prophets. Hence, man is incapable of distinguishing between them. Man focuses solely on appearances, completely unaware that, even though the two are alike in being working and speaking, there is an essential difference between them. Because man’s ability to tell things apart is too poor, he is unable to distinguish between simple issues, much less something so complex. When the prophets and those people used by the Holy Spirit spoke and worked, this was to do the duties of man, it was to serve the function of a created being, and it was something that man ought to do. However, the words and the work of God incarnate were to carry out His ministry. Though His external form was that of a created being, His work was not to carry out His function but His ministry. The term “duty” is used with regard to created beings, whereas “ministry” is used with regard to the flesh of God incarnate. There is a substantive difference between the two; they are not interchangeable. The work of man is only to do his duty, whereas the work of God is to manage, and to carry out His ministry. Therefore, though many apostles were used by the Holy Spirit and many prophets were filled with Him, their work and words were merely to perform their duty as created beings. Their prophecies may have exceeded the way of life spoken of by God incarnate, and their humanity may have even transcended that of God incarnate, but they were still doing their duty, and not fulfilling a ministry. The duty of man refers to the function of man; it is what is attainable by man. However, the ministry carried out by God incarnate is related to His management, and this is unattainable by man. Whether God incarnate speaks, works, or manifests wonders, He is doing great work amidst His management, and such work cannot be done by man in His stead. The work of man is only to do his duty as a created being in a given stage of God’s work of management. Without God’s management, that is, if the ministry of God incarnate were to be lost, the duty of a created being would be lost. God’s work in carrying out His ministry is to manage man, whereas man’s performance of his duty is the fulfillment of his own obligation to meet the demands of the Creator, and can in no way be considered the carrying out of one’s ministry. To the inherent substance of God—to His Spirit—the work of God is His management, but to God incarnate, who wears the external form of a created being, His work is the carrying out of His ministry. Whatever work He does is to carry out His ministry; all that man can do is to give his best within the scope of God’s management and under His guidance.

Man’s performance of his duty is, in actuality, the accomplishment of all that is inherent within man, which is to say, that which is possible for man. It is then that his duty is fulfilled. The defects of man during his service are gradually reduced through progressive experience and the process of his undergoing judgment; they do not hinder or affect man’s duty. Those who cease to serve or yield and fall back for fear that there may be drawbacks to their service are the most cowardly of all. If people cannot express what they ought to express during service or achieve what is inherently possible for them, and instead go through the motions, they have lost the function that a created being should have. Such people are what are known as “mediocrities”; they are useless refuse. How can such people properly be called created beings? Are they not corrupt beings that shine on the outside but are rotten within? If a man calls himself God yet is unable to express the being of divinity, do the work of God Himself, or represent God, he is undoubtedly not God, for he has not the substance of God, and that which God can inherently achieve does not exist within him. If man loses what is inherently attainable by him, he can no longer be considered man, and he is not worthy to stand as a created being or come before God and serve Him. Moreover, he is not worthy to receive the grace of God or to be watched over, protected, and made perfect by God. Many who have lost the trust of God go on to lose the grace of God. Not only do they not hate their evil deeds, but they brazenly propagate the idea that the way of God is incorrect, and the rebellious ones even deny the existence of God. How can such people, who are possessed of such rebelliousness, be entitled to enjoy the grace of God? Those who do not fulfill their duty are very rebellious against God, and owe much to Him, yet they turn around and lambaste that God is wrong. How could such kind of man be worthy of being made perfect? Is this not the precursor to being cast out and punished? People who do not do their duty before God are already guilty of the most heinous of crimes, for which even death is an insufficient punishment, yet they have the gall to argue with God and match themselves against Him. What is the worth of perfecting such people? When people fail to fulfill their duty, they should feel guilt and indebtedness; they ought to hate their weakness and uselessness, their rebelliousness and corruption, and moreover, ought to give their life to God. Only then are they created beings who truly love God, and only such people are worthy of enjoying the blessings and promise of God, and of being made perfect by Him. And what of the majority of you? How do you treat the God who lives among you? How have you performed your duty before Him? Have you done all you were called upon to do, even at the expense of your own life? What have you sacrificed? Have you not received much from Me? Can you discern? How loyal are you to Me? How have you served Me? And what of all that I have bestowed upon you and have done for you? Have you taken measure of it all? Have you all judged and compared this with what little conscience you have within you? Who could your words and actions be worthy of? Could it be that such minuscule sacrifice of yours is worthy of all I have bestowed upon you? I have no other choice and have been wholeheartedly devoted to you, yet you harbor wicked intentions and are half-hearted toward Me. That is the extent of your duty, your only function. Is this not so? Do you not know that you have utterly failed to perform the duty of a created being? How can you be considered a created being? Is it not clear to you what it is you are expressing and living out? You have failed to fulfill your duty, but you seek to gain the tolerance and bountiful grace of God. Such grace has not been prepared for ones as worthless and base as you, but for those who ask for nothing and gladly sacrifice. People such as you, such mediocrities, are utterly unworthy of enjoying the grace of heaven. Only hardship and interminable punishment shall accompany your days! If you cannot be faithful to Me, your fate shall be one of suffering. If you cannot be accountable to My words and My work, your outcome will be one of punishment. All grace, blessings, and the wonderful life of the kingdom shall have nothing to do with you. This is the end you deserve to meet and a consequence of your own making! Not only do those of ignorance and arrogance not try their best, nor perform their duty, they hold out their hands for grace, as if what they ask for is deserved. And if they fail to gain what they ask for, they become ever less faithful. How can such people be considered reasonable? You are of poor caliber and devoid of reason, completely incapable of fulfilling the duty you ought to fulfill during the work of management. Your worth has already plummeted. Your failure to repay Me for showing you such grace is already an act of extreme rebelliousness, sufficient to condemn you and demonstrate your cowardice, incompetence, baseness, and unworthiness. What entitles you to keep your hands outstretched? That you are unable to be of the slightest assistance to My work, unable to be loyal, and unable to stand witness for Me are your misdeeds and failings, yet you instead attack Me, tell falsehoods of Me, and complain that I am unrighteous. Is this what constitutes your loyalty? Is this what constitutes your love? What other work can you do beyond this? How have you contributed to all the work that has been done? How much have you expended? I have already shown great tolerance by not blaming you, yet still you shamelessly make excuses to Me and complain about Me in private. Do you have even the slightest trace of humanity? Though the duty of man is tainted by the mind of man and his notions, you must do your duty and show your loyalty. The impurities in the work of man are an issue of his caliber, whereas, if man does not perform his duty, it shows his rebelliousness. There is no correlation between the duty of man and whether he is blessed or cursed. Duty is what man ought to fulfill; it is his heaven-sent vocation, and should not depend on recompense, conditions, or reasons. Only then is he doing his duty. To be blessed is when someone is made perfect and enjoys God’s blessings after experiencing judgment. To be cursed is when someone’s disposition does not change after they have experienced chastisement and judgment, it is when they do not experience being made perfect but are punished. But regardless of whether they are blessed or cursed, created beings should fulfill their duty, doing what they ought to do, and doing what they are able to do; this is the least that a person, a person who pursues God, should do. You should not do your duty only to be blessed, and you should not refuse to act for fear of being cursed. Let Me tell you this one thing: Man’s performance of his duty is what he ought to do, and if he is incapable of performing his duty, then this is his rebelliousness. It is through the process of doing his duty that man is gradually changed, and it is through this process that he demonstrates his loyalty. As such, the more you are able to do your duty, the more truth you shall receive, and the more real your expression shall become. Those who merely go through the motions in doing their duty and do not seek the truth shall be cast out in the end, for such people do not do their duty in the practice of truth, and do not practice truth in the performance of their duty. They are those who remain unchanged and will be cursed. Not only are their expressions impure, but everything they express is evil.

In the Age of Grace, Jesus also spoke many words and did much work. How was He different from Isaiah? How was He different from Daniel? Was He a prophet? Why is it said that He is Christ? What are the differences between them? They were all men who spoke words, and their words appeared more or less the same to man. They all spoke words and did work. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke prophecies, and similarly, so could Jesus. Why is this so? The distinction here is based on the nature of the work. To discern this matter, you must not consider the nature of the flesh, nor should you consider the depth or superficiality of their words. Always you must first consider their work and the effects their work achieves in man. The prophecies spoken by the prophets at the time did not supply the life of man, and the inspirations received by those such as Isaiah and Daniel were merely prophecies, and not the way of life. If not for the direct revelation of Jehovah, none could have done that work, which is not possible for mortals. Jesus, too, spoke many words, but such words were the way of life from which man could find a path to practice. That is to say, first, He could supply the life of man, for Jesus is life; second, He could reverse the distorted aspects of man; third, His work could succeed that of Jehovah in order to carry on the age; fourth, He could grasp the needs within man and understand what man lacks; fifth, He could usher in a new age and conclude the old. That is why He is called God and Christ; not only is He different from Isaiah but also from all other prophets. Take Isaiah as a comparison for the work of the prophets. First, he could not supply the life of man; second, he could not usher in a new age. He was working under the leadership of Jehovah and not to usher in a new age. Third, the words he spoke were beyond him. He was receiving revelations directly from the Spirit of God, and others would not understand, even having listened to them. These few things alone are sufficient to prove that his words were no more than prophecies, no more than an aspect of work done in Jehovah’s stead. He could not, however, completely represent Jehovah. He was Jehovah’s servant, an instrument in Jehovah’s work. He was only doing work within the Age of Law and within the scope of the work of Jehovah; he did not work beyond the Age of Law. On the contrary, the work of Jesus differed. He surpassed the scope of Jehovah’s work; He worked as God incarnate and underwent crucifixion in order to redeem all mankind. That is to say, He carried out new work outside of the work done by Jehovah. This was the ushering in of a new age. In addition, He was able to speak of that which man could not achieve. His work was work within the management of God and involved the whole of mankind. He did not work in just a few men, nor was His work meant to lead a limited number of men. As for how God was incarnated as a man, how the Spirit gave revelations at that time, and how the Spirit descended upon a man to do work—these are matters that man cannot see or touch. It is utterly impossible for these truths to serve as proof that He is God incarnate. As such, distinction can only be made among the words and work of God, which are tangible to man. Only this is real. This is because matters of the Spirit are not visible to you and are known clearly only by God Himself, and not even God’s incarnate flesh knows all; you can only verify whether He is God from the work He has done. From His work, it can be seen that, first, He is able to open up a new age; second, He is able to supply the life of man and show man the way to follow. This is sufficient to establish that He is God Himself. At the very least, the work He does can fully represent the Spirit of God, and from such work it can be seen that the Spirit of God is within Him. As the work done by God incarnate was mainly to usher in a new age, lead new work, and open up a new realm, these alone are sufficient to establish that He is God Himself. This thus differentiates Him from Isaiah, Daniel, and the other great prophets. Isaiah, Daniel, and the others were all of a class of highly educated and cultured men; they were extraordinary men under the leadership of Jehovah. The flesh of God incarnate too was knowledgeable and had no lack of sense, but His humanity was particularly normal. He was an ordinary man, and the naked eye could not discern any special humanity about Him or detect anything in His humanity unlike that of others. He was not at all supernatural or unique, and He did not possess any higher education, knowledge, or theory. The life He spoke of and the path He led were not gained through theory, through knowledge, through life experience, or through family upbringing. Rather, they were the direct work of the Spirit, which is the work of the incarnate flesh. It is because man has great notions of God, and particularly because these notions are made of too many vague and supernatural elements that, in the eyes of man, a normal God with human weakness, who cannot work signs and wonders, is assuredly not God. Are these not the fallacious notions of man? If the flesh of God incarnate was not a normal man, then how could He be said to have become flesh? To be of the flesh is to be an ordinary, normal man; if He had been a transcendent being, then He would not have been of the flesh. To prove that He is of the flesh, God incarnate needed to possess normal flesh. This was simply to complete the significance of the incarnation. However, this was not the case for the prophets and sons of man. They were gifted men used by the Holy Spirit; in the eyes of man, their humanity was particularly great, and they performed many acts that surpassed normal humanity. For this reason, man regarded them as God. Now you all must understand this clearly, for it has been the issue most easily confused by all men in ages past. Additionally, the incarnation is the most mysterious of all things, and God incarnate is the most difficult for man to accept. What I say is conducive to fulfilling your function and your understanding the mystery of the incarnation. This is all related to God’s management, to the visions. Your understanding of this will be more beneficial to gaining knowledge of the visions, that is, God’s work of management. In this way, you will also gain much understanding of the duty that different kinds of people ought to perform. Though these words do not directly show you the way, they are still of great help to your entry, for your lives at present are much lacking in visions, and this will become a significant obstacle preventing your entry. If you have been unable to understand these issues, then there will be no motivation driving your entry. And how can such a pursuit enable you to fulfill your duty properly?

God Is the Lord of All Created Beings

One stage of the work of the two previous ages was carried out in Israel, and one was carried out in Judea. Generally speaking, neither stage of this work left Israel, and each was performed upon the first chosen people. As a result, the Israelites believe that Jehovah God is only the God of the Israelites. Because Jesus worked in Judea, where He carried out the work of the crucifixion, the Jews view Him as the Redeemer of the Jewish people. They think that He is solely the King of the Jews, not of any other people; that He is not the Lord who redeems the English, nor the Lord who redeems the Americans, but the Lord who redeems the Israelites; and that it was the Jews whom He redeemed in Israel. In actuality, God is the Sovereign of all things. He is the God of all created beings. He is not only the God of the Israelites, nor of the Jews; He is the God of all created beings. The previous two stages of His work took place in Israel, which has created certain notions in people. They believe that Jehovah did His work in Israel, that Jesus Himself carried out His work in Judea, and, furthermore, that He became flesh to work—and whatever the case, this work did not extend beyond Israel. God did not work in Egyptians or Indians; He only worked in the Israelites. Thus do people form various notions, and delineate God’s work within a certain scope. They say that when God works, He must do so among the chosen people, and in Israel; save for the Israelites, God works upon no others, nor is there any greater scope to His work. They are especially strict when it comes to keeping God incarnate in line, and do not permit Him to move beyond the bounds of Israel. Are these not all just human notions? God made all of the heavens and earth and all things, He made all created beings, so how could He restrict His work to only Israel? If that were the case, what would be the point of Him making all created beings? He created the whole world, and He has carried out His six-thousand-year management plan not only in Israel, but upon every person in the universe. Regardless of whether they live in China, the United States, the United Kingdom or Russia, every person is a descendant of Adam; they are all made by God. Not one of them can escape the bounds of created beings, and not one of them can separate themselves from the label of “descendant of Adam.” They are all created beings, they are all the offspring of Adam, and they are also all the corrupted descendants of Adam and Eve. It is not only the Israelites who are created beings, but all people; it is just that some have been cursed, and some have been blessed. There are many agreeable things about the Israelites; God worked upon them in the beginning because they were the least corrupt. The Chinese do not bear comparison to them; they are far inferior. So, God initially worked among the people of Israel, and the second stage of His work was only carried out in Judea—which has led to a lot of notions and rules among man. In fact, if God were to act according to human notions, He would only be the God of the Israelites, and would thus be incapable of extending His work to the Gentile nations, for He would only be the God of the Israelites, and not the God of all created beings. The prophecies said that Jehovah’s name would be great among the Gentile nations, that it would spread to the Gentile nations. Why was this prophesied? If God were only the God of the Israelites, then He would only work in Israel. Moreover, He would not spread this work, and He would not make such a prophecy. Since He did make this prophecy, He will surely extend His work among the Gentile nations, among every nation and all lands. Since He said this, He must do it; this is His plan, for He is the Lord who created the heavens and earth and all things, and the God of all created beings. Regardless of whether He works among the Israelites, or throughout the whole of Judea, the work He does is the work of the entire universe, and the work of all humanity. The work He does today in the nation of the great red dragon—in a Gentile nation—is still the work of all humanity. Israel could be the base for His work on earth; likewise, China can also be the base for His work among the Gentile nations. Has He not now fulfilled the prophecy that “the name of Jehovah shall be great among the Gentile nations”? The first step of His work among the Gentile nations is this work, the work He does in the nation of the great red dragon. That God incarnate should work in this land, and work among these cursed people, is particularly at odds with human notions; these are the lowliest people of all, they have no worth, and they were initially forsaken by Jehovah. People can be abandoned by other people, but if they are abandoned by God, then no one is more devoid of status, no one is of lower worth. For a created being, being possessed by Satan or being abandoned by people is something that feels very painful—but for a created being to be forsaken by the Creator means that they could have no lower status. The descendants of Moab were cursed, and they were born in this backward country; without a doubt, of all the people under the influence of darkness, the descendants of Moab have the lowest status. Because these people have heretofore been of the lowest status, the work done upon them is best able to shatter human notions, and is also most beneficial to the whole of God’s six-thousand-year management plan. Doing such work among these people is the best way of shattering human notions, and with this God launches an era; with this He shatters all human notions; with this He ends the work of the entire Age of Grace. His first work was carried out in Judea, within the bounds of Israel; among the Gentile nations, He did not do any work to launch the new era. The final stage of work is not only carried out among the Gentiles, but even more so among those who have been cursed. This one point is the evidence most capable of humiliating Satan, and thus, God “becomes” the God of all created beings in the universe, the Lord of all things, the object of worship for everything with life.

Today, there are those who still do not understand what new work God has begun. Among the Gentile nations, God has ushered in a new beginning. He has begun a new era, and initiated new work—and He performs this work upon the descendants of Moab. Is this not His newest work? No one throughout history has ever experienced this work before. No one has even heard of it, much less appreciated it. God’s wisdom, God’s wonder, God’s unfathomability, God’s greatness, and God’s holiness are all made manifest through this stage of work, the work of the last days. Is this not new work, work that shatters human notions? There are those who think thusly: “Since God cursed Moab and said that He would abandon Moab’s descendants, how could He save them now?” These are the Gentiles who were cursed by God and driven out of Israel; the Israelites called them “Gentile dogs.” In everyone’s view, they are not only Gentile dogs, but even worse, the sons of destruction; which is to say, they are not God’s chosen people. They may have been born within the bounds of Israel, but they do not belong to the people of Israel, and were expelled to Gentile nations. They are the lowliest of all people. It is precisely because they are the lowliest among humanity that God carries out His work of launching a new age among them, for they are representative of corrupt humanity. God’s work is selective and targeted; the work He does in these people today is also work that is performed upon the created beings. Noah was a created being, as are his descendants. Anyone in the world who are of flesh and blood are created beings. God’s work is directed at all created beings; it is not dependent on whether someone is cursed after they were created. His management work is directed at all created beings, not those chosen people who have not been cursed. Since God wishes to carry out His work among His created beings, He will certainly carry it out to successful completion, and He will work among those people who are beneficial to His work. Therefore, He shatters all conventions when He works among people; to Him, the words “cursed,” “chastised” and “blessed” are meaningless! The Jewish people are good, as are the chosen people of Israel; they are people of good caliber and humanity. In the beginning, it was among them that Jehovah launched His work, and performed His earliest work—but to perform the work of conquest on them today would be meaningless. They, too, may be part of the created beings, and there may be much that is positive about them, but to carry out this stage of work among them would be pointless; God would not be able to conquer people, nor would He be able to convince all created beings, which is precisely the point of switching His work to these people of the nation of the great red dragon. Of greatest significance here is His launching an era, His shattering of all rules and all human notions and His ending of the work of the entire Age of Grace. If His current work were carried out among the Israelites, by the time His six-thousand-year management plan comes to a close, everyone would believe that God is only the God of the Israelites, that only the Israelites are God’s chosen people, that only the Israelites deserve to inherit God’s blessing and promise. God’s incarnation during the last days in the Gentile nation of the country of the great red dragon accomplishes the work of God as the God of all created beings; He completes the whole of His management work, and He ends the central part of His work in the nation of the great red dragon. The core of these three stages of work is the salvation of man—namely, making all created beings worship the Creator. Thus, there is great meaning to each stage of work; God does nothing that is without meaning or value. On one hand, this stage of work ushers in a new era and ends the previous two eras; on the other hand, it shatters all human notions and all the old ways of human belief and knowledge. The work of the previous two ages was carried out according to different human notions; this stage, however, completely eliminates human notions, thereby utterly conquering humanity. Through conquering the descendants of Moab, through the work carried out among the descendants of Moab, God shall conquer all people throughout the universe. This is the deepest significance of this stage of His work, and it is the most valuable aspect of this stage of His work. Even if you now know that your own status is lowly and that you are of low worth, you will still feel that you have met with the most joyous thing: You have inherited a great blessing, received a great promise, and you can help accomplish this great work of God. You have beheld God’s true countenance, you know God’s inherent disposition, and you follow God’s will. The previous two stages of God’s work were carried out in Israel. If this stage of His work during the last days were also carried out among the Israelites, not only would all created beings believe that only the Israelites were God’s chosen people, but God’s entire management plan would fail to attain its desired effect. During the period in which the two stages of His work were carried out in Israel, no new work—nor any work of launching a new era—was carried out among the Gentile nations. Today’s stage of work—the work of launching a new era—is first carried out among the Gentile nations, and is, furthermore, initially carried out among the descendants of Moab, thus launching the entire era. God has shattered any knowledge contained within human notions, permitting none of it to remain. In His work of conquest, He has shattered human notions, those old, earlier human ways of knowledge. He lets people see that with God there are no rules, that there is nothing old about God, that the work He does is entirely liberated, entirely free, and that He is right in all He does. You must fully submit to any work that He does among the created beings. All of the work He does has meaning, and is carried out according to His own will and wisdom, and not according to human choices and notions. If something is beneficial to His work, He does it; and if something is not beneficial to His work, He does not, no matter how good it is! He works and selects the recipients and location of His work in accordance with the meaning and purpose of His work. He does not adhere to past rules when He works, nor does He follow old formulas. Instead, He plans His work according to the work’s significance. Ultimately, He will attain a genuine effect and the anticipated goal. If you do not understand these things today, this work will have no effect in you.

Success or Failure Depends on the Path That Man Walks

Most people believe in God for the sake of their future destination, or for temporary enjoyment. For those who have not undergone any pruning, they believe in God in order to enter into heaven, in order to gain rewards. They do not believe in God in order to be made perfect, or to fulfill the duty of a created being. Which is to say that most people do not believe in God in order to fulfill their responsibilities, or to complete their duty. Rarely do people believe in God in order to lead meaningful lives, nor are there those who believe that, since man is alive, he should love God because it is perfectly natural and justified to do so, and is the natural vocation of man. In this way, although different people each pursue their own goals, the aim of their pursuit and the motivation behind it are all alike, and, what is more, for most of them the objects of their worship are much the same. Over the last several thousand years, many believers have died, and many have died and been born again. It is not just one or two people who seek after God, nor even one or two thousand, yet most of these people pursue for the sake of their own prospects or their glorious hopes for the future. Those who are devoted to Christ are few and far between. Many devout believers have still died ensnared in their own nets, and the number of people who have been victorious, moreover, is pifflingly small. To this day, the reasons why people fail, or the secrets of their victory, are still unknown to them. Those who are obsessed with seeking after Christ have still not had their moment of sudden insight, they have not gotten to the bottom of these mysteries, because they simply do not know. Though they make painstaking efforts in their pursuit, the path they walk is the path of failure once walked by their predecessors, and not the path of success. In this way, regardless of how they seek, do they not walk the path that leads to darkness? Is what they gain not bitter fruit? It is hard enough to predict whether the people who emulate those who succeeded in times past will ultimately come to fortune or calamity. How much worse are the odds, then, for the people who seek by following in the footsteps of those who failed? Do they not stand an even greater chance of failure? What value is there to the path they walk? Are they not wasting their time? Irrespective of whether people succeed or fail in their pursuit, there is, in short, a reason why they do so, and it is not the case that their success or failure is determined by seeking however they please.

The most fundamental requirement of man’s belief in God is that he have an honest heart, and that he fully devote himself, and truly submit. What is hardest for man is to provide his whole life in exchange for true belief, through which he can gain the entire truth, and fulfill his duty as a created being. This is what is unattainable by those who fail, and it is even more unattainable by those who cannot find Christ. Because man is not good at wholly devoting himself to God, because man is not willing to perform his duty to the Creator, because man has seen the truth but avoids it and walks his own path, because man always seeks by following the path of those who have failed, because man always rebels against Heaven, thus, man always fails, is always taken in by Satan’s trickery, and is ensnared in his own net. Because man does not know Christ, because man is not adept at understanding and experiencing the truth, because man is too worshipful of Paul and too covetous of heaven, because man is always demanding that Christ obey him and ordering God about, thus those great figures and those who have experienced the vicissitudes of the world are still mortal, and still die amid God’s chastisement. All I can say of such people is that they die a tragic death, and that the consequence for them—their death—is not without justification. Is their failure not even more intolerable to the law of Heaven? The truth comes from the world of man, yet the truth among man is passed on by Christ. It originates from Christ, that is, from God Himself, and this is not something man is capable of. Yet Christ provides only the truth; He does not come to decide whether man will be successful in his pursuit of the truth. Thus it follows that success or failure in the truth is all down to man’s pursuit. Man’s success or failure in the truth has never had anything to do with Christ, but is instead determined by his pursuit. Man’s destination and his success or failure cannot be heaped upon the head of God, so that God Himself is made to bear it, because this is not a matter for God Himself, but is directly related to the duty that created beings should perform. Most people do have a little knowledge of the pursuit and destination of Paul and Peter, yet people know nothing more than the outcomes of Peter and Paul, and are ignorant of the secret behind Peter’s success, or the deficiencies that led to Paul’s failure. And so, if you are completely incapable of seeing through to the essence of their pursuit, then the pursuit of most of you will still fail, and even if a small number of you will be successful, still they will not be the equal of Peter. If the path of your pursuit is the right one, then you have a hope of success; if the path you tread in pursuit of the truth is the wrong one, then you will forever be incapable of success, and will meet the same end as Paul.

Peter was a man who was made perfect. Only after experiencing chastisement and judgment, and thus gaining a pure God-loving heart, was he fully made perfect; the path he walked was the path of being made perfect. Which is to say that, from the very beginning, the path that Peter walked was the right one, and his motivation for believing in God was the right one, and so he became someone who was made perfect and he trod a new path that man had never walked upon before. However, the path that Paul had walked upon since the beginning was the path of opposition to Christ, and it was only because the Holy Spirit wished to use him, and to take advantage of his gifts and all his merits for His work, that he worked for Christ for several decades. He was merely someone who was used by the Holy Spirit, and he was not used because Jesus looked favorably upon his humanity, but because of his gifts. He was able to work for Jesus because he was struck down, not because he was happy to do so. He was able to do such work because of the enlightenment and guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the work he did by no means represented his pursuit, or his humanity. The work of Paul represented the work of a servant, which is to say that he did the work of an apostle. Peter, though, was different: He also did some work; it was not as great as the work of Paul, but he worked whilst pursuing his own entry, and his work was different from the work of Paul. Peter’s work was the performance of the duty of a created being. He did not work in the role of an apostle, but worked whilst pursuing the love for God. The course of Paul’s work also contained his personal pursuit: His pursuit was for the sake of nothing more than his hopes for the future, and his desire for a good destination. He did not accept refinement during his work, nor did he accept pruning. He believed that as long as the work he did satisfied God’s will, and all that he did was pleasing to God, then a reward ultimately awaited him. There were no personal experiences in his work—it was all for its own sake, and not carried out amid the pursuit of change. Everything in his work was a transaction, it contained none of the duty or submission of a created being. During the course of his work, there occurred no change in Paul’s old disposition. His work was merely of service to others, and was incapable of bringing about changes in his disposition. Paul carried out his work directly, without having been made perfect or pruned, and he was motivated by reward. Peter was different: He was someone who had undergone pruning and refinement. The aim and motivation of the work of Peter were fundamentally different to those of Paul. Although Peter did not do a large amount of work, his disposition underwent many changes, and what he sought was the truth, and real change. His work was not carried out simply for the sake of the work itself. Although Paul did much work, it was all the work of the Holy Spirit, and even though Paul cooperated in this work, he did not experience it. That Peter did much less work was only because the Holy Spirit did not do that much work through him. The quantity of their work did not determine whether they were made perfect; the pursuit of one was in order to receive rewards, and that of the other was in order to achieve an ultimate love for God, and fulfill his duty as a created being, to the extent that he could live out a lovely image in order to satisfy God’s will. Externally they were different, and so too were their essences different. You cannot determine who of them was made perfect based on how much work they did. Peter sought to live out the image of one who loves God, to be someone who submitted to God, to be someone who accepted pruning, and to be someone who fulfilled his duty as a created being. He was able to devote himself to God, to put the entirety of himself in the hands of God, and submit to Him until death. That was what he resolved to do and, moreover, that was what he achieved. This is the fundamental reason why finally his end was different to that of Paul. The work that the Holy Spirit did in Peter was to make him perfect, and the work that the Holy Spirit did in Paul was to use him. That is because their natures and their views toward pursuit were not the same. Both had the work of the Holy Spirit. Peter applied this work to himself, and also provided it to others; Paul, meanwhile, only provided the entirety of the work of the Holy Spirit to others, and gained nothing from it himself. In this way, after he had experienced the work of the Holy Spirit for so many years, the changes in Paul were close to non-existent. He still remained almost in his natural state, and he was still the Paul of before. It was merely that after enduring the hardship of many years of work, he had learned how to “work,” and had learned endurance, but his old nature—his highly competitive and mercenary nature—still remained. After working for so many years, he did not know his corrupt disposition, nor had he rid himself of his old disposition, and it was still clearly visible in his work. In him there was merely more work experience, but such little experience alone was incapable of changing him and could not alter his views about existence or the significance of his pursuit. Though he worked many years for Christ, and never again persecuted the Lord Jesus, in his heart there was no change in his knowledge of God. This means that he did not work in order to devote himself to God, but rather he was compelled to work for the sake of his future destination. For, in the beginning, he persecuted Christ, and did not submit to Christ; he was inherently a rebel who deliberately opposed Christ, and someone who had no knowledge of the work of the Holy Spirit. When his work was almost concluded, still he did not know the work of the Holy Spirit, and merely acted of his own accord pursuant to his own character, without paying the slightest attention to the will of the Holy Spirit. And so his nature was in enmity to Christ and did not submit to the truth. Someone like this, who had been forsaken by the work of the Holy Spirit, who did not know the work of the Holy Spirit, and who also opposed Christ—how could such a person be saved? Whether or not man can be saved does not depend on how much work he does, or how much he devotes, but is instead determined by whether or not he knows the work of the Holy Spirit, whether or not he can put the truth into practice, and whether or not his views toward pursuit are in conformity with the truth.

Although natural revelations did occur after Peter began to follow Jesus, in nature he was, from the very beginning, someone who was willing to submit to the Holy Spirit and seek after Christ. His submission to the Holy Spirit was pure: He did not seek fame and fortune, but was instead motivated by submission to the truth. Though there were three times when Peter denied knowing Christ, and though he tempted the Lord Jesus, such slight human weakness bore no relation to his nature, it did not affect his future pursuit, and it cannot sufficiently prove that his temptation was the act of an antichrist. Normal human weakness is something shared by all people in the world—do you expect Peter to be any different? Do people not hold certain views about Peter because he made several foolish mistakes? And do people not so adore Paul because of all the work he did, and all the epistles he wrote? How could man be capable of seeing through to the substance of man? Surely those who truly have sense can see something of such insignificance? Though the many years of painful experiences of Peter are not recorded in the Bible, this does not prove that Peter did not have real experiences, or that Peter was not made perfect. How can the work of God be fully fathomed by man? The records in the Bible were not personally selected by Jesus, but compiled by later generations. That being so, was all that was recorded in the Bible not chosen according to the ideas of man? Moreover, the ends of Peter and Paul are not expressly stated in the epistles, so man judges Peter and Paul according to his own perceptions, and according to his own preferences. And because Paul did so much work, because his “contributions” were so great, he won the trust of the masses. Does not man concentrate only on superficialities? How could man be capable of seeing through to the substance of man? Not to mention, given that Paul has been an object of worship for thousands of years, who would dare to rashly deny his work? Peter was just a fisherman, so how could his contribution be as great as that of Paul? In terms of the contributions they made, Paul should have been rewarded before Peter, and he should have been the one who was better qualified to gain God’s approval. Who could have imagined that, in His treatment of Paul, God merely made him work through his gifts, whereas God made Peter perfect. It is by no means the case that the Lord Jesus had made plans for Peter and Paul from the very beginning: They were, rather, made perfect or put to work according to their inherent natures. And so, what people see are merely the outward contributions of man, whereas what God sees is man’s substance, as well as the path that man pursues from the beginning, and the motivation behind man’s pursuit. People measure a man according to their notions, and according to their own perceptions, yet the final end of a man is not determined according to his externalities. And so I say that if the path that you take from the beginning is the path of success, and your point of view toward pursuit is the right one from the beginning, then you are like Peter; if the path that you tread is the path of failure, then whatever the price you pay, your end will still be the same as that of Paul. Whatever the case, your destination, and whether you succeed or fail, are both determined by whether the path you seek is the right one or not, rather than your devotion, or the price that you pay. Peter’s and Paul’s essences, and the goals that they pursued, were different; man is incapable of discovering these things, and only God can know them in their entirety. For what God sees is the substance of man, whereas man knows nothing of his own essence. Man is incapable of beholding the essence within man or his actual stature, and thus is incapable of identifying the reasons for the failure and success of Paul and Peter. The reason why most people worship Paul and not Peter is because Paul was used for public work, and man is able to perceive this work, and so people acknowledge the “accomplishments” of Paul. The experiences of Peter, meanwhile, are invisible to man, and that which he sought is unattainable by man, and so man has no interest in Peter.

Peter was made perfect through experiencing pruning and refinement. He said, “I must satisfy God’s will at all times. In all that I do I only seek to satisfy God’s will, and whether I am chastised, or judged, still I am happy to do so.” Peter gave his all to God, and his work, words, and entire life were all for the sake of loving God. He was someone who sought holiness, and the more he experienced, the greater was his love for God deep within his heart. Paul, meanwhile, did only outward work, and though he also worked hard, his labors were for the sake of doing his work properly and thus gaining a reward. Had he known that he would receive no reward, he would have given up his work. What Peter cared about was the true love within his heart, and that which was practical and could be achieved. He did not care about whether he would receive a reward, but about whether his disposition could be changed. Paul cared about working ever harder, he cared about outward work and devotion, and about the doctrines not experienced by normal people. He cared nothing for changes deep within him nor for the true love for God. The experiences of Peter were in order to achieve true love and true knowledge of God. His experiences were in order to gain a closer relationship to God, and to have a practical living out. The work of Paul was done because of that entrusted to him by Jesus, and in order to obtain the things that he longed for, yet these were unrelated to his knowledge of himself and God. His work was solely for the sake of escaping chastisement and judgment. What Peter sought was pure love, and what Paul sought was the crown of righteousness. Peter experienced many years of the work of the Holy Spirit, and had a practical knowledge of Christ, as well as a profound knowledge of himself. And so, his love of God was pure. Many years of refinement had elevated his knowledge of Jesus and life, and his love was an unconditional love, it was a spontaneous love, and he asked for nothing in return, nor did he hope for any benefits. Paul worked for many years, yet he did not possess a great knowledge of Christ, and his knowledge of himself was also pitiably small. He simply had no love for Christ, and his work and the course that he ran were in order to obtain the final laurel. What he sought was the finest crown, not the purest love. He did not seek actively, but passively; he was not performing his duty, but was compelled in his pursuit after having been seized by the work of the Holy Spirit. And so, his pursuit does not prove that he was a qualified created being; it was Peter who was a qualified created being who performed his duty. Man thinks that all those who make a contribution to God should receive a reward, and that the greater the contribution, the more it is taken for granted that they should receive God’s favor. The essence of man’s viewpoint is transactional, and he does not actively seek to perform his duty as a created being. For God, the more that people seek a true love for God and complete submission to God, which also means seeking to perform their duty as a created being, the more they are able to gain God’s approval. God’s viewpoint is to demand that man recover his original duty and status. Man is a created being, and so man should not overstep himself by making any demands of God, and should do nothing more than perform his duty as a created being. The destinations of Paul and Peter were measured according to whether they could fulfill their duty as created beings, and not according to the size of their contribution; their destinations were determined according to that which they sought from the beginning, not according to how much work they did, or other people’s estimation of them. And so, seeking to actively perform one’s duty as a created being is the path to success; seeking the path of the true love for God is the most correct path; seeking changes in one’s old disposition, and seeking the pure love for God, is the path to success. Such a path to success is the path of the recovery of the original duty as well as the original appearance of a created being. It is the path of recovery, and it is also the aim of all of God’s work from beginning to end. If the pursuit of man is tainted with personal extravagant demands and irrational longings, then the effect that is achieved will not be changes in man’s disposition. This is at odds with the work of recovery. It is undoubtedly not work done by the Holy Spirit, and so this proves that pursuit of this kind is not approved of by God. What significance has a pursuit that is not approved of by God?

The work done by Paul was exhibited before man, but as for how pure his love for God was and how much he loved God deep down in his heart—these things man cannot see. Man can only behold the work that he did, from which man knows that he was surely used by the Holy Spirit, and so man thinks that Paul was better than Peter, that his work was greater, for he was able to provide to the churches. Peter only looked to his personal experiences and gained but a few people during his occasional work. From him there are but a few little-known epistles, but who knows how great was his love for God deep within his heart? Day in, day out, Paul worked for God: As long as there was work to be done, he did it. He felt that in this way he would be able to gain the crown, and could satisfy God, yet he did not seek ways to change himself through his work. Anything in Peter’s life that did not satisfy God’s will made him feel uneasy. If it did not satisfy God’s will, then he would feel remorseful, and would look for a suitable way by which he could strive to satisfy God’s heart. In even the smallest and most inconsequential aspects of his life, still he required himself to satisfy God’s will. He was no less exacting when it came to his old disposition, ever rigorous in his requirements of himself to progress deeper into the truth. Paul sought only superficial reputation and status. He sought to show himself off before man, and did not seek to make any deeper progress in life entry. What he cared about was doctrine, not reality. Some people say, “Paul did so much work for God, why was he not remembered by God? Peter carried out but a little work for God, and did not make a great contribution to the churches, so why was he made perfect?” Peter loved God to a certain point, which was required by God; only such people as this have testimony. And what of Paul? To what degree did Paul love God? Do you know? What was Paul’s work done for? And what was Peter’s work done for? Peter did not do much work, but do you know what was deep within his heart? The work of Paul pertained to the provision to the churches, and the support of the churches. What Peter experienced were changes in his life disposition; he experienced the love for God. Now that you know the differences in their essences, you can see who, ultimately, truly believed in God, and who did not truly believe in God. One of them truly loved God, and the other did not truly love God; one underwent changes in his disposition, and the other did not; one served humbly, and was not easily noticed by people, and the other was worshiped by people, and was of great image; one sought holiness, and the other did not, and though he was not impure, he was not possessed of a pure love; one was possessed of true humanity, and the other was not; one was possessed of the sense of a created being, and the other was not. Such are the differences in the essences of Paul and Peter. The path that Peter walked was the path of success, which was also the path of achieving the recovery of normal humanity and the recovery of the duty of a created being. Peter represents all those who are successful. The path walked by Paul was the path of failure, and he represents all those who only submit and expend themselves superficially, and do not have a genuine God-loving heart. Paul represents all those who do not possess the truth. In his belief in God, Peter sought to satisfy God in everything, and sought to submit to all that came from God. Without the slightest complaint, he was able to accept chastisement and judgment, as well as refinement, tribulation and going without in his life, none of which could alter his God-loving heart. Was this not the ultimate love for God? Was this not the fulfillment of the duty of a created being? Whether in chastisement, judgment, or tribulation, you are always capable of achieving submission unto death, and this is what should be achieved by a created being, this is the purity of the love for God. If man can achieve this much, then he is a qualified created being, and there is nothing which better satisfies the will of the Creator. Imagine that you are able to work for God, yet you do not submit to God, and are incapable of truly loving God. In this way, not only will you not have fulfilled the duty of a created being, but you will also be condemned by God, for you are someone who does not possess the truth, who is incapable of submitting to God, and who rebels against God. You only care about working for God, and do not care about putting the truth into practice or knowing yourself. You do not understand or know the Creator, and do not submit to or love the Creator. You are someone who is innately rebellious against God, and so such people are not beloved by the Creator.

Some people say, “Paul did a tremendous amount of work, and he shouldered great burdens for the churches and contributed so much to them. The thirteen epistles of Paul upheld 2,000 years of the Age of Grace, and are second only to the Four Gospels. Who can compare with him? No one can decipher the Revelation of John, whereas Paul’s epistles provide life, and the work that he did was of benefit to the churches. Who else could have achieved such things? And what work did Peter do?” When man measures others, he does so according to their contribution. When God measures man, He does so according to man’s nature. Among those who seek life, Paul was someone who did not know his own substance. He was by no means humble or submissive, nor did he know his essence, which was in opposition to God. And so, he was someone who had not undergone detailed experiences, and was someone who did not put the truth into practice. Peter was different. He knew his imperfections, weaknesses, and his corrupt disposition as a created being, and so he had a path of practice through which to change his disposition; he was not one of those who only had doctrine but possessed no reality. Those who change are new people who have been saved, they are those who are qualified in pursuing the truth. People who do not change belong to those who are naturally obsolete; they are those who have not been saved, that is, those who are spurned by God. They will not be remembered by God no matter how great their work. When you compare this with your own pursuit, whether you are ultimately the same kind of person as Peter or Paul should be self-evident. If there is still no truth in what you seek, and if even today you are still as arrogant and insolent as Paul, and are still as glib and boastful as him, then you are without doubt a degenerate who fails. If you seek the same as Peter, if you seek practices and true changes, and are not arrogant or willful, but seek to perform your duty, then you will be a created being who can achieve victory. Paul did not know his own essence or corruption, much less did he know his own rebelliousness. He never mentioned his despicable defiance of Christ, nor was he overly regretful. He only offered a brief explanation and, deep down in his heart, he did not completely yield to God. Though he fell on the road to Damascus, he did not look deep within himself. He was content merely to keep working, and he did not consider knowing himself and changing his old disposition to be the most crucial of issues. He was satisfied with merely speaking the truth, with providing to others as a salve for his own conscience, and with no longer persecuting Jesus’ disciples to console himself and forgive himself for his past sins. The goal that he pursued was nothing more than a future crown and transitory work, the goal he pursued was abundant grace. He did not seek sufficient truth, nor did he seek to progress deeper into the truth which he had previously not understood. His knowledge of himself can therefore be said to be false, and he did not accept chastisement or judgment. That he was able to work does not mean he possessed a knowledge of his own nature or essence; his focus was on outward practices only. What he strived for, moreover, was not change, but knowledge. His work was completely the result of the appearance of Jesus on the road to Damascus. It was not something he had resolved to do originally, nor was it work that occurred after he had accepted the pruning of his old disposition. No matter how he worked, his old disposition did not change, and so his work did not atone for his past sins but merely played a certain role among the churches of the time. For someone such as this, whose old disposition did not change—that is to say, who did not gain salvation, and was even more without the truth—he was absolutely incapable of becoming one of those accepted by the Lord Jesus. He was not someone who was filled with love and fear for Jesus Christ, nor was he someone who was adept at seeking the truth, much less was he someone who sought the mystery of the incarnation. He was merely someone who was skilled in sophistry, and who would not yield to any who were higher than him or who were possessed of the truth. He envied people or truths that were contrary to him, or in enmity with him, preferring those gifted people who presented a great image and possessed profound knowledge. He did not like interacting with poor people who sought the true way and cared for nothing but the truth, and instead concerned himself with senior figures from religious organizations who only spoke of doctrines, and who were possessed of abundant knowledge. He had no love of the new work of the Holy Spirit and cared not for the movement of the new work of the Holy Spirit. Instead, he favored those rules and doctrines that were higher than general truths. In his innate substance and the entirety of what he sought, he does not deserve to be called a Christian who pursued the truth, much less a faithful servant in the house of God, for his hypocrisy was too much, and his rebelliousness too great. Though he is known as a servant of the Lord Jesus, he was not at all fit to enter the gate of the kingdom of heaven, for his actions from beginning to end cannot be called righteous. He can merely be seen as one who was hypocritical, and did unrighteousness, yet who also worked for Christ. Though he cannot be called evil, he can suitably be called a man who did unrighteousness. He did much work, yet he must not be judged on the quantity of work he did, but only on its quality and essence. Only in this way is it possible to get to the bottom of this matter. He always believed: “I am capable of working, I am better than most people; I am considerate of the Lord’s burden as no one else, and no one repents as deeply as I, for the great light shone upon me, and I have seen the great light, and so my repentance is deeper than any other.” At the time, this is what he thought within his heart. At the end of his work, Paul said: “I have fought the fight, I have finished my course, and there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” His fight, work, and course were entirely for the sake of the crown of righteousness, and he did not actively forge ahead. Though he was not perfunctory in his work, it can be said that his work was done merely in order to make up for his mistakes, to make up for the accusations of his conscience. He only hoped to complete his work, finish his course, and fight his fight as soon as possible, so that he could gain his longed-for crown of righteousness all the sooner. What he longed for was not to meet the Lord Jesus with his experiences and true knowledge, but to finish his work as soon as possible, in order that he would receive the rewards that his work had earned him when he met the Lord Jesus. He used his work to comfort himself, and to make a deal in exchange for a future crown. What he sought was not the truth or God, but only the crown. How can such a pursuit be up to standard? His motivation, his work, the price he paid, and all of his efforts—his wonderful fantasies pervaded them all, and he worked wholly according to his own desires. In the entirety of his work, there was not the slightest willingness in the price he paid; he was merely engaged in making a deal. His efforts were not made willingly in order to perform his duty, but were made willingly in order to achieve the objective of the deal. Is there any worth to such efforts? Who would commend his impure efforts? Who has any interest in such efforts? His work was full of dreams for the future, full of wonderful plans, and contained no path by which to change the human disposition. So much of his benevolence was a pretense; his work did not provide life, but was a sham of civility; it was the making of a deal. How can work such as this lead man to the path of recovering his original duty?

All that Peter sought conformed to God’s will. He sought to satisfy God’s will, and regardless of the suffering and adversity, still he was willing to satisfy God’s will. There is no greater pursuit by a believer in God. What Paul sought was tainted by his own flesh, by his own notions, and by his own plans and schemes. He was by no means a qualified created being, was not someone who sought to satisfy God’s will. Peter sought to leave himself up to God’s orchestrations, and although the work he did was not great, the motivation behind his pursuit and the path that he walked were right; though he was not able to gain many people, he was able to pursue the way of truth. Because of this it can be said that he was a qualified created being. Today, even if you are not a worker, you should be able to perform the duty of a created being and seek to leave all up to God’s orchestrations. You should be able to submit to whatever God says, and experience all manner of tribulations and refinement, and though you are weak, in your heart you should still be able to love God. Those who take responsibility for their own life are willing to perform the duty of a created being, and such people’s viewpoint about pursuit is the right one. These are the people that God needs. If you did much work, and others gained your teachings, but you yourself did not change, and did not bear any testimony, or have any true experience, such that at the end of your life, still none of what you have done bears testimony, then are you someone who has changed? Are you someone who pursues the truth? At the time, the Holy Spirit used you, but when He used you, He used the part of you that could be used to work, and He did not use the part of you that could not be used. If you sought to change, then you would gradually be made perfect during the process of being used. Yet the Holy Spirit accepts no responsibility for whether or not you will ultimately be gained, and this depends on the manner of your pursuit. If there are no changes in your personal disposition, then that is because your viewpoint toward pursuit is wrong. If you are granted no reward, then that is your own problem, and because you yourself have not put the truth into practice and are unable to satisfy God’s will. And so, nothing is of greater importance than your personal experiences, and nothing is more critical than your personal entry! Some people will end up saying, “I’ve done so much work for You, and though I may not have made any celebrated achievements, still I have been diligent in my efforts. Can’t You just let me into heaven to eat the fruit of life?” You must know what kind of people I desire; those who are impure are not permitted to enter into the kingdom, those who are impure are not permitted to besmirch the holy ground. Though you may have done much work, and worked for many years, in the end if you are still deplorably filthy, then it will be intolerable to the law of Heaven that you wish to enter My kingdom! From the foundation of the world until today, never have I offered easy access to My kingdom to those who curry favor with Me. This is a heavenly rule, and no one can break it! You must seek life. Today, those who will be made perfect are the same kind as Peter: They are those who seek changes in their own disposition, and who are willing to bear testimony to God and fulfill their duty as a created being. Only people such as this will be made perfect. If you only look to rewards, and do not seek to change your own life disposition, then all your efforts will be in vain—this is an unalterable truth!

From the difference in the essences of Peter and Paul you should understand that all those who do not pursue life labor in vain! You believe in God and follow God, and so you must have a God-loving heart. You must cast aside your corrupt disposition, you must seek to satisfy God’s will, and you must fulfill the duty of a created being. Since you believe in and follow God, you should offer everything to Him, and should not make personal choices or demands, and you should achieve the satisfaction of God’s will. Since you were created, you should submit to the Lord that created you, for you are inherently without dominion over yourself, and have no ability to control your own destiny. Since you are a person who believes in God, you should seek holiness and change. Since you are a created being, you should adhere to your duty, and keep your place, and you must not overstep your duty. This is not to constrain you, or to suppress you through doctrine, but is instead the path through which you can perform your duty, and it can be achieved—and should be achieved—by all those who do righteousness. If you compare the essences of Peter and Paul, then you will know how you should seek. Of the paths walked by Peter and Paul, one is the path of being made perfect, and one is the path of being cast out; Peter and Paul represent two different paths. Though each received the work of the Holy Spirit, and each gained the enlightenment and illumination of the Holy Spirit, and each accepted that which had been entrusted to them by the Lord Jesus, the fruit borne in each was not the same: One truly bore fruit, and the other did not. From their essences, the work that they did, that which was outwardly expressed by them, and their final ends, you should understand which path you should take, which path you should choose to walk upon. They walked two clearly different paths. Paul and Peter, they were the quintessence of each path, and so from the very start they were held up to typify these two paths. What are the key points of Paul’s experiences, and why did he not make it? What are the key points of Peter’s experiences, and how did he experience being made perfect? If you compare what they each cared about, then you will know what exact kind of person God wants, what the will of God is, what the disposition of God is, what kind of person will ultimately be made perfect, and also what kind of person will not be made perfect; you will know what the disposition is of those who will be made perfect, and what the disposition is of those who will not be made perfect—these issues of essence can be seen in the experiences of Peter and Paul. God created all things, and so He makes all creation come under His dominion and submit to His dominion; He will command all things, so that all things are in His hands. All of God’s creation, including animals, plants, mankind, the mountains and rivers, and the lakes—all must come under His dominion. All things in the skies and on the ground must come under His dominion. They cannot have any choice and must all submit to His orchestrations. This was decreed by God, and it is the authority of God. God commands everything, and orders and ranks all things, with each classed according to kind, and allotted their own position, according to God’s will. No matter how great it is, no thing can surpass God, all things serve the mankind created by God, and no thing dares to disobey God or make any demands of God. Therefore man, as a created being, must also fulfill the duty of man. Regardless of whether he is the lord or caretaker of all things, no matter how high man’s status among all things, still he is but a small human being under the dominion of God, and is no more than an insignificant human being, a created being, and he will never be above God. As a created being, man should seek to fulfill the duty of a created being, and seek to love God without making other choices, for God is worthy of man’s love. Those who seek to love God should not seek any personal benefits or seek that which they personally long for; this is the most correct means of pursuit. If what you seek is the truth, if what you put into practice is the truth, and if what you attain is a change in your disposition, then the path that you tread is the right one. If what you seek is the blessings of the flesh, and what you put into practice is the truth of your own notions, and if there is no change in your disposition, and you are not at all submissive to God in the flesh, and you still live in vagueness, then what you seek will surely take you to hell, for the path that you walk is the path of failure. Whether you will be made perfect or cast out depends on your own pursuit, which is also to say that success or failure depends on the path that man walks.

God’s Work and Man’s Work

How much of man’s work is the work of the Holy Spirit and how much is man’s experience? It may be said that people still do not understand these questions, and the reason for that is they do not understand the principles of the Holy Spirit’s work. When I say “man’s work,” I am, of course, referring to the work of those who have the Holy Spirit’s work or those who are used by the Holy Spirit. I am not referring to work that originates from the will of man, but to the work of the apostles, workers, or ordinary brothers and sisters that falls within the scope of the Holy Spirit’s work. Here, “the work of man” does not refer to the work of the incarnate God, but to the scope and principles of the work the Holy Spirit performs on people. While these principles are the principles and scope of the work of the Holy Spirit, they are not the same as the principles and scope of the work of God incarnate. The work of man has man’s essence and principles, and the work of God has God’s essence and principles.

The work in the stream of the Holy Spirit, whether it is God’s own work or the work of people being used, is the work of the Holy Spirit. The essence of God Himself is the Spirit, which can be called the Holy Spirit or the sevenfold intensified Spirit. All in all, They are the Spirit of God, though the Spirit of God has been called different names in different eras. Their essence is still one. Therefore, the work of God Himself is the work of the Holy Spirit, while the work of the incarnate God is nothing less than the Holy Spirit at work. The work of people who are used is also the work of the Holy Spirit. Yet the work of God is the complete expression of the Holy Spirit, which is absolutely true, whereas the work of people being used is mixed with many human things, and is not the direct expression of the Holy Spirit, let alone His complete expression. The work of the Holy Spirit is varied and not limited by any conditions. The work of the Holy Spirit varies in different people; it manifests different essences, and it differs by era, as well as by country. Of course, although the Holy Spirit works in many different ways and according to many principles, no matter how the work is done or on what kind of people, its essence is always different; all the work done on different people has its principles, and all of it can represent the essence of its objects. This is because the work of the Holy Spirit is quite specific in scope and quite measured. The work done in the incarnate flesh is not the same as the work conducted on people, and the work varies, too, according to the caliber of the person on whom it is conducted. Work done in the incarnate flesh is not done on people, and it is not the same work as that done on people. In brief, no matter how it is done, the work performed on different objects is never the same, and the principles by which He works differ in accordance with the states and natures of the different people on whom He works. The Holy Spirit works on different people based on their inherent essence and does not make demands on them that exceed that essence, nor does He do work on them that exceeds their inherent caliber. So, the work of the Holy Spirit on man allows people to see the essence of that work’s object. The inherent essence of man does not change; his inherent caliber is limited. The Holy Spirit uses people or works on them in accordance with the limitations of their caliber, that they may benefit from it. When the Holy Spirit works on people being used, those people’s talents and inherent caliber are unleashed, not withheld. Their inherent caliber is exerted in service of the work. It may be said that He uses the parts of men that can be used in His work, in order to achieve results in that work. By contrast, work done in the incarnate flesh expresses the work of the Spirit directly and is unadulterated by the human mind and thoughts; neither man’s gifts, nor man’s experience, nor man’s innate condition can reach it. All the myriad work of the Holy Spirit is meant to benefit and edify man. However, some people can be perfected while others do not possess the conditions for perfection, which means they cannot be perfected and can hardly be saved, and though they may have had the work of the Holy Spirit, they are ultimately cast out. This is to say that though the work of the Holy Spirit is to edify people, one cannot say that all those who have had the Holy Spirit’s work will be perfected completely, because the path many people follow in their pursuit is not the path to being perfected. They have only the unilateral work of the Holy Spirit, not subjective human cooperation nor correct human pursuit. Thus, the work of the Holy Spirit on these people comes to serve those who are being perfected. The work of the Holy Spirit cannot be seen directly by people, nor can it be touched directly by people themselves. It can only be expressed by those with the gift of work, which means that the work of the Holy Spirit is provided to followers through the expressions people make.

The work of the Holy Spirit is accomplished and completed through many types of people and many different conditions. Although the work of God incarnate can represent the work of an entire era, and can represent people’s entry in an entire era, work on the details of people’s entry still needs to be done by men who are used by the Holy Spirit, not by God incarnate. So, God’s work, or God’s own ministry, is the work of God’s incarnate flesh, which man cannot do in His stead. The work of the Holy Spirit is completed through many different types of people; no single person can achieve it entirely, and no single person can express it completely. Those who lead the churches also cannot represent the work of the Holy Spirit completely; they can only do some leading work. The work of the Holy Spirit can thus be divided into three parts: God’s own work, the work of people who are used, and the work on all those in the stream of the Holy Spirit. God’s own work is to lead the entire era; the work of those who are used is, by being sent or receiving commissions after God has done His own work, to lead all God’s followers, and these are the ones who cooperate with God’s work; the work done by the Holy Spirit on those in the stream is to maintain all His own work, that is, to maintain His entire management and His testimony, while at once perfecting those who can be perfected. Together, these three parts are the complete work of the Holy Spirit, but without the work of God Himself, the management work would stagnate in its entirety. The work of God Himself involves the work of all of mankind, and it also represents the work of the entire era, which means that God’s own work represents every dynamic and trend of the work of the Holy Spirit, whereas the work of the apostles comes after God’s own work and follows from it, and it does not lead the era, nor does it represent trends of the Holy Spirit’s work in a whole era. They only do the work man ought to do, which has nothing at all to do with the management work. The work God does Himself is a project within the management work. Man’s work is only the duty that people who are used perform, and it is unrelated to the management work. Despite the fact that they are both the work of the Holy Spirit, due to differences in identities and representations of the work, there are clear and essential differences between God’s own work and the work of man. Moreover, the extent of the work done by the Holy Spirit varies on objects with different identities. These are the principles and scope of the work of the Holy Spirit.

The work of man signifies his experience and his humanity. What man provides and the work he does represent him. Man’s insight, man’s reasoning, man’s logic, and his rich imagination are all included in his work. Man’s experience is particularly able to signify his work, and a person’s experiences become the components of his work. Man’s work can express his experience. When some people experience negatively, most of the language of their fellowship will consist of negative elements. If their experience for a period of time is positive and they are especially possessed of a path in the positive aspect, their fellowship is very encouraging, and people can obtain positive provisions from them. If a worker becomes negative for a period of time, his fellowship will always carry negative elements. This kind of fellowship is depressing, and others will unconsciously become depressed after his fellowship. The state of followers changes depending on that of the leader. Whatever a worker is like inside, that is what he expresses, and the work of the Holy Spirit often changes with man’s state. He works according to people’s experience and does not force them, but makes demands of people according to the normal course of their experience. This is to say that man’s fellowship differs from the word of God. What people fellowship conveys their individual insights and experience, expressing their insights and experience on the basis of God’s work. Their responsibility is to find out, after God works or speaks, what of it they ought to practice or enter into, and then to deliver it to followers. Therefore, man’s work represents his entry and practice. Of course, such work is mixed with human lessons and experience or some human thoughts. However the Holy Spirit works, whether on man or in God incarnate, the workers always express what they are. Though it is the Holy Spirit who works, the work is founded on what man inherently is, because the Holy Spirit does not work without foundation. In other words, the work does not come from nothing, but is always done in accord with actual circumstances and real conditions. Only in this way can man’s disposition be transformed and his old notions and old thoughts be changed. What man expresses is what he sees, experiences, and can imagine, and it is attainable by man’s thinking, even if it is doctrine or notions. Man’s work cannot exceed the scope of man’s experience, nor what man sees, nor what man can imagine or conceive, regardless of the size of that work. All God expresses is what He Himself is, and this is unattainable by man—that is, beyond the reach of man’s thinking. He expresses His work of leading all mankind, and this is unrelated to the details of human experience, but is concerned instead with His own management. What man expresses is his experience, while what God expresses is His being, which is His inherent disposition, beyond the reach of man. Man’s experience is his insight and knowledge acquired on the basis of God’s expression of His being. Such insight and knowledge are called man’s being, and the basis of their expression is man’s inherent disposition and caliber—this is why they are also called man’s being. Man is able to fellowship what he experiences and sees. No one can fellowship that which they have not experienced, have not seen, or their thinking cannot reach, those being things they do not have inside of them. If what man expresses is not from his experience, it is then his imagination or doctrine. Simply put, there is no reality in his words. Were you never to come into contact with the things of society, you would not be able to fellowship clearly the complex relationships of society. If you had no family, were others to talk about family issues, you would not understand most of what they said. So, what man fellowships and the work he does represent his inner being. If someone fellowshipped his understanding of chastisement and judgment, but you had no experience of it, you would dare not deny his knowledge, much less dare to be one hundred percent confident in it. This is because their fellowship is something that you have never experienced, something you have never known, and your mind cannot imagine it. From their knowledge, all you can take is a path to undergo chastisement and judgment in the future. But this path can only be one of doctrinal knowledge; it cannot take the place of your own understanding, much less your experience. Perhaps you think what they say is quite correct, but in your own experience, you find it impracticable in many ways. Perhaps you feel some of what you hear is completely impracticable; you harbor notions about it at the time, and although you accept it, you only do so reluctantly. But in your own experience, the knowledge from which you derived notions becomes your way of practice, and the more you practice, the more you understand the true value and meaning of the words you heard. After having had your own experience, you can then talk about the knowledge you should have of what you experienced. In addition, you can also distinguish between those whose knowledge is real and practical and those whose knowledge is based on doctrine and worthless. So, whether the knowledge you profess accords with the truth largely depends on whether you have practical experience of it. Where there is truth in your experience, your knowledge will be practical and valuable. Through your experience, you can also gain discernment and insight, deepen your knowledge, and increase your wisdom and common sense about how you should conduct yourself. The knowledge expressed by people who do not possess the truth is doctrine, no matter how lofty it may be. This type of person may well be very intelligent when it comes to matters of the flesh but cannot make distinctions when it comes to spiritual matters. This is because such people have no experience at all of spiritual affairs. These are people who are not enlightened in spiritual affairs and do not have spiritual understanding. Whatever sort of knowledge you express, as long as it is your being, then it is your personal experience, your real knowledge. What people who speak only of doctrine—those being people who possess neither the truth nor reality—discuss can also be called their being, because they have arrived at their doctrine only through deep contemplation and it is the result of their deep rumination. Yet it is only doctrine, nothing more than imagination! The experiences of all types of people represent the things within them. Anyone without any spiritual experience cannot speak of knowledge of the truth, nor of correct knowledge about various spiritual things. What man expresses is what he is inside—this is certain. If one wishes to have knowledge of spiritual things and knowledge of the truth, one must have real experience. If you cannot speak clearly about common sense in human life, how much less will you be able to talk about spiritual things? Those who can lead churches, supply people with life, and be apostles to the people must have actual experience; they must have a correct understanding of spiritual things and a correct comprehension and experience of the truth. Only such people are qualified to be workers or apostles who lead the churches. Otherwise, they can only follow as the least and cannot lead, much less be apostles who are able to supply people with life. This is because the function of apostles is not to rush about or to fight; it is to do the work of ministering life and leading others in transforming their dispositions. Those who perform this function are commissioned to shoulder a heavy responsibility, one that not just anyone can shoulder. This kind of work can only be undertaken by those with life being, that is, those who have experience of the truth. It cannot be undertaken by merely anyone who can renounce, who can rush about, or who is willing to expend themselves; people who have no experience of the truth, who have not been pruned or judged, are unable to do this type of work. People with no experience, who are people without reality, are unable to see reality clearly because they themselves are without this kind of being. So, this type of person is not only unable to do leadership work, but, if they remain without the truth for a long while, they are to be cast out. The insight you express can stand as proof of the hardships you have experienced in life, the things for which you are chastised, and the issues for which you have been judged. This is also true of trials: Where one is refined, where one is weak—these are the areas in which one has experience, in which one has a path. For example, if someone suffers frustrations in marriage, they will often fellowship, “Thank God, praise God, I must satisfy God’s will and offer up my entire life, and I must place my marriage entirely in God’s hands. I am willing to pledge my whole life to God.” All the things within man can demonstrate what he is through fellowship. The pace of a person’s speech, whether they speak loudly or quietly—such matters are not matters of experience and cannot represent what they have and are. These things can only tell whether a person’s character is good or bad, or whether their nature is good or bad, but they cannot be equated with whether someone has experience. The ability to express oneself when speaking, or the skill or speed of speech, is just a matter of practice and cannot replace one’s experience. When you talk about your individual experiences, you fellowship that which you find important and all the things within you. My speech represents My being, but what I say is beyond the reach of man. What I say is not that which man experiences, and it is not something that man can see; it is also not something that man can touch, but is what I am. Some people acknowledge only that what I fellowship is what I have experienced, but they do not recognize that it is the direct expression of the Spirit. Of course, what I say is what I have experienced. It is I who have done the management work for six thousand years. I have experienced everything from the beginning of the creation of mankind until now; how would I be unable to discuss that? When it comes to man’s nature, I have seen clearly; I observed it long ago. How would I be unable to talk clearly about it? Since I have seen the substance of man clearly, I am qualified to chastise man and judge him, because all of man came from Me but has been corrupted by Satan. Of course, I am also qualified to assess the work I have done. Although this work is not done by My flesh, it is the direct expression of the Spirit, and this is what I have and what I am. Therefore, I am qualified to express it and to do the work I ought to do. What people say is what they have experienced. It is what they have seen, what their minds can reach, and what their senses can detect. That is what they can fellowship. The words spoken by God’s incarnate flesh are the direct expression of the Spirit and they express the work that has been done by the Spirit, which the flesh has not experienced or seen, yet He still expresses His being, for the essence of the flesh is the Spirit, and He expresses the work of the Spirit. It is work already done by the Spirit, though it is beyond the reach of the flesh. After incarnation, through the expression of the flesh, He enables people to know God’s being and allows people to see God’s disposition and the work that He has done. The work of man gives people greater clarity about what they should enter into and what they should understand; it involves leading people toward understanding and experiencing the truth. Man’s work is to sustain people; God’s work is to open up new paths and new eras for mankind, and to reveal to people that which is not known by mortals, enabling them to know His disposition. God’s work is to lead all of mankind.

