3. Law of the Restoration of the Number Four
God’s purpose of creation was to realize His love through the family four position foundation. That is to say, if Adam and Eve had grown according to God’s Word and had perfected themselves, they would have become husband and wife centering on God, and would have given birth to good children. Then, the family four position foundation, consisting of God, Adam (husband), Eve (wife), and their children, would have been formed, and a family filled with God’s love would have been realized. Due to the fall of Adam and Eve, however, such a family four position foundation centered on God could not be formed; instead, a family four position foundation centered on Satan was formed, and the entire created world was put under the dominion of Satan. From that point on, it became the central purpose of history to restore the family four position foundation centered on God’s vertical love.
In order to restore the four position foundation, God first conducted symbolic, conditional providences, the goal of which was to establish a period of time with a duration symbolizing the number four. This is called the law of the restoration of the number four. The restoration of the number four was a condition of indemnity to restore the family four position foundation numerologically. The period of the number four is realized through periods of forty days, forty years, four hundred years, and so on, during which time confusion is brought about by Satan, and the people on God’s side usually undergo hardships.
Examples include Noah’s forty-day flood, Moses’ forty years in the wilderness, four hundred years of persecution of the Christians under the Roman Empire, and so on. When such periods of indemnity were over, the confusion was brought under control in the sense that the four position foundation was restored conditionally, and God’s providence was able to proceed to a new stage. The law of the restoration of the number four applied not only to the history of the Israelites, but also to the history of other peoples and countries as well.
Arnold Toynbee noted that there were many cases in history where unification was accomplished after a period of four centuries of confusion (period of turmoil). We can cite some examples: the four centuries in the Hellenic World from the Peloponnesian War to the unification by the Roman Empire (431-31 BC); about four centuries from the period of “the Contending States” to the unification by the Ch’in and Han Empires in Chinese history (634-221 BC); and about four centuries of feudal anarchy from the Kamakura-Ashikaga period to the unification of all of Japan by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japanese history (1185-1597). Toynbee could not clarify, however, the reason why such periods of four centuries appeared in history. 8
A similar case is the forty-year rule by the Japanese over Korea, starting with the Eul-sa Treaty of Protection in 1905 and ending with the liberation of Korea in 1945.