From Adamto the Second Advent

Abel’s offering is accepted

God had regard for Abel and his offering (Gen 4:4) — he stood in a right relationship with God and made it in an acceptable manner.

The first condition ever met by a fallen human being. Abel restores the foundation of faith in Adam’s place, and by doing so qualifies as the central figure of the substantial offering — the one Cain now has to yield to. Cain’s offering was not refused out of hatred: standing where he stood, he needed to make a condition first, and that condition was to remove the fallen nature.

Noah completes the ark

Ten generations and sixteen hundred years after Adam, Noah works 120 years on a mountain under constant ridicule, in absolute obedience. The ark carries the meaning of the whole cosmos — three decks for the three stages of growth, eight people for the eight of Adam’s family, the animals for the natural world. Then forty days of flood.

The symbolic offering is accepted and the foundation of faith restored. Noah, not Abraham, was meant to hold the title father of faith; it only moved later. The dove sent out three times at seven-day intervals is read as everything that follows: the first finds nowhere to land — Adam; the second returns with an olive leaf — Jesus, who would have nowhere to lay his head; the third does not return at all — the Lord at the Second Advent, after whom the ideal is never withdrawn from the earth again.

Abraham offers Isaac on Moriah

Commanded to offer the son the whole promise depends on, Abraham goes three days to Moriah, binds Isaac and raises the knife. Isaac is old enough to carry the wood, old enough to ask where the lamb is, and old enough to resist — and does not. Had he resisted, the offering would not have been accepted; his faith was as great as his father’s. The angel stops the hand, and the ram in the thicket is offered instead.

By resolving absolutely, Abraham stood in the position of having already killed Isaac, and Satan was cut off from the boy entirely — which is why God says “now I know”. Both pass through a death and a resurrection: Abraham kills the self that failed at the altar, and Isaac is given back. The ram is then the symbolic offering by which Isaac — not Abraham — restores the foundation of faith and inherits the mission. The three days it took to reach the mountain became permanent: Jacob leaving Haran, Moses leaving Egypt, Jesus in the tomb.

The Abel position moves down a generation

Had Abraham not failed, Isaac and his half-brother Ishmael would have been the Abel and Cain pair who removed the fallen nature. Because he failed, Isaac was moved up into Abraham’s own position and the Cain–Abel task passed down to Isaac’s sons. Esau inherits the standing of the first offering Satan invaded; Jacob inherits the offering of Isaac from which Satan was separated. They were fighting in the womb because they were already in opposite positions.

Jacob bows to Esau at Peniel

Three victories, in order. Jacob buys the birthright with bread and lentils — flesh and spirit, the two things Satan defiled. He goes to Haran, which stands for the satanic world, and wins family and wealth back from Laban across twenty-one years of drudgery and ten changes of wages. Returning, he wrestles the angel through the night at the ford of the Jabbok and prevails, and is renamed Israel. Then he sends his herds ahead, bows to the ground seven times before the brother who swore to kill him — and Esau runs, embraces him, and they weep (Gen 33:4).

Esau yields of his own will, and the condition to remove the fallen nature is fulfilled. This is the first foundation of substance in history, and it repairs Cain and Abel and Shem and Ham at once. Jacob is also the first fallen man ever to restore dominion over an angel — which is what the name Israel records. Moses walks this course again as image and Jesus as substance; every later course on this page is Jacob at a larger scale.

Reuben loses primacy through sin (Gen 35:22). The kingly line passes to Judah; the double blessing goes to Joseph. The Messianic line is set — David and Jesus will come from Judah.

Jacob deliberately crosses his hands when blessing Joseph’s sons and lays his right hand on the younger (Gen 48:14). By this point the pattern is doctrine — and the Exposition reads the same rule in God striking Egypt’s firstborn and in only the Levites being allowed to carry the Ark.

Moses’ forty years in Pharaoh’s palace

Raised at the centre of the satanic world, secretly nursed and taught by his own mother, Moses kept the consciousness of his people through forty years of palace comfort and then chose ill-treatment with them over the fleeting pleasures of sin.

