Pyeong Hwa Gyeong (028) - Complete and Perfect Restoration of Cain and Abel Brotherhood and the Ideal World of Creation
2. The beginning of our tragic history
Humankind was to be one great family. God was to be the head of every family, which would live as three generations. Nonetheless, by the end its second and third generations, the members of God’s first family, Adam’s family, failed to fulfill the conditions set for them.
They failed in the limited responsibility that was given them as their portion in accordance with the Principle of Creation. Here was the beginning of humankind’s tragic history. Yet God could not give up on His creation. He began His providence of restoration through indemnity in order to find His children, whom Satan had abducted, no matter what the cost. God is a Lord of principles, fundamental rules, and laws. If God had abandoned the realm of three generations that was lost in Adam’s family, it would have been tantamount to abandoning His entire work of creation.
Accordingly, God waited 130 years after Cain’s murder of Abel and raised Adam’s third son, Seth, as a new central figure. Seth had to fulfill the responsibility that Abel did not, which was to establish the realm of the eldest son and also to restore God’s lineage. From that time forth, God called descendants from Seth’s lineage to establish appropriate conditions of indemnity as He advanced His restoration providence to separate humankind from Satan.
God was supposed to rule the cosmos with absolute authority as the true Father, true Teacher, and true Lord of humankind. Yet Adam’s family trampled on God’s ideal of creation and drove God into the back alleys of history. Today, all of you need to understand clearly how the history of separating good from evil centering on Cain and Abel has providentially affected human history. You must be aware of the significance it has for us, as we begin the fifth year of Cheon II Guk.
As the Lord of true love, God created human beings as His children based on the standard of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience. This is the principle for all created beings. When God created, He completely and absolutely invested Himself, absolutely affirming His creation. This is why we human beings, as God’s object partners, must offer our absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience to God, who is our Subject Partner.
The same principle applies to the relationship between Cain and Abel, even though they represent the side of evil and good, respectively. It is a heavenly law that Cain, who stands in the position of an object partner, needs go to God through Abel. Cain must attend Abel as a father, master and teacher. Abel, for his part, has to maintain an absolute standard in the position to represent God. Like God, he must embrace and love Cain as he would his own child, with absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience. By possessing a character worthy of trust and respect, Abel should be able to induce Cain to submit to him naturally.
This is the heavenly principle for resolving the countless Cain-Abel conflicts that have appeared in the history of God’s providence. Whenever this path was not followed, the conflict, bloodshed and war only continued unabated. With each failure, God had to go through the ordeal of seeing His providence prolonged. The thousands of years of human history bear living testimony to this principle.
I do not have time to explain the details of the events that have occurred in the history of the providence to complete the restoration of the realm of the eldest son and restore God’s lineage. After Seth in Adam’s family, a period of sixteen hundred years elapsed and then the providence moved to Noah’s family. God called Noah as the central figure and worked through his family to restore through indemnity the mistakes of Adam’s family. However, this providence also ended poorly, due to the mistake of Ham, Noah’s second son, who stood in the position of Abel.
God waited four hundred more years and then called Abraham. He was the eldest son of Terah, an idol-maker who symbolized Satan’s world. Abraham’s life is a story of setting conditions to restore the realm of the eldest son and the lineage.
Through the three generations of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God worked a providence to restore in a short time the three historical generations of Adam’s family, Noah’s family and Abraham’s family. Finally, Jacob established the conditions for the restoration of the realm of the eldest son and the lineage. By going into exile and suffering mistreatment, Jacob was victorious in achieving the condition of separation from Satan. Based upon that success, Jacob triumphed in wrestling with the angel and was blessed with the name “Israel.” The relationship between Esau and Jacob was the same as that between Cain and Abel.
Through the principled way of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, and the successful cooperation between mother and son, Jacob was finally able to recover the realm of the eldest son by bringing his father Isaac and elder brother Esau into natural submission to him. In Jacob’s family, Joseph, who was the son of Rachel, Jacob’s wife on God’s side, entered Egypt and was successful in his course of recovery.
Eventually he brought his eleven brothers, who stood in the position of Cain, into natural submission to him; thus he was victorious in the role of Abel. Having become the prime minister of Egypt, he brought Jacob’s family to live with him. What if Joseph had also invited Esau’s family to Egypt? Then the historical struggle between Cain and Abel would have come to an end. Later difficulties, such as the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the wilderness under Moses, would never have arisen.
Upon the victorious foundation of Jacob’s family, Jesus would finally emerge from that lineage, four thousand years after the failure of Adam and Eve.
God united the ten northern tribes and two southern tribes into the nation of Israel, and prepared Judaism. God set up Israel and Judaism in another Cain and Abel relationship to create the environment for receiving the substantial Messiah. God raised Israel in the position of Cain representing the political sphere, and Judaism in the position of Abel representing the religious sphere.
The relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus also resembled that of Cain and Abel. If Israel and Judaism had clearly understood the teachings of the Old Testament, which were given as a guide for the four-thousand- year providence of restoration, they would have united internally and externally. Led by John the Baptist, they would have attended Jesus as the King of kings and True Parent. Jesus would then have been able to build the kingdom of heaven, God’s ideal of creation, within his lifetime.
Furthermore, if John the Baptist had clearly understood and fulfilled his responsibility in the position of Cain, how could Jesus have died on the cross? Yet despite receiving direct revelations and visions from Heaven, and despite hearing Jesus’ guidance that Jesus was himself the Lord and Abel, in the end John the Baptist could not meet the challenge of living by absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience. |