All the work of the Holy Spirit is performed to benefit people. It is all about edifying people; there is no work that does not benefit people. No matter whether the truth is deep or shallow, and no matter the caliber of those who accept the truth, whatever the Holy Spirit does, it benefits people. But the work of the Holy Spirit cannot be done directly; it must be expressed through the people who cooperate with Him. Only thus can the results of the work of the Holy Spirit be obtained. Of course, when the Holy Spirit works directly, it is not adulterated at all; but when the Holy Spirit works through man, it becomes very tainted and is not the original work of the Holy Spirit. This being so, the truth changes to differing degrees. Followers do not receive the original intention of the Holy Spirit but a combination of the work of the Holy Spirit and the experience and knowledge of man. The part of what followers receive that is the work of the Holy Spirit is correct, whereas the experience and the knowledge of man they receive vary because the workers are different. Workers with the enlightenment and guidance of the Holy Spirit will go on to have experiences based on this enlightenment and guidance. Within these experiences are combined man’s mind and experience, as well as the being of humanity, and afterward, they gain the knowledge or insight they should have. This is man’s way of practice after experiencing the truth. This way of practice is not always the same, because people experience differently and the things people experience are different. In this way, the same enlightenment of the Holy Spirit results in different knowledge and practice, because those who receive the enlightenment are different. Some people make minor mistakes during practice while some make major mistakes, and some make nothing but mistakes. This is because people differ in their comprehension ability and also because their inherent calibers differ. Some people have one sort of understanding after hearing a message, and some people have another after hearing a truth. Some people deviate slightly, while some do not understand the real meaning of the truth at all. Therefore, one’s understanding dictates how one will lead others; this is exactly true, because one’s work is simply an expression of one’s being. People led by those who have a correct understanding of the truth will also have a correct understanding of the truth. Even if there are people with absurd understanding, there are very few of them, and not everyone will be like this. If one has an absurd understanding of the truth, those who follow him will undoubtedly also be distorted, and these people will be absurd types in every sense of the word. The degree to which followers understand the truth largely depends on the workers. Of course, the truth from God is correct and without error, and it is absolutely certain. The workers, however, are not completely correct and cannot be said to be completely reliable. If workers have a very practical way to put the truth into practice, then followers will also have a way to practice. If workers do not have a way to practice the truth but have only doctrine, then followers will have no reality. The caliber and nature of followers are determined by birth and are not associated with workers, but the extent to which followers comprehend the truth and know God depends on the workers (this is only so for some people). Whatever a worker is like, so will the followers he leads be. What a worker expresses is his own being, without reservation. The demands he makes of those who follow him are what he himself is willing or able to achieve. Most workers use what they do themselves as a basis to make demands of their followers, despite there being much their followers cannot achieve at all—and that which one cannot achieve becomes an obstacle to one’s entry.

There is far less deviation in the work of those who have undergone pruning, judgment and chastisement, and the expression of their work is much more accurate. Those who rely on their naturalness to work make quite major mistakes. The work of unperfected people expresses too much of their own naturalness, which poses a major obstacle to the work of the Holy Spirit. However good a person’s caliber, they must also undergo pruning and judgment before they can do the work of God’s commission. If they have not undergone such judgment, their work, no matter how well done, cannot accord with the principles of the truth and is always a product of their own naturalness and human goodness. The work of those who have undergone pruning and judgment is much more accurate than the work of those who have not been pruned and judged. Those who have not undergone judgment express nothing but human flesh and thoughts, mingled with much human intelligence and innate talent. This is not man’s accurate expression of God’s work. Those who follow such people are brought before them by their innate caliber. Because they express too much of the insight and experience of man, which are almost disconnected from God’s original intention and deviate too far from it, the work of this type of person cannot bring people before God, but brings them rather before man. So, those who have not undergone judgment and chastisement are unqualified to carry out the work of God’s commission. The work of a qualified worker can bring people to the right way and grant them greater entry into the truth. His work can bring people before God. In addition, the work he does can vary from individual to individual and is not bound by rules, allowing people liberation and freedom, and the capacity gradually to grow in life and to have a more profound entry into the truth. The work of an unqualified worker falls far short. His work is foolish. He can only bring people into rules, and what he demands of people does not vary from individual to individual; he does not work according to people’s actual needs. In this type of work, there are too many rules and too many doctrines, and it cannot bring people into reality, nor into normal practice of growth in life. It can only enable people to adhere to a few worthless rules. Such guidance can only lead people astray. He leads you to become like him; he can bring you into what he has and is. For followers to discern whether leaders are qualified, the key is to look at the path on which they lead and the results of their work, and to see whether followers receive principles in accordance with the truth, and whether they receive ways of practice suitable for their transformation. You should distinguish between the different work of different types of people; you should not be a foolish follower. This bears on the matter of people’s entry. If you are unable to distinguish which person’s leadership has a path and which does not, you will easily be misled. All of this has a direct bearing on your own life. There is too much naturalness in the work of unperfected people; it is mixed with too much of human will. Their being is naturalness—what they are born with. It is not life after having been pruned or reality after having been transformed. How can such a person support those who are pursuing life? The life that man has originally is his innate intelligence or talent. This kind of intelligence or talent is quite far from God’s exact demands for man. If a man has not been perfected and his corrupt disposition has not been pruned, there will be a wide gap between what he expresses and the truth; what he expresses will be mixed with vague things, such as his imagination and one-sided experience. Moreover, regardless of how he works, people feel there is no overall goal and no truth suitable for the entry of all people. Most of what is demanded of people is beyond their ability, as if they were ducks being made to sit on perches. This is the work of human will. Man’s corrupt disposition, his thoughts, and his notions pervade all parts of his body. Man is not born with the instinct to practice the truth, nor does he have the instinct to understand the truth directly. Add to that man’s corrupt disposition—when this kind of natural person works, does it not cause disruptions? But a man who has been perfected has experience of the truth that people should understand, and knowledge of their corrupt dispositions, so that the vague and unreal things in his work gradually diminish, the human adulterations become fewer, and his work and service come ever closer to the standards required by God. Thus, his work has entered the truth reality and it has also become realistic. The thoughts in man’s mind in particular block the work of the Holy Spirit. Man has a rich imagination and reasonable logic, and he has had long experience handling affairs. If these aspects of man do not undergo pruning and correction, they are all obstacles to work. Therefore, man’s work cannot achieve the greatest degree of accuracy, especially the work of unperfected people.

The work of man stays within a range and is limited. One person can only do work of a certain phase and cannot do the work of the entire era—otherwise, he would lead people into the midst of rules. The work of man can only apply to a particular time or phase. This is because man’s experience has its scope. One cannot compare the work of man with the work of God. Man’s ways of practice and his knowledge of the truth are all applicable to a particular scope. You cannot say that the path man treads is completely the will of the Holy Spirit, because man can only be enlightened by the Holy Spirit, and cannot be completely filled with the Holy Spirit. The things man can experience are all within the scope of normal humanity and cannot exceed the range of thoughts in the normal human mind. All those who can live out the truth reality experience within this range. When they experience the truth, it is always an experience of normal human life enlightened by the Holy Spirit; it is not a way of experiencing that deviates from normal human life. They experience the truth enlightened by the Holy Spirit on the foundation of living their human lives. Moreover, this truth varies from person to person, and its depth is related to the state of the person. One can only say that the path they walk is the normal human life of someone pursuing the truth, and it may be called the path walked by a normal person enlightened by the Holy Spirit. One cannot say that the path they walk is the path the Holy Spirit takes. In normal human experience, because people who pursue are not the same, the work of the Holy Spirit is also not the same. In addition, because the environments people experience and the ranges of their experience are not the same, and because of the admixture of their mind and thoughts, their experience is mixed to different degrees. Each person understands a truth according to their different, individual conditions. Their understanding of the real meaning of the truth is not complete and is only one or several aspects of it. The scope of the truth man experiences differs from person to person in line with each person’s conditions. In this way, the knowledge of the same truth, as expressed by different people, is not the same. This is to say, man’s experience always has limitations and cannot completely represent the will of the Holy Spirit, nor can the work of man be perceived as the work of God, even if what is expressed by man corresponds very closely to God’s will, and even if the experience of man is very close to the perfecting work that the Holy Spirit performs. Man can only be God’s servant, doing the work that God entrusts to him. Man can only express knowledge enlightened by the Holy Spirit and truths obtained from his personal experiences. Man is unqualified and does not meet the conditions to be the outlet of the Holy Spirit. He is not entitled to say that his work is the work of God. Man has man’s working principles, and all men have different experiences and possess varying conditions. Man’s work includes all his experiences under the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. These experiences can only represent man’s being and do not represent the being of God or the will of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the path man walks cannot be said to be the path walked by the Holy Spirit, because the work of man cannot represent the work of God, and man’s work and man’s experience are not the complete will of the Holy Spirit. Man’s work is susceptible to falling into rules, and the method of his work is easily confined to a limited scope, and is unable to lead people to a free way. Most followers live within a limited scope, and their way of experiencing is also limited in its scope. Man’s experience is always limited; the method of his work is also limited to a few types and cannot be compared with the work of the Holy Spirit or the work of God Himself. This is because man’s experience, in the end, is limited. However God does His work, it is unbound by rules; however it is done, it is not limited to a single method. There are no rules whatsoever to God’s work—all His work is released and free. No matter how much time man spends following Him, he cannot distill any laws that govern God’s ways of working. Although His work is principled, it is always done in new ways and always has new developments, and it is beyond man’s reach. In a single period, God may have several different types of work and different ways of leading people, making it so people always have new entries and changes. You cannot discern the laws of His work because He is always working in new ways, and only thus do followers of God not become bound by rules. The work of God Himself always avoids people’s notions and counters them. Only those who follow and pursue Him with a true heart can have their dispositions transformed and be able to live freely, not constrained by any rules or restrained by any religious notions. The work of man makes demands of people based on his own experience and what he himself can achieve. The standard of these requirements is limited within a certain scope, and the methods of practice are also very limited. Followers thus unconsciously live within this limited scope; as time passes, these things become rules and rituals. If the work of one period is led by someone who has not undergone God’s personal perfecting and not received judgment, his followers will all become religionists and experts in resisting God. Therefore, if someone is a qualified leader, that person must have undergone judgment and accepted being perfected. Those who have not undergone judgment, even though they may have the work of the Holy Spirit, express only vague and impractical things. With time, they will lead people into vague and supernatural rules. The work that God performs does not accord with the flesh of man. It does not accord with man’s thoughts, but counters man’s notions; it is not tainted with vague religious colorings. The results of God’s work cannot be achieved by someone who has not been perfected by Him; they are beyond the reach of man’s thinking.

Work in the mind of man is too easy for man to achieve. Pastors and leaders in the religious world, for example, rely on their gifts and positions to do their work. People who follow them for a long time will be infected by their gifts and influenced by some of their being. They focus on people’s gifts, abilities and knowledge, and they pay attention to supernatural things and many profound, unrealistic doctrines (of course, these profound doctrines are unattainable). They do not focus on changes in people’s dispositions, but rather on training people to preach and work, improving people’s knowledge and their abundant religious doctrines. They do not focus on how much people’s disposition is changed nor on how much people understand of the truth. They do not concern themselves with people’s essence, and much less do they try to know people’s normal and abnormal states. They do not counter people’s notions, nor do they reveal their notions, much less do they prune people for their deficiencies or corruptions. Most who follow them serve with their gifts, and all they release is religious notions and theological theories, which are out of touch with reality and completely unable to confer life onto people. In fact, the essence of their work is nurturing talent, nurturing a person with nothing into a talented seminary graduate who later goes on to work and lead. Can you discern any laws in God’s six thousand years of work? There are many rules and restrictions in the work that man does, and the human brain is too dogmatic. What man expresses, therefore, is knowledge and realizations that are within the scope of his experience. Man is unable to express anything apart from this. Man’s experiences or knowledge do not arise from his innate gifts or his instinct; they arise because of God’s guidance and direct shepherding. Man has only the faculty to accept this shepherding and no faculty that can express directly what divinity is. Man is unable to be the source; he can only be a vessel that accepts water from the source. This is the human instinct, the faculty that one should have as a human being. If a person loses the faculty that accepts God’s word and loses the human instinct, that person also loses what is most precious, and loses the duty of created man. If a person has no knowledge or experience of God’s word or His work, that person loses his duty, the duty he should perform as a created being, and loses the dignity of a created being. It is God’s instinct to express what divinity is, whether it is expressed in the flesh or directly by the Spirit; this is God’s ministry. Man expresses his own experiences or knowledge (that is, expresses what he is) during God’s work or afterward; this is man’s instinct and man’s duty, and it is what man should achieve. Although man’s expression falls far short of what God expresses, and although man’s expression is bound by many rules, man must fulfill the duty he should fulfill and do what he must do. Man should do everything humanly possible to fulfill his duty, and he should not have even the slightest reservation.

After working for years, man will summarize the experience of his many years of work, as well as the wisdom and rules he has accumulated. One who has worked for a long time knows how to sense the movement of the work of the Holy Spirit; he knows when the Holy Spirit is working and when He is not; he knows how to fellowship while carrying a burden; and he is aware of the normal state of the Holy Spirit’s work and the normal state of people’s growth in life. Such is a person who has worked for years and knows the work of the Holy Spirit. Those who have worked for a long time speak assuredly and unhurriedly; even when they have nothing to say, they are composed. Inside, they can continue praying to seek the work of the Holy Spirit. They are experienced in working. A person who has worked for a long time, who has much experience and has learned many lessons, has much inside that obstructs the work of the Holy Spirit; this is a defect of his long-term work. A person who has just started working is unadulterated by human lessons or experience and is particularly at a loss about how the Holy Spirit works. However, during the course of work, he gradually learns to sense how the Holy Spirit works and becomes aware of what to do in order to obtain the Holy Spirit’s work, what to do in order to strike exactly at others’ vulnerabilities, and other such common knowledge that those who work should possess. Over time, he comes to know such wisdom and common knowledge of working like the back of his hand, and seems to use it easily when working. However, when the Holy Spirit changes the way He works, he still adheres to his old knowledge of work and old rules of work and knows very little about the new dynamics of the work. Years of work and of being full of the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit give him ever more lessons on work and ever more experience. Such things fill him with a self-confidence that is not pride. In other words, he is quite pleased with his own work and content with the common knowledge he has obtained about the work of the Holy Spirit. In particular, having obtained or realized those things that others have not gives him even more confidence in himself; it seems that the work of the Holy Spirit within him can never be extinguished, while others do not qualify for this special treatment. Only people of his kind, who have worked for years and whose use is of considerable value, are qualified to enjoy it. These things become a great hindrance to his accepting the new work of the Holy Spirit. Even if he can accept the new work, he cannot do so overnight. He is sure to go through several twists and turns before accepting it. This situation can only be reversed gradually, after his old notions are pruned and his old disposition is judged. Without going through these steps, he does not let go and easily accept new teachings and work that are not in harmony with his old notions. This is the most difficult thing to deal with in man, and it is not easy to change. If, as a worker, he is able at once to achieve an understanding of the Holy Spirit’s work and to summarize its dynamics, and if he is able not to be restricted by his experiences of work and to accept new work in light of old work, then he is a wise man and a qualified worker. People are often like this: They work for several years without being able to summarize their experience of work, or, after summarizing their experience and wisdom concerning work, they are hindered from accepting the new work and cannot properly understand or correctly treat the old and new work. People really are difficult to handle! Most of you are like this. Those who have experienced years of the Holy Spirit’s work find it hard to accept the new work, and they are always full of notions that they cannot set aside, while a man who has just started working lacks common knowledge about work and does not even know how to handle some of the simplest matters. You people are really difficult! Those with some seniority are so proud and conceited that they have forgotten where they came from. They always look down on younger people, yet they are unable to accept the new work and to let go of the notions they have collected and kept over the years. Although those young, ignorant people are able to accept a little of the Holy Spirit’s new work and are quite enthusiastic, they always become muddled and do not know what to do when problems arise. They are enthusiastic but ignorant. They have only a little knowledge of the Holy Spirit’s work and are unable to use it in their lives; it is just entirely useless doctrine. There are too many people like you; how many are fit for use? How many are there who can submit to the enlightenment and illumination of the Holy Spirit and manage to accord with God’s will? It seems those of you who have been followers until now have been very submissive, but, in fact, you have not given up your notions, you are still seeking in the Bible, believing in vagueness, or wandering in notions. There is no one who investigates today’s practical work carefully or goes deeply into it. You are accepting today’s way with your old notions. What can you gain with such a belief? It could be said that in you are hidden many notions that have not been revealed, and that you are simply making a supreme effort to hide them, without revealing them easily. You do not accept the new work sincerely, and you do not plan to give up your old notions; you have too many philosophies for worldly dealings, and they are too substantial. You do not give up your old notions and you deal with the new work reluctantly. Your hearts are too sinister, and you simply do not take the steps of the new work to heart. Can such wastrels as you do the work of spreading the gospel? Are you able to undertake the work of spreading it to the entire universe? These practices of yours are stopping you from transforming your disposition and knowing God. If you continue thus, you are bound to be cast out.

You must know how to differentiate God’s work from the work of man. What can you see in the work of man? There are many elements of man’s experience in his work; what man expresses is what he is. God’s own work also expresses what He is, but His being is different from man’s. Man’s being represents man’s experience and life (what man experiences or encounters in his life, or the philosophies for worldly dealings he has), and people living in different environments express different beings. Whether you have experiences of society and how you actually live in your family and experience within it can be seen in what you express, whereas you cannot see in the work of God incarnate whether He has social experiences. He is well aware of the substance of man and can reveal all kinds of practices pertaining to all kinds of people. He is even better at revealing the corrupt dispositions and the rebellious behavior of humans. He does not live among worldly people, but He is aware of the nature of mortals and all the corruptions of worldly people. This is His being. Though He does not deal with the world, He knows the rules of dealing with the world, because He understands human nature fully. He knows about the Spirit’s work that man’s eyes cannot see and man’s ears cannot hear, both of today and of the past. This includes wisdom that is not a philosophy for worldly dealings and wonders that are hard for people to fathom. This is His being, open to people and also hidden from people. What He expresses is not the being of an extraordinary person, but the inherent attributes and being of the Spirit. He does not travel the world but knows everything of it. He contacts the “anthropoids” who have no knowledge or insight, but He expresses words that are higher than knowledge and above great men. He lives within a group of obtuse and numb people who are without humanity and who do not understand the conventions and life of humanity, but He can ask mankind to live out normal humanity, at the same time revealing the base and low humanity of mankind. All this is His being, higher than the being of any flesh-and-blood person. For Him, it is unnecessary to experience a complicated, cumbersome, and sordid social life to do the work He needs to do and reveal the substance of corrupt mankind thoroughly. A sordid social life does not edify His flesh. His work and words only reveal man’s rebelliousness and do not provide man with experience and lessons for dealing with the world. He does not need to investigate society or man’s family when He supplies man with life. Exposing and judging man is not an expression of the experiences of His flesh; it is His revelation of man’s unrighteousness after having known man’s rebelliousness for a long time and abhorring mankind’s corruption. The work He does is all meant to reveal His disposition to man and to express His being. Only He can do this work; it is not something a flesh-and-blood person could achieve. From His work, man cannot tell what kind of person He is. Man is also unable to classify Him as a created person on the basis of His work. His being also makes Him unclassifiable as a created person. Man can only consider Him a non-human, but does not know in which category to put Him, so man is forced to list Him in the category of God. It is not unreasonable for man to do so, for God has done much work among people that man is unable to do.

The work God does is not representative of the experience of His flesh; the work man does is representative of his experience. Everyone talks about their personal experience. God can express the truth directly, while man can only express the experience that corresponds to his having experienced the truth. God’s work has no rules and is not subject to time or geographical constraints. He can express what He is at anytime, anywhere. He works as He pleases. Man’s work has conditions and context; without them, he would be unable to work and unable to express his knowledge of God or his experience of the truth. To tell whether something is God’s own work or man’s work, you must simply compare the differences between the two. If there is no work done by God Himself and there is only the work of man, you will simply know that man’s teachings are high, beyond the capacity of anyone else; their tones of speaking, their principles in handling things, and their experienced and steady manner in working are beyond the reach of others. You all admire these people of good caliber and lofty knowledge, but you cannot see from God’s work and words how high His humanity is. Instead, He is ordinary, and, when working, He is normal and practical yet also immeasurable by mortals, which therefore makes people develop a kind of heart of fear. Perhaps a person’s experience in his work is particularly advanced, or his imagination and reasoning are particularly advanced, and his humanity is particularly good; such attributes can only gain people’s admiration, but not arouse their fear and fright. People all admire those who can work well, who have particularly deep experience, and who can practice the truth, but such people can never elicit fear, only admiration and envy. But people who have experienced God’s work do not admire God; instead, they feel His work is beyond human reach and is unfathomable to man, that it is fresh and wonderful. When people experience God’s work, their first knowledge of Him is that He is unfathomable, wise, and wonderful, and they unconsciously fear Him and feel the mystery of the work He does, which is beyond the ken of man’s mind. People want only to be able to meet His requirements, to satisfy His will; they do not wish to exceed Him, because the work He does goes beyond man’s thinking and imagination and could not be done by man in His stead. Even man himself does not know his own inadequacies, yet God has forged a new path and has come to bring man into a newer and more beautiful world, and so mankind has made new progress and has had a new start. What people feel for God is not admiration, or rather, is not only admiration. Their deepest experience is fear and love; their feeling is that God is indeed wonderful. He does work that man is unable to do and says things that man is unable to say. People who have experienced God’s work always have an indescribable feeling. People of deep enough experience can understand the love of God; they can feel His loveliness, that His work is so wise, so wonderful, and thereby is infinite power generated among them. It is not fright or occasional love and respect, but a deep sense of God’s compassion for man and tolerance of him. However, people who have experienced His chastisement and judgment sense His majesty and that He tolerates no offense. Even people who have experienced much of His work are unable to fathom Him; all who truly fear Him know that His work is not in line with people’s notions but always goes against their notions. He does not need people to admire Him wholly or present the appearance of submission to Him; rather, they should achieve true fear and true submission. In so much of His work, anyone with true experience develops a heart of fear for Him, which is higher than admiration. People have seen His disposition due to His work of chastisement and judgment, and they therefore have hearts of fear for Him. God is meant to be feared and submitted to, because His being and His disposition are not the same as those of a created being and are above those of a created being. God is self-existent and everlasting, He is a non-created being, and only God is worthy of fear and submission; man is not qualified for this. So, all who have experienced His work and truly known Him develop hearts of fear for Him. However, those who do not let go of their notions about Him—those who simply do not regard Him as God—lack hearts of fear for Him, and though they follow Him, they are not conquered; they are rebellious people by nature. What He means to achieve by working thus is for all created beings to have hearts of fear for the Creator, worship Him, and surrender to His dominion unconditionally. This is the final result that all His work is meant to achieve. If people who have experienced such work do not have hearts of fear for God, even slightly, and if their past rebelliousness does not change at all, then they are sure to be cast out. If a person’s attitude toward God is only to admire Him or to show Him respect from a distance, and not to love Him in the slightest, then this is the result at which a person without a God-loving heart has arrived, and that person lacks the conditions to be perfected. If so much work is unable to obtain a person’s true love, then that person has not gained God and does not genuinely pursue the truth. A person who does not love God does not love the truth and thus cannot gain God, much less receive God’s approval. Such people, however they experience the work of the Holy Spirit, and however they experience judgment, are unable to have a God-fearing heart. These are people whose nature is unchangeable and who have extremely odious dispositions. All who do not have a God-fearing heart are to be cast out, to be objects of punishment, and to be punished just like those who do evil, to suffer even more than those who have done unrighteous things.

Knowing the Three Stages of God’s Work Is the Path to Knowing God

The work of managing mankind is divided into three stages, which means that the work of saving mankind is divided into three stages. These three stages do not include the work of creating the world, but are rather the three stages of the work of the Age of Law, the Age of Grace, and the Age of Kingdom. The work of creating the world was the work of producing the whole of mankind. It was not the work of saving mankind, and bears no relation to the work of saving mankind, for when the world was created, mankind had not been corrupted by Satan, and so there was no need to carry out the work of mankind’s salvation. The work of saving mankind only began when mankind had been corrupted by Satan, and so the work of managing mankind also only began when mankind had been corrupted. In other words, God’s management of man began as a result of the work of saving mankind, and did not arise from the work of creating the world. It was only after mankind acquired a corrupt disposition that the work of management came into existence, and so the work of managing mankind includes three parts, rather than four stages, or four ages. Only this is the correct way to refer to God’s management of mankind. When the final age comes to a close, the work of managing mankind will have come to a complete end. The conclusion of the work of management means that the work of saving all mankind will have been completely finished, and that this phase will thenceforth have concluded for mankind. Without the work of saving all mankind, the work of managing mankind would not exist, nor would there be the three stages of work. It was precisely because of mankind’s depravity, and because mankind was in such urgent need of salvation, that Jehovah concluded the creation of the world and began the work of the Age of Law. Only then did the work of managing mankind begin, which means that only then did the work of saving mankind begin. “Managing mankind” does not mean guiding the life of mankind, newly created, on earth (which is to say, a mankind that had yet to be corrupted). Rather, it is the salvation of a mankind that has been corrupted by Satan, which is to say, it is to transform this corrupt mankind. This is the meaning of “managing mankind.” The work of saving mankind does not include the work of creating the world, and so the work of managing mankind also does not include the work of creating the world, but rather only includes three stages of work that are separate from the world’s creation. To understand the work of managing mankind, it is necessary to be aware of the history of the three stages of work—this is what everyone must be aware of in order to be saved. As created beings, you should recognize that man was created by God, and you should recognize the source of mankind’s corruption, and, moreover, the process of man’s salvation. If you only know how to act according to doctrine in an attempt to gain God’s favor, but have no inkling of how God saves mankind, or of the source of mankind’s corruption, then this is what you lack as a created being. You should not be satisfied with just understanding those truths that can be put into practice, while remaining ignorant of the wider scope of God’s management work—if this is the case, then you are too dogmatic. The three stages of work are the inside story of God’s management of man, the advent of the gospel of the whole world, the greatest mystery among all mankind, and they are also the foundation of spreading the gospel. If you only focus on understanding simple truths that relate to your life, and know nothing of this, the greatest of all mysteries and visions, then is your life not akin to a defective product, good for nothing except being looked at?

If man only concentrates on practice, and sees the work of God and what man should know as secondary, is this not penny-wise and pound-foolish of him? That which you must know, you must know; that which you must put into practice, you must put into practice. Only then will you be someone who knows how to pursue the truth. When the day comes for you to spread the gospel, if you are only able to say that God is a great and righteous God, that He is the supreme God, a God with whom no great man can compare, and that He is a God above whom there is none…, if you can only say these irrelevant and superficial words while being utterly incapable of speaking words which are of crucial importance and which have essence; if you have nothing to say about knowing God or the work of God, and, furthermore, cannot explain the truth, or provide what is lacking in man, then someone such as you is incapable of performing their duty well. Bearing testimony to God and spreading the gospel of the kingdom is no simple matter. You must first be equipped with the truth, and the visions that must be understood. When you are clear about the visions and truth of the different aspects of God’s work, and in your heart you come to know the work of God, and regardless of what God does—whether it be righteous judgment or refinement of man—you possess the greatest vision as your foundation, and you possess the right truth to put into practice, then you will be able to follow God to the very end. You must know that regardless of what work He does, the aim of God’s work does not change, the heart of His work does not change, and His will toward man does not change. No matter how severe His words, no matter how adverse the environment, the principles of His work will not change, and His intention of saving man will not change. Provided that it is not the work of the revelation of the end of man or the destination of man, and is not the work of the final phase, or the work of bringing God’s entire plan of management to an end, and provided that it is during the time He works man, then the heart of His work will not change. It will always be the salvation of mankind. This should be the foundation of your belief in God. The aim of the three stages of work is the salvation of all mankind—this means the complete salvation of man from the power of Satan. Though each of the three stages of work has a different objective and significance, each is part of the work of saving mankind, and each is different work of salvation carried out according to the requirements of mankind. Once you are aware of the aim of these three stages of work, then you will be aware of how to appreciate the significance of each stage of work, and will recognize how to act in order to satisfy the will of God. If you can reach this point, then this, the greatest of all visions, will become the foundation of your belief in God. You should not only seek after easy ways of practice or deep truths, but should combine visions with practice, so that there are both truths that can be put into practice and knowledge that is based on visions. Only then will you be someone who comprehensively pursues the truth.

The three stages of work are at the heart of God’s entire management, and in them are expressed the disposition of God and what He is. Those who do not know of the three stages of God’s work are incapable of realizing how God expresses His disposition, nor do they know the wisdom of God’s work. They also remain ignorant of the many ways in which He saves mankind, and of His will for the whole of mankind. The three stages of work are the full expression of the work of saving mankind. Those who do not know the three stages of work will be ignorant of the various methods and principles of the Holy Spirit’s work, and those who only rigidly stick to doctrine that is left over from a certain stage of work are people who limit God to doctrine, and whose belief in God is vague and uncertain. Such people will never receive God’s salvation. Only the three stages of God’s work can fully express the entirety of God’s disposition and completely express God’s intention of saving the whole of mankind, and the entire process of mankind’s salvation. This is proof that He has defeated Satan and gained mankind; it is proof of God’s victory, and is the expression of God’s entire disposition. Those who understand only one stage of the three stages of God’s work know only part of God’s disposition. In the notions of man, it is easy for this single stage of work to become doctrine, and it becomes likely that man will establish fixed rules about God and use this single part of God’s disposition as a representation of God’s entire disposition. Furthermore, much of man’s imagination is mixed within, such that man rigidly constrains the disposition, being, and wisdom of God, as well as the principles of God’s work, within limited parameters, believing that if God was like this once, then He will remain the same for all time and never change. Only those who know and appreciate the three stages of work can fully and accurately know God. At the very least, they will not define God as the God of the Israelites, or the Jews, and will not see Him as a God who will be forever nailed to the cross for the sake of man. If one only comes to know God from one stage of His work, then their knowledge is far too small, and amounts to no more than a drop in the ocean. If not, why would many of the religious old guard nail God to the cross alive? Is it not because man confines God within certain parameters? Do many people not oppose God and obstruct the work of the Holy Spirit because they do not know the varied and diverse work of God, and, furthermore, because they possess but a smidgeon of knowledge and doctrine with which to measure the work of the Holy Spirit? Though the experiences of such people are superficial, they are arrogant and indulgent in nature and they regard the work of the Holy Spirit with contempt, ignore the disciplines of the Holy Spirit and, moreover, use their trivial old arguments to “confirm” the work of the Holy Spirit. They also put on an act, and are wholly convinced of their own learning and erudition, and convinced that they are able to travel across the world. Are such people not those who are spurned by the Holy Spirit, and will they not be cast out by the new age? Are not those who come before God and openly oppose Him ignorant and under-informed villains, who are merely trying to show how brilliant they are? With but a meager knowledge of the Bible, they try to run riot in the world’s “academia”; with but a superficial doctrine to teach people, they try to reverse the work of the Holy Spirit and attempt to make it revolve around their own thought process. Short-sighted as they are, they try to behold in one glance 6,000 years of God’s work. These people do not have any sense worth mentioning! In fact, the greater people’s knowledge of God, the slower they are to judge His work. Furthermore, they only talk a little of their knowledge of God’s work today, but they are not rash in their judgments. The less people know of God, the more arrogant and overconfident they are and the more wantonly they proclaim God’s being—yet they only talk of theory, and offer no real evidence. Such people are of no value whatsoever. Those who see the work of the Holy Spirit as a game are frivolous! Those who are not cautious when they encounter the new work of the Holy Spirit, who run their mouths off, are quick to judge, who give free rein to their temperament to deny the rightness of the Holy Spirit’s work, and who also insult and blaspheme it—are such disrespectful people not ignorant of the Holy Spirit’s work? Are they not, furthermore, people of great arrogance, people who are inherently proud and ungovernable? Even if a day comes when such people accept the new work of the Holy Spirit, still God will not tolerate them. Not only do they look down upon those who work for God, but they also blaspheme against God Himself. Such desperate people will not be forgiven, either in this age or the age to come, and they shall forever perish in hell! Such disrespectful, indulgent people are pretending to believe in God, and the more people are like this, the more liable they are to offend God’s administrative decrees. Do not all those arrogant ones who are innately unbridled, and who have never obeyed anyone, all walk upon this path? Do they not oppose God day after day, God who is always new and never old? Today, you should understand why you must know the importance of the three stages of God’s work. The words I say are of benefit to you, and are not just empty talk. If you simply read them as if admiring flowers whilst galloping past on horseback, will not all My hard work be for naught? Each of you should know your own nature. Most of you are skilled at argument; the answers to theoretical questions roll off your tongue, but you have nothing to say to questions involving essence. Even today, you still indulge in frivolous conversation, incapable of changing your old dispositions, and most of you have no intention of changing the way in which you pursue in order to achieve higher truth, but instead only live your lives half-heartedly. How are such people capable of following God to the very end? Even if you do make it to the end of the path, what benefit will it be to you? It is better to change your ideas before it is too late, either truly pursuing, or else withdrawing early. As time goes on you will become a freeloading parasite—are you willing to play such a low and ignoble role?

The three stages of work are a record of the entire work of God; they are a record of God’s salvation of mankind, and they are not imaginary. If you truly wish to seek a knowledge of God’s entire disposition, then you must know the three stages of work carried out by God, and, furthermore, you must not omit any stage. This is the minimum that must be achieved by those who seek to know God. Man himself cannot fabricate a true knowledge of God. This is not something that man himself can imagine, nor is it the consequence of the Holy Spirit’s special favor granted to a single person. Rather, it is a knowledge that comes after man has experienced the work of God, and it is a knowledge of God that only comes after having experienced the facts of God’s work. Such a knowledge cannot be gotten readily, and nor is it something that can be taught. It is wholly related to personal experience. God’s salvation of mankind is at the core of these three stages of work, yet within the work of salvation are included several methods of working and several means by which God’s disposition is expressed. This is what is most difficult for man to identify, and it is this that is difficult for man to understand. The separation of the ages, changes in God’s work, changes in the location of work, changes in the recipient of this work, and so on—these are all included in the three stages of work. In particular, the difference in the Holy Spirit’s way of working, as well as alterations in God’s disposition, image, name, identity, or other changes, are all part of the three stages of work. One stage of work can only represent one part, and is limited within a certain scope. It does not involve the separation of the ages, or changes in God’s work, much less the other aspects. This is a clearly obvious fact. The three stages of work are the entirety of God’s work in saving mankind. Man must know God’s work and God’s disposition in the work of salvation; without this fact, your knowledge of God consists of nothing but hollow words, nothing more than armchair pontification. Such knowledge can neither convince nor conquer man; it is at odds with reality, and it is not the truth. It may be very plentiful and pleasing to the ear, but if it is at odds with God’s inherent disposition, then God will not spare you. Not only will He not commend your knowledge, but He will also take retribution on you for being a sinner who has blasphemed Him. The words of knowing God are not spoken lightly. Though you may be glib and silver-tongued, and though your words are so clever that you can argue black into being white and white into being black, still you are out of your depth when it comes to speaking of the knowledge of God. God is not someone that you can judge rashly or casually praise, or nonchalantly denigrate. You praise anyone and everyone, yet you struggle to find the right words to describe the supreme grace of God—this is what every loser comes to realize. Even though there are many masters of language who are capable of describing God, the accuracy of what they describe is but a hundredth of the truth spoken by people who belong to God, people who though possessing only a limited vocabulary, have rich experience to draw upon. Thus it can be seen that knowledge of God lies in accuracy and practicality, and not in the clever use of words or a rich vocabulary, and that man’s knowledge and the knowledge of God are completely unrelated. The lesson of knowing God is higher than any of the natural sciences of mankind. It is a lesson that can only be achieved by an extremely small number of those who seek to know God, and cannot be achieved by just any person of talent. So, you must not view knowing God and pursuing the truth as if they are things that could be achieved by a mere child. Perhaps you have been completely successful in your family life, or your career, or in your marriage, but when it comes to the truth and the lesson of knowing God, you have nothing to show for yourself and you have achieved nothing. Putting the truth into practice, it can be said, is of great difficulty for you, and knowing God is an even greater problem. This is your difficulty, and this is also the difficulty faced by the whole of mankind. Among those who have had some achievements in the cause of knowing God, there are almost none who are up to standard. Man does not know what it means to know God, or why it is necessary to know God, or to what degree one must attain in order to know God. This is what is so confounding to mankind, and it is quite simply the biggest riddle faced by mankind—no one is capable of answering this question, nor is anyone willing to answer this question, because, to date, no one among mankind has had any success in the study of this work. Perhaps, when the riddle of the three stages of work is made known to mankind, there will appear in succession a group of talented people who know God. Of course, I hope that is the case, and, furthermore, I am in the process of carrying out this work, and hope to see the appearance of more such talented people in the near future. They will become those who bear testimony to the fact of these three stages of work, and, of course, they will also be the first to bear testimony to these three stages of work. But nothing would be more distressing and regrettable than if such talented people do not emerge on the day that God’s work comes to an end, or if there are only one or two such people who have personally accepted being made perfect by God incarnate. However, this is only the worst case scenario. Whatever the case may be, I still hope that those who truly pursue can gain this blessing. Since the beginning of time, there has never before been work such as this; such an undertaking has never occurred in the history of human development. If you can truly become one of the first of those who know God, would this not be the highest honor among all created beings? Would any created being among mankind be more commended by God? Such work is not easy to achieve, but will ultimately still reap rewards. Regardless of their gender or nationality, all those who are capable of achieving the knowledge of God will, in the end, receive God’s greatest honor, and will be the only ones that possess the authority of God. This is the work of today, and it is also the work of the future; it is the last and highest work to be accomplished in 6,000 years of work, and it is a way of working that reveals each category of man. Through the work of causing man to know God, the different ranks of man are revealed: Those who know God are qualified to receive God’s blessings and accept His promises, while those who do not know God are unqualified to receive God’s blessings and accept His promises. Those who know God are the intimates of God, and those who do not know God cannot be called the intimates of God; the intimates of God can receive any of God’s blessings, but those who are not His intimates are not worthy of any of His work. Whether it be tribulations, refinement, or judgment, all these things are for the sake of allowing man to ultimately achieve a knowledge of God, and so that man may submit to God. This is the only effect that will ultimately be achieved. Nothing of the three stages of work is hidden, and this is advantageous to man’s knowledge of God, and helps man gain a more complete and thorough knowledge of God. All this work is of benefit to man.

The work of God Himself is the vision that man must know, for the work of God cannot be achieved by man, and is not possessed by man. The three stages of work are the entirety of God’s management, and there is no greater vision that should be known by man. If man does not know this mighty vision, then it is not easy to know God, it is not easy to understand God’s will, and, furthermore, the path that man walks upon will become increasingly arduous. Without visions, man would not have been able to come this far. It is the visions that have safeguarded man until today, and which have provided the greatest protection to man. In the future, your knowledge must deepen, and you must come to know the entirety of His will and the essence of His wise work within the three stages of work. Only this is your true stature. The final stage of work does not stand alone, but is part of the whole formed together with the two previous stages, which is to say that it is impossible to complete the entire work of salvation by only doing one of the three stages of work. Even though the final stage of work is able to fully save man, this does not mean that it is only necessary to carry out this single stage on its own, and that the two previous stages of work are not required to save man from the influence of Satan. No single stage of the three stages can be held up as the only vision that must be known by all mankind, for the entirety of the work of salvation is the three stages of work, not a single stage among them. As long as the work of salvation has not been accomplished, the management of God will be unable to come to a complete end. God’s being, His disposition, and His wisdom are expressed in the entirety of the work of salvation; they are not revealed to man at the very beginning, but have been gradually expressed in the work of salvation. Each stage of the work of salvation expresses part of the disposition of God, and part of His being; no one stage of work can directly and completely express the entirety of God’s being. As such, the work of salvation can only be fully concluded once the three stages of work have been completed, and so man’s knowledge of the entirety of God is inseparable from the three stages of God’s work. What man gains from one stage of work is merely the disposition of God that is expressed in a single part of His work. It cannot represent the disposition and being that is expressed in the stages before or after. That is because the work of saving mankind cannot be finished straight away during one period, or in one location, but gradually becomes deeper according to man’s level of development at different times and places. It is work that is carried out in stages, and it is not completed in a single stage. So, God’s entire wisdom is crystallized in the three stages, rather than in one individual stage. His entire being and His entire wisdom are laid forth in these three stages, and each stage contains His being, and each stage is a record of the wisdom of His work. Man should know the entire disposition of God expressed in these three stages. All this of God’s being is of the utmost importance to all mankind, and if people do not have this knowledge when they worship God, then they are no different from those who worship Buddha. God’s work among man is not hidden from man, and should be known by all of those who worship God. Since God has carried out the three stages of the work of salvation among man, man should know the expression of what He has and is during these three stages of work. This is what must be done by man. What God hides from man is that which man is incapable of achieving, and that which man should not know, whereas that which God shows to man is that which man should know, and that which man should possess. Each of the three stages of work is carried out upon the foundation of the previous stage; it is not carried out independently, separate from the work of salvation. Though there are great differences in the age and the work that is carried out, at its core is still the salvation of mankind, and each stage of the work of salvation is deeper than the last. Each stage of work continues on from the foundation of the last, which is not abolished. In this way, in His work that is always new and never old, God is constantly expressing aspects of His disposition that have never before been expressed to man, and is always revealing to man His new work and His new being, and even though the religious old guard does its utmost to resist this, and openly opposes it, God always does the new work that He intends to do. His work is always changing, and because of this, it is always encountering the opposition of man. So, too, is His disposition always changing, as are the age and recipients of His work. Furthermore, He is always doing work that has never been done before, even carrying out work that appears to man to be in contradiction to the work done before, to run counter to it. Man is only able to accept one kind of work, or one way of practice, and it is difficult for man to accept work, or ways of practice, that are at odds with, or higher than, them. But the Holy Spirit is always doing new work, and so there appear group after group of religious experts that oppose the new work of God. These people have become experts precisely because man has no knowledge of how God is always new and never old, and has no knowledge of the principles of God’s work, and, furthermore, has no knowledge of the many ways in which God saves man. As such, man is utterly unable to tell if it is work that comes from the Holy Spirit, and if it is the work of God Himself. Many people cling to an attitude in which, if something corresponds with the words that came before, then they accept it, and if there are differences with the work of before, then they oppose and reject it. Today, do you all not abide by such principles? The three stages of the work of salvation have not had any great effect on you, and there are those who believe that the two previous stages of work are a burden they simply do not need to know. They think that these stages should not be declared to the masses and should be retracted as soon as possible, so that people do not feel overwhelmed by the previous two stages of the three stages of work. Most believe that making the two previous stages of work known is a step too far, and is of no help in knowing God—that is what you think. Today, you all believe that it is right to act in this way, but the day will come when you realize the importance of My work: Know that I do not do any work that is of no significance. Since I am declaring the three stages of work to you, they must be of benefit to you; since these three stages of work are at the heart of God’s entire management, they must become the focus of everyone throughout the universe. One day, you will all realize the importance of this work. Know that you oppose God’s work, or use your own notions to measure the work of today, because you do not know the principles of God’s work, and because of your rash treatment of the work of the Holy Spirit. Your opposition to God and obstruction of the work of the Holy Spirit is caused by your notions and inherent arrogance. It is not because God’s work is wrong, but because you are naturally too rebellious. After finding their belief in God, some people cannot even say with certainty where man came from, yet they dare to make public speeches appraising the rights and wrongs of the Holy Spirit’s work. They even lecture the apostles who have the Holy Spirit’s new work, passing comment and speaking out of turn; their humanity is too low, and there is not the slightest sense in them. Will the day not come when such people are spurned by the work of the Holy Spirit, and burned by the fires of hell? They do not know the work of God, but instead criticize His work, and also try to instruct God how to work. How can such unreasonable people know God? Man comes to know God during the process of seeking and experiencing; it is not through criticizing at whim that man comes to know God through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. The more accurate people’s knowledge of God becomes, the less they oppose Him. In contrast, the less people know of God, the more likely they are to oppose Him. Your notions, your old nature, and your humanity, character and moral outlook are the capital with which you resist God, and the more corrupted your morals, odious your qualities, and low your humanity, the more you are the enemy of God. Those who are possessed of strong notions and who have a self-righteous disposition are even more in enmity of God incarnate; such people are the antichrists. If your notions are not rectified, then they will always be against God; you will never be compatible with God, and will always be apart from Him.

Only by putting aside your old notions can you gain new knowledge, yet old knowledge is not necessarily equivalent to old notions. “Notions” refers to the things imagined by man that are at odds with reality. If the old knowledge was already outdated in the old age and stopped man from entering into the new work, then such knowledge is also a notion. If man is able to take the correct approach to such knowledge and can come to know God from several different aspects, combining the old and the new, then the old knowledge becomes an aid to man, and becomes the basis by which man enters the new age. The lesson of knowing God requires you to master many principles: how to enter onto the path to knowing God, which truths you must understand in order to know God, and how to get rid of your notions and old dispositions so that you may submit to all of the arrangements of God’s new work. If you use these principles as the foundation for entering into the lesson of knowing God, then your knowledge will become deeper and deeper. If you have a clear knowledge of the three stages of work—which is to say, of God’s entire plan of management—and if you can fully correlate the previous two stages of God’s work with the present stage, and see that it is work done by one God, then you will have an incomparably sturdy foundation. The three stages of work were done by one God; this is the greatest vision, and this is the only path to knowing God. The three stages of work could only have been done by God Himself, and no man could do such work on His behalf—this is to say that only God Himself could have done His own work from the beginning until today. Though the three stages of God’s work have been carried out in different ages and locations, and though the work of each is different, it is all work done by one God. Of all the visions, this is the greatest vision that man should know, and if it can be completely understood by man, then he will be able to stand fast. Today, the biggest problem facing various religions and denominations is that they do not know the work of the Holy Spirit, and are unable to differentiate between the work of the Holy Spirit and work that is not of the Holy Spirit—because of this, they cannot tell whether this stage of work is, like the last two stages of work, also done by Jehovah God. Though people follow God, most are still unable to tell whether it is the right way. Man worries whether this way is the way personally led by God Himself, and whether God’s incarnation is a fact, and most people still have no clue about how to discern such things. Those who follow God are unable to determine the way, and so the messages which are spoken only have a partial effect among these people, and are incapable of being fully effective, and so this then affects the life entry of such people. If man can see in the three stages of work that they were carried out by God Himself at different times, in different places, and in different people; if man can see that although the work is different, it is all done by one God, and that since it is work done by one God, then it must be right and without error, and that though it is at odds with the notions of man, there is no denying that it is the work of one God—if man can say for sure that it is the work of one God, then the notions of man will be reduced to mere trifles, unworthy of mention. Because the visions of man are unclear, and because man only knows Jehovah as God, and Jesus as the Lord, and is in two minds about the God incarnate of today, many people remain devoted to the work of Jehovah and Jesus, and are beset by notions about the work of today, most people are always doubtful, and do not take the work of today seriously. Man has no notions toward the last two stages of work, which were invisible. That is because man does not understand the reality of the last two stages of work, and did not personally witness them. It is because these stages of work cannot be seen that man imagines as he likes; regardless of what he comes up with, there are no facts to prove such imaginings, and no one to correct them. Man gives free rein to his temperament, throwing caution to the wind and letting his imagination run free; there are no facts to verify his imaginings, and so man’s imaginings become “fact,” regardless of whether there is any proof to them. Thus man believes in his own imagined God in his mind, and does not seek the realistic God. If one person has one kind of belief, then among a hundred people there are a hundred kinds of belief. Man is possessed of such beliefs because he has not seen God’s practical work, because he has only heard it with his ears and has not beheld it with his eyes. Man has heard legends and stories—but rarely has he heard the knowledge of the facts of God’s work. Thus it is that people who have only been believers for a year come to believe in God through their own notions. The same is also true for those who have believed in God their entire lives. Those who cannot see the facts will never be able to escape from a faith in which they have notions about God. Man believes that he has freed himself from the bonds of his old notions, and has entered new territory. Does man not know that the knowledge of those who cannot see the true face of God is nothing but notions and hearsay? Man thinks that his notions are right and without error, and he thinks that these notions come from God. Today, when man witnesses the work of God, he lets loose notions that have built up over many years. The imaginings and ideas of the past have become an obstruction to the work of this stage, and it has become difficult for man to let go of such notions and to refute such ideas. The notions toward this step-by-step work of many of those who have followed God until today have become ever more grievous, and these people have gradually formed a stubborn enmity to the God incarnate. The source of this hatred lies in the notions and imaginings of man. The notions and imaginings of man have become the enemy of the work of today, work which is at odds with the notions of man. This has happened precisely because facts do not allow man to give free rein to his imagination, and, moreover, cannot be easily refuted by man, and the notions and imaginings of man do not brook the existence of facts, and, furthermore, because man does not give thought to the correctness and veracity of facts, and merely single-mindedly lets loose his notions and employs his own imagination. This can only be said to be the fault of the notions of man, and cannot be said to be a fault of the work of God. Man may imagine whatever he wishes, but he may not freely dispute any stage of God’s work or any bit of it; the fact of God’s work is inviolable by man. You may give free rein to your imagination, and may even compile fine stories about the work of Jehovah and Jesus, but you may not refute the fact of each stage of the work of Jehovah and Jesus; this is a principle, and it is also an administrative decree, and you should understand the importance of these issues. Man believes that this stage of work is incompatible with the notions of man, and that this is not the case for the two previous stages of work. In his imagination, man believes that the work of the two previous stages is surely not the same as the work of today—but have you ever considered that the principles of God’s work are all the same, that His work is always practical, and that, regardless of the age, there will always be a deluge of people who resist and oppose the fact of His work? All those who today resist and oppose this stage of work would also undoubtedly have opposed God in times past, for such people will always be the enemies of God. The people who know the fact of God’s work will see the three stages of work as the work of one God, and will let go of their notions. These are people who know God, and such people are those who truly follow God. When the entire management of God is nearing its end, God will class all things according to kind. Man was made by the hands of the Creator, and in the end He must completely return man under His dominion; this is the conclusion of the three stages of work. The stage of work of the last days, and the previous two stages in Israel and Judea, are God’s plan of management in the entire universe. No one can deny this, and it is the fact of God’s work. Although people have not experienced or witnessed much of this work, the facts are still the facts, and this is undeniable by any man. People who believe in God in every land of the universe will all accept the three stages of work. If you only know one particular stage of work, and do not understand the other two stages of work, do not understand the work of God in times past, then you are unable to speak the whole truth of God’s entire plan of management, and your knowledge of God is one-sided, for in your belief in God you do not know or understand Him, and so you are not fit to bear testimony to God. Regardless of whether your current knowledge of these things is profound or superficial, in the end, you must have knowledge, and must be thoroughly convinced, and all people will see the entirety of God’s work and submit under the dominion of God. At the end of this work, all religions will become one, all created beings will return under the dominion of the Creator, all created beings will worship the one true God, and all evil religions will come to nothing, never to appear again.

Why this continual reference to the three stages of work? The passing of the ages, social development, and the changing face of nature all follow alterations in the three stages of work. Mankind changes in time with the work of God, and does not develop by itself. The three stages of God’s work are referred to in order to bring all created beings, and all people of every religion and denomination, under the dominion of one God. Regardless of what religion you belong to, ultimately you will all surrender to the dominion of God. Only God Himself can carry out this work; it cannot be done by any religious head. There are several major religions in the world, and each has its own head, or leader, and the followers are spread across different countries and regions all over the world; almost every country, be it large or small, has different religions within it. However, regardless of how many religions there are across the world, all people within the universe ultimately exist under the guidance of one God, and their existence is not guided by religious heads or leaders. This is to say that mankind is not guided by a particular religious head or leader; rather, the whole of mankind is led by the Creator, who created the heavens and earth and all things, and who also created mankind—this is a fact. Although the world has several major religions, regardless of how great they are, they all exist under the dominion of the Creator, and none of them can exceed the scope of this dominion. The development of mankind, the supersedure of society, the development of natural sciences—each is inseparable from the arrangements of the Creator, and this work is not something that can be done by any given religious head. A religious head is merely the leader of a particular religion, and cannot represent God, nor can they represent the One who created the heavens and earth and all things. A religious head can lead all those within the entire religion, but they cannot command all created beings beneath the heavens—this is a universally acknowledged fact. A religious head is merely a leader, and cannot stand equal to God (the Creator). All things are in the hands of the Creator, and in the end they will all return to the hands of the Creator. Mankind was made by God, and regardless of the religion, every person will return under the dominion of God—this is inevitable. Only God is the Most High among all things, and the highest ruler among all created beings must also return under His dominion. No matter how high the status of a man, that man cannot take mankind to a suitable destination, and no one is able to class all things according to kind. Jehovah Himself created mankind and classed each according to kind, and when the end time arrives He will still do His own work Himself, classing all things according to kind—this work cannot be done by any apart from God. The three stages of work carried out from the beginning until today were all carried out by God Himself, and were carried out by the one God. The fact of the three stages of work is the fact of God’s leadership of all mankind, a fact that no one can deny. At the end of the three stages of work, all things will be classed according to kind and return under the dominion of God, for throughout the entire universe there only exists this one God, and there are no other religions. He who is incapable of creating the world will be incapable of bringing it to an end, whereas He who created the world will surely be capable of bringing it to an end. Therefore, if one is unable to bring the age to an end and is merely able to help man cultivate his mind, then he will surely not be God, and will surely not be the Lord of mankind. He will be incapable of doing such great work; there is only one who can carry out such work, and all that are unable to do this work are surely enemies and not God. All evil religions are incompatible with God, and since they are incompatible with God, they are enemies of God. All work is done by this one true God, and the entire universe is commanded by this one God. Regardless of whether it is His work in Israel or in China, regardless of whether the work is carried out by the Spirit or by the flesh, all is done by God Himself, and can be done by no one else. It is precisely because He is the God of all mankind that He works freely, unconstrained by any conditions—this is the greatest of all visions. As a created being, if you wish to fulfill the duty of a created being and understand the will of God, you must understand the work of God, you must understand God’s will for created beings, you must understand His plan of management, and you must understand all the significance of the work He does. Those who do not understand this are not qualified created beings! As a created being, if you do not understand where you came from, do not understand the history of mankind and all the work done by God, and, furthermore, do not understand how mankind has developed up to today, and do not understand who commands the whole of mankind, then you are incapable of performing your duty. God has led mankind up until today, and ever since He created man upon the earth He has never left him. The Holy Spirit never stops working, has never stopped leading mankind, and has never left mankind. But mankind does not realize that there is a God, much less does he know God. Is there anything more humiliating than this for all created beings? God personally leads man, but man does not understand the work of God. You are a created being, yet you do not understand your own history, and are unaware of who has led you on your journey, you are oblivious of the work done by God, and so you cannot know God. If you still do not know now, then you will never be qualified to bear testimony to God. Today, the Creator personally leads all people once again, and causes all people to behold His wisdom, almightiness, salvation, and wonderfulness. Yet you still do not realize or understand—are you not therefore the one who will not receive salvation? Those who belong to Satan do not understand the words of God, while those who belong to God can hear the voice of God. All those who realize and understand the words I speak are the ones who will be saved and who will bear testimony to God; all those who do not understand the words that I speak cannot bear testimony to God, and are the ones who will be cast out. Those who do not understand God’s will and do not realize the work of God are incapable of achieving the knowledge of God, and such people cannot bear testimony to God. If you wish to bear testimony to God, then you must know God; the knowledge of God is accomplished through the work of God. All in all, if you wish to know God, then you must know God’s work: Knowing God’s work is of the utmost importance. When the three stages of work come to an end, there will be made a group of those who bear testimony to God, a group of those who know God. These people will all know God and will be able to put the truth into practice. They will possess humanity and sense, and will all know the three stages of God’s work of salvation. This is the work that will be accomplished at the end, and these people are the crystallization of the work of 6,000 years of management, and are the most powerful testimony to the ultimate defeat of Satan. Those who can bear testimony to God will be able to receive God’s promise and blessing, and will be the group that remains at the very end, the group which possesses the authority of God and bears testimony to God. Perhaps those among you can all become a member of this group, or perhaps only half, or only a few—it depends on your will and on your pursuit.

Corrupt Mankind Is More in Need of the Salvation of the Incarnate God

God became flesh because the object of His work is not the spirit of Satan, or any incorporeal thing, but man, who is of the flesh and has been corrupted by Satan. It is precisely because the flesh of man has been corrupted that God has made fleshly man the object of His work; moreover, because man is the object of corruption, God has made man the only object of His work throughout all the stages of His salvation work. Man is a mortal being, is of flesh and blood, and God is the only One who can save man. In this way, God must become a flesh that possesses the same attributes as man in order to do His work, so that His work might achieve better effects. God must become flesh to do His work precisely because man is of the flesh, and incapable of overcoming sin or divesting himself of the flesh. Though the essence and identity of God incarnate differ greatly from the essence and identity of man, yet His appearance is identical to that of man; He has the appearance of a normal person, and leads the life of a normal person, and those who see Him can discern no difference to a normal person. This normal appearance and normal humanity are sufficient for Him to do His divine work in normal humanity. His flesh allows Him to do His work in normal humanity, and helps Him do His work among man, and His normal humanity, moreover, helps Him carry out the work of salvation among man. Although His normal humanity has caused much tumult among man, such tumult has not impacted the normal effects of His work. In short, the work of His normal flesh is of supreme benefit to man. Though most people do not accept His normal humanity, His work can still achieve results, and these results are achieved thanks to His normal humanity. Of this there is no doubt. From His work in the flesh, man gains ten times or dozens of times more things than the notions that exist among man about His normal humanity, and such notions shall all ultimately be swallowed by His work. And the effect that His work has achieved, which is to say, the knowledge that man has toward Him, far outweighs man’s notions about Him. There is no way to imagine or measure the work He does in the flesh, for His flesh is unlike that of any fleshly human being; although the outer shell is identical, the essence is not the same. His flesh engenders many notions among man about God, yet His flesh can also allow man to acquire much knowledge, and can even conquer any person possessed of a similar outer shell. For He is not merely human, but is God with the outer shell of a human, and none can completely fathom or understand Him. An invisible and intangible God is loved and welcomed by all. If God is just a Spirit that is invisible to man, it is so easy for man to believe in God. People can give free rein to their imaginations, can choose whatever image they like as God’s image to please themselves and make themselves feel happy. In this way, people may do whatever their own God most likes and wishes for them to do, without any scruples. What is more, people believe that no one is more loyal and devout than they toward God, and that all others are Gentile dogs, and disloyal to God. It can be said that this is what is sought by those whose belief in God is vague and based on doctrine; what they seek is all much the same, with little variation. It is merely that the images of God in their imaginations are different, yet their essence is actually the same.

Man is untroubled by his carefree belief in God and believes in God however he pleases. This is one of the “rights and freedoms of man,” with which no one may interfere, for people believe in their own God and not the God of anyone else; it is their own private property, and almost everyone possesses this kind of private property. People regard this property as a precious treasure, but to God there is nothing more lowly or worthless, for there is no clearer indication of opposition to God than this private property of man. It is because of the work of God incarnate that God becomes a flesh with a tangible form, and who can be seen and touched by man. He is not a formless Spirit, but a flesh that man can see and come into contact with. However, most of the Gods people believe in are fleshless deities that are formless, which are also of a free form. In this way, the incarnate God has become the enemy of most of those who believe in God, and those who cannot accept the fact of God’s incarnation have, similarly, become the adversaries of God. Man is possessed of notions not because of his way of thinking, or because of his rebelliousness, but because of this private property of man. It is because of this property that most people die, and it is this vague God that cannot be touched, cannot be seen, and does not exist in reality that ruins man’s life. Man’s life is forfeited not by the incarnate God, much less by the God of heaven, but by the God of man’s own imagining. The only reason that the incarnate God has come into the flesh is because of the needs of corrupt man. It is because of the needs of man, not of God, and all His sacrifices and sufferings are for the sake of mankind, and not for the benefit of God Himself. There are no pros and cons or rewards for God; He shall not reap some future harvest, but that which was originally owed to Him. All that He does and sacrifices for mankind is not so that He might gain great rewards, but purely for the sake of mankind. Though God’s work in the flesh involves many unimaginable difficulties, the effects that it ultimately achieves far exceed those of the work done directly by the Spirit. The work of the flesh entails much hardship, and the flesh cannot possess the same great identity as the Spirit, He cannot carry out the same supernatural deeds as the Spirit, much less can He possess the same authority as the Spirit. Yet the essence of the work done by this unremarkable flesh is far superior to that of the work done directly by the Spirit, and this flesh Himself is the answer to the needs of all mankind. For those to be saved, the use value of the Spirit is far inferior to that of the flesh: The work of the Spirit is able to cover the entire universe, across all mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans, yet the work of the flesh more effectively relates to every person with whom He comes into contact. What is more, God’s flesh with tangible form can better be understood and trusted by man, and can further deepen man’s knowledge of God, and can leave upon man a more profound impression of the practical deeds of God. The work of the Spirit is shrouded in mystery; it is difficult for mortal beings to fathom, and even harder for them to see, and so they can only rely on hollow imaginings. The work of the flesh, however, is normal and practical, and possessed of rich wisdom, and is a fact that can be beheld by the physical eye of man; man can personally experience the wisdom of the work of God, and has no need to employ his bountiful imagination. This is the accuracy and practical value of the work of God in the flesh. The Spirit can only do things that are invisible to man and difficult for him to imagine, for example the enlightenment of the Spirit, the moving of the Spirit, and the guidance of the Spirit, but for man who has a mind, these do not provide any clear meaning. They only provide a moving, or a broad meaning, and cannot give an instruction with words. The work of God in the flesh, however, is greatly different: It involves the accurate guidance of words, it has clear will, and has clear required goals. And so man does not need to grope around, or employ his imagination, much less make guesses. This is the clarity of the work in the flesh, and its great difference from the work of the Spirit. The work of the Spirit is only suitable for a limited scope and cannot replace the work of the flesh. The work of the flesh gives man far more exact and necessary goals and far more practical, valuable knowledge than the work of the Spirit. The work that is of greatest value to corrupt man is that which provides accurate words, clear goals to pursue, and which can be seen and touched. Only realistic work and timely guidance are suited to man’s tastes, and only practical work can save man from his corrupt and depraved disposition. This can only be achieved by the incarnate God; only the incarnate God can save man from his formerly corrupt and depraved disposition. Although the Spirit is the inherent essence of God, work such as this can only be done by His flesh. If the Spirit worked single-handedly, then it would not be possible for His work to be effective—this is a plain truth. Though most people have become the enemies of God because of this flesh, when He concludes His work, those who are against Him will not only cease to be His enemies, but on the contrary will become His witnesses. They will become the witnesses that have been conquered by Him, witnesses that are compatible with Him and inseparable from Him. He shall cause man to know the importance of His work in the flesh to man, and man shall know the importance of this flesh to the meaning of man’s existence, shall know His practical value as concerns the growth of man’s life, and, moreover, shall know that this flesh will become a living fountain of life from which man cannot bear to part. Though the incarnate flesh of God is far from matching God’s identity and position, and seems to man to be incompatible with His actual status, this flesh, who does not possess the true image of God, or the true identity of God, can do the work that God’s Spirit is unable to do directly. Such is the true significance and value of God’s incarnation, and it is this significance and value which man is unable to appreciate and acknowledge. Though all mankind look up to God’s Spirit and look down on God’s flesh, irrespective of how they view or think, the practical significance and value of the flesh far exceed those of the Spirit. Of course, this is only with regard to corrupt mankind. For everyone who seeks the truth and longs for the appearance of God, the Spirit’s work can only provide moving or inspiration, and a sense of wondrousness that it is inexplicable and unimaginable, and a sense that it is great, transcendent, and admirable, yet also unattainable and unobtainable to all. Man and the Spirit of God can only look upon each other from afar, as if there were a great distance between them, and they can never be alike, as if man and God were separated by an invisible divide. In fact, this is an illusion given to man by the Spirit, which is because the Spirit and man are not of the same kind and shall never coexist in the same world, and because the Spirit possesses nothing of man. So man does not have need of the Spirit, for the Spirit cannot directly do the work most needed by man. The work of the flesh offers man practical objectives to pursue, clear words, and a sense that He is practical and normal, that He is humble and ordinary. Although man may be afraid of Him, for most people He is easy to relate to: Man can behold His face, and hear His voice, and he does not need to look at Him from afar. This flesh feels approachable to man, not distant, or unfathomable, but visible and touchable, for this flesh is in the same world as man.

