In truth, the work being done now is to cause people to rebel against Satan and their old ancestor. All judgments by the word aim to expose people’s corrupt dispositions and to enable them to understand the essence of life. These repeated judgments pierce people’s hearts. Each judgment directly relates to their fates and is meant to wound their hearts so that they can let go of all those things and thereby come to know life, know this filthy world, know God’s wisdom and almightiness, and also know mankind, which is corrupted by Satan. The more chastisement and judgment is like this, the more man’s heart can be wounded and the more his spirit can be awakened. The goal of such judgment is to awaken the spirits of these extremely corrupted and most deeply deluded of people. Man has no spirit, that is, his spirit died long ago and he knows not that there is Heaven, knows not that there is a God, and certainly knows not that he is struggling in the abyss of death; how could he possibly know that he is living in this evil human hell? How could he possibly know that this putrid corpse of his has fallen into Hades of death after it was corrupted by Satan? How could he possibly know that all things on earth have long been ruined beyond repair by mankind? And how could he possibly know that the Creator has come to the earth today and is searching for a group of corrupted people whom He can save? Even though man has experienced every possible refinement and judgment, his numb consciousness has remained entirely unmoved and is virtually unresponsive. How degenerate is man! And though this kind of judgment is like the cruel hail that falls from the sky, it is of the greatest benefit to man. Without judging people like this, the result could not be achieved, and it would be absolutely impossible to save people from the abyss of misery. Without working in this way, it would be very difficult for people to emerge from Hades, because their hearts long ago died and their spirits long ago were trampled by Satan. Saving you who have sunk to the deepest depths of degeneration requires calling out to you strenuously, judging you strenuously; only then can your frozen hearts be awakened.

Your flesh, your extravagant desires, your greed, and your lust are deeply rooted in you. These things are so constantly controlling your hearts that you are powerless to cast off the yoke of those feudal and degenerate thoughts. You neither yearn to change your present situation, nor to escape the influence of darkness. You are simply bound by those things. Even though you all know that this life is so painful and this human world so dark, still, not a single one of you has the courage to change your life. You only long to escape the realities of this life, achieve transcendence of the soul, and live in a peaceful, wonderful, heaven-like environment. You are unwilling to endure hardships to change your current life; neither are you willing to search within this judgment and chastisement for the life that you should enter into. Rather, you dream entirely unrealistic dreams about that beautiful world beyond the flesh. The life you long for is one you can effortlessly obtain without suffering any pain. That is completely unrealistic! This is because what you hope for is not to live a meaningful lifetime in the flesh and to gain the truth in the course of a lifetime, that is, to live for the truth and to stand up for justice. This is not what you would consider a radiant, dazzling life. You feel that this would not be a glamorous or meaningful life. In your eyes, living such a life would feel like an injustice! Even though you accept this chastisement today, what you are pursuing is not to gain the truth or live out the truth in the present, but rather to be able to enter a happy life beyond the flesh later. You are not seeking for the truth, neither are you standing up for the truth, much less are you living for the truth. You are not pursuing for the sake of entry today; rather, your thoughts are occupied by what might one day come to be: You are gazing at the blue sky and shedding bitter tears as you look forward to the day you will be taken to heaven. Do you not know that thinking like this is already out of touch with reality? You keep thinking that the Savior has infinite kindness and compassion, that there will no doubt come a day in which He takes you with Him, you who have endured hardship and suffering in this world, and that He will redress your grievances and avenge you, you who have been victimized and oppressed. Are you not full of sin? Are you the only one who has suffered in this world? You have fallen under Satan’s power yourself and suffered—does God really still need to redress your grievances? Those who are unable to satisfy God’s demands—are they not all God’s enemies? Those who do not believe in God incarnate—are they not all antichrists? What does your good behavior count for? Can it take the place of a heart that worships God? You cannot receive God’s blessing simply by doing some good things, and God will not redress your grievances and avenge the wrongs against you just because you have been victimized and oppressed. Those who believe in God yet do not know God, but who do good—are they not also chastised? You merely believe in God, merely want God to redress and avenge the wrongs against you, and you want God to give you your day, a day when you can finally hold your head high. But you ignore the truth, and you do not thirst to live out the truth. Much less are you able to escape this hard, empty life. Instead, while living your life in the flesh and amid sin, you look expectantly to God to right your grievances and part the fog of your existence. But is this possible? If you possess the truth, you can follow God. If you have living out, you can be a manifestation of God’s word. If you have life, you can enjoy God’s blessing. Those who possess the truth can enjoy God’s blessing. God ensures redress for those who love Him wholeheartedly and who endure hardships and sufferings, but not for those who only love themselves and who have fallen prey to Satan’s deceptions. How can there be goodness in those who do not love the truth? How can there be righteousness in those who only love the flesh? Are not righteousness and goodness both spoken of only in reference to the truth? Are they not reserved for those who wholeheartedly love God? Those who do not love the truth and who are but putrid corpses—do not all these people harbor evil? Those unable to live out the truth—are they not all enemies of the truth? And what about you?

