Pyeong Hwa Gyeong (133) Book 8. The Reunification of Korea and World Peace CHAPTER 2. May Our Homeland Shine Forth
4. A Second Israel for the Second Advent of the Messiah
Then what accomplishment has God been seeking during the last two thousand years of history, and what is the key for beginning the new history? Before sending the second Messiah, God will prepare another chosen people.
Just as one cannot build a house without a foundation, God cannot send the Messiah without the foundation of a chosen people. Before sending Jesus Christ, God prepared the chosen people of Israel. Likewise, God laid a new foundation of a worldwide chosen people to receive the coming new Messiah. This is Christianity, which has spread around the world.
The teachings of Jesus, who was laid in a manger in Bethlehem, are the foundation of a religion that over the last two thousand years expanded worldwide. This is the result of God’s providence to form a worldwide chosen people, in expectation of the day of the Second Advent.
The task of Christianity today is to welcome and serve the Messiah when God sends him again. Christians absolutely should not act as the chosen people did two thousand years ago, and nail him to the cross again. Christianity today stands in the position of the Second Israel in both name and reality.
Moreover, God has two important tasks that need to be accomplished before sending the Messiah again. One of them is the creation of a highly developed material civilization. The accomplishment of God’s Will means the realization of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
It doesn’t mean only a spiritual kingdom of heaven, but also a physical kingdom of heaven, or paradise in the material sense. Hence, God needs to prepare a highly developed material civilization to encompass the highly developed spiritual culture that will come into being with the Second Advent of the Messiah. In God’s ideal world, all humankind will live in close contact with one another.
Through the advancement of science, there will be means of transportation and communication serving our every need. This advancement is a very important element for the construction of the kingdom of heaven on earth. It is a necessary condition, indispensable to the creation of the one world culture.
The realization of a highly developed material civilization, which began with the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and has continued through recent centuries, is all part of God’s master plan.
The very fact that men and women all over the globe could simultaneously watch the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon shows that today we share a common connection. This means that the day of the Lord is at hand.
God will form the circumstances in which the Messiah can come. What does this mean? It means the creation of a system of law such that even kings cannot kill others at will. If we look at the time of Jesus, people’s lives were as insignificant as flies to the people in power.
The system of laws into which Jesus was born had little meaning; it was a world without laws. If the administrators or people with power wanted to have him killed, they could do it as easily as killing a fly.
Jesus’ proclamation of a fundamental human revolution could not be permitted or accepted under the system of that society. We can say that Jesus being nailed to the cross was almost unavoidable under the system of those days.
God knows this so well, so He knows that one of the necessary conditions for the Second Advent of the Messiah is a system of laws in which a person cannot be killed just because it is someone else’s will.
The system that God prepared for over the last two thousand years is democracy. Democracy is the system that respects human rights. Democracy is the system in which a minority can survive in the midst of a majority.
Democracy is the system that guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. If we consider the Constitution of the United States, which can be regarded as the representative nation of democracy, the most essential freedom is freedom of religion.
The Constitution states that the American Congress and government shall pass no laws respecting the establishment of religion or denying the free exercise thereof.
This is the system in which God’s Son can come and even preach a revolutionary message without being nailed to the cross again. To take a familiar example in this light, the Unification Church has preached a revolutionary message in America and has incurred the displeasure of some Americans, but they could not nail us to the cross.
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