Those forty years are a completed dispensation for the separation of Satan, and with them Moses lays the foundation of faith for the first national course. Unlike Abel, Noah and Isaac, he needs no symbolic offering at all: he stands on their three accepted offerings, and the age of relating to God through sacrifice has given way to the age of relating to Him through His Word.

Three signs, ten plagues, and the Red Sea

The staff that becomes a serpent, the hand that turns leprous and is healed, the water that turns to blood — then ten plagues answering Laban’s ten deceptions of Jacob, and the sea divided by the staff. Israel sees, believes, and follows.

A second dispensation to start, granted with greater grace than the first because the first was squandered. Every element is read forward: the staff is Jesus, the hand into the bosom twice is Jesus and his Bride restoring what the archangel defiled, the ninth plague’s three days of darkness is the separation of light from dark at his coming. But believing Moses while the miracles are happening was never the condition — the condition was to keep believing him all the way into Canaan.

The second tablets, and the Tabernacle raised

This time Moses must carve the blank stones himself before God will write on them, and fast another forty days. The people wait for him, and then build the Ark and the Tabernacle under his direction.

The foundation for the Tabernacle is complete. Its purpose was insurance: an object of faith that stays fixed even when people change, so that as long as one person still honours it the providence has somewhere to stand — the way a baton passes in a relay. Moses restoring the broken tablets by forty days of fasting is also read forward: it is why the forty days after the resurrection could give Jesus a new beginning.

Joshua crosses the Jordan and takes Jericho

Two spies this time, and a faithful report. A three-day course, then the Ark goes first and the Jordan parts before it. Twelve stones out of the riverbed are set up at Gilgal, Passover is kept, the manna stops. Six days circling Jericho with nothing happening, and on the seventh, seven circuits and the walls go down. Thirty-one kings fall after it.

The generation born in the wilderness completes what their parents forfeited, and the national foundation for the Messiah is established — though as a people without sovereignty, not yet a kingdom. Joshua inheriting Moses’ unfinished course is the Exposition’s template for the Second Advent: Moses could only enter in spirit, Joshua entered in substance, and what Jesus began spiritually the returning Christ completes on the earth.

Solomon builds the Temple

The dispensation Saul was given, prolonged through David, is finally carried out in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign — 480 years after the Exodus.

The Temple is the image of the Messiah as the Tabernacle was his symbol: what Moses carried through the wilderness, standing at last in the land. Israel now has territory, sovereignty and a Temple — everything the family foundation of Isaac’s day lacked.

Elijah on Mount Carmel

The northern kingdom runs through nineteen kings and nine dynasties without one righteous ruler. Into it God sends Elijah, who takes on the 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah alone on Mount Carmel, calls down fire on the altar, and throws down their altars.

A single man separates Satan from a kingdom that had given itself to idols. With the Temple’s ideal forfeited under Solomon, God now works through prophets rather than kings — four major and twelve minor — to purge Israel of satanic influence and keep the way open for the Messiah, who comes as the incarnate Temple.

John the Baptist lays the foundation of faith

An angel foretells his birth; his father is struck dumb for doubting it and speaks again only when the child is named; the hill country talks of nothing else. He grows up in the wilderness on locusts and wild honey, and lives so exactly that priests and Levites come out to ask whether he is the Messiah.

Called on four hundred years of separation from Satan just as Moses was, John completes the same dispensation and lays the foundation of faith for the first worldwide course. He stood where Moses stood — and the whole nation, esteeming him as it did, only had to follow him to Jesus for the foundation of substance to be laid on the spot. His baptism of Jesus was, without his knowing it, the ceremony of handing everything he had built over.

Forty days in the wilderness, and the three temptations

Stones into bread, refused: the stone Satan held ever since Moses struck the rock twice, recovered — and with it the perfection of individual character. The pinnacle of the Temple, refused: Satan wanted the Lord of the Temple to fall out of his own position, and instead the way opened for believers to become branch temples. The kingdoms of the world, refused: dominion over creation, which was already his by the first two victories.

