Who we are

Ever since the beginning when God commanded the man He created to be fruitful and multiply, God has been working to create His kingdom on this earth. Also working from the beginning, however, God’s enemy the devil has opposed God’s work by deceiving God’s people and enticing them to turn away from Him. After judging the corrupt world of Adam’s descendants with the flood and after the cursing of Noah’s second son Ham as well as Ham’s son Canaan (Gn 9), God next chose from among Noah’s descendants a righteous man named Abraham. God promised Abraham that although his descendants would be enslaved for 400 years in a foreign land, God would ultimately deliver them and bless them by leading them into a Promised Land. God fulfilled this promise as he established the 12 tribes of Israel as His kingdom on this earth.

The name Israel, which means overcomer or victor, was bestowed upon Abraham’s grandson Jacob after he wrestled with an angel of God. This man Israel was then blessed with 12 sons who became the 12 patriarchs of the 12 tribes of Israel. God led the descendants of Israel into the land of Egypt and allowed them to be enslaved for 400 years according to the promise He made to Abraham. At the appointed time, God chose Moses and commanded him to lead Israel out of Egypt. God gathered His people at Mt. Sinai, gave them the Law, and made a covenant with them. In this covenant, Israel promised to keep God’s word and never turn away from Him. As Joshua led Israel into the Promised Land of Canaan, God commanded them not to intermarry with the Canaanites because He knew the gentiles would turn their hearts away from following Him. In a particularly egregious example of disobedience, Israel’s King Solomon married hundreds of gentile wives and began to worship their false gods (1 Kgs 11). He even built temples to false gods in the capital city of Jerusalem. Thus, because the 12 tribes of Israel turned their backs on God, breaking their covenant with Him, God left them. Without God’s continued protection, the united kingdom of the 12 tribes crumbled and was overrun. The gentile nation of Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and later, the gentile kingdom of Babylon conquered the southern kingdom of Judah.

But God did not give up on His plan to establish His kingdom on this earth. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God spoke about giving Israel and Judah a certificate of divorce because of their infidelity in worshiping other gods and breaking their covenant (Jer 3:8). God also promised through Jeremiah that He would create a new thing on the earth and establish a new covenant with Israel in the future (Jer 31:31-34). How was this fulfilled? Six hundred years after those promises were made through Jeremiah, Jesus was born to a virgin in Bethlehem. It was through Jesus that God created His new kingdom and established the new covenant He had promised. Jesus overcame the world, the devil, and even death (Jn 16:33) to become a new “Israel.” Rather than having physical sons like Jacob before him, Jesus gathered 12 spiritual sons (i.e., the 12 disciples) to become the patriarchs of the 12 tribes of a new spiritual kingdom of Israel. Rather than the physical kingdom of Israel that turned away from God, Jesus established the new covenant with this new kingdom of Spiritual Israel (i.e., Christians). This was what Paul meant when he referred to the difference between outward Jews and inward Jews in Romans 2:28-29. In other words, although the Jews had been God’s people in the past, they could no longer be considered Israel unless they accepted Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promises in the Old Testament. In God’s eyes, it was the Christians who had become the “true Jews.”

In addition to his sacrifice for sin, Jesus had another task to complete at the time of his first coming. He came to sow the seed of God’s word into the hearts of his followers (Jer 31:27, Mt 13:24). As in the past, however, the devil did not just stand idly by and let this happen; he quickly began sowing the tares—his own false teachings and misunderstandings—into the hearts of Jesus’s followers (Mt 13:25). This is how the unified church of Jesus eventually became the many different denominations we see today, all teaching their own specific interpretations of the Bible. Knowing that this would happen, Jesus prophesied a harvest at the end of the age in which he would gather all the sons of the kingdom of heaven (i.e., the true Christians) to himself (Mt 13:37-39, 2 Thes 2:1). The book of Revelation promises a harvest of 144,000 first fruits who will stand with the Lamb on Mt. Zion (Rv 14). These people, who are gathered at the end of the age and sealed with the revealed word of God, are divided into twelve tribes (Rv 7:4-8). These twelve tribes are a new kingdom and people of God established in the last days when a promised messenger of Jesus overcomes to become a new Israel. Working with the harvesting angels, this overcomer and those who receive the word from him gather more and more people to join God’s kingdom on earth. This kingdom is Shincheonji Church of Jesus—Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. The twelve tribes of Shincheonji were established on March 14, 1995 using the names of Jesus’s twelve disciples (Mt 19:28). Although each of the twelve tribes is head-quartered in South Korea where Shincheonji was first established, they are now spreading the revealed word of God all over the world. It is through these twelve tribes that God and Jesus are working today to heal all nations and restore all creation to God.