Facing Deep Fakes, Confusion, War – Keeping Faith

God longs to see his dream – his ideal – realized, yet in a world of strange teachings, idols, deepfakes, confusion, war, keeping faith in the ideal is not easy

Part 2 of extracts from a sermon titled “Yesterday, Today and Forever”, that Dr. Michael Balcomb, the President of the Europe and the Middle East Region of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, gave at the Sunday service in Geneva, Switzerland on 6th October 2024. Slightly edited. 

See part 1, part 3, part 4

Actually, the next verse is very interesting. It says,

“Do not get led away by diverse and strange teachings […]” (Hebrews 13:9, RSV).

I could add here, “nor by idols”. These days, we don’t make idols of stone and wood, but actually we have many idols in our life: our career, our work, our children, our home. There are so many things that we’re tempted to start putting ahead of God. We all are susceptible to it.

Also – and it’s been a problem for the last 2,000 years – we tend to be a bit gullible. Do you know what gullible means? It means we believe things too easily without checking to see if they’re true or not. And even if we find out that they’re not true, the residue of that confusion remains.

On the way here, I read a very interesting and disturbing article from America, from the city of Baltimore. […] Baltimore is a big city, halfway between Washington and New York. And historically, a lot of black people live there.

One day there was this bombshell of an audio recording. It said the principal of a local high school was complaining about his students. And in this audio, he was saying,

“How long do I have to put up with these ungrateful kids? They come late, they don’t work, and the teachers are not much better either.”

Of course, this spread. And very quickly there was an uproar, and the police had to be called to protect the principal. Pretty soon the whole community was asking, “Hey, how can this be?”

But then somebody started to investigate. They found out this was a deepfake. It wasn’t him at all, actually. It was one of his staff who’d been fired for theft and had used his computer skills to create this entirely false audio. So, it was reported,

“Sorry, everybody, it was false. It wasn’t true.”

But actually, six months later, still half the population believed it was true. Because in that first moment, it must have touched something deep inside them that they were already thinking. And it confirmed for them,

“We live in a racist town, and our principal is racist.”

Even though it wasn’t true, even though it was proved not to be true, still the poison remained.

And if you think about it, this happens a lot. We hear something. We don’t like what we hear. We’re busy, so we don’t necessarily really check it out because we think,

“Yeah, I always thought that.”

So here are two things to bear in mind. The background of this message is a community that’s in trouble. They were in trouble from the outside because there’s persecution, as there is, for example, in Japan these days, but also in trouble from the inside because there’s confusion and even fatigue. We have been doing this for a long time, and we begin to wonder,

“Did we make the right choice? Are we really heading for the Cheonilguk (Kingdom of Heaven)?”

The True Parents’ message is actually very simple. When you boil it right down, the message is that God is our Parent who wants to live with his and her children and grandchildren in peace forever. It really couldn’t be more simple.

But of course, as we know through the Divine Principle, this dream was lost. And it’s always been lost. There’s never been any human being ever who saw the dream of God.

So even to believe that it exists requires effort, right? It requires commitment, “Yes, I believe that dream is true.”

And now True Mother says the time of fulfilment is now. You heard it right here on this video we watched, right? It’s now, not in the distant future. Then you check the date on the video, and you see that was in 2020. That’s already four years ago.

And meanwhile, when we look at our world, what’s going on in Israel, in Lebanon, in Ukraine and Russia and Yemen, it takes real effort, actually, to believe that the kingdom is now, because it definitely doesn’t look like it. It looks like things are going backwards.

I can’t help remembering when I was working in Israel and Palestine 20 years ago, and the kind of easy, cordial relations – despite everything – that we had with Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders – how peaceful it was and how we managed to fill up the park in the middle of Jerusalem with people to crown Jesus. It’s astonishing.

I think that could not have happened today. So this is a challenge. What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, is not the same as what we profess. Am I the only one who has this doubt?

[…] If you believe that progress is somehow linear, you start low, and you keep going higher and higher and higher. If you then see this sudden drop off, you will be very disappointed, because you’ll think,

“Well, that’s it. We were winning for a time, and now it looks like we’re going backwards. And who knows if this will change? Doesn’t look like it.”

It’s possible then, that we start thinking,

“Have I made a mistake? Did I join the wrong church, or did I come to the wrong city? Should I have taken that job instead of this job? Should I have become a missionary, or should I have stayed in Japan?”

I think those thoughts are out there. The other great reformer, Martin Luther, not John Calvin, said,

“You can’t help it if the birds of temptation and confusion fly around your head. You can’t help it, but if they make a nest in your hair, you can help that.”

You have to chase away those thoughts when they come.

Continued in part 3.

See part 1, part 3, part 4

Featured image above: Keeping faith in a world of confusion and war is not easy. Illustration: Microsoft Designer Image Creator, 13th October 2024.

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