For all of those who live in the flesh, changing their disposition requires goals to pursue, and knowing God requires witnessing the practical deeds and the real face of God. Both can only be achieved by God’s incarnate flesh, and both can only be accomplished by the normal and tangible flesh. This is why the incarnation is necessary, and why it is needed by all corrupt mankind. Since people are required to know God, the images of the vague and supernatural Gods must be dispelled from their hearts, and since they are required to cast off their corrupt disposition, they must first know their corrupt disposition. If only man does the work to dispel the images of the vague Gods from people’s hearts, then he will fail to achieve the proper effect. The images of the vague Gods in people’s hearts cannot be exposed, cast off, or completely expelled by words alone. In doing so, ultimately it would still not be possible to dispel these deep-rooted things from people. Only by replacing these vague and supernatural things with the practical God and the true image of God, and making people gradually know them, can the due effect be achieved. Man recognizes that the God whom he sought in times past is vague and supernatural. That which can achieve this effect is not the direct leadership of the Spirit, much less the teachings of a certain individual, but the incarnate God. The notions of man are laid bare when the incarnate God officially does His work, because the normality and practicality of the incarnate God is the antithesis of the vague and supernatural God in man’s imagination. The original notions of man can only be revealed when contrasted against the incarnate God. Without the comparison to the incarnate God, the notions of man could not be revealed; in other words, without practicality as a foil, the vague things could not be revealed. No one is capable of using words to do this work, and no one is capable of articulating this work using words. Only God Himself can do His own work, and no one else can do this work on His behalf. No matter how rich the language of man is, he is incapable of articulating the practicality and normality of God. Man can only know God more practically, and can only see Him more clearly, if God personally works among man and completely shows forth His image and His being. This effect cannot be achieved by any human being of flesh. Of course, God’s Spirit is also incapable of achieving this effect. God can save corrupt man from the influence of Satan, but this work cannot be directly accomplished by the Spirit of God; rather, it can only be done by the flesh God’s Spirit wears, by God’s incarnate flesh. This flesh is man and is also God, is a man possessed of normal humanity and also God possessed of full divinity. And so, even though this flesh is not the Spirit of God, and differs greatly from the Spirit, it is still the incarnate God Himself who saves man, who is the Spirit and also the flesh. No matter what He is called by, ultimately it is still God Himself who saves mankind. For the Spirit of God is indivisible from the flesh, and the work of the flesh is also the work of the Spirit of God; it is just that this work is not done using the identity of the Spirit, but is done using the identity of the flesh. Work that needs to be done directly by the Spirit does not require incarnation, and work that requires the flesh to do cannot be done directly by the Spirit, and can only be done by God incarnate. This is what is required for this work, and it is what is required by corrupt mankind. In the three stages of God’s work, only one stage was carried out directly by the Spirit, and the remaining two stages are carried out by the incarnate God, and not directly by the Spirit. The work of the Age of Law done by the Spirit did not involve changing the corrupt disposition of man, and neither did it bear any relation to man’s knowledge of God. The work of God’s flesh in the Age of Grace and the Age of Kingdom, however, involves man’s corrupt disposition and his knowledge of God, and is an important and crucial part of the work of salvation. Therefore, corrupt mankind is more in need of the salvation of the incarnate God, and is more in need of the direct work of the incarnate God. Mankind needs the incarnate God to shepherd him, support him, water him, feed him, judge and chastise him, and he needs more grace and greater redemption from the incarnate God. Only God in the flesh can be the confidant of man, the shepherd of man, the very present help of man, and all of this is the necessity of the incarnation both today and in times past.

Man has been corrupted by Satan and is the highest of all God’s creatures, therefore man is in need of God’s salvation. The object of God’s salvation is man, not Satan, and that which shall be saved is the flesh of man, and the soul of man, and not devils. Satan is the object of God’s annihilation, man is the object of God’s salvation, and the flesh of man has been corrupted by Satan, so the first to be saved must be the flesh of man. The flesh of man has been most profoundly corrupted, and it has become something which opposes God, so much so that it even openly opposes and denies the existence of God. This corrupt flesh is simply too intractable, and nothing is more difficult to prune or change than the corrupt disposition of the flesh. Satan comes into the flesh of man to stir up disturbances, and it uses the flesh of man to disturb the work of God and impair the plan of God, and thus man has become Satan, and become the enemy of God. For man to be saved, he must first be conquered. It is because of this that God rises to the challenge and comes into the flesh to do the work He intends to do, and to do battle with Satan. His aim is the salvation of man, who has been corrupted, and the defeat and annihilation of Satan, which rebels against Him. He defeats Satan through His work of conquering man, while at the same time He saves corrupt mankind. Thus, it is a work that achieves two aims at once. He works in the flesh, and speaks in the flesh, and undertakes all work in the flesh in order to better engage with man, and better conquer man. The last time that God becomes flesh, His work of the last days will be concluded in the flesh. He will class all men according to kind, conclude His entire management, and also conclude all His work in the flesh. After all His work on earth comes to an end, He will be completely victorious. Working in the flesh, God will have fully conquered mankind, and fully gained mankind. Does this not mean that His entire management will have come to an end? When God concludes His work in the flesh, as He has fully defeated Satan and has been victorious, Satan will have no further opportunity to corrupt man. The work of the first incarnation of God was the redemption and forgiveness of man’s sins. Now it is the work of conquering and fully gaining mankind, so that Satan will no longer have any way to do its work, and will have completely lost, and God will have been completely victorious. This is the work of the flesh, and is the work done by God Himself. The initial work of the three stages of God’s work was done directly by the Spirit, and not by the flesh. The final work of the three stages of God’s work, however, is done by the incarnate God, and not directly by the Spirit. The work of redemption of the intermediary stage was also done by God in the flesh. Throughout the entire management work, the most important work is to save man from the influence of Satan. The key work is the complete conquest of corrupt man, thus restoring the God-fearing heart that man once possessed to those who have been conquered, and allowing him to achieve a normal life, which is to say, the normal life of a created being. This work is crucial, and it is the core of the management work. In the three stages of the work of salvation, the first stage of the work of the Age of Law was far from the core of the management work; it only had the slight appearance of the work of salvation, and was not the beginning of God’s work of saving man from the power of Satan. The first stage of work was done directly by the Spirit because, under the law, man only knew to abide by the law, and man did not have more truth, and because the work in the Age of Law hardly involved changes in the disposition of man, much less was it concerned with the work of how to save man from the power of Satan. Thus the Spirit of God completed this supremely simple stage of work that did not concern the corrupt disposition of man. This stage of work bore little relation to the core of the management, and it had no great correlation to the official work of the salvation of man, and so it did not require God to become flesh to personally do His work. The work done by the Spirit is implicit and unfathomable, and it is deeply frightening and unapproachable to man; the Spirit is not suited to directly doing the work of salvation, and is not suited to directly providing life to man. Most suitable for man is to transform the work of the Spirit into an approach that is close to man, which is to say, what is most suitable for man is for God to become an ordinary, normal person to do His work. This requires God to be incarnated to take the place of the Spirit in His work, and for man, there is no more suitable way for God to work. Among these three stages of work, two stages are carried out by the flesh, and these two stages are the key phases of the management work. The two incarnations are mutually complementary and they complement each other perfectly. The first stage of God’s incarnation laid the foundation for the second stage, and it can be said that the two incarnations of God form one whole and are not incompatible with each other. These two stages of God’s work are carried out by God in His incarnate identity because they are so important to the entire management work. It could almost be said that, without the work of the two incarnations of God, the entire management work would have ground to a halt, and the work of saving mankind would be nothing but empty talk. Whether or not this work is important is based on the needs of mankind, on the reality of mankind’s depravity, and on the severity of Satan’s rebelliousness and its disturbance of the work. The right one who is up to the task is predicated upon the nature of the work performed by the worker, and the importance of the work. When it comes to the importance of this work, in terms of what method of work to adopt—work done directly by God’s Spirit, or work done by God incarnate, or work done through man—the first to be eliminated is work done through man, and, based on the nature of the work, and the nature of the Spirit’s work versus that of the flesh, it is ultimately decided that work done by the flesh is more beneficial for man than work done directly by the Spirit, and that it offers more advantages. This is God’s thought at the time when He decided whether the work was to be done by the Spirit or by the flesh. There is a significance and a basis to each stage of work. They are not groundless imaginings, nor are they carried out arbitrarily; there is a certain wisdom to them. Such is the truth behind all of God’s work. In particular, there is even more of God’s plan in such a great work as God incarnate personally working among man. Therefore, God’s wisdom and the entirety of His being are reflected in every action, thought, and idea in His work; this is the more concrete and systematic being of God. These subtle thoughts and ideas are difficult for man to imagine, and difficult for man to believe, and, moreover, difficult for man to know. Work done by man is done according to general principle, which, for man, is highly satisfactory. Yet compared to the work of God, there is simply too great a disparity; although the deeds of God are great and the work of God is of a magnificent scale, behind them are many minute and precise plans and arrangements that are unimaginable to man. Each stage of His work is not only performed according to principle, but each stage also contains many things that cannot be articulated by human language, and these are the things that are invisible to man. Regardless of whether it is the work of the Spirit or the work of God incarnate, each contains the plans of His work. He does not work groundlessly, and He does not do insignificant work. When the Spirit works directly, it is with His goals, and when He becomes man (which is to say, when He transforms His outer shell) to work, it is even more with His purpose. Why else would He readily change His identity? Why else would He readily become a person who is regarded as lowly and is persecuted?

His work in the flesh is of the utmost significance, which is spoken with regard to the work, and the One who ultimately concludes the work is the incarnate God, and not the Spirit. Some believe that God may at some unknown time come to earth and appear to man, whereupon He shall personally judge the whole of mankind, testing them one by one without anyone being left out. Those who think in this way do not know this stage of work of the incarnation. God does not judge man one by one, and He does not test man one by one; to do thus would not be the work of judgment. Is not the corruption of all mankind the same? Is not the essence of all mankind the same? What is judged is mankind’s corrupt essence, man’s essence corrupted by Satan, and all the sins of man. God does not judge the trifling and insignificant faults of man. The work of judgment is representative, and it is not carried out especially for a certain person. Rather, it is work in which a group of people are judged in order to represent the judgment of all of mankind. By personally carrying out His work on a group of people, God in the flesh uses His work to represent the work of the whole of mankind, after which it is gradually spread. This is also how the work of judgment is. God does not judge a certain kind of person or a certain group of people, but instead judges the unrighteousness of the whole of mankind—man’s opposition to God, for example, or man’s lack of fear for Him, or man’s disturbance of the work of God, and so on. What is judged is mankind’s essence of opposition to God, and this work is the work of conquest of the last days. The work and word of the incarnate God witnessed by man are the work of judgment before the great white throne during the last days, which was conceived by man during times past. The work that is currently being done by the incarnate God is exactly the judgment before the great white throne. The incarnate God of today is the God who judges the whole of mankind during the last days. This flesh and His work, His word, and His entire disposition are the entirety of Him. Although the scope of His work is limited, and does not directly involve the entire universe, the essence of the work of judgment is the direct judgment of all mankind—not only for the sake of the chosen people of China, nor for the sake of a small number of people. During the work of God in the flesh, although the scope of this work does not involve the entire universe, it represents the work of the entire universe, and after He concludes the work within the work scope of His flesh, He will immediately expand this work to the entire universe, in the same way that the gospel of Jesus spread throughout the universe following His resurrection and ascension. Regardless of whether it is the work of the Spirit or the work of the flesh, it is work that is carried out within a limited scope, but which represents the work of the entire universe. During the last days, God performs His work by appearing in His incarnate identity, and God in the flesh is the God who judges man before the great white throne. Regardless of whether He is the Spirit or the flesh, He who does the work of judgment is the God who judges mankind during the last days. This is defined based on His work, and it is not defined according to His external appearance or several other factors. Although man harbors notions about these words, no one can deny the fact of the incarnate God’s judgment and conquest of all mankind. Regardless of what man thinks of it, facts are, after all, facts. No one can say that “The work is done by God, but the flesh is not God.” This is a fallacy, for this work can be done by no one except God in the flesh. Since this work has already been completed, following this work the work of God’s judgment of man shall not appear for a second time; God in His second incarnation has already concluded all of the work of the entire management, and there shall not be a fourth stage of God’s work. Because the one who is judged is man, man who is of the flesh and has been corrupted, and it is not the spirit of Satan that is judged directly, the work of judgment is therefore not carried out in the spiritual realm, but among man. No one is more suitable, and qualified, than God in the flesh for the work of judging the corruption of man’s flesh. If judgment were carried out directly by the Spirit of God, then it would not be all-embracing. Furthermore, such work would be difficult for man to accept, for the Spirit is unable to come face-to-face with man, and because of this, the effects would not be immediate, much less would man be able to behold the unoffendable disposition of God more clearly. Satan can only be fully defeated if God in the flesh judges the corruption of mankind. Being the same as man possessed of normal humanity, God in the flesh can directly judge the unrighteousness of man; this is the mark of His innate holiness, and of His extraordinariness. Only God is qualified to, and is in the position to, judge man, for He is possessed of the truth, and righteousness, and so He is able to judge man. Those who are without truth and righteousness are not fit to judge others. If this work were done by the Spirit of God, then it would not mean victory over Satan. The Spirit is inherently more exalted than mortal beings, and the Spirit of God is inherently holy, and triumphant over the flesh. If the Spirit did this work directly, He would not be able to judge all of man’s rebelliousness and could not reveal all of man’s unrighteousness. For the work of judgment is also carried out through man’s notions about God, and man has never had any notions about the Spirit, and so the Spirit is incapable of better revealing the unrighteousness of man, much less of completely disclosing such unrighteousness. The incarnate God is the enemy of all those who do not know Him. Through judging man’s notions and opposition to Him, He discloses all the rebelliousness of mankind. The effects of His work in the flesh are more apparent than those of the work of the Spirit. And so, the judgment of all mankind is not carried out directly by the Spirit but is the work of the incarnate God. God in the flesh can be seen and touched by man, and God in the flesh can completely conquer man. In his relationship with God in the flesh, man progresses from opposition to submission, from persecution to acceptance, from notions to knowledge, and from rejection to love—these are the effects of the work of the incarnate God. Man is only saved through the acceptance of His judgment, man only gradually comes to know Him through the words of His mouth, man is conquered by Him during his opposition to Him, and he receives the life supply from Him during the acceptance of His chastisement. All of this work is the work of God in the flesh, and not the work of God in His identity as the Spirit. The work done by God incarnate is the greatest work, and the most profound work, and the crucial part of the three stages of God’s work are the two stages of the work of incarnation. The profound corruption of man is a great obstacle to the work of God incarnate. In particular, the work carried out on the people of the last days is tremendously difficult, and the environment is hostile, and the caliber of every kind of person is quite poor. Yet at the end of this work, it will still achieve the proper effect, without any flaws; this is the effect of the work of the flesh, and this effect is more persuasive than that of the work of the Spirit. The three stages of God’s work shall be concluded in the flesh, and they must be concluded by the incarnate God. The most important and most crucial work is done in the flesh, and the salvation of man must be personally carried out by God in the flesh. Even though all mankind feels that God in the flesh seems unrelated to man, in fact this flesh concerns the fate and existence of the whole of mankind.

Every stage of God’s work is implemented for the sake of all mankind and is directed at the whole of mankind. Even though it is His work in the flesh, it is still directed at all mankind; He is the God of all mankind, and He is the God of all created and non-created beings. Although His work in the flesh is within a limited scope, and the object of this work is also limited, each time He becomes flesh to do His work He chooses an object of His work that is supremely representative; He does not select a group of simple and unremarkable people on which to work, but instead picks as the object of His work a group of people capable of being the representatives for His work in the flesh. This group of people is chosen because the scope of His work in the flesh is limited, and is prepared especially for His incarnate flesh, and is chosen especially for His work in the flesh. God’s selection of the objects of His work is not baseless, but is done according to principle: The object of the work must be of benefit to the work of God in the flesh, and must be able to represent the whole of mankind. For example, the Jews were able to represent the whole of mankind in accepting the personal redemption of Jesus, and the Chinese are able to represent the whole of mankind in accepting the personal conquest of the incarnate God. There is a basis to the Jews’ representation of the whole of mankind, and there is also a basis to Chinese people’s representation of the whole of mankind in accepting the personal conquest of God. Nothing reveals the significance of redemption more than the work of redemption done among the Jews, and nothing reveals the thoroughness and success of the work of conquest more than the work of conquest being done among Chinese people. The work and word of God incarnate appear to only be aimed at a small group of people, but in fact, His work among this small group is the work of the entire universe, and His word is directed at the whole of mankind. After His work in the flesh comes to an end, those who follow Him shall begin to spread the work He has done among them. The best thing about His work in the flesh is that He can leave accurate words and exhortations, and His specific will for mankind to those who follow Him, so that afterward His followers can more accurately and more concretely pass on all of His work in the flesh, and His will for the whole of mankind, to those who accept this way. Only the work of God in the flesh among man truly accomplishes the fact of God’s being together and living together with man. Only this work fulfills man’s desire to behold the face of God, witness the work of God, and hear the personal word of God. The incarnate God brings to an end the age when only the back of Jehovah appeared to mankind, and He also concludes the age of mankind’s belief in the vague God. In particular, the work of the last incarnate God brings all mankind into an age that is more realistic, more practical, and more beautiful. He not only concludes the age of law and rules but, more importantly, He reveals to mankind a God who is practical and normal, who is righteous and holy, who unlocks the work of the management plan and who demonstrates the mysteries and destination of mankind, who created mankind and brings to an end the management work, and who has remained hidden for thousands of years. He brings the age of vagueness to a complete end, He concludes the age in which the whole of mankind wished to seek God’s face but was unable to, He ends the age in which the whole of mankind served Satan, and He leads the whole of mankind all the way into a completely new era. All this is the outcome of the work of God in the flesh in place of God’s Spirit. When God works in His flesh, those who follow Him no longer seek and grope after those things which seem to both exist and not exist, and they cease to guess at the will of the vague God. When God spreads His work in the flesh, those who follow Him shall pass on the work that He has done in the flesh to all religions and denominations, and they shall communicate all of His words to the ears of the whole of mankind. All that is heard by those who receive His gospel shall be the facts of His work, shall be things personally seen and heard by man, and shall be facts and not hearsay. These facts are the evidence with which He spreads the work, and they are also the tools that He uses in spreading the work. Without the existence of facts, His gospel would not spread across all countries and to all places; without facts but only with man’s imaginings, He would never be able to do the work of conquering the entire universe. The Spirit is impalpable to man, and invisible to man, and the work of the Spirit is incapable of leaving any further evidence or facts of God’s work for man. Man shall never behold the real face of God, he shall always believe in a vague God that does not exist. Man shall never behold the face of God, nor will man ever hear words personally spoken by God. Man’s imaginings are, after all, empty, and cannot replace the true face of God; the inherent disposition of God, and the work of God Himself, cannot be impersonated by man. The invisible God in heaven and His work can only be brought to earth by God incarnate who personally does His work among man. This is the most ideal way for God to appear to man, in which man sees God and comes to know the true face of God, and it cannot be achieved by a non-incarnate God. Having carried out His work to this stage, God’s work has already achieved the optimal effect, and has been a complete success. The personal work of God in the flesh has already completed ninety percent of the work of His entire management. This flesh has provided a better beginning to all of His work, and a summary for all of His work, and has promulgated all of His work, and made the last thorough replenishment to all of this work. Henceforth, there will not be another incarnate God to do the fourth stage of God’s work, and never will there be any wondrous work of a third incarnation of God.

Each stage of work of God in the flesh represents His work of the entire age, and it does not represent a certain period, as does the work of man. And so the end of the work of His last incarnation does not mean that His work has come to a complete end, for His work in the flesh represents the entire age, and does not only represent the period in which He does His work in the flesh. It is just that He finishes His work of the entire age during the time that He is in the flesh, after which it spreads to all places. After the incarnate God fulfills His ministry, He will entrust His future work to those who follow Him. In this way, His work of the entire age will be carried on unbroken. The work of the entire age of incarnation shall only be considered complete once it has spread throughout the entire universe. The work of God incarnate begins a new era, and those who continue His work are those who are used by Him. The work done by man is all within the ministry of God in the flesh, and it is incapable of going beyond this scope. If God incarnate had not come to do His work, man would not be able to bring the old age to an end and would not be able to usher in a new era. The work done by man is merely within the range of his duty that is humanly possible to do, and it does not represent the work of God. Only the incarnate God can come and complete the work that He should do and, besides Him, no one can do this work on His behalf. Of course, what I speak of is in regard to the work of incarnation. This incarnate God first carries out a step of work that does not conform to the notions of man, after which He does more work that does not conform to the notions of man. The aim of the work is the conquest of man. In one regard, God’s incarnation does not conform to the notions of man, in addition to which He does more work that does not conform to the notions of man, and so man develops even more critical views about Him. He just does the work of conquest among people who have myriad notions about Him. Regardless of how they treat Him, once He has fulfilled His ministry, all people will have become subject to His dominion. The fact of this work is not only reflected among Chinese people, but it also represents how the whole of mankind shall be conquered. The effects that are achieved on these people are a precursor to the effects that shall be achieved on the whole of mankind, and the effects of the work that He does in the future shall increasingly exceed even the effects on these people. The work of God in the flesh does not involve great fanfare, nor is it wreathed in obscurity. It is real and actual, and it is work in which one and one equals two. It is not hidden from anyone, nor does it deceive anyone. What people see are real and genuine things, and what man gains is practical truth and knowledge. When the work ends, man shall have a new knowledge of Him, and those who truly pursue shall no longer have any notions about Him. This is not just the effect of His work on Chinese people, but it also represents the effect of His work in conquering the whole of mankind, for nothing is more beneficial to the work of conquering the whole of mankind than this flesh, and the work of this flesh, and everything of this flesh. They are beneficial to His work today, and beneficial to His work in the future. This flesh shall conquer the whole of mankind and shall gain the whole of mankind. There is no better work through which the whole of mankind shall behold God, and submit to God, and know God. The work done by man only represents a limited scope, and when God does His work He does not speak to a certain person, but speaks to the whole of mankind, and all those who accept His words. The end that He proclaims is the end of all mankind, not just the end of a certain person. He does not give anyone special treatment, nor does He victimize anyone, and He works for, and speaks to, the whole of mankind. This incarnate God has therefore already classed the whole of mankind according to kind, has already judged the whole of mankind, and has arranged a suitable destination for the whole of mankind. Although God only does His work in China, in fact He has already resolved the work of the entire universe. He cannot wait until His work has spread among the whole of mankind before making His utterances and arrangements step by step. Would that not be too late? Now He is fully able to complete the future work in advance. Because the One who is working is God in the flesh, He is doing limitless work within a limited scope, and afterward He shall make man perform the duty that man should perform; this is the principle of His work. He can only live with man for a time and cannot accompany man until the work of the whole era is concluded. It is because He is God that He foretells His future work in advance. Afterward, He shall class the whole of mankind according to kind by His words, and mankind shall enter into His step-by-step work according to His words. None shall escape, and all must practice according to this. So, in the future the age shall be guided by His words, and not guided by the Spirit.

The work of God in the flesh must be done in the flesh. If it were done directly by the Spirit of God, it would yield no effects. Even if it were done by the Spirit, the work would be of no great significance, and would ultimately be unpersuasive. All created beings wish to know whether the work of the Creator has significance, and what it represents, and what it is done for the sake of, and whether the work of God is full of authority and wisdom, and whether it is of the utmost value and significance. The work He does is done for the salvation of the whole of mankind, for the sake of defeating Satan, and for bearing testimony to Himself among all things. As such, the work that He does must be of great significance. The flesh of man has been corrupted by Satan, and it has been most deeply blinded, and profoundly harmed. The most fundamental reason why God works personally in the flesh is because the object of His salvation is man, who is of the flesh, and because Satan also uses the flesh of man to disturb the work of God. The battle with Satan is actually the work of conquering man, and at the same time, man is also the object of God’s salvation. In this way, the work of God incarnate is essential. Satan corrupted the flesh of man, and man became the embodiment of Satan, and became the object to be defeated by God. In this way, the work of doing battle with Satan and saving mankind occurs on earth, and God must become human in order to do battle with Satan. This is work of the utmost practicality. When God is working in the flesh, He is actually doing battle with Satan in the flesh. When He works in the flesh, He is doing His work in the spiritual realm, and He makes the whole of His work in the spiritual realm real on earth. The one who is conquered is man, man who is rebellious to Him, and the one who is defeated is the embodiment of Satan (of course, this is also man), who is in enmity to Him, and the one who is ultimately saved is also man. In this way, it is even more necessary for God to become a human who has the outer shell of a created being, so that He is able to do real battle with Satan, to conquer man, who is rebellious to Him and possessed of the same outer shell as Him, and to save man, who is of the same outer shell as Him and has been harmed by Satan. His enemy is man, the object of His conquest is man, and the object of His salvation is man, who was created by Him. So He must become human, and in this way, His work becomes much easier. He is able to defeat Satan and conquer mankind, and, moreover, is able to save mankind. Although this flesh is normal and practical, He is no common flesh: He is not flesh that is only human, but flesh that is both human and divine. This is the difference between Him and man, and it is the mark of the identity of God. Only flesh such as this can do the work that He intends to do, and fulfill the ministry of God in the flesh, and fully complete His work among man. If it were not thus, His work among man would always be empty and flawed. Even though God can do battle with the spirit of Satan and emerge victorious, the old nature of corrupted man can never be resolved, and those who are rebellious to God and oppose Him can never truly become subject to His dominion, which is to say, He can never conquer mankind, and can never gain the whole of mankind. If His work on earth cannot be resolved, then His management shall never be brought to an end, and the whole of mankind will not be able to enter rest. If God cannot enter rest with all of His created beings, then there shall never be an outcome to such management work, and the glory of God shall consequently disappear. Although His flesh has no authority, the work He does will have achieved its effect. This is the inevitable direction of His work. Regardless of whether or not His flesh is possessed of authority, as long as He is capable of doing the work of God Himself, then He is God Himself. Regardless of how normal and ordinary this flesh is, He can do the work He should do, for this flesh is God and is not just a human. The reason this flesh can do the work that man cannot is because His inner essence is unlike that of any human, and the reason He can save man is because His identity is different from that of any human. This flesh is so important to mankind because He is man and, even more so, He is God, because He can do the work that no ordinary man of flesh can do, and because He can save corrupt man, who lives together with Him on earth. Though He is identical to man, the incarnate God is more important to mankind than any person of value, for He can do the work that cannot be done by the Spirit of God, is more able than the Spirit of God to bear testimony to God Himself, and is more able than the Spirit of God to fully gain mankind. As a result, although this flesh is normal and ordinary, His contribution to mankind and His significance to the existence of mankind make Him highly precious, and the practical value and significance of this flesh is immeasurable to any human. Although this flesh cannot directly destroy Satan, He can use His work to conquer mankind and defeat Satan, and make Satan fully submit to His dominion. It is because God is incarnated that He can defeat Satan and is able to save mankind. He does not directly destroy Satan, but instead becomes flesh to do the work to conquer mankind, who has been corrupted by Satan. In this way, He is better able to bear testimony to Himself among His created beings, and He is better able to save corrupted man. God incarnate’s defeat of Satan bears greater testimony, and is more persuasive, than the direct destruction of Satan by the Spirit of God. God in the flesh is better able to help man know the Creator and is better able to bear testimony to Himself among His created beings.

The Essence of the Flesh Inhabited by God

God in His first incarnation lived upon the earth for thirty-three and a half years, and He performed His ministry for only three and a half of those years. Both during the time He worked, and before He began His work, He was possessed of normal humanity; He inhabited His normal humanity for thirty-three and a half years. Throughout the last three and a half years, He revealed Himself to be the incarnate God. Before He began performing His ministry, He appeared with ordinary, normal humanity, showing no sign of His divinity, and it was only after He began formally performing His ministry that His divinity was made manifest. His life and work during those first twenty-nine years demonstrated that He was a genuine human being, a son of man, and a fleshly body, for His ministry only began in earnest after the age of twenty-nine. The “incarnation” is God’s appearance in the flesh; God works among created mankind in the image of the flesh. So for God to be incarnated, He must first be flesh, flesh with normal humanity; this is the most basic prerequisite. In fact, the implication of God’s incarnation is that God lives and works in the flesh, that God in His very essence becomes flesh, becomes a man. His incarnate life and work can be divided into two stages. First is the life He lives before performing His ministry. He lives in an ordinary human family, in utterly normal humanity, obeying the normal morals and laws of human life, with normal human needs (food, clothing, sleep, shelter), normal human weaknesses, and normal human emotions. In other words, during this first stage He lives in non-divine, completely normal humanity, engaging in all the normal human activities. The second stage is the life He lives after beginning to perform His ministry. He still dwells in the ordinary humanity with a normal human shell, showing no outward sign of the supernatural. Yet He lives purely for the sake of His ministry, and during this time His normal humanity exists entirely in order to sustain the normal work of His divinity, for by then His normal humanity has matured to the point of being able to perform His ministry. So, the second stage of His life is to perform His ministry in His normal humanity, when it is a life both of normal humanity and complete divinity. The reason why, during the first stage of His life, He lives in completely ordinary humanity is that His humanity is not yet able to maintain the entirety of the divine work, is not yet mature; only after His humanity grows mature, becomes capable of shouldering His ministry, can He set about performing the ministry that He ought to perform. Since He, as flesh, needs to grow and mature, the first stage of His life is that of normal humanity—while in the second stage, because His humanity is capable of undertaking His work and performing His ministry, the life the incarnate God lives during His ministry is one of both humanity and complete divinity. If, from the moment of His birth, the incarnate God began His ministry in earnest, performing supernatural signs and wonders, then He would have no corporeal essence. Therefore, His humanity exists for the sake of His corporeal essence; there can be no flesh without humanity, and a person without humanity is not a human being. In this way, the humanity of God’s flesh is an intrinsic property of God’s incarnate flesh. To say that “when God becomes flesh He is entirely divine, and not at all human,” is blasphemy, for this statement simply does not exist, and violates the principle of incarnation. Even after He begins to perform His ministry, He still lives in His divinity with a human outer shell when He does His work; it is just that at the time, His humanity serves the sole purpose of allowing His divinity to perform the work in the normal flesh. So the agent of the work is the divinity inhabiting His humanity. His divinity, not His humanity, is at work, yet this divinity is hidden within His humanity; in essence, His work is done by His complete divinity, not by His humanity. But the performer of the work is His flesh. One could say that He is a man and also is God, for God becomes a God living in the flesh, with a human shell and a human essence but also the essence of God. Because He is a man with the essence of God, He is above all created humans, above any man who can perform God’s work. And so, among all those with a human shell like His, among all those who possess humanity, only He is the incarnate God Himself—all others are created humans. Though they all have humanity, created humans have nothing but humanity, while God incarnate is different: In His flesh He not only has humanity but, more importantly, divinity. His humanity can be seen in the outer appearance of His flesh and in His everyday life, but His divinity is difficult to perceive. Because His divinity is expressed only when He has humanity, and is not as supernatural as people imagine it to be, it is extremely difficult for people to see. Even today, people have the utmost difficulty fathoming the true essence of the incarnate God. Even after I have spoken about it at such length, I expect it is still a mystery to most of you. In fact, this issue is very simple: Since God becomes flesh, His essence is a combination of humanity and divinity. This combination is called God Himself, God Himself on earth.

The life that Jesus lived on earth was a normal life of the flesh. He lived in the normal humanity of His flesh. His authority—to do His work and speak His word, or to heal the sick and cast out demons, to do such extraordinary things—did not manifest itself, for the most part, until He began His ministry. His life before age twenty-nine, before He performed His ministry, was proof enough that He was just a normal fleshly body. Because of this, and because He had not yet begun to perform His ministry, people saw nothing divine in Him, saw nothing more than a normal human being, an ordinary man—just as at that time, some people believed Him to be Joseph’s son. People thought that He was the son of an ordinary man, they had no way of telling that He was God’s incarnate flesh; even when, in the course of performing His ministry, He performed many miracles, most people still said that He was Joseph’s son, for He was Christ with the outer shell of normal humanity. His normal humanity and His work both existed in order to fulfill the significance of the first incarnation, to prove that God had entirely come into the flesh, that He had become an utterly ordinary man. His normal humanity before He began His work was proof that He was an ordinary flesh; and that He worked afterward also proved that He was an ordinary flesh, for He performed signs and wonders, healed the sick and cast out demons in the flesh with normal humanity. The reason that He could work miracles was that His flesh bore the authority of God, was the flesh in which God’s Spirit was clothed. He possessed this authority because of the Spirit of God, and it did not mean that He was not a flesh. Healing the sick and casting out demons was the work that He needed to perform in His ministry, it was an expression of His divinity hidden in His humanity, and no matter what signs He showed or how He demonstrated His authority, He still lived in normal humanity and was still a normal flesh. Up to the point that He was resurrected after dying upon the cross, He dwelt within normal flesh. Bestowing grace, healing the sick, and casting out demons were all part of His ministry, they were all work He performed in His normal flesh. Before He went to the cross, He never departed from His normal human flesh, regardless of what He was doing. He was God Himself, doing God’s own work, yet because He was the incarnate flesh of God, He ate food and wore clothing, had normal human needs, had normal human reason, and a normal human mind. All of this was proof that He was a normal man, which proved that God’s incarnate flesh was a flesh with normal humanity, and not supernatural. His job was to complete the work of God’s first incarnation, to fulfill the ministry that the first incarnation ought to perform. The significance of incarnation is that an ordinary, normal man performs the work of God Himself; that is, that God performs His divine work in humanity and thereby vanquishes Satan. Incarnation means that God’s Spirit becomes a flesh, that is, God becomes flesh; the work that the flesh does is the work of the Spirit, which is realized in the flesh, expressed by the flesh. No one except God’s flesh can fulfill the ministry of the incarnate God; that is, only God’s incarnate flesh, this normal humanity—and no one else—can express the divine work. If, during His first coming, God had not possessed normal humanity before the age of twenty-nine—if as soon as He was born He could work miracles, if as soon as He learned to speak He could speak the language of heaven, if the moment He first set foot upon the earth He could apprehend all worldly matters, discern every person’s thoughts and intentions—such a person could not have been called a normal man, and such flesh could not have been called human flesh. If this were the case with Christ, then the meaning and the essence of God’s incarnation would be lost. That He possesses normal humanity proves that He is God incarnated in the flesh; the fact that He undergoes a normal human growth process further demonstrates that He is a normal flesh; moreover, His work is sufficient proof that He is God’s Word, God’s Spirit, become flesh. God becomes flesh because of the needs of His work; in other words, this stage of work must be done in the flesh, it must be performed in normal humanity. This is the prerequisite for “the Word become flesh,” for “the Word’s appearance in the flesh,” and it is the true story behind God’s two incarnations. People may believe that Jesus performed miracles throughout His life, that He showed no sign of humanity right up until His work on earth ended, that He did not have normal human needs or weaknesses or human emotions, did not require the basic necessities of life or entertain normal human thoughts. They imagine Him to only have a superhuman mind, a transcendent humanity. They believe that since He is God, He should not think and live as normal humans do, that only a normal person, a bona fide human being, can think normal human thoughts and live a normal human life. These are all human ideas and human notions, and these notions run counter to the original intentions of God’s work. Normal human thinking sustains normal human reason and normal humanity; normal humanity sustains the normal functions of the flesh; and the normal functions of the flesh enable the normal life of the flesh in its entirety. Only by working in such flesh can God fulfill the purpose of His incarnation. If the incarnate God possessed only an outer shell of the flesh, but did not think normal human thoughts, then this flesh would not possess human reason, much less bona fide humanity. How could a flesh like this, without humanity, fulfill the ministry that the incarnate God ought to perform? A normal mind sustains all aspects of human life; without a normal mind, one would not be human. In other words, a person who does not think normal thoughts is mentally ill, and a Christ who has no humanity but only divinity cannot be said to be God’s incarnate flesh. So, how could God’s incarnate flesh have no normal humanity? Is it not blasphemy to say that Christ has no humanity? All activities that normal humans engage in rely on the functioning of a normal human mind. Without it, humans would behave aberrantly; they would even be unable to tell the difference between black and white, good and evil; and they would have no human ethics and moral principles. Similarly, if the incarnate God did not think like a normal human, then He would not be a bona fide flesh, a normal flesh. Such non-thinking flesh would not be able to take on the divine work. He would not be able to normally engage in the activities of the normal flesh, much less live together with humans on earth. And so, the significance of God’s incarnation, the very essence of God’s coming into the flesh, would have been lost. The humanity of God incarnate exists to maintain the normal divine work in the flesh; His normal human thinking sustains His normal humanity and all His normal corporeal activities. One could say that His normal human thinking exists in order to sustain all the work of God in the flesh. If this flesh did not possess a normal human mind, then God could not work in the flesh, and what He needs to do in the flesh could never be accomplished. Though the incarnate God possesses a normal human mind, His work is not adulterated by human thought; He undertakes the work in the humanity with a normal mind, under the precondition of possessing the humanity with a mind, not by the exercise of normal human thought. No matter how lofty the thoughts of His flesh are, His work is not tainted by logic or thinking. In other words, His work is not conceived by the mind of His flesh, but is a direct expression of the divine work in His humanity. All of His work is the ministry He must fulfill, and none of it is conceived by His brain. For example, healing the sick, casting out demons, and the crucifixion were not products of His human mind, and could not have been achieved by any man with a human mind. Likewise, today’s work of conquest is a ministry that must be performed by the incarnate God, but it is not the work of a human will, it is the work His divinity should do, work of which no fleshly human is capable. So the incarnate God must possess a normal human mind, must possess normal humanity, because He must perform His work in the humanity with a normal mind. This is the essence of the work of the incarnate God, the very essence of the incarnate God.

Before Jesus performed the work, He merely lived in His normal humanity. No one could tell that He was God, no one found out that He was the incarnate God; people just knew Him as a completely ordinary man. His utterly ordinary, normal humanity was proof that God was incarnated in the flesh, and that the Age of Grace was the age of the work of the incarnate God, not the age of the Spirit’s work. It was proof that the Spirit of God was realized completely in the flesh, that in the age of God’s incarnation His flesh would perform all the work of the Spirit. The Christ with normal humanity is a flesh in which the Spirit is realized, and is possessed of normal humanity, normal sense, and human thought. “Being realized” means God becoming man, the Spirit becoming flesh; to put it more plainly, it is when God Himself inhabits a flesh with normal humanity, and through it expresses His divine work—this is what it means to be realized, or incarnated. During His first incarnation, it was necessary for God to heal the sick and cast out demons, because His work was to redeem. In order to redeem the entire human race, He needed to be compassionate and forgiving. The work that He did before He was crucified was healing the sick and casting out demons, which presaged His salvation of man from sin and filth. Because it was the Age of Grace, it was necessary for Him to heal the sick, thereby showing signs and wonders, which were representative of grace in that age—for the Age of Grace centered around the bestowal of grace, symbolized by peace, joy, and material blessings, all tokens of people’s faith in Jesus. That is to say, healing the sick, casting out demons, and bestowing grace were instinctive abilities of Jesus’ flesh in the Age of Grace, they were the work the Spirit realized in the flesh. But while He was performing such work, He was living in the flesh, and did not transcend the flesh. No matter what acts of healing He performed, He still possessed normal humanity, still lived a normal human life. The reason I say that during the age of God’s incarnation the flesh performed all the work of the Spirit, is that no matter what work He did, He did it in the flesh. But because of His work, people did not regard His flesh as having a completely corporeal essence, for this flesh could work wonders, and at certain special moments could do things that transcended the flesh. Of course, all these happenings occurred after He began His ministry, such as His being tested for forty days or being transfigured on the mountain. So with Jesus, the meaning of God’s incarnation was not completed, but only partially fulfilled. The life that He lived in the flesh before beginning His work was utterly normal in all respects. After He began the work, He retained only the outer shell of His flesh. Because His work was an expression of divinity, it exceeded the normal functions of the flesh. After all, God’s incarnate flesh was different from flesh-and-blood humans. Of course, in His daily life, He required food, clothing, sleep, and shelter, He needed all the normal necessities, and had the sense of a normal human being, and thought like a normal human being. People still held Him to be a normal man, except that the work He did was supernatural. Actually, no matter what He did, He lived in an ordinary and normal humanity, and insofar as He performed the work, His sense was particularly normal, His thoughts especially lucid, more so than those of any other normal man. It was necessary for the incarnate God to have such thinking and sense, for the divine work needed to be expressed by a flesh whose sense was very much normal and whose thoughts were very lucid—only in this way could His flesh express the divine work. All throughout the thirty-three and a half years that Jesus lived on earth, He retained His normal humanity, but because of His work during His three-and-a-half-year ministry, people thought that He was very transcendent, that He was much more supernatural than before. In actuality, Jesus’ normal humanity remained unchanged before and after He began His ministry; His humanity was the same throughout, but because of the difference before and after He began His ministry, two different views emerged concerning His flesh. No matter what people thought, God incarnate retained His original, normal humanity the entire time, for since God was incarnated, He lived in the flesh, the flesh that had normal humanity. Regardless of whether He was performing His ministry or not, the normal humanity of His flesh could not be erased, for humanity is the basic essence of flesh. Before Jesus performed His ministry, His flesh remained completely normal, engaging in all ordinary human activities; He did not appear in the least bit supernatural, did not show any miraculous signs. At that time, He was simply a very common man who worshiped God, though His pursuit was more honest, more sincere than anyone’s. This was how His utterly normal humanity manifested itself. Because He did no work at all before assuming His ministry, no one was aware of His identity, no one could tell that His flesh was different from all the others, for He did not work even a single miracle, did not perform one bit of God’s own work. However, after He began to perform His ministry, He retained the outer shell of normal humanity and still lived with normal human reason, but because He had begun to do the work of God Himself, assume the ministry of Christ and do work that mortal beings, flesh-and-blood humans, were incapable of, people assumed that He did not have normal humanity and was not a completely normal flesh, but an incomplete flesh. Because of the work He performed, people said that He was a God in the flesh who did not have normal humanity. Such an understanding is fallacious, for people did not grasp the significance of God’s incarnation. This fallacious understanding arose from the fact that the work expressed by God in the flesh was the divine work, expressed in a flesh that had normal humanity. God was clothed in flesh, He dwelt within flesh, and His work in His humanity obscured the normality of His humanity. For this reason, people believed that God did not have humanity but only divinity.

God in His first incarnation did not complete the work of incarnation; He only completed the first step of the work that it was necessary for God to do in the flesh. So, in order to finish the work of incarnation, God has returned to the flesh once again, living out all the normality and practicality of the flesh, that is, making God’s Word manifest in an entirely normal and ordinary flesh, thereby concluding the work that He left undone in the flesh. In essence, the second incarnate flesh is like the first, but it is even more practical, even more normal than the first. As a consequence, the suffering the second incarnate flesh endures is greater than that of the first, but this suffering is a result of His ministry in the flesh, which is unlike the suffering of corrupted man. It also stems from the normality and practicality of His flesh. Because He performs His ministry in utterly normal and practical flesh, the flesh must endure a great deal of hardship. The more normal and practical this flesh is, the more He will suffer in the performance of His ministry. God’s work is expressed in a very common flesh, one that is not supernatural at all. Because His flesh is normal and must also shoulder the work of saving man, He suffers in even greater measure than a supernatural flesh would—and all this suffering stems from the practicality and normality of His flesh. From the suffering that the two incarnate fleshes have undergone while performing Their ministries, one can see the essence of the incarnate flesh. The more normal the flesh, the greater hardship He must endure while undertaking the work; the more practical the flesh that undertakes the work, the harsher people’s notions, and the more dangers are likely to befall Him. And yet, the more practical the flesh is, and the more the flesh possesses the needs and complete sense of a normal human being, the more capable He is of taking on God’s work in the flesh. It was Jesus’ flesh that was nailed to the cross, His flesh that He gave up as a sin offering; it was by means of a flesh with normal humanity that He defeated Satan and completely saved man from the cross. And it is as a complete flesh that God in His second incarnation performs the work of conquest and defeats Satan. Only a flesh that is completely normal and practical can perform the work of conquest in its entirety and bear powerful testimony. That is to say, the conquest of man is made effective through the practicality and normality of God in the flesh, not through supernatural miracles and revelations. The ministry of this incarnate God is to speak, and thereby to conquer and perfect man; in other words, the work of the Spirit realized in the flesh, the flesh’s duty, is to speak and thereby conquer, reveal, perfect, and cast out man completely. And so, it is in the work of conquest that God’s work in the flesh will be accomplished in full. The initial work of redemption was only the beginning of the work of incarnation; the flesh that performs the work of conquest will complete the entire work of incarnation. In gender, one is male and the other female, so completing the significance of God’s incarnation, and dispelling man’s notions of God: God can become both male and female, and in essence, the incarnate God is genderless. He made both man and woman, and to Him, there is no division of gender. In this stage of the work, God does not perform signs and wonders, so that the work will achieve its results by means of words. The reason for this, moreover, is because the work of God incarnate this time is not to heal the sick and cast out demons, but to conquer man by speaking, which is to say that the native ability possessed by this incarnate flesh of God is to speak words and to conquer man, not to heal the sick and cast out demons. His work in normal humanity is not to perform miracles, not to heal the sick and cast out demons, but to speak, and so the second incarnate flesh seems to people much more normal than the first. People see that God’s incarnation is no lie; but this incarnate God is different from Jesus incarnate, and though They are both God incarnate, They are not completely the same. Jesus possessed normal humanity, ordinary humanity, but He was accompanied by many signs and wonders. In this incarnate God, human eyes will see no signs or wonders, neither healing the sick nor driving out demons, nor walking on the sea, nor fasting for forty days…. He does not do the same work that Jesus did, not because, in essence, His flesh is any different from Jesus’, but because it is not His ministry to heal the sick and cast out demons. He does not tear down His own work, does not disturb His own work. Since He conquers man through His practical words, there is no need to subdue him with miracles, and so this stage is to complete the work of incarnation. The incarnate God you see today is entirely a flesh, and there is nothing supernatural about Him. He gets sick as others do, needs food and clothing just as others do; He is wholly a flesh. If, this time around, God incarnate performed supernatural signs and wonders, if He healed the sick, cast out demons, or could kill with one word, how could the work of conquest be carried out? How could the work be spread among the Gentile nations? Healing the sick and casting out demons was the work of the Age of Grace, it was the first step in the work of redemption, and now that God has saved man from the cross, He no longer performs that work. If, during the last days, a “God” the same as Jesus appeared, one who healed the sick, cast out demons, and was crucified for man, that “God,” though identical to the description of God in the Bible and easy for man to accept, would not, in its essence, be the flesh worn by the Spirit of God, but by an evil spirit. For it is the principle of God’s work never to repeat what He has already completed. And so, the work of God’s second incarnation is different from the work of the first. In the last days, God realizes the work of conquest in an ordinary, normal flesh; He does not heal the sick, will not be crucified for man, but simply speaks words in the flesh, and conquers man in the flesh. Only such flesh is God’s incarnate flesh; only such flesh can complete God’s work in the flesh.

Whether in this stage God incarnate is enduring hardship or performing His ministry, He does so to complete the meaning of incarnation, for this is God’s last incarnation. God can only be incarnated twice. There cannot be a third time. The first incarnation was male, the second female, and so the image of God’s flesh is completed in man’s mind; moreover, the two incarnations have already finished God’s work in the flesh. The first time, God incarnate possessed normal humanity in order to complete the meaning of incarnation. This time He also possesses normal humanity, but the meaning of this incarnation is different: It is deeper, and His work is of more profound significance. The reason God has become flesh once more is to complete the meaning of incarnation. When God has wholly ended this stage of His work, the entire meaning of incarnation, that is, God’s work in the flesh, will be complete, and there will be no more work to be done in the flesh. Which is to say, from now on God will never again come into the flesh to do His work. Only to save and perfect mankind does God do the work of incarnation. In other words, it is by no means usual for God to come into the flesh, except for the sake of the work. By coming into the flesh to work, He shows Satan that God is a flesh, a normal person, an ordinary person—and yet He can reign triumphant over the world, can vanquish Satan, redeem mankind, conquer mankind! The goal of Satan’s work is to corrupt mankind, while the goal of God’s is to save mankind. Satan traps man in a bottomless pit, while God rescues him from it. Satan makes all men worship it, while God makes them subject to His dominion, for He is the Lord of creation. All this work is achieved through God’s two incarnations. In essence, His flesh is the union of humanity and divinity, and is possessed of normal humanity. So without God’s incarnate flesh, God could not achieve the results of saving mankind, and without the normal humanity of His flesh, His work in the flesh still could not achieve these results. The essence of God’s incarnation is that He must possess normal humanity; for it to be otherwise would run counter to God’s original intention in being incarnated.

Why do I say that the meaning of incarnation was not completed in Jesus’ work? Because the Word did not entirely become flesh. What Jesus did was only one part of God’s work in the flesh; He only did the work of redemption, and did not do the work of completely gaining man. For this reason, God has become flesh once again in the last days. This stage of the work is also done in an ordinary flesh; it is performed by an utterly normal human being, one whose humanity is not in the least bit transcendent. In other words, God has become a complete human being; He is a person whose identity is that of God, a complete human being, a complete flesh, who is performing the work. Human eyes see a fleshly body that is not transcendent at all, a very ordinary person who can speak the language of heaven, who shows no miraculous signs, works no miracles, much less exposes the inside truth about religion in great assembly halls. To people, the work of the second incarnate flesh seems utterly unlike that of the first, so much so that the two seem to have nothing in common, and nothing of the first’s work can be seen this time. Though the work of the second incarnate flesh is different from the first, that does not prove that Their source is not one and the same. Whether Their source is the same depends on the nature of the work done by the fleshes, and not on Their outer shells. During the three stages of His work, God has been incarnated twice, and both times the work of God incarnate inaugurates a new age, ushers in a new work; the incarnations complement each other. It is impossible for human eyes to tell that the two fleshes actually come from the same source. It goes without saying that this is beyond the capacity of the human eye or the human mind. But in Their essence, They are the same, for Their work originates from the same Spirit. Whether the two incarnate fleshes arise from the same source cannot be judged by the era and the place in which They were born, or other such factors, but by the divine work expressed by Them. The second incarnate flesh does not perform any of the work that Jesus did, for God’s work does not adhere to convention, but opens up a new path each time. The second incarnate flesh does not aim to deepen or solidify the impression of the first flesh in people’s minds, but to complement and perfect it, to deepen man’s knowledge of God, to break all the rules that exist in people’s hearts, and to wipe out the fallacious images of God in their hearts. It can be said that no individual stage of God’s own work can give man a complete knowledge of Him; each gives only a part, not the whole. Though God has expressed His disposition in full, because of man’s limited comprehension ability, his knowledge of God still remains incomplete. It is impossible, using human language, to convey the entirety of God’s disposition; moreover, how can a single stage of His work fully express God? He works in the flesh under the cover of His normal humanity, and one can only know Him by the expressions of His divinity, not by His bodily shell. God comes into the flesh to allow man to know Him by means of His various work, and no two stages of His work are alike. Only in this way can man have a full knowledge of God’s work in the flesh, not confined to one single facet. Though the work of the two incarnate fleshes is different, the essence of the fleshes, and the source of Their work, are identical; it is just that They exist to perform two different stages of the work, and arise in two different ages. No matter what, God’s incarnate fleshes share the same essence and the same origin—this is a truth no one can deny.

God’s Work and Man’s Practice

God’s work among man is inseparable from man, for man is the object of this work, and the only creature made by God that can bear testimony to God. The life of man and all of man’s activities are inseparable from God, and are all controlled by the hands of God, and it may even be said that no person can exist independently of God. None can deny this, for it is a fact. All that God does is for the profit of mankind and is directed against the schemes of Satan. All that man needs comes from God, and God is the source of man’s life. Thus, man is simply unable to part from God. God, furthermore, has never had any intention of parting from man. The work that God does is for the sake of all mankind, and His thoughts are always kind. For man, then, the work of God and the thoughts of God (that is, God’s will) are both “visions” that should be known by man. Such visions are also the management of God, and work that is incapable of being done by man. The requirements that God makes of man during His work, meanwhile, are called the “practice” of man. Visions are the work of God Himself, or they are His will for mankind or the aims and significance of His work. Visions can also be said to be a part of the management, for this management is the work of God, and is directed at man, which means that it is the work that God does among man. This work is the evidence and the path through which man comes to know God, and it is of the utmost importance for man. If, instead of paying attention to the knowledge of God’s work, people only pay attention to the doctrines of belief in God, or to triflingly unimportant details, then they simply will not know God, and, moreover, will not conform to God’s will. The work of God that is exceedingly helpful to man’s knowledge of God is called visions. These visions are the work of God, the will of God, and the aims and significance of God’s work; they are all of benefit to man. Practice refers to that which should be done by man, that which should be done by the created beings that follow God, and it is also the duty of man. What man is supposed to do is not something that was understood by man from the very beginning, but is the requirements that God makes of man during His work. These requirements become gradually more profound and more elevated as God works. For example, during the Age of Law, man had to follow the law, and during the Age of Grace, man had to bear the cross. The Age of Kingdom is different: The requirements of man are higher than those during the Age of Law and the Age of Grace. As the visions become more elevated, the requirements of man become ever higher, and become ever clearer and more practical. Likewise, the visions also become increasingly practical. These many practical visions are not only conducive to man’s submission to God, but are, moreover, conducive to his knowledge of God.

Compared to previous ages, the work of God during the Age of Kingdom is more realistic, more directed at man’s essence and changes in his disposition, and more able to bear testimony to God Himself for all those that follow Him. In other words, during the Age of Kingdom, as He works, God shows more of Himself to man than at any time in the past, which means that the visions that should be known by man are higher than in any previous age. Because God’s work among man has entered unprecedented territory, the visions known by man during the Age of Kingdom are the highest throughout all of the management work. God’s work has entered unprecedented territory, and so the visions to be known by man have become the highest of all visions, and the resultant practice of man is also higher than in any previous age, for the practice of man changes in step with the visions, and the perfection of the visions also marks the perfection of the requirements of man. As soon as all of God’s management comes to a halt, so too does the practice of man cease, and without the work of God, man will have no choice but to keep to the doctrine of times past, or else will simply have nowhere to turn. Without new visions, there will be no new practice by man; without complete visions, there will be no perfect practice by man; without higher visions, there will be no higher practice by man. The practice of man changes along with the footsteps of God, and, likewise, the knowledge and experience of man also change along with God’s work. Regardless of how capable man is, still he is inseparable from God, and if God were to stop working for just a moment, man would immediately die from His wrath. Man has nothing to boast of, for no matter how high man’s knowledge today, no matter how profound his experiences, he is inseparable from God’s work—for the practice of man, and that which he should seek in his belief in God, are inseparable from the visions. In every instance of God’s work, there are visions that man should know, and, following these, fitting requirements are made of man. Without these visions as the foundation, man would be simply incapable of practice, nor would man be able to follow God unwaveringly. If man does not know God or understand God’s will, then all that man does is in vain, and incapable of being approved by God. No matter how plentiful man’s gifts, still he is inseparable from God’s work and the guidance of God. No matter how good the actions of man are or how many actions man performs, still they cannot replace the work of God. And so, under no circumstance is the practice of man separable from the visions. Those who do not accept the new visions have no new practice. Their practice bears no relation to the truth because they abide by doctrine and keep to the dead law; they have no new visions at all, and as a result, they put nothing from the new age into practice. They have lost the visions, and in doing so they have also lost the work of the Holy Spirit, and they have lost the truth. Those who are without the truth are the progeny of absurdity, they are the embodiment of Satan. No matter what kind of person someone is, they cannot be without the visions of God’s work, and cannot be bereft of the presence of the Holy Spirit; as soon as one loses the visions, one instantly descends into Hades and lives among darkness. People without visions are those who follow God foolishly, they are those who are devoid of the work of the Holy Spirit, and they are living in hell. Such people do not pursue the truth, but instead hang out the name of God like a signboard. Those who do not know the work of the Holy Spirit, who do not know God incarnate, who do not know the three stages of work in the entirety of God’s management—they do not know the visions, and so are without the truth. And are not those who do not possess the truth all evildoers? Those who are willing to put the truth into practice, who are willing to seek a knowledge of God, and who truly cooperate with God are people for whom the visions act as a foundation. They are approved by God because they cooperate with God, and it is this cooperation that should be put into practice by man.

In the visions are contained many paths to practice. The practical demands made of man are also contained within the visions, as is the work of God that should be known by man. In the past, during the special gatherings or the grand gatherings that were held in various places, only one aspect of the path of practice was spoken of. Such practice was that which was to be put into practice during the Age of Grace, and scarcely bore any relation to the knowledge of God, for the vision of the Age of Grace was only the vision of Jesus’ crucifixion, and there were no greater visions. Man was supposed to know no more than the work of His redemption of mankind through the crucifixion, and so during the Age of Grace there were no other visions for man to know. In this way, man had only a scant knowledge of God, and apart from the knowledge of Jesus’ love and compassion, there were but a few simple and pitiful things for him to put into practice, things that were a far cry from today. In the past, no matter what form his assembly took, man was incapable of speaking of a practical knowledge of God’s work, much less was anyone able to clearly say which was the most suitable path of practice for man to enter upon. Man merely added a few simple details to a foundation of forbearance and patience; there was simply no change in the essence of his practice, for within the same age God did not do any newer work, and the only requirements He made of man were forbearance and patience, or bearing the cross. Apart from such practices, there were no higher visions than the crucifixion of Jesus. In the past, there was no mention of other visions because God did not do a great deal of work, and because He only made limited demands of man. In this way, regardless of what man did, he was incapable of transgressing these bounds, bounds which were but a few simple and shallow things for man to put into practice. Today I talk of other visions because today, more work has been done, work that is several times in excess of the Age of Law and the Age of Grace. The requirements of man, too, are several times higher than in ages past. If man is incapable of fully knowing such work, then it would possess no great significance; it can be said that man will have difficulty fully knowing such work if he does not devote an entire lifetime’s effort to it. In the work of conquest, to talk only of the path of practice would make the conquest of man impossible. Mere talk of the visions, without making any requirements of man, would also render the conquest of man impossible. If nothing were spoken of but the path of practice, then it would be impossible to strike at man’s Achilles’ heel, or to dispel the notions of man, and so too would it be impossible to completely conquer man. Visions are the main instrument of man’s conquest, yet if there were no path of practice apart from the visions, then man would have no way to follow, much less would he have any means of entry. This has been the principle of God’s work from beginning to end: In the visions there is that which can be put into practice, and so too are there visions in addition to practice. The degree of changes in both man’s life and his disposition accompanies changes in the visions. Were man only to rely on his own efforts, then it would be impossible for him to achieve any great degree of change. The visions speak of the work of God Himself and the management of God. Practice refers to the path of man’s practice, and to the way of man’s existence; in all of God’s management, the relationship between visions and practice is the relationship between God and man. If the visions were removed, or if they were spoken of without the talk of practice, or if there were only visions and the practice of man was eradicated, then such things could not be considered the management of God, much less could it be said that the work of God is done for the sake of mankind; in this way, not only would man’s duty be removed, but it would be a denial of the purpose of God’s work. If, from beginning to end, man were merely required to practice, without the involvement of God’s work, and, moreover, if man were not required to know the work of God, then such work could even less be called the management of God. If man did not know God, and were ignorant of God’s will, and blindly carried out his practice in a vague and abstract way, then he would never become a fully qualified created being. And so, these two things are both indispensable. If there were only the work of God, which is to say, if there were only the visions and if there were no cooperation or practice by man, then such things could not be called the management of God. If there were only the practice and entry of man, then regardless of how high the path that man entered upon, this, too, would be unacceptable. The entry of man must gradually change in step with the work and visions; it cannot change on a whim. The principles of man’s practice are not free and unrestrained but are set within certain bounds. Such principles change in step with the visions of the work. Therefore, God’s management ultimately comes down to God’s work and the practice of man.

The management work only came about because of mankind, which means it only arose because of the existence of mankind. There was no management before mankind, or in the beginning, when the heavens and earth and all things were created. If, in all of God’s work, there were no practice beneficial to man, which is to say, if God did not make fitting requirements of corrupt mankind (if, in the work done by God, there were no suitable path for man’s practice), then this work could not be called God’s management. If the entirety of God’s work only involved telling corrupt mankind how to go about their practice, and God did not carry out any of His own enterprise, and exhibited not a shred of His omnipotence or wisdom, then no matter how high God’s requirements of man, no matter how long God lived among man, man would know nothing of God’s disposition; if that were the case, then work of this kind would be even less worthy of being called God’s management. Simply put, the work of God’s management is the work done by God, and all the work carried out under the guidance of God by those who have been gained by God. Such work can be summarized as management. In other words, God’s work among man, as well as the cooperation with Him of all those who follow Him are collectively called management. Here, the work of God is called visions, and the cooperation of man is called practice. The higher God’s work (that is, the higher the visions), the more God’s disposition is made plain to man, the more it is at odds with the notions of man, and the higher the practice and cooperation of man become. The higher the requirements of man, the more God’s work is at odds with the notions of man, as a result of which the trials of man, and the standards that he is required to meet, also become higher. At the conclusion of this work, all visions will have been made complete, and that which man is required to put into practice will have reached the acme of perfection. This will also be the time when each is classed according to kind, for that which man is required to know will have been shown to man. So, when the visions reach their apogee, the work will accordingly approach its end, and man’s practice will have also reached its zenith. The practice of man is based on the work of God, and the management of God is only fully expressed thanks to the practice and cooperation of man. Man is the showpiece of God’s work, and the object of the work of all of God’s management, and also the product of God’s entire management. If God worked alone, without the cooperation of man, then there would be nothing that could serve as the crystallization of His entire work, and then there would not be the slightest significance to God’s management. Besides God’s work, only by God choosing fitting objects to express His work and prove its omnipotence and wisdom can God achieve the aim of His management, and achieve the aim of using all of this work to completely defeat Satan. Therefore, man is an indispensable part of the work of God’s management, and man is the only one that can make God’s management bear fruit and achieve its ultimate aim; apart from man, no other life form can undertake such a role. If man is to become the true crystallization of God’s management work, then the rebelliousness of corrupt mankind must be entirely dispelled. This requires that man be given practice suitable for different times, and that God carry out the corresponding work among man. Only in this way will there ultimately be gained a group of people who are the crystallization of God’s management work. God’s work among man cannot bear testimony to God Himself merely through the work of God alone; to be achieved, such testimony also requires living human beings that are suitable for His work. God will first work upon these people, through whom His work will then be expressed, and thus such testimony of His will be borne among the created beings, and in this, God will have achieved the aim of His work. God does not work alone to defeat Satan because He cannot bear direct testimony to Himself among all created beings. If He were to do so, it would be impossible to utterly convince man, so God must work on man in order to conquer him, and only then will He be able to gain testimony among all created beings. If it were just God who worked, without the cooperation of man, or if man were not required to cooperate, then man would never be able to know God’s disposition, and would forever be unaware of God’s will; God’s work could then not be called the work of God’s management. If only man himself were to strive, and seek, and work hard, without understanding the work of God, then man would be playing pranks. Without the work of the Holy Spirit, that which man does is of Satan, it is rebellious and it is evildoing; Satan is exhibited in all that is done by corrupt mankind, and there is nothing that is compatible with God, and all man does is the manifestation of Satan. Nothing in all that has been spoken of is exclusive of visions and practice. Upon the foundation of visions, man finds practice and the path of submission, so that he may put aside his notions and gain those things that he has not possessed in the past. God requires that man cooperate with Him, that man completely submit to His requirements, and man asks to behold the work done by God Himself, to experience the almighty power of God, and to know God’s disposition. These, in summary, are the management of God. God’s union with man is the management, and it is the greatest management.

