Discovering the Divine Principle Session 6 Mission of the Messiah part 1 - Script

1 Welcome, my name is , and it is my great pleasure to be your host for this session of the series, Discovering the Divine Principle, the Mission of the Messiah.

2 The Divine Principle is a revelation from God that was given to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. In this presentation we are going to share a new perspective on Jesus’s mission and his crucifixion. This perspective will awaken you to the heart of Jesus and the meaning of God’s work of salvation.

3 While deep in prayer on Easter morning of 1935, at age 15, Sun Myung Moon tells us that he met Jesus. 4 Jesus revealed that God wanted the people to welcome and believe in him and that he came to bring humanity into the kingdom of Heaven as the living Messiah. His sacrifice on the cross came because of the people’s disbelief in him. Nonetheless, it provided forgiveness of sin and set the foundation to complete that original mission at the Second Advent. To that mission, he called Sun Myung Moon.

Understandably, you may be skeptical as to whether or not Jesus actually spoke to Rev. Moon. Yet the reality is, we don’t need to depend on Re. Moon’s testimony. The essential message that Jesus revealed to Rev. Moon can be found in Jesus’s own words 5 recorded in the Bible. If you can listen with an open mind you will see this clearly for yourself. As we refer to the biblical record and this fresh perspective, ask yourself if this rings true.

One thing is clear to all Christian believers: Jesus is the Messiah, born with the mission to bring salvation to a suffering world.

6 But what does it mean to bring salvation? 7 What does it mean to save someone? If a man fell out of a boat and was drowning, to save him you would help him back into the boat. If someone ate poison, salvation would be to take the poison out of their system. In other words, salvation means to restore a person back to where they were before they fell into danger.

And so, let’s begin with the question, 8 “What exactly is it that humanity needs to be saved from?” The answer, if we understand the Fall and how we became separated from God, is fairly clear. 9 We need to be saved from being a member of this dysfunctional human family. 10 We need to be saved from a family that, instead of being rooted in God’s love, is rooted in a fallen, selfish love that was initiated by the fallen archangel. 11This is a family that passes on to its children an imperfect and distorted love and fallen nature.

What then does this tell us about salvation? Well, if we want to leave the sinful family we are a part of, then naturally we would first seek an alternative: 12 a godly family that we could join.

13 There needs to be a family that belongs to God and is rooted in God’s love, 14 a family through which we can restore our original God-given nature.

In other words, salvation means to join a family where we can fulfill God’s original purpose of creation— 15 the three blessings we spoke about in session one of this series. This is where we can grow to become God’s true children, 16 where we can become parents able to give birth to children free of sin, and where our children can grow up to be lords of creation establishing and sustaining a world of peace.

17 In the Principle of Creation we learned about God’s original blueprint for the family of true love. You may have wondered how God is going to re-create such a family. To make a family, God needs a man and a woman who can overcome temptation and stand as God’s true son and daughter. 18 And Jesus came to be that True Son.

And not only was he God’s son. According to his words in Matthew 9:15 he was also the bridegroom who had come to find his bride. 19 Had the people welcomed Jesus, he would have been able to meet his bride, the woman who was to become God’s true daughter. Together, they would have formed God’s true family.

20 And through this family God would have been able to save all of humanity. Jesus and his bride would have stood as the True Parents of humankind. They would have been able to invite all people to leave the fallen archangel who had taken the position of the false parent, and be adopted into God’s family. St Paul, in Romans 8:23, described this final step of redemption and adoption. Beginning with the people of Israel, Jesus and his bride would have brought all the people of the world into God’s family.

When you hear this, you may want to ask the question, 21 “If God planned for Jesus to create a family, why would He let Jesus be killed?” The answer is critical to understanding the key point of this session. God could not force anyone to accept Jesus. And god knows our tendency to reject His prophets. So he had to have a secondary plan. As painful as it was, that plan was the crucifixion. 22 It was God’s back-up plan in case Jesus was rejected.

Although Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection could not bring God’s complete ideal to this world, it did provide 23 salvation of the spirit, the forgiveness of sins based upon repentance and faith.

