Pyeong Hwa Gyeong / 평화경平和經

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to express my gratitude for your attendance this evening. For a long time I have yearned to meet with the people of America, and I am truly delighted and thankful for having been given this opportunity. The topic I would like to discuss with you today is, “The Ideal World, or the United World, for God and Humankind.”

Where does the pursuit of the ideal world begin?

In their hearts, all people long for an ideal world, a world of oneness. However, at this point it seems like an impossible dream. This can only be a source of sadness for humanity.

If there is a God, He too undoubtedly is longing for such an ideal world, the world of oneness. Without a doubt, both God and humankind yearn for this ideal world of oneness. If there is a God, He must bring about such a world, without fail, and if you are a person who believes in God’s ability, you will think that this task must be accomplished above all else.

Although all human beings yearn for a united world, we must acknowledge that it is not simple to bring this about. The democratic world and the communist world, from their own positions and in their own ways, both are thinking about uniting the world. Then, could the communist world submit to the democratic world and become one with it? Or could the democratic world submit to the communist world and unite with it? This is an extremely difficult problem.

Before we start our search for a way to realize unity and an ideal world on the global level, we first need to ask if there is a nation which is itself united. Only through such a nation can we bring about a united world.

Before there can be a united world, there must be a united nation, and before there can be a united nation, there must be a united tribe. Before there can be a united tribe, we need a united family, and before a united family, there must be a united individual. This is where the problem lies.

Human beings are the origin of good and evil

Where is unity first achieved? Since this world is a resultant world, we can conclude that unity must begin with the causal beings. Where are those individuals? It cannot be denied that we human beings are torn between two purposes that lead us in contrary directions. Our minds desire to go toward goodness, whereas our bodies lead us the opposite way. The two are fighting with each other. There are two different individuals, a man and a woman, who come together in union to form a family. Because they each possess an internal self and an external self, when the two meet as a couple, they in fact come together as four beings, each acting in different ways. In the same way, whether it is a clan, a tribe, a people, a nation or the world, everything is divided. Nevertheless, we can be grateful that they are not divided into hundreds or thousands of directions; they are divided in two ways. This is what is fascinating.

If there were a God, He surely would not allow people to continue like this. He would have no choice except to work in the background of history, even without their knowing it. And if there were a Satan who had driven human beings to evil, that Satan would keep trying to pull them in the direction opposite to that of God.

Nonetheless, even if Satan opposes the absolute God, he does not have the right to rise up and oppose the principles that God set up with absolute authority. God governs what is good and Satan governs what is evil. The resulting fight between God and Satan starts within us as individuals. We need to understand that this is the reason that human beings can be the origin of evil and the origin of goodness. In short, a person can be the starting point of goodness and at the same time the starting point of evil.

Ladies and gentlemen! Going up symbolizes something good and going down signifies something bad. When you are complimented for some reason, you wish to boast loudly of it. In contrast, when you are criticized for doing wrong, you shrink into yourself. When you do something good, you advertise it and call for others to follow your example. When you do something bad, you hide it for fear of it being known. No one goes about boldly advertising having done something bad, like stealing. Rather, such a person goes his or her way in secret.

You need to understand that people have two parts, one desiring to go up and the other desiring to go down. The part that desires to go up is the conscience. There is no person, even one of great power or fame, who does not suffer pangs of conscience when doing something evil. We need to understand clearly that the human conscience is the guardian of God, whereas the body is the guardian of Satan, and that the conscience is the origin of heaven, whereas the body is the origin of hell.

This leads us to realize the fundamental difference between the essence of good and the essence of evil. Goodness seeks to benefit the whole, whereas evil seeks only its own benefit. Good people live more for the sake of their family than for themselves, more for the sake of their village than their family, more for the sake of their nation than their village, and more for the sake of the world than their nation.

Until now, history has unfolded as a struggle between the perspective of living for one’s own sake and the perspective of living for the sake of others. God’s absolute demand is that we completely uproot and destroy the basis of evil in our bodies. In contrast, Satan’s evil demand is that we mercilessly destroy the conscience and anything associated with it. History continues to unfold through this conflict.

God’s side is centered on the conscience, while the side of evil is centered on the body and on material things. They oppose each other, and we can conclude that this is why humanity is divided between the realm of materialism and the realm of spirituality. If there were no God, we would not have such a resultant world. Evil manifests as jealousy, disunity and conflict that lead to self-destruction. From this viewpoint, where can unity and the ideal be realized? In the end, they start from the most fundamental level, from “me,” the individual. Thus God needs to teach us about the united world, the ideal world for which He yearns.

The teachings of religion

Ladies and gentlemen, would you like to know how this is done? It is not done in a way that you desire. In fact, no one desires this way. First of all, you need to chastise whoever or whatever opposes the conscience.

God cannot do this. Human beings are stuck in the midway position, with God and Satan both struggling to claim them, and if God were to strike them, so would Satan. So God’s teachings center on the conscience and tell you, “Strike, strike, strike your body!” We need to carry out this campaign worldwide. You have to do what your body hates. It is religion that teaches this.

Then what are the teachings of religion? All religions teach, “Strike the body! Don’t eat what you desire to eat! Don’t do what your body desires to do!” All major religions teach this. Buddhism places great importance on asceticism. Also, self-sacrifice is an important principle in Christianity. However, because it is extremely difficult for people to practice this, God has had no choice except to find a way to work with us just as we are.

Since our minds and bodies exert a similar degree of power over us, we tend to alternate between going this way and that, back and forth. Religion teaches us to deny what the body wants while offering devotions that give us strength from God. This has been the role of religion until now. God started out working with one individual and advanced through the family, tribe and people in His desire to gain one nation. In this way the nation and people of Israel emerged. In short, they were the chosen people. The existence of the terms “chosen people” and “chosen nation,” testify to the existence of God.

In accordance with His plan, God promised to send His representative who, as an individual, could completely unite his body and mind, then unite his family, tribe and nation, and completely unite the world. This was the messianic vision of Israel. Following this pattern, God anticipated that the people would unite with this individual, family, tribe and become the nation to save the world, creating one world and bringing it to God’s side.

Jesus came as the embodiment of unity

Of course, God’s purpose was, in part, to have the people of Israel receive the Messiah and live happily. However, His providence is not merely to save one people; it is to save the world. He was, in fact, trying to save the world, and for that He established the people of Israel as the foundation upon which He could send the Messiah. Yet at that time, although the desire of the Israelites and the direction of God’s providence ought to have been the same, they went different ways.

Jesus came as an individual with the ideal of a united world. Based on that ideal he was to form a perfected family, then go on to establish an ideal tribe, people, nation and world. Instead he was crucified before he could accomplish this. The nation of Israel was like a field of wild olive trees with which the owner could do whatever he pleased. When Jesus came as the true olive tree to this field of wild olive trees, God’s plan was to engraft all the wild olive trees, from individuals to families to the entire nation, into His ideal. If this had come to pass, the people of Israel would have become true olive trees. If Israel, based on Judaism, had become one with Jesus and backed him with its sovereignty in carrying his mission to the world, the two-thousand-year history of Christianity would not have been necessary.

God sent Jesus to a world filled with people whose minds and bodies were not united, to embody the ideal and to unite all people. However, the people to whom he was sent nailed him to the cross and murdered him. Because Judaism and the nation of Israel went against God’s Will, the nation and the foundation established by God over the course of thousands of years were lost to Satan’s side. The Israelites became a people without a nation, groaning under tyranny, overrun by other peoples for two thousand years, having to fight for survival. Israel became an independent state in 1948. This indicates that we have entered a new global era in which the people of Israel can overcome their suffering and regain their good fortune. This means that the time for the Lord to come again is approaching.

Do you think there was a foundation, an individual, family, tribe and nation that God could use as His stepping stone, after the people of Israel did not fulfill God’s providence? There was none. Since the First Israel was unable to fulfill the Will of God, Christianity inherited its position. Christianity must accept the mission of the Second Israel and fulfill God’s Will. However, you must know that Christianity has been unable to set the foundation to unite the physical world and the spirit world. Instead, it denied the physical world and tried to find the one nation based only on the spirit world.

Today’s Christians believe that the Lord of the Second Advent will come from the sky. However, based on such an event, he cannot bring unity within individuals, families, tribes, peoples and the world. We must know with certainty that the place where the coming Lord can fulfill his purpose is not the sky; it is this earth, this physical world. To do so, Jesus, as the man who has achieved the ideal of integrity, the man whose mind and body are united completely, must find a woman of integrity and form a family with her. Only when this occurs can the united nation and world come to be. How can this be brought about?

Among today’s Christians, is there anyone who is prepared to become the bride of the Lord and form a family with Him? Christians don’t know about this. They don’t even know where and how he will come. The Lord of the Second Advent does not come on a cloud in the sky. The Lord comes to restore the family of oneness, which God desires. It will take more than one family to restore that family. There needs to be a tribe that can live for the sake of the family. There needs to be a people that can live for the sake of the tribe, and a nation that can live for the sake of the people. Present-day Christianity needs to understand clearly that without going through this pattern in one nation, the nation that inherits the mission of the Third Israel cannot be restored.

Christian doctrine is the teaching of service and sacrifice

Let us take a moment now to think about the way in which a person can enjoy eternal life. If we as individuals wish to be respected in this world, we cannot simply praise ourselves. To earn respect, we need to sacrifice. If, for instance, you have ten friends and you have served those ten friends for a long time, you will become the central figure among them. Not only that, their relatives and friends will want to unite with you.

In contrast, let’s say there is a person who tells his ten friends, “You need to live for my sake. Live for my sake.” Those friends will break away from that person. In short, that person will be left alone and in the end will have no place to go. You need to realize that this is the point that distinguishes between good and evil in society.

Let us consider a nation’s patriot. When you think about the United States, you surely respect people like President Lincoln and President Kennedy. Why do you respect them? You respect those two presidents because they gave their lives for the United States. Among the presidents of the United States, there are those who died miserable deaths for the nation. The more they sacrificed themselves, the more they are revered as patriots and the higher is their position as presidents.

The more a person sacrifices out of love for the nation, even at the risk of his or her life, the more that person is revered. Those who suffer miserably through their sacrifice are considered even greater. Even though they are miserable at the time, their misery is only for a moment, and as history goes on, that person’s impact in the world broadens in scope.

This holds true in the death of Jesus. If you were to ask for whom Jesus sacrificed himself, the answer is for the sake of humankind and for the nation. In the position of having loved humanity more than anyone else, of having loved God more than anyone else, and of having loved even his enemies, he died miserably after praying for them to be blessed. At the time, Jesus died without a name, for he was accused of being a traitor to his people. No one could have known that he would give rise to today’s worldwide realm of Christian culture. At this point we can propose one principle: It is that those who sacrifice themselves for a greater purpose, for the greater good of the whole, cannot fail. We know that they cannot fail. Such people are historical saints.

In this regard, if there is a God and He has a strategy for fighting the world of evil, we can discover His strategy at this point. The nature of evil is to follow the complete opposite of God’s strategy. It sacrifices others for its own sake. If it does this on the individual level, then other individuals will oppose it, and when it does this on the level of the family or the nation, it inevitably leads to a dictatorship that is denounced by history.

You need to understand that the strategy of evil is to promote oneself by sacrificing others, whereas God’s strategy is to sacrifice oneself to save others. That is why the people who asserted goodness in the course of history were not welcomed in their time and were sacrificed, yet nonetheless the names of those who sacrificed themselves out of their love for their nation and the world came to be known long after their time. We cannot deny that this is the truth.

That is why the doctrine of Christianity is the teaching of service and sacrifice. If a Christian denomination existed only for its own sake, it would come to ruin. However, if there were a denomination whose entire purpose was to save the United States, one that stepped forward and sacrificed itself to achieve this, Heaven would cooperate with it. Having saved the United States, Christianity would thereby become a movement for the United States to sacrifice itself to save the world. This would be the Christianity that could be considered suitable to guide the world.

The reason God blessed the United States

If we ask whether God loves the United States or the world, we would say that God loves the world more than the United States. Because of this, God has placed the United States at the forefront, to have it pay the price of sacrifice to save the world.

American citizens! Do you think that the United States has an ideological tradition? You cannot find it among today’s youth. As you know, the Puritans were among those who pioneered the United States. They were a group who came to the new world, the land of America, leaving behind their nation because it limited their freedom to practice their faith and serve God as they desired.

At the time, a small number of Pilgrims risked their lives and held on to God as they struggled to survive in a new land with native inhabitants. I am aware that their beliefs were based on their reverence for God, and they overcame many difficulties while holding on to Him, which became a founding principle of the United States. I also know that this is the reason they built their homes only after first building a church and a school. Because they stood in such a position, God pulled them out of an environment in which they were oppressed and protected them in this land. He thus made this nation a global power in a period of less than two hundred years. Why did God do all this and give you such blessings? Do not think that God blessed you so that only the people who live in the United States can live in comfort. Instead, you have to take the point of view that God blessed you to make this land the representative nation for saving the world.

However, do the American people have a truth that calls them to join forces and save the world? No, they don’t. In contrast, the communist world, the enemy of the United States, has an ideology that can conquer the world, and it is displaying its confidence that it can swallow up the United States without a problem.

American people need to remember that reducing support for Asia or other parts of the world is not the Will of God. I believe that President Kennedy was the president who first began this trend. The United Nations secretary-general at the time was Mr. Hammarskjold. It is a matter of speculation as to why they both met such tragic ends.

I had a meeting with former President Eisenhower in 1965. I pointed out to him, “You may think that you did well to call for a truce in the Korean War. However, it was actually a historical error.” I also said to him, “Do you trust communists? Communists are a group of people whose words and actions differ.” Their actions and words are different. You need to know this. Now, twenty years after the ceasefire agreement, we can see with our own eyes how North Korea has done everything in its power to militarize. Can you deny this fact?

On February 21, a meeting is scheduled between Mao Zedong and President Nixon. Mao Zedong has nothing to lose; he can attack or do whatever he wants to President Nixon. The American people need to be aware of this fact. Communists may announce with regard to the United States, “We are very close,” and suddenly do an about face. Theirs is a dictatorial system; it can go forward or retreat on command at any moment.

The American people, on the other hand, cannot do that. Let’s say the United States made an agreement and all its people had gone forward. If they then were told to retreat, do you think every one of the American people would retreat? You ought to know that at least half would break off. I am now thinking about what would become of the United States if such a thing were to happen. From the viewpoint of providence, I believe that God will protect the United States until its fortieth president, or for two hundred ten years of its history.

Ladies and gentlemen! I know that the year 1976 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the United States. Also, forty-two generations lie between Abraham and Jesus, and two thousand-year historical cycles, of forty generations, have been unfolding based on the Will of God. Though the actual number of generations is forty-two, since the God of three generations, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, is considered to be the God of one generation, we can say the number represents forty generations.

We must transcend the nation to save the world

It is my view that a history of indemnity is unfolding during the Last Days centered on the United States. If the United States is unable to fulfill its responsibility during this period, I believe that it will no longer remain under the protection of God. Americans must not boast about the United States shouldering responsibility as the leading global power now in the latter half of the twentieth century. Even if the United States ceased to exist as a nation, you need a philosophy that you can be proud of, even to the thirtieth and fortieth centuries. If you Americans have such a commitment for the sake of the world, I believe that you will become a people who can guide the world.

Based on this viewpoint, let us interpret the mission that today’s Unification Church is trying to fulfill. The Unification Church is trying to attend the bride of the Lord, and to prepare a multinational movement to construct the kingdom of heaven of hope that God requires on this earth.

To do so, this Unification Church must reject the idea of working for its own sake. God’s strategy requires the individual, family, tribe and nation to sacrifice for the world. It is our mission to raise such individuals, families, tribes and peoples and pave the way for the kingdom that God desires.

We need to become individuals, families, tribes and peoples established on the principles of internal unity and unity with the Messiah. Who will take the lead in carrying out this task? Will it be a nonbeliever or a believer? Will it be a person of religion or a person without religion? This task needs to be carried out through the joint effort of Christians and all religious people. Such a movement needs to be realized in the world now.

Thus, do not focus only on your own religious denomination. Instead, become one with the motto of serving God’s Will and saving the world. In organizing such a movement, do not think about taking a leadership position. Instead you need to go to the lowest position and support the movement by serving others. Do not become a central figure by employing every means you can and seeking influence through the power of money, authority or knowledge. You need to build a new movement worldwide through which others will voluntarily install and revere you as their central figure. Otherwise there is no way to save this world.

The man standing before you has had to walk the path of much persecution before he could be where he is today. Even though I was working for Christianity and proposing the way for it to go forward, Christians have opposed me. Even though I was proposing the way for the nation to go forward, I have been opposed by the nation. Based on this viewpoint, I believe that a day will come when this group of hardworking people will also be criticized by the United States.