That which involves visions primarily refers to the work of God Himself, and that which involves practice should be done by man and bears no relation to God whatsoever. The work of God is completed by God Himself, and the practice of man is achieved by man himself. That which should be done by God Himself does not need to be done by man, and that which should be practiced by man is unrelated to God. The work of God is His own ministry and bears no relation to man. This work does not need to be done by man, and, furthermore, man would be incapable of doing the work to be done by God. That which man is required to practice must be accomplished by man, whether it be the sacrifice of his life, or the delivery of him over to Satan to stand testimony—these must all be accomplished by man. God Himself completes all the work He is supposed to, and that which man should do is shown to man, and the remaining work is left to man to do. God does not do additional work. He does only the work that is within His ministry, and only shows man the way, and only does the work of opening the way, and does not do the work of paving the way; this should be understood by all. Putting the truth into practice means putting the words of God into practice, and all this is the duty of man, is that which should be done by man, and has nothing whatsoever to do with God. If man demands that God also suffer torment and refinement in the truth, in the same way as man, then man is being rebellious. God’s work is to perform His ministry, and the duty of man is to submit to all of God’s guidance, without any resistance. That which man must attain he is behooved to accomplish, regardless of the manner in which God works or lives. Only God Himself can make requirements of man, which is to say, only God Himself is fit to make requirements of man. Man should not have any choice and should do nothing but fully submit and practice; this is the sense that should be possessed by man. Once the work that should be done by God Himself is completed, man is required to experience it, step by step. If, in the end, when all of God’s management has been completed, man has still not done that which is required by God, then man should be punished. If man does not fulfill the requirements of God, then this is due to the rebelliousness of man; it does not mean that God has not been thorough enough in His work. All those who cannot put God’s words into practice, those who cannot fulfill God’s requirements, and those who cannot give their loyalty and fulfill their duty shall all be punished. Today, what you are required to achieve are not additional demands, but the duty of man, and that which should be done by all people. If you are incapable of even doing your duty, or of doing it well, then are you not bringing trouble upon yourselves? Are you not courting death? How could you still expect to have a future and prospects? The work of God is done for the sake of mankind, and the cooperation of man is given for the sake of God’s management. After God has done all that He is supposed to do, man is required to be unstinting in his practice, and to cooperate with God. In the work of God, man should spare no effort, should offer up his loyalty, and should not indulge in numerous notions, or sit passively and await death. God can sacrifice Himself for man, so why can man not offer his loyalty to God? God is of one heart and mind toward man, so why can man not offer a little cooperation? God works for mankind, so why can man not perform some of his duty for the sake of God’s management? God’s work has come this far, yet still you see but do not act, you hear but do not move. Are not such people the objects of perdition? God has already devoted His all to man, so why, today, is man incapable of earnestly performing his duty? For God, His work is His first priority, and the work of His management is of the utmost importance. For man, putting God’s words into practice and fulfilling God’s requirements are his first priority. This you should all understand. The words spoken to you have reached the very core of your substance, and God’s work has entered unprecedented territory. Many people still do not understand the truth or falsehood of this way; they are still waiting and seeing, and not performing their duty. Instead, they examine every word and action by God, they focus on what He eats and wears, and their notions become ever more grievous. Are such people not making a fuss about nothing? How could such people be those who seek God? And how could they be those who have the intention to submit to God? They put their loyalty and duty to the back of their minds, and instead concentrate on the whereabouts of God. They are an outrage! If man has understood all that he is supposed to understand, and has put into practice all that he is supposed to put into practice, then God will surely bestow His blessings upon man, for that which He requires of man is the duty of man, and that which should be done by man. If man is incapable of comprehending what he is supposed to understand and is incapable of putting into practice what he should put into practice, then man will be punished. Those who do not cooperate with God are in enmity to God, those who do not accept the new work are opposed to it, even if such people do nothing that is obviously in opposition to it. All those who do not put into practice the truth required by God are people who deliberately oppose and are rebellious toward the words of God, even if such people pay special attention to the work of the Holy Spirit. People who are not obedient or submissive are rebellious, and they are in opposition to God. People who do not perform their duty are those who do not cooperate with God, and people who do not cooperate with God are those who do not accept the work of the Holy Spirit.

When God’s work reaches a certain point, and His management reaches a certain point, those who conform to His will are all capable of fulfilling His requirements. God makes requirements of man according to His own standards, and according to that which man is capable of achieving. Whilst talking of His management, He also points the way for man, and provides man with a path for survival. The management of God and the practice of man are both of the same stage of work and are carried out simultaneously. Talk of God’s management relates to changes in man’s disposition, and talk of that which should be done by man and of changes in man’s disposition relates to the work of God; there is no time at which these two may be separated. The practice of man is changing, step-by-step. That is because God’s requirements of man are also changing, and because God’s work is always changing and progressing. If man’s practice remains ensnared in doctrine, this proves that he is bereft of God’s work and guidance; if man’s practice never changes or goes deeper, then this proves that the practice of man is carried out according to the will of man, and is not the practice of the truth; if man has no path on which to tread, then he has already fallen into the hands of Satan, and is controlled by Satan, which means that he is controlled by evil spirits. If man’s practice does not go deeper, then God’s work will not develop, and if there is no change in God’s work, then man’s entry will come to a halt; this is inevitable. Throughout all of God’s work, if man were to always abide by the law of Jehovah, then God’s work could not progress, much less would it be possible to bring the entire age to an end. If man always held to the cross and practiced patience and humility, then it would be impossible for God’s work to continue progressing. Six thousand years of management simply cannot be brought to an end among people who only abide by the law, or only hold to the cross and practice patience and humility. Instead, the entire work of God’s management is concluded among those of the last days, who know God, who have been recovered from the clutches of Satan, and who have fully divested themselves from the influence of Satan. This is the inevitable direction of God’s work. Why is it said that the practice of those in the religious churches is outdated? It is because what they put into practice is divorced from the work of today. In the Age of Grace, what they put into practice was right, but as the age has passed and God’s work has changed, their practice has gradually become outdated. It has been left behind by the new work and the new light. Based upon its original foundation, the work of the Holy Spirit has progressed several steps deeper. Yet those people still remain stuck at the original stage of God’s work, and still cleave to the old practices and the old light. God’s work can change greatly in three or five years, so would not even greater transformations occur over the course of 2,000 years? If man has no new light or practice, it means that he has not kept up with the work of the Holy Spirit. This is the failing of man; the existence of God’s new work cannot be denied because, today, those who previously had the work of the Holy Spirit still abide by outdated practices. The work of the Holy Spirit is always moving forward, and all those who are in the stream of the Holy Spirit should also be progressing deeper and changing, step-by-step. They should not stop at a single stage. Only those who do not know the work of the Holy Spirit would remain amongst His original work, and not accept the new work of the Holy Spirit. Only those who are rebellious would be incapable of gaining the Holy Spirit’s work. If the practice of man does not keep pace with the new work of the Holy Spirit, then the practice of man is surely dissevered from the work of today and is surely incompatible with the work of today. Such outdated people as these are simply incapable of accomplishing God’s will, much less could they become people who will ultimately stand testimony to God. The entire management work, furthermore, could not be concluded amongst such a group of people. For those who once held to the law of Jehovah, and those who once suffered for the cross, if they cannot accept the stage of work of the last days, then all that they did will have been in vain, and useless. The clearest expression of the Holy Spirit’s work is in embracing the here and now, not clinging to the past. Those who have not kept up with the work of today, and who have become separated from the practice of today, are those who oppose and do not accept the work of the Holy Spirit. Such people defy the present work of God. Though they hold onto the light of the past, it cannot be denied that they do not know the work of the Holy Spirit. Why has there been all this talk of the changes in the practice of man, of the differences in the practice between the past and today, of how the practice was carried out during the previous age, and of how it is done today? Such divisions in the practice of man are always spoken of because the work of the Holy Spirit is constantly moving forward, and thus the practice of man is required to constantly change. If man remains stuck in one stage, then this proves that he is incapable of keeping up with God’s new work and new light; it does not prove that God’s plan of management has not changed. Those who are outside the stream of the Holy Spirit always think they are right, but in fact, God’s work in them ceased long ago, and the work of the Holy Spirit is absent from them. The work of God was long since transferred to another group of people, a group on whom He intends to complete His new work. Because those in religion are incapable of accepting God’s new work, and hold only to the old work of the past, thus God has forsaken these people, and does His new work on the people who accept this new work. These are people who cooperate in His new work, and only in this way can His management be accomplished. The management of God is always moving forward, and the practice of man is always ascending higher. God is always working, and man is always in need, such that both reach their zenith and God and man achieve complete union. This is the expression of the accomplishment of God’s work, and it is the final outcome of God’s entire management.

In each stage of God’s work there are also corresponding requirements of man. All those who are within the stream of the Holy Spirit are possessed of the presence and discipline of the Holy Spirit, and those who are not within the stream of the Holy Spirit are under the command of Satan, and without any of the work of the Holy Spirit. People who are in the stream of the Holy Spirit are those who accept the new work of God, and who cooperate in the new work of God. If those who are within this stream are incapable of cooperating, and unable to put into practice the truth required by God during this time, then they will be disciplined, and at worst will be forsaken by the Holy Spirit. Those who accept the new work of the Holy Spirit, will live within the stream of the Holy Spirit, and they will receive the care and protection of the Holy Spirit. Those who are willing to put the truth into practice are enlightened by the Holy Spirit, and those who are unwilling to put the truth into practice are disciplined by the Holy Spirit, and may even be punished. Regardless of what kind of person they are, provided that they are within the stream of the Holy Spirit, God will take responsibility for all those who accept His new work for the sake of His name. Those who glorify His name and are willing to put His words into practice will receive His blessings; those who rebel against Him and do not put His words into practice will receive His punishment. People who are in the stream of the Holy Spirit are those who accept the new work, and since they have accepted the new work, they should cooperate appropriately with God, and should not act as rebels who do not perform their duty. This is God’s only requirement of man. Not so for the people who do not accept the new work: They are outside the stream of the Holy Spirit, and the discipline and reproach of the Holy Spirit do not apply to them. All day, these people live within the flesh, they live within their minds, and all that they do is according to the doctrine produced by the analysis and research of their own brains. This is not what is required by the Holy Spirit’s new work, much less is it cooperation with God. Those who do not accept the new work of God are bereft of the presence of God, and, moreover, devoid of the blessings and protection of God. Most of their words and actions hold to the past requirements of the Holy Spirit’s work; they are doctrine, not truth. Such doctrine and regulation are sufficient to prove that the gathering together of these people is nothing but religion; they are not the chosen ones, or the objects of God’s work. The assembly of all those among them can only be called a grand congress of religion, and cannot be called a church. This is an unalterable fact. They do not have the Holy Spirit’s new work; what they do seems redolent of religion, what they live out seems replete with religion; they do not possess the presence and work of the Holy Spirit, much less are they eligible to receive the discipline or enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. These people are all lifeless corpses, and maggots that are devoid of spirituality. They have no knowledge of man’s rebelliousness and opposition, have no knowledge of all of man’s evildoing, much less do they know all of God’s work and God’s present will. They are all ignorant, base people, and they are scum that are unfit to be called believers! Nothing they do has any bearing on the management of God, much less can it impair God’s plans. Their words and actions are too disgusting, too pathetic, and simply unworthy of mention. Nothing done by those who are not within the stream of the Holy Spirit has anything to do with the new work of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, no matter what they do, they are without the discipline of the Holy Spirit, and, moreover, without the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. For they are all people who have no love for the truth, and who have been spurned by the Holy Spirit. They are called evildoers because they walk in the flesh and do whatever pleases them under the signboard of God. While God works, they are deliberately hostile to Him, and run in the opposite direction to Him. Man’s failure to cooperate with God is supremely rebellious in itself, so will not those people who deliberately run counter to God particularly receive their just retribution? At the mention of these people’s evildoing, some people are eager to curse them, whereas God ignores them. To man, it appears that their actions concern God’s name, but in fact, to God, they bear no relation to His name or to the testimony to Him. No matter what these people do, it is unrelated to God: It is unrelated to both His name and His current work. These people humiliate themselves, and manifest Satan; they are evildoers who are hoarding for the day of wrath. Today, regardless of their actions, and provided they do not obstruct God’s management and have nothing to do with the new work of God, such people will not be subjected to the corresponding retribution, for the day of wrath has yet to arrive. There is much that people believe God should already have dealt with, and they think that those evildoers should be subject to retribution as early as possible. But because the work of God’s management has still not come to an end, and the day of wrath has yet to arrive, the unrighteous still continue to perform their unrighteous deeds. Some say, “Those in religion are without the presence or work of the Holy Spirit, and they bring shame upon God’s name; so why does God not destroy them, rather than still tolerating their unbridled behavior?” These people, who are the manifestation of Satan and who express the flesh, they are ignorant, base people; they are absurd people. They will not behold the advent of God’s wrath before they have come to understand how God does His work among man, and once they have been fully conquered, those evildoers will all receive their retribution, and not one of them will be able to escape the day of wrath. Now is not the time for man’s punishment, but the time for carrying out the work of conquest, unless there are those who impair God’s management, in which case they will be subjected to punishment based on the severity of their actions. During God’s management of mankind, all those who are within the stream of the Holy Spirit bear a relation to God. Those who are spurned by the Holy Spirit live under the influence of Satan, and that which they put into practice bears no relation to God. Only those who accept God’s new work and cooperate with God bear relation to God, for God’s work is aimed only at those who accept it, and it is not aimed at all people, regardless of whether they accept it or not. The work done by God always has an object and is not done on a whim. Those who are associated with Satan are not fit to bear testimony to God, much less are they fit to cooperate with God.

Each stage of the Holy Spirit’s work also requires the testimony of man. Each stage of work is a battle between God and Satan, and the target of the battle is Satan, while the one who will be made perfect by this work is man. Whether or not God’s work can bear fruit depends on the manner of man’s testimony to God. This testimony is what God requires of those who follow Him; it is the testimony made before Satan, and also proof of the effects of His work. The entire management of God is divided into three stages, and in each stage, fitting requirements are made of man. Furthermore, as the ages pass and progress, God’s requirements of all mankind become ever higher. Thus, step-by-step, this work of God’s management reaches its climax, until man beholds the fact of the “appearance of the Word in the flesh,” and in this way the requirements of man become even higher, as do the requirements of man to bear testimony. The more man is capable of truly cooperating with God, the more God gains glory. Man’s cooperation is the testimony that he is required to bear, and the testimony that he bears is the practice of man. Therefore, whether or not God’s work can have the due effect, and whether or not there can be true testimony, are inextricably linked to the cooperation and testimony of man. When the work is finished, which is to say, when all of God’s management has reached its end, man will be required to bear higher testimony, and when the work of God reaches its end, the practice and entry of man will reach their zenith. In the past, man was required to comply with the law and the commandments, and he was required to be patient and humble. Today, man is required to submit to all of God’s arrangements and possess a supreme love of God, and he is ultimately required to still love God amid tribulation. These three stages are requirements that God makes of man, step-by-step, throughout His entire management. Each stage of God’s work goes deeper than the last, and in each stage the requirements of man are more profound than the last, and in this way, God’s entire management gradually takes shape. It is precisely because the requirements of man are ever higher that man’s disposition comes ever closer to the standards required by God, and only then does the whole of mankind begin to gradually depart from the influence of Satan until, when God’s work comes to a complete end, the whole of mankind will have been saved from the influence of Satan. When that time comes, the work of God will have reached its end, and man’s cooperation with God in order to achieve changes in his disposition will be no more, and the whole of mankind will live in the light of God, and from then on, there will be no rebelliousness or opposition to God. God will also make no demands of man, and there will be a more harmonious cooperation between man and God, one which will be the life of man and God together, the life that comes after the management of God has been completely concluded, and after man has been fully saved by God from the clutches of Satan. Those who cannot closely follow the footsteps of God are incapable of attaining such a life. They will have lowered themselves into darkness, where they will weep and gnash their teeth; they are people who believe in God but do not follow Him, who believe in God but do not submit to all of His work. Since man believes in God, he must closely follow the footsteps of God, step-by-step; he should “follow the Lamb wherever He goes.” Only these are the people who seek the true way, only they are the ones who know the work of the Holy Spirit. People who slavishly follow words and doctrines are those who have been cast out by the work of the Holy Spirit. In each period of time, God will begin new work, and in each period, there will be a new beginning among man. If man only abides by the truths that “Jehovah is God” and “Jesus is Christ,” which are truths that only apply to their respective ages, then man will never keep up with the work of the Holy Spirit, and will forever be incapable of gaining the work of the Holy Spirit. Regardless of how God works, man follows without the slightest doubt, and he follows closely. In this way, how could man be cast out by the Holy Spirit? Regardless of what God does, as long as man is certain that it is the work of the Holy Spirit, and cooperates in the work of the Holy Spirit without any misgivings, and tries to meet the requirements of God, then how could he be punished? The work of God has never ceased, His footsteps have never halted, and prior to the completion of His management work, He has always been busy, and never stops. But man is different: Having gained but a modicum of the Holy Spirit’s work, he treats it as if it will never change; having gained a little knowledge, he does not go forth to follow the footsteps of God’s newer work; having seen but a little of God’s work, he immediately prescribes God as a particular wooden figure, and believes that God will always remain in this form that he sees before him, that it was like this in the past and will always be thus in the future; having gained but a superficial knowledge, man is so proud that he forgets himself and begins to wantonly proclaim a disposition and a being of God that simply do not exist; and having become certain about one stage of the Holy Spirit’s work, no matter what kind of person it is that proclaims the new work of God, man does not accept it. These are people who cannot accept the new work of the Holy Spirit; they are too conservative, and incapable of accepting new things. Such people are those who believe in God but also reject God. Man believes that the Israelites were wrong to “only believe in Jehovah and not believe in Jesus,” yet the majority of people act out a role in which they “only believe in Jehovah and reject Jesus” and “long for the return of the Messiah, but oppose the Messiah who is called Jesus.” No wonder, then, that people still live under the power of Satan after accepting one stage of the work of the Holy Spirit, and still do not receive God’s blessings. Is this not the result of man’s rebelliousness? Christians across the world who have not kept up with the new work of today all cling to the hope that they will get lucky, assuming that God will fulfill each of their wishes. Yet they cannot say for sure why God will take them up to the third heaven, nor are they certain about how Jesus will come to receive them riding upon a white cloud, much less can they say with absolute certainty whether Jesus will truly arrive upon a white cloud on the day that they imagine. They are all anxious, and at a loss; they themselves do not even know whether God will take up each of them, the varied small handfuls of people, who hail from every denomination. The work that God does now, the present age, God’s will—they have no grasp of any of these things, and they can do nothing but count down the days on their fingers. Only those who follow the footsteps of the Lamb to the very end can gain the final blessing, whereas those “clever people,” who are unable to follow to the very end yet believe they have gained all, are incapable of witnessing the appearance of God. They each believe they are the smartest person on earth, and they cut short the continued development of God’s work for no reason at all, and seem to believe with absolute certainty that God will take them up to heaven, they who “have the utmost loyalty to God, follow God, and abide by the words of God.” Even though they have the “utmost loyalty” toward the words spoken by God, their words and actions are still so disgusting because they oppose the work of the Holy Spirit, and commit deceit and evil. Those who do not follow to the very end, who do not keep up with the work of the Holy Spirit, and who only cleave to the old work have not only failed to achieve loyalty to God, but on the contrary, have become those who oppose God, have become those who are rejected by the new age, and who will be punished. Are there any more pitiable than them? Many even believe that all those who reject the old law and accept the new work are without conscience. These people, who only talk of “conscience,” and do not know the work of the Holy Spirit, will ultimately have their prospects cut short by their own consciences. God’s work does not abide by doctrine, and though it may be His own work, still God does not cling to it. That which should be denied is denied, that which should be cast out is cast out. Yet man places himself in enmity to God by holding onto but one small part of the work of God’s management. Is this not the absurdity of man? Is this not the ignorance of man? The more people are timid and overcautious because they are afraid of not gaining God’s blessings, the more they are incapable of gaining greater blessings, and of receiving the final blessing. Those people who slavishly abide by the law all display the utmost loyalty toward the law, and the more they display such loyalty toward the law, the more they are rebels who oppose God. For now is the Age of Kingdom and not the Age of Law, and the work of today and the work of the past cannot be mentioned in the same breath, nor can the work of the past be compared to the work of today. The work of God has changed, and the practice of man has also changed; it is not to hold onto the law or bear the cross, therefore people’s loyalty toward the law and the cross will not gain God’s approval.

Man will be fully made complete in the Age of Kingdom. After the work of conquest, man will be subjected to refinement and tribulation. Those who can overcome and stand testimony during this tribulation are the ones who will ultimately be made complete; they are the overcomers. During this tribulation, man is required to accept this refinement, and this refinement is the last instance of God’s work. It is the last time that man will be refined prior to the conclusion of all the work of God’s management, and all those who follow God must accept this final test, and they must accept this last refinement. Those who are beset by tribulation are without the work of the Holy Spirit and the guidance of God, but those who have been truly conquered and who truly seek after God will ultimately stand fast; they are the ones who are possessed of humanity, and who truly love God. No matter what God does, these victorious ones will not be bereft of the visions and will still put the truth into practice without failing in their testimony. They are the ones who will finally emerge from the great tribulation. Even though those who fish in troubled waters can still freeload today, no one is able to escape the final tribulation, and no one can escape the final test. For those who overcome, such tribulation is a tremendous refinement; but for those who fish in troubled waters, it is the work of casting out utterly. No matter how they are tried, the allegiance of those who have God in their heart remains unchanged; but for those who do not have God in their heart, once the work of God is not advantageous to their flesh, they change their view of God, and even depart from God. Such are those who will not stand fast in the end, who only seek God’s blessings and have no desire to expend themselves for God and dedicate themselves to Him. Such base people will all be expelled when God’s work comes to an end, and they are unworthy of any sympathy. Those without humanity are incapable of truly loving God. When the environment is safe and secure, or there are profits to be made, they are totally obedient toward God, but once that which they desire is compromised or finally refuted, they immediately revolt. Even in the space of just one night, they may go from a smiling, “kind-hearted” person to an ugly-looking and ferocious killer, suddenly treating their benefactor of yesterday as their mortal enemy, without rhyme or reason. If these demons are not cast out, these demons that would kill without blinking an eye, will they not become a hidden danger? The work of saving man is not achieved following the completion of the work of conquest. Although the work of conquest has come to an end, the work of purifying man has not; such work will only be finished once man has been wholly purified, once those who truly submit to God have been made complete, and once those disguisers who are without God in their heart have been cleared out. Those who do not satisfy God in the final stage of His work will be completely cast out, and those who are cast out are of devils. As they are incapable of satisfying God, they are rebellious against God, and even though these people follow God today, this does not prove that they are those who will finally remain. In the words that “those who follow God to the end will receive salvation,” the meaning of “follow” is to stand firm in the midst of tribulation. Today, many believe that following God is easy, but when God’s work is about to end, you will know the true meaning of “follow.” Just because you are still able to follow God today after being conquered, this does not prove that you are one of those who will be made perfect. Those who are unable to endure the trials, who are incapable of being victorious amid tribulation will, ultimately, be incapable of standing fast, and so will be unable to follow God to the very end. Those who truly follow God are able to withstand the test of their work, whereas those who do not truly follow God are incapable of withstanding any of God’s trials. Sooner or later they will be expelled, while the overcomers will remain in the kingdom. Whether or not man truly seeks God is determined by the test of his work, that is, by God’s trials, and has nothing to do with the decision by man himself. God does not reject any person on a whim; all that He does can utterly convince man. He does not do anything that is invisible to man, or any work that cannot convince man. Whether man’s belief is true or not is proved by the facts and cannot be decided by man. That “wheat cannot be made into tares, and tares cannot be made into wheat” is without doubt. All those who truly love God will ultimately remain in the kingdom, and God will not mistreat anyone who truly loves Him. Based on their different functions and testimonies, the overcomers within the kingdom will serve as priests or followers, and all those who are victorious amid tribulation will become the body of priests within the kingdom. The body of priests will be formed when the work of the gospel throughout the universe has come to an end. When that time comes, that which should be done by man will be the performance of his duty within the kingdom of God, and his living together with God within the kingdom. In the body of priests there will be chief priests and priests, and the remainder will be the sons and people of God. This is all determined by their testimonies to God during tribulation; they are not titles that are given on a whim. Once man’s status has been established, the work of God will cease, for each is classed according to kind and returned to their original position, and this is the mark of the accomplishment of God’s work, it is the final outcome of the work of God and the practice of man, and it is the crystallization of the visions of God’s work and the cooperation of man. In the end, man will find repose in the kingdom of God, and God, too, will return to His dwelling place to rest. This will be the final outcome of 6,000 years of cooperation between God and man.

The Essence of Christ Is Submission to the Will of the Heavenly Father

The incarnate God is called Christ, and Christ is the flesh donned by the Spirit of God. This flesh is unlike any man that is of the flesh. This difference is because Christ is not of flesh and blood; He is the incarnation of the Spirit. He has both a normal humanity and a complete divinity. His divinity is not possessed by any man. His normal humanity sustains all His normal activities in the flesh, while His divinity carries out the work of God Himself. Be it His humanity or divinity, both submit to the will of the heavenly Father. The essence of Christ is the Spirit, that is, the divinity. Therefore, His essence is that of God Himself; this essence will not disrupt His own work, and He could not possibly do anything that destroys His own work, nor would He ever utter any words that go against His own will. Therefore, the incarnate God would absolutely never do any work that disrupts His own management. This is what all people should understand. The essence of the work of the Holy Spirit is to save man, and is for the sake of God’s own management. Similarly, the work of Christ is also to save man, and is for the sake of God’s will. Given that God becomes flesh, He realizes His essence within His flesh, such that His flesh is sufficient to undertake His work. Therefore, all the work of God’s Spirit is replaced by the work of Christ during the time of incarnation, and at the core of all work throughout the time of incarnation is the work of Christ. It cannot be commingled with work from any other age. And since God becomes flesh, He works in the identity of His flesh; since He comes in the flesh, He then finishes in the flesh the work that He ought to do. Be it the Spirit of God or be it Christ, both are God Himself, and He does the work that He ought to do and performs the ministry that He ought to perform.

The very essence of God itself wields authority, but He is able to fully submit to the authority that comes from Him. Be it the work of the Spirit or the work of the flesh, neither conflicts with the other. The Spirit of God is the authority over all creation. The flesh with the essence of God is also possessed of authority, but God in the flesh can do all the work that submits to the will of the heavenly Father. This cannot be attained or conceived by any one person. God Himself is authority, but His flesh can submit to His authority. This is what is implied when it is said that “Christ submits to the will of God the Father.” God is a Spirit and can do the work of salvation, as can God become man. At any rate, God Himself does His own work; He neither disrupts nor disturbs, much less does He carry out work that contradicts itself, for the essence of the work done by the Spirit and the flesh is alike. Be it the Spirit or the flesh, both work to fulfill one will and to manage the same work. Though the Spirit and the flesh have two disparate qualities, their essences are the same; both have the essence of God Himself, and the identity of God Himself. God Himself possesses no elements of rebelliousness; His essence is good. He is the expression of all beauty and goodness, as well as all love. Even in the flesh, God does not do anything that rebels against God the Father. Even at the expense of sacrificing His life, He would be wholeheartedly willing to do so, and He would make no other choice. God possesses no elements of self-righteousness or self-importance, or those of conceit and arrogance; He possesses no elements of crookedness. Everything that rebels against God comes from Satan; Satan is the source of all ugliness and evil. The reason that man has qualities similar to those of Satan is because man has been corrupted and processed by Satan. Christ has not been corrupted by Satan, hence He possesses only the characteristics of God, and none of the characteristics of Satan. No matter how arduous the work or weak the flesh, God, while He lives in the flesh, will never do anything that disrupts the work of God Himself, much less forsake the will of God the Father in rebelliousness. He would rather suffer pains of the flesh than go against the will of God the Father; it is just as Jesus said in prayer, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless not as I will, but as You will.” People make their own choices, but Christ does not. Though He has the identity of God Himself, He still seeks the will of God the Father, and fulfills what is entrusted to Him by God the Father, from the perspective of the flesh. This is something that man cannot attain to. That which comes from Satan cannot have the essence of God; it can only have one that rebels against and resists God. It cannot fully submit to God, much less willingly submit to the will of God. All men apart from Christ may do that which resists God, and not a single man can directly undertake the work entrusted by God; not one is able to regard the management of God as their own duty to perform. The essence of Christ is submission to the will of God the Father; rebelliousness against God is the characteristic of Satan. These two qualities are incompatible, and any who has the qualities of Satan cannot be called Christ. The reason that man cannot do the work of God in His stead is because man does not have any of the essence of God. Man works for God for the sake of man’s personal interests and future prospects, but Christ works to follow the will of God the Father.

The humanity of Christ is governed by His divinity. Though He is in the flesh, His humanity is not entirely like that of a man of the flesh. He has His own unique character, and this too is governed by His divinity. His divinity has no weakness; the weakness of Christ refers to that of His humanity. To a certain degree, this weakness constrains His divinity, but such limits are within a certain scope and time, and are not boundless. When it comes time to carry out the work of His divinity, it is done regardless of His humanity. The humanity of Christ is directed entirely by His divinity. Aside from the normal life of His humanity, all other actions of His humanity are influenced, affected, and directed by His divinity. Though Christ has a humanity, it does not disturb the work of His divinity, and this is precisely because the humanity of Christ is directed by His divinity; though His humanity is not mature in how it conducts itself with others, it does not affect the normal work of His divinity. When I say that His humanity has not been corrupted, I mean that the humanity of Christ can be directly commanded by His divinity, and that He is possessed of a higher sense than that of the ordinary man. His humanity is most suited to being directed by the divinity in His work; His humanity is most able to express the work of the divinity, and most able to submit to such work. As God works in the flesh, He never loses sight of the duty that a man in the flesh ought to perform; He is able to worship God in heaven with a true heart. He has the essence of God, and His identity is that of God Himself. It is only that He has come to earth and become a created being, with the exterior shell of a created being and, now possessed of a humanity that He did not have before. He is able to worship God in heaven; this is the being of God Himself and is inimitable to man. His identity is God Himself. It is from the perspective of the flesh that He worships God; therefore, the words “Christ worships God in heaven” are not wrong. What He asks of man is precisely His own being; He has already achieved all that He asks of man prior to asking such of them. He would never make demands of others while He Himself is free from them, for this all constitutes His being. Regardless of how He carries out His work, He would not act in a manner that rebels against God. No matter what He asks of man, no demand exceeds that which is attainable by man. All that He does is that which follows the will of God and is for the sake of His management. The divinity of Christ is above all men; therefore, He is the highest authority of all created beings. This authority is His divinity, that is, the disposition and being of God Himself, which determines His identity. Therefore, no matter how normal His humanity, it is undeniable that He has the identity of God Himself; no matter from which standpoint He speaks and howsoever He submits to the will of God, it cannot be said that He is not God Himself. Foolish and ignorant men often regard the normal humanity of Christ as a flaw. No matter how He expresses and reveals the being of His divinity, man is unable to acknowledge that He is Christ. And the more that Christ demonstrates His submission and humility, the more lightly foolish men regard Christ. There are even those who adopt toward Him an attitude of exclusion and contempt, yet place those “great men” of lofty images upon the table to be worshiped. Man’s resistance to and rebellion against God come from the fact that the essence of the incarnate God submits to the will of God, as well as from the normal humanity of Christ; this is the source of man’s resistance to and rebellion against God. If Christ had neither the guise of His humanity nor sought the will of God the Father from the perspective of a created being, but was instead possessed of a super humanity, then there would most likely be no rebellion among man. The reason man is always willing to believe in an invisible God in heaven is because God in heaven has no humanity, nor does He possess even a single quality of a created being. Therefore, man always regards Him with the greatest esteem, but holds an attitude of contempt toward Christ.

Though Christ on earth is able to work on behalf of God Himself, He does not come with the intention of showing all men His image in the flesh. He does not come so that all men see Him; He comes to allow man to be led by His hand, and man thereby enters into the new age. The function of Christ’s flesh is for the work of God Himself, that is, for the work of God in the flesh, and not to enable man to fully understand the essence of His flesh. No matter how He works, nothing He does goes beyond that which is attainable by the flesh. No matter how He works, He does so in the flesh with a normal humanity, and does not fully reveal to man the true countenance of God. Additionally, His work in the flesh is never as supernatural or inestimable as man conceives. Even though Christ represents God Himself in the flesh and carries out in person the work that God Himself ought to do, He does not deny the existence of God in heaven, nor does He feverishly proclaim His own deeds. Rather, He remains hidden, humbly, within His flesh. Apart from Christ, those who falsely claim to be Christ do not possess His qualities. When juxtaposed against the arrogant and self-exalting disposition of those false Christs, it becomes apparent what manner of flesh is truly Christ. The falser they are, the more such false Christs flaunt themselves, and the more capable they are of working signs and wonders to mislead man. False Christs do not have the qualities of God; Christ is not tainted by any element belonging to false Christs. God becomes flesh only to complete the work of the flesh, not to merely allow men to see Him. Rather, He lets His work affirm His identity, and lets that which He reveals attest to His essence. His essence is not baseless; His identity was not seized by His hand; it is determined by His work and His essence. Though He has the essence of God Himself and is capable of doing the work of God Himself, He is still, after all, flesh, unlike the Spirit. He is not God with the qualities of the Spirit; He is God with a shell of flesh. Therefore, no matter how normal and how weak He is, and howsoever He seeks the will of God the Father, His divinity is undeniable. Within the incarnate God exists not only a normal humanity and its weaknesses; there also exists the wonderfulness and unfathomableness of His divinity, as well as all His deeds in the flesh. Therefore, both humanity and divinity exist within Christ, both actually and practically. This is not in the least something empty or supernatural. He comes to earth with the primary objective of carrying out work; it is imperative to be possessed of a normal humanity to carry out work on earth; otherwise, however great the power of His divinity, its original function cannot be put to good use. Though His humanity is of great importance, it is not His essence. His essence is the divinity; therefore, the moment He begins to perform His ministry on earth is the moment He begins to express the being of His divinity. His humanity exists solely to sustain the normal life of His flesh so that His divinity can carry out work as normal in the flesh; it is the divinity that directs His work entirely. When He completes His work, He will have fulfilled His ministry. What man ought to know is the entirety of His work, and it is through His work that He enables man to know Him. Over the course of His work, He quite fully expresses the being of His divinity, which is not a disposition tainted by humanity, or a being tainted by thought and human behavior. When the time comes when all His ministry has come to an end, He will have already perfectly and fully expressed the disposition that He ought to express. His work is not guided by the instructions of any man; the expression of His disposition is also quite free, and is not controlled by the mind or processed by thought, but revealed naturally. This is something no man can achieve. Even if the surroundings are harsh or the conditions unfavorable, He is able to express His disposition at the appropriate time. One who is Christ expresses the being of Christ, while those who are not do not possess the disposition of Christ. Therefore, even if all resist Him or have notions of Him, none can deny on the basis of man’s notions that the disposition expressed by Christ is that of God. All those who pursue Christ with a true heart or seek God with intent will admit that He is Christ based on the expression of His divinity. They would never deny Christ on the basis of any aspect of Him that does not conform to man’s notions. Though man is very foolish, all know exactly what is the will of man and what originates from God. It is merely that many people deliberately resist Christ as a result of their intentions. If not for this, then not a single man would have reason to deny the existence of Christ, for the divinity expressed by Christ does indeed exist, and His work can be witnessed by the naked eye.

The work and expression of Christ determines His essence. He is able to complete with a true heart that which has been entrusted to Him. He is able to worship God in heaven with a true heart, and with a true heart seek the will of God the Father. This is all determined by His essence. And so too is His natural revelation determined by His essence; the reason I call this His “natural revelation” is because His expression is not an imitation, or the result of education by man, or the result of many years of cultivation by man. He did not learn it or adorn Himself with it; rather, it is inherent within Him. Man may deny His work, His expression, His humanity, and the entire life of His normal humanity, but none can deny that He worships God in heaven with a true heart; none can deny that He has come to fulfill the will of the heavenly Father, and none can deny the sincerity with which He seeks God the Father. Though His image is not pleasing to the senses, His discourse not possessed of an extraordinary air, and His work not as earth-shattering or heaven-shaking as man imagines, He is indeed Christ, who fulfills the will of the heavenly Father with a true heart, completely submits to the heavenly Father, and is submissive to the death. This is because His essence is the essence of Christ. This truth is hard for man to believe, but it is a fact. When the ministry of Christ has been completely fulfilled, man will be able to see from His work that His disposition and His being represent the disposition and being of God in heaven. At that time, the summation of all His work can affirm that He is indeed the flesh which the Word becomes, and not alike that of a flesh and blood man. Every step of Christ’s work on earth has its representative significance, but man who experiences the actual work of each step is unable to grasp the significance of His work. This is especially so for the several steps of work carried out by God in His second incarnation. Most of those who have only heard or seen Christ’s words yet who have never seen Him have no notions of His work; those who have seen Christ and heard His words, as well as experienced His work, find it difficult to accept His work. Is this not because the appearance and the normal humanity of Christ are not to the taste of man? Those who accept His work after Christ has gone away will not have such difficulties, for they merely accept His work and do not come into contact with Christ’s normal humanity. Man is unable to drop his notions of God and instead scrutinizes Him intensely; this is due to the fact that man focuses only on His appearance and is unable to recognize His essence based on His work and His words. If man shuts his eyes to the appearance of Christ or avoids discussing the humanity of Christ, and speaks only of His divinity, whose work and words are unattainable by any man, then the notions of man will decrease by half, even to the extent that all man’s difficulties will be resolved. During the work of the incarnate God, man cannot tolerate Him and is full of numerous notions about Him, and instances of resistance and rebelliousness are common. Man cannot tolerate the existence of God, show leniency to the humility and hiddenness of Christ, or forgive the essence of Christ that submits to the heavenly Father. Therefore, He cannot stay with man for eternity after He finishes His work, for man is unwilling to allow Him to live alongside them. If man cannot show leniency to Him during His period of work, then how could they possibly tolerate Him living alongside them after He has fulfilled His ministry, as He watches them gradually experience His words? Would not many then fall because of Him? Man only allows Him to work on earth; this is the greatest extent of man’s lenience. If not for His work, man would have banished Him from the earth long ago, so how much less would they show leniency once His work is completed? Then would man not put Him to death and torture Him to death? If He were not called Christ, then He could not possibly work among mankind; if He did not work with the identity of God Himself, and instead worked only as a normal man, then man would not tolerate His uttering a single sentence, much less tolerate the slightest bit of His work. So He can only carry this identity with Him in His work. In this way, His work is more powerful than if He had not done so, for men are all willing to obey standing and great identity. If He did not carry the identity of God Himself as He worked or appear as God Himself, then He would not have the opportunity to do work at all. Despite the fact that He has the essence of God and the being of Christ, man would not ease up and allow Him to carry out work with ease among mankind. He carries the identity of God Himself in His work; though such work is dozens of times more powerful than that done without such identity, man is still not fully submissive to Him, for man submits only to His standing and not His essence. If so, when perhaps one day Christ steps down from His post, could man allow Him to remain alive for even one day? God is willing to live on earth with man so that He may see the effects that the work by His hand will bring about in the years to follow. However, man is unable to tolerate His presence for even one day, so He could only give up. It is already the greatest extent of man’s lenience and grace to allow God to do among man the work that He ought to do and to fulfill His ministry. Though those who have been personally conquered by Him show Him such grace, they still only permit Him to stay on until His work has finished, and not one moment more. If this is so, what of those He has not conquered? Is not the reason that man treats the incarnate God in this way because He is Christ with the shell of a normal human? If He had only the divinity and not a normal humanity, then would not the difficulties of man be resolved with the greatest of ease? Man begrudgingly acknowledges His divinity and shows no interest in His shell of an ordinary man, despite the fact that His essence is exactly that of Christ which submits to the will of the heavenly Father. As such, He could only cancel His work of being among man to share with them both joys and sorrows, for man could no longer tolerate His existence.

Restoring the Normal Life of Man and Taking Him to a Wonderful Destination

Man understands a little of the work of today and the work of the future, but he does not understand the destination into which mankind will enter. As a created being, man should perform the duty of a created being: Man should follow God in whatever He does; you should proceed in whatever way I tell you to. You have no way of managing things for yourself, and you have no mastery over yourself; all must be left to the mercy of God, and everything is held within His hands. If the work of God provided man with an end, a wonderful destination, ahead of time, and if God used this to entice man and cause man to follow Him—if He did a deal with man—then this would not be conquest, nor would it be to work the life of man. Were God to use man’s end to control him and gain his heart, then in this He would not be perfecting man, nor would He be able to gain man, but instead would be using the destination to control him. Man cares about nothing more than the future end, the final destination, and whether or not there is something good to hope for. If man were given a beautiful hope during the work of conquest, and if, prior to the conquest of man, he were given a proper destination to pursue, then not only would the conquest of man not achieve its effect, but the effect of the work of conquest would also be influenced. That is to say, the work of conquest achieves its effect by taking away the fate and prospects of man and judging and chastising the rebellious disposition of man. It is not achieved by doing a deal with man, that is, by giving man blessings and grace, but rather by revealing man’s loyalty by stripping him of his “freedom” and eradicating his prospects. This is the essence of the work of conquest. If man were given a beautiful hope at the very beginning, and the work of chastisement and judgment were done after, then man would accept this chastisement and judgment on the basis that he had prospects, and in the end, the unconditional submission to and worship of the Creator by all His created beings would not be achieved; there would only be blind, ignorant submission, or else man would blindly make demands of God, and it would be impossible to fully conquer man’s heart. Consequently, it would be impossible for such work of conquest to gain man, or, moreover, to bear testimony to God. Such created beings would be unable to perform their duty and would only strike bargains with God; this would not be conquest, but mercy and blessing. The biggest problem with man is that he thinks of nothing but his fate and prospects and idolizes these things. Man pursues God for the sake of his fate and prospects; he does not worship God because of his love for Him. And so, in the conquest of man, man’s selfishness, greed and the things that most obstruct his worship of God must all be pruned and thereby eliminated. In doing so, the effects of man’s conquest will be achieved. As a result, in the first stages of the conquest of man it is necessary to purge the wild ambitions and most fatal weaknesses of man, and, through this, to reveal man’s God-loving heart and change his knowledge of human life, his view of God, and the meaning of his existence. In this way, man’s God-loving heart is cleansed, which is to say, man’s heart is conquered. But in God’s attitude toward all created beings, God does not conquer only for the sake of conquering; rather, He conquers in order to gain man, for the sake of His own glory, and in order to recover the earliest, original likeness of man. Were He to conquer only for the sake of conquering, then the significance of the work of conquest would be lost. That is to say that if, after conquering man, God washed His hands of man and paid no heed to man’s life or death, then this would not be the management of mankind, nor would man’s conquest be for the sake of his salvation. Only the gaining of man following his conquest, and his ultimate arrival at a wonderful destination, is at the heart of all the work of salvation, and only this can achieve the aim of man’s salvation. In other words, only man’s arrival at the beautiful destination and his entry into rest are the prospects that should be possessed by all created beings, and the work that should be done by the Creator. If man were to do this work, then it would be too limited: It could take man to a certain point, but it would not be able to bring man to the eternal destination. Man is not able to decide man’s destiny, nor, moreover, is he able to ensure man’s prospects and future destination. The work done by God, however, is different. Since He created man, He leads him; since He saves man, He will thoroughly save him, and will completely gain him; since He leads man, He will bring him to the proper destination; and since He created and manages man, He must take responsibility for man’s fate and prospects. It is this which is the work done by the Creator. Though the work of conquest is achieved by purging man of his prospects, man must ultimately be brought into the proper destination prepared for him by God. It is precisely because God works man that man has a destination and his fate is assured. Here, the suitable destination referred to is not man’s hopes and prospects purged in times past; the two are different. Those things which man hopes for and pursues are the yearnings arising from his pursuit of the extravagant desires of the flesh, rather than the destination due to man. What God has prepared for man, meanwhile, are the blessings and promises due to man once he has been made pure, which God prepared for man after creating the world, and which are not tainted by the choices, notions, imaginings, or flesh of man. This destination is not prepared for a particular person, but is the place of rest of the whole of mankind. And so, this destination is the most suitable destination for mankind.

The Creator intends to orchestrate created beings. You must not discard or disobey anything that He does, nor should you be rebellious toward Him. When the work He does ultimately achieves His aims, in this He will gain glory. Today, why is it not said that you are the descendant of Moab, or the offspring of the great red dragon? Why is there no talk of chosen people, and only talk of created beings? Created being—this was man’s original title, and it is this which is his innate identity. Names vary only because the ages and periods of work vary; in fact, man is an ordinary created being. All created beings, whether they be the most corrupt or the most holy, must perform the duty of a created being. When God carries out the work of conquest, He does not control you using your prospects, fate or destination. There is actually no need to work in this way. The aim of the work of conquest is to make man perform the duty of a created being, to make him worship the Creator; only after this can he enter the wonderful destination. The fate of man is controlled by the hands of God. You are incapable of controlling yourself: Despite man always rushing and busying himself on his own behalf, he remains incapable of controlling himself. If you could know your own prospects, if you could control your own fate, would you still be a created being? In short, regardless of how God works, all His work is for the sake of man. Take, for example, the heavens and earth and all things that God created to serve man: The moon, the sun, and the stars that He made for man, the animals and plants, spring, summer, autumn and winter, and so on—all are made for the sake of man’s existence. And so, regardless of how God chastises and judges man, it is all for the sake of man’s salvation. Even though He strips man of his fleshly hopes, it is for the sake of purifying man, and the purification of man is done so that he may survive. The destination of man is in the hands of the Creator, so how could man control himself?

Once the work of conquest has been completed, man will be brought into a beautiful world. This life will, of course, still be on earth, but it will be totally unlike man’s life today. It is the life that mankind will have after the whole of mankind has been conquered, it will be a new beginning for man on earth, and for mankind to have such a life will be proof that mankind has entered a new and beautiful realm. It will be the beginning of the life of man and God on earth. The premise of such a beautiful life must be that, after man has been purified and conquered, he submits before the Creator. And so, the work of conquest is the last stage of God’s work before mankind enters the wonderful destination. Such a life is man’s future life on earth, the most beautiful life on earth, the kind of life that man longs for, the kind that man has never before achieved in the history of the world. It is the final outcome of the 6,000 years of work of management; it is what mankind yearns for most, and it is also God’s promise to man. But this promise cannot come to pass immediately: Man will enter the future destination only once the work of the last days has been completed and he has been completely conquered, that is, once Satan has been utterly defeated. After man has been refined, he will be without a sinful nature, because God will have defeated Satan, meaning that there will be no encroachment by hostile forces, and no hostile forces at all that can attack the flesh of man. And so man will be free and holy—he will have entered eternity. Only if the hostile forces of darkness are held in bondage will man be free wherever he goes, and so he will be without rebelliousness or opposition. Satan has but to be held in bondage, and all will be well with man; the current situation exists because Satan still stirs up disturbance everywhere on earth, and because the entire work of God’s management has yet to reach its end. Once Satan has been defeated, man will be completely liberated; when man gains God and comes out from under the power of Satan, he will behold the Sun of righteousness. The life due to normal man will be regained; all that should be possessed by normal man—such as the ability to discern good from evil, and understanding how to eat and clothe oneself, and the ability to live normally—all of this will be regained. If Eve had not been tempted by the serpent, man should have had this kind of normal life after he was created in the beginning. He should have eaten, been clothed, and led the normal human life on earth. Yet after man became depraved, this life became an unattainable illusion, and even today man does not dare to imagine such things. In fact, this beautiful life that man longs for is a necessity. If man were without such a destination, then his depraved life on earth would never cease, and if there were not such a beautiful life, then there would be no conclusion to Satan’s fate or to the age in which Satan holds power over the earth. Man must arrive at a realm unreachable by the forces of darkness, and when he does, this will prove that Satan has been defeated. In this way, once there is no disturbance by Satan, God Himself will control mankind, and He will command and control the entire life of man; only then will Satan truly have been defeated. Man’s life today is mostly a life of filth; it is still a life of suffering and affliction. This could not be called the defeat of Satan; man has yet to escape from the sea of affliction, has yet to escape from the hardship of the life of man, or the influence of Satan, and he still has but an infinitesimal knowledge of God. All of man’s hardship was created by Satan; it was Satan that brought suffering into the life of man, and only after Satan is placed in bondage will man be able to completely escape from the sea of affliction. Yet the bondage of Satan is achieved through the conquest and gaining of the heart of man, by making man the spoils of the battle with Satan.

Today, man’s pursuit of becoming an overcomer and being made perfect are the things he pursues before he has the normal human life on earth, and they are the objectives that he seeks before Satan is placed in bondage. In essence, man’s pursuit of becoming an overcomer and being made perfect, or being made great use of, is to escape from Satan’s influence: The pursuit of man is to become an overcomer, but the final outcome will be his escape from the influence of Satan. Only by escaping from the influence of Satan can man lead the normal human life on earth, the life of worshiping God. Today, man’s pursuit of becoming an overcomer and being made perfect are the things that are pursued prior to having the normal human life on earth. They are pursued primarily for the sake of being cleansed and putting the truth into practice, and in order to worship the Creator. If man possesses the normal human life on earth, a life without hardship or affliction, then man will not engage in the pursuit of becoming an overcomer. “Becoming an overcomer” and “being made perfect” are the objectives that God gives man to pursue, and through the pursuit of these objectives He causes man to put the truth into practice and live out a life of meaning. The objective is to make man complete and to gain him, and the pursuit of becoming an overcomer and being made perfect is merely a means. If, in the future, man enters into the wonderful destination, there will be no reference to becoming an overcomer and being made perfect; there will only be each created being performing their duty. Today, man is made to pursue these things simply in order to define a scope for man, so that man’s pursuit can be more targeted and practical. Otherwise, man would live amidst vague abstractedness, and pursue entry into eternal life, and if this were so, would man not be even more pitiable? To pursue in this way, without goals or principles—is it not self-deception? Ultimately, this pursuit would naturally be fruitless; in the end, man would still live under the power of Satan and would be incapable of extricating himself from it. Why subject himself to such aimless pursuit? When man enters the eternal destination, man will worship the Creator, and because man has gained salvation and entered eternity, man will not pursue any objectives, nor, moreover, will he need to worry about being besieged by Satan. At this time, man will know his place, and will perform his duty, and even if they are not chastised or judged, each person will perform their duty. At that time, man will be a created being in both identity and status. There will no longer be the distinction of high and low; each person will simply perform a different function. Yet man will still live in a destination that is orderly and suitable for mankind; man will perform his duty for the sake of worshiping the Creator, and it is this mankind which will become the mankind of eternity. At that time, man will have gained a life illuminated by God, a life under the care and protection of God, a life together with God. Mankind will lead a normal life on earth, and all people will enter onto the right track. The 6,000-year management plan will have utterly defeated Satan, meaning that God will have recovered the original image of man after creating him on earth, and as such, the original will of God will have been satisfied. In the beginning, before mankind was corrupted by Satan, mankind led a normal life on earth. Later, when man was corrupted by Satan, man lost this normal life, and so there began the work of God’s management, and the battle with Satan to recover the normal life of man. Only when the 6,000-year work of God’s management comes to an end will the life of all mankind officially begin on earth; only then will man have a wonderful life, and God will recover His purpose in creating man in the beginning, as well as the original likeness of man. And so, once man has the normal life of mankind on earth, man will not pursue becoming an overcomer or being made perfect, for man will be holy. The “overcomers” and “being perfected” of which people speak are the objectives given to man to pursue during the battle between God and Satan, and they exist only because man has been corrupted. It is by giving you an objective and causing you to pursue this objective, that Satan will be defeated. Asking you to be an overcomer or to be made perfect or to be used requires that you bear testimony in order to shame Satan. In the end, man will lead the normal human life on earth, and man will be holy; when this happens, will people still seek to become overcomers? Are they not all created beings? Speaking of being an overcomer and being a perfected one, these words are directed at Satan, and at the filthiness of man. Is this word “overcomer” not in reference to the victory over Satan and the hostile forces? When you say that you have been made perfect, what within you has been made perfect? Is it not that you have divested yourself of your corrupt satanic dispositions, so that you can achieve supreme love for God? Such things are said in relation to the filthy things within man, and in relation to Satan; they are not spoken of in relation to God.

If you do not pursue becoming an overcomer and being made perfect now, then in the future, when mankind leads a normal life on earth, there will be no opportunity for such pursuit. At that time, the end of every kind of person will have been revealed. At that time, it will be clear what kind of thing you are, and if you wish to be an overcomer or wish to be made perfect, it will be impossible. It will only be that, because of his rebelliousness, man will be punished after being revealed. At that time, the pursuit of man will not be a higher position than others, for some to be overcomers and others made perfect, or for some to be the firstborn sons of God and others to be the sons of God; they will not pursue these things. All will be created beings, all will live on earth, and all will live together with God on earth. Now is the time of the battle between God and Satan, it is a time in which this battle has yet to be concluded, a time in which man has yet to be completely gained; it is a period of transition. And so, man is required to pursue becoming either an overcomer or one of God’s people. Today there are distinctions in status, but when the time comes there will be no such distinctions: The status of all those who have been victorious will be the same, they will all be qualified members of mankind and will live equally upon earth, meaning that they will all be qualified created beings, and the same will be given to all. Because the ages of God’s work are different, and the objects of His work are different, if this work is done in you, then you are eligible to be made perfect and become overcomers; if it were done abroad, then the people there would be eligible to become the first group of people to be conquered, and the first group of people to be made perfect. Today, this work is not done abroad, so people of other countries are not eligible to be made perfect and become overcomers, and it is impossible for them to become the first group. Because the object of God’s work is different, the age of God’s work is different, and its scope is different, there is the first group, that is, there are the overcomers, and so too will there be a second group that is made perfect. Once there is the first group that has been made perfect, there will be a specimen and model, and so in the future there will be a second and third group of those who are made perfect, but in eternity they will all be the same, and there will be no classifications of status. They will simply have been made perfect at different times, and there will be no differences in status. When the time comes that everyone has been made complete, and the work of the entire universe has been concluded, there will be no distinctions in status, and all will be of equal status. Today, this work is done among you so that you will become the overcomers. If it were done in Britain, then Britain would have the first group, in the same way that you will be the first group. It is merely that you have been especially blessed with grace in the way that work is being carried out in you today, and if this work were not done in you, then you would be the second group, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth. This is merely because of the difference in the order of work; the first group and the second group do not denote that one is higher or lower than the other, it simply denotes the order in which these people are made perfect. Today these words are communicated to you, but why were you not informed earlier? Because, without a process, people tend toward extremes. For example, Jesus said in His time: “As I departed, so shall I arrive.” Today, many are infatuated by these words, and they want only to wear white robes and await their rapture into heaven. Thus, there are many words that cannot be spoken too early; if they were spoken too early, man would tend toward extremes. Man’s stature is too small, and he is incapable of seeing through to the truth of these words.

When man achieves the true life of man on earth and the entire forces of Satan are placed in bondage, man will live easily upon earth. Things will not be as complex as they are today: Human relationships, social relationships, complex familial relationships—they bring so much trouble, so much pain! Man’s life here is so miserable! Once man has been conquered, his heart and mind will change: He will have a God-fearing and God-loving heart. Once all those within the universe who seek to love God have been conquered, which is to say, once Satan has been defeated, and once Satan—all the forces of darkness—has been placed in bondage, then man’s life on earth will be undisturbed, and he will be able to live freely upon earth. If man’s life were without fleshly relationships and the complexities of the flesh, then it would be so much easier. Man’s relationships of the flesh are too complex, and for man to have such things is proof that he has yet to free himself of the influence of Satan. If you had the same relationship with each of your brothers and sisters, if you had the same relationship with each member of your family, then you would have no concerns, and would not need to worry about anyone. Nothing could be better, and in this way man would be relieved of half of his suffering. Living a normal human life on earth, man will be similar to the angels; though still being of the flesh, he will be much like an angel. This is the final promise, the last promise bestowed upon man. Today man undergoes chastisement and judgment; do you think man’s experience of such things is meaningless? Could the work of chastisement and judgment be done for no reason? Previously it has been said that to chastise and judge man is to place him into the bottomless pit, which means the taking away of his fate and prospects. This is for the sake of one thing: the cleansing of man. Man is not placed in the bottomless pit deliberately, after which God washes His hands of him. Instead, it is in order to prune the rebelliousness within man, so that in the end the things within man may be cleansed, so that he may have a true knowledge of God and be like a holy person. If this is done, then all will be accomplished. In fact, when those things within man that are meant to be pruned are pruned, and man bears resounding testimony, Satan will also be defeated, and even though there may be a few of those things which are originally within man that are not completely cleansed, once Satan is defeated, it will no longer cause disturbance, and at that time man will have been completely cleansed. Man has never experienced such a life, but when Satan is defeated, all will be settled and those trifling things within man will all be solved, and once that main problem has been solved, all other troubles will end. During this incarnation of God on earth, when He personally does His work among man, all the work He does is done to defeat Satan, and He will defeat Satan through the conquest of man and by making you complete. When you bear resounding testimony, this, too, will be a mark of Satan’s defeat. Man is first conquered and ultimately completely made perfect in order to defeat Satan. In essence, however, along with the defeat of Satan, this is also the salvation of all mankind from this empty sea of affliction. Regardless of whether work is carried out throughout the entire universe or in China, it is all in order to defeat Satan and bring salvation to the whole of mankind, so that man may enter the place of rest. The incarnate God, this normal flesh, is precisely for the sake of defeating Satan. The work of God in flesh is used to bring salvation to all those beneath heaven who love God, it is for the sake of conquering all mankind, and, moreover, for the sake of defeating Satan. The core of all God’s management work is inseparable from the defeat of Satan to bring salvation to all mankind. Why, in much of this work, is there always talk of having you bear testimony? And whom is this testimony directed at? Is it not directed at Satan? This testimony is made to God, and it is made to testify that the work of God has achieved its effect. Bearing testimony is related to the work of defeating Satan; if there were not a battle with Satan, then man would not be required to bear testimony. It is because Satan must be defeated that, at the same time as saving man, God requires that man bear testimony to Him before Satan, which He uses to save man and do battle with Satan. As a result, man is both the object of salvation and a tool in the defeat of Satan, and so man is at the core of the work of God’s entire management, while Satan is merely the object of destruction, the enemy. You may feel that you have done nothing, but because of the changes in your disposition, testimony has been borne, and this testimony is directed at Satan and is not made to man. Man is not fit to enjoy such a testimony. How could he understand the work done by God? The object of God’s fight is Satan; man, meanwhile, is only the object of salvation. Man has corrupt satanic dispositions, and is incapable of understanding this work. This is because of the corruption of Satan and is not inherent to man, but is directed by Satan. Today, God’s main work is to defeat Satan, that is, to completely conquer man, so that man may bear final testimony to God before Satan. In this way, all things will be accomplished. In many cases, to your naked eye it appears that nothing has been done, but in fact, the work has already been completed. Man requires that all the work of completion be visible, yet without making it visible to you, I have completed My work, for Satan has yielded, which means that it has been utterly defeated, that all of God’s wisdom, power and authority have vanquished Satan. This is exactly the testimony that must be borne, and though it has no clear expression in man, though it is not visible to the naked eye, Satan has already been defeated. The entirety of this work is directed against Satan and carried out because of the battle with Satan. And so, there are many things that man does not see as having been successful, but which, in God’s eyes, were successfully completed long ago. This is one of the inner truths of all God’s work.

Once Satan has been defeated, that is to say, once man has been completely conquered, then man will comprehend that all of this work is for the sake of salvation, and that the means of this salvation is to seize people from the hands of Satan. The 6,000 years of work of God’s management are divided into three stages: the Age of Law, the Age of Grace, and the Age of Kingdom. These three stages of work are all for the sake of mankind’s salvation, which is to say, they are for the salvation of mankind that has been severely corrupted by Satan. At the same time, however, they are also so that God may do battle with Satan. Thus, just as the work of salvation is divided into three stages, so the battle with Satan is also divided into three stages, and these two aspects of God’s work are conducted simultaneously. The battle with Satan is actually for the sake of mankind’s salvation, and because the work of mankind’s salvation is not something that can be successfully completed in a single stage, the battle with Satan is also divided into phases and periods, and war is waged upon Satan in accordance with the needs of man and the extent of Satan’s corruption of him. Perhaps, in man’s imagination, he believes that in this battle God will take up arms against Satan, in the same way that two armies would fight each other. This is just what man’s intellect is capable of imagining; it is a supremely vague and unrealistic idea, yet it is what man believes. And because I say here that the means of man’s salvation is through battle with Satan, man imagines that this is how the battle is conducted. There are three stages to the work of man’s salvation, which is to say that the battle with Satan has been split into three stages in order to defeat Satan once and for all. Yet the inner truth of the entire work of the battle with Satan is that its effects are achieved through several steps of work: bestowing grace upon man, becoming man’s sin offering, forgiving the sins of man, conquering man, and making man perfect. As a matter of fact, the battle with Satan is not the taking up of arms against Satan, but the salvation of man, the working of the life of man, and the changing of man’s disposition so that he may bear testimony to God. This is how Satan is defeated. Satan is defeated through changing the corrupt disposition of man. When Satan has been defeated, that is, when man has been completely saved, then the humiliated Satan will be completely bound, and in this way, man will have been completely saved. Thus, the essence of man’s salvation is the war against Satan, and this war is primarily reflected in the salvation of man. The stage of the last days, in which man is to be conquered, is the last stage in the battle with Satan, and it is also the work of man’s complete salvation from the power of Satan. The inner meaning of man’s conquest is the return of the embodiment of Satan—man who has been corrupted by Satan—to the Creator following his conquest, through which he will rebel against Satan and completely return to God. In this way, man will have been completely saved. And so, the work of conquest is the last work in the battle against Satan and the final stage in God’s management for the sake of Satan’s defeat. Without this work, the full salvation of man would ultimately be impossible, the utter defeat of Satan would also be impossible, and mankind would never be able to enter the wonderful destination, or get free from Satan’s influence. Consequently, the work of salvation of man cannot be concluded before the battle with Satan is concluded, for the core of the work of God’s management is for the sake of mankind’s salvation. Earliest mankind was in the hands of God, but because of Satan’s temptation and corruption, man was bound up by Satan and fell into the hands of the evil one. Thus, Satan became the object to be defeated in the work of God’s management. Because Satan took possession of man, and because man is the capital which God uses to carry out all management, if man is to be saved, then he must be snatched back from the hands of Satan, which is to say that man must be taken back after having been held captive by Satan. Thus, Satan must be defeated through changes in man’s old disposition, changes which restore man’s original sense of reason. In this way, man, who has been taken captive, can be snatched back from the hands of Satan. If man is freed from the influence and bondage of Satan, then Satan will be shamed, man will ultimately be taken back, and Satan will be defeated. And because man has been freed from the dark influence of Satan, man will become the spoils of this entire battle, and Satan will become the object to be punished once the battle has finished, after which the entire work of mankind’s salvation will have been completed.

