Part Four

Understand God’s Attitude and Set Aside All Misconceptions of God

Just what sort of God is this God you currently believe in? Have you ever thought about it? When He sees an evil person committing evil acts, does He despise it? (Yes, He does.) What is His attitude when He sees ignorant people making mistakes? (Sorrow.) When He sees people stealing His offerings, what is His attitude? (He despises them.) This is all very clear, right? When God sees someone confused in their belief in Him, who is in no way pursuing the truth, what is God’s attitude? You are not quite sure, are you? “Confusion,” as an attitude, is not a sin, nor does it offend God, and people feel that it is not a sort of major mistake. So, tell Me—what is God’s attitude in this case? (He is unwilling to acknowledge them.) “Unwillingness to acknowledge”—what sort of attitude is this? It means God looks down on these people and scorns them! The way He deals with such people is to give them the cold shoulder. God’s approach is to set them aside, not engaging in any work on them, and this includes the work of enlightenment, illumination, chastening, and discipline. Such people are simply not counted in God’s work. What is God’s attitude toward those who aggravate His disposition and violate His administrative decrees? Extreme loathing! God is tremendously enraged by people who are unrepentant about aggravating His disposition! “Enraged” is no more than a feeling, a mood; it does not correspond to a clear attitude. However, this feeling—this mood—will bring about an outcome for such people: It will fill God with extreme loathing! What is the consequence of this extreme loathing? It is that God will set these people aside and not respond to them for the time being. He will then wait to sort them out “after autumn.” What does this imply? Will these people still have outcomes? God never intended to grant such people any outcome! Therefore, is it not perfectly normal that God does not now respond to such people? (Yes, it is normal.) What should such people be preparing to do? They should prepare to bear the negative consequences of their behavior and of the evil actions they have committed. This is God’s response to such a person. So, now I say clearly to such people: Do not hold on to your delusions any longer, and do not engage in any more wishful thinking. God will not be tolerant of people indefinitely; He will not endure their trespasses or disobedience forever. Some people will say, “I’ve seen a few such people, too, and when they pray, they feel especially touched by God, and then they weep bitterly. Usually they’re also very happy; they seem to have God’s presence and God’s guidance with them.” Do not utter such nonsense! Bitter tears do not necessarily mean one is being touched by God or enjoys God’s presence, let alone God’s guidance. If people anger God, will He still guide them? In short, when God has decided to eliminate and abandon someone, that person’s outcome is already gone. No matter how favorable their feelings when they pray, or how much faith they have in God in their hearts, it is no longer of consequence. The important thing is that God does not need this kind of faith; He has already spurned these people. How to deal with them in the future is also unimportant. The important thing is that in the very instant that these people anger God, their outcomes are set. If God has determined not to save such people, then they will be left behind to be punished. This is God’s attitude.

Though God’s essence contains an element of love, and He is merciful toward each and every person, people have overlooked and forgotten the fact that His essence is one of dignity as well. That He has love does not mean that people can offend Him freely, without inciting in Him feelings or a reaction, nor does the fact that He has mercy mean that He has no principles in how He treats people. God is alive; He genuinely exists. He is neither an imagined puppet nor any other object. Given that He does exist, we should carefully listen to the voice of His heart at all times, pay close attention to His attitude, and come to understand His feelings. We should not use human imaginings to define God, nor should we impose human thoughts or wishes on Him, making God treat people in a human manner based on human imaginings. If you do this, then you are angering God, tempting His wrath, and challenging His dignity! Thus, once you have come to understand the severity of this matter, I urge each and every one of you to be cautious and prudent in your actions. Be cautious and prudent in your speech, as well—with regard to how you treat God, the more cautious and prudent you are, the better! When you do not understand what God’s attitude is, refrain from speaking carelessly, do not be careless in your actions, and do not apply labels casually. Even more importantly, do not come to any arbitrary conclusions. Instead, you should wait and seek; these actions, too, are an expression of fearing God and shunning evil. Above all else, if you can achieve this, and above all else, if you possess this attitude, then God will not blame you for your stupidity, ignorance, and lack of understanding of the reasons behind things. Rather, owing to your attitude of fear of offending God, respect for His intentions, and willingness to obey Him, God will remember you, guide and enlighten you, or tolerate your immaturity and ignorance. Conversely, should your attitude toward Him be irreverent—judging Him as you wish or arbitrarily guessing at and defining His ideas—God will condemn you, discipline you, and even punish you; or, He might offer comment on you. Perhaps this comment will involve your outcome. Therefore, I wish to emphasize once more: Each of you should be cautious and prudent about everything that comes from God. Do not speak carelessly, and do not be careless in your actions. Before you say anything, you should stop and think: Would this action of mine anger God? In doing it, am I revering God? Even in simple matters, you should try to figure these questions out, and spend more time considering them. If you can truly practice according to these principles in all aspects, in all things, at all times, and adopt such an attitude especially when you do not understand something, then God will always guide you and provide you with a path to follow. No matter what sort of show people put on, God sees them quite clearly and plainly, and He will offer an accurate and appropriate evaluation of these displays of yours. After you have undergone the final trial, God will take all of your behavior and sum it up completely in order to determine your outcome. This result will convince every single person beyond the shadow of a doubt. What I would like to tell you here is this: Your every deed, your every action, and your every thought decide your fate.