The critical point is that Jesus’s crucifixion was spiritual salvation only and did not uproot the original sin. 24 It could not bring us out of the fallen family we were born into. Christianity teaches that when a Christian man and woman marry and have children, even though they have received Jesus as their savior, their lineage still belongs to the sinful world. Their children are still born with original sin and must also be saved. They must go through the same process of baptism and repentance that their parents went through. In other words, salvation through the cross, although immeasurable in value, cannot completely cut us off from the fallen lineage that connects us the archangel.

I said that the cross was God’s plan B. 25 You may ask why God would need more than one plan. “Doesn’t everything go as God wants it to go?” The answer is no. For example, in Genesis 6:6 when God saw how evil we had become, He said that her wished he had never created us.

In fact, when God works with people, he always has several plans. As we explained in the introduction, God gave us a portion of responsibility. That means, whenever God makes plans that involve people, we have to do their part. And there is always the possibility we won’t do our part.

26 This explains why there are two types of prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah. 27 One type, found in Isaiah 9, 11, 60, and 61, predicts a glorious Messiah who will establish God’s Kingdom o the earth. This is what would have happened if the people had fulfilled their part and believed in Jesus. 28 The other type, found in Isaiah 53, reveals God’s secondary plan, what will happen if we fail to do our part. It predicts a Messiah who suffers in order to pay the price for our sin.

29 At the beginning of this session I said that Jesus’s words would reveal to us the true meaning of his mission. Let’s look and see what Jesus had to say about his mission.

What did Jesus teach we must do in order to gain salvation? The first and most essential point that Jesus made concerning our salvation is that we believe in him. 30 In the fullest sense, we are asked to unite with Jesus— in our beliefs, our actions, and in our hearts. In John 6:28, when asked by the people what they must do to do the work of God, Jesus told them to believe in him, the one whom God has sent. In Luke 18:18, when asked by one man how he could gain eternal life, Jesus told him to give all he had to the poor and then 31 follow him. And in Matthew 11:37 Jesus taught that if we want to become his disciples we must 32 love him even more than we love our own life.

33 Jesus never taught that rejecting and killing him was a good thing. In fact, when people did reject Jesus, he strongly condemned them. He made it clear that because they had rejected him, they would not find their way to Heaven.

And sadly, that is what happened. The chosen people rejected Jesus. Take for example, 34 Judas, Jesus’s betrayer. Jesus told him it would have been better if he had never been born. 35 Or consider Matthew 11:20-24, when people in the towns where his great works were performed refused to repent. This was very painful for Jesus. It meant that God’s will to bring peace to this world would not be accomplished. It meant that there would be more tragedy and more suffering. For this reason, Jesus proclaimed that they would find themselves deeper in Hell than the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

36 And there are other examples. In Luke 19:41-44, Jesus, in tears, spoke of the terrible suffering the chosen people would experience because they had not recognized his coming. The desire of Jesus’s heart was that the people receive him. Consider his words in Matthew 23:37, “Oh

Jerusalem…how I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you refused to come!”

And on the cross, Jesus did not proclaim that the people were fulfilling God’s will. He made it clear that they were doing something terribly wrong. This is why he asked God to forgive them.

When Jesus first started his ministry, in Matthew 4:17 and 4:23, he proclaimed that the Kingdom of God was at hand. 37 This was the message of the victorious Messiah who is received by the people. After he had received John’s baptism, when he gave his first reading from scripture in the synagogue at Nazareth, he did not quote from Isaiah 53, which predicted his crucifixion, but instead from Isaiah 61, which prophesied the glorious coming of the Messiah as “king of kings, and lord of lords”.

At what point did he begin to teach about his death and resurrection? This takes place in Matthew 16:21 after John the Baptist, the one who was to prepare the people to receive him, was killed. In that passage it states, 38 “from that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering…and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

Why did Jesus change his message? Why did he stop teaching that the Kingdom was at hand and begin teaching that he must go to the cross? 39 What is the significance of the cross? 40 To answer these important questions, let’s listen to Jesus’s explanation. Jesus explains to us the meaning of his crucifixion in John 3:14. In this passage he tells us that his death on the cross has the same meaning as when 41 Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.

Jesus said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up.”

Jesus is telling us that his situation is similar to Moses. In what way are they similar? To begin with, Jesus’s primary mission was to bring the people out of the world of sin, into God’s Kingdom. Moses was trying to bring the people out of slavery in Egypt— which represented the sinful world, to freedom in the land of Canaan, which was a symbol for God’s Kingdom. But for Moses to succeed, he needed the people to believe in him, just as Jesus needed the people to believe in him in order to fulfill his mission.

