How to Know God’s Disposition and the Result of His Work (Part Four)

Understand God’s Attitude and Drop All Misconceptions of God

This God that you currently believe in, have you ever thought about what kind of God He is? When He sees an evil person doing evil things, does He despise it? (He despises it.) When He sees the mistakes of ignorant people, what is His attitude? (Sadness.) When He sees people stealing His offerings, what is His attitude? (He despises them.) This is all very clear, right? When He sees someone being careless in their belief in God, and in no way seeking after the truth, what is God’s attitude? You’re not totally clear on this one, right? Carelessness is an attitude that isn’t a sin, and it isn’t offending God. People believe that it shouldn’t be considered a blunder. Then what do you think God’s attitude is? (He’s unwilling to respond to it.) Unwilling to respond to it—what attitude is this? It’s that God looks down on these people, scorns these people! God deals with these people by giving them the cold shoulder. His approach is to set them aside, not engaging in any work on them, including enlightenment, illumination, chastening, or discipline. This type of person just does not count in God’s work. What is God’s attitude toward people who aggravate His disposition, and offend His administrative decrees? Extreme loathing! God is extremely enraged by people who are unrepentant about aggravating His disposition! “Enraged” is just a feeling, a mood; it can’t represent a clear attitude. But this feeling, this mood, will bring about an outcome for this person: It will fill God with extreme loathing! What is the consequence of this extreme loathing? It’s that God will set this person aside, and not respond to them for the time being. He will wait for them to be sorted out during the retribution. What does this imply? Does this person still have an outcome? God never intended to give this type of person an outcome! So is it not then normal that God currently doesn’t respond to this type of person? (Yes.) How should this type of person prepare now? They should prepare to take on the negative consequences caused by their behavior, and the evil they’ve done. This is God’s response to this kind of person. So I now clearly say to this type of person: Do not hold on to delusions anymore, and don’t engage in wishful thinking anymore. God will not be tolerant of people indefinitely; He will not endure their trespasses or disobedience indefinitely. Some people will say: “I’ve also seen a few people like this. When they pray they are especially touched by God, and they weep bitterly. Usually they’re also very happy; they seem to have God’s presence, and God’s guidance.” Don’t say that nonsense! Weeping bitterly is not necessarily being touched by God or having God’s presence, let alone God’s guidance. If people anger God, will God still guide them? Generally speaking, when God has determined to eliminate someone, to abandon them, that person already doesn’t have an outcome. It doesn’t matter how complacent they feel about themselves when they pray, and how much confidence they have in God in their heart; this is already unimportant. The important thing is that God doesn’t need this kind of confidence, that God has already spurned this person. How to deal with them afterward is also unimportant. What is important is that in the moment this person angers God, their outcome is already established. If God has determined to not save this type of person, then they will be left behind to be punished. This is God’s attitude.

Though part of God’s essence is love, and He extends mercy toward everyone, people overlook and forget the point that His essence is dignity as well. That He has love doesn’t mean that people can freely offend Him and He doesn’t have any feelings, or any reactions. That He has mercy doesn’t mean that He doesn’t have any principles in how He treats people. God is living; He really exists. He is not an imagined puppet or something else. Since He exists, we should carefully listen to His heart’s voice at all times, pay attention to His attitude, and understand His feelings. We shouldn’t use people’s imaginings to define God, and we shouldn’t impose the thoughts and wishes of people onto God, making God employ man’s style and thinking in how He treats mankind. If you do so, then you’re angering God, you’re tempting God’s wrath, and you’re challenging God’s dignity! Thus, after you’ve understood the severity of this matter, I urge each and every one of you here to be cautious and prudent in your actions. Be cautious and prudent in your speaking. And regarding how you treat God, the more cautious and prudent you are, the better! When you don’t understand what God’s attitude is, don’t speak carelessly, don’t be careless in your actions, and don’t carelessly apply labels. Even more, don’t arbitrarily come to conclusions. Instead, you should wait and seek; this is also a manifestation of fearing God and shunning evil. If you can achieve this point above all, and possess this attitude above all, then God will not blame you for your stupidity, your ignorance, and your unreasonableness. Instead, owing to your fear of offending God, your respect for God’s intentions, and your attitude of 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—arbitrarily judging God, arbitrarily guessing and defining God’s meaning—God will give you a conviction, discipline, even punishment; or He will give you a statement. Perhaps this statement involves your outcome. Therefore, I still want to emphasize this once more, and inform everyone present to be cautious and prudent toward everything that comes from God. Don’t speak carelessly, and don’t be careless in your actions. Before you say anything, you should think: Would doing this anger God? Is doing this fearing God? Even for simple matters, you should still really try to figure these questions out, really consider them. If you can truly practice according to these principles everywhere, in all things, and all of the time, especially with regard to the matters you don’t understand, then God will always guide you, and will always give you a path to follow. No matter what people are displaying, God sees it all clearly, plainly, and He will provide you with an accurate and suitable evaluation of these displays. After you’ve experienced the final trial, God will take all of your behavior and sum it up completely to establish your outcome. This result will convince everyone beyond the shadow of a doubt. What I’d like to tell you is that your every deed, your every action, and your every thought will decide your fate.