If you can escape these influences of darkness and divorce yourself from those unclean things, if you can become sanctified, then you will possess the truth. It is not that your nature has changed, but only that you are able to put the truth into practice and are able to rebel against the flesh. This is what is possessed by those who have been cleansed. The main goal of the work of conquest is to cleanse people so they can possess the truth, because people understand too little of the truth! To do the work of conquest on such people is of the deepest significance. You have all fallen under the influence of darkness and have been deeply harmed. The goal of this work, then, is to enable you to know human nature and thereby live out the truth. To be perfected is something that all created beings should accept. If the work of this stage involved only perfecting people, then it could be done in the UK, or America, or Israel; it could be done on the people of any country. But the work of conquest is selective. The first step of the work of conquest is short-term; moreover, it will be used to humiliate Satan and conquer the entire universe. This is the initial work of conquest. One can say that any created being who believes in God can be perfected because to be perfected is something that can be achieved only after long-term change. But to be conquered is different. The specimen and model for conquest must be the people who are most backward, who live in the deepest darkness; they must be the most degraded people, those who least acknowledge God, and who are the most rebellious toward God. This is exactly the kind of person who can bear testimony of being conquered. The main goal of the work of conquest is to defeat Satan, while the goal of perfecting people is to gain people. It is to enable people to have testimony after being conquered that this work of conquest has been carried out here, on people like you. The aim is to have people bear testimony after being conquered. These conquered people will be used to achieve the goal of humiliating Satan. So, what is the main method of conquest? Chastisement, judgment, casting curses, and revealing—using a righteous disposition to conquer people so that they are utterly convinced because of God’s righteous disposition. To use the reality and the authority of the word to conquer people, making it so they’re fully convinced—this is what it means to be conquered. Those who have been perfected are not just able to achieve submission after being conquered, but they are also able to have knowledge of the work of judgment, change their disposition, and come to know God. They experience the path of loving God and become filled with the truth. They are able to experience God’s work, they become able to suffer for God, and they have their own resolve. The perfected are those who have practical understanding of the truth thanks to having experienced God’s word. The conquered are those who know of the truth but have not comprehended the real meaning of the truth. After being conquered, they submit, but their submission is all the result of the judgment they received. They have absolutely no understanding of the real meaning of many truths. They acknowledge the truth verbally, but they do not have entry into the truth; they understand the truth, but they have not experienced the truth. The work being done on those being perfected includes chastisements and judgments, along with the provision of life. A person who focuses on entering the truth is a person to be perfected. The difference between the perfected and the conquered lies in whether they have entry into the truth. The perfected are those who understand the truth, enter the truth, and live out the truth; people who cannot be perfected are those who do not understand the truth and do not enter the truth, that is, those who do not live out the truth. If such people are able to now submit completely, then they are conquered. If the conquered do not seek the truth—if they follow but do not live out the truth, if they see and hear the truth but do not focus on living out the truth—then they cannot be perfected. People who are to be perfected practice the truth according to God’s requirements along the path of being perfected. Through this, they satisfy God’s intentions, and they are perfected. Anyone who follows to the end before the work of conquest concludes is a conquered one, but cannot be said to be a perfected one. “The perfected” refers to those who, after the work of conquest ends, are able to pursue the truth and will be gained by God. It refers to those who, after the work of conquest ends, stand firm in tribulation and live out the truth. What distinguishes being conquered from being perfected is differences in the steps of the work and differences in the degree to which people understand and enter into the truth. All those who have not embarked on the path of being perfected, meaning those who do not possess the truth, will ultimately still be eliminated. Only those who possess the truth and who live out the truth can be completely gained by God. That is, those who live out Peter’s image are the perfected, while all others are the conquered. The work being done on all those being conquered consists of cursing, chastising, and wrath, and what comes to them is righteousness and curses. To work on such a person is to expose without the slightest bit of leniency—to expose the corrupt dispositions inside them so that they recognize them for themselves and are fully convinced. Once man becomes completely submissive, the work of conquest ends. Even if most people still do not seek to understand the truth, the conquest work will have ended.