God bears no malice toward the created beings; He wishes only to defeat Satan. All of His work—whether it be chastisement or judgment—is directed at Satan; it is carried out for the sake of mankind’s salvation, it is all in order to defeat Satan, and it has one objective: to do battle against Satan to the very end! God will never rest until He has been victorious over Satan! He will rest only once He has defeated Satan. Because all of the work done by God is directed at Satan, and because those who have been corrupted by Satan are all under the control of Satan’s power and all live under Satan’s power, without battling against Satan and breaking with it, Satan would not relax its hold on these people, and they could not be gained. If they were not gained, it would prove that Satan has not been defeated, that it has not been vanquished. And so, in God’s 6,000-year management plan, during the first stage He did the work of the law, during the second stage He did the work of the Age of Grace, that is, the work of crucifixion, and during the third stage He does the work of conquering mankind. All this work is directed at the extent to which Satan has corrupted mankind, it is all in order to defeat Satan, and every one of the stages is for the sake of defeating Satan. The essence of the 6,000-year work of God’s management is the battle against the great red dragon, and the work of managing mankind is also the work of defeating Satan, the work of doing battle with Satan. God has battled for 6,000 years, and thus He has worked for 6,000 years to ultimately bring man into the new realm. When Satan is defeated, man will be completely liberated. Is this not the direction of God’s work today? This is precisely the direction of the work of today: the complete liberation and freeing of man, so that he is not constrained by any rules, nor limited by any binds or restrictions. All this work is done in accordance with your stature and in accordance with your needs, meaning that you are provided with whatever you can accomplish. It is not a case of “driving a duck onto a perch,” of imposing anything upon you; rather, all this work is carried out in accordance with your actual needs. Each stage of work is carried out in accordance with the actual needs and requirements of man; each stage of work is for the sake of defeating Satan. In fact, at the beginning there were no barriers between the Creator and created beings. All of these barriers were caused by Satan. Man has become unable to see or touch anything because of how Satan has disturbed and corrupted him. Man is the victim, the one who has been deceived. Once Satan has been defeated, the created beings will behold the Creator, and the Creator will look upon the created beings and be able to personally lead them. Only this is the life that man should have on earth. And so, God’s work is primarily in order to defeat Satan, and once Satan has been defeated, everything will be solved. Today, you have seen that it is no simple matter for God to come among man. He has not come to spend each day finding fault in you, to say this and that, or to simply allow you to see what He looks like and how He speaks and lives. God has not become flesh merely to allow you to look upon Him or to open your eyes, or to allow you to hear the mysteries He has spoken of and the seven seals that He has opened. Rather, He has become flesh to defeat Satan. He has personally come among man in the flesh to save man and to do battle with Satan; this is the significance of His incarnation. If it were not in order to defeat Satan, then He would not personally do this work. God has come to earth to do His work among man, to personally reveal Himself to man and allow man to behold Him; is this a small matter? It really is not simple! It is not as man imagines: that God has come so man may look upon Him, so that man may understand that God is practical and not vague or hollow, and that God is lofty but also humble. Could it be that simple? It is precisely because Satan has corrupted the flesh of man, and man is the one who God intends to save, that God must assume the flesh to do battle with Satan and to personally shepherd man. Only this is beneficial to His work. The two incarnate fleshes of God have existed in order to defeat Satan, and also in order to better save man. That is because the one doing the battle with Satan can only be God, whether it be the Spirit of God or the incarnate flesh of God. In short, it cannot be the angels who are doing battle with Satan, much less can it be man, who has been corrupted by Satan. The angels are powerless to fight this battle, and man is even more impotent. As such, if God wishes to work the life of man, if He wishes to personally come to earth to save man, then He must personally become flesh—that is, He must personally assume the flesh, and with His inherent identity and the work that He must do, come among man and personally save man. If not, if it were the Spirit of God or man that did this work, then nothing would ever come of this battle, and it would never end. Only when God becomes flesh to personally go to war against Satan among man does man have a chance of salvation. Furthermore, only then is Satan shamed and left without any opportunities to exploit or any plans to execute. The work done by God incarnate is unachievable by the Spirit of God, and it would be even more impossible for any fleshly man to do it on God’s behalf, for the work that He does is for the sake of the life of man, and in order to change the corrupt disposition of man. Were man to participate in this battle, he would only flee in woeful disarray, and would simply be incapable of changing his corrupt disposition. He would be incapable of saving man from the cross, or of conquering all of rebellious mankind, but would only be able to do a little old work that does not go beyond principles, or else work that is unrelated to the defeat of Satan. So why bother? What is the significance of work that cannot gain mankind, much less defeat Satan? And so, the battle with Satan can only be carried out by God Himself, and it would simply be impossible for man to do it. Man’s duty is to submit and to follow, for man is unable to do work akin to creating the heavens and earth, nor, moreover, can he carry out the work of battling Satan. Man can only satisfy the Creator under the leadership of God Himself, through which Satan is defeated; this is the only thing that man can do. And so, every time a new battle commences, which is to say, every time the work of a new age begins, this work is personally done by God Himself, through which He leads the entire age and opens up a new path for the whole of mankind. The dawn of each new age is a new start in the battle with Satan, through which man enters a newer, more beautiful realm, and a new age that is personally led by God Himself. Man is the master of all things, but those who have been gained will become the fruits of all battles with Satan. Satan is the corrupter of all things, it is the defeated at the end of all battles, and is also the one which will be punished following these battles. Among God, man and Satan, only Satan is the one which will be spurned. Those who were gained by Satan but are not taken back by God, meanwhile, become the ones who will receive punishment on behalf of Satan. Of these three, only God should be worshiped by all things. Those who were corrupted by Satan but are taken back by God and who follow the way of God, meanwhile, become the ones who will receive God’s promise and judge the evil ones for God. God will surely be victorious and Satan will surely be defeated, but among man there are those who will win and those who will lose. Those who win will belong with the overcomers, and those who lose will belong with the losers; this is the classification of each according to kind, it is the final ending of all God’s work. It is also the aim of all God’s work, and it will never change. The core of the main work of God’s management plan is focused on the salvation of man, and God becomes flesh primarily for the sake of this core, for the sake of this work, and in order to defeat Satan. The first time God became flesh was also in order to defeat Satan: He personally became flesh, and was personally nailed to the cross, in order to complete the work of the first battle, which was the work of mankind’s redemption. Likewise, this stage of work is also personally done by God, who has become flesh to do His work among man, to personally speak His word and allow man to see Him. Of course, it is inevitable that He also does some other work along the way, but the main reason He carries out His work personally is in order to defeat Satan, to conquer the whole of mankind, and to gain these people. So, the work of God’s incarnation really is not simple. If His purpose were only to show man that God is humble and hidden and that God is practical, if it were only for the sake of doing this work, then there would be no need to become flesh. Even if God did not become flesh, He could reveal His humbleness and hiddenness, His greatness and holiness, to man directly, but such things have nothing to do with the work of managing mankind. They are incapable of saving man or making him complete, much less can they defeat Satan. If the defeat of Satan only involved the Spirit doing battle against a spirit, then such work would have even less practical value; it would be incapable of gaining man and would ruin the fate and prospects of man. As such, God’s work today is of profound significance. It is not only so that man may see Him, or so that man’s eyes may be opened, or in order to provide him with a little sense of feeling moved and encouraged; such work has no significance. If you can only speak of this kind of knowledge, then it proves that you do not know the true significance of God’s incarnation.

The work of God’s entire management plan is personally done by God Himself. The first stage—the creation of the world—was personally done by God Himself, and if it had not been, then no one would have been capable of creating mankind; the second stage was the redemption of all mankind, and it was also personally done by God Himself; the third stage goes without saying: There is an even greater need for the end of all God’s work to be done by God Himself. The work of redeeming, conquering, gaining, and perfecting the whole of mankind is all personally carried out by God Himself. If He did not personally do this work, then His identity could not be represented by man, nor His work done by man. In order to defeat Satan, in order to gain mankind, and in order to give man a normal life on earth, He personally leads man and personally works among man; for the sake of His entire management plan, and for all of His work, He must personally do this work. If man only believes that God came so that man may see Him, for the sake of making man happy, then such beliefs hold no value, no significance. Man’s understanding is too superficial! Only by carrying this work out Himself can God do this work thoroughly and completely. Man is incapable of doing it on behalf of God. As he does not have God’s identity or His essence, he is incapable of doing God’s work, and even if man did this work, it would not have any effect. The first time God became flesh was for the sake of redemption, to redeem all mankind from sin, to make man capable of being cleansed and of being forgiven for his sins. The work of conquest is also personally done by God among man. If, during this stage, God were only to speak prophecy, then a prophet or someone gifted could be found to take His place; if it were only prophecy being spoken, then man could stand in for God. Yet if man tried to personally do the work of God Himself and tried to work the life of man, it would be impossible for him to do this work. It must be personally done by God Himself: God must personally become flesh to do this work. In the Age of Word, if only prophecy were spoken, then Isaiah or Elijah the prophet could be found to do this work, and there would be no need for God Himself to do it personally. Because the work done in this stage is not merely the speaking of prophecy, and because it is of greater importance that the work of words is used to conquer man and defeat Satan, this work cannot be done by man, and must be personally done by God Himself. In the Age of Law Jehovah did part of His work, after which He spoke some words and did some work through the prophets. That is because man could replace Jehovah in His work, and the seers could foretell things and interpret some dreams on His behalf. The work done in the beginning was not the work of directly changing man’s disposition, and was unrelated to the sin of man, and man was required only to abide by the law. So Jehovah did not become flesh and reveal Himself to man; instead He spoke directly to Moses and others, made them speak and work on His behalf, and caused them to work directly among mankind. The first stage of God’s work was the leadership of man. It was the start of the battle against Satan, but this battle had yet to officially begin. The official war against Satan began with the first incarnation of God, and it has continued right up until today. The first battle of this war was when God incarnate was nailed to the cross. The crucifixion of God incarnate defeated Satan, and it was the first successful stage in the war. When God incarnate began to directly work the life of man, this was the official start of the work of regaining man, and because this was the work of changing man’s old disposition, it was the work of doing battle with Satan. The stage of work done by Jehovah in the beginning was merely the leadership of man’s life on earth. It was the beginning of God’s work, and although it had yet to involve any battle, or any major work, it laid the foundation for the work of the battle to come. Later, the second stage of work during the Age of Grace involved changing man’s old disposition, which means that God Himself wrought the life of man. This had to be personally done by God: It required that God personally become flesh. If He had not become flesh, no one else could have replaced Him in this stage of work, for it represented the work of fighting directly against Satan. If man had done this work on God’s behalf, when man stood before Satan, Satan would not have yielded and it would have been impossible to defeat it. It had to be God incarnate who came to defeat it, for the essence of God incarnate is still God, He is still the life of man, and He is still the Creator; whatever happens, His identity and essence will not change. And so, He assumed the flesh and did the work to cause Satan to completely yield. During the stage of work of the last days, if man were to do this work and were made to speak the words directly, then he would be unable to speak them, and if prophecy were spoken, then this prophecy would be incapable of conquering man. By assuming the flesh, God comes to defeat Satan and cause it to completely yield. When He utterly defeats Satan, fully conquers man, and completely gains man, this stage of work will be completed and success achieved. In God’s management, man cannot stand in for God. In particular, the work of leading the age and launching new work is in even greater need of being personally done by God Himself. Giving man revelation and providing him with prophecy can be done by man, but if it is work that must be personally done by God, work of the battle between God Himself and Satan, then this work cannot be done by man. During the first stage of work, when there was no battle with Satan, Jehovah personally led the people of Israel using the prophecy spoken by the prophets. Afterward, the second stage of work was the battle with Satan, and God Himself personally became flesh and came into the flesh to do this work. Anything that involves the battle against Satan also involves the incarnation of God, which means that this battle cannot be waged by man. If man were to do battle, he would be incapable of defeating Satan. How could he have the strength to fight against it whilst still under its power? Man is in the middle: If you lean toward Satan, then you belong to Satan, but if you satisfy God, then you belong to God. Were man to try and stand in for God in the work of this battle, would he be able to? If he did, would he not have perished long ago? Would he not have entered into the netherworld long ago? So, man is unable to replace God in His work, which is to say that man does not have the essence of God, and if you did battle with Satan you would be incapable of defeating it. Man can only do some work; he can win some people over, but he cannot stand in for God in the work of God Himself. How could man do battle with Satan? Satan would take you captive before you had even started. Only when God Himself does battle with Satan and man follows and submits to God upon this basis, can man be gained by God and escape from the bonds of Satan. The things that man can achieve with his own wisdom and abilities are too limited; he is incapable of making man complete, of leading him, and, moreover, of defeating Satan. Man’s intelligence and wisdom are unable to thwart the schemes of Satan, so how could man do battle with it?

All those who are willing to be made perfect have the chance to be made perfect, so everyone must relax: In the future you will all enter the destination. But if you are unwilling to be made perfect, and are unwilling to enter the wonderful realm, then that is your own problem. All those who are willing to be made perfect and are loyal to God, all those who submit, and all those who faithfully perform their function—all such people can be made perfect. Today, all those who do not loyally perform their duty, all those who are not loyal to God, all those who do not submit to God, particularly those who have received the enlightenment and illumination of the Holy Spirit but do not put it into practice—all such people are unable to be made perfect. All those who are willing to be loyal and submit to God can be made perfect, even if they are a little ignorant; all those who are willing to pursue can be made perfect. There is no need to worry about this. As long as you are willing to pursue in this direction, you can be made perfect. I am unwilling to forsake or cast out any of those among you, but if man does not strive to do well, then you are only ruining yourself; it is not Me that casts you out, but you yourself. If you yourself do not strive to do well—if you are lazy, or do not perform your duty, or are not loyal, or do not pursue the truth and always do as you please, if you behave recklessly, fight for your own fame and fortune, and are unscrupulous in your dealings with the opposite sex, then you will bear the burden of your own sins; you are not worthy of anyone’s pity. My intention is for all of you to be made perfect, and at the very least be conquered, so that this stage of work may be successfully completed. God’s wish is for every person to be made perfect, to be ultimately gained by Him, to be completely cleansed by Him, and to become people He loves. No matter whether I say you are backward or of poor caliber, this is all fact. My saying this does not prove that I intend to forsake you, that I have lost hope in you, much less that I am unwilling to save you. Today I have come to do the work of your salvation, which is to say that the work I do is a continuation of the work of salvation. Every person has the chance to be made perfect: Provided that you are willing, provided that you pursue, in the end you will be able to achieve this result, and not one of you will be forsaken. If you are of poor caliber, My requirements of you will be in accordance with your poor caliber; if you are of high caliber, My requirements of you will be in accordance with your high caliber; if you are ignorant and illiterate, My requirements of you will be in accordance with your illiteracy; if you are literate, My requirements of you will be in accordance with the fact that you are literate; if you are elderly, My requirements of you will be in accordance with your age; if you are capable of providing hospitality, My requirements of you will be in accordance with this capability; if you say you cannot offer hospitality, and can only perform a certain function, whether it be spreading the gospel, or taking care of the church, or attending to other general affairs, My perfection of you will be in accordance with the function that you perform. Being loyal, submitting to the very end, and seeking to have supreme love for God—this is what you must accomplish, and there are no better practices than these three things. Ultimately, man is required to achieve these three things, and if he can achieve them, then he will be made perfect. But, above all, you must truly pursue, you must actively press onward and upward, and not be passive in that regard. I have said that every person has the chance to be made perfect and is capable of being made perfect, and this holds true, but you do not try to be better in your pursuit. If you do not achieve these three criteria, then in the end you must be cast out. I want everyone to catch up, I want everyone to have the work and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, and be able to submit to the very end, because this is the duty that each of you should perform. When you have all performed your duty, you will all have been made perfect, you will also have resounding testimony. All those who have testimony are those who have been victorious over Satan and gained God’s promise, and they are the ones who will remain to live in the wonderful destination.

God and Man Will Enter Into Rest Together

In the beginning, God was in rest. There were no humans or anything else upon the earth at that time, and God had not yet done any work. He only began His work of management once humanity existed and after humanity had been corrupted; from that point on, He no longer rested, but instead began to busy Himself among humanity. It was because of humanity’s corruption that God lost His rest, and also because of the archangel’s betrayal. If God does not defeat Satan and save corrupted humanity, He will never again be able to enter into rest. As man lacks rest, so does God, and when He rests once more, humans will, too. Living in rest means a life without war, without filth, and without any persisting unrighteousness. This is to say, it is a life devoid of Satan’s disturbances (here “Satan” refers to enemy forces) and Satan’s corruption, and nor is it prone to the invasion of any force in opposition to God; it is a life in which everything follows its own kind and can worship the Lord of creation, and in which heaven and earth are entirely tranquil—this is what is meant by the words “restful life of humans.” When God rests, unrighteousness will no longer persist upon the earth, nor will there be any further invasion from enemy forces, and humankind will enter a new realm—no longer be a humanity corrupted by Satan, but rather a humanity that has been saved after having been corrupted by Satan. Humanity’s day of rest will also be God’s day of rest. God lost His rest due to humanity’s inability to enter into rest, not because He had originally been unable to rest. Entering into rest does not mean that everything stops moving or ceases to develop, nor does it mean that God stops working or that humans stop living. The sign of entering into rest will be when Satan has been destroyed, when those evil people who joined it in its evildoing have been punished and wiped out and when all forces hostile to God cease to exist. God entering into rest means that He will no longer carry out His work of humanity’s salvation. Humanity entering into rest means that all of humanity will live within God’s light and under His blessings, devoid of Satan’s corruption, and no more unrighteousness will occur. Under God’s care, humans will live normally upon earth. When God and humanity enter into rest together, it means that humanity has been saved and that Satan has been destroyed, that God’s work in humans is entirely complete. God will no longer continue to work in humans, and they will no longer live under Satan’s power. As such, God will no longer be busy, and humans will no longer be constantly on the move; God and humanity will enter into rest simultaneously. God will return to His original place, and each person will return to their respective place. These are the destinations in which God and humans will reside once God’s entire management is finished. God has God’s destination, and humanity has humanity’s destination. While resting, God will continue to guide all humans in their lives upon earth, and while in His light, they will worship the one true God in heaven. God will no longer live among humanity, nor will humans be able to live with God in His destination. God and humans cannot live within the same realm; rather, both have their own respective manners of living. God is the One who guides all of humanity, and all of humanity is the crystallization of God’s management work. Humans are the ones who are led, and are not of the same substance as God. To “rest” means to return to one’s original place. Therefore, when God enters into rest, it means He has returned to His original place. He will no longer live upon the earth or be among humanity to share in their joy and suffering. When humans enter into rest, it means that they have become true created beings; they will worship God from upon the earth, and live normal human lives. People will no longer rebel against God or resist Him, and will return to the original life of Adam and Eve. These will be the respective lives and destinations of God and humans after they enter into rest. Satan’s defeat is an inevitable trend in the war between it and God. As such, God’s entering into rest after the completion of His management work and humanity’s complete salvation and entrance into rest have likewise become inevitable trends. Humanity’s place of rest is on earth, and God’s place of rest is in heaven. While humans worship God in rest, they will live upon the earth, and while God leads the rest of humanity in rest, He will lead them from heaven, not from earth. God will still be the Spirit, while humans will still be flesh. God and humans both rest in a different manner. While God rests, He will come and appear among humans; while humans rest, they will be led by God to visit heaven, as well as to enjoy life there. After God and humanity enter into rest, Satan will no longer exist; likewise, those evil people will also cease to exist. Before God and humanity rest, those evil individuals who once persecuted God on earth, as well as the enemies who were rebellious against Him there, will already have been destroyed; they will have been eradicated by the great disasters of the last days. Once those evil people have been utterly annihilated, earth will never again know Satan’s disturbance. Only then will humanity obtain complete salvation, and God’s work be thoroughly finished. These are the prerequisites for God and humanity to enter into rest.

The approach of the end of all things indicates the completion of God’s work, as well as an end to humanity’s development. This means that humans, as corrupted by Satan, will have reached their final stage of development, and that the descendants of Adam and Eve will have completed their propagation. It also means that it will be impossible for such a humanity, having been corrupted by Satan, to continue to develop. The Adam and Eve in the beginning had not been corrupted, but the Adam and Eve who were driven from the Garden of Eden were corrupted by Satan. When God and humans enter into rest together, Adam and Eve—who were driven from the Garden of Eden—and their descendants will finally come to an end. The humanity of the future will still consist of the descendants of Adam and Eve, but those will not be humans living under Satan’s power. Rather, they will be people who have been saved and purified. This will be a humanity that has been judged and chastised, and one that is holy. These people will not be like the human race as it originally was; it can almost be said that they will be an entirely different kind of humanity from that of Adam and Eve in the beginning. These people will have been selected from among all of those who were corrupted by Satan, and they will be the ones who have ultimately stood firm during God’s judgment and chastisement; they will be the last remaining group of humans among corrupt humankind. Only these people will be able to enter into the final rest along with God. Those who are able to stand firm during God’s work of judgment and chastisement during the last days—that is, during the final work of purification—will be the ones who will enter into the final rest alongside God; as such, all those who enter into rest will have broken free of Satan’s influence and been obtained by God after having undergone His final work of purification. These humans, who will have been finally obtained by God, will enter into the final rest. The purpose of God’s work of chastisement and judgment is in essence meant to purify humanity, for the sake of the ultimate rest; otherwise none of humanity could be classified into different categories according to kind, or enter into rest. This work is humanity’s only path to enter into rest. Only God’s work of purification will cleanse humans of their unrighteousness, and only His work of chastisement and judgment will bring to light those rebellious elements of humanity, thereby separating those who can be saved from those who cannot, and those who will remain from those who will not. When this work ends, those people who are allowed to remain will all be cleansed and enter a higher state of humanity in which they will enjoy a more wonderful second human life upon the earth; in other words, they will commence their human day of rest, and coexist with God. After those who are not allowed to remain have been chastised and judged, their true colors will be entirely exposed, after which they will all be destroyed and, like Satan, will no longer be permitted to survive upon the earth. The humanity of the future will no longer include any of this type of people; such people are not fit to enter the land of the ultimate rest, nor are they fit to join in the day of rest that God and humanity will share, for they are the targets of punishment and are evil, unrighteous people. They were redeemed once, and they have also been judged and chastised; they also once rendered service to God. However, when the final day comes, they will still be cast out and destroyed due to their evil and as a result of their rebelliousness and inability to be redeemed; they will never again come into being in the world of the future, and will no longer live among the human race of the future. Whether they are spirits of the dead or people still living in the flesh, all evildoers and all those who have not been saved will be destroyed once the holy among humanity enter into rest. As for these evildoing spirits and humans, or the spirits of righteous people and those who do righteousness, regardless of what era they are in, all those who are evil will ultimately be destroyed, and all those who are righteous will survive. Whether a person or spirit will receive salvation is not entirely decided on the basis of the work of the final age; rather, it is determined by whether or not they have resisted or rebelled against God. People in the previous era who committed evil and could not attain salvation will, undoubtedly, be targets for punishment, and those in the current era who commit evil and cannot be saved will surely be targets for punishment, too. Humans are categorized on the basis of good and evil, not by which epoch they live in. Once thus categorized, they will not be punished or rewarded immediately; rather, God will only carry out His work of punishing evil and rewarding good after He has finished carrying out His work of conquest in the last days. Actually, He has been separating humans into good and evil ever since He started doing His work of mankind’s salvation. It is just that He will reward the righteous and punish the evil only after His work has come to an end; it is not that He will separate them into categories upon the completion of His work and then immediately set about the task of punishing evil and rewarding good. Rather, this task will be done only when His work is wholly finished. The entire purpose behind God’s ultimate work of punishing evil and rewarding good is to thoroughly purify all humans so that He may bring a purely holy humanity into eternal rest. This stage of His work is the most crucial; it is the final stage of the whole of His work of management. If God did not destroy the evil, but instead allowed them to remain, then every human would still be unable to enter into rest, and God would not be able to bring all of humanity into a better realm. Such work would not be complete. When His work is finished, the whole of humanity will be entirely holy; only in this way will God be able to live in rest peacefully.

People nowadays are still unable to let go of things of the flesh; they cannot give up the enjoyment of the flesh, the world, money, or their corrupt dispositions. Most people go about their pursuits in a perfunctory manner. Actually, these people do not harbor God in their hearts at all; even worse, they do not dread God. They do not have God in their hearts, and so they cannot perceive all that God does, and much less are they capable of believing the words He utters. Such people are too much of the flesh; they are too deeply corrupted and lack any truth whatsoever. What is more, they do not believe that God can become flesh. Anyone who does not believe in God incarnate—that is, anyone who does not believe in the visible God or in His work and words, and instead worships the invisible God in heaven—is a person who does not have God in their heart. Such people are rebellious and resistant to God. They lack humanity and reason, to say nothing of truth. Moreover, for these people, the visible and tangible God all the more cannot be believed, yet they consider the invisible and intangible God to be most credible and most gladdening. What they seek is not the actual truth, nor is it the true essence of life; much less is it God’s will. Rather, they seek excitement. Whichever things can most enable them to fulfill their own desires are, without a doubt, what they believe in and what they pursue. They only believe in God in order to satisfy their own desires, not to seek the truth. Are such people not evildoers? They are extremely self-confident, and they do not at all believe that God in heaven will destroy such “good people” as themselves. Instead, they believe that God will allow them to remain and, moreover, will reward them handsomely due to having done many things for God and displayed considerable “loyalty” toward Him. If they were to also pursue the visible God, as soon as their desires were not met, they would immediately strike back against God or fly into a rage. They show themselves to be vile little dogs who are always just seeking to satisfy their own desires; they are not people of integrity in pursuit of the truth. Such people are the so-called evil ones who follow Christ. Those people who do not seek the truth cannot possibly believe the truth, and are all the more unable to perceive humanity’s future outcome, for they do not believe any work or words of the visible God—and this includes not being able to believe in humanity’s future destination. Therefore, even if they follow the visible God, they still commit evil and do not at all seek the truth, nor do they practice the truth that I require. Those people who do not believe that they will be destroyed are, conversely, the very ones who will be destroyed. They all believe themselves to be so clever, and they think that they themselves are people who practice the truth. They consider their evil conduct to be the truth and therefore cherish it. Such evil people are very self-confident; they take the truth to be doctrine and take their evil acts to be truth, but in the end, they can only reap what they have sown. The more self-confident people are and the more wildly arrogant they are, the more they are unable to obtain truth; the more people believe in the God in heaven, the more they resist God. These people are the ones who will be punished. Before humanity enters into rest, whether each sort of person is punished or rewarded will be determined according to whether they have sought the truth, whether they know God, and whether they can submit to the visible God. Those who have rendered service to the visible God, yet neither know Him nor submit to Him, lack truth. Such people are evildoers, and evildoers will undoubtedly be objects of punishment; furthermore, they shall be punished according to their evil conduct. God is for humans to believe in, and He is also worthy of their submission. Those who only have faith in the vague and invisible God are people who do not believe in God and are unable to submit to God. If these people still cannot manage to believe in the visible God by the time His work of conquest is finished, and continue to rebel against and resist the God who is visible in the flesh, then these “vagueists” will, without a doubt, become objects of destruction. It is just like some among you—anyone who verbally recognizes God incarnate, yet cannot practice the truth of submission to God incarnate, are ultimately to be cast out and destroyed. Moreover, anyone who verbally recognizes the visible God, eating and drinking of the truth expressed by Him while also seeking after the vague and invisible God, will certainly be the object of destruction. None of these people will be able to remain until the time of rest that will come after God’s work has finished, nor can a single individual similar to such people remain in that time of rest. Demonic people are those who do not practice the truth; their essence is one of resistance and rebelliousness to God, and they do not have the slightest intention of submitting to Him. Such people will all be destroyed. Whether you have truth and whether you resist God depend on your essence, not on your appearance or how you might occasionally speak or conduct yourself. Whether or not an individual will be destroyed is determined by one’s essence; it is decided according to the essence revealed by one’s behavior and one’s pursuit of the truth. Among people who are the same as each other in that they are doing work, and who do similar amounts of work, those whose human essences are good and who possess truth are the people who will be allowed to remain, while those whose human essences are evil and who rebel against the visible God are those who will be objects of destruction. All of God’s work or words related to humanity’s destination will deal with people appropriately according to each individual’s essence; not the slightest error will occur, and not a single mistake will be made. It is only when people do work that human feelings or meaning enter the mix. The work God does is most appropriate; He absolutely does not bring false claims against any created being. There are currently many people who are unable to perceive humanity’s future destination and who do not believe the words I utter. All those who do not believe, as well as the ones who do not practice truth, are demons!

Nowadays, those who seek and those who do not are two entirely different types of people, whose destinations are also very different. Those who pursue knowledge of the truth and practice the truth are the ones to whom God will bring salvation. Those who do not know the true way are demons and enemies; they are the descendants of the archangel and will be objects of destruction. Even those who are pious believers of a vague God—are they not also demons? People who possess good consciences but do not accept the true way are demons; their essence is one of resistance to God. Those who do not accept the true way are those who resist God, and even if such people endure many hardships, they will still be destroyed. All those who are unwilling to relinquish the world, who cannot bear to part with their parents, and who cannot bear to rid themselves of their own enjoyments of the flesh are rebellious against God, and all will be objects of destruction. Anyone who does not believe in God incarnate is demonic and, moreover, will be destroyed. Those who have faith but do not practice the truth, those who do not believe in God incarnate, and those who do not at all believe in God’s existence will also be objects of destruction. All those who will be allowed to remain are people who have undergone the suffering of refinement and stood firm; these are people who have truly endured trials. Anyone who does not recognize God is an enemy; that is, anyone who does not recognize God incarnate—whether or not they are inside or outside this stream—is an antichrist! Who is Satan, who are demons, and who are God’s enemies if not resisters who do not believe in God? Are they not those people who are rebellious against God? Are they not those who claim to have faith, yet who lack truth? Are they not those who merely seek to obtain blessings while being unable to bear witness for God? You still mingle with those demons today and bear conscience and love toward them, but in this case are you not extending good intentions toward Satan? Are you not in league with demons? If people these days are still unable to distinguish between good and evil, and continue to blindly be loving and merciful without any intention of seeking God’s will or being able in any way to harbor God’s intentions as their own, then their endings will be all the more wretched. Anyone who does not believe in the God in the flesh is an enemy of God. If you can bear conscience and love toward an enemy, do you not lack a sense of justice? If you are compatible with those which I detest and with which I disagree, and still bear love or personal feelings toward them, then are you not rebellious? Are you not intentionally resisting God? Does such a person possess truth? If people bear conscience toward enemies, love for demons, and mercy for Satan, then are they not intentionally disrupting God’s work? Those people who believe only in Jesus and do not believe in God incarnate during the last days, as well as those who verbally claim to believe in God incarnate but do evil, are all antichrists, without even mentioning those who do not even believe in God. All these people will be objects of destruction. The standard by which humans judge other humans is based on their behavior; those whose conduct is good are righteous, while those whose conduct is abominable are evil. The standard by which God judges humans is based on whether their essence submits to Him or not; one who submits to God is a righteous person, while one who does not is an enemy and an evil person, regardless of whether this person’s behavior is good or bad and regardless of whether their speech is correct or incorrect. Some people wish to use good deeds to obtain a good destination in the future, and some people wish to use fine words to acquire a good destination. Everyone mistakenly believes that God determines people’s outcomes after watching their behavior or after listening to their speech; many people therefore wish to take advantage of this to deceive God into granting them a momentary favor. In the future, the people who will survive in a state of rest will all have endured the day of tribulation and will also have borne witness for God; they will all be people who have fulfilled their duties and who have deliberately submitted to God. Those who merely wish to use the opportunity to do service with the intention of avoiding practicing the truth will not be allowed to remain. God has appropriate standards for the arrangement of the outcome of every individual; He does not simply make these decisions according to one’s words and conduct, nor does He make them based on how one acts during a single period of time. He will absolutely not be lenient with regard to one’s evil conduct due to their past service for Him, nor will He spare one from death because of any one-time expense for God. No one can evade retribution for their evil, and no one can cover up their evil behavior and thereby evade the torments of destruction. If people can truly fulfill their own duty, it means that they are eternally faithful to God and not seeking rewards, regardless of whether they receive blessings or suffer misfortune. If people are faithful to God when they see blessings, but lose their faithfulness when they cannot see any blessings, and if, in the end, they are still unable to bear witness for God or fulfill the duties incumbent upon them, then they will still be objects of destruction despite their having once previously rendered faithful service to God. In short, evil people cannot survive through eternity, nor can they enter into rest; only the righteous are the masters of rest. Once humanity is on the right track, people will have normal human lives. They will all do their own respective duties and be absolutely faithful to God. They will utterly shed their rebelliousness and their corrupt dispositions, and they will live for God and because of God, devoid of both rebelliousness and resistance. They will all be able to completely submit to God. This will be the life of God and humanity; it will be the life of the kingdom, and it will be a life of rest.

Those who drag their utterly unbelieving children and relatives into church are all extremely selfish, and they are just exhibiting kindness. These people only focus on being loving, regardless of whether they believe or not and regardless of whether it is God’s will. Some bring their wives before God, or drag their parents before God, and whether or not the Holy Spirit agrees with this or is working in them, they blindly continue to “adopt talented people” for God. What benefit can possibly be gained from extending kindness toward these nonbelievers? Even if they, who are without the presence of the Holy Spirit, struggle to follow God, they still cannot be saved as one might believe. Those who can receive salvation are not actually so easy to obtain. People who have not undergone the Holy Spirit’s work and trials, and have not been perfected by God incarnate, are utterly incapable of being made complete. Therefore, from the moment they begin to nominally follow God, those people lack the Holy Spirit’s presence. In light of their conditions and actual states, they simply cannot be made complete. As such, the Holy Spirit decides not to expend much energy upon them, nor does He provide any enlightenment or guide them in any way; He merely allows them to follow along, and will ultimately reveal their outcomes—this is enough. Humanity’s enthusiasm and intentions come from Satan, and in no way can these things complete the Holy Spirit’s work. No matter what people are like, they must have the work of the Holy Spirit. Can humans make humans complete? Why does a husband love his wife? Why does a wife love her husband? Why are children dutiful to their parents? Why do parents dote on their children? What sorts of intentions do people actually harbor? Is their intent not to satisfy their own plans and selfish desires? Do they truly mean to act for the sake of God’s management plan? Are they really acting for the sake of God’s work? Is their intent to fulfill the duties of a created being? Those who, ever since the moment they began to believe in God, have been unable to attain the presence of the Holy Spirit, can never gain the work of the Holy Spirit; these people are decidedly objects to be destroyed. No matter how much love one has for them, it cannot replace the work of the Holy Spirit. People’s enthusiasm and love represent human intentions, but cannot represent God’s intentions, and nor can they be a substitute for God’s work. Even if one extends the greatest possible amount of love or mercy toward those people who nominally believe in God and pretend to follow Him without knowing what it actually means to believe in God, they will still not obtain God’s sympathy, nor will they gain the work of the Holy Spirit. Even if people who sincerely follow God are of poor caliber and unable to understand a lot of truths, they can still occasionally gain the work of the Holy Spirit; however, those who are of considerably good caliber, but do not sincerely believe, simply cannot gain the Holy Spirit’s presence. There is absolutely no possibility for salvation with such people. Even if they read God’s words or occasionally listen to sermons, or even sing praises to God, they will ultimately not be able to survive until the time of rest. Whether people seek in earnest is not determined by how others judge them or how the people around view them, but by whether the Holy Spirit works on them and whether they have attained the presence of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, it depends on whether their dispositions change and on whether they have gained any knowledge of God after undergoing the Holy Spirit’s work over a certain period. If the Holy Spirit works upon a person, this person’s disposition will gradually change, and their perspective on believing in God will gradually grow purer. Regardless of how long people follow God, as long as they have changed, it means that the Holy Spirit is working on them. If they have not changed, it means that the Holy Spirit is not working on them. Even if these people do render some service, what drives them to do so is a desire to receive blessings. Only doing service occasionally cannot replace experiencing a change in their dispositions. Ultimately, they will still be destroyed, for in the kingdom there will be no need for service-doers, nor will there be a need for anyone whose disposition has not changed to be of service to those people who have been perfected and who are faithful to God. Those words spoken in the past, “When one believes in the Lord, fortune smiles upon one’s entire family,” are suitable for the Age of Grace, but are unrelated to humanity’s destination. They were only appropriate for a stage during the Age of Grace. The connotation of those words was directed at the peace and material blessings that people enjoyed; they did not mean that the entire family of one who believes in the Lord will be saved, nor did they mean that when one receives blessings, one’s entire family can also be brought into rest. Whether one receives blessings or suffers misfortune is determined according to one’s essence, not according to any common essence one might share with others. That sort of saying or rule simply has no place in the kingdom. If a person is ultimately able to survive, it is because they have met God’s requirements, and if they are ultimately unable to remain until the time of rest, it is because they have been rebellious against God and have not satisfied God’s requirements. Everyone has a suitable destination. These destinations are determined according to each individual’s essence, and have absolutely nothing to do with other people. A child’s evil behavior cannot be transferred to their parents, nor can a child’s righteousness be shared with their parents. A parent’s evil behavior cannot be transferred to their children, nor can a parent’s righteousness be shared with their children. Everyone bears their respective sins, and everyone enjoys their respective blessings. No one can be a substitute for another person; this is righteousness. From man’s perspective, if parents receive blessings, then their children should be able to, too, and if children commit evil, then their parents must atone for those sins. This is a human perspective and a human way of doing things; it is not God’s perspective. Everyone’s outcome is determined according to the essence that comes from their conduct, and it is always determined appropriately. No one can bear the sins of another; even more so, no one can receive punishment in another’s stead. This is absolute. A parent’s doting care for their children does not indicate that they can perform righteous deeds in their children’s stead, nor does the dutiful affection of a child to their parents mean that they can perform righteous deeds in their parents’ stead. This is what is truly meant by the words, “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.” People cannot take their evildoing children into rest on the basis of their deep love for them, nor can anyone take their wife (or husband) into rest on the basis of their own righteous conduct. This is an administrative rule; there can be no exceptions for anyone. In the end, doers of righteousness are doers of righteousness, and evildoers are evildoers. The righteous will eventually be allowed to survive, while the evildoers will be destroyed. The holy are holy; they are not filthy. The filthy are filthy, and not one part of them is holy. The people who will be destroyed are all the evil ones, and the ones who will survive are all the righteous—even if the children of the evil ones perform righteous deeds, and even if the parents of the righteous ones commit evil deeds. There is no relationship between a believing husband and an unbelieving wife, and there is no relationship between believing children and unbelieving parents; these two types of people are completely incompatible. Prior to entering into rest, one has physical relatives, but once one has entered into rest, one will no longer have any physical relatives to speak of. Those who do their duty are enemies of those who do not; those who love God and those who hate Him are in opposition to one another. Those who will enter into rest and those who will have been destroyed are two incompatible types of created beings. Created beings that fulfill their duties will be able to survive, while those that do not fulfill their duties will be objects of destruction; what is more, this shall last through eternity. Do you love your husband in order to fulfill your duty as a created being? Do you love your wife in order to fulfill your duty as a created being? Are you dutiful to your unbelieving parents in order to fulfill your duty as a created being? Is the human view on believing in God right or wrong? Why do you believe in God? What do you wish to gain? How do you love God? Those who cannot fulfill their duties as created beings, and who cannot make an all-out effort, will become objects of destruction. There are physical relationships that exist between the people of today, as well as associations by blood, but in the future, these will all be shattered. Believers and unbelievers are not compatible; rather, they are opposed to one another. Those in rest will believe that there is a God and will submit to God, whereas those who are rebellious against God will all have been destroyed. Families will no longer exist upon earth; how could there be parents or children or spousal relationships? The very incompatibility of belief and unbelief will have utterly severed such physical relationships!

There were originally no families among humanity; only a man and a woman existed—two different kinds of humans. There were no countries, to say nothing of families, but as a result of humanity’s corruption, all kinds of people organized themselves into individual clans, later developing into countries and ethnicities. These countries and ethnicities consisted of small individual families, and in this manner, all sorts of people were distributed among various races based on differences in language and boundaries. Actually, no matter how many races there might be in the world, humanity has only one ancestor. In the beginning, there were only two kinds of humans, and these two kinds were men and women. However, due to the progress of God’s work, the movement of history, and geographical changes, to varying degrees these two kinds of humans developed into even more sorts of humans. At base, regardless of how many races might make up humanity, all of humanity is still God’s creation. No matter what races people belong to, they are all His created beings; they are all the descendants of Adam and Eve. Even though they were not made by the hands of God, they are descendants of Adam and Eve, whom God created personally. No matter which type of being people belong to, they are all His creatures; since they belong to humanity, which was created by God, their destination is that which humanity should have, and they have been divided according to the rules that organize humans. That is to say, all evildoers and all those who perform righteous deeds are, after all, created beings. Created beings that commit evil will ultimately be destroyed, and created beings who perform righteous deeds will survive. This is the most suitable arrangement for these two kinds of created beings. Evildoers cannot, because of their rebelliousness, deny that though they are God’s created beings, they have been seized by Satan, and can therefore not be saved. Created beings that conduct themselves righteously cannot, based on the fact that they will survive, deny that they have been created by God and yet have received salvation after having been corrupted by Satan. Evildoers are created beings who are rebellious against God; they are created beings that cannot be saved and have already been thoroughly captured by Satan. People who commit evil are also people; they are humans who have been corrupted to the extreme, and who cannot be saved. Just as they are also created beings, people of righteous conduct have also been corrupted, but they are humans who are willing to break free of their corrupt dispositions and have become capable of submitting to God. People of righteous conduct do not brim with righteousness; rather, they have received salvation and broken free of their corrupt dispositions; they can submit to God. They will stand fast in the end, though that is not to say that they have never been corrupted by Satan. After God’s work ends, among all created beings, there will be those who will be destroyed and those who will survive. This is an inevitable trend of His management work; no one can deny it. Evildoers will not be allowed to survive; those who submit and follow God to the end are certain to survive. As this work is that of humanity’s management, there will be those who remain and those who are cast out. These are different outcomes for different types of people, and they are the most suitable arrangements for created beings. God’s ultimate arrangement for humankind is to divide them by breaking families, crushing ethnicities and shattering national borders in an arrangement without families or national borders, for humans are, after all, descended from one ancestor and are God’s created beings. In short, created beings that do evil will all be destroyed, and created beings that submit to God will survive. In this way, there will be no families, no countries, and especially no ethnicities in the time of rest to come; this kind of humanity will be the holiest kind of humanity. Adam and Eve were originally created so that humanity could care for all things on earth; humans were originally the masters of all things. Jehovah’s intention in creating humans was to allow them to exist upon the earth and to take care of all things upon it, for humanity had not originally been corrupted and was incapable of committing evil. However, after humans became corrupted, they were no longer the caretakers of all things. The purpose of God’s salvation is to restore this function of humanity, to restore humankind’s original reason and original submission; humanity in rest will be the very representation of the result that God hopes to attain with His work of salvation. Although it will no longer be a life such as the one in the Garden of Eden, their essence will be the same; humanity will merely no longer be their earlier uncorrupted self, but rather a humanity that became corrupted and later received salvation. These people who have received salvation will ultimately (that is, after God’s work is done) enter into rest. Likewise, the outcomes of those who are to be punished will also be completely revealed in the end, and they will only be destroyed after God’s work has ended. In other words, after His work is finished, those evildoers and those who have been saved will all be exposed, for the work of exposing all types of people (whether they are evildoers or among those who are saved) will be carried out upon everyone simultaneously. Evildoers will be cast out, and those who are allowed to remain will be revealed simultaneously. Therefore, the outcomes of all types of people will be revealed at the same time. God will not allow a group of the people who have been brought salvation to enter into rest prior to setting aside the evildoers and judging or punishing them a little at a time; that would not be in line with the facts. When evildoers are destroyed and those who can survive enter into rest, God’s work throughout the universe will be complete. There will be no order of priority among those who receive blessings and those who suffer misfortune; those who receive blessings will live forever, while those who suffer misfortune will perish for all eternity. These two steps of work shall be completed simultaneously. It is precisely due to the existence of rebellious people that the righteousness of the ones who submit shall be revealed, and it is precisely because there are those who have received blessings that the misfortune suffered by evildoers for their evil behavior shall be revealed. If God did not expose evildoers, then the people who sincerely submit to God would never see the sun; if God did not take those who submit to Him to a suitable destination, then the ones who are rebellious against God would not be able to receive their deserved retributions. This is the process of God’s work. If He did not carry out this work of punishing evil and rewarding good, then created beings would never be able to enter into their respective destinations. Once humankind has entered into rest, the evildoers will have been destroyed and all of humanity will be on the right track; all the types of people will be with their own kind in accordance with the functions that they should carry out. Only this will be humanity’s day of rest, it will be the inevitable trend for humanity’s development, and only when humanity enters into rest will God’s great and ultimate accomplishment reach completion; this will be the final part of His work. This work will end all of humanity’s decadent life of the flesh, as well as the life of corrupt humanity. Humans shall thenceforth enter into a new realm. Though all humans will live in the flesh, there will be significant differences between the essence of this life and the life of corrupt humanity. The significance of this existence and that of the existence of corrupt humanity also differ. Although this will not be the life of a new kind of person, it can be said to be the life of a humanity that has received salvation, as well as a life in which humanity and reason have been regained. These are people who once were rebellious against God, who have been conquered by God and then saved by Him; these are people who dishonored God and later bore witness to Him. After they have undergone and survived His test, their existence will be the most meaningful existence; they are people who bore witness to God before Satan, and are humans who are fit to live. Those who will be destroyed are the ones who cannot stand witness to God and are not fit to go on living. Their destruction shall be a result of their evil behavior, and such annihilation is the best destination for them. In the future, when humanity enters the beautiful realm, there will be none of the relationships between husband and wife, between father and daughter, or between mother and son that people imagine they will find. At that time, each human will follow their own kind, and families will already have been shattered. Having completely failed, Satan will never disturb humanity again, and humans will no longer have corrupt satanic dispositions. Those rebellious people will already have been destroyed, and only the people who submit will remain. As such, very few families will survive intact; how can physical relationships continue to exist? Humanity’s previous life of the flesh will be utterly banned; how can physical relationships then exist between people? Without corrupt satanic dispositions, human life will no longer be the old life of the past, but rather a new life. Parents will lose children, and children will lose parents. Husbands will lose wives, and wives will lose husbands. Physical relationships currently exist between people, but they will exist no longer once everyone has entered into rest. Only this sort of humanity will possess righteousness and holiness; only this sort of humanity can worship God.

God created humans and placed them upon earth, and He has led them ever since. He then saved them and served as a sin offering for humanity. At the end, He still must conquer humanity, save humans entirely, and restore them to their original likeness. This is the work that He has been engaged in ever since the beginning—restoring humanity to their original image and likeness. God will establish His kingdom and restore the original likeness of human beings, which means that God will restore His authority upon earth and among all created beings. Humanity lost their God-fearing heart as well as the function incumbent upon created beings after being corrupted by Satan, thereby becoming an enemy rebellious against God. Humanity then lived under Satan’s power and followed Satan’s orders; thus, God had no way to work among His created beings, and became all the more unable to gain their fear. Humans were created by God, and ought to worship God, but they actually turned their backs on Him and worshiped Satan instead. Satan became the idol in their hearts. Thus, God lost His standing in their hearts, which is to say that He lost the meaning behind His creation of humanity. Therefore, to restore the meaning behind His creation of humanity, He must restore their original likeness and rid humanity of their corrupt dispositions. To reclaim humans from Satan, He must save them from sin. Only in this way can God gradually restore their original likeness and function, and finally, restore His kingdom. The ultimate destruction of those sons of rebellion will also be carried out in order to allow humans to better worship God and better live upon the earth. Because God created humans, He will make them worship Him; because He wishes to restore humanity’s original function, He will restore it completely and without any adulteration. Restoring His authority means making humans worship Him and submit to Him; it means that God will make humans live because of Him and cause His enemies to perish as a result of His authority. It means that God will cause everything about Him to persist among humans without resistance from anybody. The kingdom God wishes to establish is His own kingdom. The humanity He desires is one that will worship Him, one that will submit to Him completely and manifest His glory. If God does not save corrupt humanity, then the meaning behind His creation of humanity will be lost; He will have no more authority among humans, and His kingdom will no longer be able to exist upon the earth. If God does not destroy those enemies who are rebellious against Him, He will be unable to obtain His complete glory, nor will He be able to establish His kingdom upon the earth. These will be marks of the completion of His work and of His great accomplishment: to utterly destroy those among humanity who are rebellious against Him, and to bring into rest those who have been made complete. When humans have been restored to their original likeness, and when they can fulfill their respective duties, keep to their own proper places and submit to all of God’s arrangements, God will have obtained a group of people upon the earth who worship Him, and He will also have established a kingdom upon the earth that worships Him. He will have eternal victory upon the earth, and all those who are opposed to Him will perish for all eternity. This will restore His original intention in creating humanity; it will restore His intention in creating all things, and it will also restore His authority upon earth, among all things, and among His enemies. These will be the symbols of His total victory. Thenceforth, humanity will enter into rest and begin a life that is on the right track. God will also enter into eternal rest with humanity, and commence an eternal life shared by both Himself and humans. The filth and rebelliousness upon the earth will have disappeared, and all the wailing will have dissipated, and everything in this world that opposes God will have ceased to exist. Only God and those people to whom He has brought salvation will remain; only His creation will remain.

By the Time You Behold the Spiritual Body of Jesus, God Will Have Made Heaven and Earth Anew

Do you wish to see Jesus? Do you wish to live with Jesus? Do you wish to hear the words spoken by Jesus? If so, then how will you welcome the return of Jesus? Are you fully prepared? In what manner will you welcome Jesus’ return? I think that every brother and sister who follows Jesus would like to give Him a good welcome. But have you considered this: Will you truly know Jesus when He returns? Will you truly comprehend everything that He says? Will you truly accept, unconditionally, all of the work that He does? All those who have read the Bible know of Jesus’ return, and all those who have read the Bible intently await His coming. You are all fixated upon the arrival of that moment, and your sincerity is laudable, your faith is truly enviable, but do you realize you have committed a grave error? In what manner will Jesus return? You believe that Jesus will return upon a white cloud, but I ask you: To what does this white cloud refer? With so many followers of Jesus awaiting His return, among which people shall He descend? If you are the first among whom Jesus descends, will others not see this as grossly unfair? I know that you are of great sincerity and loyalty toward Jesus, but have you ever met Jesus? Do you know His disposition? Have you ever lived with Him? How much do you really understand about Him? Some will say that these words put them in an awkward predicament. They will say, “I’ve read the Bible from cover to cover so many times. How could I not understand Jesus? Never mind Jesus’ disposition—I even know the color of the clothes He liked to wear. Are You not belittling me when You say I do not understand Him?” I suggest that you do not dispute these issues; it is better to calm down and fellowship about the following questions: Firstly, do you know what is reality, and what is theory? Secondly, do you know what are notions, and what is truth? Thirdly, do you know what is imagined, and what is real?

Some people deny the fact that they do not understand Jesus. And yet I say you do not understand Him in the slightest, and do not comprehend a single word of Jesus. That is because each one of you follows Him because of the accounts of the Bible, because of what was said by others. You have never seen Jesus, much less lived with Him, and you have not even kept Him company for a short time. As such, is not your understanding of Jesus nothing but theory? Is it not devoid of reality? Perhaps some people have seen the portrait of Jesus, or some have personally visited the home of Jesus. Maybe some have touched the clothes of Jesus. Yet your understanding of Him is still theoretical and not practical, even if you have personally tasted the food eaten by Jesus. Whatever the case, you have never seen Jesus, and have never kept company with Him in fleshly form, and so your understanding of Jesus shall always be empty theory that is devoid of reality. Perhaps My words hold little interest to you, but I ask you this: Though you may have read many works by the author whom you most admire, can you fully understand him without ever having spent time with him? Do you know what his personality is like? Do you know what kind of life he leads? Do you know anything of his emotional state? You cannot even fully understand a man whom you admire, so how could you possibly understand Jesus Christ? Everything you understand of Jesus is full of imaginings and notions and holds no truth or reality. It stinks and is full of flesh. How could such an understanding qualify you to welcome the return of Jesus? Jesus will not receive those who are full of fantasies and the notions of the flesh. How are those who do not understand Jesus fit to be His believers?

Do you wish to know the root of why the Pharisees opposed Jesus? Do you wish to know the essence of the Pharisees? They were full of fantasies about the Messiah. What is more, they believed only that the Messiah would come, yet did not pursue the life truth. And so, even today they still await the Messiah, for they have no knowledge of the way of life, and do not know what the way of truth is. How, say you, could such foolish, stubborn and ignorant people gain God’s blessing? How could they behold the Messiah? They opposed Jesus because they did not know the direction of the Holy Spirit’s work, because they did not know the way of truth spoken by Jesus, and, furthermore, because they did not understand the Messiah. And since they had never seen the Messiah and had never been in the company of the Messiah, they made the mistake of clinging to the mere name of the Messiah while opposing the essence of the Messiah by any means possible. These Pharisees in essence were stubborn, arrogant, and did not obey the truth. The principle of their belief in God was: No matter how profound Your preaching, no matter how high Your authority, You are not Christ unless You are called the Messiah. Is this belief not preposterous and ridiculous? I ask you further: Is it not extremely easy for you to commit the mistakes of the earliest Pharisees, given that you have not the slightest understanding of Jesus? Are you able to discern the way of truth? Can you truly guarantee that you will not oppose Christ? Are you able to follow the work of the Holy Spirit? If you do not know whether you will oppose Christ, then I say that you are already living on the brink of death. Those who did not know the Messiah were all capable of opposing Jesus, of rejecting Jesus, of slandering Him. People who do not understand Jesus are all capable of rejecting Him and reviling Him. Moreover, they are capable of seeing the return of Jesus as the misleading of Satan, and more people shall condemn Jesus returned to flesh. Does not all of this make you afraid? What you face shall be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the ruination of the words of the Holy Spirit to the churches, and the spurning of all that is expressed by Jesus. What can you gain from Jesus if you are so befuddled? How can you understand the work of Jesus when He returns to flesh on a white cloud, if you obstinately refuse to realize your errors? I tell you this: People who do not accept the truth, yet blindly await the arrival of Jesus upon white clouds, will surely blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, and they are the category that shall be destroyed. You merely wish for the grace of Jesus, and merely want to enjoy the blissful realm of heaven, yet you have never obeyed the words spoken by Jesus, and have never accepted the truth expressed by Jesus when He returns to flesh. What will you hold up in exchange for the fact of Jesus’ return upon a white cloud? Is it the sincerity in which you repeatedly commit sins, and then speak your confession, over and over? What will you offer in sacrifice to Jesus who returns upon a white cloud? Is it the capital of the many years of work with which you exalt yourselves? What will you hold up to make the returned Jesus trust you? Is it that arrogant nature of yours, which does not submit to any truth?

Your loyalty is in word only, your knowledge is merely intellectual and conceptual, your labors are for the sake of gaining the blessings of heaven, and so what must your faith be like? Even today, you still turn a deaf ear to each and every word of truth. You do not know what God is, you do not know what Christ is, you do not know how to fear Jehovah, you do not know how to enter into the work of the Holy Spirit, and you do not know how to distinguish between the work of God Himself and the misleading of man. You know only to condemn any word of truth expressed by God that does not conform to your own thoughts. Where is your humility? Where is your submission? Where is your loyalty? Where is your desire to seek the truth? Where is your God-fearing heart? I tell you, those who believe in God because of the signs are surely the category that shall be destroyed. Those who are incapable of accepting the words of Jesus who has returned to flesh are surely the progeny of hell, the descendants of the archangel, the category that shall be subjected to everlasting destruction. Many people may not care what I say, but I still want to tell every so-called saint who follows Jesus that, when you see Jesus descend from the heaven upon a white cloud with your own eyes, this will be the public appearance of the Sun of righteousness. Perhaps that will be a time of great excitement for you, yet you should know that the time when you witness Jesus descend from the heaven is also the time when you go down to hell to be punished. That will be the time of the end of God’s management plan and it will be when God rewards the good and punishes the evil. For the judgment of God will have ended before man sees signs, when there is only the expression of truth. Those who accept the truth and do not seek signs, and thus have been purified, shall have returned before the throne of God and entered the Creator’s embrace. Only those who persist in the belief that “The Jesus who does not ride upon a white cloud is a false Christ” shall be subjected to everlasting punishment, for they only believe in the Jesus who exhibits signs, but do not acknowledge the Jesus who proclaims severe judgment and releases the true way and life. And so it can only be that Jesus deals with them when He openly returns upon a white cloud. They are too stubborn, too confident in themselves, too arrogant. How could such degenerates be rewarded by Jesus? The return of Jesus is a great salvation for those who are capable of accepting the truth, but for those who are unable to accept the truth it is a sign of condemnation. You should choose your own path, and should not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit and reject the truth. You should not be an ignorant and arrogant person, but someone who obeys the guidance of the Holy Spirit and longs for and seeks the truth; only in this way will you benefit. I advise you to tread the path of belief in God with care. Do not jump to conclusions; what is more, do not be casual and thoughtless in your belief in God. You should know that, at the very least, those who believe in God should possess humble and God-fearing hearts. Those who have heard the truth and yet turn their nose up at it are foolish and ignorant. Those who have heard the truth and yet carelessly jump to conclusions or condemn it are beset by arrogance. No one who believes in Jesus is qualified to curse or condemn others. You should all be someone with sense and who accepts the truth. Perhaps, having heard the way of truth and having read the word of life, you believe that only one in 10,000 of these words are in line with your convictions and the Bible, and then you should continue to seek in that 10,000th of these words. I still advise you to be humble, to not be over-confident, and to not exalt yourself too highly. With the bit of a God-fearing heart you possess, you will gain greater light. If you carefully examine and repeatedly contemplate these words, you shall understand whether or not they are the truth, and whether or not they are life. Perhaps, having only read a few sentences, some people will blindly condemn these words, saying, “This is nothing more than some enlightenment of the Holy Spirit,” or, “This is a false Christ come to mislead people.” Those who say such things are blinded by ignorance! You understand too little of the work and wisdom of God, and I advise you to start again from scratch! You must not blindly condemn the words expressed by God because of the appearance of false Christs during the last days, and you must not be someone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit because you are afraid of being misled. Would that not be a great pity? If, after much examination, you still believe that these words are not the truth, are not the way, and are not the expression of God, then you shall ultimately be punished, and you shall be without blessings. If you cannot accept such truth spoken so plainly and so clearly, then are you not unfit for God’s salvation? Are you not someone who is not blessed enough to return before the throne of God? Think about it! Do not be rash and impetuous, and do not treat belief in God as a game. Think for the sake of your destination, for the sake of your prospects, for the sake of your life, and do not play yourself. Can you accept these words?

Those Who Are Incompatible With Christ Are Surely Opponents of God

All men wish to see the true countenance of Jesus, and all desire to be with Him. I do not think that any brother or sister would say that they do not wish to see or to be with Jesus. Before you have seen Jesus—before you have seen the incarnate God—you are likely to entertain all sorts of ideas, for example, about Jesus’ appearance, His way of speaking, His way of life, and so on. But once you have really seen Him, your ideas will swiftly change. Why is this? Do you wish to know? Man’s thinking cannot be overlooked, which is true—but more than that, the essence of Christ does not brook alteration by man. You think Christ an immortal or a sage, but no one considers Him a normal man possessed of divine essence. As such, many of those who yearn day and night to see God are actually enemies of God, and are incompatible with Him. Is this not a mistake on the part of man? Even now you still think that your belief and loyalty are enough to make you worthy of beholding the countenance of Christ, but I exhort you to equip yourselves with more things that are practical! For in the past, present, and future, many of those who come in contact with Christ have failed or will fail; they all play the role of the Pharisees. What is the reason for your failure? It is precisely because there is in your notions a God who is lofty and deserving of admiration. But the truth is not as man wishes. Not only is Christ not lofty, but He is particularly small; not only is He a man, but He is an ordinary man; not only can He not ascend to heaven, but He cannot even move about freely on earth. And this being so, people treat Him as they would an ordinary man; they treat Him casually when they are with Him, and speak to Him heedlessly, all the while still waiting for the coming of the “true Christ.” You take the Christ that has already come for an ordinary man, and His words for those of an ordinary man. For this reason, you have not received anything from Christ, and have instead completely exposed your own ugliness to the light.

Prior to contact with Christ, you may believe your disposition to have been entirely transformed, that you are a loyal follower of Christ, that no one is more worthy of receiving the blessings of Christ than you—and that, having traveled many roads, done much work, and brought forth much fruit, you will surely be one of those who ultimately receive the crown. Yet there is one truth that you may not know: The corrupt disposition of man and his rebelliousness and resistance are exposed when he sees Christ, and the rebelliousness and resistance exposed at this time are more absolutely and completely exposed than at any other. It is because Christ is the Son of man—a Son of man who possesses normal humanity—that man neither honors nor respects Him. It is because God lives in the flesh that the rebelliousness of man is brought to light so thoroughly and in such vivid detail. So I say that the coming of Christ has unearthed all the rebelliousness of mankind and has thrown the nature of mankind into sharp relief. This is called “luring a tiger down the mountain” and “luring a wolf out of its cave.” Dare you presume to say that you are loyal to God? Dare you presume to say that you show absolute submission to God? Dare you presume to say that you are not rebellious? Some will say: “Whenever God sets me up in a new environment, I invariably submit without a murmur, and furthermore I entertain no notions about God.” Some will say: “Whatever God tasks me with I do to the best of my ability and am never perfunctory.” In that case, I ask you this: Can you be compatible with Christ when you live alongside Him? And how long will you be compatible with Him? One day? Two days? One hour? Two hours? Your faith may well be commendable, but you do not have much in the way of steadfastness. Once you are really living with Christ, your self-righteousness and self-importance will be exposed through your words and actions, bit-by-bit, and so too will your overweening desires, your disobedient mindset and discontent naturally be revealed. Finally, your arrogance will become ever greater, until you are as much at odds with Christ as water is with fire, and then your nature will be completely exposed. At that time, your notions can no longer be covered up, your complaints, too, will naturally come out, and your debased humanity will be completely exposed. Even then, however, you still refuse to acknowledge your own rebelliousness, believing instead that a Christ such as this is not easy for man to accept, that He is too exacting of man, and that you would wholly submit if He were a kinder Christ. You believe that your rebelliousness is justified, that you only rebel against Him when He pushes you too far. Never once have you considered that you do not look upon Christ as God, that you lack the intent to submit to Him. Rather, you stubbornly insist that Christ work in accordance with your own wishes, and as soon as He does a single thing that is at odds with your own thinking, you believe that He is not God but a man. Are there not many among you who have contended with Him in this way? Who is it, after all, that you believe in? And in what way do you seek?

You always wish to see Christ, but I urge you not to hold yourselves in such high esteem; anyone may see Christ, but I say no one is fit to see Christ. Because the nature of man brims with evil, arrogance, and rebelliousness, at the moment you see Christ, your nature will destroy you and condemn you to death. Your association with a brother (or a sister) may not show much about you, but it is not so simple when you associate with Christ. At any time, your notions may take root, your arrogance begin to sprout, and your rebelliousness bear figs. How can you with such humanity be fit to associate with Christ? Are you truly able to treat Him as God every moment of every day? Will you truly have the reality of submission to God? You worship the lofty God within your hearts as Jehovah while regarding the visible Christ as a man. Your sense is too inferior and your humanity too debased! You are incapable of always looking upon Christ as God; only occasionally, when it takes your fancy, do you grab hold of Him and worship Him as God. This is why I say you are not believers of God, but a posse of accomplices who fight against Christ. Even men who show kindness to others are repaid, and yet Christ, who has done such work among you, has received neither man’s love nor his recompense and submission. Is this not something heartrending?

