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| Lecture 37 : [Restoration] Preparation for the Second Advent | |
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| Date created : 2015-05-20/ Views : 1480 | |
The Period of Preparation for the Second Advent of the Messiah
Chapter 37. The Period of Preparation for the Second Advent of the Messiah
Welcome back to the path to happiness, an introduction to the Unification principle. I’m your host, Dr. Tyler Hendricks.
We see that the Unification principle integrates the principles of the creation, the human fall, the development of human faith and love, as well as science and economy, into one overarching ideal of true love and true families.
But how does all this make its way into the twenty-first century? Social media, terrorism, gay marriage, healthcare crisis, environmental crisis… what is God’s plan today? We’ll find our way there by looking at the last 400 years of history.
By the parallels, the period of preparation for the Second Advent of the messiah covers a period of 400 years extending from the time of Martin Luther’s reformation, beginning in 1517, until the First World War and the effort to build the League of Nations. Human history is the providence of restoration. Its purpose is to lay the foundation to receive the messiah. This foundation signifies the process of separating from Satan’s love, which is selfish love. This process begins with dividing myself into Abel, on the heavenly side of TRUE love, and Cain, on the satanic side of FALSE love, and then setting up the conditions wherein Abel can bring Cain to WANT to change. Thus, human history is the process of separating good and evil, in which the Abel side must overcome the Cain side. It comes down to a “struggle between good and evil” in myself, my family, my country, my religion, all the way to the world level.
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God divides good and evil and establishes the conditions wherein the good side can naturally win over the evil side. We look at the struggle between Abraham’s tribe and the neighboring tribes, or Moses’ struggle between the Hebrews and the oppressive nation, or Jesus’ struggle between the Jews and the oppressive empire. Central figures in each age made conditions through which the chosen people—chosen to SACRIFICE—could unite and win over larger environment of Satan’s domain. The dynamics began with Abel and Cain, whose traits and motives keep getting repeated on larger levels, so we refer to these dynamics as Abel-type and Cain-type. This condition between the Abel-type and the Cain-type appears internally, in the form of religion or ideology, as the struggle between Abel-type and Cain-type worldviews, and externally, as wars between Abel-type and Cain-type forces.
Now, God is not going to send His only begotten son an unprepared and violent world. He is going to prepare the environment first into an environment in which His Son can grow to achieve God’s ideal. In Jesus’ time, we see this as God’s plan to establish the internal foundation, which we call Hebraism, centering upon the Jewish religion, and the external foundation, which we call Hellenism, centering upon Greco-Roman civilization.
First, God established the religious environment both domestically and internationally centered upon Judaism. The Jews returning from Babylon and rebuilt the Temple. Then, under the prophets Ezra, Nehemiah and Malachi, the Israelites repented of their worshipping foreign idols, and began to study and compile the law, along with the Old Testament scriptures, thus bringing about a revival of Jewish faith and practice. Thereby they restored the foundation of faith.
The Jews, having been dominated by many imperial powers, longed for the restoration of God’s nation, and looked forward with great expectation to the Messiah’s advent as the central figure to build that nation. In the midst of such expectation Jesus appeared.
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Along with such a domestic religious revival, spiritual preparation necessary to receive the messiah took place around the world, beginning from about 500 B.C.E., an era that social-historian Carl Jaspers branded the “Axial Age”. God advanced Indian religion by forging the new path of Buddhism centered upon Shakyamuni (565-485 B.C.). In Greece, Hellenistic culture was developed centered upon Socrates (470-399 B.C.), and in Asia, Zoroastrianism arose centered on Zoroaster, and Confucianism developed as a system of ethics and morals centered upon Confucius (552-479 B.C.). In this way and others, God established religions suitable to the cultures in each area of the globe. Jesus appeared upon this prepared foundation with God’s intention of unifying all of these cultural spheres centered upon the one true God through the True Parents, who would have engrafted Judaism and incorporated Hellenistic civilization along with Buddhism, Confucianism and all other religions.
An immense cultural sphere centered upon the Greek language connected the globe via a prosperous economy and a well-organized legal system established under the Greco-Roman Empire—the Pax Romana. This foundation was established so that once Jesus had gathered Jerusalem his wing, he could advance to Rome and then expand the scope of the messianic mission to the world centered upon Rome.
In the same way, God has established the religious, political, and cultural environment for Jesus’ return. The Cain-type worldview began in the 14th century as , the Renaissance, a revival of Hellenism, with Italy leading the way. This was a revival of ancient Greek humanism, and ultimately led to movements to reform medieval society and the Catholic Church, which suppressed the external values of original human nature. The movement eventually affected science, politics, economics and religion. This set off a historical trajectory based upon humanism, which seeks to fulfill the external desires of human nature.
The Abel-type worldview was established through the Reformation in an effort to restore the internal aspects of the original nature, which also was suppressed by the Catholic Church. How did it prevail? In 1517, Pope Leo X authorized a sale of indulgences in order to gather funds for the construction of St. Peter’s Cathedral. Martin Luther, a monk and professor at the University of Wittenburg, questioned this. The leadership of northern Germany supported his rebellion against the church, and this spark of revolution was spread by John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli and their followers to France, Switzerland, England, and the Netherlands. This led to the outbreak of international war between Catholics and Protestants, which lasted for 100 years, and was eventually settled at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. As a result, Europe divided between Protestantism and Catholicism, with the principle that each country’s monarch could decide that country’s religion.