Who Determines People’s Outcomes?

There is another matter of the utmost importance to discuss, and that is your attitude toward God. This attitude is extremely important! It determines whether you will ultimately walk toward destruction or into the beautiful destination that God has prepared for you. In the Age of Kingdom, God has already worked for more than twenty years, and perhaps, over the course of these two decades, deep down you have been a bit unsure of how you have performed. However, in God’s heart, He has made a real and truthful record of each of you. From the time that each person started following Him and listening to His sermons, gradually understanding more and more of the truth, and until the time each person began to fulfill their duties, God has kept a record of all manner of behaviors attributable to each person. While fulfilling their duties and being faced with all manner of environments and trials, what are people’s attitudes? How do they perform? How do they feel toward God in their hearts? … God has an account of all of this; He has a record of all of it. Perhaps, from your point of view, these issues are confusing. However, from where God stands, they are all clear as crystal, and there is not even the slightest hint of sloppiness. This is an issue that involves the outcome of each person, and touches upon each person’s fate and future prospects as well, and more than that, this is where God expends all of His painstaking efforts; therefore, God would never neglect it one bit, nor does He tolerate any carelessness. God is making a record of this account of humankind, making note of the entire course of humans in their following of God, from the beginning right up to the end. Your attitude toward Him during this period has determined your fate. Is this not true? Now, do you believe that God is righteous? Are His actions appropriate? Do you still have any other imaginings about God in your heads? (No.) Then would you say that people’s outcomes are for God to determine, or for people to determine themselves? (They are for God to determine.) Who is it that determines them? (God.) You are not sure, are you? Brothers and sisters from Hong Kong, speak up—who determines them? (People themselves determine them.) Do people themselves determine them? Would that not then mean that people’s outcomes have nothing to do with God? Brothers and sisters from South Korea, speak up. (God determines people’s outcomes based on all of their actions and deeds, and in accordance with what path they are on.) This is a very objective response. There is a fact here of which I must inform you all: Over the course of God’s salvation work, He has set a standard for humans. This standard is that they must listen to the word of God and walk in God’s way. It is this standard that is used to weigh people’s outcomes. If you practice in accordance with this standard of God, then you can obtain a good outcome; if you do not, then you cannot obtain a good outcome. Who, then, would you say determines this outcome? It is not God alone who determines it, but rather God and humans together. Is this correct? (Yes.) Why is that? It is because it is God who actively wishes to engage in the work of humankind’s salvation and prepare a beautiful destination for humanity; humans are the objects of God’s work, and this outcome, this destination, is what God prepares for them. If there were no objects for Him to work on, then He would not need to do this work; if He were not doing this work, then humans would not have an opportunity to gain salvation. Humans are the ones to be saved, and although being saved is the passive part of this process, it is the attitude of the ones playing this part that determines whether or not God will be successful in His work to save humankind. If not for the guidance that God gives you, you would not know His standard, nor would you have an objective. If you have this standard, this objective, yet you still do not cooperate, put it into practice, or pay the price, then you will not obtain this outcome. For this reason, I say that one’s outcome cannot be separated from God, and it also cannot be separated from the person. Now, then, you know who determines people’s outcomes.