Who Sets the Outcome of Man

There’s another most important matter, and that’s your attitude toward God. This attitude is crucial! It determines whether ultimately you will walk toward destruction, or into a beautiful destination that God has prepared for you. In the Age of Kingdom, God has already worked for more than 20 years, and over the course of these 20 years perhaps your hearts have been a bit unsure about your performance. However, in God’s heart, He has made an actual and truthful record for each and every one of you. Beginning from when each person starts following Him and listening to His preaching, understanding more and more of the truth, all the way to when they perform their duty—God has a record of each and every one of these displays. When someone does their duty, when they’re being faced with all manner of circumstances, all manner of trials, what is the person’s attitude? How do they perform? How do they feel toward God in their heart? … God has an account of all of this, a record of all of it. Perhaps from your point of view, these issues are confusing. However, from where God stands, they’re all crystal clear, and there isn’t even the slightest hint of sloppiness. This is an issue that involves the outcome of each and every person, and their fates and future prospects as well. Even more, this is where God expends all of His painstaking efforts. Hence God doesn’t dare to neglect it in the slightest, and won’t tolerate any sloppiness. God is recording this account of mankind, recording an account of the entire course of man following God, from the beginning right up to the end. Your attitude toward God in this time will determine your fate. Is this not true? Up until now, do you believe that God is righteous? Are God’s actions appropriate? Do you still have any other picture of God in your heads? (No.) Then do you say that man’s outcome is for God to set or for man himself to set? (It’s for God to set.) Who is it that sets it? (God.) You’re not sure, are you? Brothers and sisters of the Hong Kong churches, speak up—who sets it? (Man sets it himself.) Man sets it himself? Then doesn’t that mean it has nothing to do with God? Who wants to speak up from the Korean churches? (God establishes man’s outcome based on all of their actions and deeds, and based on the path they walk.) This is a very objective response. There’s a fact here that I must inform all of you: In the course of God’s salvation work, He sets a standard for man. This standard is that man can obey the word of God, and walk in God’s way. It is this standard that is used to weigh man’s outcome. If you practice in accordance with this standard of God, then you can obtain a good outcome; if you don’t, then you cannot obtain a good outcome. Then who is it you say that sets this outcome? It’s not God alone who sets it, but rather God and man together. Is this correct? (Yes.) Why is that? Because it’s God who actively wants to engage in the work of mankind’s salvation, and prepare a beautiful destination for man; man is the target of God’s work, and this outcome, this destination, is what God prepares for man. If there was no target for His work, then God wouldn’t need to do this work; if God didn’t do this work, then man wouldn’t have an opportunity for salvation. Man is the target for salvation, and although man is the passive side in this process, it is the attitude of this side that determines whether or not God will be successful in His work to save mankind. If not for the guidance that God gives you, then you wouldn’t know His standard, and you would have no objective. If you have this standard, this objective, yet you don’t cooperate, you don’t put it into practice, you don’t pay the price, then you still won’t obtain this outcome. This is why we say that this outcome cannot be separated from God, and it cannot be separated from man. And now you know who sets man’s outcome.

