Cheon Seong Gyeong: Episode 19

Cheon Seong Gyeong Book 1: God
Chapter 4: The God Who Needs Liberation
Section 1: God's Sorrow and the Providence of Restoration, 1-13

(1) God, who created all things, poured His utmost love into the creation of human beings. God invested his sincere heart into the creation of human beings, more than anything else He had created in the preceding five days, so that they would manifest His glory and His hope.  He wanted human beings to grow up and fulfill his hope, to sing with joy and establish a peaceful family with whom He could dwell.  Prior to the Fall, God was delighted with the original Adam and Eve, His creations.  God watched them grow with a heart of sincere anticipation, waiting for the time when His great hope would come to glorious fruition in them.  As He surveyed His creation, God Thought, "I am pleased with all the things I made for you, Adam and Eve.  Yet, I am even more pleased to look at you, who will govern all these things.” Such were the heart and mind of their Heavenly Parent for Adam and Eve.  They were indeed the central beings.  God placed His cherished hope in them, for they were to be the foundation of His happiness.  Moreover, they were essential to the whole created world.  They should never have experienced the Fall; they should not have known even one day of sorrow.  Yet one day Adam and Eve made a tragic mistake and the word "Fall" appeared.  At that moment the word "sorrow" also came to exist, and a dark force invaded the world for which God had had such hope.  This is truly something to lament and regret.

(2) Since it was our first ancestors who committed the Fall, it was natural that they would suffer sorrow.  But the Fall brought sorrow even to God, who had created them with such great hope.  That is, when human beings fell into sorrow, they wronged God and brought Him to a miserable and painful state.  This should never have happened on the earth; it should never have occurred under the sun.  Nevertheless, the mistake of our first ancestors led to the unimaginable incident that we call the Fall.

Why is God the God of sorrow?

(3) God's ideal of creation should have brought Him boundless joy and delight in the garden of love, based on His love and truth.  But God's joy was frustrated as a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and He has had to toil in history for thousands of years.  You need to experience the sorrowful heart of God, who suffers to this day even as He fights Satan in order to fulfill the ideal of creation, which Adam and Eve did not fulfill due to the Fall.  You must also experience God's intense grief at the loss of Adam and Eve, when they betrayed Him and fell.  Unless you first understand what God's love is all about and experience how much God loves human beings, you can never fathom the depth of His sorrow upon losing them.

(4) God was supposed to have emerged as a glorious being.  Our joy should have been God's joy, and God's joy should have been our joy; this would have been the ideal of creation.  But due to the Fall that ideal was lost, and God ended up miserable.  The God who appears to us is not the God of glory.  He is incomparably more wretched and deserving of pity than anyone in all of history.  God originally should have been the God of glory, but since the day of the Fall his situation has been the opposite.  God should have been able to entrust everything to human beings, and we should have been able to entrust everything to God; but this sort of open relationship with God became impossible.  How deeply painful it is for parents if their children see them in deep misery.  Accordingly, God does not want to reveal His painful heart and situation to His children.  Though He is toiling endlessly, He does not want to show His sad face.

(5) To this day, we human beings have thought of God as the God of glory, not the God of suffering or pain.  Many religions in history have taught this, and believers have led their lives of faith with this idea.  But the truth is that God is in the situation where He has lost His family, His children, His property, His nation and His world.  Our Father is in that kind of situation.  We have thought that once we meet our Father, all our pain and suffering will be dissolved and all our wishes fulfilled.  However, when I came to meet our Heavenly Parent after seeking Him for so long, I discovered that everything He owns—His children, His property, even the whole world—was in the hands of the enemy.

(6) You must become filial sons and daughters who can attend the God who has suffered in sorrow throughout history, who can comfort Him, and offer Him joy and glory.  Even now, God laments in disappointment.  Hence, you must reach the point where you can welcome the day of God's victory; and not only you but all humankind with you.  To comfort God's heart of bitter sorrow, you must attend Him, beyond your own people and beyond the world, to advance with the full authority of the cosmos.  You need to devote yourselves to becoming children of God whom God wants to bless rather than judge.  You have to become a group of people who can endure.  No matter what cruel situations or adverse circumstances you suffer, you should be able to say, "Even if no one else remains, I will survive.” Only with this kind of heart can you connect your life to God.  If you have this kind of relationship with God, even though strong winds and mighty storms may come against you, nothing can destroy that bond of heart, which holds the power of life.

