Session 6 It is my great pleasure to share the Divine Principle view on the Messiah. Session 6.

2 The Divine Principle is a revelation from God to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. This perspective will awaken you to the heart of Jesus and to the true meaning of God’s work of salvation.

3 While deep in prayer on Mount Myodu on Easter morning of 1935, at age 15, Sun Myung Moon had a spiritual encounter with Jesus.

4 Jesus revealed that God had wanted the people of Jesus’ day to believe in him. He died on the cross because of their disbelief. Through that sacrifice, he can forgive our sin and continue the path to complete the Messiah’s work. To that mission, he called Sun Myung Moon. Now, you may be skeptical as to whether Reverend Moon really met Jesus. But the truth is we don’t need to depend on Rev. Moon’s testimony alone -

5 Jesus shared the essential message right in the Gospels. We just didn’t see it before. One thing is clear to all Christians: Jesus is the Messiah, born with the mission to bring salvation.

6 What does it mean to bring salvation?

7 It means to save someone. If a man fell out of a boat, to save him you would get him back into the boat. If someone ate poison, you would take the poison out of their system. In other words, salvation means to restore a person to their original state. Now, our follow-up question is,

8 What do we need to be saved from? Our answer is clear.

9 We need to be saved from this dysfunctional human family that is far from God.

10 A family that is rooted in selfish love that was initiated by the fallen archangel.

11 A family that passes on the problems to its children. What do we need in order to leave this sinful family behind?

12 We need a godly family that we can join.

13 This would be a family that is rooted in God’s love,

14 a family through which we can realize our God-given nature and bequeath it to our children. In other words, salvation means to join a family where we can fulfill God’s original purpose of creation.

15 This is where we grow as God’s true children,

16 to become spouses and parents who give birth to children free of sin, and where our children can grow up in a world of peace. In the first part of our series we learned about God’s blueprint for this family.

17 To make a true family, God needs a man and a woman who can overcome temptation and stand as God’s true son and daughter.

18 Jesus was that True Son. He said that he was also the bridegroom who had come to find his bride, in Matthew 9:15.

19 Had the people welcomed Jesus, he and his bride would have formed a true, Godly family. Through this family God would have been able to save all of humanity.

20 Jesus and his bride would have stood as the True Parents of humankind. Beginning with the people of Israel, Jesus and his bride would have brought all people of the world into God’s family. When you hear this, you may ask,

21 If God planned for Jesus to create a family, then why would He let him be killed? The answer is that God could not force the people to accept Jesus. He knew our tendency to reject His prophets and He knew that if Jesus was rejected, he would not be the Lord of Glory, but he may end up as the Lord of Suffering. God’s plan A is always for glory and success.

22 There was a Plan B—that Jesus’ blood would be spilled on the cross. Although it did not bring God’s complete ideal to this world, the cross did provide

23 salvation of the spirit, the forgiveness of sin based on repentance. It opened the path to a future where we could be brought out of the fallen family.

24 Plan B, however, does not get us all the way there. You may ask why God would need more than one plan. Doesn’t everything go as God wants? The answer is no, for this would be to deny human freedom.

25 This explains why there are two types of prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah.

26 One type, found in Isaiah 9, 11, 60, and 61, predicts a glorious Messiah. This is what would have happened if the people had believed in Jesus.

27 The other type, found in Isaiah 53, predicts that if we fail, the Messiah will suffer as the price for our sin.

28 At the beginning of this session I said that Jesus revealed the true meaning of his mission. What does he say about salvation? The first point that Jesus made is that we must believe in him.

29 In John 6:28, when asked by the people what they must do to do the work of God, Jesus said 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

30 follow him. And in Matthew 11:37 Jesus taught that if we want to become his disciples we must

31 love him even more than we love our own life.

32 Jesus never called the people to reject and kill him. In fact, he strongly condemned them for it. Take for example,

33 Judas Iscariot, Jesus’ betrayer. Jesus said it would have been better if Judas had never been born.

34 In Matthew 11:20-24, people refused to repent and Jesus said that they would find themselves deeper in Hell than the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

35 Jesus also said that the people did not know what they were doing and asked God to forgive them. This is a far cry from the time when Jesus started his ministry. In Matthew 4:17 and 4:23, he proclaimed that the Kingdom of God was at hand.

36 This was a call for acceptance and faith. When he gave his first reading in a synagogue, Jesus did not read Isaiah 53, which predicted his crucifixion, but instead Isaiah 61, which prophesied the “king of kings, and lord of lords.” At what point did he begin to teach about his death and resurrection? It was not until after John the Baptist was killed. That passage states,

37 “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.” (Matthew 16:21)

38 In other words, Plan B - Jesus going the way of the cross. What is the significance of this?

39 Let’s listen to Jesus’ explanation of his crucifixion in John 3:14. He compared his death on the cross to

40 Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness. In what way are they similar? Jesus was to bring the people out of the world of sin into God’s Kingdom, just as Moses was to bring the people out of slavery into freedom. But both men needed the people to believe. When the people turned against Moses, God sent fiery serpents to attack them, but God provided a Plan B for Moses.

41 He had him put a bronze serpent on a pole and call the people to look at this serpent and be saved. It was to this incident that Jesus compared his crucifixion saying, “As Moses lifted up a serpent in the wilderness, so I, the Son of Man, must be lifted up on a pole, so that everyone who believes in me will have eternal life.”

42 The point is that this all happened, not because the people united with God’s Will, but but because they rejected it. Let’s look at what God accomplished by allowing His son to be killed. The sin of rejecting Jesus tied humanity even more deeply to

43 the fallen archangel, who wanted more than anything to kill Jesus. God did not send His son to drive humanity even deeper into Hell, but to save us, even if He had to offer Jesus as a ransom.

44 The victory of the cross was that Jesus continued to love those who persecuted him. The fallen angel had to bow down before Jesus’ love. No one was able to love as Jesus did. Jesus transformed his death into a life-giving offering and created a realm of resurrection for all through faith in him.

45 Those who believe and follow can receive God’s forgiving love through the Holy Spirit. We call this, spiritual salvation. So the Bible tells us the Messiah needs to come a second time to complete God’s plan on earth. This is why Jesus taught us in Matthew 6:10 to continue to pray,

46 “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

47 So the Messiah and his bride will establish the position of True Parents, creating a godly family through which all people will be able to return to God.

48 Traditional Bible teachings somehow miss this point. I encourage you to take this matter to God and to Jesus in prayer. I did, and I was amazed at how my questions were answered.

49 I finally could understand why, before Jesus was arrested, he went to the garden at Gethsemane and prayed three times to open a way other than the cross.

50 I could understand why Jesus could forgive sin already without his blood shed on the cross as shown in Luke 7:48. (Matthew 9:2-6, Luke 7:48)

51 I could understand why evil and sin continue to plague all religions. Most of all, I was awakened to God’s pain as His son was crucified.

52 At this point you may have questions of your own. When people hear this presentation, they often ask, “If God wanted the people to receive Jesus,

53 why didn’t He make it more plain?

54 Why didn’t God prepare people who would believe in him? These are all important questions and we will address them in the next session. The answers will deepen your relationship with Jesus and guide you in what he is doing today.

Thank you for attending this session Thank you for attending this session. I look forward to seeing you for session 7, the second part of “Mission of the Messiah”. God bless you.