The way of goodness is to endeavor to save the world even at the sacrifice of those on your own side. This is the historical tradition. Therefore, unless we inherit such a tradition on this earth in this day and age, and build a movement worldwide through sacrifice, we cannot show the direction toward the ideal. Henceforth, only an organization that teaches people around the globe to save the world by living for the sake of others, and promotes the principle of working to save the world even if it means sacrificing oneself, will have authentic authority.

Let us think about the United States, which represents the democratic world. If the United States had stayed its course in giving assistance for the sake of the world, it would have remained a nation that is revered by the world. If it had continued its movement to love the world even more than its own people and nation, the United States would not be in the position in which it currently finds itself.

However, as a nation representing the democratic world, if the United States believes that historically there has never been a country that prospered by supporting other nations, and that it must follow that historical tradition, and it turns around and starts to prioritize itself before others, it will be isolated.

The United States today is placing its national interest ahead of that of the world, and serving the people of America more than the people of the world. God’s vision is different. God is trying to save the world by mobilizing the United States. God is trying to have the United States go beyond itself and serve the world. Democratic nations cannot progress if they are divided amongst each other.

Only a united world can realize God’s ideal

A movement that teaches and practices the principle of serving the world more than its own nation or people, that is, a movement capable of loving God above all, will remain to the end. Therefore, the problem is finding that principle and multinational movement that can transcend the nation and lead us to the place where Heaven’s love and the love of the people of the world flow freely, beyond national borders.

If the Lord of the Second Advent is indeed coming, he does not come to save just one nation. He comes to save the world. When that time draws near, it will be the Last Days. Therefore, we conclude that the world will come to ruin unless we can love beyond our own nation, honor the people of Heaven, and establish a movement through which we can go beyond the nation and love God. This is the path of unity, the teaching that the world will need in the future.

Respecting this ideal, one’s skin color is not an issue. In this matter, one’s cultural background is not an issue. Our shared hope and purpose will be to love God and become one for the world that lives for the sake of God’s Will. When the world becomes one in this way, I believe that the ideal world desired by God and humankind will be realized. Therefore, the mission of the Unification Church is to teach the path for individuals to follow, the path for families, tribes and peoples to follow, and the path for the nations and the world to follow.

In closing, please have faith that the ideal represented by the title of my speech, “The Ideal World for God and Humankind,” will be realized, and that we are beginning the work to bring this about on the earth. Thank you.

God’s Hope for Humanity

October 20,1973

Lisner Auditorium, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
Twenty-one city speaking tour in the United States

Ladies and gentlemen, first of all I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation for your coming tonight. I thank God for this opportunity because I have been looking forward to visiting this city and meeting all of you.

Because we speak different languages, even though I can speak, from your standpoint I am dumb. Also from my standpoint, even though you can hear, you are deaf. In order to correct this, we need the man standing next to me as my interpreter. However, as you know, interpretation from one language to another is not an easy task. So this man beside me really needs your sympathetic understanding.

My topic tonight is “God’s Hope for Humanity” This subject is vast in nature and rather complicated in content. I will try my best to stay on the central point of my topic.

God and human beings are subject and object partners

If there is a God, God definitely needs human beings. God created all things, but in creation, human beings occupy the most precious and distinguished position. It is therefore very important for us to have a clear understanding of the relationship between God and ourselves. Historically, there have been many theories concerning this relationship. Varying opinions, theological concepts and academic schools abound, however the true, living relationship between God and humankind remains an unsettled question.

Since this relationship is so fundamental to life, our understanding cannot proceed until we have clarified this question thoroughly. As we pursue the answer, we discover that there are two main perspectives that we might take. One view is from God’s standpoint, and the other is from our point of view. A variety of religions have developed through developing these two perspectives, and there must be one principle common to all religions, one that can clarify the relationship between God and ourselves. God wants us to understand this truth in the ultimate sense.

As someone living on this earth, what do you consider to be most precious? If somebody were to ask you this question, I’m sure your answers would vary. Some might say, “Power.” Some would undoubtedly say money, Money is everything.” And others would suggest, “Wisdom or knowledge.” Then are those elements—power, money, knowledge—the most important things in life? If we take time to reflect on this question, we can conclude that there is ultimately no one who will claim these as most precious. What, then, do we hold as most precious? When we look into this question deeply, other thoughts emerge. We soon come to the conclusion that the most precious thing is love; love is the most precious thing in life. And second to love, life itself is most precious. If we have love and life, we need one more thing—an ideal. These three elements, love, life, and an ideal, are not just precious and profound in value, they are the very things that make our lives worth living.

While it may seem like an expression from a fairytale, it is understandable that we need to emphasize the notion of unchanging, unique and eternal love. No one wishes for love to change. Regardless of whether we are teenagers, middle-aged adults, or senior citizens, we all wish for love that is eternal. Also, in the same way, with respect to life, there is no one who wishes to live for a short period of time and then just die. We wish for life to last forever, to be unchanging, uniquely special, and absolute.

The goal of your religions is ultimately for salvation and eternal life. If there were no belief in eternal life, we would not have religion. Religion is necessary because it is through religion that people can strive toward the ideal of love. Thus, love, life and an ideal are the most precious things to us, and we cannot help but strive for eternal life.

Furthermore, we see that the words “love” and “ideal” are without meaning by themselves. Love exists only when there is someone to love and someone to be loved by. In the same way, an ideal is something to be shared with someone. Love and ideals come alive as soon as there is a reciprocal and complementary relationship of giving and receiving established. We are in the object partner position and always need someone to be in the subject partner position. Love and ideals will bud and blossom into full flower only when two elements are in a relationship as subject and object partners.

Are we the cause, the source of the universe, or did someone create us? How can we be the cause of the universe when we do not even create ourselves? It is obvious that we are resultant beings. We are the products of some cause. Therefore, a cause that is in the subject partner position has to exist. There must be a cause for our existence. This subject partner, or cause, then, is the essential reality. We must be as certain of this as we are of our own existence. Whatever name you choose for that cause does not matter. The most important thing is that there is a causal being. And we call that being, “God.”

Let us put our question to God. “What is the most precious thing to you, God?” The reply will be no different from your answer and mine. God will answer, “Love, life and my ideal are the most precious things to me.” Does God need money? God created all things. Everything belongs to God anyway. God does not need money. Does God need power? God is already the source of all power. What about knowledge? God is omniscient and the source of all knowledge. Yes, God is all these things, but God cannot have love, life and the ideal alone. God needs to share, to give and receive with someone in a reciprocal relationship. Even almighty God cannot experience the value of love, life and His ideal when He is alone. That is why God created human beings to be object partners.

Now I shall ask, “Why do we act the way we do?” The answer is simple: because God acts that way. All human traits originate in God. Why are we the way we are? Because God is that way.

We are mirrors reflecting the characteristics of God. God is just like you and me. God is the origin. Therefore, our love comes from the love of God. Our life comes from the life of God, and our ideals come from the ideals of God. We feel these are the most precious things because God felt these were most precious first. God is the subject partner of love, the subject partner of life, and the subject partner of ideals. We are the object partners of love, the object partners of life, and the object partners of ideals. Therefore, if God is absolute, we are to be absolute. If God is unchanging, we are to be unchanging. If God is unique, we are to be unique. If God is everlasting, we are to be everlasting. Our eternal life is not a fantasy. It is reality. Since God is eternal, human beings were created to be eternal. Otherwise, we would not reflect the nature of our eternal God.

Human beings are God incarnate

If there is a God of love, life and ideals, and that God does not manifest all these qualities in human beings as His object partners, then God has defeated the very purpose of creating. God either projected God’s own full value in the object of creation, or created nothing at all. God is the subject partner to human beings, and we are the object partners to God. An object partner is the full reflection of the subject partner. So we are the visible form of God, and God is our invisible form. Subject and object partners are one in essence. God and human beings are one. Human beings are God incarnate. Otherwise, we would not be able to reflect God’s full image. God could not realize joy, the purpose of the creation. When we as object partners are not perfect as God is perfect, we cannot reflect the full love, life and ideal of God. So human beings, the object partners of God, are as important in value as God.

If I made excited gestures and shouted to an empty auditorium, I am sure that anyone who saw me would wonder, “Is that man crazy?” Although if there were someone listening and responding, some object partner there to receive my words, even one small child in front of me, and I poured out my heart and soul to that person, then I would be considered normal. The sole difference is the presence of a person as an object partner.

What I am trying to illustrate is the value of an object partner. As we are the object partners to God, we are placed in a position equal to God. Thus, people share the same value as God and are just as important as God. Even though God is most high, and noble and mighty, God too has to have an object partner. Otherwise God feels no joy. Joy comes when you receive stimulation from the object partner. Not even God can be joyful alone. Please realize that God created us and the universe for joy. However God’s joy remains dormant until God gives and receives with an object partner.

Until now, through Christianity we placed God so high up in heaven, and pushed people so low in hell, that there has been an unbridgeable gap between us. A wide and raging river has separated us from God. We do not dare to reach out to God as a living reality. We have been unable to realize that God is so close, so real, and so approachable, that we can even dwell with God. We are supposed to be the living temples of God. Yet conventional Christianity has been unable to make that a reality.

No matter how wealthy and famous you may be, unless you have someone with whom to give and receive, so that you can share your joy, your sorrow, your opinions and your ideals, you are just a poor person.

We feel joy and sadness because God’s heart can feel joy and sadness. Not until this time in history did we ever believe that God could feel sorrow. And God can feel excitement and indignation, just as we can. We, the object partners of God, have this ability to experience emotion because our subject partner, God, has the same capacity for emotion. God is the first personality, and human personality comes from God. How then can we become true object partners to God? By our efforts and hard work alone? No. There is but one way to come together in oneness with God. That way is through love, through oneness in love with God.

Let me illustrate. Suppose there is a famous man. Opposite him is a woman who is unassuming and meek and without beauty or education. However, once this great man and this humble woman establish a circuit of giving and receiving in love, she will immediately achieve his level of prestige. Let’s say the man’s name is Jones and he falls in love with this woman and marries her. She then becomes Mrs. Jones and returns his love with all her heart. Whatever power, authority and prestige Mr. Jones enjoys, Mrs. Jones would share in every respect. Now, what does this teach us? Once we have a relationship of love with God and become one with God, our value increases instantly to the level of God’s value. And love such as this is everlasting, unchanging and unique.

The alpha and the omega

Now is the time when we have to fulfill this fundamental relationship between God and humankind. The subject and object partners must be one just as cause and effect are one. Therefore, the Bible says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev. 22:13) Within God, two are one. God is the beginning and we are the end. He is the first and we are the last. And the relationship between God and humankind is a circuit, because the beginning and the end come together in oneness.

Peace, happiness and joy are the fruits of harmony in love. Therefore, in God’s ideal of creation, the relationship between God and human beings was planned to be one of harmony in love, harmony in life, and harmony in ideal.

Thus we know that God is the subject partner and we are the object partners. We also know that the object partner is just as important as the subject partner. We now want to know precisely what our position as God’s object partner means.

When God created human beings, God gave us wisdom and ambition. Wisdom gives us the power to compare, and ambition gives us the power to strive for the best. If there are two choices before us, A and B, we will automatically compare them to determine which is better. Our human desire leads us to choose, and our ambition does not let us rest until we have attained ultimate fulfillment.

Let me make another analogy. Let’s say there is a most handsome man and most beautiful woman. They are not only attractive, but also all-powerful and all wise. You would be anxious to have some kind of personal relationship with this great man and woman. What would you want it to be? Would you like to be their servant? No, in your heart you know there is a position better than that of servant. Would you like to be their friend? No, you would still not be happy. Would you like to be their adopted child? Will this position bring you complete happiness? No, I don’t think so. You would still crave a closer position. There is one relationship beyond which there is nothing more intimate. That is to become a true son or daughter of this man and woman. With this relationship you will have reached the ultimate fulfillment, and you cannot desire anything more.

Why, then, do we want to become true sons and daughters? It is because that is the position in which we receive this man and woman’s love most fully. There is no closer or deeper relationship in human society than that between the parents and children. Once you have your parents’ love, you possess everything they have. Every joy of the father, all the power of the mother, all their skill, wisdom, ambition and desire will be yours. In receiving the love of a father and mother, there is no procedure; there is no paperwork or ceremony necessary to grant those things to their son and daughter. The parents and children are automatically one. This principle applies throughout humankind, and it applies between God and us.

The true child of God

Then, what kind of relationship would you like to have with God? Would you be content to be just a servant? Or would you prefer to be a friend? Would you rather be an adopted son or daughter, or would you like to find a way to become God’s own child? I know you would be satisfied with nothing short of the ultimate position as sons and daughters of God.

God’s ultimate purpose in His creation of human beings is to give to us all God’s love, life and ideal. You are to occupy the entire love of God, to the depth of His heart. By becoming God’s true sons and daughters your desire will be fulfilled. That is your ultimate destiny. Then you will be saturated with the love of God. You will be filled with joy and feel overwhelmed by a total satisfaction with life.

There is no limit to this joy. True happiness has no end. When you are standing in the love of God, every cell in your body jumps for joy. You breathe in and out with the entire universe. In this state your life is fulfilled. This is how God means for us to live; enraptured in love and joy. And through our joy, God receives joy. The joy of humanity is the joy of God; the joy of God is the joy of humanity.

Early in my life I was called for a mission as God’s instrument. I was called to reveal God’s truth, as God’s prophet. I committed myself unyieldingly to the pursuit of truth, searching the hills and valleys of the spirit world. The time suddenly came upon me when heaven opened up and I was privileged to communicate with Jesus Christ and the living God directly. Since then I have received many astonishing revelations. God told me that the most basic and central truth of the universe is that God is the Parent and we are God’s children. We are all created as children of God. And God said there is nothing closer, nothing deeper, nothing more ultimate than when parent and child are one; one in love, one in life, and one in ideal.

Love, life and the ideal are the central point where parent and child meet. Once we unite, at that point God’s love is our love, God’s ideal is our ideal and God’s life is our life. There is no relationship where you can have the eternal unity of life, love and the ideal other than in the parent-child relationship. This is a fundamental reality of the universe.

How do we come into being in this world? The father and mother become one through their love, and bring together their lives and ideals. Their love precedes our birth. Love is the force that unites. Husband and wife become one in love. This means the husband’s love, life, and ideal become the wife’s, and the wife’s love, life, and ideal become the husband’s. This is the way that two live as one, and two become one flesh. Upon this foundation of oneness in love, a new life can be generated.

When a child is born, that child is the manifestation of the parents’ love, life and ideal. When you look at your own child, you are actually seeing another you. You are looking at the fruit of your love, the fruit of your life, and the fruit of your ideal. You are looking at your second self, another visible form of yourself.

Now let us expand this truth to a universal scale. Man and woman were created as God’s son and daughter. God wanted to be reflected in human beings. Therefore the Bible says, “God created humankind in His image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:27)

Humankind is created in the likeness of God. In other words, human beings are God incarnate. Humankind is the mirror of the living God, and God’s every virtue, characteristic and quality is reflected in this mirror. God surely wants human beings to reflect God’s love, life and ideal. We are the fruit of God’s love, life and ideal.

The state of perfection

How wonderful, how simply wonderful it is to live this perfected life of God! This is the true life of joy unequaled by any earthly joy. Once you reach this state of perfection you do not need prayer. Why would you? You meet God face to face and you live heart to heart with Him. You converse with God. You no longer need religion and you do not need a Savior. All the things of religion are part of the mending process, the process of restoration. A person of perfect health does not need a physician. The person in perfect union with God does not need a savior.

Life in union with God is the one great way to live life with God, you living in God and God living in you. This was the spiritual state of Jesus when he said, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:10) God and human beings will embrace in one all-consuming love. This is the state where God is made the living reality. You no longer believe; you know. And you live the truth. If you really experience this love in oneness with God, then you have tasted the supreme experience of life. There are probably many Christian leaders among you, yet how many of you have had that wonderful experience, receiving the profound love of God?

God made us to live a life of intoxication. We are meant to live intoxicated by the love of God. Since we lost this original capacity, people seek unnatural, artificial intoxication, getting drunk on alcohol or deadened with drugs. The perfect person, however, is created to be intoxicated in the love of God. There is nothing that can go beyond this feeling of joy. Every cell in your body will explode with joy. Your eyes and ears, the tissues in your face, your arms and legs, everything will be newly alive in a rapture of joy. Nothing else can ever match this quality of joy. This is the plan of God’s original creation. When you say, “Heavenly Father,” do you really have a living and vibrant feeling of God’s presence? Don’t you want to hear God answering, “Yes, my child”?

Here is my gift to you tonight: I want you to realize that the true relationship between God and human beings is that of a subject partner and object partner. You are God’s sons and daughters. Once you have achieved unity with God, nothing can trouble you. Neither sorrow, nor loneliness, or sickness or anything else under the sun can discourage you. God is the ultimate security. You could pay many millions of dollars and still not have that kind of security. It is priceless. No money can buy it. This is the total experience of life. We are meant to live with God.

