Shincheonji lesson 37: figurative beast

Where SCJ’s reading conflicts with the Bible

This lesson defines beasts as “False Pastors and people who do not understand the word,” and sorts all the animals in Scripture into three groups: betrayal, destruction and salvation. It reads the beast of Revelation 13 as “Seven Pastors who lack understanding of the word and who devour their congregation.” It says that missing class for a job “doesn’t make sense,” and that “The same can be said with relationships or even family.” It warns that a betrayer, someone who leaves “The open Word,” “is no longer protected by God.” SCJ’s The Explanation of Parables (p. 61) goes further: “John the Baptist was a betrayer.” Scripture does use animal imagery for false teachers, and that should be admitted (Matthew 7:15). But the lesson’s three-category system, and its verdict on John the Baptist, contradict the passages it cites.

1. 1. Revelation 13: A world power, not seven pastors

   The board says the beast of Revelation 13 is “Seven Pastors who lack understanding of the word.”

   • Revelation explains the seven heads itself: “The seven heads are seven mountains the woman sits on. They are also seven kings” (17:9-10).
   • The beast is given “ruling authority over every tribe, people, language, and nation,” and “all those who live on the earth will worship the beast” (13:7-8). It is a worldwide power, not the leadership of one church.
   • Daniel 7, which Revelation 13 draws on, explains its beasts as “four kings who will arise from the earth” (7:17).
   • SCJ’s own sources don’t agree. The notes say seven pastors; The Creation of Heaven and Earth (p. 313) says the beast is “a gentile pastor of Satan who invades God’s tabernacle.”

2. 2. Jude 10: Who the “beasts” are

   The lesson uses Jude 10 to say beasts act on instinct and destroy what they don’t understand.

   • Jude is describing false teachers who “have secretly slipped in among you,” who “have turned the grace of our God into a license for evil and who deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).
   • Jude’s test is what someone does with grace and with Jesus’ lordship. It isn’t whether a person understands a course’s explanation of prophecy.

3. 3. Seeking comfort isn’t beast-like

   The lesson says “people who only act on feeling” are “often misled,” and “a beast will seek comfort instead of seeking what it needs to do.”

   • Scripture calls God the “God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
   • “Even when I must walk through the darkest valley … your rod and your staff reassure me” (Psalm 23:4).
   • Jesus wept (John 11:35) and “had compassion on” the crowds (Matthew 9:36). Feelings aren’t the problem.
   • Teaching students that wanting comfort is beast-like makes their own unease about the course something to suppress.

4. 4. Proverbs 30: Agur’s humility is about himself

   The lesson uses Proverbs 30:2-4 to say anyone without knowledge of the Holy One is “like the beast” in God’s eyes.

   • Agur says, “Surely I am more brutish than any other human being.” He is confessing his own smallness before God’s greatness: “Who has ascended into heaven, and then descended?” (30:2-4).
   • His next words: “Every word of God is purified … Do not add to his words, lest he reprove you and prove you to be a liar” (30:5-6).
   • It’s a model of humility, not a label to put on others.

5. 5. Psalm 49:20 is about trusting wealth

   • Psalm 49 is about the rich who trust in their wealth. Like animals, they die and take nothing with them (49:6, 10-12, 17-20).
   • The psalmist’s hope is: “God will rescue my life from the power of Sheol” (49:15).
   • It isn’t about whether someone attends a class.

6. 6. Job, relationships and family

   The lesson says missing class for a job opportunity “doesn’t make sense,” and “The same can be said with relationships or even family.”

   • “if someone does not provide for his own, especially his own family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8).
   • Jesus rebuked using religious devotion to avoid caring for family (Mark 7:9-13).
   • “Whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as to the Lord” (Colossians 3:23).

   Placing a course above work and family reverses what Scripture asks. (See Lessons 16, 27 and 30.)