People Tend to Define God Based on Experience

When communicating about the topic of knowing God, have you noticed something? Have you noticed that His attitude these days has undergone a transformation? Is His attitude toward humans unchangeable? Will He always endure like this, extending all of His love and mercy to humans indefinitely? This matter also involves the essence of God. Let us return to the question of the so-called prodigal son mentioned earlier. After that question was asked, your answers were not very clear; in other words, you still do not have a very solid understanding of God’s intentions. Upon knowing that God loves humankind, they define Him as a symbol of love: They believe that no matter what people do, no matter how they behave, no matter how they treat God, and no matter how disobedient they might be, none of this really matters, for God has love, and His love is unlimited and immeasurable; God has love, so He can be tolerant of people; and God has love, so He can be merciful toward people, merciful toward their immaturity, merciful toward their ignorance, and merciful toward their disobedience. Is this really the way it is? For some people, when they have experienced God’s patience once or even a few times, they will treat these experiences as capital in their own understanding of God, believing that He will forever be patient and merciful toward them, and then, over the course of their lives, they take this patience of God and regard it as the standard by which He treats them. There are also those who, after having experienced God’s tolerance once, will forever define God as tolerant—and in their minds, this tolerance is indefinite, unconditional, and even totally unprincipled. Are such beliefs correct? Every time matters of God’s essence or God’s disposition are discussed, you seem bewildered. Seeing you like this makes Me very anxious. You have heard a lot of truths concerning God’s essence; you have also listened to a great many discussions concerning His disposition. However, in your minds, these issues and the truth of these aspects are just memories based on theory and written words; in your day-to-day lives, none of you is ever able to experience or see God’s disposition for what it really is. Thus, you are all muddle-headed in your beliefs; you are all believing blindly, to the point that you have an irreverent attitude toward God and even brush Him aside. What does your having this kind of attitude toward God lead to? It leads to your always making conclusions about God. Once you have acquired a little bit of knowledge, you then feel very satisfied, as though you have obtained God in His entirety. Afterward, you conclude that this is how God is, and you do not let Him move freely. Furthermore, whenever God does something new, you simply refuse to admit that He is God. One day, when God says, “I do not love humankind anymore; I will extend no more mercy to humans; I do not have any further tolerance or patience for them; I am filled to the brim with extreme loathing and antipathy toward them,” such statements will cause conflict deep in people’s hearts. Some of them will even say, “You’re not my God anymore; You’re no longer the God that I want to follow. If this is what You say, then You’re no longer qualified to be my God, and I don’t need to keep following You. If You won’t give me mercy, love, and tolerance anymore, then I will stop following You. If You are tolerant of me indefinitely, always patient with me, and allow me to see that You are love, that You are patience, and that You are tolerance, only then can I follow You, and only then will I have the confidence to follow You to the end. Since I have Your patience and mercy, my disobedience and my trespasses can be forgiven and pardoned indefinitely, and I can sin anytime and anywhere, confess and be pardoned anytime and anywhere, and anger You anytime and anywhere. You shouldn’t have any opinions or draw any conclusions about me.” Though not a single one of you may think about this sort of issue so subjectively or consciously, whenever you consider God to be a tool to be used to forgive you of your sins or an object to be used for obtaining a beautiful destination, you have subtly placed the living God in opposition to you, as your enemy. This is what I see. You may keep on saying such things as, “I believe in God,” “I pursue the truth,” “I want to change my disposition,” “I want to break free from the influence of darkness,” “I want to satisfy God,” “I want to submit to God,” “I want to be faithful toward God, and do my duty well,” and so forth. However, no matter how sweet-sounding your words might be, no matter how much theory you might know, and no matter how imposing or dignified that theory might be, the fact of the matter is that there are now many of you who have already learned how to use the regulations, the doctrines, the theories you have mastered to draw conclusions about God, thus naturally placing Him in opposition to yourselves. Though you may have mastered letters and doctrines, you have not genuinely entered the reality of the truth, so it is very difficult for you to get close to God, to know Him, and to understand Him. This is so lamentable!