Your life is therefore the most valuable thing in this universe. That is why Jesus said, “For what will it profit them, if they gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Or what shall they give in return for their life?” (Matt. 16:26) Jesus is talking about life with God. Life without God has the value of a burned-out light bulb. A life without God is death.

Jesus Christ is the one person who lived God’s ideal in its fullest realization. He was the first person of perfection ever to walk the earth, and he came to restore the true relationship between God and humanity. But after Jesus’ crucifixion, Christianity identified him with God. This is why the gap between God and humankind remained. Jesus is a man in whom God is incarnate. But he himself is not God. Paul’s first epistle to Timothy in the Bible says, “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human.” (1 Tim. 2:5) The dwelling of God within Jesus was a complete reality. He said, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:10) Jesus is, indeed, the only begotten Son of God, yet God does not want Jesus as the only son. All human beings are created to say, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” This is everyone’s fully attainable goal.

God’s view of good and evil

Our first step in becoming the true sons and daughters of God is to clearly comprehend God’s view of good and evil. What is goodness and what is evil?

We are not concerned with a man-made definition. God defines the eternal standard of good and evil. The sharp definition of good and evil existed at the time of His creation, long before evil ever came into being in the garden of Eden. God’s view of good and evil will never change. God is eternal, His law is eternal, and His definition is eternal and unchanging, despite the passage of time.

All of our human traits originate in God. We recognize that there is some human tendency for selfishness. This is natural because at one time God Himself was self-centered. This fact may surprise you, but you must understand that before God created man and the universe, He was completely alone, with no one to care for except Himself. However the very instant that God initiated creation, His full concept of life emerged. God now lives for His counterpart, not for Himself.

What is creation? Creation means nothing more than the Creator, God, projecting Himself into a substantial form. He made Himself incarnate symbolically in the universe, and He made Himself incarnate directly in man. When the spirit takes form, this is creation. God invested Himself in the creation. God’s investment of energy is the creation.

The book of Genesis in the Bible makes creation sound simple and easy. Genesis gives us the impression that God’s creation is accomplished through the magic of His words. God simply says, “Let there be a world” and presto! The world comes into being. Then He says, “Let there be man” and poof! Adam and Eve come into being.

But now it has been revealed that it was not this easy at all. God invested all of Himself in His creation. He did not reserve even one ounce of energy. Creation was His total labor, His total effort of giving all of Himself. When God put His entire heart and soul into the creation of His object, He was investing 100 percent of Himself. Only in this way could He create His second self, the visible God.

Therefore, after His creation, God no longer existed just for Himself. God began existing for His son and daughter, Adam and Eve. He exists to love, He exists to give. God is the totally unselfish existence. God cannot exist alone. “Love” and “ideal” only take on meaning when partners are in complementary relationship. God initiated creation and made an investment He cannot lose. When God poured all of His love, life, and ideal into His second self, in a sense, He had to realize a profit. God knew that when He invested all He had one hundred percent, His object would mature and return to Him many, many times over the fruits of love, life, and His ideal. His object, humankind, is everything to God. The life of the object attracts God. God wants to go and dwell with His object, with humankind.

Let us look at an illustration. Suppose there is a great artist. If he works at random without feeling, he cannot create anything worthwhile. To create the masterpiece of his lifetime, the artist must put all of his heart and soul into his creation. That is the only way for him to come up with a great work of art. If an artist works in this way, his art becomes his life. God is the greatest of all artists. When He created His masterpieces, man and woman, He poured His heart into the process. He poured His soul into it. He poured all of His wisdom and all of His energy into it. God wished only to exist for Adam and Eve, and all mankind. He saved not a single ounce of energy when He created them. In this way, humankind has become the life of God.

Goodness is total giving

God set the pattern for the universe. In the ideal existence we live for others. The subject exists for the object, and the object exists for the subject. God’s definition of goodness is total giving, total service, and absolute unselfishness. We are to live our lives for others. You live for others and others live for you. God lives for man and man lives for God. The husband lives for his wife and the wife lives for her husband. This is goodness. Here unity, harmony, and prosperity abound.

Would you, as a man, be disturbed if I said that you were created for a woman? Perhaps some of you are proud of your masculinity and would not want to hear this. But this is the principle of God’s creation, and you must not be sorry to hear these words. Man lives his life for his partner, not for himself.

Let us assume that one of you ladies is a beauty queen. No matter how beautiful you are, your beauty is not for your own gratification; it is for the delight of men. We are created to live for each other. This is the very reason for our existence; we exist for others, for an object, for a counterpart. This is the principle for all human relationships in our society. Parents exist for their children, and children exist for their parents. Then both parents and children, when they give unselfishly, become united in a circular motion.

This circling motion is the motion of unity. When you give and take, the give and take action creates a circular motion. Circular motion alone can be eternal, because there you will find no end. Therefore, all of God’s creation is based on a pattern of circular movement, since He created for eternity. Even our faces are round, although there is one central vertical line. Our eyeballs are round, and there are upper and lower lips, which make up a round mouth. The sun is round, the moon, the earth, and all heavenly bodies are round. They are each rotating on their own axes and revolving around others. Everything in this universe has complementary give and take action between subject and object. Give and take action occurs between arteries and veins, and so the blood circulates through the body. Human sickness is the state where the balance of give and take action is broken, and normal circulating motion is stopped. Without having this give and take action between subject and object, without abiding by this principle, nothing endures for eternity. All existence that is based upon God’s principle is a good existence.

Then, what is evil? Evil is the emergence of selfishness into this world. God’s principle of unselfish giving was twisted into an ungodly principle of selfish taking. The ungodly position of desiring to be served, rather than to serve, was thereby established. The origin of evil is Satan. He was in the position to serve God, but instead he posed as another god and subjugated man for his own benefit. God is the absolute positive force in this universe. Then Satan posed as another positive force. Two positives naturally repel each other. Satan is a fallen archangel. He left his position as a faithful servant to God and man, and he challenged and competed with God. His motivation was selfishness. Out of his selfishness comes the origin of evil and sin.

What happened is this: Eve fell from her position as God’s first daughter, becoming the first victim of Satan and transforming herself into a creature of selfishness. Together Eve and Satan then successfully brought Adam into their selfish world. Through this tragic event, God was isolated by man in the Garden of Eden. Human history started on the wrong footing, without God. The foundation for the evil history of man was laid, and Satan was established as the ruler of this world. Selfishness came into being at the beginning of history, and now our world is rampant with killing, lying, and stealing. All of these actions in the evil world are motivated by selfishness. Evil subjugated others for its own benefit, while good sacrifices itself for the benefit of others.

Since the fall of man, God’s work has been the restoration of original goodness. God wants to destroy the world of evil and recreate the world of goodness. We have lost our health. We have become sick people. The salvation of God is, therefore, the restoration of man to a healthy state once again.

God sowed the seed of goodness, but before He could gather its fruit, Satan invaded with his evil seed and harvested his evil fruit. For this reason, God must sow the seed of goodness once again. To do this job God needs certain tools. The religions of the world have served as these tools for God. Throughout history, good religions have taught God’s way of life, centered upon sacrificial love and duty. Thus Christianity may be considered the most advanced and progressive religion because it teaches this sacrificial love and duty in supreme form.

Jesus came as a savior, but his teaching was, “The Son of man came not to be served but to serve.” (Matt. 20:28) Jesus taught that the greatest love in this universe is to give one’s life for his enemy. The teaching of the Bible is contrary to the common rule of our worldly society. It is exactly the opposite of the way of this self-centered world. The Bible teaches complete giving and total sacrifice. “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matt. 10:39) It seems almost foolish to think seriously about living this way in man’s evil society. However, once you know God’s principle, you discover that there is actually no wisdom greater than this.

You reap as you sow

Jesus Christ’s teachings were hitting the very core of this fundamental truth. The more you give the more you receive. God rewards total giving with total love, and total sacrifice with total life. Giving creates room for God’s love to enter. The more room and the greater the vacuum created by your giving, the faster you will be filled by the flow of God’s love.

To be treated well you must first treat others well. You reap as you sow. Sow evil to reap evil; sow goodness to reap goodness. Your concern should be how to give, and how to give well. As for the return to you, you must trust in God. He will take care of it.

Let us take an illustration of a good man and a bad man. Let us say there is one man who has ten friends. Day in and day out this man is unselfishly serving his ten friends. People cannot help but love this man. He can become the very best friend to ten people. Then his influence will spread to the relatives and friends of those first ten people. By giving and serving unselfishly this man becomes prosperous. He is a center of harmony and unity because he lives God’s principle. Unselfishness brings prosperity. Here is a good man.

But suppose, on the contrary, this man said to his friends, “You ten, bring everything to me; you are here to serve me.” If he spoke this way to his friends three times, everyone would end all connection with him. They would want to have nothing at all to do with him. So he would be left all alone. Isn’t that true, even in our society? It is universally true. A self-centered doctrine, a self-centered philosophy, a self-centered way of life will fling you head over heels down the tragic road of self-destruction. However, if you live your life in service to others, you will find prosperity. It may seem that such a route would lead you to ruin, but it will not. The only reason it may not always bring prosperity to you is because you do not give to the very end. In the middle you suddenly become skeptical. You change your heart or pity yourself, and so you shrink from God’s law of total giving. A good result never materializes. Total giving is the way of prosperity, because it is the way of God.

If any individual sacrifices himself for another individual, he becomes a hero to others. If one family is sacrificial for the well-being of another family, then that family becomes a heroic family among all families. Peoples and nations who sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others become champions of nations. A man who gives his life for his parents is a pious son. A man who gives his life for his king is a loyal subject. And a man who gives his life for all mankind is a saint.

Jesus Christ proclaimed this very truth you are hearing tonight. He strove for the fulfillment of God’s truth on earth. He came not to satisfy his nation’s selfish purpose, but to achieve salvation for the entire world.

God intended the chosen people of Israel to serve as the prepared instrument of the Messiah for his mission of world salvation. The people of Israel did not know this. They conceived of the coming Messiah as an invincible military conqueror who would restore the political empire of King David for the glory of the Jews. How wrong they were!

God’s purpose is not the salvation of any particular man, church, or nation. God’s purpose is to save the whole world. Therefore, the true church would give itself as a sacrifice for the benefit of the world. Yes, true Christians must be willing to sacrifice their own lives for the salvation of the world and all mankind. However, Christian teachings today are self- centered. Christians are seeking their own personal salvation. Christians are crying out for “my salvation” and “my heaven.” This is contrary to God’s truth and contrary to God’s ideal. We must steadfastly give, love, sacrifice, and live for the sake of others.

We must all work for the ideal way of life. I exist for my family, my family exists for our society, our society exists for our nation, our nation exists for the world, the world exists for God, and God exists for you and me, for all mankind. In this great circle of give and take there is harmony, there is unity, and there is an eternal process of increasing prosperity. Furthermore, since in this circuit all existence will fulfill its purpose of creation, there is abundant and profound joy. This is the kingdom of heaven, in which feelings of happiness overflow.

In this world, selfishness ruins everything. Selfishness in the family causes disharmony, which then erupts into bitterness and strife. Everyone wants to be served, instead of serving others. Wives tell their husbands what to do and then seek to be served. Husbands want to be served by their wives. Parents expect service from their children, and the children take their parents for granted. This is demonstrated in our families, in our societies, and in our nations.

In this world today, nations exist solely for their own national interests. They plot, connive, cheat, and lie. They destroy other nations for their own national benefit. Is there even one nation on earth, which pledges to God, “God, you may use this nation as your sacrifice and as your altar, if that is the way you can save the world”? Tell me, where is such a nation? Where?

It is a recognized fact that when America demonstrated the spirit of service and sacrificial duty in the world, and went out of her way to help others in their need, when America gave lives, money, and a helping hand, she enjoyed a golden age. But now America has a selfish attitude. Its domestic problems today are very difficult. America’s situation is chaotic. Today there are greater divisions, more corruption, and graver problems choking this land.

I am not criticizing any people or nation. I am merely proclaiming the heavenly truth that all mankind is seeking.

I started the Unification Church. If this Unification Church exists solely for the benefit of the welfare of the Unification Church itself, then it is doomed to perish. I founded the Church so that I could give my life, my heart, and my soul for the advancement of the salvation of the world. Among this audience there are many members of the Unification Church. Their great desire, their only motivation, is to serve others, to save this nation and the world.

Jesus did not teach his disciples laws of retaliation. He told them, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (Matt. 5:39, 41) You never have to retaliate; all you have to do is give completely and totally, and then God will return to you more and more abundantly.

When Jesus was crucified, Roman soldiers pierced him. And Jesus prayed for his enemies, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34) Even at the moment of death on the cross, Jesus was so earnest in forgiving. His very last act was motivated by his love for his enemies. He was the supreme example of a paragon of love. The example of Jesus Christ is the absolute standard for all mankind. Just imagine an entire nation composed of men like Jesus. What would you call it? The kingdom of heaven on earth; it could be nothing less.

Jesus Christ was lord over all life because of his unparalleled form of loving, giving, and sacrifice. He will remain the Lord forever. In the same way, no one in this universe surpasses the total giving and loving of God. So God is God forever. He reigns over all creation.

Look at the decline of Rome. The entire Roman Empire collapsed in front of an army with no weapons, the army of Jesus Christ. By what means did the Christians conquer Rome? They conquered by love, sacrifice, and total giving, up to the cost of their very lives. History is a witness that no empire can withstand the army of sacrificial love. And this history shall be repeated.

Up to now in our lives we did not know clearly the definition of good and evil. We could not be certain where to commit ourselves, when to act, what to serve. This has been the source of the greatest confusion in human lives. We must not become Christians who merely crave their own wellbeing. As Christians, we must live the life of Jesus and give ourselves totally for the benefit of others, so that others might have life. This is God’s way.

This present world is evoking the wrath of God. It truly deserves His uncompromising judgment. But God is love, and He is long-suffering. God is suppressing His anger because He wants to save us. He is giving us a chance to change. He is waiting.

I know that Western culture is characterized by individualism. However, selfish individualism is doomed. Sacrificial individualism will blossom. Individuality in itself is good. God gave each one of us a unique way to serve. But individualism without God can only build castles of sand.

The quiet revolution

I can see a great change, a great new surge of revolution coming to America— not by fire, not by bullets, but by God’s truth kindling a revolution in men’s hearts. I have come here to ignite this spiritual revolution. I do not need to demonstrate in front of the White House or in Lafayette Square. The answer does not lie there, but in the hearts of men, in the quiet revolution from selfishness to unselfishness.

Can you imagine how wonderful the ideal society will be? Individuals will belong to their families, the family will belong to the society, the society will belong to the nation, the nation will belong to the world, the world will belong to God, and God will belong to you. He who gives the most will know God most deeply.

Some young people might say to me, “Rev. Moon, you are coming here repeating the same old stuff!’ But that is not at all true. I am speaking, not from theory, but from life. I am telling you that we are all here to live the truth, as Jesus lived the truth. This is not a theory, a philosophy, or a theological doctrine. It is the ultimate truth of God—not to be talked about, but to be lived. When man makes this truth live, it is going to bring about the greatest change upon the face of the earth. Although in one sense you know the truth of the things I have been saying, still nobody truly believes them. Since nobody believes the truth, nobody ever lives it. This truth is as old as God, yet as new as the twenty-first century. You must live the truth. If the revelation of the Divine Principle has made this age-old truth real in your heart, then you have in effect discovered a brand-new truth. The Divine Principle is touching the hearts of millions of young people, showing them the way to our very real God. People throughout the world are learning that God is absolute and perfect, and the perfect God demands perfect human beings as His object. Jesus said, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48) He is dearly indicating that our standard of value is the perfection of our Heavenly Father. Otherwise we cannot be God’s objects and God cannot accept us.

All of us want to be perfect. All of us want heaven on earth, but we ask, “How can it be done?”

We wonder if it is at all possible for man to be perfect. Some contend, with apparent justification, that all one has to do is merely look at man to see the gross error of such an aspiration. We point to the sin and suffering inherent in all things, even in the things that are most holy. We say, “Only God is perfect.” However, when we fully comprehend the design for man in God’s concept of creation, we will understand that perfection is within our grasp.

In God’s ideal of creation we were designed as temples of God, temples of the spirit of God, where God is master. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16)We were designed to be God’s temples. When we attain this status, we shall cease to possess a will that is corruptible. Limitations or laws will no longer be necessary, for His will is our will. With His spirit dwelling in us completely we shall move only as He dictates. We shall then be perfect, because the force that is guiding and directing us is the perfect force.

When man achieves this ultimate goal he is in perfect union with God. He is no longer living on the human level alone, but on the God-like level. He takes on God’s qualities because the Spirit dwells in and possesses him as a perfect temple; he reflects God’s virtue and power. Thus man can be as perfect as Heavenly Father is perfect. This was the original pattern, which God intended for humankind through Adam.

