Once I found faith, I learned how to pray and read the Bible,
and I did my utmost to follow the Lord's words.
Later, I watched lots of online videos on judgment in the last days.
They share these verses from Revelation:
In the last days, the Lord Jesus sits on the great white throne in white robes,
and all kneel before Him.
He judges every person according to their deeds in life.
Those of sin go to hell to be punished.
Those not of sin are raptured to His kingdom.
These videos filled my mind with images of the Lord's judgment.
I believed that His judgment in the last days would be as the videos said.
I resolved to follow the Lord's teachings,
so when He returned to judge us He'd welcome me into the kingdom.
In 2004, Indonesia suffered a tsunami, killing over 200,000 people.
I realized this was God's wrath.
He was warning us that the day of judgment would soon come.
Over my many years of faith
I'd done my utmost to practice the Lord's teachings,
but I couldn't put His words into practice, or love others as myself.
I became angry when I heard my mother-in-law criticize me to my sister-in-law,
and I resented her for it.
I craved wealth and followed worldly trends.
The Bible says:
God is holy and the unholy can't behold God's face.
Amen!
But I was always sinning and confessing and hadn't rid myself of sin.
Would the returned Lord judge me and send me to hell?
So I asked some pastors how to solve the problem of sinning.
They said,
"If we pray to the Lord and confess and repent,
the Lord will forgive our sins."
But this didn't solve my problem in the slightest.
I kept sinning and confessing.
Every time I sinned, I would feel so afraid.
I understood that the Lord would come in the last days
to judge all of us by our actions.
If I continued sinning, in the end, I'd be judged and condemned.
How could I enter God's kingdom?
I felt so anxious.
In two thousand eighteen, my husband joined gatherings online.
He looked so happy every day, and he became a lot more engaged in his faith.
I got curious about what they were talking about in their gatherings.
One day, my husband said,
"The Lord Jesus has returned as Almighty God.
He's doing judgment work."
I was simply astounded.
If the Lord Jesus had returned,
He would be sitting upon a great white throne in the sky,
judging us all, one by one.
This spectacle hadn't yet been sighted,
so then how could the last days' judgment have already begun?
When I said this to my husband, he laughed and said,
"God's work of judgment in the last days is not how we might imagine it.
God has come to the earth in the flesh and He is expressing the truth to judge us."
My doubts grew and I wondered:
How could the Lord judge us through the act of expressing words?
I'd never heard a pastor or elder say that.
As my husband had just accepted Almighty God's work of the last days,
he couldn't explain it well,
so he asked me to meet with people from The Church of Almighty God.
I initially didn't want to,
but thinking that my husband was a thoughtful man
who was deeply earnest in his faith,
that he really believed the Lord had returned and was performing judgment work,
I knew there's a reason.
To find out whether the Lord really had returned,
I agreed to join their gatherings.
At a gathering, a Church member named Sister Liu gave fellowship on my question:
"The judgment of the great white throne in Revelation
was a vision John saw on the island of Patmos,
prophesying God's work in the last days.
It wasn't the facts of God's work.
We can't try to grasp this prophecy using our notions.
The Bible says:
We must all have a truly God-fearing heart when it comes to prophecies.
Prophecies come from God and are quite mysterious,
only God can reveal their meaning."
Amen!
"What's more, people only grasp them once they've been fulfilled.
If we were to interpret them literally,
we'd likely delimit God's work and offend God."
Right.
"The Pharisees went by the literal meaning of Scripture,
imagining that the Messiah would be born into a grand palace and would come to power.
But the exact opposite occurred.
The Lord not only wasn't born in a palace,
He was born in a manger as the son of a carpenter,
and He never came to power.
The Pharisees stubbornly clung to their notions
and refused to acknowledge the Lord as the Messiah.
They could see that His words and work had authority and power and came from God,
but nevertheless, they still resisted and even condemned Him.
We know they had the Lord crucified in the end.
So God punished them for deeply offending His disposition."
Right.
"It is crucial that we learn from the Pharisees
and try not to grasp prophecies and limit God's work with our notions."
Yes.
What she said was very enlightening and accorded with the Bible as well.
All prophecies come from God and His thoughts are loftier than man's.
God's wisdom is also loftier.
Amen!
Only God knows the details of how prophecies are to be fulfilled.
How could man ever fathom God's work?
Right!
I realized I couldn't delimit God's work with my own notions.
I asked the sister,
"You testify God has incarnated and returned in the last days,
voicing truth and doing judgment work.
What does all this mean?
How is this all connected with the judgment of the great white throne in the Bible?"
The sister looked up these verses in the Bible:
And this in First Peter:
Amen!
She then gave fellowship:
"These biblical verses mention,
We see that God comes to earth in the last days to do judgment work.
One of them says,
'Son' and 'Son of man' mean someone born of man and possessing normal humanity.
Like the Lord Jesus, though He may appear ordinary on the outside,
He has God's Spirit and a divine essence within.
God's Spirit and His spiritual body can't be called the Son of man.
These verses prove God will incarnate as the Son of man in the last days
to express the truth and to perform judgment work,
and this judgment work begins with God's house.
This means those who hear God's voice and come before His throne will be judged first."
She then read some passages of Almighty God's words:
Thanks be to God!
I'll read the next one.
Sure.
May I read the next one?
Sure.
Thank God!