But the people refused to believe in Moses. They complained and turned against Moses. And because they turned against him, they were bitten by poisonous snakes and were thus destined to die. But then God provided a secondary plan— 42 God guided Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole, and the people who looked at this serpent were saved from the poison.

This is what Jesus is comparing his crucifixion to. 43 By doing so, he is teaching us that the crucifixion was not the result of God’s first plan. It was instead the result of his being rejected by the chosen people, just as Moses was rejected.

At this point, let’s take a closer look at the cross. What did God accomplish by allowing His son to be killed?

When the people and Jesus’s disciples failed to support him, and the religious establishment ultimately sought to kill him, they were committing a terrible sin. This sin tied humanity even more deeply to 44 the fallen archangel, who, more than anything, wanted to kill Jesus.

But God did not send His son so that humanity would be driven even deeper into Hell. God sent us His son to save us. Therefore, when the people united with the fallen archangel’s desire, God had to ask Jesus to offer his life as ransom for the people who had rejected him. The fallen archangel could not deny the greatness of Jesus’s love and had to bow down before him.

45 And so Jesus was crucified. But what is so incredible is that while being put to death on the cross, Jesus continued to love those who persecuted him, asking God to forgive them. No one in human history was ever able to love his or her enemy as Jesus did. Jesus transformed his death into a life-giving offering. Although his body was killed his spirit was taken by God. Jesus’s love created a realm of resurrection that all humankind can enter through faith in him.

46 Because of Jesus’ victory, those who believe in him and follow his teachings receive the Holy Spirit and experience God’s love and forgiveness. We call this spiritual salvation. By going to the cross, Jesus could not bring God’s Kingdom visibly on the earth, but he was able to bring believers spiritually to God.

47 Sadly, spiritual salvation has its limits. On this earth, Christians must be saved like any other child born into this fallen world. This is why St Paul lamented his own struggle with sin. In

romans 7:24 he cried out, “wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” and this is why he acknowledged in Romans 8:23 that our salvation in the physical body would not come until sometime in the future, when our adoption by God would be complete.

48 And with the root remaining corrupt, the whole tree of humankind suffers the effects of sin— war, racism, tyranny, and so forth.

This is the limit of salvation through the cross. And because it is limited, we can now understand more clearly why the Messiah needs to come a second time on this earth. God must send a Messiah again in order to fulfill His original plan, His deal of creation. This is why Jesus taught us in Matthew 6:10 to pray, 49 “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

50 And when the Messiah comes again he must finally establish God’s family, beginning with the marriage supper of the lamb described in Revelations 19:7, “Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.” The Messiah and his bride will finally establish the position of True Parents, creating a godly family through which all people will be able to return to God.

51 We have covered a lot in this session, including points that you may never have heard before and that may seem to contradict traditional Christian understanding. I want to encourage you to reflect and pray about what you have heard and ask God and Jesus for guidance. I did, and I was amazed to find how many of my questions were answered.

52 I finally could understand why, before Jesus was arrested, he went to pray in the garden at Gethsemane, and why in his prayer he asked God three times, blood and tears, if there was any way that he could avoid the way of the cross.

53 I could understand why Jesus was able to forgive sin before his blood was shed on the cross. In Matthew 9:2-6 and in Luke7:48, Jesus forgave sin based on people’s faith. It had nothing to do with his death.

54 I now understand why evil and sin have continued to dominate this world, including people of the Christian faith and their descendants.

And most of all, I was awakened to how painful it was for God to watch His son be crucified by the very people He had so loved and prepared to believe in His son.

55 At this point you may have some unanswered questions of your own. When people hear this presentation for the first time, they often ask, “If God wanted Jesus to be received, 56 why didn’t God make it more clear to the people who Jesus was? 57 And why didn’t God prepare more people who would welcome Jesus and believe in him? 58 How could people have failed to respect a person as loving and wise as Jesus?” These are important questions that will be addressed in the next session.

59 Thank you for joining us in this session. If you have comments or questions, be sure to ask us. We want you to have a deep relationship with Jesus and understand his will today. God bless you