Marriage is the most important means of establishing God’s kingdom on earth. Adam and Eve were God’s first children. They were born of God, grew up in God, and would have matured into perfection in God. God intended to make Adam and Eve one in heavenly matrimony. Then they would have borne sinless children and become the true mother and father for all mankind. They would have been the first “king” and “queen,” establishing the heavenly kingdom on earth.

Has such a kingdom ever existed? No. Instead, history started in the wrong direction. From the evil first step, Satan has been the god of this world. It has, therefore, been God’s purpose of restoration, His purpose of salvation, to restore the perfected nation so that He can truly have His kingdom upon the earth. For this God needs a model. Who can set the criteria of perfection on this earth? To meet this need the Messiah comes.

Jesus Christ came as the Messiah. He was to be the model of perfection upon every level: the individual, family, tribal, national, and worldwide levels. He came to establish a perfect world in his lifetime, not over a period of centuries.

Before God sent His champion Jesus Christ, He prepared the field with the chosen people of Israel. They were the foundation for the Messiah’s coming. The people of Israel could have perfected themselves and their nation if they had united with the coming of the Lord. The kingdom of God would have been a physical reality at that time.

The mission of Jesus

However, his people did not accept Jesus. Instead of welcome, he met rejection at every level. Jesus was denied the opportunity to take a bride in the position of restored Eve, and to establish the first God-centered heavenly family. Instead, the people of Israel nailed him to the cross. Read 1 Cor. 2:8: “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” In this way, the mission of Jesus Christ was left undone on earth.

The history of God’s providence is a very sad story. To comfort the heart of God and fulfill His work, we must clearly understand His process of restoration.

When God created man, He placed Adam and Eve, man and woman, in the Garden of Eden. They both united with Satan and became sinful, thereby leaving God isolated. In the process of restoration, God must restore both Adam and Eve. Jesus came as the sinless Adam, or perfected Adam. His first mission was, therefore, to restore his bride and form the first family of God. All fallen generations would have been grafted onto him as the true olive tree. God-centered families, tribes, and nations would have been restored in this way. Perfection would have reigned. The sinless state of God’s kingdom could have been a reality for the last two thousand years. This is why 1 Cor. 15:45 says Jesus is the “last Adam,” the second Adam.

Jesus came, but he was crucified. He was not given the chance to restore his bride. This is why Jesus promised his second coming. Jesus Christ must come again to consummate the mission he left undone two thousand years ago. Let me repeat: Jesus was a man, not God Himself. When he returns to earth he will come as a man in the position of the third Adam.

Let us understand more fully the significance of these revelations in the book of Revelations, where there is the prophecy of the marriage of the Lamb. God intended Adam and Eve to come together in heavenly matrimony in the Garden of Eden. Since it was not realized at that time, God intended Jesus to fulfill this marriage in his time. However, it was not realized by Jesus either because of the faithlessness of the chosen people.

Jesus was the second Adam. It was God’s Will for him to be blessed in heavenly matrimony with the second Eve, his restored bride. They would have become the True Parents for mankind. In this way all mankind would have found life by grafting onto them.

Jesus cautioned the people, “You are of your father the devil.” (John 8:44) Because of the beginning point of human history, we were born as Satan’s children. Through the restoration of True Parents we will be reborn as children of our Heavenly Father, God, with full salvation.

God’s Will was denied fulfillment in Jesus’ time. That is why he is coming again as the third Adam. The marriage supper of the Lamb will take place. True Parents for all mankind will be realized in our time. God will bring forth His true family upon the face of the earth. All people will be made new through their True Parents. All will be made capable of bringing sinless children into the world. This will be done when Jesus Christ reappears. The kingdom of heaven on earth will then begin. This will be the day when the dwelling of God is with men. God will be full of joy. His own son, as perfected third Adam, will initiate an entirely new history upon the earth. On that day, we shall become living images of God. God will bring His kingdom on earth.

I pledge to you from the bottom of my heart that the realization of all this is at hand, in the fullness of God’s time. The ultimate realization of this ideal has been the hope of God, as well as the hope of humanity.

Thank you very much for your attentive listening. You have been a most gracious audience. Thank you.

A World of Living for
the Sake of Others

January 16, 1975 Chosun Hotel, Seoul, Korea Korean Day of Hope Banquet

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to you eminent figures from all walks of life. Your coming here this evening in such great numbers has made my night of celebration a great success.

This man standing here is, as you all know, the very man who has been stirring up considerable controversy both in Korea and the United States. I am aware that many of you are attending this event wondering, “What kind of person is this Mr. Moon?”

Love, the ideal and happiness cannot be achieved alone It is a great pleasure to be able to eat together while watching and listening to a good performance. Therefore, let us give a big round of applause to show how grateful we are to Mr. Kim Gang-seob, leader of the KBS lounge band, and his band members, for providing us with musical accompaniment during this delicious dinner so we could enjoy it all the more. In addition, I would like to thank the staff members of the Chosun Hotel, who are working hard to entertain guests at this late hour.

I have given considerable thought to what I would speak about before all of you gathered here this evening. It would be easy to say just a few courteous words and end it there. However, if I did so, I’m sure you would feel quite disappointed that Mr. Moon did not speak, since you have come to meet him. Therefore, if you will allow me, I will now take this time to share my thoughts.

We know that from early on humanity has yearned for true and unchanging love, the ideal, happiness and peace, which are eternal, true and unchanging. However, in this day and age we live in a world of distrust and chaos. Under these circumstances, we are faced with the fact that it is impossible to attain the conditions that human beings long for.

At present, humankind has made every possible effort, yet still has not achieved these basic conditions. If we as human beings cannot achieve this through our own efforts, we will have no choice except to go beyond our own capacity, to find and rely on a certain Absolute Being who is eternal, unchanging and true. If that Being also yearns for true love, a true ideal, true peace and true happiness, we must conclude that it is possible to attain these things only through that One. Based on this viewpoint, if there is such a Being, it can only be God.

God is a Being who can be the King of love, the King of the ideal and the King of peace and happiness. Therefore, we can conclude that in order for human beings to attain the ideal conditions we pursue through God, we have no choice but to discern what God is proposing and to respond to it. This is an obvious conclusion.

When we think about love, the ideal, happiness and peace, we know that we cannot attain these things as individuals. We can do so only in a reciprocal relationship. Even though God exists as the Absolute Being, He also cannot achieve by Himself the love, ideal, happiness and peace that He desires. It is an inevitable conclusion that even God needs an object partner.

Then, if we were to ask who, among all created beings, can be the object partner of God, we can declare without argument it is none other than human beings. Until now, we have been unable to consider that humankind is the very object partner to achieve the ideal of God and realize the love of God, the happiness of God and the peace of God. What meaning would there be for God to love all alone, strive for the ideal alone or be peaceful and happy alone? The obvious conclusion is that none of this is possible without human beings as God’s object partners.

God desires an object partner that is better than He is. In light of this, I would like to ask a question of the many prominent figures present here today. When you were young and were about to choose your spouse, did you seek someone inferior to you or better than you? If I asked anyone among you this question, you would answer that you wanted someone better. Furthermore, if a handsome man and a beautiful woman married and had their first baby, and you looked at the baby’s face and saw it was quite plain, compared with the mother’s or father’s, and yet you said as you looked at the infant, “This baby is more beautiful than her mother or father,” you would see the parents smile from ear to ear with delight.

Keeping this in mind, we can ask, “Why did we turn out this way? Whom do we take after?” Human beings are in all respects resultant beings, not causal beings. Resultant beings possess certain characteristics because they are made of the same material as the causal being. We can conclude that we are a certain way because we resemble God, who is like us. If you were to ask God, “Do You wish for Your object partners to be better than You or inferior to You?” God would answer that He wishes for them to be better than Himself. This is why we also desire our sons and daughters be better than ourselves. When we look at ourselves simply as human beings, we may seem insignificant, yet when we look at ourselves based on this principle, we can see we are beings whom God originally desired to be superior to and more precious than God Himself. We have been completely unaware of this fact.

Today’s established theologies state that the Creator and the creation do not stand on equal terms. If this were true, it would be impossible to realize love, peace, happiness and the ideal as envisioned by that Creator. In this regard, humanity up to the present has been unaware of the fact that we originally were created with the right to become God’s object partners, who can be even more precious and noble than He is, and who are qualified to stand as His children. Based on this viewpoint, all of you present here this evening need to remember that we stand before God as His object partners and His children, who possess a value that is greater than God’s. Therefore if God is eternal, we cannot exist for only a short time on the physical plane and then just disappear. Even though we live in this physical world, we know there is not one person who wishes for their loved ones to exist for a short time and then just disappear. There is not one person who wishes to live apart from his or her beloved children throughout eternity. In this respect, as long as God is eternal, unique and absolute, we can logically conclude that, as His object partners, we also need to become beings possessing eternal, absolute and unique value.

Among those of you gathered here, there may be some who do not believe in religion and who do not lead lives of faith. Nonetheless, the fact that these ideal requisites resonate with you, leads to the conclusion that

God exists. If we possess the value of His object partner then, if God is eternal, it is reasonable to conclude that we will live eternally. I believe that if all of you present here this evening remember this and nothing else, I will have provided you with the starting point of a more meaningful life.

Living for the sake of others is the original ideal .

If God were the King of wisdom and the center of everything, where in the relationship between the subject partner and the object partner would He place the origin of the true ideal, true happiness and true peace? God pondered whether it was better to make the object partner live for the sake of the subject partner, or vice versa. If God had made the object partner live for the sake of the subject partner or for Himself, as soon as He had done so, every person in the position of a subject partner would also have made the object partners standing before them live for their sake.

If this had taken place, the path to unity would have been blocked. They would have become divided. So where is the path that can serve as the origin of peace, through which the subject and object partners truly can become one? Not only God Himself but also true human beings accept the principle that they need to exist for the sake of others. That is why true love stems from living for the sake of others, why the true ideal stems from living for the sake of others, and why true peace and true happiness can be found only when one lives for the sake of others. Humankind has not known that this is the basic principle of the creation of the universe.

If you ask me to describe true parents, the answer would be that they are people who were born for their children, who live for their children and who would die for their children. Only then can the love of the true parents be established, and only then can they appear before true children as ideal parents. Furthermore, we can understand that only then can the parents become the center of peace and the standard of happiness before their children. On the other hand, where should the standard of true filial piety be set? It needs to be set in the position corresponding to that of true parents. Only children who feel that they were born for their parents, who live for their parents and who would give their lives for their parents can become true filial children. Only such children become ideal children before their parents, become children who can be truly loved, and become the object partners of happiness and peace. Based on this standard, if we were to propose a formula at this point, I am sure you would assume that such ideals as true love, true happiness and true peace can be found only at the place where one exists for the sake of others.

The principle of creation of the universe and the origin of happiness. Then what kind of person is a true husband? If there were a husband who felt that he was born for his wife, who lived for his wife and who was willing to die for his wife, his wife could only praise him, saying her husband was the owner of true love, a husband of the true ideal and a husband who was the subject partner of true peace and happiness. The same would be true for the wife. When applying this formula to the nation of Korea, what kind of person would be a true patriot? If you were to ask this question, you would have to say it would be someone like Admiral Lee Soon-shin, who was born for the nation, lived for the nation, and in spite of difficult circumstances gave his life without a word for the sake of the nation, for his king above him and for the people below him.

If we were to apply this principle of living for the sake of others to the world and ask who is the greatest among all the saints in the course of history, we would find the answer right away. That person, more than anyone else, could only be someone who lived for the sake of humanity. Many among those present here are not Christians, yet I tell you, the person who lived and died for the sake of humanity and who also prayed for the enemies who took his life, whom he very well could have hated, is indeed Jesus Christ. Thus he is the greatest saint in history. This is what we can conclude by applying this formula. In this way, we must always remember that the principle of the creation of the universe, and the origin of human happiness, begin from existing for the sake of others.

To give another example, if you were to ask why men were born, many among the prominent figures here tonight could easily think they were born for the sake of themselves, especially since you are in high positions here in Korea. Originally, however, men are born for the sake of women. Nobody can refute this fact.

From a proportional perspective, men have broad shoulders and women have wide hips. If you go somewhere like New York City and get on a subway car packed with people, you will see that when a man with broad shoulders and a woman with big hips sit adjacent to one another, they fit perfectly in that limited space. This just goes to show that we were born to form a reciprocal relationship in which we can live for the sake of each other. In short, men were not born for the sake of men; they were born for the sake of women. Correspondingly, women were not born for the sake of women; they were born for the sake of men.

You need to know that problems arise when we are unsure about this fact. I know well that since God, the Lord of creation of the universe, established this as a principle of creation, we cannot enter the world of goodness, truth, happiness and peace, the world of love and ideal, without following this principle.

Religion teaches us to align with the original law

You may not know that I have had many spiritual experiences through which I explored and learned about the spirit world. If you ask me about the standard of life in the original world where God dwells, that is to say, the place called the kingdom of heaven or paradise, the answer is simple. It is a place where only those who lived for the sake of God can enter, the place where only those people who knew they were born for the sake of others, who lived for the sake of others, and who were ready to die for the sake of others can enter. Since this is the structure of our ideal, original homeland, God has established many religions throughout the course of history through which He has trained human beings to help us find our way to that world.

Religious believers need to be gentle, humble and sacrificial, because that is the law of the original homeland. You need to be trained in the course of your life on earth to fit in when you go to the original homeland, as preparation for the moment of your passing to that place. The higher the level of a religion, the more it emphasizes a higher degree of sacrifice and service. Such religions have to emphasize this, because we need to live in accordance with the laws of that world. In light of this fact, we have no choice other than to admit that God carries out His providence as history progresses. Regardless of how voluminous are the scriptures that make up the Bible, they are all in accordance with this one principle: “One exists for the sake of others.”

Jesus said, “Those who find their life shall lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake shall find it.” (Matt. 10:39) We know that he spoke such paradoxical words ultimately to have us harmonize with the principle of the original world where we exist for the sake of others.

Then why did God have to establish this principle of existing for the sake of others? I will point out a few reasons. Taking our better nature into consideration, if you owe a favor to someone who truly devoted his life to you, would your original mind tell you to put fifty percent of what you owe in your pocket and pay back only fifty percent, or would it tell you to pay back more than one hundred percent? If you were to ask your original mind this question, it would give you a clear answer. It would tell you that you ought to pay back more than one hundred percent.

To put it another way, if Person B owed a debt to Person A, Person B ought to give back more than one hundred percent of what he or she owed. In that case, Person A would wish to give an even higher percentage back to Person B in return. As they pursued this giving and receiving back and forth, the value of their exchange would not decrease; rather, it gradually would increase. The concept of eternity is based upon this principle.

The concept of eternity vanishes when you live only for your own sake. If you were to consider the motion of any entity, you would see that the greater the resistance it encounters, the stronger its response has to be in order to maintain itself. The reason that God, the King of wisdom, established this law of living for the sake of others was to enable us to maintain our position eternally. We have to bear in mind that God had to establish this principle of existing for the sake of others because God Himself embodies this principle.

Not only that, to establish the foundation for eternity is to establish your foundation to develop and prosper eternally. We can advance and develop beyond our present status only when we feel stimulated, and only when we are growing beyond our present status will we be happy. Since this is the case, God had to establish the principle of existing for the sake of others.

What is another reason that God established the principle of existing for the sake of others? Let us say there were ten family members in a household. If the youngest were to live for the sake of the family more than anyone else, then the parents and brothers and sisters would place that one at the head of the family, even though he or she was the youngest. By living selflessly, in time the youngest family member would emerge naturally as the central figure of that household.

The place where ideal unity is achieved

Just as God exists as the central Being of the entire universe because He exists for the sake of others, a person who resembles God by existing for the sake of others will become the central figure in the household. This will be the case even if he or she is the youngest sibling or the smallest child. At the place where we live for the sake of others, we do not decline. Rather, the more we live for the sake of others, the closer we come to the position of the central figure. Since God is like that, He establishes the person who lives in such a way as the central figure. Furthermore, only by living in such a way can ideal and complete unity be accomplished.

I know that there are many of us who would rather die than be under another person’s dominion. You see this trait more often than not in those renowned people who belong to society’s intelligentsia. However, there is one thing you need to know. Not even in your wildest dreams have you conceived of how happy you would be under the dominion of a being who exists for the sake of others. God had to establish the principle of existing for the sake of others because He knew that by establishing such a position in the realm of ideal unity we would be grateful to be under the dominion of someone in that position for tens of thousands of years. Another reason why God established this principle is to address the fact that many people today think, “Love is my love. The ideal is my ideal.” Although many think this way, they are mistaken. Love does not begin from oneself, and the ideal does not begin from oneself. Love and the ideal, which are more precious than life, can be found only in one’s object partner. They cannot be found elsewhere. The being who can discover and receive sublime love and the ideal is the object partner. This is why in order for us to receive that love and ideal with humility, we need to stand in a position where we live abundantly for the sake of others. Otherwise we cannot receive love and the ideal. This is another reason that God established the principle of existing for the sake of others. I hope that those of you present here this evening will remember this one fact.

