Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 311
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 8: The Reunification of Korea and World Peace
Speech 02: May Our Homeland Shine Forth, pg 1151-1155
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.
America is the central nation of God’s providence
When the days of the Second Advent come, God will need to choose one central nation from Christianity, the worldwide Second Israel. What does this mean? Since the ultimate ideal of the kingdom of heaven on earth is to be substantially realized on the earth, it needs to start at a particular central point and then spread step by step to the world. That is to say, there should be a nation adequate to serve as a model. The nation that was predestined and chosen long ago, and which is capable of carrying out God’s central providence in the Last Days, is the United States
Now for a short time I would like to look back on the formation of the United States. In spite of being such a mighty continent, North America did not enter world history until the sixteenth century. We can explain this by thinking that God planned to use it in a special way during the Last Days and, therefore, hid it away in secret.
The United States is a nation that began through immigration. That is to say, it had no owners. The original inhabitants, the Native Americans, lived there, but they did not consolidate their rule over the continent as the owners of one nation. Because there was no one owner, we can say that God was the owner. Therefore, America was a place to which God could send His special people, whom He had chosen. On the European continent people called America the New World. The first people who immigrated to North America came with hopes to serve God. They were seeking freedom of religion.
These early immigrants living under the tyranny of the Old World had so completely lost hope that, even knowing they might lose their lives, they left their homeland and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. They possessed heroic determination and sailed for fifty-seven days on the tiny ship called the Mayflower, with their lives constantly in peril on the rough seas. After a difficult voyage, they finally landed in the New England region of North America. These people were the Pilgrims. They were America’s forefathers. During the voyage two of them died, and fully half of them died during the first winter after they landed. They were people who thought God and faith were more important than their lives. It cannot be called accidental that they became America’s forebears, and that their spirit became the founding spirit of America.
The founding spirit of America is expressed in the motto, One Nation under God. This is clear proof of God’s Will to establish it as His nation and make it the central Christian nation for receiving the Messiah at his return. People that believed in God gathered together in this fertile land that God had hidden away and built a religious nation of all races. This is the model of the future kingdom of heaven on earth.
Now, centering on God’s Will, America has become the flag bearer to save the world. Through the cooperation of religion and the nation, America is accomplishing God’s historical wish for the salvation of the world, a one world family with a universal culture. America has taken on the burden of this central task to accomplish God’s historical vision of world salvation.
Out of a virgin land, God gave birth to the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, in just two hundred years, in order to prepare for the struggle against communism, the final evil power that would appear in the Last Days. The American people must realize that God’s blessing, which they are enjoying today, is not only for America. They need to realize clearly that their blessing is for the world, and that it brings with it the responsibility to fulfill God’s Will.
The American people ought to be burning with determination to save the people of the world, even if they have to suffer martyrdom. Armed with the spirit of Christianity, they need to be willing to go the way of the cross. From God’s point of view, the paramount task for America is to protect the free world from communism and become the driving force that can eventually liberate even the communists.
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