Luke 3
12Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”
Luke 2
4So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.
LET US BE STRONG AND BOLD
AND RESTORE THE LOST LAND
Chung Pa Dong Church
Seoul, Korea
June 23, 1957
Rev. Sun Myung Moon
The original people would not have needed to long for the blessed land. The garden that God created was to be the blessed land, and it was the garden of beauty that humans could enjoy for eternity. However, because humans disobeyed the heavenly principles established by God, they came to grief, and the blessed land where they should have lived became a mere hope to them. We know all about this.
If God created all things, He would have had an ideal for the creation. If the ideal had been actually realized, not only the Creator but also His created beings could have sung joyful songs in the garden. Then humans also could have sung of their joy and been grateful for this. Due to the human fall, all of this came to have nothing to do with human beings. Further, all things created as the symbol of beauty before God and humans had to undergo a long history of lamentation until the present. They still cannot return glory and appreciation to God.
God has a purpose for creating all things and is responsible for fulfilling the purpose of creation. Thus, God must fulfill His will. Otherwise, God’s ideal of creation and the purpose of the providence of restoration cannot be realized as the will to introduce the world of joy. The people living on this earth cannot feel the value of life; nor can the whole universe.
Consequently, to fulfill the purpose of creation, God has been leading a dispensation in order for humans to return to this purpose. You are well aware that this is the long history of 6,000 years of restoration. When Adam and Eve fell, God regretted and lamented over creating them. You should feel to the bone that the lamentation of God began from your ancestors.
Because God is lamenting over it, all the created beings cannot rejoice, even if they desire to. Because the center of the creation is saddened, all the creation is also saddened. Then what would be the purpose of God’s unfolding the dispensation? Having set up the will, He wishes that will to be fulfilled. That will is to find someone who can liberate Him, who is sorrowful and grieving because of His grief and lamentation. This is the unifying point of the providence of restoration.
To find the person who can alleviate God’s lamentation, that is, the one person who can stop the human history of sin that caused lamentation to God throughout the 6,000 years of long history and cleanse the sinful history, is the purpose of the providence of restoration. To find one original person who can represent this history is the purpose of the providence of restoration. You should clearly understand this.
When you come before God, you need to desire to be forgiven. You also need to ask for the grace of forgiveness for the family, the nation, and the world. Yet we should transcend the level of begging God to liberate us from our personal grief and lamentation and should realize that we need to appeal to God to alleviate His profound grief, deeply immersed in His heart, which started at the beginning of human history and was caused by their wrongdoing.
Then who will be the one who makes us long for the garden of hope, the garden of restoration, and to enter the garden and return glory to God on behalf of the creation? That person will be the one who will volunteer to become an offering of sacrifice to indemnify to God all the sins committed by human beings. Further, this person will be the one who is willing to indemnify all human historical sins until the present and take responsibility for all the sins of the historical figures in human ancestry that led God to work for 6,000 years. He must thus say: “Father, please entrust all the hopes and lamentations that You could not express upon me. I will be the one who can fulfill all of Your hopes and eliminate all of Your lamentations.” We should know that God has been looking forward to seeing a person on earth who can replace Adam, the human ancestor, who should have substantialized God’s joy, ideal and glory.
Our fate is to free ourselves from the history of sin. Thus you should understand that God has been leading the dispensation of restoration with the wish of seeing sons and daughters who can deserve to be living sacrificial offerings. Such never existed throughout history who can say, “Father, through this, please be freed from all the grief and pain, and rejoice from today on.”