Throughout the world, people commonly wonder about the meaning of life. For human beings, the matter of establishing a view of life, a national perspective, a worldview, and even a view of the universe and of God poses a problem. The most serious one of all is how the system of the universe is ordered and how that multidimensional system connects together.

A new perspective on values based on existing for the sake of others When we consider our lives based on this principle of existing for the sake of others, the most positive view of life would be one that says we exist for all humanity, for the entire world, for the nation, for the society, for the family, for the husband, for the wife and for the children. You can discover happiness within yourself by living in such a way, and so I would say there could not be a better view of life. The same is true even if you were to consider what an ideal nation would be like. We know all too well that the nations that made others serve them throughout history are reproached as bad nations. Yet, among the nations in the present world, there is not one that is carrying out unselfish policies for the sake of the world.

As you may well know, the communist world is on the verge of collapse. The year 1957 was when it reached its maximum global expansion. Why did the communist world start its decline from that point? It was because communism prioritized the Soviet Union’s self-interest and dreamed of taking over the world centered solely on the Slavic people. Communism will break down in the end because it is an ideology that serves only the interests of its own people.

We also are facing the reality of America’s decline from its position as the leading nation of democracy. Why is this so? It is because, while America could have become a democratic nation existing for the sake of the world, it unfortunately has abandoned the world and decided to pursue its own interest. Now America is on the road of retreat, and it looks as if there is no way for it to correct its course.

In light of this issue, we see that Korea too is advocating its own national interest. If our nation embraces a worldview that focuses only on this Asian nation of Korea, it will fade away with the passing of history. Look at what is happening with the communists of the Soviet Union and with America. However, if Korea embraces the worldview of existing for the sake of the world as a national belief system, even though today it is a small nation with a small population, Korea will lead the world. Even if the nation is no longer here, such a people will lead without fail in the twenty-first century, the twenty-fifth century and the thirtieth century. We can come to this conclusion based on this principle.

A true nation is one that exists for the world. Furthermore, extending from that, a true world is not one that exists only for itself. Since the world stands in the resultant position, if there is an absolute God who is its origin and motivating force, that world needs to have a belief system that is in accord with God’s view. If you follow a worldview that supports only your own interest, you cannot lead the world or solve its problems. What kind of place is our heavenly home? It has to be a home in which the wife exists one hundred percent for her husband, and the husband lives one hundred percent for his wife, and is willing to die for her. This is the home that can be called heaven.

There is a Korean saying to the effect that, “When one’s home is harmonious, all goes well.” The same is true for a nation to flourish. The sovereign who rules over a nation draws his or her value not from the exercise of sovereignty, but rather from acting on behalf of the people. Likewise, the people find value not by living only for themselves, but for the sake of the nation. The day this becomes a reality, that nation will become heaven. If we were to expand this formula and realize a world where people live for the sake of others, transcending nations and peoples, without a doubt we would have the world of love, the ideal, peace and happiness for which all people yearn. If you go out into the world upholding this principle of existing for the sake of others, you will find that there is not one place where that principle will not bring success.

What do you think was the motive that drove me to go to America and cause so much controversy in such a short period of time? It is the fact that, though I am a Korean, I love America more than the Americans do. All my efforts were for America, shedding my own sweat and blood day and night to find a way to inspire the American people to embrace a noble worldview. I have eaten for the sake of others, worked for the sake of others and lived for the sake of others. While doing this, I came to experience that if I contended with an individual, afterward I became one with that individual, and if I contended with an organization, afterward I harmonized with that organization.

How the UN General Assembly passed the Korea bill

You may not know that I had a keen awareness that the issue of Korea was causing much trouble at last year’s United Nations General Assembly session. I gathered all the information I could, including the evaluations of everyone at the Assembly, from the president of the General Assembly to his aides, ambassadors and observers, in order to understand the problem. The consensus was that the South Korean position was hopeless.

As the founder and leader of the Unification Church, I have always believed that the Unification Church exists not for itself but for the nation as well as the world. With this principle in mind, I brought together Unification Church missionaries from about thirty nations and selected thirty-four representatives from among them. I paired them with thirty- four Japanese women and called these sixty-eight members to pray for and attend the UN General Assembly meetings. They shared their faith with everyone they met in the Assembly and moved their hearts, one on one. What did I tell our members to say? It was nothing special. I did not send them because they were excellent speakers. I just told them, “You need to devote yourselves completely for their sake! When you meet them, make every effort to live for their sake. Speak with them, dine with them, counsel them with God’s heart.”

After experiencing our ministry for forty days, the hearts of these delegates were moved by our efforts. As a faith leader, I knew that the issue of the Japanese women who had been deceived into moving to North Korea to join their husbands and then denied freedom of travel, would open people’s eyes about that regime. While the general sentiment of the world toward South Korea was unfavorable, I knew that the United Nations ambassadors’ support for the Japanese wives would change international opinion on Korean issues. When I said this, however, no one believed me. The UN General Assembly brings together intellectuals from all parts of the world, and our Unification Church missionaries were not confident to open their mouths and speak with such people. However, I asked them to work from the position of truly attending with sincerity and faith. So they looked at an ambassador’s office, not as that of a stranger from a random nation, but rather as from their own. They served and selflessly helped those people, day and night, even calling taxis after one or two o’clock in the morning for them. They served in the background with love.

As you may know, we have a conference center called Belvedere in the village of Tarrytown, just north of New York City. We hosted UN ambassadors from seventy nations there. After this kind of ministry, they opened their hearts to the cause of justice for the Japanese wives. During this process, we discovered that friends of North Korea had reached out to underdeveloped nations in Africa, offering bribes for their support in the General Assembly. And so the North Koreans toasted their victory even before sending their delegation to the United Nations. Nonetheless, as a result of our having invested our service for the world, shedding tears and staying up nights for the sake of freedom and justice for God’s daughters from Japan, South Korea’s proposal was accepted by sixty-one votes to forty- two, whereas North Korea's received forty-eight votes against forty-eight. Thus we brought a victory for freedom. I am not telling you this to boast. It is only to show how unimaginable miracles can be wrought based on this principle of living for the sake of others, miracles I have experienced on many occasions throughout my life.

The reason the Unification Church is developing globally Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to ask you, what do you think the Unification Church is? In the course of history, many theologians tried to bring together the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, yet success remained only in their dreams. Moreover, many Protestants tried to unite, yet they now are divided into more than four hundred denominations. This is the actual state of affairs, so how can the Unification Church unite all religions? You may think Mr. Moon is somewhat weak in the head. However, I think the solution to division among religions is quite simple. It boils down to whether Unification Church members can love Christians more than their ministers do, and whether Unification Church members can love Christian ministers more than their own congregations do. Can we exist more for their sake than for ourselves? If this is possible, the unity we are envisioning is also possible.

The Unification Church has now passed through a history of twenty years. I know you must have heard all kinds of rumors and controversial news about the church. Yes, we have been persecuted globally; nonetheless we have achieved a global impact. How do you think we achieved such an impact? It is because we learned that when people betray us, a path is opened that leads to the world. Everyone ought to tread the path that is taken for the sake of the world. If this path is indeed the principle of heavenly law and the common formula that everyone must follow, the world will come to know this fact. When it does, the Korean people can automatically come to know this as well. Based on this principle, we continue to carry out mission work abroad, even in the face of bloody persecution.

To give an example, our missionaries pioneered Japan seventeen years ago, when the Liberal Democratic Party had just come to power. At that time, the Ewha Women’s University incident had erupted and Mr. Moon’s reputation had fallen to the point where he was deemed contemptible. However, I actually intuited how the political situation of Japan would develop in the future, and in my own way I had an inkling of how the situation of Asia would unfold.

Therefore, while I was aware that Japan was barring missionaries, I knew that this would change soon, and that in five or ten years the Unification Church of Japan would serve the world. I decided I had no choice except to take this path, even though I might be branded an outlaw. It was in 1956. As you well know, I had just been released from Seodaemun Prison and had gone to Gabsa Monastery in South Chungcheong Province to recuperate. A young man visited me and I called him to go to Japan. I told him, “When a person sets out on the path of his choosing, he ought to do so at the cost of his life.”

On his first entry, he was arrested as soon as he set foot in Japan. So the first try was unsuccessful. I sent him a second time to try again. He was rebuffed in his second entry too, and came back. Upon my release from prison I found that the Unification Church had disbanded and its one-room house had been lost. I had to borrow money in order to send that man a third time, which I did for the sake of Korea and Asia. It seems like that happened only yesterday. That was in 1958. In Japan the Unification Church began under such circumstances. When he went to Japan for the third time, again he was detained. This was a major crisis for him. He had made me a solemn promise to succeed, yet instead of being in a position to lay the foundation for the church in Japan, he was blocked and there was no one to whom he could turn for support. So he found a way. He drank a large quantity of soy sauce and he became feverish. He was admitted to a hospital and was kept there for three days. From there he escaped and made his way to Tokyo. This is how the Unification Church began in Japan.

Now we have reached the stage at which the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan respects our voice. When a major event is taking place there, they listen to us; we have faithful members on that level. While the movement was growing, I taught the members in Japan the principle of living for the sake of others, established by heavenly law. When you uphold it, you will succeed. Because they are aware of this, the young men and women of the Unification Church in Japan have spread nationwide. They carry out activities on the premise that “the Unification Church exists for the nation. It needs to be a church that exists for Asia and, furthermore, it needs to be a church that exists for the world.” This is why they are prominent in Japan today.

My meeting with you on such a formal occasion as this and delivering these words is unprecedented in the twenty-year history of the Unification Church. While visiting all parts of North America, I was very sad. I said to myself, “You poor man, you are no better than an orphan! You are in a pitiful position, having left behind your young members who are distrusted and mistreated in your own country, while you are asking for the trust of the people of a foreign nation. However, since God called a man such as you and is working through you, God is supporting you. He knows your situation.” While saying this, I held on to God and invested all my effort, and as a result I have come to experience the beginning of a new history of creation both in name and in reality.

The realization of the kingdom of heaven

Those of you present here this evening may wonder how you can know whether someone is evil or good. How can you determine whether even a religious believer will go to heaven or hell? The answer is simple. If the person has lived more for himself or herself than for others, then the person is bound for hell. Yet if the portion of his or her life lived for others is greater even by one percent than the part lived for himself or herself, that person will travel the road that bypasses hell and leads to heaven. Again, if the percentage of his or her living selfishly is even a little higher, then he or she will sink into hell.

Distinguished leaders, up to this point we have contributed to Korea as its citizens. We have all contributed something from our respective positions. However, what was our motivation? If all of Korea’s citizens can be reenergized in their respective fields through the worldview of living for the sake of others, then no matter how dismal Korea’s current situation is, there will still be hope. If such a worldview is adopted in shaping the attitude of the Korean people in the family, in society, in the government and among the leaders of organizations, this nation will never come to ruin. I believe that this people without a doubt will influence Asia and the world.

The single formula based on this worldview, by which we can conceive the ideal social system, is simply that of a husband living for his wife, a wife living for her husband, a couple living for their children, a family living for their clan, a clan living for the society, a society living for the nation and a nation living for the world. Such a nation will never perish.

If there is a God, He desires such people. He wants everyone to be His children. Therefore His goal is to save all humanity and even the universe. Religions need to take off the fetters of nationalism, ethnocentrism and racism in order to stand before the full Will of God.

Since God’s main purpose is to save the world, we must ponder how to develop a step-by-step process to make this extent of salvation possible. The principle is actually very simple. All it takes is for the family to exist for the clan, the clan to exist for the people, the people to exist for the nation, the nation to exist for the world and the world to exist for God. Unless you are a person who exists for the world, you cannot be eligible to become a child of the omnipotent and omniscient God, who created the universe. If the world stands in the position of existing for the sake of God, God will stand in the position of existing for the sake of the world, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of the people, for the sake of the tribe and for the sake of the family.

In other words, a world that upholds the notion that what belongs to me belongs to my wife, what belongs to the couple belongs to the family, what belongs to the family belongs to the clan, and what belongs to the clan belongs to the people, what belongs to the people belongs to the nation and what belongs to the nation belongs to the world, such a world will eventually belong to God. When something belongs to God who does it also belong to? It belongs to me. Only when you have attained such a position can you hope to achieve your greatest desires.

Ladies and gentlemen, is this not true? Everyone has the desire to become the best in the world. Since we can become beings of such value, we human beings can stand in the position of glory, where what belongs to God, the center of all things in the world, also belongs to us. In this regard, the realization of heaven in the family, heaven in the nation and heaven in the world becomes possible only through living for the sake of others. Not only that, we will also connect to the world where God can be happy together with humankind. This will be the world that can be called the ideal garden, wherein everyone can dance and sing. Such a place is the heaven that religions pursue, and it is this heaven that will be realized on earth. Thus, we can conclude that such a place is the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that through this event you have embraced this principle of “existing for the sake of others” and that you will now embody it by practicing it in your homes and workplaces. On the day you begin living in such a manner, you will see a future more and more hopeful and joyful unfold, and you will discover yourselves boldly fulfilling central responsibilities as the pioneers of tomorrow.

I hope you will strive to become such people, and I pray that the great blessings of God will be with your families, your society and this nation. I have spoken before you this evening on the subject of existing for the sake of others. With these words, I now conclude this address.

The New Future of Humankind

April 14, 1975

Jangchoong Gymnasium, Seoul, Korea
Nine-city Day of Hope Tour in Korea

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your gathering here this evening. This evening I will speak on “The New Future of Humankind.” I hope you will reflect on this topic along with me.

We live in a chaotic world. We have passed through an age of theocentric culture, the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, which began to decline at a certain point, and today we live in the era of humanism. Our age is also the era of materialism, a fitting word for the current secular attitudes and worldviews. Having passed through such states of confusion, no one has been able to come up with clear answers to our problems; humanity today is at the beginning of a post-ideological era, in which everything is out of control.

Our value as object partners of the absolute God

The problems we currently face do not arise from a shortage of resources, whether human or material. They arise because a clear view of God has yet to appear. Until humankind establishes a view of life or a spiritual interpretation of history based on a definitive view of God, I believe that a new future for humanity cannot appear. In my opinion, when we understand God clearly, we can resolve the problems that originate from ambiguity in our view of God, which began in the medieval ages, as well as from the trends of materialism and humanism in the present age.

Therefore, the matter of whether or not God exists poses a profound problem. It is important that I make a permanent impression on you this evening.

Throughout the ages and to this day, people have longed eagerly for love, ideals, happiness and peace that are true, eternal and unchanging. Yet people, who are apt to change their attitudes and values, cannot achieve these ideals. The current world situation clearly illustrates this. If there is an absolute, eternal, unique and unchanging God, we need to know the origin of true love, true ideals, true peace and true happiness that derives from a new viewpoint about this God. We can usher in a new world of peace and happiness only when we have clarified our view of God, of life and of the material world from God’s perspective.

What is the problem here? It is that, even if God is absolute, it is impossible for Him to achieve love, ideals, happiness or peace by Himself. Love, ideals, peace and happiness are words that are not realized in isolation. They can be achieved only with an object partner. Therefore, even in the case of the absolute God, unless He has an object partner, He cannot achieve the absolute love, absolute ideals, absolute happiness or absolute peace that He desires so very much.

Based on this viewpoint, what being could appear before that absolute God as His object partner? We can think only of human beings. Until now, we did not know that human beings alone possess the value of the object partner who can achieve God’s ideals, the object partner who can realize God’s true love, and the object partner who can complete God’s happiness and peace.

God is the subject partner and human beings are the object partners. We need to understand that we are beings of infinite value, because we human beings are the object partners before the God who can be the King of true love, true ideals and true peace.

God desires for us to be better than He is

I would like to ask you: When you were young and you were about to choose your spouse, if you are a man and you were about to choose your wife, did you want someone who was inferior to you or someone who was better than you? When asked this question, anyone among you, regardless of who you are, will answer that you wanted someone who was better than you.

Furthermore, if there is a couple and their beloved child is about to be born, would any parent wish for their child to be inferior to them? There would not be such a parent anywhere. It is the desire of each person’s original human nature that one’s spouse or one’s child be better than he or she is. Since human beings feel this way, whom do they resemble? We cannot deny that human beings are in all respects resultant beings and not causal beings. If human beings wish for their spouse or their children to be better than they, whom would they take after in this desire? The obvious conclusion is that we have such a desire because we resemble God, who is the causal Being.

Today many people think of themselves as being worthless. There are many people who regard themselves as no better than animals, saying, “I have no special value at all.” The one thing I hope you will remember today is that God wishes for you to be better than He is. If you think about this once you return home, I am sure that you will consider this to be an important discovery. I believe that only when we recover our original value as dignified human beings can the path that leads to the world of true love, true ideals, true happiness and true peace open. On the contrary, most theologians until now have believed that the Creator and the creation cannot stand on equal footing.