People Tend to Define God Based on Experience

When communicating the topic of knowing God, have you noticed something? Have you noticed that God’s current attitude has undergone a change? Is God’s attitude toward mankind unchangeable? Will God always endure like this, extending all of His love and mercy to man indefinitely? This matter also involves the essence of God. Let’s return to the question of the so-called prodigal son from before. After this question was asked, your answers weren’t very clear. In other words, you still don’t well understand God’s intentions. Once people know that God loves mankind, they define God as a symbol of love: No matter what people do, no matter how they behave, no matter how they treat God, and no matter how disobedient they are, none of it matters because God has love, and God’s love is unlimited and immeasurable. God has love, so He can be tolerant with people; 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 a few times, they will treat it as capital in their own understanding of God, believing that God will once and forever be patient toward them, be merciful toward them, and over the course of their life they will take God’s patience and regard it as the standard of how God treats them. There are also those people who, when they have experienced God’s tolerance once, will once and forever define God as tolerance, and this tolerance is indefinite, unconditional, and even totally unprincipled. Are these beliefs correct? Every time matters of God’s essence or God’s disposition are discussed, you seem bewildered. Seeing you like this makes Me a little angry. You have heard a lot of truth concerning God’s essence; you have also listened to many topics concerning God’s disposition. However, in your minds these issues, and the truth of these aspects, are just memories based on theory and written words. None of you are ever able to experience just what God’s disposition is in your real lives, nor can you see just what God’s disposition is. Therefore, you’re all muddleheaded in your beliefs, you all blindly believe, to the point that you have an irreverent attitude toward God, that you brush Him aside. What does your having this kind of attitude toward God lead to? It leads to you always making conclusions about God. Once you acquire a little bit of knowledge, you feel very satisfied, you feel like you have obtained God in His entirety. Afterward, you conclude that this is how God is, and you don’t let Him move freely. And whenever God does something new, you just don’t admit that He is God. One day, when God says: “I don’t love man anymore; I don’t extend mercy to man anymore; I don’t have any tolerance or patience toward man anymore; I am full of extreme loathing and antipathy toward man,” people will clash with this kind of statement from the bottom of their 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 don’t give me mercy, don’t give me love, don’t give me tolerance, then I will not follow You anymore. Only if You are tolerant of me indefinitely, are always patient with me, and let me see that You are love, that You are patience, that You are tolerance, only then can I follow You, and only then can I have the confidence to follow to the end. Since I have Your patience and mercy, my disobedience and my trespasses can be forgiven indefinitely, be 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 of Your own ideas or conclusions concerning me.” Though you may not think about this kind of question in such a subjective and conscious manner, whenever you consider God to be a tool for having your sins forgiven and an object to be used for obtaining a beautiful destination, you have already imperceptibly placed the living God in opposition to you, as your enemy. This is what I see. You may keep on saying, “I believe in God”; “I seek after 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 obey God”; “I want to be faithful toward God, and do my duty well”; and so forth. However, no matter how nice whatever you say sounds, no matter how much theory you know, no matter how imposing that theory is, how dignified it is, the fact of the matter is that there are now many of you who have already learned how to use the regulation, the doctrine, the theory you’ve mastered to draw conclusions about God, and place Him in opposition to yourselves in a totally natural way. Although you have mastered letters and mastered doctrines, you have not really entered the reality of the truth, so it’s very hard for you to get close to God, to know God, to understand God. This is pathetic!

I saw this scene on a video: A few sisters were holding a book of The Word Appears in the Flesh, and they were holding it up very high. They were holding this book in the middle of them, higher than their own heads. Although this is just an image, what it evokes inside Me isn’t an image. Rather, it makes Me think that what every person holds high in their heart isn’t God’s word, but the book of God’s word. This is a very depressing matter. This way of practicing is simply not a case of holding God high. It’s because you don’t understand God such that an obvious question, a very small question, has you coming up with your own notions. When I ask things of you, when I’m being serious with you, you respond with conjecture and your own imaginings; some of you even adopt a doubtful tone and ask back. This confirms it even more clearly to Me that the God you believe in is not the true God. After reading God’s word for so many years, you use God’s word, use God’s work, and more doctrines to draw conclusions about God once again. Moreover, you never attempt to understand God; you never try to figure out God’s intentions; you don’t attempt to understand what God’s attitude toward man is; or how God thinks, why He is sad, why He is angry, why He spurns people, and other such questions. What’s more, even more people believe that God has always been silent because He’s just watching mankind’s actions, because He has no attitude toward them, nor does He have His own ideas. Another group takes it even further. These people believe that God doesn’t utter a sound because He has acquiesced, God doesn’t utter a sound because He is waiting, God doesn’t utter a sound because He has no attitude, because God’s attitude has already been elaborated fully in books, it has already been expressed in its entirety to mankind, and doesn’t need to be repeatedly told to people time and time again. Although God is silent, He still has an attitude, has a viewpoint, and has a standard He demands of people. Though people don’t try to understand Him, and don’t try to seek Him, His attitude is very clear. Consider someone who once passionately followed God, but at some point abandoned Him and left. Should this person want to come back now, surprisingly enough, you don’t know what God’s viewpoint would be, and what God’s attitude would be. Isn’t this pathetic? In fact, 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 wouldn’t give an ambiguous answer. Since you don’t know, allow Me to fill you in.

