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. … 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!

—The Word, Vol. 2. On Knowing God. How to Know God’s Disposition and the Results His Work Shall Achieve