We say that God is love. And we know Him to be an ideal God. However, what could He achieve by being ideal all by Himself? Can you be happy by yourself? Can you have peace and freedom all by yourself? In this regard, we are in the state we are in because we lost our original value. If we fully possessed our original value, without a doubt we would have become human beings who could be elevated by God. Because we still have this original nature latent in us, through which we can restore our original value, we desire to become the best possible object partner or subject partner.

Even among fallen human beings, is there anyone who wishes for the object partner of their love to exist for one year, or ten, and then disappear or change? Love and love’s object partner are meant to be eternal and unchanging. We desire unchanging and absolute love from an absolute and unique higher level. If human beings, who have lost their original value due to the Fall, ask for such love, could God, the eternal, unchanging, unique and absolute Being, want the object partner of His love to exist for only a little while and then disappear? Certainly not! Since God is eternal, our most obvious and logical conclusion is that He desires for us human beings, who are the object partners of His love, to be eternal as well.

Please understand clearly this pivotal conclusion, namely, that our life has to be eternal. Only then can the statement, “Humankind is the most precious existence in all of creation,” be fulfilled. Our life needs to be eternal, unchanging and absolute. Why do human beings need to be unique beings? You need to understand that because God is the subject partner, human beings, who are the object partner of His love, ideals and happiness, also need to be like Him.

Now you understand that only when there is a relationship between a subject partner and an object partner can the realization of God’s ideal, the world of love and happiness, the world of peace and true freedom, become possible. Now you understand with certainty the concept of subject partner and object partner.

The creation of heaven and earth and the cause of the Fall

Until now, we have not considered the significance of the ideal origin of the creation. What does the word “creation” mean? It implies investing everything. In order to actualize an idea, you need to invest your own energy, which corresponds to that idea. Existence begins from the act of investing.

When God considered how to design the relationship between the subject partner and the object partner, He had only two choices. One was to make the object partner live for the sake of the subject partner, Himself, and the other was to create His object partner, human beings, and to live for their sake. This was the point at which God had to establish the foundation and ideal origin of creation.

If God, who is the subject partner, one day said that all beings, who are His object partners, must obey Him absolutely and live only for the sake of their subject partner, what would happen? In the case of the relationship between a man and a woman, where the man is the subject partner and the woman the object partner, if the man said to the woman, “Live for the sake of your subject partner,” what would happen? Their way to unity would go off course.

However, if God, the King of wisdom, were to say, “Live for the sake of the object partner,” every couple would be able to unite as one. For this reason, we now need to understand that the ideal origin of the creation of the universe cannot be established by telling others to live for your sake; instead it is established by telling others to live for the sake of their object partners.

Then what is the Fall? Human beings are meant to exist for God, and God is meant to exist for human beings. God established this principle by which they exist for the sake of each other. However, the Fall occurred when human beings went against this principle and began to center on themselves. In other words, they tried to create a position for themselves in which everything would live for their sake, centered on themselves. That is the point where the Fall originated. In short, the application of the principle of the heavenly way began to fall apart.

The principle of existing for the sake of others

In spite of that, if human beings had taken after God, if God had been able to educate them and if they had lived for the sake of God, the realization of the ideal world would have been possible. Unfortunately, human beings did not do so and instead, centered on themselves, emphasized their identity as separate from God; then the Fall took place. The Bible clearly describes this.

Therefore, if we were to draw a formal conclusion now, it would be the principle that all ideal created beings exist for the sake of others. The model is true parents; parents who are born for their children, who live for their children and who would die for their children. Such parents are parents of true love and true ideals. They are the parents of true happiness and the subject of true peace for their children. What would true filial children be like? They would be born for their parents and not for themselves, live for their parents and not for themselves, and would give their lives for their parents.

Then what is the purpose behind a man coming into being? It is not for himself. He came into being for a woman. When a woman dresses in nice clothes and puts cosmetics on her face, for whom is she doing so? Is there any woman who does that for herself? She does so because of a man. The purpose of the birth of a woman is a man. They exist for one another, so the moment they think that they were born for themselves, problems arise.

Then what is an ideal husband like? Would an ideal husband say that his wife must always live for his sake? No. Where can you find a true husband and a true wife? In the case of the man, only when he knows that he was born for his wife, is living for his wife and is ready to die for his wife, can his wife say, “Oh! He is my ideal husband and the eternal and unchanging subject partner of my love.” Therefore, only a wife with such a husband can claim, “I am a happy wife.” And we truly can say that only such a family can be a family of peace.

On the other hand, we know only too well that, if a woman’s husband says that she has to live for his sake, she will be unhappy. Based on this viewpoint, we have to praise God as the King of wisdom, for instituting this principle of existing for the sake of others as the origin of the creation of the universe.

Here we have reached one conclusion. At this point we can establish the formula that only where one exists for the sake of others can true love, true ideals, true happiness and true peace begin. If God has established such a formula in the creation of the universe, through this formula alone can the love, the ideals, the happiness and the peace desired by God become possible. Otherwise, obviously we have to conclude that they cannot come about.

Patriots, great men and women, and saints live for the greatest cause

If you ask what a true patriot is, by applying this formula the answer would be that only someone who is born for the nation, lives for the nation, does everything for the nation and its people, and who would die for the nation can be a patriot. We know very well that Koreans consider someone like General Yi Sun-sin a patriot. If you were to rank such people, those who live more for the sake of others would be of higher rank. Therefore, even a person in a miserable situation who kept his or her integrity and cared more for the sake of others would be a patriot on a higher level than others. Based on the formula, this conclusion is logical.

In the course of history until now many great men, great women and saints have come and gone. If you were to ask who is the greatest and most honorable among them, we could find the answer right away by applying this formula. That person would be someone who was born for humanity, and lived and died for humanity while pleading for them to be blessed instead of blaming them. That person would be truly the greatest saint in history.

I know that many among you are not Christians; you believe in other religions. Let us take a moment to find out who Jesus Christ was. He did not come to this earth for himself. He came for humankind and for God. Moreover, he did not live for his own sake; instead he lived for the sake of God and humanity. If there were one person who fulfilled one hundred percent the standard of living for the sake of others, in good times and in bad, in accordance with God’s heavenly laws, that person would be none other than Jesus Christ. For this reason, God had no choice but to protect Jesus and develop Christianity. Therefore, Christianity became a global religion, both in spirit and in reality.

The Bible stresses living for the sake of others

Jesus’ words are very clear, when we analyze them. We need to know that he was disclosing a great heavenly principle when he said he came “not to be served, but to serve.” (Matt. 20:28) In other words, he came to live for the sake of others, not to ask others to live for his sake. Since Jesus’ life was anchored in God’s ideal, the origin of all forms of existence, we need to realize that Jesus preached about this origin and followed a life course that was in complete accord with this origin.

Despite the great volume of the Bible’s sixty-six books in the Old and New Testaments, they can be summed up by the phrase, “Live for the sake of others.” We did not understand until now the paradoxical reasoning behind the idea that those who wish to go up will go down, and those who wish to go down will go up. This is certainly the truth in light of the principled origin of the creation.

I am aware that there are many people who do not know much about the spirit world. Thanks to God’s special grace, I have had opportunities to experience the spirit world thoroughly. What does the structure of that world look like? Who can go to the kingdom of heaven? Who is allowed to go near the throne of God? Those who have lived only for their own sake cannot go there. Since God Himself, who is both the ideal Origin and central Being of creation, lives for the universe, and since He lives as the central Being of the principle of living for the sake of others, the structure of the kingdom of heaven is simple. Our obvious conclusion is that it is a place that can be entered only by those who live for the sake of others.

The place where God, the Lord of the universe, dwells is our original homeland, the original world. How can you learn to be in accord with the law of the original homeland? It is through religion. What, then, would be the mission of religion? God’s Will for religious believers is not to live only for the sake of their own religious denomination, as do sectarians. Even if it means transcending itself, a religious denomination needs to be able to live for the sake of God and for the sake of humanity. Instead of living for one’s own church and fighting for one’s own church, a religious denomination ought to fight against Satan and direct its course for the sake of humanity.

What makes a true religion?

For this reason, today’s religion is a training ground where you practice to live according to the law of the original homeland, in order to equip yourself to return there. For this reason, since the onset of history, the many religions that followed God’s Will practiced self-denial. Until now, we did not understand why we were told to sacrifice ourselves and serve others. This is because the original world is the original homeland where one exists for the sake of others. Therefore, in order to go to that world, you need to train and prepare. In this regard, the higher the level of a religion, the more it emphasizes the need for sacrifice and service. This attests to the fact that God has continued to carry out His providence throughout the course of history.

Then what makes a true religion? The answer is simple. A true religion is one that follows God’s Will. What is God’s Will? It is to save the universe and to save the world. Christians need to know this. God’s Will is to save the world. This world needs to be saved, even if it means sacrificing Christianity. This is the Will of God. The original mission of Christianity is to fulfill God’s Will. In order to achieve His Will, Christianity needs to fulfill the responsibility of bringing salvation to humanity. Otherwise, it will be judged and will not be allowed to go the way it is destined to go. I have looked into this and found it to be true.

Where can we find the true religion? It is a religion that can sacrifice its own nation, its own denomination or its own church for humanity. Such a religion will not perish. What do we need to determine? You need to know that we can differentiate what is true and what is false based on the principle of who lives more for the sake of the nation and humanity.

The reason for the principle of living for the sake of others

Why did God have no choice other than to establish the principle of living for the sake of others? I shall elaborate on this question. Let’s say you owed a favor to someone who was truly devoted to you. In that case, would you wish to pay back only fifty percent, or would you wish to pay back more than one hundred percent of what you owed? What would your original nature want to do in this case? Without a doubt, your original mind would desire to pay back more than one hundred percent. Because we have an original mind and can follow it, it is possible for us to be saved.

You need to know the reason why God, the King of wisdom, had no choice but to establish this principle of living for the sake of others. When you live for the sake of others, you live eternally and you also prosper. And thereupon you can develop and grow. When you owe a favor, you pay it back, and it is utterly impossible to pay back just exactly what you owe. Your original mind desires to pay back more and spurs you on to truly devote your life to do so. You need to know that it is because you have such a heart that you can go to the kingdom of heaven.

What is the second reason that God had no choice but to establish the principle of living for the sake of others? For example, let us say that there were eight family members in your family. If among those eight, the youngest child lived more for the sake of the family than anyone else, be it father or mother, or brothers or sisters, to what position would this youngest member advance? As time passed, everyone would think more and more highly of this child, and this son or daughter ultimately would emerge as the central figure.

The logic taught by today’s religions may seem paradoxical, yet if you were to follow this principle, you would see that as you lived more and more for the sake of others, you would become the central figure on a higher and higher level. How can you become the central figure? Since God exists for the sake of the entire universe, a person who lives for the sake of others comes to resemble God. Therefore, it is valid to say that He will install the one who resembles Him as the central figure in His stead. When you become an object partner who truly lives for the sake of a subject partner, who in turn truly lives for the sake of the object partner, you naturally become a central figure.

A significant problem in today’s politics and philosophy is the relationship between rulers and ruled. Until now, the solution to this issue posed a dilemma. However, we can solve it easily. Human beings in the contemporary world think it is a disgrace to stand in the position of living more for the sake of others and of being ruled and dominated by a central figure. They say, “I would rather die than be under someone else’s dominion!”

They don’t know what they are saying. We miss knowing how happy it is to be under the complete authority and rule of a person who truly lives for our sake.

Since God exists as the central figure of the universe, when you go to the spirit world, the longer you are under His dominion, be it for thousands or more years, the more you will come to know happiness. It becomes greater and greater. Until now we have been unaware of this, and also that if there is a person who truly can rule over us for our sake, we can bring about true peace. We need to understand that whoever lives for the sake of others becomes the central figure, and that by becoming the central figure they can build a completely united environment.

What is the third reason that God established the principle of living for the sake of others? Until now, when you thought of “love,” it was easy to think of it as “my love.” When you spoke of “love,” you thought of it as your own love. Where does love come from? Love does not come from me. Ideals also do not come from me. You need to know that love and ideals, which are more precious than life and more valuable than anything else, cannot come from me. They come from the object partner. This is true even for God.

We did not know that the object partner is so precious. Where do love and ideals that are more precious than life come from? They come from my object partner, not from me. We need to know that this is another reason that God established the principle of living for the sake of others. We must bow our heads in humility.

Heaven’s strategy to unite the church

This Mr. Moon, who carries the name of the Lord of the Second Coming, has suffered most severely as a leader. Then what kind of church is this Unification Church? It is simple. The name “Unification Church” suggests that you are trying to unite the church. Can you unite the church? Since their division, the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church passed through a history of nine hundred and fifty years, and until now they have been unable to reunite. The Protestants divided into more than four hundred denominations. These churches have fought against one another for hundreds of years. Think of the idea of uniting them! You may even think that Mr. Moon of the Unification Church has gone a little crazy. Nonetheless, my conclusion is that it is simple. By what means can it be possible? It can be possible through the principle of living for the sake of others.

Based on this reasoning, even though I was subjected to all kinds of attacks and slander by the other existing churches during the last thirty years, I stayed quiet. It was not because I was dumb. I walked my way silently, without saying a word, because I knew that the heavenly law follows a brutal and harsh principle. I needed to go my way as God and Jesus would.

I became aware that Heaven’s strategy is to be struck first and then to make a demand. For instance, if Satan murdered a virtuous, high-level Christian, God could ask for compensation that amounted to hundreds of times greater value. Even if all existing churches came together to oppose the Unification Church, if the Unification Church were blameless, they would have to compensate God for what they had done. This is logical.

We need to understand that God is yearning for the appearance of the one person, the one organization, the one people and the one nation that can go beyond the individual and the family and the tribe, people, nation, world and, furthermore, the universe, and live absolutely for the sake of God. Faced with the Will of God, who is searching everywhere, the Unification Church of today is endeavoring and struggling to advance to such a position. I hope you will remember us as such an organization.

We can conclude that through this step-by-step principle and formula the realization of our ideals can be possible. The husband needs to live for his wife, the wife for her husband, and the parents need to live for their children. Furthermore, the family then lives for the tribe and the relatives. Moreover, the tribe lives for the people. And the nation, instead of prioritizing itself and trying to bring other nations in the world to submission, needs to say that it will live for the sake of the world, even if it means sacrificing itself. You have to know that God is looking for such a nation.

The principle that makes the realization of the ideal possible

There is no special law set aside to protect a dictator or a dictatorial empire. You need to know that when a nation prioritizes itself, and tries to tread over innumerable peoples and nations and says that others must live for its own sake, that nation is a dictatorial state and the enemy of God.

As you know, today’s communism reached a decisive turning point in 1957, when the relationship between the Soviet Union and communist

China began to break down. The communism in both countries began to fall apart because the Soviet Union asserted what it called world communism but it was solely for the sake of the Slavic people. Because the Soviet leader’s dream of a communism based on the Soviet Union as the eternal superpower state, this communism will break down. However, if the communism of the Soviet Union had been an ideology of sacrificing itself for the sake of world communism, communist China and the Soviet Union would not have split up. The Soviet Union found it impossible to establish a belief system with a standard transcending nationalism. Therefore, it has begun to break down.

From a viewpoint based on God’s Will, how can today’s United States go forward as a leading democratic nation? If the United States is indeed the superpower of democracy, it needs to sacrifice itself in order to lead democracy to live for the sake of the world. However, instead it remains in a position of living solely for its own sake, even when this means abandoning the world. And we know this to be the reason that the United States is suffering in today’s miserable situation.

From this viewpoint, where is the worldview and the ideal that can guide the world in the future? If there were a nation and a people that could transcend itself, that would save the world even if it had to sacrifice itself in the process and endure a miserable situation, a time surely would come when the world would need that nation, sometime before the twenty-fifth century or the thirtieth century. When that time came, it would be the nation that would guide the world.

Today’s Korea also cannot put Korea first. I believe that the direct path that the Korean people of today, living in misery, must find and follow is that which will establish a Korea living for the sake of Asia, for the sake of the world and, furthermore, for the sake of God.

In this regard, the Unification Church is fighting with communism head on, ready to sacrifice itself if necessary. We are working hard to prevent the downfall of the democratic world, and we are prepared to make extreme sacrifices if needed. When an organization stands on this solemn principle, by sacrificing itself if and as necessary, God will surely be with it.

Who would have thought that Jesus, who died young, in his thirties, accused of being a traitor to his people on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, possessed the building blocks to create a nation through which the democratic world could be constructed which, in turn, could lead the entire world? My life followed the same logic. For this reason the Unification Church is continuing to pioneer its path in silence.

I taught the members of the international task force who have come here from twenty-five nations around the world, “You have to love the world more than your own nations!” God has laid out this path, and a true religion has to follow it. So they have come all the way to the land of Korea today in order to create a movement of loving the Koreans more than their own people. I hope you will remember this.