The Reformation and Renaissance was the first stage, which led to the Enlightenment and Awakenings. We’ll talk about the Enlightenment first.
The Renaissance, as a restoration of Hellenistic ideology, which originates in the Cain-type worldview, evolved into the enlightenment and became increasingly humanistic and anti- or a-religious. The enlightenment thinkers, relying upon empirical analysis and rational criticism founded upon reason and experience, began to reevaluate the relationship between humanity and nature. This led them to separate nature and man from God. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) gave birth to the philosophies of rationalism and empiricism. The trend expanded across Europe and inspired atheistic and materialistic philosophy propounded by people such as Hume, Hobbes, Locke and Spinoza. The French philosophes, Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert, attacked the church and inspired the French Revolution in 1789. This was a movement that sought to throw off the yoke of absolute monarchy in the name of democratic values such as “Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity,” based upon pure reason. This was a Cain-type democracy that eliminated God.
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Following the Enlightenment, the Cain-type evolved to its third stage with the emergence of left-wing thought. Materialists overturned Hegel’s (1770-1831) dialectical idealism and established dialectical materialism to support communist ideology, the dictatorship of the party. David Strauss (1808-1874) began to criticize the miracles of the Bible as deceptions, while Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) claimed, in “Essence of Christianity,” that religion is the product of socio-economic conditions. Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) advocated class struggle and violent revolution in pursuit of the ideal society, and thereby perfected the Cain-type worldview that manifested in various so-called Democratic People’s Republics, the Communist bloc of the twentieth-century.
However, even in the midst of this confusion and turmoil brought about by humanism and materialistic communism, those who maintained the Reformation’s legacy grew strong. They expressed religious passion and sought the inner life; they placed value upon transcendental experience in seeking the direct experience of God, rather than the external forms of religion. Among those who pursued this were the Puritans, who experienced religious persecution under England’s absolute monarchy, crossed the Atlantic to the new world of America in search of the freedom to exercise their faith, and, by 1783, won the American War of Independence. They established a democracy founded upon Christian principles. Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution was fought centered upon the Abel-type worldview in order to secure religious freedom, and is therefore an Abel-type democracy. This religious faith and freedom is the foundation of modern freedom of politics and economy.
Other Abel-type trends included Germany’s Philip Spener (1635-1705), who advocated Pietism, which was conservative and placed emphasis upon mystical experience. Germany’s Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz pioneered the Baptist churches at the cost of their lives. England’s John Wesley (1703-1791) founded the Methodist denomination. George Fox (1624-1691) started the Quaker movement, which emphasized the mysterious oneness between man and Christ that comes through the Holy Spirit. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), was a scientist who revealed much information concerning the spirit world.
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The Renaissance, which was a revival of Hellenism, led to humanism and the Enlightenment, the materialistic wing of which brought unleashed violence and the use of force to try to reform society. At the same time, the revival of Hebraism in the Reformation and Awakenings led the masses to long for “God’s nation” and the returning Lord while emphasizing direct personal experience of Christ, study of the Bible, and freedom of church life.
The culmination of the struggle between the Cain and Abel-type worldviews erupted externally as the 1st and 2nd World Wars. Ideologically, the First World War (1914.07.28-1918.09.02) was a struggle between the Cain-type nations of Germany, Austria and Turkey, all of which suppressed freedom of religion, and the Abel-type nations of England, America, and France, all of which allowed freedom of religion. Shortly thereafter, another struggle broke out between the Allies, led by America, England, and France on the Abel side, and the axis powers, led by Germany, Italy and Japan on the Cain side. This was the Second World War (1939.09.01-1945.09.02).
In modern times, the world has advanced through politics, economics, culture, and science to create today’s contemporary environment. The purpose of it all is everlasting: to receive the messiah, Jesus, the Lord of the Second Advent. This is the achievement of the democratic political sphere based upon freedom of religion, which has spread across the globe at the time of the Second Advent. The Lord at his return will work with this democratic foundation, rooted in Christian values, to share heaven’s will with the entire world.
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Rapid progress in transportation and communications, due to scientific and economic development, has significantly reduced the gap between East and West, and allowed languages and cultures to exchange globally. Thus, an environment has been established in which the Lord can rapidly expand the reach of his ideology.
This period in which the environment necessary to receive the Lord of the Second Advent is established is known as “The Period of Preparation for the Messiah”. Through it, we can once again glimpse the heart of God who is our True Parent. Just as a child’s parents begin to prepare an environment conducive to a child’s growth even before the child is born, the True Parent of humanity must have sent His Son into a prepared world, with a heart full of hope and anticipation.
Christians believe that the Second Advent will bring about the last days and the end of history. As the most significant event in history, it is a transitional period of great turmoil and confusion. It will be a time in which catastrophes strike like bolts out of the blue. It is the time in which the final battle between good and evil is fought in order to prepare to meet the Lord of the Second Advent, resulting in good finally overcoming evil and the happiness the world has been long waiting for. This process will occur at the end of the period of preparation for the Lord’s return over the course of not just two, but three world wars.
By knowing the principle, we can navigate these waters and help the time of salvation to come soon. Our next sessions will make this very clear. Thanks for listening; see you next time.
