God is silent, and has never appeared to us, yet His work has never stopped. He looks upon all lands, and commands all things, and beholds all the words and deeds of man. His management is conducted in steps and according to His plan. It proceeds silently, without dramatic effect, yet His footsteps advance ever closer to mankind, and His judgment seat is deployed in the universe at the speed of lightning, immediately followed by the descent of His throne among us. What a majestic scene that is, what a stately and solemn tableau. Like a dove, and like a roaring lion, the Spirit arrives among us all. He is wise, He is righteous and majestic, He quietly arrives among us possessed of authority and filled with love and compassion. No one is aware of His arrival, no one welcomes His arrival, and, moreover, no one knows all that He will do. Man’s life remains unchanged; his heart is no different, and the days go by as usual. God lives among us like an ordinary person, as a most insignificant follower and an ordinary believer. He has His own pursuits, His own goals, and, moreover, 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 substance and that of man. We live together with Him, unconstrained and unafraid, for we see Him as nothing more than 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 has any imagination of His function, and, moreover, no one has any suspicion about who He is. We merely continue our pursuits, as if He has nothing to do with us …

By chance, the Holy Spirit expresses a passage of words “through” Him, and though it feels very unexpected, we recognize that this is the utterance of God, and we 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 cannot deny them. The next utterance could be through me, it could be through you, or it could be through him. Regardless of who it is, all is the grace of God. Yet no matter who the person is, we should not worship them, for regardless of anything else, they cannot possibly be God; we can by no means choose an ordinary person such as this to be our God. Our God is so great and honorable; how could He be represented by someone so insignificant? What’s more, we are all awaiting the arrival of God to take us back to the kingdom of heaven, and so how could someone so insignificant be qualified for such an important and arduous task? If the Lord comes again, it must be upon a white cloud, visible to all. How glorious that will be! How could He quietly hide among an ordinary group of people?

And yet it is this ordinary person hidden among people who is doing the new work of saving us. He does not clarify anything for us, nor does He tell us why He has come. He merely does the work He intends to do in 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 kind, to words that are fierce and majestic—they all instill both compassion and trepidation in man. Everything that He says hits home at the secrets hidden deep within us, His words sting our hearts, sting our spirits, and leave us ashamed and humiliated. We begin to wonder whether the God in this person’s heart really loves us, and what exactly He intends to do. Perhaps we can only be raptured after enduring such pain? In our heads we are calculating … about the destination to come, and about our future fate. Still none of us believes that God has assumed flesh and works among us. Even though He has been with us for so long, even though He has already spoken so many words face to face with us, we are still unwilling to accept someone so ordinary as the God of our future, much less are we willing to entrust control of our future and fate to someone so insignificant. From Him we enjoy an unending supply of living water, and thanks to Him we live face-to-face with God. We are only thankful for the grace of the Lord Jesus in heaven, and have never paid any attention to the feelings of this ordinary person who is possessed of divinity. He still does His work humbly hidden in the flesh, expressing His heart’s voice, seemingly insensible to mankind’s rejection of Him, apparently eternally forgiving of man’s childishness and ignorance, and forever tolerant of man’s irreverence toward Him.

Unbeknownst to us, this insignificant man has led us into step after step of God’s work. We undergo countless trials, are subjected to innumerable chastenings, and tested by death. We learn of God’s righteous and majestic disposition, enjoy, too, His love and compassion, 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 substance of God, come to understand God’s will, come to know the nature and substance of man, and see the way of salvation and perfection. His words cause us to die, and 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 great pain. Sometimes we are as lambs to the slaughter in His hands; sometimes we are like the apple of His eye, and enjoy His love and affection; sometimes we are like His enemy, turned to ashes by His wrath in His eyes. We are the mankind saved by Him, we are the maggots in His eyes, and we are the lost lambs that He thinks of finding day and night. 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. He worries for us night and day, He protects and cares for us night and day, He never leaves our side, and He devotes all His care to us and pays any price for us. Among the words of this small and ordinary flesh, we have enjoyed the entirety of God, and beheld the destination that God has bestowed upon us. Yet despite this, vanity still stalks within our hearts, and we are still unwilling to actively accept a person such as this as our God. Though He has given us so much manna, so much to enjoy, none of this can usurp the Lord’s place in our hearts. We honor this person’s special identity and status only with great reluctance. If He does not speak up to make us acknowledge that He is God, then we will never take it upon ourselves to acknowledge Him as the God that is soon to arrive yet has been working among us for so long.

The utterance of God continues, and He employs various methods and perspectives to admonish us what to do and express His heart’s voice. His words carry life power, and show us the way we should walk, and allow us to understand what the truth is. We start to be drawn to His words, we begin to focus on the tone and manner of His speaking, and subconsciously begin to take an interest in the heart’s voice of this unremarkable person. He makes painstaking efforts for us, loses sleep and appetite for us, weeps for us, sighs for us, groans in sickness for us, suffers humiliation for the sake of our destination and salvation, and His heart bleeds and sheds tears for our numbness and rebelliousness. Such being and possessions of His are beyond an ordinary person, and cannot be possessed or attained by any of the corrupted. He has tolerance and patience possessed by no ordinary person, and His love is not possessed by any created being. No one apart from Him can know all of our thoughts, or have such a grasp of our nature and substance, or judge the rebelliousness and corruption of mankind, or speak to us and work among us like this on behalf of the God of heaven. No one except for Him can possess the authority, wisdom, and dignity of God; the disposition of God and what He has and is are issued forth, in their entirety, from Him. No one apart from Him can show us the way and bring us light. No one apart from Him can reveal the mysteries God has not disclosed from creation until today. No one apart from Him can save us from Satan’s bondage and our corrupt disposition. He represents God, and expresses the heart’s voice of God, the exhortations of God, and the words of judgment of God toward all mankind. He has begun a new age, a new era, and brought a new heaven and earth, new work, and He has brought us hope, and ended the life we led in vagueness, and allowed us to fully behold the path of salvation. He has conquered our whole being, and gained our hearts. From that moment onward, our minds 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 He not the Lord Jesus, who is ever in our thoughts, and whom we long for night and day? It is He! It’s really Him! He is our God! He is the truth, the way, and the life! He has allowed us to live again, 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 have seen the road ahead. At the time, our hearts have been completely conquered by Him; we no longer doubt who He is, and no longer oppose His work and word, and we fall down, completely, before Him. We wish for nothing except 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.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. Appendix 4: Beholding the Appearance of God in His Judgment and Chastisement