The sister then gave fellowship and said,
"God doesn't do His judgment work in the last days as we imagine,
with everybody upon their knees, and God revealing our sins one by one,
and deciding if we go to heaven or the lake of fire.
If God judged man like this, none would be fit to enter His kingdom."
True.
"Satan corrupted us and filled us with satanic dispositions,
so once we have faith in the Lord we may do some good deeds,
behave kindly, spread the gospel and work hard for the Lord,
but we still have a sinful nature within.
We still keep sinning and we can't keep the Lord's teachings."
True.
"If the Lord doesn't do what we want, then we begin to blame Him.
We lie and cheat for the sake of our own interests and prestige.
When our interests are impacted, we hate people and take revenge on them.
The Bible says,
Can people as sinful as we are get into the kingdom of heaven?
If God judged and condemned us based on our current behavior,
wouldn't we all be punished and annihilated?"
Yes.
"So to save mankind from sin once and for all,
God has incarnated as the Son of man and returned in secret in the last days.
He is Almighty God
who expresses the truth and works to judge and to cleanse mankind.
This in fact is the judgment of the great white throne in Revelation.
God performs His work of judgment
by first becoming flesh and expressing the truth to cleanse and save man
and make a group of overcomers.
He'll then bring the disasters to destroy this evil age,
rewarding the good and punishing the wicked.
Finally He'll appear to all people, then His judgment work will be finished."
Yes.
"When the great disasters rain down
is not when the judgment of the great white throne will begin,
but when it will end.
At that time all whose corrupt dispositions have been cleansed,
through the judgment of God's words at the time of His secret work,
will survive the disasters with God's protection
and He will lead them into His kingdom."
- Amen! - Thank God!
"Those who denied and condemned Almighty God, during the time of His secret work,
will be swept away by unprecedented disasters to be punished while the gnashing of teeth."
My heart brightened after her fellowship.
It turned out God's judgment work in the last days wasn't as I'd imagined,
with God sitting upon a great white throne judging people one by one,
and sending them up to heaven or down to hell.
God's judgment work is done in stages.
First He voices the truth to uproot man's sinful nature and cleanse them,
giving them a chance to repent and change.
Yes.
Then He appears in the open to reward goodness and to punish evil.
That image I had in my head for so long of the great white throne
will be the scene of God's judgment work ending.
If I waited till then to accept God's work of the last days, it'd be too late,
and I'd have missed my chance at salvation.
That's true.
I realized I had to look into Almighty God's work.
So I asked the sister,
"How exactly does God judge and cleanse us with His words?"
She read some of Almighty God's words, which I will read to you now.
Great.
Thank God!
She continued her fellowship, saying,
"In expressing the truth to perform His work of judging and cleansing man,
God doesn't just write a few lines or say some words.
He expresses all the truths which cleanse and save mankind."
Right.
"He reveals such important truths as how Satan corrupts man,
how God saves man, who God blesses,
who He eliminates and who can be saved
and get into His kingdom and so forth.
He exposes and dissects man's God-resisting satanic nature,
and utterly reveals all the satanic dispositions and poisons we carry within us.
We see in the judgment of God's words
the truth and reality of our corruption by Satan.
We come to know our sinful God-resisting nature and its root cause,
and we see how deeply rooted within us our satanic dispositions are,
such as arrogance, deceitfulness, evil, and despising the truth."
Yes.
"For example,
though we can take being mocked and slandered by unbelievers,
and expend ourselves for the Lord,
though we don't stop preaching the kingdom gospel,
even when it means imprisonment,
when calamity does strike and our future prospects look bleak,
we still complain and blame God,
we regret the efforts we've made,
and we may even deny and betray God.
We see that all the efforts we made
were just to get God's grace and blessings, and to be rewarded.
Such efforts as these are impure.
We're making deals with God and cheating the Lord."
Yes.
"Only then do we see how corrupted we are,
and that we don't revere God and are without conscience or reason.
Through God's judgment and chastisement,
we start to know God's righteous and majestic disposition.
We begin to revere God,
to truly hate ourselves, and willingly forsake our flesh and practice truth.
Our corruptions begin to be cleansed away, and we start living out a human likeness."
Thank God!
"Those who have been judged by the words of God for years
know that from the bottom of their hearts
that God's judgment can indeed cleanse and change people,
and that it is His love and salvation for man."
Amen!
I saw from her fellowship just how practical God's judgment work really is.
God expresses words in order
to judge and expose our corruptions and the root cause of our sins,
to instruct us on how to change, and to cleanse and save us.
Whenever I would sin before, I'd ask the Lord to forgive me,
but then I couldn't help but to sin again,
because I hadn't yet accepted God's judgment in the last days.
I'd now finally found the path to be rid of sin and be cleansed.
Thanks be to God!
I read more of Almighty God's words after that,
as well as testimonies from church members.
I became convinced that Almighty God's words are the truth
and can cleanse and change people.
I recognized Almighty God as the Lord Jesus returned
and accepted His work of the last days.
Amen! Thank God!
Thinking back,
I lived within my imagination,
awaiting the Lord and the judgment of the great white throne.
I didn't know God had already come in secret
to express the truth and start judgment work beginning with God's house.
I almost missed God's salvation of the last days!
True.
I thank God for His kind mercy in allowing me to hear His voice,
to come before His throne
and accept being judged and purified before Christ's seat.
Thank Almighty God!
Amen!
Thank God!
Thanks be to God!
The judgment work in the last days is truly saving man.