17 The Lord Jesus is a God of mercy and love. As long as we hold on to His name and His way, we believe that He will not abandon us when He comes back, and that He’ll directly take us into the kingdom of heaven.
Bible Reference:
“Not every one that said to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that does the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? and in your name have cast out devils? and in your name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess to them, I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:21-23).
The answer from God’s word:
“The last days have already arrived. All things will be classed according to kind, and will be divided into different categories based on their nature. This is the time in which God reveals the end and the destination of man. If man does not undergo chastisement and judgment, then there will be no way of revealing the disobedience and unrighteousness of man. Only through chastisement and judgment can the end of all things be revealed. Man only shows his true colors when he is chastised and judged.Evil shall return to evil, good shall return to good, and man shall be classified according to kind. Through chastisement and judgment, the end of all things shall be revealed, so that the evil shall be punished and the good shall be rewarded, and all people shall become subject under the dominion of God. All the work requires righteous chastisement and judgment to be achieved.Because man’s corruption has reached its peak and his disobedience has been too serious, only God’s righteous disposition, which is principally one of chastisement and judgment, and is revealed during the last days, can fully transform and complete man.
Only this disposition can expose evil and thus severely punish all the unrighteous. Therefore, a disposition such as this possesses the significance of the age, and the revelation and exhibition of His disposition is for the sake of the work of each new age. God does not reveal His disposition arbitrarily and without significance. If, when the end of man is revealed during the last days, God still bestows upon man inexhaustible compassion and love, if He is still loving toward man, and He does not subject man to righteous judgment, but shows him tolerance, patience, and forgiveness, if He still pardons man no matter what serious sins he commits, without any righteous judgment, then would there ever be an end to all of God’s management? When would a disposition such as this be able to lead mankind into the right destination? Take, for example, a judge who is always loving, kindhearted and gentle. He loves people irrespective of the sins they have committed, and he is loving and tolerant of people whoever they are. Then when will he be able to reach a just verdict? During the last days, only righteous judgment can classify man and bring man into a new realm. In this way, the entire age is brought to an end through God’s righteous disposition of judgment and chastisement.”
from “The Vision of God’s Work (3)” in The Word Appears in the Flesh
“Anyone who does not believe in God incarnate—that is, anyone who does not believe the work and speech of the visible God and does not believe in the visible God but instead worships the invisible God in heaven—does not have God in his or her heart. They are people who are disobedient to and resist God. These people lack humanity and reason, to say nothing of truth. For these people, the visible and tangible God all the more cannot be believed, yet the invisible and intangible God is the most credible and also the most gladdening to their hearts. What they seek is not the truth of reality, nor is it the true essence of life, much less God’s intentions; rather, they pursue excitement. Whichever things are most capable of letting them attain their own desires are, without a doubt, their faiths and pursuits. They only believe in God in order to satisfy their own desires, not to seek the truth. Are these people not evildoers? They are extremely self-confident, and they do not believe that God in heaven will destroy them, these ‘good people.’ Instead, they believe that God will allow them to remain and, moreover, will reward them handsomely, for they have done many things for God and displayed a great deal of ‘loyalty’ toward Him. If they were to pursue the visible God, they would immediately strike back against God or fly into a rage once their desires were to fall through. These are vile people who seek to satisfy their own desires; they are not people of integrity in pursuit of the truth. Such kind of people are the so-called wicked people who follow Christ. Those people who do not seek the truth cannot believe the truth. They are all the more unable to perceive humanity’s future outcome, for they do not believe any work or speech of the visible God, and they cannot believe in humanity’s future destination. Therefore, even if they follow the visible God, they still commit evil and do not seek the truth, nor do they practice the truth that I require. Those people who do not believe that they will be destroyed are conversely the very individuals who will be destroyed. They all believe themselves to be so clever, and they believe that they themselves are those who practice the truth. They consider their evil conduct to be the truth and thereby cherish it. These wicked people are very self-confident; they take the truth to be doctrine, and take their evil acts to be truth, and in the end they can only reap what they have sown. The more self-confident people are and the more wildly arrogant they are, the more they are unable to obtain truth; the more people believe in the heavenly God, the more they resist God. These are the people who will be punished.”
from “God and Man Will Enter Into Rest Together” in The Word Appears in the Flesh
“God does not want more people to be punished, but hopes that more people can be saved and more people can keep up with His footsteps and enter into His kingdom. But if one still persists in his mistaken way and cannot accept the truth with a humble heart, but deliberately finds faults, looking for a bone in an egg, or pretends to know what he doesn’t, then he himself will come to grief and suffer loss in the end. God’s work waits for no one, and His salvation will not be thrown lightly to anyone like rubbish, but rather, it has its objects, its aims, and its selections. If you do not know to treasure it, then what awaits you will only be God’s righteous judgment and punishment. God is righteous to everyone. No matter how old you are, how senior you are, or even how much you have suffered, God’s righteous disposition will never change because of these. God does not think highly of anyone nor treat anyone unfairly. His attitude toward a person depends on whether he can drop everything to accept the truth and accept His new work. If you can receive His new work and receive the truth that He expresses, then you will receive God’s salvation; if you flaunt your seniority, put on the airs of a veteran, and bargain over terms with God, then God’s salvation will leave you. The Jews, for example, could not accept Jesus Christ but only waited for the Messiah, and what came upon them in the end was God’s curse and wrath. This is a fact obvious to us all. … Never again should we rashly draw conclusions about God’s work and His management; otherwise, what we receive will not be God’s promise but God’s wrath, curse, and punishment, and our lifetime expectation will thus come to naught. After we have drawn a lesson from those bitter experiences, a more necessary thing we should do is to not let God’s salvation slip away from us but grasp every guidance and every opportunity that God gives us, lest God’s curse come upon us at an unexpected hour. We should wait for God’s coming patiently and cautiously, treat the gospel coming upon us carefully, and pray to God to give us faith and bestow to us spiritual eyes so that we can discern every person, matter, and thing that we encounter, until we see God’s appearing.
… The knowledge and outward behavior of the Pharisees did not save their relationship with Jesus Christ, but on the contrary ruined them. It was their knowledge and notions and the image of God in their hearts that drove them to condemn the Lord Jesus; it was their imaginations and minds that misled them and covered their spiritual eyes, so that they could not recognize the Messiah who had already come but did their utmost to search for evidence and handles to condemn the Lord Jesus. This was their ugly features—condemning God’s practical work of that time on the excuse of safeguarding God’s original work. Of course, this is the mistake that the people of every age easily make—using the old doctrines and regulations to measure and condemn the truth that they have never heard, and believing that by doing so, they have kept the true way, kept their purity before God, and had faithfulness to God. But what is the fact? God has been unceasingly doing His new work and continuing His management, being ever new and never old. However, what about man? Man always sticks to the small number of obsolete things he regards as the complete expression of God, complacent and overwhelmingly arrogant, and waits for God to bestow rewards upon him with the attitude that God will never abandon him and will never treat him unfairly. Then what is the result? God’s work never stops. And more people of the new age follow Him and accept His new work, whereas those who wait for God to bestow rewards upon them are eliminated by God’s new work, and worse still, more people fall into God’s punishment. From the moment they are punished, their life of believing in God thus comes to an end, and their outcomes and destinations are thus settled. No one wants to see such a fact, but it happens right before our eyes unknowingly. Is it because God’s disposition is too merciless or because man pursues erroneously? Is this unworthy for mankind to make a careful self-examination?”
from Postscript to Typical Cases of Punishment for Resisting Almighty God
Source：The Church of Almighty God
Recommandation：Eastern Lightning
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