Let us head toward the ideal world

God yearns for a nation that can take responsibility for the world. You need to know that He is longing for a church that can sacrifice itself for the sake of the world. If you were to ask Him, “Heavenly Parent, do you wish to be the God of Christianity or the God of the Unification Church?” He would say that He wants to be neither the God of Christianity nor the God of the Unification Church. He wishes to be the God of the world.

A group that walks a path for the sake of others on a higher level is exemplary; therefore it can last eternally and prosper, become the center of its environment, and thus come to have authority automatically. You need to know that, from that place, one can possess the eternal love and eternal ideal that come from Heaven. That is the formula for the husband to live for his wife, for the wife to live for her husband, for the parents to live for their children, and for the family to live for the tribe.

In this way we find the one formula that can encompass the view of life for the individual, the nation, the universe, and even the view of life for God. It is the ideal for the family to live for the tribe, for the tribe to live for the people, for the people to live for the nation, for the nation to live for the world, for the world to live for God, and for God to live for us. Only when you are able to say, “The great God and the love of the great God exist for me,” can peace, happiness, ideals and true love be realized. To state this conclusion differently: What belongs to me would belong to my wife; what belongs to the parents would belong to the family; what belongs to the family would belong to the tribe; what belongs to the tribe would belong to the people; what belongs to the people would belong to the nation; what belongs to the nation would belong to the world; what belongs to the world would belong to God; and what belongs to God would belong to me.

The world where such a thing is possible, where every entity lives for the sake of others, whether as an individual, as a family, as a society, as a nation or as the world, and where everyone lives for the sake of others, no matter where they go, is the most wonderful ideal that we all yearn for. This ideal world has the true love, true peace, true happiness and true freedom that we long for.

When such a world becomes real, having achieved unity based on God, it has to be the kingdom of heaven on earth. You need to understand that fallen humanity is advancing toward such a world, a world that will realize the new future of humankind, the world of new hope. I will conclude my speech by saying that I hope you will remember this for a long time to come.

Thank you very much.

A Life Devoted to Others

April 27, 1991

National Theater, Montevideo, Uruguay
Welcoming Assembly for Rev. Sun Myung Moon at the
Tenth Anniversary of CAUSA

Respected guests, members of CAUSA Uruguay, ladies and gentlemen: I am most honored to be with you here in Montevideo, your beautiful capital of Uruguay. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the citizens of Uruguay who have so warmly welcomed me, especially to those who prepared such a wonderful occasion today.

I would also like to congratulate you who have devoted yourselves to your homeland Uruguay for ten years now, culminating in this celebration of the tenth anniversary of the foundation of CAUSA Uruguay. Personally, I am so moved that I could visit this country that is located at the center of South America and that plays such an important role among the countries of Latin America.

Technological standardization for the construction of a great world This is the first time for me to visit your beautiful country, although I made a tour of various nations in South America twenty-six years ago. Since then, I have never forgotten Latin America, and I have worried about the future of this region for years. I have been deeply concerned in particular about the spiritual salvation of the people of Latin America.

We are now on the threshold of the five hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of the Americas, and we are at an historic and pivotal point where we have to think seriously about the origin of this continent’s culture, our present reality and our future.

I believe it is not by chance, but as a result of God’s providence, that the Americas remained unknown to Europeans until the end of the fifteenth century. God had prepared these continents for a role in His providence.

Many of the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic Ocean and settle in the New World were deeply devoted people, seeking a land where they could freely worship God and bring the message of Christ to the native peoples of the New World. It was certainly God’s desire that unity and friendship would blossom between the native peoples of the Americas and the European settlers.

The New World of America was supposed to have been a model of harmony under God for all people. However, this did not take place as God had hoped. Along with good people of devotion, many selfish people came to the New World. They abused the natives and took their wealth. Problems of slavery and racism added to these woes. As a result, God could not always bless the foundation of this new culture. In some cases, nations were established based on greed rather than on the model of Christian love. This unfortunate beginning developed into a tradition of selfishness and exploitation that remains to this day.

If Latin America wishes to be an example of reconciliation and peace in front of the world, it needs to abandon the customs of the past and make a new start. Since the day of its liberation from Spain and the other colonial powers, Latin America has nurtured a great dream of unity as a neighborhood of countries.

Simon Bolivar, with his idea of Patria Grande, Jose Artigas, who brought about the independence of Uruguay, and other Latin American patriots, all envisioned the unity of Latin America. Today all nations of the world are seeking greater unity through cultural, economic and political endeavors. It is clear that the vision of one world, with the Latin American dream as a precursor, is shining with ever-greater luster.

Sharing this vision, I have supported and promoted Latin America’s dream through organizations such as CAUSA, AULA, PWPA and the Global Summit. Through these organizations, for several years I have called many former presidents and prime ministers together. We have studied how to promote the cooperation and unity of all countries. It was for just this purpose that the former presidents of fourteen countries in Latin America met together under the auspices of AULA here in Montevideo in 1986.

Your homeland Latin America still has serious cultural, economic and political problems. Your effort to resolve them is required in order to build a peaceful and abundant future. Latin American countries have the same responsibility in the task of reforming this world as the various developed countries. For the establishment of the ideal world, distribution of technology and free exchange of ideas need to be extended to all nations.

The Unification Church is working for more rapid worldwide development in places such as China, Africa, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and your homeland, Latin America.

If Latin America is to show an example of harmony and peace to the world, the trend toward division and conflict has to be stopped and reversed. To this end, CAUSA is making a worldwide contribution in the field of ideas, offering a clear vision of the path that democratic systems have to take based on a solid foundation of moral and ethical values. CAUSA presents a moral perspective that can serve as the foundation to eliminate corruption and exploitation in democratic society.

These serious problems and others that face all humanity, such as ignorance, hunger and disease are products of deeper, underlying spiritual causes that need to be addressed urgently by responsible citizens everywhere. In this time of grave importance, we live in a moment of transition in human history. In the past, many movements in the fields of religion, culture and politics were founded upon noble ideals in pursuit of a better world. Despite great accomplishments, the movements and the institutions they established often departed from their originally intended ideals. Religious and cultural movements, political parties and social systems often fall into division, contradiction and disharmony within themselves, and even fight with one another.

In the world today, wrongful political and religious zeal and narrow mindedness still induce antagonism and hatred. Such are clearly not the desired objectives of people of faith and good conscience, and we must not bequeath such mistaken traditions to our descendants. Then what is the direction we ought to take? What is the proper tradition to bequeath?

God’s ideal of creation begins from the family

In order for us to understand more about the direction humanity has to take to achieve harmony and peace, it is first necessary to understand God’s ideal for the creation.

For God, who is absolute and eternal, why was creation necessary? What could it have been that God absolutely needed? Was it material goods, knowledge or power? These are available to God anytime, and as He wants to, He can manage them. True love alone is what God cannot create by Himself. This is because true love can be achieved only with a reciprocal partner. Without a counterpart, even God cannot realize love. This is the very reason God needed the world of creation.

Then what is true love? As we know, Jesus Christ sacrificed his life to love his enemies. This is true love, which is the love you give to others even if you have to sacrifice your life, a love you give without any thought of reward. Therefore, only through true love, like that of Jesus Christ, can we obtain eternal life and eventually become citizens of the heavenly kingdom.

As we observe the creation, the mineral, plant and animal worlds, we see that all things are created to participate in relationships of subject partner and object partner pairs that can respond to each other in harmony, centering on love. Likewise there is a harmonious love between a husband and wife for each other and for their children. Such relationships are found on each level of the creation.

Humankind is the center of all things, created to be on the highest level, the closest to God. We are the partners of God’s love. Thus men and women are the object partners of God’s true love, and without them, God’s goal of true love cannot be accomplished. God established true love, which is the ideal for the creation, as the highest and absolute value.

Even the absolute God likes to surrender absolutely to true love. Since even God is this way, all people and all things are drawn to true love. From this perspective, we can readily see how high a value each person has, as God’s own object partner of true love. God initiated the ideal of creation with love for the sake of others. He gives and gives, without keeping any tally. In this way, God realizes true love. God began creation investing without limit. Likewise, all people are created to harmonize, exist and live eternally through God’s principle of investing for the sake of others. Man came into being for the sake of woman, as did woman for man.

In God’s ideal for the creation, which is giving true love, both man and woman are born to love and become husband and wife. By doing so, they become the object partner of God’s vertical love. This is the very purpose of their existence. God, who is the origin of true love and the parent of humankind, wished to give this absolute and unchanging true love as an inheritance to human beings. Since in true love perfect harmony and unity are realized, God’s true love can be perfectly bequeathed to His children, who are His partners. Not only that, because of the attributes of true love, God also bestows upon man and woman the right to live together with Him and the right to share absolute value with Him.

Parents want to see their children become more successful and better than they are. We also know that before they marry, all men and women seek a spouse who is better than themselves. By this same principle, God created human beings as His children and gave His blessing to them to become better than God Himself! This is true love. From this perspective, God made human beings to live with Him as His children and to have the same value as God Himself.

Furthermore, God made human beings, centering on His true love, to be able to share their inheritance among themselves, live together and have equal value. Thus in the ideal world all human beings, centering on God’s true love, would possess true individual ideals and happiness and would transmit these to their spouse and offspring. This was the world of God’s originally intended ideal.

Why we need to seek True Parents

Today’s world, however, is far from the world God intended. Contrary to its original purpose, the world has degenerated into a world of hell, full of sin, struggle and pain. In religious terms, this sick, broken human world is called the fallen world. To bring this fallen world to its originally planned condition and order, God wages a dispensation for salvation. Thus I have been teaching that God’s work of salvation is the work of restoration, which is synonymous with the work of re-creation.

God’s purpose lies in the transformation of this world into the original ideal family, and beyond that to the establishment of the ideal world. This centers on God’s true love and the worldview of true parentship. When we understand the mission of the Messiah as a mission of true parents to realize God’s love in this world, we understand that we too are called by God to pursue and accomplish this mission. The mission of the Messiah is thus the cosmic mission that all men and women of faith ought to undertake.

As described in the Bible, Adam and Eve, the first son and daughter of God, were to grow in God’s true love and receive the Blessing of marriage and give birth to sinless children. Thus they, like God, would have become True Parents and could enter heaven. In this way, the world was to become the world of heaven on earth, where God’s ideal family was to expand to realize a world where only God would reign.

However Adam and Eve engaged in illicit love before becoming mature. The archangel became Satan. Adam and Eve became evil ancestors and the world of spiritual death began. The world has become one where people spring from an evil lineage. Satan became the god of licentiousness, and God hates licentiousness the most. Because of licentiousness, the America and Europe of today face the fate that befell Sodom and Gomorrah and Rome. The world needs to find the True Parent who can liberate all people from Satan’s love, life and lineage. This person is the Messiah.

By Adam and Eve failing to fulfill their responsibility, God lost His hoped-for true children, and human beings failed to realize their potential as true parents. The Fall caused the loss of the true being who could have realized the true love of God and the ideal of True Parents. Thus the Messiah comes with the awesome task to stand as the True Parent, uproot the false love that was implanted by the human ancestors, who became false parents, and realize the ideal world of creation.

In a family, the relationship among brothers and sisters exists only on the premise of common parents. Thus, before this world can enter into the realm of true love and true family, the True Parents’ position first has to be established. To help fulfill this very purpose, God has called upon me. For this objective I have poured out my entire life.

The Unification churches I am deploying worldwide, the projects I have sponsored covering all fields, ecumenical, academic, educational, media, technical, business, financial and so forth, were all envisioned with this one purpose in mind. I have suffered persecution and confronted death throughout my life with only one purpose in mind: to live with the heart of True Parents, loving people of all colors and cultures in the world more than I love my own parents who gave birth to me, or my own brothers and sisters.

God is calling every human being to walk this same path of the Messiah, loving God and all humankind with true, unconditional love and giving all of oneself for the sake of God’s eternal ideal of love, peace and harmony. This path of love is a universal path for all men and women of faith and good conscience to follow. God wishes for each of us to become a messiah for our community. With the heart of a true parent, each person has to love God and his or her community. This is the mission God calls every man and woman to fulfill.

Urgency for the establishment of true values

Presently, we are experiencing the winding down of the Cold War and a new era of peacemaking between East and West, North and South. Overcoming confrontations and divisions, we are heading toward the age of unification through harmony, as one world family of brothers and sisters. The decade leading up to the year 2000 is a precious period that God has allowed us for returning to the originally intended world. It is a golden opportunity.

I have proposed already establishing the Federation for World Peace, and thousands of leaders in the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries are responding enthusiastically. I have also established the Interreligious Federation for World Peace, which is actively supported by more than eight hundred of the most prominent religious leaders in the world.

Many people have devoted themselves to the search for true unity and the achievement of one world, yet true world peace still eludes us. Everyone wants peace. We must first know what is necessary to bring it about. The key lies not in one’s spouse, sons and daughters, neighbors, nation or world; it is within one’s self. It depends on whether one can become a harmonious being, where mind and body have achieved harmony and unity centering on the “original mind.”

A person’s original mind is the most precious gift from God. Even compared to the entire universe, the original mind has more value. When a person becomes a harmonious being centering on the original mind, he or she comes to have the heart of God and True Parents. They can begin to live fully for the sake of others, and consistently lead a life where true love is the center. Such a life is one in which an individual can achieve true peace to enjoy happiness and the unification of the world. Beginning with true love, which is the standard of eternal, unchanging value, we have to establish the unification of mind and body and the interconnectedness and unity of the world, which presently is so divided by worldviews both spiritual and materialistic.

These are concerns of all conscientious people. The role of religion, politics and culture in realizing ultimate world peace is therefore indispensable. Accordingly, all men and women of all fields of human endeavor now need to begin to tear down the walls of sectarianism. We need to prepare to act with unified power in accordance with God’s desires for the greater goal of the realization of world peace.

Now is the time to reflect upon the fact that we have not contributed enough for world peace. Now is the time for each person to develop true love, which is the origin and basic element of world peace.

We all have to come to the point of interacting with each other with true love, knowing that this is the shortest route to attaining world peace. Any one of us who insults or is hostile to our neighbor cannot contribute to world peace or God’s providence.

The world of today is awash with problems. To stop the rush toward corruption and immorality and engrain in people the way of goodness, we need to establish a true sense of values and a corresponding standard of universal morality. We have to call together all people of conscience and deep faith and educate them to be the workers of true love of our eternal God, workers who can practice the true love of God and True Parents. Regardless of age or gender, so many people throughout the world today are starving for true love. In other words, they are waiting for true people to emerge who are able to live for the sake of others.

If we can establish the tradition of true love, all religions will be united, God and all humanity will be united, and our new hope, God’s originally intended ideal of creation, will be fulfilled. Then let us push forward with establishing the ideal world, which Jesus also sought. Let us show the world and our young people that a new age of peace, an age of true families, and an age of the blossoming of true humanity is dawning.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude again to you for so warmly welcoming my family and me. May God bless you, your family and your country, Uruguay!

Thank you very much.

The Fundamental Principle
of True Peace

March 27, 1994
Lotte Hotel, Seoul, Korea

Second World Peace Conference of the Federation for World Peace

Dear President Mikhail Gorbachev, distinguished co-chairmen, honored heads of state and government, respected ladies and gentlemen: I would like to express my deep gratitude to all of you for attending the Second World Peace Conference of the Federation for World Peace.

Solutions for serious global issues

As we enter the age of internationalization and globalization in the twenty- first century, we are confronted with the urgent task of overcoming a large number of difficult obstacles to world peace. I have an absolute conviction that our global problems can only be resolved through a process that addresses their fundamental root. I have dedicated my entire life to the pursuit of the Will of Heaven based on this conviction. Please allow me to share a few of its core elements with you.

Our world today has become evil, filled with conflict, confusion and hatred. This is true of individuals, families, societies and nations. The root cause of so much wickedness is the conflict between the mind and body of individual human beings, a conflict that started at the beginning of human history and has been perpetuated throughout the ages.

As embodiments of discord, individuals naturally produce families fraught with conflict, countries torn by strife and a world divided by struggle. What is the result? The result is an evil, hellish world. For Heaven, it is the most abominable of all possible worlds. The origin of this ongoing conflict lies in the relationship between two individuals, man and woman, who are themselves torn by internal conflict.

Therefore, the solution to our complex global difficulties lies in creating unity between mind and body and in harmonizing the relationship between man and woman. By accomplishing these two goals, we will have found the solution to the problems of the entire world.

Why have mind and body come into conflict with each other? Why have man and woman been unable to establish harmony and unity? It is my firm conviction that through .the Fall, which took place at the dawn of human history, the mind and body of human beings became divided and strife emerged between man and woman. The human world became evil, with Satan at its center.

The first step in solving the world’s problems then is to find God. The second is to cast out the evil Satan. The third is for men and women to accomplish the unity of mind and body.

God expelled fallen Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden when they left God and became husband and wife centering on Satan. When they bore children while in that state, humankind inherited the lineage of Satan. Their lineage was corrupted.