If you are to be perfected, there are criteria to be met. You must, through your resolve, your perseverance and your conscience, and your pursuit, have experience when it comes to life, and satisfy God’s intentions. This is your entry, and this is what’s required on the path of being perfected. The work of perfection can be done on all people. Anyone who pursues God can be perfected and has the opportunity and qualifications to be perfected. It is not something that is predetermined. Whether one can be perfected mainly depends on what one pursues. People who love the truth and are able to live out the truth are certainly able to be perfected. People who do not love the truth are not approved of by God; they do not possess the life that God demands, and they are unable to be perfected. The perfection work is only for the sake of gaining people. It is not part of the work of battling Satan; the conquest work is only for the sake of battling Satan, which means using the conquest of man to defeat Satan. The work of conquest is the main work, the newest work that has never been done in all the ages. One can say that the goal of this stage of work is mainly to conquer all people so as to defeat Satan. The work of perfecting people—this is not new work. The goal of all the work God does during the time in which He’s working in the flesh is primarily the conquest of people. This is like in the Age of Grace, when the main work was the redemption of all mankind through the crucifixion. “Gaining people” was additional to the work in the flesh and was done only after the crucifixion. When Jesus came and did His work, His goal was mainly to use His crucifixion to triumph over the bondage of death and Hades, to triumph over Satan’s influence—that is, to defeat Satan. It was only after Jesus was crucified that Peter embarked, one step at a time, on the path to perfection. Of course, Peter was among those who followed Jesus while Jesus was working, but he was not perfected during that time. Rather, it was after Jesus finished His work that Peter gradually understood the truth and then became perfected. God incarnate comes to earth only to complete a key, crucial stage of work in a short period of time, not to live long-term among people on earth with the intention of perfecting them. He does not do that work. He does not wait until such time as when man is completely perfected to conclude His work. That is not the goal and significance of His incarnation. He comes only to do the short-term work of saving humanity, not to do the very long-term work of perfecting humanity. The work of saving humanity is representative, capable of launching a new age. It can be finished in a short period of time. But perfecting humanity requires working man to a certain level; such work takes a long time. It is work that must be done by the Spirit of God, but it is done on the foundation of the truth that was spoken during God’s work in the flesh, or it is otherwise done through His raising up of the apostles to do long-term shepherding work—in this way His goal of perfecting humanity is achieved. God incarnate does not do this work. He only speaks about the way of life so people will understand, and He only provides humanity with the truth, rather than continuously accompanying man in practicing the truth, because that is not within His ministry. Therefore, He will not be accompanying man until the day man completely understands the truth and completely gains the truth. His work in the flesh concludes when man formally enters the right track of belief in God, when man steps onto the right track of being perfected. This of course is also when He will have thoroughly defeated Satan and triumphed over the world. He cares not whether man will have ultimately entered the truth at that time, nor does He care about whether man’s life is great or small. None of that is what He in the flesh should be concerned with; none of it is within the ministry of God incarnate. Once He finishes the work He ought to do, He will conclude His work in the flesh. So, the work that God incarnate does is only the work that God’s Spirit cannot do directly. Moreover, it is the short-term work of salvation, not work that He will carry out on earth on a long-term basis.