I saw the following scene in a video: A few sisters had a copy of The Word Appears in the Flesh, and they were holding it up very high; they were raising the book in their midst, high over their heads. Although this was just an image, what it evoked inside Me was not an image; rather, it made Me think that what every person holds high in their heart is not God’s word, but the book of God’s word. This is a matter that is extremely sad. Such an action is not at all the same as holding God high, because your lack of understanding of God has gotten to the point that even a very obvious question, an extremely minor issue, has you coming up with your own notions. When I ask things of you, and am being serious with you, you respond with conjecture and your own imaginings; some of you even take on a doubtful tone and answer My questions with questions. This tells Me even more clearly that the God you believe in is not the true God. After reading God’s words for so many years, you use them, God’s work, and more doctrines to draw conclusions about Him once again. Moreover, you never even attempt to understand God; you never try to figure out His intentions, understand His attitude toward humans, or comprehend how God thinks, why He is sad, why He is angry, why He spurns people, and other such questions. Moreover, even more people believe that God has always been silent because He is simply watching humanity’s various actions, with no attitude or ideas about them. Yet another group of people believe that God does not utter a sound because He has acquiesced, remaining silent because He is waiting or because He has no attitude; they think that because God’s attitude has already been elaborated fully in the book, and expressed in its entirety to humankind, it therefore does not need to be told to people time and time again. Although God is silent, He still has an attitude and a viewpoint, as well as a standard He demands people to live up to. Though people do not try to understand Him or seek Him, God’s attitude is very clear. Consider someone who once passionately followed God, but then, at some point, abandoned Him and left. Should this person want to come back now, surprisingly enough, you do not know what God’s viewpoint would be, or what His attitude would be. Is this not extremely sad? The fact is this is a fairly superficial matter. If you truly understood God’s heart, you would know His attitude toward this kind of person, and you would not give an ambiguous answer. Since you do not know, allow Me to fill you in.

God’s Attitude Toward Those Who Run Away During His Work

There are people like this everywhere: After they have been certain about God’s way, for various reasons, they depart in silence, without a goodbye, to go off and do whatever their hearts desire. For the time being, we will not get into the reasons these people leave; we will first take a look at what God’s attitude is toward this kind of person. It is very clear! From the moment these people walk away, in God’s eyes, the span of their faith is over. It is not the individual person who ended it, but God. That this person left God means that they have already rejected God, that they do not want Him anymore, and that they no longer accept God’s salvation. Since people like this do not want God, can He still want them? Moreover, when such people possess this sort of attitude, this view, and have grown determined to leave God, they have already aggravated God’s disposition. This is despite the fact that they may not have flown into a rage and cursed God, despite the fact that they may not have engaged in any vile or excessive behavior, and despite the fact that these people are thinking, “If there comes a day when I’ve had my fill of fun on the outside, or when I still need God for something, I will come back. Or if God calls on me, I will come back,” or they say, “When I am hurt on the outside, or when I see that the outside world is too dark and too wicked and I no longer want to go with the flow, I will come back to God.” Even though these people have calculated in their minds when exactly they will come back, and even though they have tried to leave the door open for their return, they do not realize that no matter what they believe or how they plan, this is all just wishful thinking. Their biggest mistake is being unclear about how their desire to leave makes God feel. From the very moment they decided to leave God, He completely abandons them; by then, He has already determined the outcome of such a person in His heart. What outcome is that? It is that this person will be one of the mice, and will therefore perish along with them. Thus, people often see this kind of situation: Someone abandons God, but then does not receive a punishment. God operates according to His own principles; some things can be seen, while others are only concluded in God’s heart, so people cannot see the results. The part which is visible to humans is not necessarily the true side of things, but that other side—the side you do not see—does indeed contain God’s true heartfelt thoughts and conclusions.

