Why did the World Wars occur?

The World Wars arose from identifiable political, economic, and military causes. This teaching additionally connects them to restoration, the three blessings, Jesus’ temptations, and preparation for the returning Christ. It interprets a third confrontation as requiring spiritual–material harmony, while rejecting victim-blaming, historical simplification, and the glorification of war.

The two World Wars occurred through a convergence of nationalism, imperial rivalry, militarism, economic instability, aggressive expansion, and failures of political leadership and diplomacy. They killed tens of millions, devastated societies, and included the Holocaust. Alongside these historical causes, there is a providential meaning to the World Wars. They represent a global struggle between the inherited dominion of evil and God's work to establish a world centered on His love. God worked to bring restoration out of these catastrophes caused by human wrongdoing. This spiritual explanation illuminates the internal purpose behind the external historical events; it does not excuse perpetrators or suggest the suffering of victims was deserved.

The Biblical Foundation

The Bible presents history as subject ultimately to God’s authority: “the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will” (Daniel 4:17). Yet divine sovereignty does not mean that every ruler’s decision or every act of violence expresses God’s desire. Human beings remain responsible for their choices.

Jesus described the upheavals that would precede the fulfillment of God’s purposes: “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows” (Matthew 24:7–8). These words prophesied the kind of upheavals that would culminate in the 20th century. The World Wars were distinctive in their scale, industrialized destruction, and total mobilization of societies.

Daniel likewise foretells “a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time” (Daniel 12:1). Revelation depicts the gathering of earthly rulers for a final confrontation (Revelation 16:14–16). These passages illuminate a decisive struggle over humanity’s ultimate direction.

That struggle is not simply a contest between peoples. Paul writes, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12). Its deepest issue is whether human life will be governed by domination and selfishness or by truth, freedom, and love.

The Historical Causes and the Internal Providential Struggle

World War I began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. The ensuing crisis escalated through Austria-Hungary’s confrontation with Serbia, German support for Austria-Hungary, Russian mobilization, and the decisions of other European powers. Alliance commitments, military planning, imperial competition, and nationalist antagonisms helped turn a regional crisis into a general war. Colonial empires and international connections extended its reach worldwide.

World War II arose from a different but connected sequence: the unresolved tensions following World War I, resentment of the peace settlement, the Great Depression, the rise of militarist and fascist regimes, and the failure to stop aggression. Japanese expansion in Asia, Fascist Italy’s conquests, and Nazi Germany’s expansionism destroyed the possibility of a stable peace. Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 brought Britain and France into war; the full-scale Sino-Japanese War had already begun in 1937.

Internally, these conflicts were Satan’s last-ditch effort to preserve evil sovereignty as history approached its transition to God’s sovereignty. Satan sought not only to retain control over nations but also to destroy the conditions for the returning Lord’s work and, ultimately, to kill him.

The reasoning is that the Messiah comes to replace a world organized around fallen relationships with one organized around God’s love. A sovereignty opposed to that purpose would resist most fiercely when its position was threatened. Worldwide violence, persecution, and totalitarian control were therefore attempts to block the Messiah’s appearance, development, and mission.

This spiritual conflict manifests through the decisions of governments and the actions of armies, even when the human actors are unaware of the deeper struggle. God does not require atrocities; human aggression caused the destruction. Nevertheless, God continued working for restoration amidst the wreckage.

Global-Scale Separation of Good and Evil

The wars were worldwide expressions of the pattern represented by Cain and Abel. Because goodness and evil are entangled in fallen humanity, restoration involves distinguishing opposing directions and establishing conditions through which goodness can prevail.

The terms Cain-type and Abel-type describe relative providential positions, not the inherent worth of populations. An Abel-type position carries the responsibility to serve, protect, and ultimately reconcile; it is not permission to regard opponents as less than human. Nor does victory establish that every action of the victorious coalition was righteous.

In World War I, the Allied powers stood in the relatively Abel-type position and the Central Powers in the relatively Cain-type position. In World War II, the defeat of the Axis was a further victory for the Abel-type side over systems of conquest and domination.

Because fallen humanity lives in a world where good and evil are mixed, neither coalition was spiritually or politically uniform. For example, the atheist Soviet Union was indispensable to Allied victory in World War II, and major Allied powers like Britain and France still retained colonial empires. This complexity shows that the struggle was not between purely good and purely evil nations. Nevertheless, the central ideologies of the Axis powers, particularly Nazi racial ideology and its systematic murder of six million Jews, represented a radical assault on human dignity and God's ideal. The Allied victory, despite the internal contradictions, represented a victory for the side of greater goodness and freedom.