Raising your caliber is not within the realm of My work. I ask you to do this only because your caliber is too low. In truth this is not part of the work of perfection; rather, it is extra work being done on you. The work being done on you today is done according to what you need. It is individualized and is not a path that should be entered into by everyone who is being perfected. Because your caliber is lower than anyone who was perfected in the past, and this work is fraught with obstructions when done upon you, and because the targets of perfection are all different, I must therefore do some extra work among you. Originally, when God came to the earth, He remained within His proper remit and carried out His work, not bothering with other unrelated matters. He did not get involved in family matters or take part in people’s lives. He is utterly unconcerned with such trivial things; they are not part of His ministry. But your caliber is so much lower than what I demanded—indeed, there is absolutely no comparison—that it poses extreme obstacles to the work. Moreover, this work must be done among the people in this land of China, and you are so undereducated—so I was compelled to speak out and demand that you educate yourselves. I have told you that this is extra work, but it is also something you must attain to, something that will help you to become perfected. In truth, education, basic knowledge about self-conduct, and basic knowledge about life are all things that you should naturally possess; I should not have to talk to you about these things. But since you do not have these things, I have no choice but to do the work of instilling them in you. Even though you harbor many notions about Me, I still demand this of you—I still demand that you raise your caliber. It is not My intention to come and do this work, because My work is just to conquer you, just to obtain your complete conviction by judging you, thereby pointing out the way of life you should enter. To put it another way, how educated you are and whether you are knowledgeable about life would have absolutely nothing to do with Me were it not for the fact that I need to conquer you with My word. All this is being added on to ensure results are achieved in the work of conquest and for the sake of your later perfection. It is not a part of the work of conquest. Because you are of low caliber, and you are lazy and indolent, foolish and slow-witted, wooden and idiotic—because you are exceedingly abnormal—I require that you first raise your caliber. Anyone who wants to be perfected must meet certain criteria. To be perfected, one must be of clear and sober mind and willing to live a meaningful life. If you are someone unwilling to live a hollow life, someone who pursues the truth, someone who is earnest in everything they do, and someone of exceptionally normal humanity, then you meet the conditions to be perfected.

This work being done among you is being carried out on you according to the needs of the work. After the conquest of these people, a group of people will be perfected. Therefore, much of the work at present is also in preparation for the goal of perfecting you, because there are many people hungering for the truth who can be perfected. If the work of conquest was the only step carried out on you and thereafter no further work were done, then would it not be the case that some who yearn for the truth would not gain it? The present work aims to open a path for perfecting people later. Although My work is just the work of conquest, the way of life of which I speak is nevertheless in preparation for perfecting people later. The work that comes after conquest centers on perfecting people, and the conquering is done in order to lay a foundation for the work of perfecting. Man can be perfected only after being conquered. Right now, the main task is to conquer; later, those who seek and long for the truth will be perfected. To be perfected involves people’s positive aspects of entry: whether you have a God-loving heart, how much you’ve experienced walking this path, how pure your love of God is, and how exact your practice of the truth is. To be perfected, one must have basic knowledge of humanity in all regards. This is a baseline requirement. All those who cannot be perfected after being conquered become service objects and will ultimately still be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone and will still fall into the bottomless pit, because your disposition has not changed and you are still of Satan. If a person doesn’t meet the conditions for perfection, then they are useless—they are trash, a tool, something that cannot withstand the trial of fire! How much of a God-loving heart do you possess right now? How much of a self-loathing heart? How deeply do you really know Satan? Have you strengthened your resolve? Is there order to the way you live within your humanity? Has your life changed? Are you living a new life? Has your life outlook changed? If these things have not changed, you cannot be perfected even if you do not retreat; rather, you have only been conquered. When it is time to test you, you will not have the truth, your humanity will be abnormal, and you will be as low as a beast. All you will have attained to is having been conquered—you will merely be an object I have conquered. Just as a donkey, once it has experienced the master’s whip, becomes fearful and afraid to act out every time it sees the master, you would merely be a donkey that has been conquered. If a person lacks those positive aspects and is instead negative and fearful, timid and hesitant in all things, unable to see anything clearly, unable to comprehend the truth, still without a path for practice, and beyond that even without a God-loving heart—if a person has no understanding of how to love God, how to live a meaningful life, or how to be a real person—how can such a person bear witness to God? This would show that your life has little value and you are but a conquered donkey. You would be conquered, but that would merely mean you have rebelled against the great red dragon and refused to submit to its power; it would mean you believe there is a God, want to submit to all of God’s arrangements, and have no complaints. But as for the positive aspects, are you able to live out God’s word and manifest God? If you have none of these aspects, it means you have not been gained by God, and you are but a conquered donkey. There is nothing desirable in you, and the Holy Spirit is not at work in you. Your humanity is too lacking; it is impossible for God to use you. You have to be found worthy by God and be a hundred times better than the nonbelieving beasts and the walking dead—only those who reach this level are qualified to be perfected. Only if one has humanity and has a conscience is one fit for God’s use. Only when you have been perfected can you be considered human. Only the perfected are people who live meaningful lives. Only such people can bear more resounding witness for God.