It may be that in all your years of faith in God, you have never cursed anyone or committed a bad deed, yet in your association with Christ, you cannot speak the truth, act honestly, or submit to the word of Christ; in that case, I say that you are the most sinister and malicious person in the world. You may be exceptionally amiable and devoted toward your relatives, friends, wife (or husband), sons and daughters, and parents, and never take advantage of others, but if you are incapable of compatibility with Christ, if you are unable to interact in harmony with Him, then even if you expend your all in relief to your neighbors or take meticulous care of your father, mother, and members of your household, I would say that you are still an evil person, and moreover one full of cunning tricks. Do not think yourself compatible with Christ simply because you get along with others or do a few good deeds. Do you think that your charitable intent can finagle the blessings of Heaven? Do you think that doing a few good deeds is a substitute for your submission? Not one of you is able to accept being pruned, and you all find it difficult to embrace the normal humanity of Christ, notwithstanding which you are constantly trumpeting your submission to God. Such faith as yours will bring down a fitting retribution. Stop indulging in fanciful illusions and wishing to see Christ, for you are too little in stature, so much so that you are not even worthy of seeing Him. When you are completely purged of your rebelliousness, and are capable of being in harmony with Christ, at that moment God will naturally appear to you. If you go to see God without having undergone pruning or judgment, then you shall surely become an opponent of God and are destined for destruction. The nature of man is inherently hostile to God, for all men have been subjected to Satan’s most profound corruption. If man tries to associate with God from the midst of his own corruption, it is certain that nothing good can come of this; his actions and words will surely expose his corruption at every turn, and in associating with God his rebelliousness will be revealed in its every aspect. Unknowingly, man comes to oppose Christ, to deceive Christ, and to forsake Christ; when this happens, man will be in an even more precarious state and, should this continue, he shall become the object of punishment.

Some may believe that, if association with God is so dangerous, then it might be wiser to keep God at a distance. What can people like this possibly gain? Can they be loyal to God? Assuredly, association with God is very difficult—but that is because man is corrupted, not because God is unable to associate with him. It would be best for you to dedicate more effort to the truth of knowing the self. Why have you not found favor with God? Why is your disposition abominable to Him? Why does your speech arouse His loathing? As soon as you have demonstrated a bit of loyalty, you sing your own praises, and you demand a reward for a small contribution; you look down upon others when you have shown a modicum of obedience, and become contemptuous of God upon accomplishing some petty task. For receiving God, you ask for money, gifts, and compliments. It makes you heartsore to give a coin or two; when you give ten, you wish for blessings and to be treated with distinction. A humanity such as yours is positively offensive to speak or hear of. Is there anything praiseworthy in your words and actions? Those who perform their duty and those who do not; those who lead and those who follow; those who receive God and those who do not; those who donate and those who do not; those who preach and those who receive the word, and so on: all such men praise themselves. Do you not find this laughable? Knowing full well that you believe in God, you nevertheless cannot be compatible with God. Knowing full well that you are utterly without merit, you persist in boasting all the same. Do you not feel your sense has deteriorated to the point that you no longer have self-control? With sense like this, how are you fit to associate with God? Are you not afraid for yourselves at this juncture? Your disposition has already deteriorated to the point where you are incapable of compatibility with God. This being so, is your faith not laughable? Is your faith not preposterous? How are you going to approach your future? How are you going to choose which path to take?

Many Are Called, but Few Are Chosen

I have sought many on earth to be My followers. Among all these followers, there are those who serve as priests, those who lead, those who are the sons of God, those who are the people of God, and those who do service. I class them based on the loyalty they show to Me. When all have been classified according to kind, that is, when the nature of each type of person has been made clear, I shall number each of them among their rightful category and place each kind into their fitting place, in order to achieve the aim of My salvation of mankind. In groups, I call those whom I wish to save to My house, and then cause all of them to accept My work of the last days. At the same time, I classify them according to kind, then reward or punish each one on the basis of their actions. Such are the steps that comprise My work.

Today, I live on earth, and I live among man. People experience My work, and watch My utterances, and along with this I bestow all truths upon each of My followers, that they may receive life from Me and thus obtain a path that they can tread. For I am God, Giver of life. During the many years of My work, people have gained much, and forsaken much, yet still I say that they do not truly believe in Me. For people merely acknowledge that I am God with their mouths, but they disagree with the truths I speak, and, moreover, do not practice the truths that I ask of them. Which is to say, people acknowledge only the existence of God, but not that of the truth; people acknowledge only the existence of God, but not that of the life; people acknowledge only God’s name, but not His essence. I despise them for their zeal, for they only use nice-sounding words to deceive Me; none of them truly worship Me. Your words contain the temptation of the serpent; further, they are conceited in the extreme, a veritable proclamation by the archangel. What is more, your deeds are tattered and torn to a disgraceful degree; your immoderate desires and covetous intentions are offensive to the ear. You have all become moths in My house, objects to be spurned by Me. For none of you love the truth; instead, you desire to be blessed, to ascend to heaven, to behold the magnificent vision of Christ wielding His power on earth. But have you ever thought how someone like you, someone so deeply corrupted, who has no idea what God is, could be worthy of following God? How could you ascend to heaven? How could you be worthy of beholding such magnificent scenes, scenes without precedent in their splendor? Your mouths are filled with words of deceit and filth, of betrayal and arrogance. Never have you spoken words of sincerity to Me, no holy words, no words of submission to Me upon experiencing My word. What, in the end, is your faith like? There is nothing but desire and money in your hearts, and nothing but material things in your minds. Every day, you calculate how to get something from Me. Every day, you count how much wealth and how many material things you have gained from Me. Every day, you await ever more blessings to come down upon you so that you may enjoy, in greater quantities and of a higher standard, the things that may be enjoyed. It is not Me who is in your thoughts at each and every moment, nor the truth that comes from Me, but rather your husband or wife, your sons, daughters, and the things you eat and wear. You think of how you can gain ever greater, ever higher enjoyment. But even when you have filled your stomach to bursting, are you still not a corpse? Even when, outwardly, you adorn yourselves in such beautiful apparel, are you not still a walking corpse devoid of life? You toil for the sake of your stomach, until your hair is streaked with gray, yet none of you sacrifice a single hair for My work. You are constantly on the go, taxing your body and racking your brain, for the sake of your own flesh, and for your sons and daughters—yet not one of you shows any worry or concern for My will. What is it that you still hope to gain from Me?

I am never hurried when I work. Regardless of how people follow Me, I do My work in accordance with each step, in accordance with My plan. So despite all your rebellion against Me, I still work without cease, and I still continue to speak the words I must speak. I call to My house those who were predestined by Me, that they might bear audience to My words. All those who submit to My words, who yearn for My words, I bring before My throne; all those who turn their back on My words, who do not obey or submit to Me, and openly defy Me, I cast to one side to await their final punishment. People all live amidst corruption and beneath the hand of the evil one, and so not many of those who follow Me pine for the truth. Which is to say, most do not truly worship Me; they do not worship Me with the truth, but try to gain My trust through corruption and rebellion, by deceitful means. It is for this reason that I say: Many are called, but few are chosen. Those ones who are called have been profoundly corrupted and all live in the same age—but those who are chosen are one portion of them, they are those who believe in and acknowledge the truth, and who practice the truth. These people are but a very small part of the whole, and from among them I shall receive more glory. Measured against these words, do you know if you are among the chosen? What will your end be like?

As I said, those who follow Me are many but those who truly love Me are few. Perhaps some might say, “Would I have paid such a great price if I did not love You? Would I have followed to this point if I did not love You?” Assuredly, you have many reasons, and your love, assuredly, is very great, but what is the essence of your love for Me? “Love,” as it is called, refers to an affection that is pure and without blemish, where you use your heart to love, to feel, and to be thoughtful. In love there are no conditions, no barriers, and no distance. In love there is no suspicion, no deceit, and no cunning. In love there is no trade and nothing impure. If you love, then you will not deceive, complain, betray, rebel, exact, or seek to gain something or to gain a certain amount. If you love, then you will gladly dedicate yourself, will gladly suffer hardship, you will be compatible with Me, you will forsake all that you have for Me, you will give up your family, your future, your youth, and your marriage. If not, your love would not be love at all, but deceit and betrayal! What kind of love is yours? Is it a true love? Or false? How much have you forsaken? How much have you offered up? How much love have I received from you? Do you know? Your hearts are filled with evil, betrayal, and deceit—and that being so, how much of your love is impure? You think that you have already given up enough for Me; you think that your love for Me is already enough. But then why are your words and actions always rebellious and deceitful? You follow Me, yet you do not acknowledge My word. Is this considered love? You follow Me, yet then cast Me aside. Is this considered love? You follow Me, yet you are mistrustful of Me. Is this considered love? You follow Me, yet you cannot accept My existence. Is this considered love? You follow Me, yet you do not treat Me as befits who I am, and you make things difficult for Me at every turn. Is this considered love? You follow Me, yet you try to fool Me and deceive Me in every matter. Is this considered love? You serve Me, yet you do not dread Me. Is this considered love? You oppose Me in all respects and all things. Is this all considered love? You have dedicated much, it is true, yet you have never practiced what I require of you. Can this be considered love? Careful reckoning shows that there is not the slightest hint of love for Me within you. After so many years of work and all the many words I have supplied, how much have you actually gained? Does this not merit a careful look back? I admonish you: Those I call to Me are not the ones who have never been corrupted; rather, those I choose are the ones who truly love Me. Therefore, you must be vigilant in your words and deeds, and examine your intentions and thoughts so that they do not cross the line. At the time of the last days, do your utmost to offer up your love before Me, lest My wrath never depart from you!

You Should Seek the Way of Compatibility With Christ

I have done much work among man, during which time I have also expressed many words. These words are all for the sake of man’s salvation and were expressed so that man might become compatible with Me. However, I have gained only a few people on earth who are compatible with Me, and so I say that man does not treasure My words—it is because man is not compatible with Me. In this way, the work I do is not merely so that man can worship Me; more importantly, it is so that man can be compatible with Me. Man has been corrupted and lives in Satan’s trap. All people live in the flesh, live in selfish desires, and there is not a single one among them who is compatible with Me. There are those who say that they are compatible with Me, but such people all worship vague idols. Although they acknowledge My name as holy, they tread a path that runs contrary to Me, and their words are full of arrogance and self-confidence. This is because, at root, they are all against Me and incompatible with Me. Every day, they seek traces of Me in the Bible and find “suitable” passages at random which they read endlessly and recite as scriptures. They do not know how to be compatible with Me nor what it means to be against Me. They merely read scriptures blindly. Within the Bible, they constrain a vague God that they have never seen, and are incapable of seeing, and take it out to look at at their leisure. They believe in My existence only within the scope of the Bible, and they equate Me with the Bible; without the Bible there is no Me, and without Me there is no Bible. They pay no heed to My existence or actions, but instead devote extreme and special attention to each and every word of Scripture. Many more even believe that I should not do anything I wish to do unless it is foretold by Scripture. They attach too much importance to Scripture. It can be said that they see literal words as too important, to the extent that they use verses from the Bible to measure every word I say and to condemn Me. What they seek is not the way of compatibility with Me or the way of compatibility with the truth, but the way of compatibility with the words of the Bible, and they believe that anything that does not conform to the Bible is, without exception, not My work. Are such people not the dutiful descendants of the Pharisees? The Jewish Pharisees used the law of Moses to condemn Jesus. They did not seek compatibility with the Jesus of that time, but diligently followed the law to the letter, to the extent that—after having charged Him with not following the law of the Old Testament and not being the Messiah—they ultimately nailed the innocent Jesus to the cross. What was their substance? Was it not that they didn’t seek the way of compatibility with the truth? They obsessed over each and every word of Scripture while paying heed neither to My will nor to the steps and methods of My work. They were not people who sought the truth, but people who rigidly clung to words; they were not people who believed in God, but people who believed in the Bible. Essentially, they were watchdogs of the Bible. In order to safeguard the interests of the Bible, to uphold the dignity of the Bible, and to protect the reputation of the Bible, they went so far as to nail the merciful Jesus to the cross. This they did merely for the sake of defending the Bible, and for the sake of maintaining the status of each and every word of the Bible in people’s hearts. So they preferred to forsake their future and the sin offering to condemn Jesus, who did not conform to the doctrine of Scripture, to death. Were they not all lackeys to each and every word of Scripture?

And what of people today? Christ has come to release the truth, yet they would rather expel Him from this world so that they may gain entry into heaven and receive grace. They would rather completely deny the coming of the truth in order to safeguard the interests of the Bible, and they would rather nail the Christ returned to flesh to the cross again in order to ensure the everlasting existence of the Bible. How can man receive My salvation when his heart is so malicious and his nature so antagonistic toward Me? I live among man, yet man does not know of My existence. When I shine My light upon man, he still remains ignorant of My existence. When I unleash My wrath upon man, he denies My existence with even greater vigor. Man searches for compatibility with words and compatibility with the Bible, yet not a single person comes before Me to seek the way of compatibility with the truth. Man looks up to Me in heaven and devotes particular concern to My existence in heaven, yet no one cares about Me in the flesh, for I who live among man am simply too insignificant. Those who only seek compatibility with the words of the Bible and who only seek compatibility with a vague God are a wretched sight to Me. That is because what they worship are dead words, and a God that is capable of giving them untold treasures; what they worship is a God that would lay Himself at the mercy of man—a God who does not exist. What, then, can such people gain from Me? Man is simply too lowly for words. Those who are against Me, who make limitless demands of Me, who have no love of the truth, who are rebellious toward Me—how could they be compatible with Me?

Those who are against Me are those who are not compatible with Me. Such is also the case among those who do not love the truth. Those who rebel against Me are even more against Me and incompatible with Me. I deliver into the hands of the evil one all those who are not compatible with Me, and I relinquish them to the corruption of the evil one, give them free rein to reveal their maleficence, and ultimately hand them over to the evil one to be devoured. I care not how many worship Me, which is to say, I care not how many people believe in Me. All that concerns Me is how many are compatible with Me. That is because all those who are not compatible with Me are evil ones who betray Me; they are My enemies, and I shall not “enshrine” My enemies in My home. Those who are compatible with Me shall forever serve Me in My home, and those who go against Me shall forever suffer My punishment. Those who only care about the words of the Bible and are concerned neither with the truth nor with seeking My footsteps—they are against Me, for they limit Me according to the Bible, constrain Me within the Bible, and so are blasphemous in the extreme toward Me. How could such people come before Me? They pay no heed to My deeds, or My will, or the truth, but instead obsess over words—words that kill. How could such people be compatible with Me?

I have expressed so many words, and have also expressed My will and disposition, yet even so, people are still incapable of knowing Me and believing in Me. Or, it could be said, people are still incapable of submitting to Me. Those who live within the Bible, those who live within the law, those who live on the cross, those who live according to doctrine, those who live amid the work I do today—who among them is compatible with Me? You only think of receiving blessings and rewards, but have never spared a thought as to how to actually be compatible with Me, or to how to prevent yourselves from being against Me. I am so disappointed in you, for I have given you so much, yet I have gained so little from you. Your deception, your arrogance, your greed, your extravagant desires, your betrayal, your disobedience—which of these could escape My notice? You are perfunctory with Me, you fool Me, you insult Me, you wheedle Me, you exact Me and extort Me for sacrifices—how could such maleficence elude My punishment? All this evildoing is proof of your enmity against Me and is proof of your incompatibility with Me. Each of you believes yourself to be so compatible with Me, but if that were the case, then to whom would such irrefutable evidence apply? You believe yourselves to possess the utmost sincerity and loyalty toward Me. You think that you are so kindhearted, so compassionate, and have devoted so much to Me. You think that you have done more than enough for Me. But have you ever held this up against your actions? I say you are plenty arrogant, plenty greedy, plenty perfunctory; the tricks with which you fool Me are plenty clever, and you have plenty of contemptible intentions and contemptible methods. Your loyalty is too meager, your earnestness too paltry, and your conscience even more lacking. There is too much maliciousness in your hearts, and no one is spared from your malice, not even Me. You shut Me out for the sake of your children, or your husband, or your own self-preservation. Instead of caring about Me, you care about your family, your children, your status, your future, and your own gratification. When have you ever thought of Me as you spoke or acted? On frigid days, your thoughts turn to your children, your husband, your wife, or your parents. On blistering days, I hold no place in your thoughts, either. When you perform your duty, you are thinking of your own interests, of your own personal safety, of the members of your family. What have you ever done that was for Me? When have you ever thought of Me? When have you ever devoted yourself, at any cost, to Me and My work? Where is the evidence of your compatibility with Me? Where is the reality of your loyalty to Me? Where is the reality of your submission to Me? When have your intentions not been for the sake of gaining My blessings? You fool and deceive Me, you play with the truth, you conceal the existence of the truth, and betray the essence of the truth. What awaits you in the future by going against Me in this way? You merely seek compatibility with a vague God, and merely seek a vague belief, yet you are not compatible with Christ. Will not your maleficence beget the same retribution as that deserved by the evil? At that time, you will realize that no one who is incompatible with Christ can escape the day of wrath, and you will discover what kind of retribution shall be wrought upon those who are against Christ. When that day comes, your dreams of being blessed for your belief in God and of gaining entry into heaven shall all be shattered. It shall not be so, however, for those who are compatible with Christ. Though they have lost so much, though they have suffered much hardship, they shall receive all of the inheritance I bequeath to mankind. Ultimately, you will understand that I alone am the righteous God, and that I alone am capable of taking mankind into his beautiful destination.

Are You a True Believer in God?

You may have walked the path of faith in God for more than one or two years, and perhaps you have endured much hardship in your life during these years; or perhaps you have not endured much hardship, and have instead received much grace. It may also be that you have experienced neither hardship nor grace, but lived a rather unremarkable life. Regardless, you are still a follower of God, so let us fellowship on the subject of following God. However, I must remind all who read these words that the word of God is directed toward those who acknowledge and follow Him, not toward all people whether they acknowledge Him or not. If you believe that God speaks to the masses, to all people in the world, then God’s word will have no effect upon you. Thus, you should remember all of these words in your heart, and not always exclude yourself from them. In any case, let us speak of what is happening in our house.

You should all now understand the true meaning of faith in God. The meaning of faith in God of which I previously spoke related to your positive entry. Today is different: Today, I would like to dissect the essence of your faith in God. Of course, this is guiding you from a negative aspect; if I did not, then you would never know your true face, and would forever boast of your piety and faithfulness. It is fair to say that if I did not expose the ugliness in the depths of your hearts, then each of you would place a crown upon your head and keep all the glory for yourselves. Your arrogant and conceited natures drive you to betray your own consciences, to rebel against and resist Christ, and to reveal your ugliness, thereby bringing to light your intentions, notions, extravagant desires, and eyes full of greed. And yet you continue to prattle on about your lifelong passion for the work of Christ, and repeat again and again the truths long ago spoken by Christ. This is your “faith”—your “faith without impurity.” I have held man to a strict standard throughout. If your loyalty comes with intentions and conditions, then I would rather be without your so-called loyalty, for I abhor those who deceive Me through their intentions and extort Me with conditions. I wish only for man to be absolutely loyal to Me, and to do all things for the sake of—and in order to prove—one word: faith. I despise your use of blandishments to try to make Me rejoice, for I have always treated you with sincerity, and so wish for you to also act with true faith toward Me. When it comes to faith, many may think that they follow God because they have faith, and would not endure such suffering otherwise. So I ask you this: If you believe in God’s existence, why do you not fear Him? If you believe in God’s existence, why is there not the slightest dread of Him in your heart? You accept that Christ is the incarnation of God, so why do you hold Him in contempt? Why do you act irreverently toward Him? Why do you openly judge Him? Why do you always spy upon His movements? Why do you not submit to His arrangements? Why do you not act in accordance with His word? Why do you try to extort and rob Him of His offerings? Why do you speak from the place of Christ? Why do you judge whether His work and His word are correct? Why do you dare blaspheme Him behind His back? Are these and others what constitute your faith?

In your words and behavior are revealed elements of your unbelief in Christ. Unbelief pervades the motives and objectives of all you do. Even the character of your gaze contains the unbelief in Christ. It can be said that minute by minute, each of you harbors the elements of unbelief. This means that, at every moment, you are in danger of betraying Christ, for the blood that runs through your body is infused with unbelief in the incarnate God. Therefore, I say that the footprints you leave on the path of faith in God are not real; as you walk the path of faith in God, you do not plant your feet firmly upon the ground—you are merely going through the motions. You never fully believe the word of Christ and are incapable of immediately putting it into practice. This is the reason you do not have faith in Christ. Always having notions about Him is another reason you do not have faith in Him. Forever being skeptical about the work of Christ, letting the word of Christ fall on deaf ears, having an opinion on whatever work is done by Christ and not being able to correctly understand this work, struggling to put aside your notions no matter what explanation you receive, and so on—these are all the elements of unbelief mingled within your hearts. Though you follow the work of Christ and never fall behind, there is too much rebelliousness mixed in your hearts. This rebelliousness is an impurity in your belief in God. Perhaps you do not think this is the case, but if you are incapable of recognizing your intentions from within this, then you are bound to be among those who perish, for God perfects only those who truly believe in Him, not those who are skeptical of Him, and least of all those who reluctantly follow Him despite never having believed that He is God.

Some people do not rejoice in the truth, much less judgment. Instead, they rejoice in power and riches; such people are called power seekers. They search only for those denominations in the world with influence, and they search only for pastors and teachers that come from seminaries. Though they have accepted the way of truth, they are only half-believing; they are incapable of giving all of their hearts and minds, their mouths speak words of expending themselves for God, but their eyes are focused on the great pastors and teachers, and they do not spare Christ a second glance. Their hearts are fixated upon fame, fortune, and glory. They think it out of the question that such a meager person could be capable of conquering so many, that one so unremarkable could perfect man. They think it out of the question that these nobodies among the dust and dunghills are the people chosen by God. They believe that if such people were the objects of God’s salvation, then heaven and earth would be turned upside down, and all people would laugh themselves silly. They believe that if God chose such nobodies to be perfected, then those great men would become God Himself. Their perspectives are tainted with unbelief; more than not believing, they are simply preposterous beasts. For they value only status, prestige, and power, and they esteem only large groups and denominations. They have not the slightest regard for those led by Christ; they are simply betrayers who have turned their backs on Christ, on truth, and on life.

What you admire is not the humility of Christ, but those false shepherds of prominent standing. You do not adore the loveliness or wisdom of Christ, but those libertines who wallow in the filth of the world. You laugh at the pain of Christ who has no place to lay His head, but you admire those corpses that hunt for offerings and live in debauchery. You are not willing to suffer alongside Christ, but you gladly throw yourself into the arms of those reckless antichrists, though they only supply you with flesh, words, and control. Even now, your heart still turns toward them, toward their reputation, toward their status, toward their influence. And yet you continue to hold an attitude whereby you find the work of Christ hard to swallow and you are unwilling to accept it. This is why I say that you lack the faith to acknowledge Christ. The reason you have followed Him to this day is only because you had no other option. A series of lofty images are forever towering in your heart; you cannot forget their every word and deed, nor their influential words and hands. They are, in your heart, forever supreme and forever heroes. But this is not so for the Christ of today. He is forever insignificant in your heart, and forever undeserving of fear. For He is far too ordinary, has far too little influence, and is far from lofty.

In any case, I say that all those who do not value the truth are nonbelievers and betrayers of the truth. Such men shall never receive the approval of Christ. Have you now identified how much unbelief is within you, and how much betrayal of Christ you have? I exhort you thus: Since you have chosen the way of truth, then you should devote yourself wholeheartedly; do not be ambivalent or half-hearted. You should understand that God does not belong to the world nor any one person, but to all those who truly believe in Him, all those who worship Him, and all those who are devoted and faithful to Him.

Today, much unbelief remains within you. Look hard within yourselves, and you will surely find your answer. When you find the real answer, then you will admit that you are not a believer in God, but rather one who deceives, blasphemes, and betrays Him, and one who is disloyal to Him. Then you will realize that Christ is no man, but God. When that day comes, you will fear, dread, and truly love Christ. Presently, only thirty percent of your heart is filled with faith, while the other seventy percent is filled with doubt. Everything Christ does and says is liable to give you notions and opinions about Him, notions and opinions that stem from your complete unbelief in Him. You admire and dread only the unseen God in heaven, and have no regard for the living Christ on earth. Is this not also your unbelief? You yearn only for the God who did work in the past, but do not face up to the Christ of today. All this is the “faith,” forever mixed in your hearts, the faith that does not believe in the Christ of today. I am in no way underestimating you, for there is too much unbelief within you, too much of you that is impure and must be dissected. These impurities are a sign that you have no faith at all; they are a mark of your renouncement of Christ, and they brand you as a betrayer of Christ. They are a veil to your knowledge of Christ, a barrier to your being gained by Christ, an obstacle to your compatibility with Christ, and proof that Christ does not approve of you. Now is the time to examine all parts of your life! Doing so will benefit you in every way imaginable!

Christ Does the Work of Judgment With the Truth

The work of the last days is to separate all according to their kind, and to conclude the management plan of God, for the time is near and the day of God has come. God brings all who enter His kingdom—all who are loyal to Him to the very end—into the age of God Himself. Yet prior to the arrival of the age of God Himself, God’s work is not to observe the deeds of man, or to inquire into the life of man, but to judge man’s rebelliousness, for God shall purify all those who come before His throne. All who have followed the footsteps of God to this day are those who come before the throne of God, and this being so, every single person who accepts God’s work in its final phase is the object of God’s purification. In other words, everyone who accepts God’s work in its final phase is the object of God’s judgment.

In the judgment beginning at the house of God spoken of in times past, the “judgment” of these words refers to the judgment that God today passes on those who come before His throne in the last days. There are, perhaps, those who believe in such supernatural imaginings as that, when the last days have arrived, God will erect a big table in the heavens, upon which a white tablecloth will be spread, and then, sitting upon a great throne with all men kneeling on the ground, He will reveal the sins of each man and thereby determine whether they are to ascend to heaven or be sent down to the lake of fire and brimstone. No matter what man imagines, it cannot alter the essence of God’s work. The imaginings of man are nothing but the constructs of man’s thoughts; they come from the brain of man, summed up and pieced together from what man has seen and heard. Therefore I say, however brilliant the images conceived, they are but cartoon drawings, and are incapable of substituting the plan of God’s work. Man, after all, has been corrupted by Satan, so how could he fathom the thoughts of God? Man conceives God’s work of judgment as something fantastic. He believes that since it is God Himself who does the work of judgment, then this work must be of the most tremendous scale, and incomprehensible to mortals, and must resound throughout the heavens and shake the earth; if not, how could it be the work of judgment by God? He believes that, as this is the work of judgment, then God must be particularly imposing and majestic as He works, and those being judged must be howling with tears and on their knees begging for mercy. Such scenes would surely be spectacular, and deeply affecting…. Everyone imagines God’s work of judgment to be miraculous. Do you know, however, that, at the time when God has long since begun His work of judgment among man, you remain nestled in lethargic slumber? That at the time when you think God’s work of judgment has formally begun, God will have already made heaven and earth anew? At that time, perhaps, you will have only just come to understand the meaning of life, but God’s merciless work of punishment shall bring you, still deep in sleep, into hell. Only then will you suddenly realize that God’s work of judgment has already concluded.

Let us not waste our precious time, and talk no more of these abhorrent and detestable topics. Let us speak instead of what constitutes judgment. At the mention of the word “judgment,” you are likely to think of the words that Jehovah spoke to instruct the people in every region and the words that Jesus spoke to rebuke the Pharisees. For all their severity, these words were not God’s judgment of man; they were but words spoken by God within different environments, that is, in different contexts. These words are unlike the words spoken by Christ of the last days as He judges man. Christ of the last days uses a variety of truths to teach man, to expose the substance of man, and to dissect the words and deeds of man. These words comprise various truths, such as man’s duty, how man should submit to God, how man should be loyal to God, how man ought to live out normal humanity, as well as the wisdom and the disposition of God, and so on. These words are all directed at the substance of man and his corrupt disposition. In particular, the words that expose how man spurns God are spoken in regard to how man is an embodiment of Satan, and an enemy force against God. In undertaking His work of judgment, God does not simply make clear the nature of man with a few words; He exposes and prunes over the long term. All these different methods of exposure and pruning cannot be substituted with ordinary words, but with the truth of which man is utterly bereft. Only methods such as these can be called judgment; only through judgment of this kind can man be subdued and thoroughly convinced about God, and moreover gain true knowledge of God. What the work of judgment brings about is man’s understanding of the true face of God and the truth about his own rebelliousness. The work of judgment allows man to gain much understanding of the will of God, of the purpose of God’s work, and of the mysteries that are incomprehensible to him. It also allows man to recognize and know his corrupt essence and the roots of his corruption, as well as to discover the ugliness of man. These effects are all brought about by the work of judgment, for the essence of this work is actually the work of opening up the truth, the way, and the life of God to all those who have faith in Him. This work is the work of judgment done by God. If you do not regard these truths as important, if you think of nothing but how to avoid them, or how to find a new way out that does not involve them, then I say you are a grievous sinner. If you have faith in God, yet seek not the truth or the will of God, nor love the way that brings you closer to God, then I say that you are one who is trying to evade judgment, and that you are a puppet and a traitor who flees from the great white throne. God will not spare any of the rebellious who escape from under His eyes. Such men shall receive even more severe punishment. Those who come before God to be judged, and have moreover been purified, shall forever live in the kingdom of God. Of course, this is something that belongs to the future.

The work of judgment is God’s own work, so it must naturally be carried out by God Himself; it cannot be done by man in His stead. Because judgment is the use of the truth to conquer humankind, there is no question that God would still appear in the incarnate image to perform this work among man. That is to say, Christ of the last days shall use the truth to teach people across the world and make all truths known to them. This is God’s work of judgment. Many have a bad feeling about the second incarnation of God, for people find it difficult to believe that God would become flesh to do the work of judgment. Nevertheless, I must tell you that the work of God often goes far beyond the expectations of man, and is difficult for human minds to accept. For people are but maggots upon the earth, while God is the supreme One who fills the universe; the mind of man is like a pit of foul water that breeds only maggots, whereas each stage of the work directed by the thoughts of God is the distillation of God’s wisdom. People are always trying to contend with God, to which I say it is self-evident who will lose out in the end. I exhort you all not to think yourselves more valuable than gold. If others can accept the judgment of God, why can’t you? How much higher do you stand above others? If others can bow their heads before the truth, why can’t you, too? God’s work has an unstoppable momentum. He will not repeat the work of judgment again just because of the “contribution” you have made, and you will be overcome with regret at letting such a good opportunity slip by. If you do not believe My words, then just wait for that great white throne in the sky to pass judgment upon you! You must know that all of the Israelites spurned and denied Jesus, and yet the fact of Jesus’ redemption of mankind still extended throughout the universe and to the ends of the earth. Isn’t this a reality that God made long ago? If you are still waiting for Jesus to take you up to heaven, then I say that you are an obstinate piece of deadwood.[a] Jesus will not acknowledge a false believer such as you, who is disloyal to the truth and seeks only blessings. On the contrary, He will show no mercy in casting you into the lake of fire to burn for tens of thousands of years.

Do you understand now what is judgment and what is truth? If you do, then I exhort you to submit obediently to being judged, otherwise you shall never have the opportunity to be commended by God or to be brought by Him into His kingdom. Those who only accept judgment but can never be purified, that is, those who flee amidst the work of judgment, shall forever be spurned by God. Their sins are more numerous, and more grievous, than those of the Pharisees, for they have betrayed God and are rebels against God. Such people who are not worthy even to do service shall receive more severe punishment, a punishment that is, moreover, everlasting. God shall not spare any traitor who once evinced loyalty with words but then betrayed Him. People such as these shall receive retribution through punishment of the spirit, soul, and body. Is this not precisely a revelation of the righteous disposition of God? Is this not God’s purpose in judging man, and revealing him? God consigns all who perform all kinds of evil deeds during the time of judgment to a place infested with evil spirits, and lets these evil spirits destroy their fleshly bodies as they wish, and those people’s bodies emit the stench of corpses. Such is their fitting retribution. God writes down in their record books each and every one of the sins of those disloyal false believers, false apostles, and false workers; then, when the time is right, He casts them amidst the unclean spirits, letting these unclean spirits defile their entire bodies at will, so that they may never be reincarnated and never again see the light. Those hypocrites who do service for a time but are incapable of remaining loyal to the end are numbered by God among the evil, so that they fall into cahoots with the evil and become part of their disorderly rabble; in the end, God shall annihilate them. God casts aside and takes no notice of those who have never been loyal to Christ or have never contributed anything of their strength, and at the changing of the age He shall annihilate them all. They shall no longer exist on earth, much less gain passage into the kingdom of God. Those who have never been sincere to God, but are forced by circumstance into dealing with Him perfunctorily, are numbered among those who do service for His people. Only a small number of such people will survive, while the majority shall perish along with those who render service that is not up to standard. Ultimately, God shall bring into His kingdom all those who are of the same mind as God, the people and the sons of God, and those predestined by God to be priests. They will be the distillation of God’s work. As for those who cannot be classed in any of the categories set by God, they shall be numbered among the unbelievers—and you can surely imagine what their outcome shall be. I have already said to you all that I should say; the road that you select is your choice alone. What you should understand is this: The work of God never waits for any that cannot keep pace with Him, and the righteous disposition of God shows no mercy to any man.

Footnotes:

a. A piece of deadwood: a Chinese idiom, meaning “beyond help.”

Did You Know? God Has Done a Great Thing Among Men

The old age has passed, and the new age has come. Year after year and day after day, God has done much work. He came into the world and then departed. This cycle has repeated itself through many generations. Today, God continues, as before, to do the work that He must, the work that He has yet to complete, for to this day He has yet to enter into rest. From the time of creation to this day, God has done much work. But did you know that God today does much more work than before, and the scale of His work is much greater than before? This is why I say that God has done a great thing among men. All of God’s work is very important, be it to man or to God, for every item of His work is related to man.

Since the work of God can neither be seen nor touched—much less seen by the world—how can it be something great? Just what kind of thing would be considered great? Certainly, none can deny that, whatever work God does, it can be deemed to be great, but why do I say this of the work God does this day? When I say that God has done a great thing, this undoubtedly involves many mysteries that man has yet to understand. Let us speak of them now.

Jesus was born in a manger in an age that could not tolerate His existence, but even so, the world could not stand in His way, and He lived among men for thirty-three years under the care of God. In these many years of life, He experienced the bitterness of the world and tasted the life of misery on earth. He shouldered the great burden of being crucified to redeem all mankind. He redeemed all the sinners who had been living under the power of Satan, and finally, His resurrected body returned to His resting place. Now the new work of God has begun, and it is also the beginning of a new age. God brings into His house those who have been redeemed to begin His new work of salvation. This time, the work of salvation is more thorough than in times past. It is not the Holy Spirit working in man to cause him to change on his own, nor is it the body of Jesus appearing among men to do this work, and least of all is this work done through other means. Rather, it is God incarnate doing the work and directing it Himself. He does it in this way in order to lead man into the new work. Is this not a great thing? God does not do this work through a part of humanity or by means of prophecies; rather, God does it Himself. Some may say that this is not a great thing and that it cannot bring man ecstasy. But I will say to you that the work of God is not merely this, but something much greater and much more.

This time around, God comes to do work not in a spiritual body, but in a very ordinary one. Moreover, not only is it the body of God’s second incarnation, it is also the body through which God returns to the flesh. It is a very ordinary flesh. You cannot see anything that makes Him stand out from others, but you can gain from Him previously unheard-of truths. This insignificant flesh is what embodies all the words of truth from God, undertakes God’s work in the last days, and expresses the whole of God’s disposition for man to understand. Do you not desire greatly to see the God in heaven? Do you not desire greatly to understand the God in heaven? Do you not desire greatly to see the destination of mankind? He will tell you all these secrets—secrets that no man has been able to tell you, and He will also tell you of the truths that you do not understand. He is your gate into the kingdom, and your guide into the new age. Such an ordinary flesh holds many unfathomable mysteries. His deeds may be inscrutable to you, but the entire goal of the work He does is sufficient enough to allow you to see that He is not, as people believe, a simple flesh. For He represents the will of God and the care shown by God toward mankind in the last days. Though you cannot hear His words seeming to shake the heavens and earth, though you cannot see His eyes as a flame of fire, and though you cannot receive the discipline of His iron rod, nevertheless you can hear from His words that God is wrathful and know that God is showing compassion for mankind; you can see the righteous disposition of God and His wisdom, and, moreover, realize God’s solicitude for all mankind. The work of God in the last days is to allow man to see the God in heaven living among men on earth, and to enable man to know, submit to, fear, and love God. This is why He has returned to the flesh for a second time. Though what man sees this day is a God that is the same as man, a God with a nose and two eyes, and an unremarkable God, in the end, God will show you that if this man did not exist, heaven and earth would undergo a tremendous change; if this man did not exist, the heavens would grow dim, the earth would be plunged into chaos, and all mankind would live amid famine and plagues. He will show you that if God incarnate did not come to save you in the last days, then God would have long ago destroyed all mankind in hell; if this flesh did not exist, then you would forever be arch-sinners, and you would be corpses evermore. You should know that if this flesh did not exist, all mankind would face an ineluctable calamity and find it impossible to escape the even more severe punishment that God metes out to mankind in the last days. Had this ordinary flesh not been born, you would all be in a state where you beg for life without being able to live and pray for death without being able to die; if this flesh did not exist, then you would not be able to gain the truth and come before the throne of God today, but rather, you would be punished by God because of your grievous sins. Did you know that were it not for the return of God to the flesh, none would have a chance at salvation; and were it not for the coming of this flesh, God would have long ago put an end to the age of old? This being so, are you still able to reject the second incarnation of God? Since you can derive so many benefits from this ordinary man, why would you not gladly accept Him?

The work of God is something that you cannot comprehend. If you can neither fully grasp whether your choice is correct, nor can you know whether the work of God can succeed, then why not try your luck and see whether this ordinary man may be of great help to you, and whether God has indeed done great work? However, I must tell you that in the time of Noah, men had been eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage to such an extent that it was unbearable for God to witness, so He sent down a great flood to destroy mankind, sparing only Noah’s family of eight and all kinds of birds and beasts. In the last days, however, those spared by God are all those who have been loyal to Him until the end. Though both ages were times of great corruption unbearable for God to witness, and mankind in both ages became so corrupt and denied that God was their Lord, God destroyed only the people in the time of Noah. Mankind in both ages caused God great distress, yet God has remained patient with the men of the last days until now. Why is this? Have you never wondered why? If you truly do not know, then let Me tell you. The reason that God is able to accord grace to people in the last days is not that they are less corrupt than people in the time of Noah, or that they have shown repentance to God, much less is it that technology in the last days is so advanced that God cannot bring Himself to destroy them. Rather, it is that God has work to do in a group of people in the last days, and that God will do this work Himself in His incarnation. Furthermore, God will choose a part of this group to become the objects of His salvation and the fruit of His management plan, and bring these people into the next age. Therefore, no matter what, this price paid by God has entirely been in preparation for the work His incarnated flesh will do in the last days. The fact that you have arrived at today is thanks to this flesh. It is because God lives in the flesh that you have the chance to survive. All this good fortune has been gained on account of this ordinary man. Not only this, but in the end, every nation shall worship this ordinary man, as well as give thanks to and submit to this insignificant man, because it is the truth, the life, and the way He brought that has saved all mankind, eased the conflict between man and God, shortened the distance between them, and opened up a connection between the thoughts of God and man. It is also He who has obtained even greater glory for God. Is such an ordinary man unworthy of your trust and adoration? Is such an ordinary flesh unfit to be called Christ? Can such an ordinary man not become the expression of God among men? Does such a man, who has spared mankind from disaster, not deserve your love and your desire to hold on to Him? If you reject the truths expressed from His mouth and detest His existence among you, then what will become of you in the end?

All of God’s work in the last days is done through this ordinary man. He will bestow everything upon you, and what is more, He will be able to decide everything relating to you. Can such a man be as you believe Him to be: a man so simple as to be unworthy of mention? Is His truth not enough to utterly convince you? Is witness of His deeds not enough to utterly convince you? Or is it that the path He brings is not worthy for you to walk on? When all is said and done, what is it that causes you to abhor Him and to cast Him away and give Him a wide berth? It is this man who expresses the truth, it is this man who provides the truth, and it is this man who gives you a path to follow. Could it be that you are still unable to find the traces of God’s work within these truths? Without the work of Jesus, mankind could not have come down from the cross, but without the incarnation of today, those who come down from the cross could never gain God’s approval or enter into the new age. Without the coming of this ordinary man, you would never have the opportunity to see the true countenance of God, nor would you be qualified to, for you are all objects that should have long ago been destroyed. Because of the coming of the second incarnation of God, God has forgiven you and shown you mercy. Regardless, the words I must leave you with in the end are still these: This ordinary man, who is God incarnate, is of vital importance to you. This is the great thing that God has already done among men.

Only Christ of the Last Days Can Give Man the Way of Eternal Life

The way of life is not something that anyone can possess, nor is it something anyone can attain easily. This is because life can only come from God, which is to say, only God Himself possesses the essence of life, and only God Himself has the way of life. And so only God is the source of life, and the ever-flowing wellspring of living water of life. Ever since He created the world, God has done much work involving the vitality of life, has done much work that brings life to man, and has paid a great price so that man might gain life. This is because God Himself is eternal life, and God Himself is the way by which man is resurrected. God is never absent from the heart of man, and He lives among man at all times. He has been the driving force of man’s living, the root of man’s existence, and a rich deposit for man’s existence after birth. He causes man to be reborn, and enables him to tenaciously live in his every role. Thanks to His power and His inextinguishable life force, man has lived for generation after generation, throughout which the power of God’s life has been the mainstay of man’s existence, and God has paid a price that no ordinary man has ever paid. God’s life force can prevail over any power; moreover, it exceeds any power. His life is eternal, His power extraordinary, and His life force cannot be overwhelmed by any created being or enemy force. The life force of God exists and shines its brilliant radiance regardless of time or place. Heaven and earth may undergo great changes, but God’s life is forever the same. All things may pass away, but God’s life will still remain, for God is the source of the existence of all things and the root of their existence. Man’s life originates from God, the existence of heaven is because of God, and the existence of earth stems from the power of God’s life. No object possessed of vitality can transcend the sovereignty of God, and no thing with vigor can elude the domain of God’s authority. In this way, regardless of who they are, everyone must surrender to the dominion of God, everyone must live under God’s command, and no one can escape from His hands.

Perhaps what you now desire is to gain life, or perhaps you desire to gain the truth. Whatever the case, you wish to find God, to find the God that you can rely on, and who can provide you with eternal life. If you wish to gain eternal life, you must first understand the source of eternal life and must first know where God is. I have already said that only God is immutable life, and only God possesses the way of life. Since God is immutable life, He is thus eternal life; since only God is the way of life, God Himself is thus the way of eternal life. As such, you should first understand where God is, and how to gain this way of eternal life. Let us now engage in fellowship on these two issues separately.

If you truly wish to gain the way of eternal life, and if you are voracious in your search for it, then first answer this question: Where is God today? Perhaps you would reply, “God lives in heaven, of course—He wouldn’t be living in your home, would He?” Perhaps you might say that God obviously lives among all things. Or you might say that God lives in each person’s heart, or that God is in the spiritual realm. I don’t deny any of this, but I must clarify the issue. It isn’t totally correct to say that God lives in the heart of man, but neither is it entirely wrong. That is because, among believers in God, there are those whose belief is true and those whose belief is false, there are those of whom God approves and those of whom He disapproves, there are those who please Him and those whom He detests, and there are those whom He makes perfect and those whom He casts out. And so I say that God lives in but a few people’s hearts, and these people are undoubtedly those who truly believe in God, those of whom God approves, those who please Him, and those whom He makes perfect. They are the ones who are led by God. Since they are led by God, they are the people who have already heard and seen God’s way of eternal life. Those whose belief in God is false, those who are not approved by God, those who are despised by God, those who are cast out by God—they are bound to be rejected by God, are bound to remain without the way of life, and are bound to remain ignorant of where God is. In contrast, those who have God living in their hearts know where He is. They are the people unto whom God bestows the way of eternal life, and they are the ones who follow God. Now do you know where God is? God is both in the heart of man and at man’s side. He is not only in the spiritual realm, and above all things, but even more on the earth upon which man exists. And so the arrival of the last days has taken the steps of God’s work into new territory. God holds sovereignty over everything among all things, and He is the mainstay of man in his heart, and moreover, He exists among man. Only in this way can He bring the way of life to mankind, and bring man into the way of life. God has come to earth, and lives among man, so that man may gain the way of life, and so that man may exist. At the same time, God also commands everything among all things, to facilitate cooperation with the management He does among man. And so, if you only acknowledge the doctrine that God is in heaven and in the heart of man, yet do not acknowledge the truth of God’s existence among man, then you shall never gain life, and shall never gain the way of truth.

God Himself is life, and the truth, and His life and truth coexist. Those who are incapable of gaining the truth shall never gain life. Without the guidance, support, and provision of the truth, you shall only gain words, doctrines, and, above all, death. God’s life is ever-present, and His truth and life coexist. If you cannot find the source of truth, then you will not gain the nourishment of life; if you cannot gain the provision of life, then you will surely have no truth, and so apart from imaginations and notions, the entirety of your body shall be nothing but your flesh—your stench-ridden flesh. Know that the words of books do not count as life, the records of history cannot be worshiped as the truth, and the regulations of the past cannot serve as an account of words presently spoken by God. Only that which is expressed by God when He comes to earth and lives among man is the truth, life, God’s will, and His current way of working. If you apply the records of words spoken by God during ages past to today, that makes you an archaeologist, and the best way of describing you is as an expert on historical heritage. That is because you always believe in traces of the work that God did in times past, only believe in the shadow of God left from when He previously worked among man, and only believe in the way that God gave to His followers in former times. You do not believe in the direction of God’s work today, do not believe in the glorious countenance of God today, and do not believe in the way of truth presently expressed by God. And so you are undeniably a daydreamer who is completely out of touch with reality. If now you still cling to words that are incapable of bringing life to man, then you are a hopeless piece of deadwood,[a] for you are too conservative, too intractable, too impervious to reason!

God become flesh is called Christ, and so the Christ that can give people the truth is called God. There is nothing excessive about this, for He possesses the essence of God, and possesses God’s disposition, and wisdom in His work, that are unattainable by man. Those who call themselves Christ, yet cannot do the work of God, are frauds. Christ is not merely the manifestation of God on earth, but also the particular flesh assumed by God as He carries out and completes His work among man. This flesh cannot be supplanted by just any man, but is a flesh that can adequately bear God’s work on earth, and express the disposition of God, and well represent God, and provide man with life. Sooner or later, those who impersonate Christ will all fall, for although they claim to be Christ, they possess none of the essence of Christ. And so I say that the authenticity of Christ cannot be defined by man, but is answered and decided by God Himself. In this way, if you truly wish to seek the way of life, you must first acknowledge it is by coming to earth that God performs the work of bestowing the way of life unto man, and you must acknowledge it is during the last days that He comes to earth to bestow the way of life unto man. This is not the past; it is happening today.

Christ of the last days brings life, and brings the enduring and everlasting way of truth. This truth is the path by which man gains life, and it is the only path by which man shall know God and be approved by God. If you do not seek the way of life provided by Christ of the last days, then you shall never gain the approval of Jesus, and shall never be qualified to enter the gate of the kingdom of heaven, for you are both a puppet and prisoner of history. Those who are controlled by regulations, by words, and shackled by history will never be able to gain life nor gain the perpetual way of life. This is because all they have is turbid water which has been clung to for thousands of years instead of the water of life that flows from the throne. Those who are not supplied with the water of life will forever remain corpses, playthings of Satan, and sons of hell. How, then, can they behold God? If you only try to hold on to the past, only try to keep things as they are by standing still, and do not try to change the status quo and discard history, then will you not always be against God? The steps of God’s work are vast and mighty, like surging waves and rolling thunders—yet you sit passively awaiting destruction, clinging to your folly and doing nothing. In this way, how can you be considered someone who follows the footsteps of the Lamb? How can you justify the God that you hold on to as a God who is always new and never old? And how can the words of your yellowed books carry you across into a new age? How can they lead you to seek the steps of God’s work? And how can they take you up to heaven? What you hold in your hands are words that can provide but temporary solace, not truths that are capable of giving life. The words of scriptures you read can only enrich your tongue and are not words of philosophy that can help you know human life, much less the paths that can lead you to perfection. Does this discrepancy not give you cause for reflection? Does it not make you realize the mysteries contained within? Are you capable of delivering yourself to heaven to meet God on your own? Without the coming of God, can you take yourself into heaven to enjoy family happiness with God? Are you still dreaming now? I suggest, then, that you stop dreaming and look at who is working now—look to see who is now carrying out the work of saving man during the last days. If you do not, you shall never gain the truth, and shall never gain life.

Those who wish to gain life without relying on the truth spoken by Christ are the most ridiculous people on earth, and those who do not accept the way of life brought by Christ are lost in fantasy. And so I say that those who do not accept Christ of the last days shall forever be loathed by God. Christ is man’s gateway to the kingdom during the last days, and there are none who can go around Him. None may be perfected by God except through Christ. You believe in God, and so you must accept His words and submit to His way. You cannot only think of gaining blessings while being incapable of comprehending the truth and incapable of accepting the provision of life. Christ comes during the last days so that all those who truly believe in Him may be provided with life. His work is for the sake of concluding the old age and entering the new one, and His work is the path that must be taken by all those who would enter the new age. If you are incapable of acknowledging Him, and instead condemn, blaspheme, or even persecute Him, then you are bound to burn for eternity and shall never enter the kingdom of God. For this Christ is Himself the expression of the Holy Spirit, the expression of God, the One whom God has entrusted to do His work on earth. And so I say that if you cannot accept all that is done by Christ of the last days, then you blaspheme the Holy Spirit. The retribution to be had by those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit is self-evident to all. I also tell you that if you resist Christ of the last days, if you spurn Christ of the last days, there will be no one else to bear the consequences on your behalf. Furthermore, from this day onward you will not have another chance to gain the approval of God; even if you try to redeem yourself, you will never again behold the face of God. For what you resist is not a man, what you spurn is not some puny being, but Christ. Do you know what the consequences of this will be? You will not have made a small mistake, but committed a heinous crime. And so I advise everyone not to bare your fangs before the truth, or make careless criticisms, for only the truth can bring you life, and nothing except the truth can allow you to be reborn and behold the face of God again.

Footnotes:

a. A piece of deadwood: a Chinese idiom, meaning “beyond help.”

Prepare Sufficient Good Deeds for Your Destination

I have done much work among you and, of course, have spoken a number of utterances as well. Yet I cannot help feeling that My words and My work have not entirely fulfilled the purpose of My work in the last days. For in the last days, My work is not for the sake of a certain person or certain people, but to demonstrate My inherent disposition. Yet for a myriad of reasons—perhaps a scarcity of time or hectic work schedule—people have not gained any knowledge of Me from My disposition. Thus do I embark upon My new plan, My final work, and open a new page in My work, so that all who see Me will beat upon their breasts and weep and wail without cease on account of My existence. This is because I bring the end of mankind to the world, and from this point on, I lay bare My entire disposition before mankind, so that all who know Me and all those who do not may feast their eyes and see that I have indeed come to the human world, have come onto the earth where all things multiply. This is My plan, and My sole “confession” since My creation of mankind. May you give your undivided attention to My every move, for My rod once again presses close to mankind, to all those who oppose Me.

Together with the heavens, I begin the work that I must do. And so I thread My way through the streams of people and move between heaven and earth, without anyone ever perceiving My movements or taking notice of My words. Therefore, My plan continues to progress smoothly. It is only that all your senses have become so benumbed that you are oblivious to the steps of My work. But there will surely come a day when you will realize My intentions. Today, I live together with you and suffer together with you, and I have long since come to understand the attitude that mankind bears toward Me. I wish to speak no further of this, much less do I wish to bring shame on you by bringing up further instances of this painful subject. I hope only that you remember all you have done in your hearts, so that we may tally our accounts on the day when we meet again. I do not wish to falsely accuse any one among you, for I have always acted justly, fairly, and with honor. Of course, I also hope that you can be upstanding, and do nothing that goes against heaven and earth or your own conscience. This is the only thing that I ask of you. Many people feel restless and ill at ease because they have committed atrocious wrongs, and many feel ashamed of themselves because they have never performed a single good deed. Yet there are also many who, far from feeling disgraced by their sins, go from bad to worse, completely ripping off the mask concealing their hideous features—which had yet to be fully exposed—to test My disposition. I do not care for, nor pay any heed to, the actions of any one person. Rather, I do the work that I ought to do, be it gathering information, or traveling the land, or doing something within My interests. At key times, I proceed with My work among man as originally planned, not a second too late or too soon, and with both ease and dispatch. However, with every step of My work, some are cast aside, for I despise their flattering ways and their feigned subservience. Those who are abhorrent to Me will certainly be forsaken, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In short, I would that all whom I despise stay far away from Me. Needless to say, I will not spare the evil who remain in My house. Because the day of man’s punishment is near, I do not hurry to cast out all those despicable souls from My house, for I have a plan of My own.

Now is the time when I determine the ending for each person, not the stage in which I began to work man. I write down in My record book, one by one, the words and actions of each person, the path by which they have followed Me, their inherent characteristics, and how they have ultimately comported themselves. In this way, no matter what kind of person they are, no one shall escape My hand, and all shall be with their own kind as I assign. I decide the destination of each person not on the basis of age, seniority, amount of suffering, and least of all, the degree to which they invite pity, but according to whether they possess the truth. There is no other choice but this. You must realize that all those who do not follow the will of God shall also be punished. This is an immutable fact. Therefore, all those who are punished are so punished for the righteousness of God and as retribution for their numerous evil acts. I have not made a single change to My plan since its inception. It is simply that, as far as man is concerned, those to whom I direct My words seem to be diminishing in number, as are those of whom I truly approve. However, I maintain that My plan has never changed; rather, it is the faith and love of man that are ever changing, ever waning, to the extent that it is possible for each person to go from fawning over Me to being cold toward Me and even casting Me out. My attitude toward you will be neither hot nor cold, until I feel disgust and abhorrence, and finally mete out punishment. However, on the day of your punishment, I will still see you, but you shall no longer be able to see Me. As life among you already has become tedious and dull to Me, so, needless to say, I have chosen different surroundings in which to live, the better to avoid the hurt of your malicious words and steer clear of your unbearably sordid behavior, that you may no longer fool Me or treat Me in a perfunctory manner. Before I leave you, I must still exhort you to refrain from doing that which is not in accordance with the truth. Rather, you should do that which is pleasing to all, that which brings benefit to all, and that which benefits your own destination, otherwise the one who suffers in the midst of disaster will be none other than yourself.

My mercy is expressed toward those who love Me and deny themselves. The punishment visited upon the evil, meanwhile, is precisely proof of My righteous disposition and, even more, testimony to My wrath. When disaster comes, all who oppose Me will weep as they fall victim to famine and plague. Those who have committed all manner of evil deeds, but who have followed Me for many years, will not escape paying for their sins; they too, will be plunged into disaster, the like of which has seldom been seen throughout millions of years, and they will live in a constant state of panic and fear. And those of My followers who have shown loyalty to Me will rejoice and applaud My might. They will experience ineffable contentment and live amid joy such as I have never before bestowed upon mankind. For I treasure the good deeds of man and abhor their evil deeds. Since I first began to lead mankind, I have been eagerly hoping to gain a group of people who are of the same mind with Me. Those who are not of the same mind with Me, meanwhile, I never forget; I always loathe them in My heart, awaiting the chance to make them answer for their evil deeds, which is something I shall relish to see. Now My day has finally come, and I need no longer wait!

My final work is not only for the sake of punishing man, but also for the sake of arranging the destination of man. Moreover, it is so that all people may acknowledge My deeds and actions. I want each and every person to see that all I have done is right, and that all I have done is an expression of My disposition. It is not man’s doing, much less nature, that brought forth mankind, but I, who nourish every living being in creation. Without My existence, mankind will only perish and suffer the scourge of calamity. No human being will ever again see the beauteous sun and moon, or the verdant world; mankind shall encounter only the frigid night and the inexorable valley of the shadow of death. I am mankind’s only salvation. I am mankind’s only hope and, even more, I am He on whom the existence of all mankind rests. Without Me, mankind will immediately come to a standstill. Without Me, mankind will suffer catastrophe and be trampled underfoot by all manner of ghosts, though no one takes heed of Me. I have done work that can be done by no other, and hope only that man can repay Me with some good deeds. Though but a few have been able to repay Me, I will still conclude My journey in the human world and begin the next step of My unfolding work, because all My rushing to and fro in man’s midst these many years has been fruitful, and I am very pleased. What I care about is not the number of people, but rather their good deeds. In any case, I hope that you prepare a sufficiency of good deeds for your own destination. Then will I be satisfied; otherwise, none of you can escape the disaster that will befall you. The disaster originates with Me and is of course orchestrated by Me. If you cannot appear as good in My eyes, then you will not escape suffering the disaster. In the midst of tribulation, your actions and deeds were not considered entirely appropriate, for your faith and love were hollow, and you only showed yourselves to be either timid or tough. Regarding this, I will only make a judgment of good or bad. My concern continues to be the way in which each of you acts and expresses himself, on the basis of which I shall determine your end. However, I must make this clear: Toward those who showed Me not the slightest loyalty during times of tribulation, I shall be merciful no more, for My mercy only extends so far. I have no liking, furthermore, for anyone who has once betrayed Me, much less do I like to associate with those who sell out the interests of their friends. This is My disposition, regardless of who the person may be. I must tell you this: Anyone who breaks My heart shall not receive clemency from Me a second time, and anyone who has been faithful to Me shall forever remain in My heart.

To Whom Are You Loyal?

Right now, each day you live through is crucial, and it is of the utmost importance to your destination and your fate, so you must cherish everything you have today, and treasure each minute that passes. You must carve out as much time as you can to give yourselves the greatest gains so that you will not have lived this life in vain. You may feel confused about why I speak such words. To be frank, I am not at all pleased by the behavior of any of you, for the hopes I had of you were not as you are today. Thus, I can say this: Each one of you is on the brink of danger, and your erstwhile cries for help and former aspirations to pursue the truth and seek the light are approaching their end. This is your final display of recompense, and it is something I never expected. I do not wish to speak contrary to the facts, for you have greatly disappointed Me. Perhaps you do not wish to take this lying down, do not wish to face reality—yet I must ask you this seriously: In all these years, what exactly have your hearts been filled with? To whom are they loyal? Do not say that these questions came out of nowhere, and do not ask Me why I asked such things. Know this: It is because I know you too well, care for you too much, and have invested too much of My heart in your conduct and deeds that I have called you to account without cease and borne bitter hardship. Yet you repay Me with nothing more than indifference and unbearable resignation. You have been so remiss toward Me; could it be possible that I know nothing of it? If this is what you believe, it further proves the fact that you do not truly treat Me with kindness. And so I say that you are burying your heads in the sand. You are all so clever that you do not even know what you are doing—so what will you use to give an account to Me?

The question of most concern to Me is exactly to whom your hearts are loyal. I hope, too, that each of you will try to marshal your thoughts, and ask yourself to whom you are loyal and for whom you live. Perhaps you have never given careful consideration to these questions, so how about I reveal the answers to you?

Anyone with a memory will acknowledge this fact: Man lives for himself and is loyal to himself. I do not believe your answers to be entirely correct, for you each exist in your respective lives and each are struggling with your own suffering. As such, you are loyal to the people you love and the things that please you; you are not entirely loyal to yourselves. Because you are each influenced by the people, occurrences, and objects around you, you are not truly loyal to yourselves. I speak these words not to endorse being loyal to yourselves, but to expose your loyalty to any one thing, for over the course of so many years, I have never received loyalty from any of you. You have followed Me all these years, yet have never given Me one iota of loyalty. Instead, you have revolved around the people you love and the things that please you—so much so that at all times, and wherever you go, you keep them close to your hearts and have never abandoned them. Whenever you become eager or passionate about any one thing that you love, it happens while you are following Me, or even while you are listening to My words. Therefore, I say you are using the loyalty that I ask of you to instead be loyal to and cherish your “pets.” Though you may sacrifice a thing or two for Me, it does not represent your all, and does not show that it is Me to whom you are truly loyal. You involve yourselves in undertakings about which you are passionate: Some people are loyal to sons and daughters, others to husbands, wives, riches, work, superiors, status, or women. You never feel weary or annoyed toward the things you are loyal to; instead, you grow ever more eager to possess these things in greater quantity, and higher quality, and you never give up. I and My words are always pushed back behind the things you are passionate about. And you have no choice but to rank them last. There are even those who leave this last place for things they are loyal to that they have yet to discover. Never has there been the slightest trace of Me in their hearts. You may think that I ask too much of you or am wrongfully accusing you—but have you ever given any thought to the fact that while you are happily spending time with your family, you have never once been loyal to Me? At times like this, does it not pain you? When your hearts are filled with joy, and you are rewarded for your labors, do you not feel disheartened at not having furnished yourselves with sufficient truth? When have you wept for not having received My approval? You rack your brains and take great pains for the sake of your sons and daughters, yet still you are not satisfied; still you believe that you have not been diligent on their behalf, that you have not done everything you can for them. Toward Me, however, you have always been remiss and careless; I am only in your memories, but I do not endure in your hearts. My devotion and efforts forever go unfelt by you, and you have never had any appreciation of them. You merely engage in brief reflection and believe that this will suffice. Such “loyalty” is not what I have long yearned for, but that which I have long despised. Nevertheless, no matter what I say, you continue to admit only one or two things; you cannot fully accept this, for you are all very “confident,” and you always pick and choose what to accept from the words I have spoken. If you are still like this today, I do have some methods for dealing with your self-confidence—and, what’s more, I shall make you acknowledge that all My words are true, and that none of them distort the facts.

If I were to place some money in front of you right now and give you the freedom to choose—and if I did not condemn you for your choice—then most of you would choose the money and forsake the truth. The better among you would give up the money and choose the truth reluctantly, while those in-between would seize the money in one hand and the truth in the other. Would your true colors thus not become self-evident? When choosing between the truth and anything to which you are loyal, you would all make this choice, and your attitude would remain the same. Is that not so? Are there not many among you who have seesawed between right and wrong? In contests between positive and negative, black and white, you are surely aware of the choices that you have made between family and God, children and God, peace and disruption, riches and poverty, status and ordinariness, being supported and being cast aside, and so on. Between a peaceful family and a broken one, you chose the former, and you did so without any hesitation; between riches and duty, you again chose the former, even lacking the will to return to shore;[a] between luxury and poverty, you chose the former; when choosing between your sons, daughters, wives and husbands, and Me, you chose the former; and between notion and truth, you once again chose the former. Faced with all manner of your evil deeds, I have simply lost faith in you. It simply astounds Me that your hearts are so resistant to being softened. Many years of dedication and effort have apparently brought Me nothing more than your abandonment and despair, but My hopes for you grow with each passing day, for My day has been completely laid bare before everyone. Yet you persist in seeking dark and evil things, and refuse to loosen your grip on them. What, then, will be your outcome? Have you ever given careful consideration to this? If you were asked to choose again, what then would be your position? Would it still be the former? Would you still bring Me disappointment and wretched sorrow? Would your hearts still possess the sole modicum of warmth? Would you still be unaware of what to do to comfort My heart? At this moment, what do you choose? Will you submit to My words or be averse to them? My day has been laid out before your very eyes, and what you face is a new life and a new starting point. However, I must tell you that this starting point is not the beginning of past new work, but the conclusion of the old. That is, this is the final act. I think you can all understand what is unusual about this starting point. One day soon, however, you will understand the true meaning of this starting point, so let us move past it together and welcome the finale to come! However, what continues to worry Me about you is that, when faced with injustice and justice, you always choose the former. That, though, is all in your past. I, too, hope to forget everything of your past, though this is very difficult to do. Nevertheless, I have a very good way of doing it: Let the future replace the past, and allow the shadows of your past to be dispelled in exchange for your true self of today. Thus must I trouble you to make the choice once more: To whom exactly are you loyal?

Footnotes:

a. Return to shore: a Chinese idiom, meaning “turn from one’s evil ways.”