The providential significance, therefore, lies in the direction opened by the outcome: the defeat of aggressive regimes created opportunities for greater religious freedom, international cooperation, and preparation for the Messiah. This does not sanctify every Allied policy or erase Allied wrongdoing.

Why Three Worldwide Confrontations?

Worldwide restoration proceeds through formation, growth, and completion. Consequently, the providence required three worldwide confrontations to restore history on a global scale.

Four connected purposes explain the threefold pattern.

First, the confrontations establish worldwide conditions for restoring the three great blessings expressed in Genesis 1:28: mature individuals, God-centered families and human community, and loving dominion over creation. Fallen sovereignty counterfeits these blessings through self-exaltation, coercive social organization, and exploitative control of the world. Restoration must address all three dimensions.

Second, they progressively undermine sovereignty opposed to God’s purpose. The goal is not merely to replace one powerful state with another, but to overcome the principle of domination itself.

Third, they extend Jesus’ victory over his three temptations to the worldwide level. What Jesus established through personal fidelity must become embodied in the life of humanity.

Fourth, they reverse the pattern of Cain’s murder of Abel. Rather than goodness being destroyed by violence, goodness must survive, prevail, and create the possibility of reconciliation. Victory is incomplete if it merely reproduces hatred under a new ruler.

Here, indemnity means a condition of restoration through which the consequences of past failures are addressed. It should not be understood as a monetary price assigned to human lives or as evidence that murdered civilians were guilty of the wrongs being restored.

World War I: Formation and the First Temptation

The first temptation concerned bread. Jesus answered, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). His response affirms that material survival must not displace fidelity to God. Restored personhood requires the proper ordering of spiritual and physical life.

World War I consequently established the formation-stage indemnity condition for overcoming that temptation on a worldwide scale. It was associated with restoring the first blessing: the emergence of a person whose character and life are united with God.

The reasoning proceeds from the individual to the world. Just as Jesus resisted subordinating his calling to material demands, humanity needed an international foundation less completely subject to coercive sovereignty. The Allied victory opened that initial foundation, though neither the victors nor the resulting order perfectly embodied it.

Its specifically messianic purpose was to lay the foundation for the birth of the returning Christ and the perfection of his character. These are related but distinct steps: first, conditions for his coming into earthly life; then, conditions in which he could grow toward maturity and prepare for his public responsibility. The purpose of this victory was not to perfect anyone’s character directly, but to prepare an external setting for that spiritual development.

The war’s historical outcomes included the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires; the creation or reconstitution of states; and profound changes in international power. The Russian Revolution also established a communist state that would become central to the next ideological confrontation.

A particularly important outcome was the League of Nations, established in 1920. It represented an attempt to replace recurring power struggles with collective security and international deliberation. Providentially, it was an initial, imperfect expression of humanity’s need for worldwide organization.

Yet the League’s weaknesses, the absence of the United States from membership, unresolved grievances, and the later failure to restrain aggression show that this was only a beginning. The peace settlement did not secure a lasting peace.

World War II: Growth and the Second Blessing

In the second temptation, Satan urged Jesus to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Jesus replied, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (Matthew 4:7). He refused to misuse his position or demand a spectacular demonstration of divine protection.

The temple also points toward the sanctity of the person and the community centered on God. Jesus’ fidelity preserves the foundation from which restored relationships can develop. This connects to the second blessing because mature individuality must expand into faithful family life and a community that honors God rather than exalting power.

World War II was the growth-stage indemnity condition for overcoming this second temptation globally and restoring the second blessing. The defeat of regimes organized around racial supremacy, conquest, and the subordination of persons to the state opened greater possibilities for a worldwide family that recognized common human dignity.

In messianic terms, the formation-stage foundation for the returning Christ’s birth and maturation had to expand into a broader foundation for his mission. A worldwide community capable of receiving that mission required freedom to believe, organize, teach, and build relationships across national boundaries.

The Allied victory ended Axis rule and stopped the Nazi machinery of genocide. The United Nations was founded in 1945, creating a more enduring framework for international cooperation than the League. The postwar period also brought renewed emphasis on human rights, expanding Christian missions in many regions, and accelerating decolonization. These developments were uneven and contested, but they opened significant new possibilities.