People Who Run Away During God’s Work Are Those Who Abandon the True Way

So, how can God give people who run away during His work such serious punishment? Why is He so angry at them? First of all, we know that God’s disposition is majesty and wrath; He is not a sheep to be slaughtered by anyone, much less a puppet to be controlled by people however they want. He is also not a bunch of empty air to be bossed around. If you truly believe that God exists, then you should have a God-fearing heart, and you should know that His essence is not one to be angered. This anger may be caused by a word, or perhaps a thought, or perhaps some kind of vile behavior, or perhaps even by mild behavior—behavior that is passable in the eyes and ethics of humans; or, perhaps it is provoked by a doctrine or a theory. However, once you have angered God, your opportunity is lost, and your end days have arrived. This is a terrible thing! If you do not understand that God must not be offended, then maybe you are not afraid of Him, and perhaps you are routinely offending Him. If you do not know how to fear God, then you are unable to fear God, and you will not know how to put yourself on the path of walking in God’s way—fearing God and shunning evil. Once you become aware, and are conscious that God must not be offended, you will know what it is to fear God and shun evil.

Walking in the way of fearing God and shunning evil is not necessarily about how much truth you know, how many trials you have experienced, or how much you have been disciplined. Rather, it depends on the sort of attitude you have toward God in your heart, and what essence you express. People’s essences and their subjective attitudes—these are very important, very crucial. As for those who have renounced and left God, their contemptible attitudes toward Him and their hearts that despise the truth have already aggravated His disposition, so as far as He is concerned, they will never be forgiven. They have known about God’s existence, been informed of the news that He has already arrived, and even experienced God’s new work. Their departure was not a case of being deluded or muddle-headed, much less were they forced to leave. Rather, they chose consciously, and with a clear mind, to leave God. Their departure was not a matter of losing their way, nor were they cast off. Therefore, in God’s eyes, they are not lambs that strayed from the flock, let alone prodigal sons who lost their way. They departed with impunity—and such a condition, such a situation, aggravates God’s disposition, and it is out of this aggravation that He gives them hopeless outcomes. Is this kind of outcome not frightful? Therefore, if people do not know God, they can offend Him. This is no small matter! If people do not take God’s attitude seriously, and still believe that He is looking forward to their return because they are some of His lost lambs and He is still waiting for them to have a change of heart, then they are not far off from their days of punishment. God will not merely refuse to accept them—given that this is their second time aggravating His disposition, the matter is all the more terrible! These people’s irreverent attitudes have already violated God’s administrative decrees. Will He still accept them? In His heart, God’s principles regarding this matter are that someone has attained certainty about which is the true way, yet can still consciously and with a clear mind reject God and depart from God, then He will block off the road to such a person’s salvation, and for this individual, the gate into the kingdom will henceforth be closed. When this person comes knocking once more, God will not open the door; this person will be shut out forever. Perhaps some of you have read the story of Moses in the Bible. After Moses was anointed by God, the 250 leaders expressed their disobedience to Moses because of his actions and for various other reasons. To whom did they refuse to submit? It was not Moses. They refused to submit to God’s arrangements; they refused to submit to God’s work on this issue. They said the following: “You take too much on you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and Jehovah is among them….” Are these words and lines very serious, from a human point of view? They are not serious! At least, the literal meaning of these words is not serious. In a legal sense, they do not break any laws, because on its very surface, this is not hostile language or vocabulary, much less does it have any blasphemous connotations. These are just common sentences, nothing more. Why is it, then, that these words can trigger such rage from God? It is because they were not spoken to people, but to God. The attitude and disposition expressed by them is precisely what aggravates God’s disposition, and they offend God’s disposition that must not be offended. We all know what those leaders’ outcomes were in the end. Regarding people who have abandoned God, what is their viewpoint? What is their attitude? And why do their viewpoint and attitude cause God to deal with them in such a manner? The reason is that though they clearly know He is God, they still choose to betray Him, and this is why they are totally stripped of their chances for salvation. As is written in the Bible, “For if we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins.” Do you now have a clear understanding of this matter?