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

You’ll find this kind of person everywhere: After they have been certain about God’s way, for various reasons, they depart silently and without a parting word to go off and do whatever their heart desires. For the time being, we won’t get into why this person leaves. First we’ll take a look at what God’s attitude is toward this kind of person. It’s very clear! From the moment this person leaves, in God’s eyes, the span of their belief is over. It’s not this person that ended it, but God. That this person left God means that they have already rejected God, that they already don’t want God. It means that they already don’t accept God’s salvation. Since this person doesn’t want God, can God still want them? Moreover, when this person has this attitude, this view, and is determined to leave God, they have already aggravated God’s disposition. Even though they didn’t fly into a rage and curse God, even though they didn’t engage in any vile or excessive behavior, and even though this person is 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, 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 this person has calculated in their mind at what point they’re coming back, even though they leave the door open for their return, they don’t realize that no matter how they think and how they plan, this is all just wishful thinking. Their biggest mistake is being unclear about how God feels when they want to leave. Starting from that moment when this person determines to leave God, God has completely abandoned them; God has already established their outcome in His heart. What outcome is that? That this person is one of the hamsters, and will perish along with them. Thus, people often see this kind of situation: Someone abandons God, but they don’t receive a punishment. God operates according to His own principles. People are able to see some things, and some things are only concluded in God’s heart, so people cannot see the result. That which people see isn’t necessarily the true side of things; but the other side, the side you do not see—this is the true thoughts and conclusions of God’s heart.

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

So why can God give this kind of person such a serious punishment? Why is God so enraged toward them? First of all we know that God’s disposition is majesty, is wrath. He is not a sheep to be slaughtered by anyone; even more, He is not a puppet to be controlled by people however they want. He is also not empty air to be bossed around by people. If you really believe that God exists, you should have a heart that fears God, and you should know that God’s essence is not to be angered. This anger may be caused by a word; perhaps a thought; perhaps some kind of vile behavior; perhaps mild behavior, behavior that’s passable in the eyes and ethics of man; or perhaps it is caused by a doctrine, a theory. However, once you anger God, your opportunity is lost and your end days have arrived. This is a terrible thing! If you don’t understand that God cannot be offended, then maybe you aren’t afraid of God, and maybe you offend Him all the time. If you don’t know how to fear God, then you’re unable to fear God, and you don’t know how to put yourself on the path of walking in God’s way—fearing God and shunning evil. Once you become aware, you can be conscious that God cannot be offended, then you will know what it is to fear God and shun evil.

Walking in the way of fearing God and shunning evil isn’t necessarily about how much truth you know, how many trials you have experienced, or how much you have been disciplined. Rather, it depends on what the essence of your heart is with regard to God, and what your attitude toward God is. People’s essence and their subjective attitudes—these are very important, very key. With regard to those people who have renounced and left God, their contemptible attitude toward God and their hearts that despise the truth have aggravated God’s disposition, thus so far as God is concerned they will never be forgiven. They have known about God’s existence, they have had the information that God has already arrived, they have even experienced God’s new work. Their departure isn’t a case of being deluded, nor is it that they’re hazy about it. It’s even less a case of them being forced into it. Rather they have consciously, and with a clear mind, chosen to leave God. Their departure isn’t losing their way; it’s not their being cast off. Therefore, in God’s eyes, they are not a lamb who has strayed from the flock, let alone a prodigal son who lost his 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 a hopeless outcome. Is this kind of outcome not frightful? So if people don’t know God, they can offend God. This is no small matter! If someone doesn’t take God’s attitude seriously, and still believes that God is looking forward to their return—because they are one of God’s lost lambs and God is still waiting for them to have a change of heart—then this person is not that far removed from their day of punishment. God won’t just refuse to admit them. This is their second time aggravating His disposition; it’s an even more terrible matter! This person’s irreverent attitude has already offended God’s administrative decree. Will God still admit them? God’s principles regarding this matter are: If someone has been certain about the true way yet can still consciously and with a clear mind reject God, and distance themselves from God, then God will block off the road to their salvation, and the gate into the kingdom will henceforth be closed to them. When this person comes knocking once more, God will not open the door for them again. 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 were dissatisfied with Moses because of his actions and other various reasons. Who did they refuse to obey? It wasn’t Moses. They refused to obey God’s arrangements; they refused to obey God’s work on this matter. They said the following: “You take too much on you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them….” In your eyes, are these words very serious? They’re not serious! At least the literal meaning of the words is not serious. In a legal sense, they don’t break any laws, because on their very surface it’s not hostile language, or vocabulary, much less has any blasphemous meaning. A common sentence is all there is, nothing more. Yet why is it that these words can trigger such rage from God? It’s because they are not spoken to people, but to God. The attitude and disposition expressed by them is precisely what aggravates God’s disposition, especially that of God’s disposition which cannot be offended. We all know what their outcome was in the end. Regarding those who abandoned God, what is their viewpoint? What is their attitude? And why does their viewpoint and attitude lead to God dealing with them in such a manner? The reason is that they clearly know He is God yet they still choose to betray Him. That is why they are totally stripped of their chance for salvation. Just like the Bible says: “For if we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins.” Are you clear on this matter now?

from Continuation of The Word Appears in the Flesh

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