From the providential standpoint, such changes offered conditions for worldwide reception of the Messiah. They did not guarantee that reception: human responsibility remained essential.

Twenty-one years separated the end of World War I in 1918 from the beginning of the European war in 1939. This interval has providential significance as a period of preparation and transition for the next stage of restoration.

The Third Confrontation: Completion and the Third Temptation

The story did not end in 1945. The wartime alliance soon gave way to rivalry between a United States-led bloc and a Soviet-led communist bloc. The division of Korea at the 38th parallel in 1945, followed by separate governments and the Korean War, became a particularly painful expression of that fracture.

The Cold War involved ideological and economic competition, nuclear confrontation, political repression, and devastating regional wars. Communist regimes, founded on atheism and materialism, committed vast atrocities. At the same time, because good and evil were mixed on both sides, Western-aligned states also committed serious abuses during this period. Moral evaluation must remain attentive to actual conduct rather than coalition labels alone.

The third worldwide confrontation was the completion-stage condition for overcoming Jesus’ third temptation. Offered the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worship, Jesus answered, “Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (Matthew 4:10).

This temptation concerns sovereignty directly: who, or what, will govern the world? Restoring the third blessing means bringing power, wealth, technology, and humanity’s relationship with nature under loving and responsible stewardship rather than domination.

The confrontation also concerns the reconciliation of Hebraism and Hellenism. These terms are used here as broad religious-philosophical categories, not judgments about Jewish or Greek people. Hebraism represents the God-centered stream emphasizing faith, revelation, and moral responsibility; Hellenism represents the human-centered stream emphasizing reason, inquiry, and the material and cultural dimensions of life.

Their opposition becomes destructive when faith rejects reason or material achievement denies spiritual value. The needed resolution is not the annihilation of either inheritance. It is their harmonization: spiritual purpose joined with rational understanding, religious freedom with intellectual freedom, and material progress with moral responsibility.

Consequently, the completion-stage victory cannot consist merely of defeating a rival state. Nor should a third military world war be welcomed as necessary. The final objective is a transformation of relationships and convictions through truth, justice, and sacrificial love, so that an opponent can change freely rather than submit only through force.

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended a major phase of the Cold War, but it did not by itself establish a reconciled, God-centered world. The deeper questions of freedom, inequality, spiritual meaning, and the responsible use of power remain.

Indemnity and the End of an Era

The extraordinary suffering of the World Wars belongs to the painful closing of an era shaped by accumulated human wrongdoing and the opening of conditions for the Second Coming. Worldwide indemnity expresses the scope of the restoration involved.

This must be handled with reverence for those who suffered. Describing the dead as a required payment wrongly implies that God demanded their deaths or that atrocities were justified by later benefits. This is because God works to bring good out of evil, but never wills the evil itself. Victims were not expendable instruments, and responsibility for murder belongs to its perpetrators.

The essential distinction is between God’s purpose and human violence. The purpose is restored life, love, and peace; violence expresses humanity’s failure to realize that purpose. Faith holds that God continues to work amid those failures, not that every catastrophe was a necessary divine act.

The ultimate measure of restoration is therefore not military superiority but the fulfillment of peace: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4).

Living the Principle

1. Study history honestly. Understand the decisions, institutions, prejudices, and economic conditions that produced the wars. A providential interpretation should deepen moral responsibility, not replace evidence or make violence seem inevitable.

2. Reject domination without dehumanizing people. Resist racism, aggressive nationalism, persecution, and systems that treat persons as expendable. Do not label entire populations, religions, or nonreligious people inherently evil.

3. Practice the three blessings. Cultivate integrity, build faithful and caring relationships, and exercise responsible stewardship of nature and material resources. These are constructive alternatives to the distorted desires that fuel conflict.

4. Unite spiritual commitment with reason. Let faith encourage compassion and accountability, and let careful inquiry correct prejudice and error. Seek cooperation between religious and secular people in protecting human dignity.

5. Work for reconciliation. Pray for nations and leaders, support peaceful cooperation, remember victims, and serve across divisions. The hoped-for victory of goodness is fulfilled not in humiliation or revenge, but in relationships through which former enemies can become partners in peace.

These answers explain the Bible in the light of the Divine Principle, the teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Read about the author, Sun Myung Moon.

Last reviewed: September 29, 2026

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