On Destination

Whenever destination is mentioned, you treat it with special seriousness; it is, moreover, something that you are all particularly sensitive about. Some people cannot wait to knock their heads against the ground, kowtowing before God in order to obtain a good destination. I can identify with your eagerness, which does not need to be expressed in words. It is no more than that you do not want your flesh to fall into disaster, and still less do you wish to descend into everlasting punishment in the future. You only hope to allow yourselves to live a little more freely, a little more easily. And so you feel particularly agitated whenever destination is mentioned, deeply afraid that, if you are not attentive enough, you may offend God and thus be subject to the retribution you deserve. You have not hesitated to make compromises for the sake of your destination, and even the many of you who were once devious and flippant have suddenly become especially gentle and sincere; your appearance of sincerity chills people to the marrow. Nevertheless, you all have “honest” hearts, and you have consistently opened up to Me the secrets in your hearts without keeping anything back, whether it be grievance, deceit, or devotion. All in all, you have very candidly “confessed” to Me the substantive things that lie within the deepest recesses of your being. Of course, I have never skirted around such things, for to Me they have become all too familiar. You would rather enter the sea of fire for the sake of your final destination than lose a single strand of hair to gain God’s approval. It is not that I am being too dogmatic with you; it is that you are too lacking in a heart of devotion to come face to face with all that I do. You may not understand what I have just said, so let Me provide you with a simple explanation: What you need is not truth and life, nor the principles of how to conduct yourselves, much less My painstaking work. Rather, what you need is everything you possess in the flesh—wealth, status, family, marriage, and so on. You are utterly dismissive of My words and work, so I can sum up your faith in one word: perfunctory. You will go to any lengths to achieve the things to which you are absolutely devoted, but I have discovered that you would not do the same for the sake of matters concerning your belief in God. Rather, you are relatively devoted, and relatively earnest. That is why I say that those who lack a heart of utmost sincerity are failures in their belief in God. Think carefully—are there many failures among you?

You ought to know that success in belief in God is achieved as a result of people’s own actions; when people do not succeed but instead fail, that too is due to their own actions, and no role is played by any other factor. I believe that you would do anything it takes to achieve something that is more difficult and entails more suffering than believing in God, and that you would treat it very seriously, so much so that you would be unwilling to tolerate any errors; these are the kinds of unremitting efforts all of you put into your own lives. You are even capable of deceiving My flesh under circumstances in which you would not deceive any member of your own family. This is your consistent behavior and the principle by which you live. Are you not still projecting a false facade to deceive Me for the sake of your destination, so that your destination may be perfectly beautiful and all that you desire? I am aware that your devotion is but temporary, as is your sincerity. Are not your resolve and the price you pay only for the sake of the present moment and not the future? You want only to exert one final effort to strive to secure a beautiful destination, with the sole aim of making a trade. You do not make this effort to avoid becoming indebted to the truth, and less still for the sake of repaying Me for the price I have paid. In short, you are willing only to employ clever stratagems to get what you want, but not to do open battle for it. Is this not your heartfelt wish? You must not disguise yourselves, nor rack your brains over your destination to the point where you are unable to eat or sleep. Is it not true that your outcome will have already been determined in the end? You should each fulfill your own duty with open and honest hearts, and be willing to pay whatever price is necessary. As you have said, when the day comes, God will not be remiss toward anyone who has suffered or paid a price for Him. This kind of conviction is worth holding on to, and it is right that you should never forget it. Only in this way can I put My mind at ease about you. Otherwise, you will forever be people about whom I cannot put My mind at ease, and you will forever be the objects of My distaste. If all of you can follow your conscience and give your all for Me, sparing no effort for My work, and devoting the energy of a lifetime to My gospel work, then will My heart not often leap for joy on your account? This way, I will be able to put My mind entirely at ease regarding you, won’t I? It is a shame that what you can do is but a pitifully tiny part of what I expect. This being the case, how can you have the gall to seek from Me what you hope for?

Your destination and your fate are very important to you—they are of grave concern. You believe, if you do not do things with great care, it will mean that you cease to have a destination, that you have destroyed your own fate. But has it ever occurred to you that people who expend effort solely for the sake of their destination are laboring in vain? Such efforts are not genuine—they are fakery and deceit. If that is the case, then those who work only for the sake of their destination are on the threshold of their final defeat, for failure in one’s belief in God is caused by deceit. I have previously said that I do not like to be flattered or fawned on, or treated with enthusiasm. I like honest people to face up to My truth and My expectations. Even more, I like it when people are able to show the utmost care and consideration for My heart, and when they are even capable of giving up everything for My sake. Only in this way can My heart be comforted. Right now, how many things are there about you that I dislike? How many things are there about you that I like? Can it be that none of you has realized all the different manifestations of ugliness you have put forth for the sake of your destination?

In My heart, I do not wish to be hurtful to any heart that is positive and aspires upward, and still less do I wish to dampen the energy of anyone who is faithfully doing his duty. Nonetheless, I must remind each of you of your inadequacies and of the filthy soul that lies in the deepest recesses of your hearts. I do so in the hope that you will be able to offer up your true heart in coming face to face with My words, because what I hate most is people’s deceit toward Me. I only hope that, in the last stage of My work, you will be able to give your most outstanding performance, and that you will devote yourselves wholeheartedly, no longer half-hearted. Of course, I also hope that you can all have a good destination. Nevertheless, I still have My requirement, which is for you to make the best decision in offering up to Me your sole and final devotion. If someone does not have that sole devotion, then he is surely a treasured possession of Satan, and I will no longer keep him to use but send him home to be looked after by his parents. My work is a great help to you; what I hope to get from you is a heart that is honest and that aspires upward, but so far My hands remain empty. Think about it: If one day I am still so aggrieved, beyond the scope of words to tell, what will My attitude toward you be then? Will I be as amiable to you then as I am now? Will My heart be as serene then as it is now? Do you understand the feelings of a person who, having painstakingly tilled the field, has not harvested a single grain? Do you understand how greatly a person’s heart is injured when he has been dealt a great blow? Can you taste the bitterness of a person, once so full of hope, who has had to part on bad terms? Have you seen the wrath issuing forth from a person who has been provoked? Can you know the eagerness for revenge of a person who has been treated with enmity and deceit? If you understand the mentality of these people, then I think it should not be difficult for you to imagine the attitude God will have at the time of His retribution! Finally, I hope you all put in serious effort for the sake of your own destination, though you had better not employ deceitful means in your efforts, or else I will continue to be disappointed with you in My heart. And what does such disappointment lead to? Are you not fooling yourselves? Those who take thought for their destination yet ruin it are the people least able to be saved. Even if he were to become exasperated and enraged, who would take pity on such a person? In sum, I still wish for you to have a destination that is both suitable and good, and, even more, I hope that none of you will fall into disaster.

Three Admonitions

As a believer in God, you should be loyal to none other than Him in all things, and be able to conform with His will in all things. Nevertheless, though everyone understands this message, because of the sundry difficulties of man—because of his ignorance, absurdity, and corruption, for example—these truths, which are the most apparent and basic of all, are not wholly evident in him, and so, before your end becomes set in stone, I ought first to tell you a few things that are of the utmost importance to you. Before I continue, you should first understand this: The words I speak are truths directed at all mankind; they are not addressed only to a specific person or type of person. Therefore, you should concentrate on comprehending My words from the standpoint of the truth, and must have an attitude of undivided attention and sincerity; do not ignore a single word or truth that I speak, and do not treat all of the words I speak lightly. In your lives, I see that you have done much that is irrelevant to the truth, and so I expressly ask that you become servants of the truth, that you not be enslaved by wickedness and ugliness, and that you do not trample on the truth or defile any corner of the house of God. This is My admonition to you. Now I shall speak of the topic at hand.

First, for the sake of your fate, you should seek the approval of God. This is to say, since you acknowledge that you are a member of the house of God, you ought then to bring peace of mind to God and satisfy Him in all things. You must, in other words, be principled in your actions and conform to the truth in them. If this is beyond you, then you shall be spurned by God and rejected by every man. Once you have fallen into such a predicament, you cannot then be counted among the house of God, which is precisely what it is meant by not being approved of by God.

Secondly, you ought to know that God likes those who are honest. In essence, God is faithful, and so His words can always be trusted; His actions, furthermore, are faultless and unquestionable, which is why God likes those who are absolutely honest with Him. Honesty means giving your heart to God, being genuine with God in all things, being open with Him in all things, never hiding the facts, not trying to deceive those above and below you, and not doing things only to curry favor with God. In short, to be honest is to be pure in your actions and words, and to deceive neither God nor man. What I say is very simple, but to you it is doubly arduous. Many people would rather be condemned to hell than speak and act honestly. Little wonder that I have other treatment in store for those who are dishonest. Of course, I know full well how difficult it is for you to be honest. Because you are all so clever, so good at measuring people with your own petty yardstick, this makes My work much simpler. And since you each hug your secrets to your bosom, well then, I shall send you, one by one, into disaster to be “schooled” by fire, so that thereafter you may become dead set on your belief in My words. Ultimately, I shall wrest from your mouth the words “God is a faithful God,” whereupon you shall beat upon your breast and lament, “Deceitful is the heart of man!” What will be your state of mind at this time? I imagine you will not be as triumphant as you are now. And much less will you be as “profound and abstruse” as you are now. In the presence of God, some people are all prim and proper, they take pains to be “well-behaved,” yet they bare their fangs and brandish their claws in the presence of the Spirit. Would you number such people among the ranks of the honest? If you are a hypocrite, someone who is skilled in “interpersonal relations,” then I say that you are definitely someone who tries to trifle with God. If your words are riddled with excuses and valueless justifications, then I say that you are someone who is loath to put the truth into practice. If you have many confidences that you are reluctant to share, if you are highly averse to laying bare your secrets—your difficulties—before others to seek the way of the light, then I say that you are someone who will not attain salvation easily, and who will not easily emerge from the darkness. If seeking the way of the truth pleases you well, then you are someone who dwells always in the light. If you are very glad to be a service-doer in the house of God, working diligently and conscientiously in obscurity, always giving and never taking, then I say that you are a loyal saint, because you seek no reward and are simply being an honest person. If you are willing to be candid, if you are willing to expend your all, if you are able to sacrifice your life for God and stand firm in your testimony, if you are honest to the point where you know only to satisfy God and not to consider yourself or take for yourself, then I say that such people are those who are nourished in the light and who shall live forever in the kingdom. You should know whether there is true faith and true loyalty within you, whether you have a record of suffering for God, and whether you have wholly submitted to God. If you lack these, then there remains within you rebelliousness, deceitfulness, greed, and complaint. As your heart is far from honest, you have never received positive recognition from God and never lived in the light. How one’s fate will work out in the end hinges upon whether they have an honest and blood-red heart, and whether they have a pure soul. If you are someone who is very dishonest, someone with a heart of malice, someone with an unclean soul, then you are sure to end up in the place where man is punished, as is written in the record of your fate. If you claim to be very honest, and yet never manage to act in accordance with the truth or to speak a word of truth, then are you still waiting for God to reward you? Do you still hope for God to regard you as the apple of His eye? Is such thinking not preposterous? You deceive God in all things; how could the house of God accommodate one such as you, whose hands are unclean?

The third thing I want to tell you is this: Every person, in the course of living their life of faith in God, has done things that resist and deceive God. Some misdeeds need not be recorded as an offense, but some are unforgivable; for there are many deeds that violate the administrative decrees, which offend the disposition of God. Many who are concerned about their own fates may ask what these deeds are. You should know that you are arrogant and haughty by nature, and unwilling to submit to the facts. For this reason, I shall tell you bit by bit after you have reflected upon yourselves. I exhort you to get a better understanding of the content of the administrative decrees, and to make an effort to know the disposition of God. If not, you will find it difficult to keep your lips sealed, your tongues will wag too freely with high-sounding talk, and you will unwittingly offend the disposition of God and fall into the darkness, losing the presence of the Holy Spirit and the light. Because you are unprincipled in your actions, because you do and say that which you should not, you shall receive a fitting retribution. You should know that though you are unprincipled in word and deed, God is highly principled in both. The reason you receive retribution is because you have offended God, not a person. If, in your life, you commit many offenses against the disposition of God, then you are bound to become a child of hell. To man it may appear that you have only committed a few deeds that are at odds with the truth, and nothing more. Are you aware, however, that in the eyes of God you are already someone for whom there is no more sin offering? Because you have violated the administrative decrees of God more than once and have, moreover, shown no sign of repentance, there is no other recourse but for you to plunge into hell, where God punishes man. A small number of people, while following God, committed some deeds that violated principles, but after being pruned and given guidance, they gradually discovered their own corruption, thereafter entered on the right track of reality, and they remain well-grounded today. Such people are those who shall remain in the end. Nevertheless, it is the honest that I seek; if you are an honest person and someone who acts according to principle, then you can be a confidant of God. If in your actions you do not offend the disposition of God, and seek the will of God, and have a God-fearing heart, then your faith is up to the standard. Whoever does not fear God and does not have a heart that trembles in horror is highly likely to violate the administrative decrees of God. Many serve God on the strength of their passion but have no understanding of the administrative decrees of God, still less any inkling of the implications of His words. And so, with their good intentions, they often wind up doing things that disturb God’s management. In serious cases, they are thrown out, deprived of any further chance of following Him, and are cast into hell, all association with God’s house at an end. These people work in the house of God on the strength of their ignorant good intentions, and end by angering God’s disposition. People bring their ways of serving officials and lords to the house of God and try to put them into play, vainly thinking that they can be applied with effortless ease here. Never do they imagine that God has not the disposition of a lamb, but that of a lion. Therefore, those associating with God for the first time are unable to communicate with Him, for the heart of God is unlike that of man. Only after you understand many truths can you continuously come to know God. This knowledge is not made up of words and doctrines but can be used as a treasure by means of which you enter into close confidence with God, and as proof that He delights in you. If you lack the reality of knowledge and are not equipped with the truth, then your passionate service can only bring upon you the loathing and abhorrence of God. By now you should have figured out that belief in God is no mere study in theology!

Though the words with which I admonish you are brief, all that I have described is what is most lacking in you. You should know that what I speak of now is for the sake of My final work among man, for the sake of determining man’s ending. I do not wish to do much more work that serves no purpose, nor do I wish to continue guiding those people who are as hopeless as rotten wood, much less to continue leading those who secretly harbor ill intentions. Perhaps one day you will understand the earnest intentions behind My words and the contributions I have made for mankind. Perhaps one day you will grasp the message that enables you to decide your own ending.

Transgressions Will Lead Man to Hell

I have given you many warnings and bestowed upon you many truths intended to conquer you. By now, you all feel significantly more enriched than you did in the past, have come to understand many principles of how a person should be, and you have come to possess so much of the common sense that faithful people should have. All of this is the harvest you have reaped over the course of many years. I do not deny your achievements, but I must also say quite frankly that I also do not deny the numerous rebellions and betrayals you have committed against Me over these many years, for there is not one saint among you. You are, without exception, people who have been corrupted by Satan; you are enemies of Christ. To date, your transgressions and rebellions have been too numerous to count, so it can hardly be considered strange that I am always badgering you. I do not wish to coexist with you in this manner—but for the sake of your futures, for the sake of your destinations, I will, here and now, nag you once more. I hope you will indulge Me and, moreover, that you will be able to believe My every utterance and infer the deep implications of My words. Do not doubt what I say, let alone pick up My words as you wish and toss them aside at will; this I find intolerable. Do not judge My words, and still less should you take them lightly or say that I am always tempting you or, worse, that what I have told you is inaccurate. These things I also find intolerable. Because you treat Me and what I say with such suspicion, never taking My words on board and ignoring Me, I tell each of you in all seriousness: Do not link what I say with philosophy; do not link My words with the lies of charlatans. Much less should you respond to My words with contempt. Perhaps no one in the future will be able to tell you what I am telling you, or speak to you so charitably, or, still less, walk you through these points as patiently. You will spend those days to come recalling the good times, or sobbing out loud or groaning in pain, or you will be living through dark nights without the provision of a shred of truth or life, or just waiting hopelessly, or dwelling in such bitter regret that you lose all reason…. Virtually none of you can escape these possibilities. Because none of you occupy a seat from which you truly worship God, but immerse yourselves in the world of licentiousness and evil, mixing into your beliefs, into your spirits, souls, and bodies, so many things that have nothing to do with life and truth and which actually are in opposition to them. What I therefore hope for you is that you can be brought to the path of light. My sole hope is that you can become capable of caring for yourselves, of taking care of yourselves, and that you do not place so much emphasis on your destination while viewing your behavior and transgressions with indifference.

For a long time, people who believe in God have all been earnestly hoping for a beautiful destination, and all of God’s believers hope that good fortune will suddenly come to them. They all hope that before they know it, they will find themselves peacefully seated at one place or another in heaven. But I say that these people, with their lovely thoughts, have never known whether they are qualified to receive such good fortune that falls down from heaven or even to sit on a seat there. You, at present, have a good knowledge of yourselves, yet you still hope to escape the disasters of the last days and the hand of the Almighty when He punishes the evil ones. It seems as though having sweet dreams and wanting things just how they like is a common feature of all people whom Satan has corrupted, and not some stroke of genius by any lone individual. Even so, I still wish to put an end to these extravagant desires of yours, as well as your eagerness to gain blessings. Given that your transgressions are numerous, and that the fact of your rebelliousness is ever-growing, how can these things fit with your lovely blueprints for the future? If you want to make mistakes as you please, with nothing holding you back, yet at the same time you still want your dreams to come true, then I urge you to continue in your stupor and never wake up—for yours is an empty dream and in the presence of the righteous God, He will not make an exception for you. If you simply want your dreams to come true, then never dream; rather, forever face the truth and the facts. This is the only way that you can be saved. What, in concrete terms, are the steps of this method?

First, take a look at all your transgressions, and examine any behavior and thoughts you have that do not conform to the truth.

This is one thing that you can do easily, and I believe that all intelligent people are able to do this. However, those who never know what is meant by transgression and truth are the exception, because on a fundamental level, they are not intelligent people. I am talking to people who have been approved by God, are honest, have not seriously violated any administrative decrees, and can easily discern their own transgressions. Though this one thing I require of you is easy to accomplish, it is not the only thing that I require of you. No matter what, I hope that you will not laugh in private at this requirement, and especially that you will not look down on it or take it lightly. You should treat it seriously, and not dismiss it.

Secondly, for each of your transgressions and rebellions, you should look for a corresponding truth, and then use these truths to resolve those issues. After that, replace your transgressive acts and rebellious thoughts and acts with the practice of the truth.

Thirdly, you should be an honest person, not someone who is always being clever and constantly deceitful. (Here I am asking you again to be an honest person.)

If you can accomplish all three of these things, then you are one of the fortunate—a person whose dreams come true and who receives good fortune. Perhaps you will treat these three unappealing requirements seriously, or perhaps you will treat them irresponsibly. Whichever, My purpose is to fulfill your dreams and put your ideals into practice, not to make fun of you or to make a fool out of you.

My demands may be simple, but what I am telling you is not so simple as one plus one equals two. If all you do is to talk casually about this, or ramble on about empty, high-sounding statements, then your blueprints and your wishes will forever be but a blank page. I will have no sense of pity for those of you who suffer for so many years and work so hard, yet have nothing to show for it. On the contrary, I will treat those who have not met My demands with punishment, not rewards, much less any sympathy. You might imagine that, having been a follower for so many years, you have put in hard work no matter what, and you should be granted a bowl of rice in God’s house just for being a service-doer. I would say that the majority of you think this way, for you have always pursued the principle of how to take advantage of things and not be taken advantage of. Thus, I am telling you now in all seriousness: I do not care how meritorious your hard work is, how impressive your qualifications, how closely you follow Me, how renowned you are, or how much you have improved your attitude; as long as you have not met My demands, you will never be able to win My praise. Write off all those ideas and calculations of yours as soon as possible, and start treating My requirements seriously; otherwise, I will turn everyone to ash in order to bring an end to My work and, at worst turn My years of work and suffering into nothing, for I cannot bring My enemies and those people who reek of evil and have Satan’s appearance into My kingdom or take them into the next age.

I have a lot of hopes. I hope you can conduct yourselves in a proper and well-behaved manner, faithfully perform your duty, possess truth and humanity, be people who can give up everything they have and even their lives for God, and so on. All of these hopes stem from your insufficiencies and your corruption and rebelliousness. If none of the conversations that I have had with you has been sufficient to attract your attention, then it is likely that all I can do now is to say no more. However, you understand what the results of that would be. It is not often that I rest, so if I do not speak, I will do something for people to look at. I could make someone’s tongue rot, or cause someone to die dismembered, or give people nerve abnormalities and cause them to look hideous in so many ways. Then again, I could make people endure torments I have brewed up specifically for them. This way I would feel glad, very happy, and greatly pleased. It has always been said that “Good is repaid with good, and evil with evil,” so why not now? If you wish to oppose Me, and make some judgment about Me, then I will rot your mouth, and that will delight Me to no end. This is because ultimately, what you have done is not the truth, still less has it anything to do with life, whereas everything that I do is the truth; all My actions are relevant to the principles of My work and the administrative decrees that I set forth. Therefore, I urge each of you to accumulate some virtue, stop committing so much evil, and heed My demands in your free time. I then will feel joyful. If you were to contribute (or donate) to truth even one-thousandth of the effort that you put into the flesh, then I say you would not frequently make transgressions and have rotted mouths. Is this not obvious?

The more transgressions you commit, the fewer opportunities you will have to obtain a good destination. Conversely, the fewer transgressions you make, the better your chances become of being praised by God. If your transgressions increase to the point that it is impossible for Me to forgive you, then you will have utterly wasted your chances of being forgiven. As such, your destination will not be above, but below. If you do not believe Me, then be bold and do wrong, and see what that gets you. If you are a person whose practice of the truth is very earnest, then you surely will have an opportunity to be forgiven for your transgressions, and you will rebel less and less frequently. If you are a person who is unwilling to practice the truth, then your transgressions before God will surely increase in number and you will rebel more and more frequently, until you reach the limit, which will be the time of your total destruction. This will be when your pleasant dream of receiving blessings will be ruined. Do not regard your transgressions as the mere mistakes of an immature or foolish person; do not use the excuse that you did not practice the truth because your poor caliber had made it impossible to do so. Moreover, do not simply regard the transgressions you have committed as the acts of someone who did not know any better. If you are good at forgiving yourself and treating yourself with generosity, then I say you are a coward who will never gain the truth, nor will your transgressions ever cease to haunt you; they will keep you from ever meeting the demands of the truth, and cause you to forever remain a loyal companion of Satan. My advice to you is still this: Do not pay attention only to your destination while failing to notice your hidden transgressions; take transgressions seriously, and do not overlook any of them out of concern for your destination.

It Is Very Important to Understand God’s Disposition

There are many things I hope for you to achieve, yet not all of your actions, not everything about your lives, are able to fulfill what I ask, so I have no choice but to come straight to the point and explain to you My intentions. Given that your discernment is poor and your appreciation is likewise poor, you are almost utterly ignorant of My disposition and essence—and thus it is a matter of urgency that I inform you about them. No matter how much you previously understood, regardless of whether you wish to understand these issues, I must still explain them to you in detail. These issues are not entirely foreign to you, yet you lack much understanding, much familiarity, with the meaning contained within them. Many of you have only some dim understanding, and a partial and incomplete one at that. To help you to better practice the truth—to better practice My words—I think these are the issues you must be aware of first and foremost. If not, your faith will remain vague, hypocritical, and filled with the trappings of religion. If you do not understand the disposition of God, then it will be impossible for you to do the work you should do for Him. If you do not know the essence of God, then it will be impossible for you to have fear and dread of Him; instead, there will be only heedless perfunctoriness and prevarication, and moreover, incorrigible blasphemy. Although understanding God’s disposition is indeed important, and knowing God’s essence cannot be overlooked, no one has ever thoroughly examined or delved into these issues. It is plain to see that you have all dismissed the administrative decrees I have issued. If you do not understand the disposition of God, then you will be very likely to offend His disposition. Offending His disposition is tantamount to provoking the ire of God Himself, in which case the ultimate fruit of your actions will be the violation of the administrative decrees. Now you should realize that when you know God’s essence, so too can you understand His disposition—and when you understand His disposition, so too will you have understood the administrative decrees. Needless to say, much of what is contained within the administrative decrees touches upon the disposition of God, but not all of His disposition is expressed within the administrative decrees; hence, you must go a step further in developing your understanding of God’s disposition.

I speak with you today not as in ordinary conversation, so it behooves you to approach My words carefully and, moreover, to reflect deeply upon them. What I mean by this is that you have devoted too little effort to the words I have spoken. You are even less willing to ponder the disposition of God; seldom does anyone put effort into it. For this reason I say that your faith is nothing more than grandiloquence. Even now, not a single one of you has dedicated any serious effort to your most vital weakness. You have let Me down after all the pains I have taken for you. No wonder that you have no regard for God and your lives are devoid of truth. How can such people be deemed saints? Heaven’s law will not tolerate such a thing! Since you have so little understanding of this, I have no choice but to expend more breath.

The disposition of God is a subject that seems very abstract to everyone and is, moreover, one that is not easy for anyone to accept, for His disposition is unlike a human being’s personality. God, too, has His own emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness, but these emotions differ from those of man. God is what He is and He has what He has. All that He expresses and reveals are representations of His essence and of His identity. What He is and what He has, as well as His essence and identity, are things that cannot be replaced by any man. His disposition encompasses His love for mankind, solace of mankind, hatred of mankind, and even more, a thorough understanding of mankind. The personality of man, however, may be optimistic, lively, or unfeeling. The disposition of God is one that belongs to the Sovereign of all things and living beings, to the Lord of all creation. His disposition represents honor, power, nobility, greatness, and most of all, supremacy. His disposition is the symbol of authority, the symbol of all that is just, the symbol of all that is beautiful and good. More than that, it is a symbol of Him who cannot be overcome or invaded by the darkness and any enemy force, as well as a symbol of Him who cannot be offended (nor will He tolerate being offended) by any created being. His disposition is the symbol of the highest power. No person or persons can or may disturb His work or His disposition. But the personality of man is no more than a mere symbol of the slight superiority of man over beast. Man in and of himself has no authority, no autonomy, and no ability to transcend the self, but is in his essence one who cowers at the mercy of all manner of people, events, and things. The joy of God is due to the existence and emergence of justice and light, because of the destruction of darkness and evil. He takes delight in bringing the light and a good life to mankind; His joy is a just joy, a symbol of the existence of all that is positive and, even more, a symbol of auspiciousness. The anger of God is due to the harm that the existence and disturbance of injustice brings upon His mankind, because of the existence of evil and darkness, because of the existence of things that drive out the truth, and even more, because of the existence of things that oppose what is good and beautiful. His anger is a symbol that all things negative no longer exist and, even more than that, it is a symbol of His holiness. His sorrow is due to mankind, for whom He has hopes but who has fallen into darkness, because the work He does on man does not come up to His expectations, and because the mankind He loves cannot all live in the light. He feels sorrow for the innocent mankind, for the honest but ignorant man, and for the man who is good but lacking in his own views. His sorrow is a symbol of His goodness and of His mercy, a symbol of beauty and of kindness. His happiness, of course, comes from defeating His enemies and gaining the good faith of man. More than this, it arises from the expulsion and destruction of all enemy forces, and because mankind receives a good and peaceful life. The happiness of God is unlike the joy of man; rather, it is the feeling of garnering good fruits, a feeling even greater than joy. His happiness is a symbol of mankind breaking free of suffering from this time forth, and a symbol of mankind entering a world of light. The emotions of mankind, on the other hand, all arise for the sake of his own interests, not for justice, light, or what is beautiful, and least of all for the grace bestowed by Heaven. The emotions of mankind are selfish and belong to the world of darkness. They do not exist for the sake of the will, much less for the plan of God, and so man and God can never be spoken of in the same breath. God is forever supreme and ever honorable, while man is forever base, forever worthless. This is because God is forever making sacrifices and devoting Himself to mankind; man, however, forever takes and strives only for himself. God is forever taking pains for mankind’s survival, yet man never contributes anything for the sake of the light or for justice. Even if man makes an effort for a time, it cannot withstand a single blow, for the effort of man is always for his own sake and not for others. Man is always selfish, while God is forever selfless. God is the source of all that is just, good, and beautiful, while man is he who succeeds to and makes manifest all ugliness and evil. God will never alter His essence of justice and beauty, yet man is perfectly capable, at any time and in any situation, of betraying justice and straying far from God.

Every sentence I have spoken contains within it the disposition of God. You would do well to ponder My words carefully, and you will surely profit greatly from them. The essence of God is very difficult to grasp, but I trust that you all have at least some idea about the disposition of God. I hope, then, that you will have more to show Me of things you have done that do not offend the disposition of God. Then will I be reassured. For example, keep God in your heart at all times. When you act, do so according to His words. Seek out His intentions in all things, and refrain from doing that which disrespects and dishonors God. Even less should you put God in the back of your mind to fill the future void in your heart. If you do this, you will have offended the disposition of God. Again, supposing you never make blasphemous remarks or complaints against God throughout your life, and again, supposing you are able to discharge properly all that He has entrusted to you and also to submit to all His words throughout your life, then you will have avoided transgressing against the administrative decrees. For example, if you have ever said, “Why do I not think that He is God?” “I think that these words are nothing more than some enlightenment of the Holy Spirit,” “In my opinion, not everything God does is necessarily right,” “The humanity of God is not superior to mine,” “The words of God are simply not believable,” or other such judgmental remarks, then I exhort you to confess and repent your sins more often. Otherwise, you will never have a chance at forgiveness, for you offend not a man, but God Himself. You may believe that you are judging a man, but the Spirit of God does not consider it that way. Your disrespect of His flesh is equal to disrespecting Him. This being so, have you not offended God’s disposition? You must remember that all that is done by the Spirit of God is done in order to safeguard His work in the flesh and in order that this work be done well. If you neglect this, then I say that you are someone who will never be able to succeed in believing in God. For you have provoked the wrath of God, and so He shall use fitting punishment to teach you a lesson.

Coming to know the essence of God is no trifling matter. You must understand His disposition. In this way, you will, gradually and unknowingly, come to know the essence of God. When you have entered into this knowledge, you will find yourself stepping into a higher and more beautiful state. In the end, you will come to feel ashamed of your hideous soul, and, moreover, will feel that there is nowhere to hide from your shame. At that time, there will be less and less in your conduct to offend the disposition of God, your heart will come closer and closer to that of God, and a love for Him will gradually grow in your heart. This is a sign of mankind entering a beautiful state. But as yet, you have not attained this. As you all rush about for the sake of your destiny, who has any interest in trying to know the essence of God? Should this continue, you will unknowingly transgress against the administrative decrees, for you understand far too little of the disposition of God. So is not what you do now laying down a foundation for your offenses against the disposition of God? That I ask you to understand the disposition of God is not divorced from My work. For if you transgress against the administrative decrees often, who among you will escape punishment? Would My work then not have been entirely in vain? Therefore, I still ask that, in addition to scrutinizing your own conduct, you be cautious in the steps you take. This is the higher demand that I make of you, and I hope that you will all consider it carefully and give it your earnest regard. Should a day come when your actions provoke Me to a towering rage, then the consequences will be yours alone to consider, and there will be no one else to bear the punishment in your place.

How to Know the God on Earth

You all wish to be rewarded before God and favored by God; everyone hopes for such things when they start believing in God, for everyone is preoccupied with the pursuit of higher things, and no one wants to fall behind others. This is just how people are. Precisely for this reason, many among you are constantly trying to curry favor with the God in heaven, yet in truth, your loyalty and candor toward God are far less than your loyalty and candor to yourselves. Why do I say this? Because I do not acknowledge your loyalty to God at all and, furthermore, because I deny the existence of the God that is in your hearts. Which is to say, the God that you worship, the vague God that you admire, does not exist at all. The reason I can say this so definitively is that you are too far from the true God. The reason for your loyalty is the idol within your hearts; as for Me, meanwhile, the God whom you look upon as neither great nor small, you merely acknowledge with words. When I say you are far from God, I mean that you are distant from the true God, while the vague God seems near at hand. When I say, “not great,” it is in reference to how the God that you believe in this day appears to merely be a person without great abilities, a person who is not very lofty. And when I say “not small,” this means that, although this person cannot summon the wind and command the rain, He is nonetheless able to call upon the Spirit of God to do work that shakes the heavens and earth, leaving people completely confounded. Outwardly, you all appear highly obedient to this Christ on earth, yet in essence, you do not have faith in Him, nor do you love Him. Which is to say, the one you truly believe in is that vague God of your own feelings, and the one you truly love is the God you yearn for night and day, yet have never seen in person. Toward this Christ, your faith is but fractional, and your love nothing. Faith means belief and trust; love means adoration and admiration in one’s heart, never parting. Yet your faith in and love of the Christ of today fall far short of this. When it comes to faith, how do you have faith in Him? When it comes to love, in what way do you love Him? You have simply no understanding of His disposition, still less do you know His essence, so how do you have faith in Him? Where is the reality of your faith in Him? How do you love Him? Where is the reality of your love for Him?

Many have followed Me without hesitation to this day. So, too, have you suffered much fatigue over the past several years. The innate character and habits of each of you I have grasped with crystal clarity; interacting with every one of you has been tremendously arduous. The pity is that, though I have grasped much about you, you understand nothing of Me. No wonder people say you fell for someone’s trick during a moment of confusion. Indeed, you understand nothing of My disposition, much less can you fathom what is in My mind. Today, your misunderstandings about Me are snowballing, and your faith in Me remains a confused faith. Instead of saying that you have faith in Me, it would be more apt to say that you are all trying to curry favor with Me and toady up to Me. Your motives are very simple: I will follow whoever can reward me, and I will believe in whoever allows me to escape the great disasters, whether he be God or any certain God. None of this is of any concern to me. There are many such people among you, and this state is very serious. If, one day, there were a test of how many among you had faith in Christ because of insight into His essence, then I am afraid that not a single one of you would be satisfactory to Me. So it would not hurt for each of you to consider this question: The God you believe in is vastly different from Me, and this being so, what then is the essence of your faith in God? The more you believe in your so-called God, the further you stray from Me. What, then, is the essence of this issue? It’s certain that none of you has ever considered such a question, but has the gravity of it occurred to you? Have you given thought to the consequences of continuing to believe in this way?

Today, you face many issues, and not one of you is adept at problem-solving. Should this situation continue, the only ones who stand to lose are yourselves. I will help you to identify the issues, but solving them is up to you.

I take pleasure in those who are not suspicious of others, and I like those who readily accept the truth; toward these two kinds of people I show great care, for in My eyes they are honest people. If you are deceitful, then you will be guarded and suspicious toward all people and matters, and thus your faith in Me will be built upon a foundation of suspicion. I could never acknowledge such faith. Lacking true faith, you are even more devoid of true love. And if you are liable to doubt God and speculate about Him at will, then you are, without question, the most deceitful of all people. You speculate whether God can be like man: unpardonably sinful, of petty character, devoid of fairness and reason, lacking a sense of justice, given to vicious tactics, treacherous and cunning, pleased by evil and darkness, and so on. Is not the reason that people have such thoughts because they lack the slightest knowledge of God? Such faith is nothing short of sin! There are even some who believe that the ones who please Me are precisely those who flatter and bootlick, and that those lacking in such skills will be unwelcome in the house of God and will lose their place there. Is this the only knowledge you have acquired after all these years? Is this what you have gained? And your knowledge of Me does not stop at these misunderstandings; even worse is your blasphemy against God’s Spirit and vilification of Heaven. This is why I say that such faith as yours will only cause you to stray further from Me and be in greater opposition against Me. Throughout many years of work, you have seen many truths, but do you know what My ears have heard? How many among you are willing to accept the truth? You all believe you are willing to pay the price for the truth, but how many of you have truly suffered for the truth? There is nothing but unrighteousness in your hearts, which makes you think that everyone, no matter who they are, is equally deceitful and crooked—to the point that you even believe that God incarnate could, like a normal person, be without a kind heart or benevolent love. More than that, you believe that a noble character and a merciful, benevolent nature exist only within the God in heaven. You believe that such a saint does not exist, that only darkness and evil reign on earth, while God is something with which people entrust their longing for the good and beautiful, a legendary figure fabricated by them. In your minds, the God in heaven is very upstanding, righteous, and great, worthy of worship and admiration; this God on earth, meanwhile, is but a substitute, and an instrument, of the God in heaven. You believe this God could not be the equal of the God in heaven, much less be mentioned in the same breath as Him. When it comes to the greatness and honor of God, they belong to the glory of the God in heaven, but when it comes to the nature and the corruption of man, they are attributes in which the God on earth has a part. The God in heaven is eternally lofty, while the God on earth is forever insignificant, weak, and incompetent. The God in heaven is not given to fleshly feelings, only righteousness, while the God on earth only has selfish motives and is without any fairness or reason. The God in heaven has not the slightest crookedness and is forever faithful, while the God on earth always has a dishonest side. The God in heaven loves man dearly, while the God on earth shows man inadequate care, even neglecting him entirely. This fallacious knowledge has long been kept within your hearts and may also be perpetuated in the future. You regard all deeds of Christ from the standpoint of the unrighteous and evaluate all His work, as well as His identity and essence, from the perspective of the evil. You have made a grave mistake and done that which has never been done by those coming before you. That is, you serve only the lofty God in heaven with a crown upon His head, and never attend to the God whom you regard as so insignificant that He is invisible to you. Is this not your sin? Is this not a classic example of your offense against the disposition of God? You worship the God in heaven. You adore lofty images and esteem those distinguished for their eloquence. You are gladly commanded by the God that fills your hands with riches, and crave the God who can fulfill your every desire. The only One you do not worship is this God who is not lofty; the only thing you hate is association with this God whom no man can regard highly. The only thing you are unwilling to do is to serve this God who has never given you a single penny, and the only One who is unable to make you yearn for Him is this unlovely God. This God cannot enable you to broaden your horizons, to feel as if you have found a treasure, much less fulfill what you wish. Why, then, do you follow Him? Have you given thought to questions like this? What you do does not merely offend this Christ; more importantly, it offends the God in heaven. This is not, I think, the purpose of your faith in God!

You long for God to delight in you, yet you are far from God. What is the matter here? You accept only His words, but not His pruning, much less are you able to accept His every arrangement, to have complete faith in Him. What, then, is the matter here? In the final analysis, your faith is an empty eggshell, one that could never produce a chick. For your faith has not brought you the truth or given you the life, but has instead given you an illusory sense of sustenance and hope. It is this sense of sustenance and hope that is your aim in believing in God, not the truth and the life. Thus do I say that the course of your faith in God has been none other than trying to curry the favor of God through servility and shamelessness, and can in no way be deemed true faith. How could a chick be born of faith such as this? In other words, what can faith such as this accomplish? The purpose of your faith in God is to use Him to achieve your own aims. Is this not further a fact of your offense against the disposition of God? You believe in the existence of the God in heaven and deny that of the God on earth, yet I do not recognize your views; I commend only those people who keep their feet on the ground and serve the God on earth, but never those who never acknowledge the Christ who is on earth. No matter how loyal such people are to the God in heaven, in the end they will not escape My hand that punishes the evil. These people are the evil; they are the evil ones who oppose God and have never gladly submitted to Christ. Of course, their number includes all those who do not know and, further, do not acknowledge Christ. Do you believe that you can act as you please toward Christ as long as you are loyal to the God in heaven? Wrong! Your ignorance of Christ is ignorance of the God in heaven. No matter how loyal you are to the God in heaven, it is merely empty talk and pretense, for the God on earth is not only instrumental in man receiving the truth and having more profound knowledge, but more than that is instrumental in the condemnation of man and afterward in seizing the facts to punish the evil. Have you understood the beneficial and harmful outcomes here? Have you experienced them? I wish for you one day soon to understand this truth: To know God, you must know not only the God in heaven but, even more importantly, the God on earth. Do not get your priorities confused or allow the secondary to supersede the principal. Only in this way can you truly build a good relationship with God, become closer to God, and bring your heart closer to Him. If you have been of the faith for many years and have long associated with Me, yet remain distant from Me, then I say it must be that you often offend the disposition of God, and your end will be very difficult to reckon. If the many years of association with Me have not only failed to change you into a person possessed of humanity and the truth, but, moreover, have ingrained your evil ways into your nature, and you not only have twice as much arrogance as before, but your misunderstandings of Me have also multiplied, such that you come to regard Me as your little sidekick, then I say that your affliction is no longer skin deep but has penetrated to your very bones. All that remains is for you to wait for your funeral arrangements to be made. You need not beseech Me then to be your God, for you have committed a sin deserving of death, an unforgivable sin. Even if I could have mercy on you, the God in heaven will insist on taking your life, for your offense against the disposition of God is no ordinary problem, but one of a very grave nature. When the time comes, do not blame Me for not telling you beforehand. It all comes back to this: When you associate with Christ—the God on earth—as an ordinary person, that is, when you believe that this God is nothing but a person, it is then that you shall perish. This is My only admonishment to you all.

A Very Serious Problem: Betrayal (1)

Very soon, My work will be finished, and many years together have become an unbearable memory. I have unceasingly repeated My words and constantly unfurled My new work. Of course, My advice is a necessary component of each piece of work that I do. Without My counsel, you would all wander astray and even find yourselves completely at a loss. My work is now about to finish and in its final stage. I still wish to do the work of giving counsel, that is, to offer words of advice for you to hear. I hope only that you are able not to let the pains I have taken go to waste, and, more than that, that you can understand the thoughtful care I have taken, and treat My words as the foundation of how you behave as a human being. Whether or not they are the kind of words to which you are willing to listen, whether or not you enjoy accepting them or can only accept them with discomfort, you must treat them seriously. Otherwise, your casual and unconcerned dispositions and demeanors will upset Me seriously and, indeed, disgust Me. I very much hope all of you can read My words over and over again—thousands of times—and that you may even come to know them by heart. Only in this way will you be able not to fail My expectations of you. However, none of you is living like this now. On the contrary, you are all immersed in a debauched life, a life of eating and drinking to your heart’s content, and none of you uses My words to enrich your heart and soul. For this reason, I have come to a conclusion about mankind’s true countenance: Man can betray Me at any time, and no one can be absolutely faithful to My words.

“Man has been so corrupted by Satan that he no longer has the appearance of man.” The majority of people now recognize this phrase to an extent. I say this because the “recognition” to which I refer is merely a kind of superficial acknowledgment, as opposed to true knowledge. As none of you can evaluate yourself accurately nor dissect yourself thoroughly, you remain equivocal about My words. But this time, I am using facts to explain a most serious problem that exists within you. That problem is betrayal. All of you are familiar with the word “betrayal,” because most people have done something that betrays another, such as a husband betraying his wife, a wife betraying her husband, a son betraying his father, a daughter betraying her mother, a slave betraying his master, friends betraying each other, relatives betraying each other, sellers betraying buyers, and so forth. All of these examples contain the essence of betrayal. In short, betrayal is a form of behavior that breaks a promise, violates moral principles, or acts counter to human ethics, demonstrating a loss of humanity. Generally speaking, as a human being who has been born into this world, you will have done something that constitutes violation of the truth, no matter if you remember having ever done something to betray another person, or if you have betrayed others many times before. Since you are capable of betraying your parents or friends, then you are capable of betraying others, and you are moreover capable of betraying Me and doing things I despise. In other words, betrayal is not a mere superficially immoral behavior, but something that conflicts with the truth. This is precisely the source of mankind’s resistance and rebellion against Me. This is why I have summarized it in the following statement: Betrayal is man’s nature, and this nature is the great enemy of each person’s accord with Me.

Behavior that cannot submit to Me absolutely is betrayal. Behavior that cannot be loyal to Me is betrayal. Cheating Me and using lies to deceive Me is betrayal. Harboring many notions and spreading them everywhere is betrayal. Being unable to uphold My testimonies and interests is betrayal. Offering false smiles when far from Me in heart is betrayal. These are all acts of betrayal of which you have always been capable, and they are commonplace among you. None of you may think of this as a problem, but that is not what I think. I cannot treat a person’s betrayal of Me as a trifling matter, and I certainly cannot ignore it. Now, when I am at work among you, you behave in this way—if the day comes when there is no one to watch over you, will you not be as bandits who have declared themselves kings of their own little mountains? When that happens and you cause a catastrophe, who will be there to clean up after you? You think some acts of betrayal are mere occasional incidents, not your persistent behavior, and do not merit being discussed with such severity, in a way that injures your pride. If you truly think so, then you lack sense. To think so is to be a specimen and archetype of rebellion. Man’s nature is his life; it is a principle on which he relies to survive, and he cannot change it. Take the nature of betrayal as an example. If you can do something to betray a relative or friend, it proves that it is part of your life and a nature with which you were born. This is something nobody can deny. For example, if a person enjoys stealing from others, then this enjoyment of stealing is a part of their life, though they may steal sometimes and not steal sometimes. Whether they steal or not, it cannot prove that their stealing is just a type of behavior. Rather, it proves that their stealing is a part of their life—that is, their nature. Some will ask: Since it is their nature, then why, when they see nice things, do they sometimes not steal them? The answer is very simple. There are many reasons they do not steal. They may not steal something because it is too large to snatch from under watchful eyes, or because there is no suitable time to act, or something is too expensive, guarded too tightly, or perhaps they have no particular interest in it, or cannot see what use it may have to them, and so forth. All of these reasons are possible. But no matter what, whether they steal something or not, it cannot prove that this thought only exists as a momentary, passing flash. On the contrary, it is a part of their nature that is hard to change for the better. Such a person is not satisfied with stealing just once; such thoughts of claiming others’ possessions as their own arise whenever they encounter something nice, or a suitable situation. This is why I say the origin of this thought is not something that is simply picked up every now and then, but is in this person’s own nature.

Anyone can use their own words and actions to represent their true countenance. This true countenance is, of course, their nature. If you are someone who speaks in a tortuous way, then you have a tortuous nature. If your nature is deceitful, then you act in a sly way, and you make it very easy for others to be tricked by you. If your nature is sinister, your words might be pleasant to hear, but your actions cannot conceal your sinister tricks. If your nature is lazy, then all you say is meant to shirk responsibility for your perfunctoriness and laziness, and your actions will be slow and perfunctory, and quite adept at concealing the truth. If your nature is empathetic, then your words will be reasonable, and your actions, too, will conform well with the truth. If your nature is loyal, then your words are certainly sincere and the way you act is grounded, free of anything that might make your master uneasy. If your nature is lustful or greedy for money, then your heart will often be filled by these things, and you will unwittingly commit deviant, immoral acts that people will not forget lightly and that will disgust people. Just as I have said, if you have a nature of betrayal, then you can hardly extricate yourself from it. Do not trust to luck that if you have not wronged others, then you do not have a nature of betrayal. If that is what you think then, truly, you are revolting. All My words, each time I speak, are targeted at all people, not just one person or one type of person. Just because you have not betrayed Me in one matter does not prove that you cannot betray Me in any matter. Some people, during setbacks in their marriage, lose their confidence in seeking the truth. Some people forsake their obligation to be loyal to Me during a family breakdown. Some people abandon Me to seek a moment of joy and excitement. Some people would rather fall into a dark ravine than live in the light and gain the delight of the work of the Holy Spirit. Some people ignore the advice of friends for the sake of satisfying their lust for wealth, and even now cannot acknowledge their mistake and change their course. Some people live only temporarily under My name in order to receive My protection, while others devote only a little to Me under duress because they cling to life and fear death. Are not these and other immoral actions, which are, moreover, without integrity, just behaviors with which people have long betrayed Me deep in their hearts? Of course, I know people do not plan in advance to betray Me; their betrayal is a natural revelation of their nature. Nobody wants to betray Me, and nobody is happy because they have done something to betray Me. On the contrary, they are trembling with fear, are they not? So, are you thinking of how to redeem these betrayals, and how to change the current situation?

A Very Serious Problem: Betrayal (2)

Man’s nature is quite different from My essence, for man’s corrupt nature originates entirely from Satan; man’s nature has been processed and corrupted by Satan. That is, man lives under the influence of its evil and ugliness. Man does not grow in a world of truth or a holy environment, and still less does man live in the light. Therefore, it is not possible for anyone to possess truth within their nature from the moment of birth, and less can anyone be born with an essence that fears and submits to God. On the contrary, people are possessed of a nature that resists God, rebels against God, and has no love for the truth. This nature is the problem I want to discuss—betrayal. Betrayal is the source of each person’s resistance to God. This is a problem that exists only in man, and not in Me. Some will ask: Since all men live in the world just as Christ does, why is it that all men have natures that betray God, yet Christ does not? This is a problem that must be explained clearly to you.

The basis of mankind’s existence is repeated reincarnation of the soul. In other words, every person gains a human life in the flesh when their soul is reincarnated. After a person’s body is born, its life continues until the flesh ultimately reaches its limits, which is the final moment, when the soul leaves its shell. This process repeats again and again, with a person’s soul coming and going time after time, and thus the existence of mankind is maintained. The life of flesh is also the life of man’s soul, and man’s soul supports the existence of man’s flesh. That is to say, each person’s life comes from their soul, and life is not inherent to the flesh. Thus, man’s nature comes from the soul, not from the flesh. Only the soul of each person knows how they have experienced Satan’s temptations, affliction, and corruption. These things are unknowable to the flesh of man. Therefore, mankind unwittingly becomes ever darker, ever filthier, and ever more evil, while the distance between man and Myself grows ever greater, and life becomes ever darker for mankind. Satan holds the souls of mankind in its grasp, so, of course, man’s flesh has also been occupied by Satan. How could such flesh and such a mankind not resist God? How could they be innately compatible with Him? The reason I cast Satan down into midair is because it betrayed Me. How could humans, then, be free of their involvement? This is why betrayal is human nature. I trust that once you understand this reasoning, you should also have some measure of belief in the essence of Christ. The flesh worn by the Spirit of God is God’s own flesh. The Spirit of God is supreme; He is almighty, holy, and righteous. Likewise, His flesh is also supreme, almighty, holy, and righteous. Such a flesh can only do that which is righteous and beneficial to mankind, that which is holy, glorious, and mighty; He is incapable of doing anything that violates the truth, that violates morality and justice, and much less is He capable of anything that would betray God’s Spirit. The Spirit of God is holy, and thus His flesh is incorruptible by Satan; His flesh is of a different essence than the flesh of man. For it is man, not God, who is corrupted by Satan; Satan could not possibly corrupt the flesh of God. Thus, despite the fact that man and Christ dwell within the same space, it is only man who is possessed, used, and entrapped by Satan. By contrast, Christ is eternally impervious to Satan’s corruption, because Satan will never be capable of ascending to the highest place, and will never be able to draw near to God. Today, you should all understand that it is only mankind, corrupted as it is by Satan, that betrays Me. Betrayal will never be an issue that involves Christ in the least.

All souls corrupted by Satan are held thrall in Satan’s power. Only those who believe in Christ have been made separate, saved from Satan’s camp, and brought into today’s kingdom. These people no longer live under Satan’s influence. Even so, man’s nature is still rooted in man’s flesh, which is to say that even though your souls have been saved, your nature is still as it was before, and the chance that you will betray Me remains one hundred percent. This is why My work lasts so long, as your nature is intractable. Now, you are all undergoing hardships to the best of your ability as you do your duties, yet each of you is capable of betraying Me and returning to Satan’s power, to its camp, and going back to your old lives—this is an undeniable fact. At that time, it will not be possible for you to present a shred of humanity or human likeness, as you do now. In serious cases, you will be destroyed and, more than that, doomed eternally, punished severely, never to be reincarnated again. This is the problem laid before you. I am reminding you in this way, firstly, so that My work will not have been in vain, and secondly, so that you may all live in days of light. In truth, whether My work is in vain is not the crucial problem. What is crucial is that you are able to have happy lives and a wonderful future. My work is the work of saving people’s souls. If your soul falls into Satan’s hands, your body will not live in peace. If I am protecting your body, your soul will also surely be under My care. If I really loathe you, your body and soul will fall at once into Satan’s hands. Can you imagine your situation then? If, one day My words are lost on you, then I shall either hand you all over to Satan, which will subject you to excruciating torture until My anger has completely dissipated, or I shall personally punish you irredeemable humans, for your hearts that betray Me will have never changed.

You should all now look into yourselves as quickly as you can, to see how much betrayal of Me remains within you. I am eagerly awaiting your response. Do not be perfunctory in dealing with Me. I never play games with people. If I say I will do something then I will certainly do it. I hope each of you will be someone who takes My words seriously, and not think as if they were science fiction. What I want is concrete action from you, not your imaginings. Next, you must answer My questions, which are as follows:

1. If you are truly a service-doer, can you render service to Me loyally, without any element of perfunctoriness or negativity?

2. If you discover I have never appreciated you, will you still be able to stay and render lifelong service to Me?

3. If I am still very cold to you despite you having expended much effort, will you be able to continue working for Me in obscurity?

4. If, after you have made expenditures for Me, I do not satisfy your petty demands, will you become disheartened and disappointed with Me, or even become furious and shout abuse?

5. If you have always been very loyal, with much love for Me, yet you suffer the torment of illness, poverty, and the abandonment of your friends and relatives, or if you endure any other misfortunes in life, will your loyalty and love for Me still continue?

6. If none of what you have imagined in your heart matches what I have done, how will you walk your future path?

7. If you do not receive any of the things you hoped to receive, can you continue to be My follower?

8. If you have never understood the purpose and significance of My work, can you be a submissive person who does not arbitrarily make judgments and draw conclusions?

9. Can you treasure all the words I have said and all the work I have done while I have been together with mankind?

10. Are you able to be My loyal follower, willing to endure a lifetime of suffering for Me, though you do not receive anything?

11. For My sake, are you able to forgo considering, planning, or preparing for your future path of survival?

These questions represent My final requirements of you, and I hope all of you can give Me answers. If you have fulfilled one or two things these questions ask of you, then you must continue to strive. If you cannot accomplish a single one of these requirements, you are surely the type of person that will be cast into hell. To such people, I need not say anything more, for they are surely not people who can accord with Me. How could I keep someone in My home who could betray Me under any circumstance? As for those who could still betray Me in most circumstances, I will observe their performance before making other arrangements. However, all who are capable of betraying Me, no matter under what conditions, I will never forget; I will remember them in My heart, and await the opportunity to repay their evil deeds. The requirements I have raised are all problems you must examine in yourselves. I hope all of you can consider them seriously and not deal with Me perfunctorily. In the near future, I will check the answers you have given Me against My requirements. By that time, I will require nothing more from you and will not offer you more earnest admonition. Instead, I shall exercise My authority. Those who should be kept will be kept, those who should be rewarded will be rewarded, those who should be given over to Satan will be given over to Satan, those who should be punished severely will be punished severely, and those who should perish will be destroyed. Thus, there will no longer be anyone to disturb Me in My days. Do you believe My words? Do you believe in retribution? Do you believe that I will punish all those evil ones who deceive and betray Me? Do you hope for that day to come sooner or for it to come later? Are you someone who is terrified of punishment, or someone who would resist Me though they must endure punishment? When that day arrives, can you imagine whether you will live amidst cheers and laughter, or if you will weep and gnash your teeth? What kind of end do you hope to meet? Have you ever seriously considered whether you believe in Me one hundred percent or doubt Me one hundred percent? Have you ever carefully considered what kind of consequences and outcomes your actions and behavior will bring upon you? Do you truly hope all My words will be fulfilled in turn, or are you terrified My words will be fulfilled in turn? If you hope that I depart soon in order to fulfill My words, how should you treat your own words and actions? If you do not hope for My departure and do not hope for all My words to be fulfilled immediately, why do you believe in Me at all? Do you truly know why you are following Me? If your reason is merely to broaden your horizons, there is no need for you to trouble yourself so. If it is to be blessed and evade the coming disaster, why are you not concerned about your own conduct? Why do you not ask yourself whether you can satisfy My requirements? Why do you not also ask yourself whether you are qualified to receive the blessings to come?

You Ought to Consider Your Deeds

Your every deed and action in life shows that you must be supplied with a passage of My words each day to replenish you, for you are too lacking, and your knowledge and comprehension ability too meager. In your daily lives, you live amidst an atmosphere and environment that are without truth or good sense. You lack the capital to survive, and do not have the foundation to know Me or the truth. Your faith is built upon nothing but vague and abstract faith or highly dogmatic knowledge and religious rituals. Every day I watch your movements, examining your intentions and evil fruits, and never have I found a single person who truly places their heart and spirit upon My ever-unmoved altar. Thus am I unwilling to waste time pouring out all of the words I wish to express to such a mankind; the only plans in My heart are for My unfinished work and for those among mankind whom I have yet to save. Nevertheless, I wish for all who follow Me to receive My salvation and the truths My word bestows upon man. I hope that one day when you close your eyes, you will see a realm where fragrance fills the air and streams of living waters flow—not a bleak, cold world where dark clouds blot the skies and the sounds of howling never cease.

Each and every day, the deeds and thoughts of each and every person are beheld by the eyes of the One, and, at the same time, are in preparation for their own tomorrow. This is the path that must be walked by all who are living; it is the path that I have predestined for all, and no one can escape it or be made exempt. The words I have spoken are without number, and the work I have done, moreover, is without measure. Every day, I watch as each person naturally carries out all that they are to do in accordance with their inherent nature and the development of their nature. Unknowingly, many have already set upon the “right track,” which I have laid to make plain the different kinds of people. These different kinds of people I have long since placed in different environments and, in their respective places, each has expressed their inherent attributes. There is no one to bind them, no one to seduce them. They are free in their entirety and what they express comes naturally. Only one thing keeps them in check: My words. Thus do some people read My words grudgingly, never practicing them, doing so only to avoid death; others, meanwhile, find it difficult to endure the days without My words to guide and supply them, and so they naturally hold My words at all times. As time goes on, they discover the secret of human life, the destination of mankind, and the worth of being human. This is simply how mankind is in the presence of My words, and I merely allow matters to take their course. I do not do any work that forces people to make My words the foundation of their existence. So those who have never had a conscience, and whose existence has never had any value, boldly cast aside My words and do as they wish after quietly observing how things go. They start to feel averse toward the truth and all that comes from Me. Moreover, they feel averse toward staying in My house. For the sake of their destination, and to escape punishment, these people dwell within My house for a time, even if they are rendering service. However, their intentions and actions never change. This increases their desire for blessings, and increases their desire to enter the kingdom a single time and remain forever thereafter—even to enter the eternal heaven. The more they yearn for My day to come soon, the more they feel that the truth has become an obstacle, a stumbling block in their way. They can hardly wait to step foot in the kingdom to forever enjoy the blessings of the kingdom of heaven—all without needing to pursue the truth or accept judgment and chastisement and, most of all, without needing to grovel within My house and do as I command. These people enter My house not to satisfy their desire to seek the truth, nor to cooperate with My management; their aim is merely to be among those who are not destroyed in the coming age. Hence their hearts have never known what the truth is, or how to accept the truth. This is the reason why such people have never practiced the truth or realized the depth of their corruption, and yet have dwelled in My house as “servants” throughout. They “patiently” await the coming of My day and are tireless as they are tossed about by the manner of My work. But no matter how great their efforts or what price they pay, no one has ever seen them suffer for the truth or give anything for My sake. In their hearts, they are itching to see the day I put an end to the old age and, furthermore, cannot wait to find out how great My power and authority are. That which they have never hastened to do is to change themselves and to pursue the truth. They love that which I am averse to, and are averse to that which I love. They long for that which I hate, but fear losing that which I abhor. They live in this evil world, never loathing it, and yet deeply afraid that I will destroy it. Amidst their conflicting intentions, they love this world that I abhor, but also yearn for Me to destroy it with all haste, that they may be spared the suffering of destruction and transformed into lords of the next age, before they have strayed from the true way. This is because they do not love the truth and are averse to all that comes from Me. They might become “obedient people” for a short time for the sake of not losing blessings, but their anxiousness to be blessed, and fear of perishing and entering the lake of burning fire, can never be covered up. As My day draws near, their desire steadily grows stronger. And the greater the disaster, the more it renders them helpless, not knowing where to start so as to make Me rejoice and to avoid losing the blessings that they have long yearned for. Such people are eager to take action to serve as the vanguard as soon as My hand begins its work. They think only of surging to the very front line of the troops, deeply afraid that I will not see them. They do and say that which they think to be right, never knowing that their deeds and actions have never been relevant to the truth, and that their deeds merely undermine and disturb My plan. They may have put in great effort, and may be true in their will and intention to endure hardships, but nothing they do relates to Me, for I have never seen that their deeds come from good intentions, much less have I seen them place anything upon My altar. Such are the deeds which they have done before Me over these many years.

Originally, I wished to supply you with more truths, but I have had to refrain from this because your attitude toward the truth is much too cold and indifferent; I do not wish for My efforts to be wasted, nor do I wish to see people holding My words yet in all regards doing that which resists Me, maligns Me, and blasphemes Me. Because of your attitudes and your humanity, I merely supply you with a small and, for you, very important part of My words, which serves as My trial work among mankind. Only now have I truly confirmed that the decisions and plan I have made fit your needs and, moreover, that My attitude toward mankind is the correct one. Your many years of behavior before Me have given Me an answer without precedent, and the question to this answer is: “What is man’s attitude before the truth and the true God?” The efforts I have devoted to man prove My essence of love for man, and man’s every action before Me proves his essence of loathing toward the truth and opposition to Me. At all times, I am concerned for all who follow Me, yet at no time are those who follow Me able to comprehend My words; they are not even able to accept My suggestions. This is what saddens Me most of all. No one has ever been able to understand Me and nor, moreover, has anyone ever been able to accept Me, even though My attitude is sincere, and My words are gentle. Everyone tries to do the work I have entrusted to them according to their own ideas; they do not seek My intentions, let alone do they ask what I require of them. They still claim to serve Me loyally, all while they rebel against Me. Many believe that the truths that are unacceptable to them or that they cannot practice are not truths. In such people, My truths become something that is denied and cast aside. At the same time, people recognize Me as God in word, yet also believe Me an outsider who is not the truth, the way, or the life. No one knows this truth: My words are the forever unchanging truth. I am the supply of life for man and the only guide for mankind. The worth and meaning of My words are not determined by whether they are recognized or accepted by mankind, but by the essence of the words themselves. Even if not a single person on this earth can comprehend My words, the value of My words and their help to mankind are inestimable to any man. Therefore, when faced with the many people who rebel against, refute, or are utterly contemptuous of My words, My stance is only this: Let time and facts be My witness and show that My words are the truth, the way, and the life. Let them show that all I have said is right, that it is that which man should be furnished with and, moreover, that which man should accept. I will let all who follow Me know this fact: Those who cannot fully accept My words, those who cannot practice My words, those who cannot find a purpose in My words, and those who cannot receive salvation because of My words, are those who have been condemned by My words and, moreover, have lost My salvation, and My rod shall never stray from them.

April 16, 2003

God Is the Source of Man’s Life

From the moment you come crying into this world, you begin to fulfill your duty. For God’s plan and for His ordination, you perform your role and start your life’s journey. Whatever your background, and whatever the journey ahead of you, no one can escape the orchestrations and arrangements of Heaven, and no one is in control of their own destiny, for only He who rules over all things is capable of such work. Since the day man came into existence, God has ever worked thus, managing the universe, directing the rules of change for all things and the trajectory of their movement. Like all things, man is quietly and unknowingly nourished by the sweetness and rain and dew from God; like all things, man unknowingly lives beneath the orchestration of God’s hand. Man’s heart and spirit are held in the hand of God, everything of his life is beheld in the eyes of God. Regardless of whether or not you believe this, any and all things, whether living or dead, will shift, change, renew, and disappear in accordance with God’s thoughts. Such is the way in which God presides over all things.

As the night quietly approaches, man is unaware, for the heart of man cannot perceive how the night approaches, nor whence it comes. As the night quietly slips away, man welcomes the light of day, but as for whence the light has come, and how it has driven away the darkness of the night, man knows even less, and is even less aware. These recurrent alternations of day and night take man from one period into another, from one historical context to the next, while also ensuring that the work of God in every period and His plan for every age are carried out. Man has walked through these periods together with God, yet he knows not that God rules the fate of all things and living beings, nor how God orchestrates and directs all things. This has eluded man from time immemorial to the present day. As for why, it is not because the deeds of God are too hidden, nor because the plan of God has yet to be realized, but because the heart and spirit of man are too distant from God, to the point where man remains in the service of Satan even as he follows God—and still doesn’t know it. No one actively seeks out God’s footsteps and the appearance of God, and no one is willing to exist in the care and keeping of God. Instead, they wish to rely on the corrosion of Satan, the evil one, in order to adapt to this world, and to the rules of existence that evil mankind follows. At this point, the heart and spirit of man have become man’s tribute to Satan and become Satan’s foodstuff. Even more, the human heart and spirit have become a place in which Satan can reside and its fitting playground. Thus does man unknowingly lose his understanding of the principles of being human, and of the value and meaning of human existence. The laws of God and the covenant between God and man gradually fade away in man’s heart, and he ceases to seek or pay heed to God. With the passage of time, man no longer understands why God created him, nor does he understand the words from the mouth of God and all that comes from God. Man then begins to resist the laws and decrees of God, and his heart and spirit become deadened…. God loses the man that He originally created, and man loses the root he originally had: This is the sorrow of this human race. In point of fact, from the very beginning until now, God has staged a tragedy for mankind, one in which man is both the protagonist and the victim. And no one can answer who the director of this tragedy is.