7. 7. 2 Thessalonians 2: Paul wrote to prevent deception

   The lesson uses 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3 for the order of betrayal, destruction and salvation, and calls any explanation without that flow “maddening wine or seawater.”

   • Paul wrote so believers wouldn’t be “disturbed by any kind of spirit or message … to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here” (2:2).
   • In his order, the one destroyed is the lawless one, by the Lord himself “by the manifestation of his arrival” (2:8). Salvation is “our being gathered to be with him” at “the arrival of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2:1).
   • Paul’s sequence ends with Jesus’ visible return. It doesn’t describe three groups of people in a church history. (See Lesson 10.)

8. 8. “Betrayers”: The lost sheep are the ones Jesus came to rescue

   The lesson puts dogs, pigs and “lost sheep” in the betrayal category, and says what they betray is “The open Word.”

   • Jesus said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). The lost sheep are the people he came for.
   • “Which one of you, if he has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, would not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go look for the one that is lost until he finds it?” (Luke 15:4). He rejoices when he finds it (15:5-7).
   • 2 Peter 2:20-22, the dog returning to its vomit, describes the false teachers of that chapter who “will infiltrate your midst with destructive heresies, even to the point of denying the Master who bought them” (2:1). It isn’t a picture of someone who stops attending a course.
   • Matthew 7:6 (“Do not give what is holy to dogs”) is about not pressing sacred things on people who treat them with contempt. It doesn’t define who has betrayed God.

9. 9. “No longer protected by God”

   The lesson says destroyers target betrayers, and a betrayer “is no longer protected by God.”

   • Jesus says: “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; no one will snatch them from my hand. My Father … is greater than all, and no one can snatch them from my Father’s hand” (John 10:28-29).
   • Nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
   • Peter denied Jesus three times, and Jesus restored him (John 21:15-17).

   Telling students that leaving exposes them to predators turns departure into danger. That fear doesn’t come from Scripture.

10. 10. John the Baptist was not a betrayer

    The Explanation of Parables (p. 61) says, “John the Baptist was a betrayer.” The Creation of Heaven and Earth (p. 428) says he “erred by failing” to hand over his people to Jesus and “become less important (Jn 3:30),” so his faith weakened.

    Scripture says the opposite at every point:

    • John 3:30, the verse the book cites, is John’s own joyful statement: “He must become more important while I become less important.” He said it when his disciples complained that people were going to Jesus (3:26-30).
    • John pointed his own disciples to Jesus: “Look, the Lamb of God!” and two of them left John to follow Jesus (John 1:35-37). One was Andrew (1:40).
    • When John, in prison, sent to ask whether Jesus was the one, Jesus answered with evidence, not condemnation, and then praised him to the crowd: “among those born of women, no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist” (Matthew 11:2-11; Luke 7:22-28).
    • Jesus identified John as the promised Elijah (Matthew 11:14). John was executed for confronting Herod’s sin (Matthew 14:3-10).

    SCJ’s three-step template needs a betrayer at the first coming to match the one it later names in its own history. Labeling the man Jesus called the greatest born of women a betrayer shows how far the template overrides the text.

11. 11. The “Salvation” animals point to Jesus

    • The Lamb is Jesus: “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
    • The rider on the white horse is Jesus: “he is called the Word of God,” and “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Revelation 19:11-16). Not a modern figure.
    • The sheep of Matthew 25 are known by what they did for “the least of these brothers or sisters of mine” (25:40), not by possessing “the open word at this time.”

12. 12. Hard work isn’t proof of a true teaching

    The lesson compares the evangelists and instructors to the working oxen of 1 Corinthians 9: “We, the Harvest class, evangelists and instructors, work very hard for you. Why? Because we love you deeply.”

    • Paul describes what loving ministry looks like: “the appeal we make does not come from error or impurity or with deceit … we never appeared with flattering speech … nor with a pretext for greed” (1 Thessalonians 2:3-5).
    • Love in ministry means telling people plainly who you are and what you teach. Hard work alone doesn’t show that a teaching is true.