(7) God is not seated upon a throne, receiving praise and glory.  Instead, God is weeping bitterly every day as He works to save fallen human beings.  This has long been God's situation, even as He guides humankind.  God is in such pain as He tries to save people from the pit of misery into which they have fallen, to awaken them, shouting, "Come! Come to Me!" But even Though God does all that, He cannot force people to come to Him.  We must fulfill our portion of responsibility.  God cannot do our part for us, though He may want to.  How difficult this is for God!

(8) God is the Lord of sorrow and the Lord of pain.  Our Father, whom we are supposed to attend, wants to experience joy and glory, yet He has never had the chance.  God is in bitter sorrow due to the fall, yet He carries still more grief and suffering.  We think that heaven is a garden of happiness, but in reality that is not the case.  I have thoroughly searched in every corner, looking for anything to rejoice over, but I could not find anything.  God is supposed to have the power and authority to rule the world; He is supposed to experience glory and honor, and to sing in happiness.  Yet the elements of joy, glory and goodness are all gone, while all that remains are sorrow and pain.  This is God's lament.  In heaven and on earth, there is no greater suffering than this.

(9) God is the most sorrowful being.  He is more sorrowful than a son who weeps in front of his dying mother.  He has been treated more unjustly than a person wrongfully sentenced to death as a traitor to his people when they should have recognized him as a champion of goodness.  God is the Lord who holds the title as the most wronged and most miserable.  Religions should be teaching this to the point that people's hearts are deeply moved.  God does not wear a robe of glory; His robe is soaked in blood and sweat.  That robe was made by the bloody hands of sons and daughters who desperately tried to hold onto Him but could not.  God's feet are scarred from walking the thorny paths of His children's struggles throughout history.  When individuals sought Him and fell down on the way, God took the blows on their behalf.  He chose one people even as other peoples fell away, but when even that people betrayed Him, He allowed Himself to be struck on their behalf in order to continue the fight.  The God in whom we have believed is, in fact, a being deserving of sympathy.

The God who deserves sympathy

(10) God exists in a state of confinement.  He has been living with a painful heart as the Parent who long ago lost His only children, His son and daughter Adam and Eve.  He is the God of bitter sorrow.  He has been endlessly shedding tears, beating His chest.  God, while following after human beings, has experienced countless deaths.  He has endured this over and over again, even to this day.  There are so many nails driven into His heart that they could cover the whole world.  Nowhere in the world can there be found a sorrow as profound as His.

(11) God is the Lord of the world, but He has never been able to wield His authority as the Lord.  He is the subject partner of love, but He has never been able to say to us, "I love you.” Even though He is in the position to own everything, He cannot say to us, "You are mine, " and hold us as He wishes.  Among the countless human beings on earth, God never had His own son or daughter, not even one brave soldier who could totally defeat Satan.  Even though there are countless Christians on earth who believe in Jesus, among them God has not had even one commander-in-chief who could order a total offensive against Satan.  God tried to relate to the earth by having Jesus give orders to the angelic world, but this did not succeed.  God also gave a vision for the ideal of the bride to the people on earth and searched everywhere for her.  Yet He never met even one such woman whom He could proudly present before Satan.  Indeed, as a group of people, we ought to feel deeply repentant before God.

(12) God is a being who truly deserves sympathy.  God is in the difficult position of having to embrace sinful human beings and call them His beloved ones.  God comes to the world where His sinful children are living, only to be mistreated—torn, wounded and cornered.  He weeps bitterly; His heart is scarred and broken in pieces.  His heart was in pain and desperation each time He raised up a people only to have them fall away.

(13) God carries bitter sorrow in His heart because of the Fall.  The twists and turns in God's story of relating with human beings are beyond description.  He is out of breath, running after people and trying to save them.  How miserable God is! Even a beggar on earth is better off.  For God, this is what it has come to.  If God could simply sit on a throne and order everyone in heaven and on earth to do as He wished, why then has He struggled to deal with sinful humankind for the past six thousand years? Truly, God is the being most deserving of sympathy.  He is the Lord of all, and our Father, yet He could never assume those roles.  Nothing could be more frustrating.  Although God created everything, He could not do as He pleased with His creation.  He could never call us His sons and daughters even though we were created as such.  God has led His providence for six thousand years in order to break down these walls.