Standing in John’s place, Jesus restores in forty days every dispensation of forty lost in four thousand years — Noah’s flood, Moses’ three forty-year courses and two fasts, the spy mission, the wilderness, Egypt. He becomes the fulfilment of the tablets, the Ark, the Tabernacle, the rock and the Temple all at once, and the three refusals lay the ground for God’s three blessings to be restored.

Resurrection to Pentecost — the spiritual foundation

The forty days between resurrection and ascension are another dispensation for the separation of Satan, walked in spirit from John’s position. The scattered disciples are gathered, Matthias replaces Judas to make the twelve whole again, and at Pentecost the Holy Spirit descends.

The spiritual foundation for the Messiah is complete, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit stand as spiritual True Parents, giving rebirth into a realm of resurrection Satan cannot enter. But it is spiritual only. The original sin travels through the flesh, so the body is still open to attack — which is why even a devout Christian is, in the Exposition’s terms, an adopted child rather than one of God’s own lineage, and why Paul says that those with the first fruits of the spirit still groan for adoption.

Christianity outlasts Rome

Four hundred years of persecution, restoring the four hundred in Egypt, kept pure by baptism and communion where Israel kept itself pure by circumcision and sacrifice. Then Constantine recognises Christianity in 313 and Theodosius makes it the state religion in 392, and the canon of the New Testament is gathered.

Where Moses broke Pharaoh with signs and plagues, here the same victory is won inwardly — by moving the hearts of emperors rather than by miracles, because this is the age of internal conditions. Christians restored Canaan spiritually inside the satanic empire itself, and the New Testament becomes for them what the tablets and the Tabernacle were for Israel.

Charlemagne crowned, 800

Leo III crowns him the first emperor of Christendom. Standing on four hundred years of regional church leadership as Saul stood on four hundred years of the judges, Charlemagne is the emperor to Saul’s king, with the pope in the high priest’s place and the monastic reformers in the prophets’.

The Exposition is explicit that he reached it: when Charlemagne was crowned emperor he achieved the foundation of faith. The empire realised Augustine’s City of God as an actual Christian state. Had the Second Israel then followed him as Israel was to follow Saul — the pope’s spiritual kingdom and the emperor’s earthly one fully united — the foundation for the Second Advent would have been complete in the ninth century.

The Reformation, 1517

Wycliffe had already put the Bible above the priesthood in English. When Leo X sells indulgences to build St Peter’s, Luther lights the fuse, and it carries to Zwingli, Calvin, England and the Netherlands. A hundred and thirty years of religious war end at Westphalia in 1648.

This is the foundation of faith re-laid, exactly as the returning exiles re-laid theirs by rebuilding the Temple and reforming under Ezra. It opens the four-hundred-year period of preparation for the Second Advent, the parallel of the four hundred years from Malachi to Jesus.

The world wars, read providentially

The same move twice. Each war produces a counterfeit on Satan’s side who holds the outward form of the three blessings at one stage — the Kaiser as a false Adam in 1914, Hitler as a false Jesus in 1939, complete down to the grandiose vision, the single life and the vanished corpse — and God’s side prevails over him. In the second, three nations stand against three in the positions of Adam, Eve and the archangel: the United States, Britain and France against Germany, Japan and Italy.

Each victory lays one stage of the worldwide foundation and wins, at world level, one of the three temptations Jesus refused in the wilderness: 1918 the formation stage and the first, 1945 the growth stage and the second. That is where the arithmetic lands — the four hundred years from 1517 close in 1918, and the Exposition says the period of the Second Advent began soon after that war ended. It is also where the counterfeit changes: Hitler was destroyed while Stalin, the false Christ of the Second Advent, grew stronger, which is read as the spiritual kingdom’s age closing and the age of a new heaven and new earth beginning.