In the vast expanse of the world, oceans silting into fields, fields flooding into oceans, over and over. Except for He who rules over everything among all things, no one is able to lead and guide this human race. There is no mighty one to labor or make preparations for this human race, still less is there anyone who can lead this human race toward the destination of light and liberate it from earthly injustices. God laments the future of mankind, He grieves at the fall of mankind, and is pained that mankind is marching, step by step, toward decay and the path of no return. No one has ever given thought to which direction such a mankind that has broken the heart of God and renounced Him to seek the evil one might be headed. It is precisely for this reason why no one senses the wrath of God, why no one seeks a way to please God or tries to draw closer to God, and what is more, why no one seeks to comprehend God’s grief and pain. Even after hearing the voice of God, man continues on his own path, persists in straying from God, evading God’s grace and care, and shunning His truth, preferring to sell himself to Satan, the enemy of God. And who has given any thought—should man persist in his obduracy—to how God will act toward this humanity that has dismissed Him without a backward glance? No one knows that the reason for God’s repeated reminders and exhortations is because He has prepared in His hands a calamity like never before, one that will be unbearable to the flesh and soul of man. This calamity is not merely a punishment of the flesh, but also of the soul. You need to know this: When God’s plan falls through, and when His reminders and exhortations are not repaid, what kind of rage will He unleash? It will be like nothing that has ever been experienced or heard by any created being. And so I say, this calamity is without precedent, and will never be repeated. For God’s plan is to create mankind only this once, and to save mankind only this once. This is the first time, and it is also the last. Therefore, no one can comprehend the painstaking intentions and fervent anticipation with which God saves mankind this time.

God created this world and brought man, a living being unto which He bestowed life, into it. Next, man came to have parents and kin, and was no longer alone. Ever since man first laid eyes on this material world, he was destined to exist within the ordination of God. The breath of life from God supports each and every living being throughout growth into adulthood. During this process, no one feels that man is growing up under the care of God; rather, they believe that man is doing so under the loving care of his parents, and that it is his own life instinct that directs his growing up. This is because man knows not who bestowed his life, or from whence it came, much less the way in which the instinct of life creates miracles. He knows only that food is the basis on which his life continues, that perseverance is the source of his existence, and that the beliefs in his mind are the capital upon which his survival depends. Of God’s grace and provision, man is utterly oblivious, and thus does he fritter away the life bestowed upon him by God…. Not a single one of this humanity that God cares for day and night takes it upon themselves to worship Him. God only continues to work on man, for whom He holds out no expectations, as He has planned. He does so in the hope that one day, man will awaken from his dream and suddenly realize the value and meaning of life, the price God paid for all that He has given him, and the eager solicitude with which God waits for man to turn back to Him. No one has ever looked into the secrets governing the origin and continuation of man’s life. Only God, who understands all of this, silently endures the hurt and the blows that man, who has received everything from God but is not thankful, gives Him. Man enjoys all that life brings as a matter of course, and, likewise, it is “a matter of course” that God is betrayed by man, forgotten by man, and extorted by man. Could it be that God’s plan is truly of such importance? Could it be that man, this living being that came from the hand of God, is truly of such importance? The plan of God is assuredly of importance; however, this living being created by the hand of God exists for the sake of His plan. Therefore, God cannot lay waste to His plan out of hatred for this human race. It is for the sake of His plan and for the breath He exhaled that God endures all torments, not for the flesh of man but for the life of man. He does so in order to take back not the flesh of man but the life He breathed out. This is His plan.

All who come into this world must pass through life and death, and the majority of them have passed through the cycle of death and rebirth. Those who are living will soon die, and the dead will soon return. All of this is the course of life arranged by God for each living being. Yet this course and this cycle are precisely the truth that God wishes for man to behold: that the life bestowed upon man by God is limitless, unfettered by physicality, time, or space. Such is the mystery of life bestowed upon man by God, and proof that life came from Him. Though many may not believe that life came from God, man inevitably enjoys all that comes from God, whether they believe in or deny His existence. Should God one day have a sudden change of heart and wish to reclaim all that exists in the world and to take back the life He has given, then all shall be no more. God uses His life to supply all things, both living and lifeless, bringing all to good order by virtue of His might and authority. This is a truth that can be conceived or comprehended by none, and these incomprehensible truths are the very manifestation of, and testament to, the life force of God. Now let Me tell you a secret: The greatness of the life of God and the power of His life are unfathomable to any created being. It is thus now, as it was in the past, and it will be thus in the time to come. The second secret I shall impart is this: The source of life for all creatures comes from God, however different they may be in life form or structure; whatever kind of living being you are, you cannot turn against the life trajectory set by God. In any case, all I wish is for man to understand this: Without the care, keeping, and provision of God, man cannot receive all that he was meant to receive, no matter how diligently he tries or how arduously he struggles. Without the supply of life from God, man loses the sense of value in living and the sense of the meaning of life. How could God allow man, who frivolously wastes the value of His life, to be so carefree? As I have said before: Do not forget that God is the source of your life. If man fails to cherish all that God has bestowed, not only will God take back what He gave in the beginning, but He will make man repay Him double the price of all that He has given.

May 26, 2003

The Sighing of the Almighty

There is an enormous secret in your heart, of which you have never been aware, for you have been living in a world without light. Your heart and your spirit have been wrested away by the evil one. Your eyes are obscured by darkness, and you can see neither the sun in the sky nor that twinkling star of the night. Your ears are clogged with deceitful words, and you hear neither the thunderous voice of Jehovah, nor the sound of the waters flowing from the throne. You have lost everything that is rightfully yours, everything that the Almighty bestowed upon you. You have entered an endless sea of affliction, with no strength to save yourself, no hope of survival, and all you do is struggle and rush about…. From that moment onward, you were doomed to be afflicted by the evil one, far away from the blessings of the Almighty, out of reach of the provisions of the Almighty, walking down a road of no return. A million calls can hardly rouse your heart and your spirit. You slumber soundly in the hands of the evil one, who has lured you into a boundless realm without direction or wayposts. Henceforth, you lost your original innocence and purity, and began to shun the care of the Almighty. Within your heart, the evil one steers you in all matters and has become your life. No longer do you fear him, avoid him, or doubt him; instead, you treat him as the God in your heart. You began to enshrine and worship him, and the two of you have become as inseparable as body and shadow, committed to live and die together. You have no idea from whence you came, why you were born, or why you will die. You look upon the Almighty as a stranger; you do not know His origins, let alone all that He has done for you. Everything that comes from Him has become hateful to you; you neither cherish it nor know its value. You walk alongside the evil one, starting from the day you received the provision of the Almighty. You have endured thousands of years of tempests and storms with the evil one, and you stand together with him against the God who was the source of your life. You know nothing of repentance, let alone that you have arrived at the brink of perishing. You have forgotten that the evil one has seduced and afflicted you; you have forgotten your beginnings. Thus has the evil one afflicted you at every step of the way up until the present day. Your heart and your spirit are benumbed and decayed. You have ceased to complain about the vexations of the world of man; no longer do you believe the world to be unjust. Still less do you care whether the Almighty exists. This is because you long ago deemed the evil one to be your true father and cannot be apart from him. This is the secret within your heart.

As dawn arrives, a morning star begins to shine in the east. This is a star never there before, and it illuminates the tranquil, twinkling skies, reigniting the extinguished light in the hearts of men. Humanity is no longer lonely thanks to this light, which shines alike on you and others. Yet you alone remain fast asleep in the dark night. You hear no sound and see no light; you are unaware of the advent of a new heaven and earth, of a new age, because your father tells you, “My child, do not get up, it is still early. The weather is cold, so do not go outside, lest you be pierced in the eyes by sword and spear.” You trust only in your father’s admonitions, because you believe that only your father is right, as your father is older than you and he loves you dearly. Such admonitions and such love lead you to stop believing in the legend that there is light in the world; they keep you from caring whether truth still exists in this world. You no longer dare to hope for rescue by the Almighty. You are content with the status quo, you no longer anticipate the advent of light, no longer look out for the coming of the Almighty as told in legend. As far as you are concerned, all that is beautiful cannot be revived, it cannot exist. In your eyes, mankind’s tomorrow, mankind’s future, just vanishes, obliterated. You cling to your father’s clothes with all your might, willing to share his hardships, deeply afraid of losing your traveling companion and the direction of your distant journey. The vast and hazy world of men has formed many of you, unflinching and dauntless in filling the different roles of this world. It has created many “warriors” with no fear of death. More than that, it has made batch upon batch of benumbed and paralyzed human beings who are ignorant of the purpose of their creation. The eyes of the Almighty survey each and every member of the deeply afflicted human race. What He hears is the wailing of those who are suffering, what He sees is the shamelessness of those who are afflicted, and what He feels is the helplessness and dread of a human race that has lost the grace of salvation. Mankind rejects His care, choosing to walk their own path, and tries to evade the scrutiny of His eyes, preferring to savor the bitterness of the deep sea in the company of the enemy, down to the last drop. No longer is the sighing of the Almighty heard by humanity; no longer are the hands of the Almighty willing to caress this tragic humanity. Time after time He recaptures, and time after time He loses again, and thus is the work He does repeated. From that moment, He begins to tire, to feel weary, and so He stops the work in hand and ceases to walk in mankind’s midst…. Humanity is completely unaware of any of these changes, unaware of the coming and going, the sadness and melancholy of the Almighty.

Everything of this world swiftly changes with the Almighty’s thoughts and beneath His eyes. Things mankind has never heard of suddenly arrive, whereas things that mankind has long possessed unknowingly slip away. No one can fathom the Almighty’s whereabouts, much less can anyone sense the transcendence and greatness of the Almighty’s life force. He is transcendent in that He can perceive what humans cannot. He is great in that He is the One who is forsaken by mankind and yet saves mankind. He knows the meaning of life and death, and more than that, He knows the laws of existence that mankind, who are created, should follow. He is the foundation of human existence, and He is the Redeemer who resurrects mankind again. He weighs down happy hearts with sorrow and lifts up sorrowful hearts with happiness, all for the sake of His work, and for the sake of His plan.

Humanity, having strayed from the Almighty’s provision of life, is ignorant of the purpose of existence, but fears death nonetheless. They are without help or support, yet still reluctant to close their eyes, and they steel themselves to drag out an ignoble existence in this world, sacks of flesh with no sense of their own souls. You live in this way, without hope, as do others, without aim. Only the Holy One of legend will save the people who, moaning in the midst of their suffering, long desperately for His arrival. So far, such belief has not been realized in those who lack consciousness. Nevertheless, the people still yearn for it so. The Almighty has mercy on these people who have suffered deeply; at the same time, He feels averse toward these people who lack consciousness, as He has had to wait too long for an answer from humanity. He wishes to seek, to seek your heart and your spirit, to bring you water and food and to awaken you, that you may no longer be thirsty and hungry. When you are weary and when you begin to feel something of the bleak desolation of this world, do not be lost, do not cry. Almighty God, the Watcher, will embrace your arrival at any time. He is keeping watch by your side, waiting for you to turn back around. He is waiting for the day you suddenly recover your memory: when you realize that you came from God, that, at some unknown time you lost your direction, at some unknown time you lost consciousness on the road, and at some unknown time acquired a “father”; when you realize, furthermore, that the Almighty has always been keeping watch, waiting there a very, very long time for your return. He has been watching with desperate longing, waiting for a response without an answer. His watching and waiting are beyond any price, and they are for the sake of the human heart and the human spirit. Perhaps this watching and waiting are indefinite, and perhaps they are at an end. But you should know exactly where your heart and your spirit are right now.

May 28, 2003

The Appearance of God Has Ushered in a New Age

God’s six-thousand-year plan of management is coming to an end, and the gate of the kingdom has already been opened to all those who seek His appearance. Dear brothers and sisters, what are you waiting for? What is it that you seek? Are you waiting for God to appear? Are you searching for His footprints? How the appearance of God is to be longed for! And how difficult it is to find God’s footprints! In an age such as this, in a world such as this, what must we do to witness the day on which God appears? What must we do to keep pace with the footsteps of God? Questions of this kind are faced by all those who are waiting for God to appear. You have all considered them on more than one occasion—but with what outcome? Where does God appear? Where are God’s footprints? Have you got the answer? Many people would reply in this way: “God appears among all those who follow Him and His footprints are in our midst; it’s that simple!” Anyone can provide a formulaic answer, but do you understand what is meant by the appearance of God or His footprints? The appearance of God refers to His arrival on earth to do His work in person. With His own identity and disposition, and in the way that is innate to Him, He descends among mankind to conduct the work of initiating an age and ending an age. This kind of appearance is not a form of ceremony. It is not a sign, a picture, a miracle, or some kind of a grand vision, and even less is it a kind of religious process. It is a real and actual fact that can be touched and beheld by anyone. This kind of appearance is not for the sake of going through the motions, or for any short-term undertaking; it is, rather, for a stage of work in His management plan. The appearance of God is always meaningful and always bears some relation to His management plan. What is called appearance here is completely different from the kind of “appearance” in which God guides, leads, and enlightens man. God carries out a stage of His great work each time He reveals Himself. This work is different from that of any other age. It is unimaginable to man, and has never been experienced by man. It is work that starts a new age and concludes the old age, and it is a new and improved form of work for the salvation of mankind; moreover, it is work that brings mankind into the new age. This is what the appearance of God signifies.

Once you have understood what the appearance of God means, how should you seek God’s footprints? This question is not hard to explain: Wherever God appears, there you will find His footsteps. Such an explanation sounds straightforward, but is not so easy in practice, for many people do not know where God appears, much less where He is willing to, or where He should, appear. Some impulsively believe that wherever the Holy Spirit is at work, there God appears. Or else they believe that wherever there are spiritual figures, there God appears. Or else they believe that wherever there are people of high reputation, there God appears. For the moment, let us leave aside whether such beliefs are right or wrong. To explain such a question, we must first have a clear objective: We are searching for the footprints of God. We are not seeking spiritual figures, much less are we pursuing figures of renown; we are pursuing the footprints of God. For this reason, since we are searching for the footprints of God, it behooves us to search for God’s will, for the words of God, for His utterances—because wherever there are new words spoken by God, the voice of God is there, and wherever there are the footsteps of God, God’s deeds are there. Wherever there is the expression of God, there God appears, and wherever God appears, there the truth, the way, and the life exist. In seeking God’s footprints, you have ignored the words “God is the truth, the way, and the life.” And so, many people, even when they receive the truth, do not believe that they have found God’s footprints, and still less do they acknowledge the appearance of God. What a grave mistake! The appearance of God cannot be reconciled with man’s notions, still less can God appear at the behest of man. God makes His own choices and His own plans when He does His work; moreover, He has His own objectives and His own methods. Whatever work He does, He has no need to discuss it with man or seek his advice, much less to notify each and every person of His work. This is the disposition of God, which should, moreover, be recognized by everyone. If you desire to witness the appearance of God, to follow God’s footsteps, then you must first walk away from your own notions. You must not demand that God do this or that, much less should you place Him within your own confines and limit Him to your own notions. Instead, you should demand of yourselves how you ought to seek God’s footprints, how you ought to accept God’s appearance, and how you ought to submit to the new work of God: This is what man should do. Since man is not the truth, and is not possessed of the truth, he should seek, accept, and submit.

Regardless of whether you are American, British, or any other nationality, you should step outside the confines of your own nationality, transcending your own self, and view the work of God from the identity of a created being. In this way, you will not place limitations on the footprints of God. This is because, nowadays, many people conceive it to be impossible that God will appear in a particular nation or among a certain people. How profound is the significance of God’s work, and how important is the appearance of God! How can man’s notions and thinking possibly take their measure? And so I say, you should break through notions of nationality and ethnicity in order to seek the appearance of God. Only thus will you not be constrained by your own notions; only thus will you be qualified to welcome the appearance of God. Otherwise, you will remain in eternal darkness, and never gain the approval of God.

God is the God of the entire human race. He does not consider Himself the private property of any nation or people, but goes about doing His work as He has planned it, without being confined to any form, nation, or people. Perhaps you have never imagined this form, or perhaps your attitude to this form is one of denial, or perhaps the nation where God reveals Himself and the people among whom He reveals Himself just happen to be discriminated against by everyone and just happen to be the most backward on earth. Yet God has His wisdom. With His great power, and by means of His truth and His disposition, He has truly gained a group of people who are of one mind with Him, and a group of people that He wished to make complete—a group, conquered by Him, who, having endured all manner of trials and tribulations and all manner of persecution, can follow Him to the very end. The aim of God’s appearance, which is not limited to any form or nation, is to enable Him to complete His work as He has planned it. This is just as when God became flesh in Judea: His aim was to complete the work of the crucifixion in redeeming the entire human race. Yet the Jews believed that it was impossible for God to do this, and they thought it impossible that God could become flesh and assume the form of the Lord Jesus. Their “impossible” became the basis on which they condemned and opposed God, and ultimately led to the destruction of Israel. Today, many people have committed a similar error. They proclaim with all their might the imminent appearance of God, yet at the same time condemn His appearance; their “impossible” once more confines the appearance of God within the limits of their imagination. And so I have seen many people break into wild and raucous laughter after coming upon the words of God. But is this laughter any different from the condemnation and blasphemy of the Jews? You are not reverent in the presence of the truth, still less do you possess an attitude of yearning. All you do is study indiscriminately and wait with blithe unconcern. What can you gain from studying and waiting like this? Do you think you will receive personal guidance from God? If you cannot discern God’s utterances, in what way are you qualified to witness the appearance of God? Wherever God appears, there the truth is expressed, and there the voice of God will be. Only those who can accept the truth will be able to hear the voice of God, and only such people are qualified to witness the appearance of God. Let go of your notions! Quiet yourself and give these words a careful reading. If you yearn for the truth, God will enlighten you and you will understand His will and His words. Let go of your opinions about the “impossible”! The more that people believe something is impossible, the more likely it is to occur, because the wisdom of God soars higher than the heavens, God’s thoughts are higher than man’s thoughts, and the work of God transcends the limits of man’s thinking and notions. The more that something is impossible, the more it has truth that can be sought; the more something lies beyond man’s notions and imagination, the more it contains the will of God. This is because, no matter where He reveals Himself, God is still God, and His essence will never change on account of the location or manner of His appearance. The disposition of God remains the same regardless of where His footprints are, and no matter where the footprints of God are, He is the God of all mankind, just as the Lord Jesus is not only the God of the Israelites, but is also the God of all the people of Asia, Europe, and America, and even more than that, He is the one and only God in the entire universe. So let us seek God’s will and discover His appearance in His utterances, and keep pace with His footsteps! God is the truth, the way, and the life. His words and His appearance exist concurrently, and His disposition and footprints are open to mankind at all times. Dear brothers and sisters, I hope that you can see the appearance of God in these words, begin following His footsteps as you stride forward into a new age, and enter into the beautiful new heaven and earth that God has prepared for those who await His appearance!

God Presides Over the Fate of All Mankind

As members of the human race and devout Christians, it is the responsibility and obligation of us all to offer up our minds and bodies for the fulfillment of God’s commission, for our entire being came from God, and it exists thanks to the sovereignty of God. If our minds and bodies are not for God’s commission and not for the just cause of mankind, then our souls will feel unworthy of those who were martyred for God’s commission, and much more unworthy of God, who has provided us with everything.

God created this world, He created this mankind and, moreover, He was the architect of ancient Greek culture and human civilization. Only God consoles this mankind, and only God cares for this mankind night and day. Human development and progress are inseparable from the sovereignty of God, and the history and future of mankind are inextricable from the designs of God. If you are a true Christian, then you will surely believe that the rise and fall of any country or nation occurs according to the designs of God. God alone knows the fate of a country or nation, and God alone controls the course of this mankind. If mankind wishes to have a good fate, if a country wishes to have a good fate, then man must bow down to God in worship, repent and confess before God, or else the fate and destination of man will be an unavoidable catastrophe.

Look back to the time when Noah built the ark: Mankind was deeply corrupt, people had strayed from the blessing of God, were no longer cared for by God, and had lost the promises of God. They lived in darkness, without the light of God. Then they became licentious by nature and abandoned themselves to hideous depravity. Such people could no longer receive the promise of God; they were unfit to witness the face of God or to hear the voice of God, for they had abandoned God, had cast aside all that He had bestowed upon them, and had forgotten the teachings of God. Their heart strayed farther and farther from God and, as it did, they became depraved beyond all reason and humanity and became increasingly evil. Then they walked ever closer to death and fell under the wrath and punishment of God. Only Noah worshiped God and shunned evil, and so he was able to hear the voice of God and hear His instructions. He built the ark according to the instructions of God’s word, and there assembled all manner of living creatures. And in this way, once everything had been prepared, God unleashed His destruction upon the world. Only Noah and the seven other members of his family survived the destruction, for Noah worshiped Jehovah and shunned evil.

Now look upon the present age: Such righteous men as Noah, who could worship God and shun evil, have ceased to exist. Yet God is still gracious toward this mankind and still absolves them during this final era. God seeks those who long for Him to appear. He seeks those who are able to hear His words, those who have not forgotten His commission and offer up their hearts and bodies to Him. He seeks those who are as submissive as babes before Him and do not resist Him. If you devote yourself to God, unimpeded by any power or force, then God shall look upon you with favor and shall bestow His blessings upon you. If you are of high station, of honorable reputation, possessed of abundant knowledge, the owner of plentiful assets, and supported by many people, yet these things do not prevent you from coming before God to accept His calling and His commission and to do what God asks of you, then all that you do shall be the most meaningful cause on earth and the most just undertaking of mankind. If you reject the call of God for the sake of status and your own goals, all that you do shall be cursed and even despised by God. Perhaps you are a president, a scientist, a pastor, or an elder, but no matter how high your office, if you rely on your knowledge and ability in your undertakings, then you shall always be a failure and shall always be bereft of the blessings of God, because God accepts nothing that you do, and He does not grant that your undertaking is a just one, or accept that you are working for the benefit of mankind. He will say that everything you do is done to use the knowledge and strength of mankind to thrust the protection of God away from man, and that it is done to deny the blessings of God. He will say that you are leading mankind toward darkness, toward death, and toward the start of a limitless existence in which man has lost God and His blessing.

Since mankind’s contrivance of the social sciences, the mind of man has become occupied by science and knowledge. Science and knowledge then have become tools for the ruling of mankind, and there is no longer sufficient room for man to worship God, and no more favorable conditions for the worship of God. The position of God has sunk ever lower in the heart of man. Without God in his heart, man’s inner world is dark, hopeless and empty. Subsequently many social scientists, historians, and politicians have come to the fore to express theories of social science, the theory of human evolution, and other theories that contradict the truth that God created man, to fill the hearts and minds of mankind. And in this way, those who believe that God created everything have become ever fewer, and those who believe in the theory of evolution have become ever greater in number. More and more people treat the records of the work of God and His words during the age of the Old Testament as myths and legends. In their hearts, people become indifferent to the dignity and greatness of God, to the tenet that God exists and holds dominion over all things. The survival of mankind and the fate of countries and nations are no longer important to them, and man lives in a hollow world concerned only with eating, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure. … Few people take it upon themselves to seek out where God does His work today, or to look for how He presides over and arranges the destination of man. And in this way, unbeknownst to man, human civilization becomes less and less able to hew to man’s wishes, and there are even many people who feel that, living in such a world, they are less happy than those who have already passed away. Even people of countries that used to be highly civilized air such grievances. For without the guidance of God, no matter how much rulers and sociologists wrack their brains to preserve human civilization, it is to no avail. No one can fill the emptiness in man’s heart, for no one can be the life of man, and no social theory can free man from the emptiness with which he is afflicted. Science, knowledge, freedom, democracy, leisure, comfort: these bring man only a temporary consolation. Even with these things, man still inevitably sins and bemoans the injustices of society. These things cannot restrain man’s craving and desire to explore. This is because man was made by God and the senseless sacrifices and explorations of man can only lead to more distress and can only cause man to exist in a constant state of fear, not knowing how to face the future of mankind or how to face the path that lies ahead. Man even comes to fear science and knowledge, and fear even more the feeling of emptiness. In this world, regardless of whether you live in a free country or one without human rights, you are utterly incapable of escaping the fate of mankind. Whether you are the ruler or the ruled, you are utterly incapable of escaping the desire to explore the fate, mysteries, and destination of mankind, much less are you capable of escaping the bewildering sense of emptiness. Such phenomena, which are common to all of mankind, are called social phenomena by sociologists, yet no great man can come forth to solve such problems. Man, after all, is man, and the position and life of God cannot be replaced by any man. Mankind does not just require a fair society in which everyone is well-fed and is equal and free; what mankind needs is the salvation of God and His provision of life to them. Only when man receives God’s provision of life and His salvation can the needs, the yearning to explore, and the spiritual emptiness of man be resolved. If the people of a country or a nation are unable to receive the salvation and care of God, then such a country or nation will tread the road of decline, toward darkness, and shall be annihilated by God.

Perhaps your country currently prospers, but if you allow your people to stray from God, then it shall find itself increasingly bereft of the blessings of God. The civilization of your country shall be increasingly trampled underfoot and, before long, the people shall rise up against God and curse Heaven. And so, unbeknownst to man, the fate of a country shall be ruined. God shall raise up powerful countries to counter those countries that have been cursed by God, and may even wipe them from the face of the earth. The rise and fall of a country or nation is predicated upon whether its rulers worship God, and whether they lead their people to become closer to God and to worship Him. And yet, in this final era, because those who truly seek and worship God are increasingly scarce, God bestows special favor upon countries in which Christianity is the state religion. He gathers those countries together to form the world’s relatively just camp, while the atheistic countries and those that do not worship the true God become the opponents of the just camp. In this way, God not only has a place among mankind in which to conduct His work, but also gains countries that can exercise just authority, allowing sanctions and restrictions to be imposed on those countries that resist Him. Yet despite this, still no more people come forward to worship God, because man has strayed too far from Him, and man has forgotten God for too long. There remain on earth only countries that exercise justice and resist injustice. But this is far from the wishes of God, for no country’s rulers will allow God to preside over their people, and no political party will gather together its people to worship God; God has lost His rightful place in the heart of every country, nation, ruling party, and even in the heart of every person. Although just forces do exist in this world, rule in which God holds no place in the heart of man is fragile. Without the blessing of God, the political arena shall fall into disarray and become unable to withstand a single blow. For mankind, being without the blessing of God is like being without the sun. Regardless of how assiduously rulers make contributions to their people, regardless of how many just conferences mankind holds together, none of this shall reverse the tide or alter the fate of mankind. Man believes that a country in which people are fed and clothed, in which they live together peacefully, is a good country, and one with good leadership. But God does not think so. He believes that a country in which no one worships Him is one that He shall annihilate. Man’s way of thinking is too much at odds with that of God. So, if the head of a country does not worship God, then the fate of this country shall be a tragic one, and the country shall have no destination.

God does not partake in the politics of man, yet the fate of a country or nation is controlled by God. God controls this world and the entire universe. The fate of man and the plan of God are intimately connected, and no man, country or nation is exempt from the sovereignty of God. If man wishes to know his fate, then he must come before God. God shall cause those who follow and worship Him to prosper and shall bring decline and extinction upon those who resist and reject Him.

Recall the scene in the Bible when God wrought destruction upon Sodom and think also of how Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt. Think back to how the people of Nineveh repented their sins in sackcloth and ashes and recall what followed after the Jews nailed Jesus to the cross 2,000 years ago. The Jews were expelled from Israel and fled to countries around the world. Many were killed, and the entire Jewish nation was subjected to the unprecedented pain of their country’s annihilation. They had nailed God to the cross—committed a heinous sin—and provoked the disposition of God. They were made to pay for what they did and were made to bear all the consequences of their actions. They condemned God, rejected God, and so they had but one fate: to be punished by God. This was the bitter consequence and disaster that their rulers brought upon their country and nation.

Today, God has returned to the world to do His work. His first stop is the exemplar of dictatorial rulership: China, the staunch bastion of atheism. God has gained a group of people by His wisdom and power. During this period, He has been hunted by China’s ruling party by every means and subjected to great suffering, with no place to rest His head, unable to find shelter. Despite this, God still continues the work He intends to do: He utters His voice and spreads the gospel. None can fathom the almightiness of God. In China, a country that regards God as an enemy, God has never ceased His work. Instead, more people have accepted His work and word, for God saves each and every member of mankind to the greatest extent possible. We trust that no country or power can stand in the way of what God wishes to achieve. Those who obstruct God’s work, resist the word of God and disturb and impair the plan of God shall ultimately be punished by God. He who defies the work of God shall be sent to hell; any country that defies the work of God shall be destroyed; any nation that rises up to oppose the work of God shall be wiped from this earth and shall cease to exist. I urge the people of all nations, of all countries, and even of all industries to listen to the voice of God, to behold the work of God and to pay attention to the fate of mankind, in order to make God the most holy, the most honorable, the highest, and the only object of worship among mankind, and to allow the whole of mankind to live under the blessing of God, just as the descendants of Abraham lived under the promise of Jehovah, and just as Adam and Eve, whom God created first, lived in the Garden of Eden.

The work of God surges onward like a mighty wave. No one can detain Him, and no one can halt His march. Only those who listen carefully to His words, and who seek and thirst for Him, can follow His footsteps and receive His promise. Those who do not shall be subjected to overwhelming disaster and well-deserved punishment.

Knowing God Is the Path to Fearing God and Shunning Evil

Every one of you should examine anew how you have believed in God throughout your lives, so that you may see whether, in the process of following God, you have truly understood, truly comprehended, and truly come to know God, whether you truly know what attitude God bears to the various types of human beings, and whether you truly understand the work that God is enacting upon you and how God defines your every act. This God, who is by your side, guiding the direction of your progress, ordaining your destiny, and supplying your needs—how much do you understand this God, when all is said and done. How much do you really know about this God? Do you know what work He enacts on you every single day? Do you know the principles and purposes on which He bases His every action? Do you know how He guides you? Do you know the means by which He provides for you? Do you know the methods by which He leads you? Do you know what He wishes to obtain from you and what He wishes to achieve in you? Do you know the attitude He holds toward the various ways in which you behave? Do you know whether you are a person beloved of Him? Do you know the origin of His joy, anger, sorrow, and delight, the thoughts and ideas behind them, and His essence? Do you know, ultimately, what kind of God is this God that you believe in? Are these and other questions of the sort something that you have never understood or thought about? In pursuing your belief in God, have you, through real appreciation and experience of God’s words, dispelled your misunderstandings about Him? Have you, after receiving God’s discipline and chastening, attained genuine submission and caring? Have you, in the midst of God’s chastisement and judgment, come to know the rebelliousness and satanic nature of man and gained a modicum of understanding about God’s holiness? Have you, under the guidance and enlightenment of God’s words, begun to hold a new outlook on life? Have you, in the midst of the trials sent by God, felt His intolerance for man’s offenses as well as what He requires of you and how He is saving you? If you do not know what it is to misunderstand God, or how to dispel this misunderstanding, then one can say that you have never entered into true communion with God and have never understood God, or at least one can say you have never wished to understand Him. If you do not know what is God’s discipline and chastening, then you surely do not know what are submission and caring, or at least you have never truly submitted to or cared for God. If you have never experienced God’s chastisement and judgment, then you will surely not know what is His holiness, and you will be even less clear as to what man’s rebellion is. If you have never truly had a correct outlook on life, or a correct aim in life, but are still in a state of perplexity and indecision over your future path in life, even to the point of being hesitant to move forward, then it is certain that you have never received God’s enlightenment and guidance; one can also say that you have never truly been supplied or replenished by God’s words. If you have not yet undergone God’s trials, then it goes without saying that you will certainly not know what is God’s intolerance for man’s offenses, nor would you understand what God ultimately requires of you, and even less what, ultimately, is His work of managing and saving man. No matter how many years a person has believed in God, if they have never experienced or perceived anything in God’s words, then assuredly they are not walking the path toward salvation, their faith in God is assuredly without actual content, their knowledge of God too is assuredly zero, and it goes without saying that they have no idea at all what it is to fear God.

God’s possessions and being, God’s essence, God’s disposition—all has been made known in His words to humankind. When he experiences God’s words, man will in the process of putting them into practice come to understand the purpose behind the words God speaks, and to understand the source and background of God’s words, and to understand and appreciate the intended effect of God’s words. For humanity, these are all things that man must experience, grasp, and attain in order to attain truth and life, grasp God’s intentions, become transformed in his disposition, and become able to submit to God’s sovereignty and arrangements. At the same time that man experiences, grasps, and attains these things, he will gradually have gained an understanding of God, and at this time he will also have gained different degrees of knowledge about Him. This understanding and knowledge does not come out of something man has imagined or composed, but rather from what he appreciates, experiences, feels, and confirms within himself. Only after appreciating, experiencing, feeling, and confirming these things does man’s knowledge of God acquire content; only the knowledge that man obtains at this time is actual, real, and accurate, and this process—of attaining genuine understanding and knowledge of God through appreciating, experiencing, feeling, and confirming His words—is no other than true communion between man and God. In the midst of this kind of communion, man comes truly to understand and comprehend God’s intentions, comes truly to understand and know God’s possessions and being, comes truly to understand and know God’s essence, comes gradually to understand and know God’s disposition, arrives at real certainty about, and a correct definition of, the fact of God’s dominion over all creation, and gains an essential bearing on and knowledge of God’s identity and position. In the midst of this kind of communion, man changes, step by step, his ideas about God, no longer imagining Him out of thin air, or giving rein to his own suspicions about Him, or misunderstanding Him, or condemning Him, or passing judgment on Him, or doubting Him. Thus, man will have fewer disputes with God, he will have fewer conflicts with God, and there will be fewer occasions on which man rebels against God. Conversely, man’s caring for and submission to God will grow greater, and his fear of God will become more real and more profound. In the midst of such communion, man will not only attain the provision of truth and the baptism of life, but he will at the same time also attain true knowledge of God. In the midst of such communion, man will not only be transformed in his disposition and receive salvation, but he will at the same time also garner the true fear and worship of a created being toward God. Having had this kind of communion, man’s faith in God will no longer be a blank sheet of paper, or a promise offered up in lip service, or a form of blind pursuit and idolization; only with this kind of communion will man’s life grow toward maturity day by day, and only now will his disposition gradually become transformed, and his faith in God will, step by step, pass from a vague and uncertain belief into genuine submission and caring, into real fear, and man will also, in the process of following God, gradually progress from a passive to an active stance, from the negative to the positive; only with this kind of communion will man arrive at true understanding and comprehension of God, at true knowledge of God. Because the great majority of people have never entered into true communion with God, their knowledge of God stops at the level of theory, at the level of words and doctrines. That is to say, the great majority of people, no matter how many years they have believed in God, are as far as knowing God is concerned still in the same place where they started, stuck at the foundation of traditional forms of homage, with their associated feudal superstitions and romantic tinges. That man’s knowledge of God should be stalled at its starting point means that it is practically non-existent. Apart from man’s affirmation of God’s position and identity, man’s faith in God is still in a state of vague uncertainty. This being so, how much true fear can man feel for God?

No matter how firmly you believe in God’s existence, this cannot replace your knowledge of God, nor your fear of God. No matter how much you have enjoyed of His blessings and His grace, this cannot replace your knowledge of God. No matter how willing you are to consecrate your all and expend your all for His sake, this cannot replace your knowledge of God. Perhaps you have grown so familiar with the words God has spoken, or you even know them by heart and can rattle them off, but this cannot replace your knowledge of God. However intent man may be on following God, if he has never had genuine communion with God or had a genuine experience of God’s words, then his knowledge of God would be but a blank patch, or an endless reverie; for all that you may have brushed shoulders with God in passing, or met Him face to face, your knowledge of God would still be zero, and your fear of God no more than an empty catchword or an idealized concept.

Many people hold up God’s words to read day by day, even to the point of carefully committing to memory all the classic passages therein as their most prized possession, and moreover preach God’s words everywhere, providing and aiding others with God’s words. They think that to do this is to bear witness to God, to bear witness to His words, that to do this is to follow God’s way; they think that to do this is to live by God’s words, that to do this is to bring His words into their actual lives, that doing this will enable them to receive God’s commendation, and to be saved and perfected. But, even as they preach the words of God, they never comply with God’s words in practice, or try to compare themselves against what is revealed in God’s words. Rather, they use God’s words to gain the adoration and trust of others by trickery, to enter into management on their own, and to embezzle and steal God’s glory. They hope, vainly, to exploit the opportunity afforded by spreading God’s words so as to be awarded God’s working and His commendation. How many years have gone by, but not only have these people been incapable of earning God’s commendation in the process of preaching God’s words, and not only have they been incapable of discovering the way that they should follow in the process of bearing witness to God’s words, and not only have they not aided or provided for themselves in the process of aiding and providing others with God’s words, and not only have they been incapable of knowing God, or awakening in themselves genuine fear of God, in the process of doing all these things; but, on the contrary, their misunderstandings about God grow ever deeper, their mistrust of Him ever graver, and their imaginings about Him ever more hyperbolic. Supplied and guided by their theories about God’s words, they appear as if completely in their element, as if plying their skills with effortless ease, as if they have found their purpose in life, their mission, and as if they have won new life and been saved, as if, with God’s words rolling crisply off their tongue in recital, they have gained the truth, grasped God’s intentions, and discovered the path to knowing God, as if, in the process of preaching God’s words, they often have come face to face with God. Also, they are often “moved” to bouts of weeping, and, often led by the “God” in God’s words, they appear to be ceaselessly grasping at His earnest solicitude and kind intention, and at the same time to have grasped God’s salvation of man and His management, to have come to know His essence, and to have understood His righteous disposition. Based on this foundation, they seem to believe even more firmly in God’s existence, to be more cognizant of His exalted state, and to feel even more deeply His grandeur and transcendence. Steeped in superficial knowledge of God’s words, it would appear that their faith has grown, their resolve to endure suffering has strengthened, and their knowledge of God has deepened. Little do they know that, until they actually experience God’s words, all their knowledge of God and their ideas about Him come out of their own wishful imaginings and conjecture. Their faith would not hold up under any kind of test from God, their so-called spirituality and stature would simply not hold up under God’s trial or inspection, their resolution is but a castle built upon the sand, and their so-called knowledge of God no more than a figment of their imagination. In fact, these people, who have, as it were, put a lot of effort into God’s words, have never ever realized what is real faith, what is real submission, what is real caring, or what is real knowledge of God. They take theory, imagination, knowledge, gift, tradition, superstition, and even the moral values of humanity, and make them into “capital” and “weaponry” for believing in God and following Him, even making them into the foundations of their belief in God and their following Him. At the same time, they also take this capital and weaponry and make them into magic talismans through which they know God, for facing and dealing with God’s inspections, trials, chastisement, and judgment. In the end, what they garner still consists of nothing more than conclusions about God that are steeped in religious connotation, in feudal superstition, and in all that is romantic, grotesque, and enigmatic. Their way of knowing and defining God is stamped in the same mold as that of people who believe only in Heaven Above, or the Old Man in the Sky, while God’s practicality, His essence, His disposition, His possessions and being, and so forth—all that relates to the real God Himself—are things that their knowledge has failed to grasp, from which their knowledge is completely divorced, and even as far apart as the north and south poles. In this way, although these people live under the provision and nourishment of God’s words, they are nevertheless unable truly to tread the path of fearing God and shunning evil. The true reason for this is that they have never become acquainted with God, neither have they ever had genuine contact or communion with Him, and so it is impossible for them to arrive at mutual understanding with God, or to awaken in themselves genuine belief in, following of, or worship for God. That they should thus regard God’s words, that they should thus regard God—this perspective and attitude has doomed them to return empty-handed from their endeavors, has doomed them to never in all eternity be able to tread the path of fearing God and shunning evil. The goal for which they are aiming, and the direction in which they are going, signifies that they are God’s enemies through eternity, and that through eternity they will never be able to receive salvation.

If, in the case of a person who has followed God for many years and enjoyed the provision of His words for many years, their definition of God be essentially the same as that of someone who prostrates himself in homage before idols, then this would signify that this person has not attained the reality of God’s words. This is because they have simply not entered into the reality of God’s words, and for this reason the reality, the truth, the intentions, and the demands upon humanity, all of which inhere in God’s words, have nothing whatsoever to do with that person. That is to say, no matter how hard such a person may work on the surface meaning of God’s words, all is futile: Because what they pursue is mere words, what they obtain will also of necessity be mere words. Whether the words spoken by God be plain or profound in outward appearance, they are all truths indispensable to man’s life entry; they are the fount of living waters that enables man to survive in both spirit and flesh. They provide what man needs to stay alive; the principles and creed for conducting his daily life; the path he must take to salvation, as well as its goal and direction; every truth that he should possess as a created being before God; and every truth about how man submits to and worships God. They are the guarantee that ensures man’s survival, they are man’s daily bread, and they are also the sturdy support that enables man to be strong and stand up. They are rich in the truth reality with which created mankind lives out normal humanity, rich in the truth by which mankind breaks free from corruption and eludes Satan’s snares, rich in the tireless teaching, exhortation, encouragement, and solace that the Creator gives to created humanity. They are the beacon that guides and enlightens men to understand all that is positive, the guarantee which ensures that men will live out and come into possession of all that is just and good, the criterion by which all people, events, and things are measured, and also the navigation marker that leads men toward salvation and the path of light. Only in the practical experience of God’s words can man be supplied with the truth and with life; only herein can man come to understand what is normal humanity, what is a meaningful life, what is a genuine created being, what is real submission to God; only herein can man come to understand how he should care for God, how to fulfill the duty of a created being, and how to possess the likeness of a real man; only herein can man come to understand what is meant by genuine faith and genuine worship; only herein can man come to understand who is the Sovereign of the heavens and earth and all things; only herein can man come to understand the means by which the One who is the Sovereign of all creation rules over, leads, and provides for creation; and only herein can man come to understand and grasp the means by which the One who is the Sovereign of all creation exists, becomes manifest, and works. Separated from the real experience of God’s words, man has no real knowledge of or insight into God’s words and the truth. Such a man is a downright living corpse, a consummate shell, and all knowledge relating to the Creator has nothing whatsoever to do with him. In God’s eyes, such a man has never believed in Him, nor has he ever followed Him, and so God recognizes him neither as His believer nor as His follower, even less as a genuine created being.

A genuine created being must know who the Creator is, what man’s creation is for, how to carry out the responsibilities of a created being, and how to worship the Lord of all creation, must understand, grasp, know, and care for the Creator’s intentions, wishes, and demands, and must follow the way of the Creator—fear God and shun evil.

What is to fear God? And how can one shun evil?

“To fear God” does not mean nameless fright and horror, nor to evade, nor to put at a distance, nor is it idolization or superstition. Rather, it is admiration, esteem, trust, understanding, caring, submission, consecration, love, as well as unconditional and uncomplaining worship, requital, and surrender. Without genuine knowledge of God, humanity will not have genuine admiration, genuine trust, genuine understanding, genuine caring or submission, but only dread and unease, only doubt, misunderstanding, evasion, and avoidance; without genuine knowledge of God, humanity will not have genuine consecration and requital; without genuine knowledge of God, humanity will not have genuine worship and surrender, only blind idolization and superstition; without genuine knowledge of God, humanity cannot possibly follow the way of God, or fear God, or shun evil. Conversely, every activity and behavior in which man engages will be filled with rebellion and defiance, with slanderous imputations and maligning judgments about Him, and with evil conduct running contrary to the truth and to the true meaning of God’s words.

Once humanity has genuine trust in God, they will be genuine in following Him and depending on Him; only with real trust in and dependence on God can humanity have genuine understanding and comprehension; along with real comprehension of God comes real caring for Him; only with genuine caring for God can humanity have genuine submission; only with genuine submission to God can humanity have genuine consecration; only with genuine consecration to God can humanity have requital that is unconditional and without complaint; only with genuine trust and dependence, genuine understanding and caring, genuine submission, genuine consecration and requital, can humanity truly come to know God’s disposition and essence, and to know the identity of the Creator; only when they have truly come to know the Creator can humanity awaken in themselves genuine worship and surrender; only when they have real worship for and surrender to the Creator will humanity be able truly to put aside their evil ways, that is to say, to shun evil.

This constitutes the whole process of “fearing God and shunning evil,” and is also the content in its entirety of fearing God and shunning evil. This is the path that must be traversed in order to attain fearing God and shunning evil.

“Fearing God and shunning evil” and knowing God are indivisibly connected by a myriad threads, and the connection between them is self-evident. If one wishes to attain to shunning evil, one must first have real fear of God; if one wishes to attain to real fear of God, one must first have real knowledge of God; if one wishes to attain to knowledge of God, one must first experience God’s words, enter into the reality of God’s words, experience God’s chastening and discipline, His chastisement and judgment; if one wishes to experience God’s words, one must first come face to face with God’s words, come face to face with God, and ask God to provide opportunities to experience God’s words in the form of all sorts of environments involving people, events, and objects; if one wishes to come face to face with God and with God’s words, one must first possess a simple and honest heart, readiness to accept the truth, the will to endure suffering, the resolution and the courage to shun evil, and the aspiration to become a genuine created being…. In this way, going forward step by step, you will draw ever closer to God, your heart will grow ever more pure, and your life and the value of being alive will, in the wake of your coming to know God, grow ever more meaningful and wax ever more radiant. Until, one day, you will feel that the Creator is no longer a riddle, that the Creator has never been hidden from you, that the Creator has never concealed His face from you, that the Creator is not at all far from you, that the Creator is no longer the One that you constantly long for in your thoughts but that you cannot reach with your feelings, that He is really and truly standing guard to your left and right, supplying your life, and controlling your destiny. He is not on the remote horizon, nor has He secreted Himself high up in the clouds. He is right by your side, presiding over your all, He is everything that you have, and He is the only thing you have. Such a God allows you to love Him from the heart, cling to Him, hold Him close, admire Him, fear to lose Him, and be unwilling to renounce Him any longer, rebel against Him any longer, or any longer to evade Him or put Him at a distance. All you want is to care for Him, submit to Him, requite all that He gives you, and surrender to His dominion. You no longer refuse to be guided, provided for, watched over, and kept by Him, no longer refuse what He dictates and ordains for you. All you want is to follow Him, to be around Him in His company; all you want is to accept Him as your one and only life, to accept Him as your one and only Lord, your one and only God.

August 18, 2014

Beholding the Appearance of God in His Judgment and Chastisement

Like the hundreds of millions of others who follow the Lord Jesus Christ, we abide by the laws and commandments of the Bible, enjoy the abundant grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and gather together, pray, praise, and serve in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ—and all this we do under the care and protection of the Lord. We are often weak, and we are also often strong. We believe that all of our actions are in accordance with the teachings of the Lord. It goes without saying, then, that we also believe ourselves to be on the path of following the will of the Father in heaven. We long for the return of the Lord Jesus, for His glorious descent, for the end of our life on earth, for the appearance of the kingdom, and for everything as it was foretold in the Book of Revelation: The Lord arrives, He brings disaster, He rewards the good and punishes the evil, and He takes all those who follow Him and welcome His return up to meet Him in the air. Whenever we think of this, we cannot but be overcome with emotion, joyful that we were born in the last days and have the good fortune to witness the coming of the Lord. Though we have suffered persecution, we have gotten in return “a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” What a blessing! All of this longing and the grace bestowed by the Lord render us constantly sober unto prayer and make us more diligent in gathering together. Maybe next year, maybe tomorrow, and maybe within a space of time shorter than man can conceive, the Lord shall suddenly descend, appearing among a group of people who have been waiting for Him with eager solicitude. We rush to get ahead of each other, none willing to fall behind, all for the sake of being in the first group to behold the appearance of the Lord, of being among those who are raptured. We have given everything, heedless of the cost, for the coming of this day; some leaving their jobs, some abandoning their families, some renouncing marriage, and some even donating all of their savings. What selfless acts of devotion! Such sincerity and loyalty are surely beyond even the saints of ages past! As the Lord bestows grace upon whomever He pleases and shows mercy to whomever He pleases, our acts of devotion and of expending, we believe, have long since been beheld by His eyes. So, too, have our heartfelt prayers reached His ears, and we trust that the Lord will give us recompense for our dedication. Moreover, God had been gracious toward us before He created the world, and the blessings and promises He has given to us no one can take away. We are all planning for the future, and as a matter of course have made our dedication and expenditure into counter chips or capital to exchange for being raptured to meet the Lord in the air. What is more, we have, without the slightest hesitation, placed ourselves on the throne of the future, to preside over all nations and all peoples or to reign as kings. All this we take as a given, as something to be expected.

We disdain all those who are against the Lord Jesus; all of their end will be annihilation. Who told them not to believe that the Lord Jesus is the Savior? Of course, there are times when we imitate the Lord Jesus in being compassionate toward the people of the world, for they do not understand, and it is right that we be tolerant and forgiving toward them. Everything that we do is in accordance with the words of the Bible, for everything that does not conform to the Bible is heterodoxy and heresy. Belief of this kind is deeply rooted in the mind of each one of us. Our Lord is in the Bible, and if we do not depart from the Bible, we shall not depart from the Lord; if we abide by this principle, we shall gain salvation. We spur each other on, each supporting the other, and every time we gather together, we hope that everything we say and do is in accordance with the will of the Lord and will be accepted by the Lord. Despite the severe hostility of our environment, our hearts are filled with delight. When we think of the blessings that are within such easy reach, is there anything we cannot set aside? Is there anything we are reluctant to part with? All of this goes without saying, and all of this lies under the watchful eyes of God. We, this handful of the needy who have been lifted from the dunghill, are just like all the ordinary followers of the Lord Jesus, dreaming of being raptured, of being blessed, and of ruling all nations. Our corruption has been laid bare in the eyes of God, and our desires and greed have been condemned in the eyes of God. Nevertheless, all of this happens so normally, and so logically, that none of us wonders whether our longings are right, much less do any of us doubt the accuracy of everything that we hold to. Who can know God’s will? Exactly what sort of path it is that man walks, we do not know to seek or to explore; and even less are we interested in inquiring. For we only care about whether we can be raptured, whether we can be blessed, whether there is a place for us in the kingdom of heaven, and whether we shall have a share of the water of the river of life and the fruit of the tree of life. Is it not for the sake of gaining these things that we believe in the Lord and become His followers? Our sins have been forgiven, we have repented, we have drunk the bitter cup of wine, and we have put the cross upon our back. Who can say that the Lord will not accept the price we have paid? Who can say that we have not prepared enough oil? We do not wish to be those foolish virgins or one of those who are forsaken. Moreover, we pray constantly, asking the Lord to keep us from being misled by false Christs, for it is said in the Bible: “Then if any man shall say to you, See, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:23–24). We have all committed these verses of the Bible to memory; we know them by heart, and we see them as a precious treasure, as life, and as a letter of credit that decides whether we can be saved or raptured …

For thousands of years, the living have passed away, taking their longings and their dreams with them, but as to whether they have gone to the kingdom of heaven, no one truly knows. The dead return, having forgotten all the stories that once occurred, and they still follow the teachings and the paths of the forefathers. And in this way, as years pass and the days go by, no one knows whether our Lord Jesus, our God, truly accepts everything that we do. All we can do is look forward to having an outcome and speculate about everything that will come to pass. Yet God has kept His silence throughout, never appearing to us, never speaking to us. And so, following the Bible and in accordance with signs, we willfully make judgments about God’s will and disposition. We have become accustomed to the silence of God; we have become accustomed to measuring the right and wrong of our conduct by means of our own way of thinking; we have become accustomed to relying on our knowledge, notions, and moral ethics in place of the demands God makes of us; we have become accustomed to enjoying the grace of God; we have become accustomed to having God provide assistance whenever we need it; we have become accustomed to holding out our hands to God for all things, and to ordering God about; we have also become accustomed to conforming to regulations, not paying attention to how the Holy Spirit leads us; and, even more, we have become accustomed to days in which we are our own master. We believe in a God such as this, whom we have never met face-to-face. Questions such as what His disposition is like, what He has and is, what His image is like, whether or not we will know Him when He comes, and so on—none of these is important. What is important is that He is in our hearts and that we all await Him, and it is enough we are able to imagine that He is like this or that. We appreciate our faith and treasure our spirituality. We look on all things as dung, and tread all things underfoot. Because we are believers of the glorious Lord, no matter how long and arduous the journey, no matter what hardships and dangers befall us, nothing can halt our footsteps as we follow the Lord. “A pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeded out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. On either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and His servants shall serve Him: And they shall see His face; and His name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God gives them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 22:1–5). Every time we sing these words, our hearts brim with boundless joy and satisfaction, and tears flow from our eyes. Thanks be to the Lord for choosing us, thanks be to the Lord for His grace. He has given us a hundredfold in this life and has given us eternal life in the world to come. If He were to ask us to die now, we would do so without the slightest complaint. Oh Lord! Please come soon! Considering how we yearn for You so desperately, and have forsaken everything for You, do not delay even a minute, a second, longer.

God is silent, and has never appeared to us, yet His work has never stopped. He surveys the whole earth, and commands all things, and beholds all the words and deeds of man. He conducts His management with measured steps and according to His plan, silently and without dramatic effect, yet His footsteps advance, one by one, ever closer to mankind, and His judgment seat is deployed in the universe at the speed of lightning, following which His throne immediately descends into our midst. What a majestic scene that is, what a stately and solemn tableau! Like a dove, and like a roaring lion, the Spirit comes into our midst. He is wisdom, He is righteousness and majesty, and He comes surreptitiously into our midst, wielding authority and filled with love and mercy. No one is aware of His arrival, no one welcomes His arrival, and, what is more, no one knows all that He is about to do. Man’s life goes on as before, his heart no different, and the days go by as usual. God lives among us, a man like other men, as one of the most insignificant of the followers and an ordinary believer. He has His own pursuits, His own goals; and, what is more, He has divinity not possessed by ordinary men. No one has noticed the existence of His divinity, and no one has perceived the difference between His essence and that of man. We live together with Him, unconstrained and unafraid, for in our eyes He is but an insignificant believer. He watches our every move, and all of our thoughts and ideas are laid bare before Him. No one takes an interest in His existence, no one imagines anything about His function, and, what is more, no one has the faintest suspicion about His identity. All we do is carry on our pursuits, as if He has nothing to do with us …

By chance, the Holy Spirit expresses a passage of words “through” Him, and even though it feels very unexpected, we nevertheless recognize it as an utterance coming from God and readily accept it from God. That is because, regardless of who expresses these words, as long as they come from the Holy Spirit, we should accept them and may not deny them. The next utterance could come through me, or through you, or through someone else. Whoever it is, all is the grace of God. Yet no matter who it is, we may not worship this person, for no matter what, this person cannot possibly be God, nor would we by any means choose an ordinary person like this to be our God. Our God is so great and honorable; how could such an insignificant person stand in His place? What is more, we are waiting for God to come and take us back to the kingdom of heaven, so how could someone so insignificant be up to such an important and arduous task? If the Lord comes again, it must be upon a white cloud, so that all the multitudes may see. How glorious that will be! How is it possible that He can hide surreptitiously among a group of ordinary people?

And yet it is this ordinary person, hidden in the midst of people, who is doing the new work of saving us. He offers us no explanations, nor does He tell us why He has come, but simply does the work He intends to do with measured steps and according to His plan. His words and utterances become ever more frequent. From consoling, exhorting, reminding, and warning, to reproaching and disciplining; from a tone that is gentle and mild, to words that are fierce and majestic—all of it confers mercy on man and instills trepidation in him. Everything that He says hits home at the secrets hidden deep within us; His words sting our hearts, sting our spirits, and leave us filled with unbearable shame, hardly knowing where to hide ourselves. We begin to wonder whether the God in this person’s heart truly loves us and what exactly He is up to. Perhaps we can only be raptured after enduring these sufferings? In our heads, we are calculating … about the destination to come and about our future fate. Still, as before, none of us believes that God has already assumed flesh to work in our midst. Even though He has accompanied us for such a long time, even though He has already spoken so many words face-to-face with us, we remain unwilling to accept such an ordinary man as the God of our future, and still less are we willing to entrust control of our future and our fate to this insignificant person. From Him we enjoy an unending supply of living water, and through Him we live face-to-face with God. But we are only thankful for the grace of the Lord Jesus in heaven, and have never paid any heed to the feelings of this ordinary person who is possessed of divinity. Still, as before, He does His work humbly hidden in the flesh, giving expression to His inmost heart, as though insensible to mankind’s rejection of Him, as though eternally forgiving of man’s childishness and ignorance, and forever tolerant of man’s irreverent attitude toward Him.

Unbeknownst to us, this insignificant man has led us into one step after another of God’s work. We undergo countless trials, bear innumerable chastenings, and are tested by death. We learn of God’s righteous and majestic disposition, enjoy, too, His love and mercy, come to appreciate God’s great power and wisdom, witness the loveliness of God, and behold God’s eager desire to save man. In the words of this ordinary person, we come to know the disposition and essence of God, to understand God’s will, to know the nature essence of man, and see the way to salvation and perfection. His words cause us to “die,” and they cause us to be “reborn”; His words bring us comfort, yet also leave us wracked with guilt and a sense of indebtedness; His words bring us joy and peace, but also infinite pain. Sometimes we are as lambs to the slaughter in His hands; sometimes we are like the apple of His eye, and enjoy His tender love; sometimes we are like His enemy, and under His gaze are turned to ashes by His wrath. We are the human race saved by Him, we are the maggots in His eyes, and we are the lost lambs that, day and night, He is bent on finding. He is merciful toward us, He despises us, He raises us up, He comforts and exhorts us, He guides us, He enlightens us, He chastens and disciplines us, and He even curses us. Night and day, He never ceases to worry about us, and protects and cares for us, night and day, never leaving our side, but spills His heart’s blood for our sake and pays any price for us. Within the utterances of this small and ordinary body of flesh, we have enjoyed the entirety of God and beheld the destination that God has bestowed upon us. Notwithstanding this, vanity still stirs up trouble within our hearts, and we are still unwilling actively to accept a person like this as our God. Though He has given us so much manna, so much to enjoy, none of this can take the Lord’s place in our hearts. We honor this person’s special identity and status only with great reluctance. As long as He does not open His mouth to ask us to acknowledge that He is God, we will never take it upon ourselves to acknowledge Him as the God that is soon to arrive and yet has long been working in our midst.

God continues His utterances, employing various methods and perspectives to admonish us about what we should do while, at the same time, giving voice to His heart. His words carry life power, show us the way we should walk, and enable us to understand what the truth is. We begin to be drawn by His words, we begin to focus on the tone and manner of His speaking, and subconsciously we begin to take an interest in the innermost feelings of this unremarkable person. He spits up His heart’s blood in working on our behalf, loses sleep and appetite on our account, weeps for us, sighs for us, groans in sickness for us, suffers humiliation for the sake of our destination and salvation, and our numbness and rebelliousness draw tears and blood from His heart. This way of being and of having belongs to no ordinary person, nor can it be possessed or attained by any corrupted human being. He shows tolerance and patience possessed by no ordinary person, and His love is not something with which any created being is endowed. No one apart from Him can know all of our thoughts, or have such a clear and complete grasp of our nature and essence, or judge the rebelliousness and corruption of mankind, or speak to us and work on us like this on behalf of God in heaven. No one apart from Him is endowed with the authority, wisdom, and dignity of God; the disposition of God and what God has and is are brought forth, in their entirety, in Him. No one apart from Him can show us the way and bring us light. No one apart from Him can reveal the mysteries that God has not disclosed since creation until today. No one apart from Him can save us from Satan’s bondage and our own corrupt disposition. He represents God. He expresses the inmost heart of God, the exhortations of God, and God’s words of judgment toward all mankind. He has begun a new age, a new era, and ushered in a new heaven and earth and new work, and He has brought us hope, ending the life we led in vagueness and enabling our whole being to behold, in total clarity, the path to salvation. He has conquered our whole being and gained our hearts. From that moment onward, our minds have become conscious, and our spirits seem to be revived: This ordinary, insignificant person, who lives among us and has long been rejected by us—is this not the Lord Jesus, who is ever in our thoughts, waking or dreaming, and for whom we long night and day? It is He! It really is He! He is our God! He is the truth, the way, and the life! He has enabled us to live again and to see the light and has stopped our hearts from wandering. We have returned to the home of God, we have returned before His throne, we are face-to-face with Him, we have witnessed His countenance, and we have seen the road that lies ahead. At this time, our hearts are completely conquered by Him; we no longer doubt who He is, no longer oppose His work and His word, and we fall down prostrate before Him. We wish for nothing more than to follow the footprints of God for the rest of our lives, and to be made perfect by Him, and to repay His grace, and repay His love for us, and to obey His orchestrations and arrangements, and to cooperate with His work, and to do everything we can to complete what He entrusts to us.

Being conquered by God is like a martial arts contest.

Each of God’s words strikes at one of our mortal spots, leaving us wounded and filled with dread. He exposes our notions, our imaginings, and our corrupt disposition. From all that we say and do, down to every one of our thoughts and ideas, our nature essence is revealed in His words, putting us in a state of fear and trembling with nowhere to hide our shame. One by one, He tells us about all of our actions, our aims and intentions, even the corrupt disposition that we ourselves have never discovered, making us feel exposed in all our wretched imperfection and, even more, completely won over. He judges us for opposing Him, chastises us for blaspheming and condemning Him, and makes us feel that, in His eyes, we have not one single redeeming feature, that we are the living Satan. Our hopes are dashed; we no longer dare to make any unreasonable demands of Him or to harbor any designs on Him, and even our dreams vanish overnight. This is a fact that none of us can imagine and which none of us can accept. Within the space of a moment, we lose our inward equilibrium and do not know how to continue on the road that lies ahead, or how to continue in our beliefs. It seems as if our faith has gone back to square one, and as if we have never met the Lord Jesus or gotten to know Him. Everything before our eyes fills us with perplexity and makes us vacillate indecisively. We are dismayed, we are disappointed, and deep in our hearts there is irrepressible rage and disgrace. We try to vent, to find a way out, and, what is more, to continue waiting for our Savior Jesus, that we may pour our hearts out to Him. Though there are times when we appear on the outside to be on an even keel, neither haughty nor humble, in our hearts we are afflicted with a sense of loss we have never felt before. Though sometimes we may seem unusually calm on the outside, our minds are roiling with torment like a stormy sea. His judgment and chastisement have stripped us of all our hopes and dreams, putting an end to our extravagant desires and leaving us unwilling to believe that He is our Savior and capable of saving us. His judgment and chastisement have opened a chasm between us and Him, one so deep that no one is willing to cross it. His judgment and chastisement are the first time that we have suffered such a great setback, such great humiliation in our lives. His judgment and chastisement have caused us truly to appreciate God’s honor and intolerance of man’s offense, compared to which we are exceedingly base, exceedingly impure. His judgment and chastisement have made us realize for the first time how arrogant and pompous we are, and how man will never be the equal of God, or on a par with God. His judgment and chastisement have made us yearn to live no more in such a corrupt disposition, to rid ourselves of this nature essence as soon as possible, and to cease being vile and detestable to Him. His judgment and chastisement have made us happy to submit to and obey His words, no longer rebelling against His orchestrations and arrangements. His judgment and chastisement have once more given us the desire to survive and made us happy to accept Him as our Savior…. We have stepped out of the work of conquest, out of hell, out of the valley of the shadow of death…. Almighty God has gained us, this group of people! He has triumphed over Satan and defeated the multitudes of His enemies!

We are just such an ordinary group of people, possessed of a corrupt satanic disposition, the ones predestined by God before the ages, and the needy ones whom God has lifted from the dunghill. We once rejected and condemned God, but we have now been conquered by Him. From God we have received life, the way of eternal life. Wherever we may be on earth, whatever persecutions and tribulations we endure, we cannot be apart from the salvation of Almighty God. For He is our Creator, and our only redemption!

The love of God extends forth like the water of a spring, and is given to you, and to me, and to others, and to all those who truly seek the truth and await the appearance of God.

Just as the sun and moon rise in turn, the work of God never ceases, and is carried out upon you, upon me, upon others, and upon all those who follow the footprints of God and accept His judgment and chastisement.

March 23, 2010