Through adultery the archangel, who became Satan, stole the intended bride of Heaven. It is a principle of Heaven that whenever a relationship of love is established, whether false love or true love, ownership is established from that point. Because of this principle, the human ancestors came under the ownership of Satan.

Originally, the mind and body were to have become one, centering on God’s true love. However, before the true love of God had a chance to be perfected within the human mind, the mind became bound by Satan’s false love. That enabled Satan to take root in the body.

Originally the mind was to exert a positive polarity over the body, however due to the Fall the body formed another positive pole, repelling the original mind and finally dominating it.

For that reason, God has been working to project the power of true love into the human mind, in order to bring about the absolute subjugation of the body now engulfed in false love. Only when they are unified through true love, can the mind and body return to the state where God dwells within them.

We need to obey the commands of the conscience

Through the Fall, our ancestors became false ancestors. This created the need for religion and for a Messiah. The task of religion and the purpose of the coming of the Messiah are to break down the hell of false love, false life and false lineage, which have given rise to false individuals, false families, false societies, false states and a false world. Religion and the Messiah must guide us back to the original world of true love, true life and true lineage, the world of true parents with God at the center.

God is a relational being and He, too, feels loneliness. He created the heavens and the earth centering on a relational ideal and His reason was to find true love. Look at the created world. You will see that it is structured in pairs: the mineral world, the plant world and the animal world are all arranged in subject-object partner relationships as a way of providing ideal models for true love between human beings.

True love is the reason women are born for the sake of men and men for the sake of women. Solutions to global problems become possible only when our minds and bodies, and when men and women, come to live for the very purpose of becoming one through true love. True love can be found only in a situation where a person exists for the sake of his or her relational complement. Satan’s love is self-centered whereas God’s love is other-centered. These two kinds of love are in total contradiction to each other.

For our fallen bodies to be free from the satanic world, we need to know absolutely that the invisible God is our ideal subject partner of true love, and we need to achieve the position of a second, visible God as His absolute object partners. Our minds and bodies must be united by means of the invisible God and by means of true love, and we must honor and respect our heart and conscience just as we honor and respect God Himself.

We can recover our original self only by absolutely submitting to the commands of our conscience. God is the Parent of parents, the Teacher of teachers, and the Master of masters. This forms the basis for the “three subject partner’s principle” that encompasses heaven and earth.

It is only through the conscience that these three can form absolute unity and fulfill the three subject partner’s principle. Thus, the conscience is more important to us than our parents who gave us birth, more important than any teacher, and more important than the king of any country. Only when elevated to such a position can the conscience become an object of God’s love. The conscience needs no education about right and wrong. We have to give it absolute honor and obedience, just as we would honor and obey God.

There is nothing I do that my conscience does not know about; it sees everything. The conscience objects whenever the body schemes to do something wrong. Yet, because the power of selfish love was stronger than the power of the conscience from the time of the Fall, the body is able to drag the mind around wherever it chooses. This kind of problem would not exist if the human conscience had achieved perfection and had formed a relationship of true love with God in the garden of Eden.

Adam’s family in the garden of Eden was to be a family of true love, in accordance with God’s ideal. God created Adam and Eve so that they would give visible expression to every kind of invisible existence. God, man and woman were in a subject-object partner relationship centering on true love. He created the two ancestral human beings, Adam and Eve, with the expectation that they would become the substantial perfection of the ideal children, ideal brother and sister, ideal husband and wife, and ideal parents existing within God’s heart. God wanted the true love of children to be perfected in substantial form. He wanted to see His object partners of true love perfected as actual brothers and sisters in a family, as actual husband and wife and as actual parents.

The family is where we experience the four realms of heart

True love in a parent-child relationship is vertical, in a husband-wife relationship it is horizontal, and in a brother-sister relationship it is on a front- to-back axis. God wanted such a spherical ideal of true love. Unity is accomplished at one central point, where there is a convergence of the upper and lower hemispheres on the vertical axis, the right and left hemispheres on the horizontal axis, and the front and back hemispheres on the third axis. This point becomes the focus of centripetal force.

Four realms of heart—the love of the child, brother and sister, husband and wife, and parents—are perfected when a man and wife, each centered on God, are married and enter their first relationship of love. This is the central place where perfected love bears fruit. Marriage thus represents the synthesis of the virtues of heaven, earth and humankind and the perfection of all things vertical and horizontal, left and right, and front and back.

Accordingly, Adam and Eve as husband and wife, as God’s most beloved substantial object partners, were meant to be the second ancestors, after God. From that position they would stand as the second creators and would inherit everything that God feels. They would feel the joy of God in the positions of children, brother and sister, husband and wife and parents. Their joy as the second creators would be in the experience of bearing children by which they could experience the position of God, the first Creator.

From this perspective, God was the first Creator; Adam and Eve were to be the second creators; and the children of Adam and Eve were to be the third creators. The first, second, and third creators, God, Adam and Eve, and their children, would have established a formal pattern; a pattern that would have enshrined the fundamental principle that all humanity would follow.

From the perspective of Adam and Eve there would be connections between upper and lower (the parent-child relationship), left and right (the husband-wife relationship) and front and back (the brother-sister relationship). It would have led them to the perfection of their family. It would have been the united foundation of God, Adam and Eve and their children. As people approached God, they would accomplish the unity of mind and body and the unity of man and woman and they would form a stable foundation where peace, freedom, happiness and hope would converge, forming the fundamental basis of peace.

God intended that Adam and Eve, as second creators in the visible and substantial world, would participate in His act of creation by having children, who would be the third creators. Through this process, the family becomes the place in which the four realms of heart can be experienced generation after generation. The family is the base through which each form of true love can be brought to perfection. In this way, the family achieves the unity of God and human beings through love, and it serves as the starting point toward the perfection that enables us to establish true ownership in heaven and earth. The family is the origin from which we come to have children, brothers and sisters, husband or wife and parents. Only in such families can we find men and women who have accomplished mind-body unity, and only in such families can we find husbands and wives who have achieved the ideal unity between man and woman. Such families are the starting point for ideal parents. Here, too, we can see the creation of a model, centering upon true love, for the perfection of children, brothers and sisters, husband and wife and parents.

It was God’s ideal of creation that this model would expand, not only to the level of the nation and the world, but to the entire cosmos. Thus it is possible to create a nation that is patterned on the family, and a world and cosmos that are also patterned on the family.

The cosmos seeks families that perfect the four realms of heart

Accordingly, the model for children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives and parents, who represent the four realms of heart, can be found in the family, in the nation, in the world and in the cosmos. Since a nation contains many families and is larger than a family, families ought to exist for the sake of the nation. Since the world contains many countries, countries need to exist for the sake of other countries in the world. In similar fashion, the world exists for the sake of the larger cosmos. Finally, the cosmos exists for the sake of God, who is the greatest and most central existence.

Thus, when the standard of the perfected four realms of heart within the family is projected onto higher and higher levels, the ideal of unity becomes a reality. On that basis, we can enter a cosmos of peace, happiness and freedom. This is why we have a vital need for family harmony centering on the unity of mind and body and man and woman.

God too has been growing, you see. He created Adam and Eve as the substantiation of the ideal within His invisible heart, of son and daughter, brother and sister, husband and wife and father and mother. With Adam and Eve, God becomes a growing child, a brother and a sister, a husband and a wife, and finally a parent. As God establishes children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives and parents, God experiences His second self many times over. God unites them in true love, which brings boundless joy to Him.

Human beings are designed to give joy to God and to give joy to one another. We are all in the position of someone else’s child, sibling, spouse or parent. All human beings are members of families centering on the four realms of heart, which makes the family the foundation to experience the ideal realms of heart. We all have a longing to form families and the reason is that only those people who deeply experience and embody the four great realms of heart can become ideal human beings, capable of making oneness in heart with anyone in the kingdom of heaven on earth or in the spiritual realm.

This explains the consummate human desire to achieve mind-body unity and husband-wife unity. Unless we achieve this all-important mind- body unity, we are unqualified in all other aspects and cannot develop unity in a true family. We will fall away from our families, from our nation, from the world, from the universe and from God Himself. Only through our utmost effort to accomplish mind-body unity and family unity can we achieve perfection.

We have to know that we ourselves are God’s representatives. We are in the position of a second God. All people need to work together to establish the family into a realm of goodness and joy.

The kingdom of heaven begins with a couple united in true love Please realize that the position of husband and wife is the union between a son of God and a daughter of God, the union of a brother and sister within God’s family and the union of a father and mother. From the perspective of the four realms of heart, the position of husband and wife is the absolute goal of human life, through which we can actually achieve the perfection of our individual selves.

The husband, therefore, stands in the position that enables the wife to receive an ideal son of God, to receive an older brother of heaven, to receive a husband of heaven and to receive a father of heaven. This is also true of the wife in relation to her husband. Such husbands and wives bear children in a manner analogous to God’s act of creation, and they feel joy through experiencing their own growth in a substantial manner through their children.

God’s love is absolute. Accordingly, it is a principle of heaven that the relationship of husband and wife cannot be broken. Fallen human society has lost sight of this principle, and we have to be restored so that we may return to the original homeland. When such a restoration is accomplished, the Federation for World Peace will have fulfilled its purpose. At that point, the family-level heaven will become a nation-level heaven; the nation-level heaven will become a world-level heaven; and the world-level heaven will become the kingdom of heaven in the spirit world. This will be the point at which we will finally have achieved a world of peace.

The point at which a husband and wife marry and love each other with true love is the heavenly palace, which is the origin of the love, life and lineage of God and humankind. It is the starting point for the ideal of the kingdom of heaven on earth and in the spirit world. When children who are the fruit of such true love achieve perfect unity as husbands and wives, they form families living in attendance to God. This constitutes the base upon which peace and all ideals are established. Men and women, each the corresponding better half of the other, then become one body and as God’s object partner, perfect the ideal of love.

On the foundation of true love, God perfects humankind as an existence of unlimited value. When that is done, God, too, will see the perfection of true love, the fulfillment of the family ideal, the fulfillment of His own ideal for the creation and the cradle of eternal, ideal love. From the perspective of Adam and Eve’s family, God is the first ancestor; Adam and Eve are the second ancestors and their children are the third ancestors. Adam and Eve were meant to form a royal family with God at the center. God is in the position of grandparents; Adam and Eve are in the position of parents, and Adam and Eve’s offspring are in the position of children. In this manner, the original pattern of three generations within the family is established.

According to this original pattern, the grandparents are in the position of king and queen of the spirit world, representing God in the kingdom of heaven in heaven. They are to be honored and respected as if they were God. The parents are in the central position of king and queen of the family, representing the kingdom of heaven in the present world. They are to be honored and respected just as we would the king and queen of the present world. Children are in the position of princes and princesses within the family. They are to be loved as the ones standing to inherit the future kingdom of heaven on earth and in the spirit world.

In this way, the members of Adam and Eve’s family were to form a royal family with God at the center and live peacefully on earth until they moved into the heavenly, eternal world. Only in that heavenly world can human desire, freedom, aspiration, peace and happiness attain complete fulfillment. This is the purpose that humankind needs to fulfill.

The way to achieve world peace

As respected representatives from countries around the world, through tireless efforts each of you has devoted an important period in your life for the sake of your nation and the world. As a result of your sacrifices, humankind today enjoys conditions much better than what existed in the past. Still, the ideal world of freedom and peace, which is the fervent desire of all people, has not yet been achieved. Even at this hour, countless individuals in many places around the world are dying from hunger and pain as a result of conflicts and struggles among peoples, races and religions.

I have responded as a religious leader to God’s calling. I have lived my life for the purpose of saving humankind from war and sin and of establishing a world of peace. Out of this calling, I have acquired a conviction and daily philosophy regarding peace, which I call Head-wing Thought. In my address today, I have expressed a few elements of that conviction.

The perspective of Godism and Head-wing Thought is that world peace will not be achieved by means of political ideologies oriented toward power, nor by any initiative that relies on physical force. Peace will only be accomplished when all men and women share in God’s love and truth and put these into practice. This starts with the individual and expands to the family, society, nation and world to form one global family.

From this perspective, the founding purpose of the Federation for World Peace is to promote education and practices related to true peace as a means to realize peace in various societies, nations and the world. May all of us here perfect the family-level heaven and go on to play major roles in the accomplishment of world peace.

I pray that God’s blessing be upon each and every one of you.

Thank you very much.

A Truly Peaceful World

August 23, 1995
Lotte Hotel, Seoul, Korea
Third World Peace Conference

Honored chairman, distinguished former and current heads of state, ladies and gentlemen:

At the opening of the Third World Peace Conference today, I would like to express my deepest respect to you for coming to this historic event. It is a pleasure to take this opportunity to share my beliefs regarding true world peace.

Matters of world peace are of greater concern than ever before. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to you who, out of your desire to realize world peace, have traveled from afar and brought into being this magnificent conference. I would like to share with you members of the Federation for World Peace my activities these past few months.

Earnest advice for Central and South America

Recognizing that God has a will for Latin America, I embarked on a tour of twenty-three nations on that great continent. In each nation, I shared my beliefs with key leaders, and in eight of these nations I met the head of state to discuss matters related to world peace. The title of my tour was “True Family and I.”

While traveling around the continent; north, south, east and west, I meditated and prayed about this special part of the world. I considered how the nations that make up Latin America can achieve true peace and establish an ideal society. Clearly the continent has stunning and rich potential. There are seemingly unlimited resources in a rich and peaceful natural paradise of grand mountains and unspoiled nature. The mountains and jungles remind us of the original creation, the garden of Eden.

I envisioned glory-filled days that lie ahead in the Latin America of the twenty-first century. At each opportunity, I gave a single piece of advice. I said, “Please do not blindly follow in the footsteps of the developed nations. Do not repeat their errors in rushing to harness natural resources in the name of progress.” Why would I give this advice? It is because the so-called developed countries have not found the balance with nature and the happiness that humankind has wanted from its inception.

In the twenty-first century we will return to the original world

Let us take the United States as an example. I am someone who genuinely loves the United States. For the past twenty-five years, I have devoted myself to establish the foundation for world peace in that country. Although I have suffered persecution for my efforts to guide America in the right direction, my love for America and my belief in its vital role for world peace has not changed.

In the 1960s, when I first visited that land of opportunity, it seemed that the whole world wanted to be like America. We deeply admired the life depicted on television shows such as “Little House on the Prairie.” Come Sunday morning, the sounds of hymns were heard from all directions. Superman, a superhero of justice, was a symbol of the righteous American spirit, and city streets were thought to be spotless, in good order and beautiful. The whole world looked at America with respect in those days.

Yet if we look at America today, thirty years later, what do we see? It is a nation in decay, strewn with difficult problems they cannot solve. In the midst of this, moral decadence and increase in crime demand our close attention. Numerous, unimaginable acts, including murder, drug abuse, divorce, child molestation, gang violence and teenage pregnancy emanate from America today. As a person who loves that nation, I feel deeply hurt by what I see.

Yet this phenomenon is not limited to America. All of the developed countries at the end of the twentieth century are struggling with many of the same problems. Having reached the summit of consumer wealth and technological sophistication, the developed world is caught in the trap of materialism. With the mind and spirit obsessed by material wealth, our true essence as human beings is enslaved by selfish desires. The result is a collapse of true love. Although there is an abundance of material wealth and our cities are crowded with skyscrapers, the human mind has become desolate and dried up like a desert, and the oasis of true love is not to be found. The absence of true love is the breeding ground for selfishness.

The most helpless victim of this attitude is the world of nature. One of the themes of this peace conference is the restoration of the environment. We are abusing many of our resources, including our water supply. Even the atmosphere that protects our planet is affected by the misuse of natural resources. If this trend continues, the so-called benefits of materialistic civilization will lead to the earth’s self-destruction.

The most serious damage of all, however, is the destruction of the family as a basic building block for the nation. The family is the cell of society. If each of the tens of trillions of cells in our body is healthy, then the body is likewise healthy. Conversely, if the cells are weakened and destroyed, then the whole body will weaken and eventually stop functioning. Similarly, destruction of the true family system foretells the destruction of all humankind. Our society is charging toward a destination directly opposite to what was originally designed and created by God.

The twenty-first century is inevitably a time to return to the original world of God’s Will. A civilization placing the spirit and mind as subject partner is coming. The twenty-first century is only five years away. It is my sincere wish that the developing countries not follow in the footsteps of the so-called developed countries. Instead, they ought to use the developed countries’ experience as a lesson, and move directly into the world where spirit and mind are in control. Do not fall into a pit of nationalism and materialism. This is the message that I want to share with you in our time together today.

The Blessing of 360,000 couples is a celebration of world peace

We have reached a time when the world has no alternative but to change. In religious terms, we can say that we have reached “the Last Days” of humankind. However, the Last Days I refer to does not mean darkness and destruction. From God the Creator’s point of view, the Last Days are the end of the false world, the end of the fallen world. They will be followed immediately by the founding of the true world, the original world of God’s creation. Therefore, the Last Days are what we all wish and hope for.

Then, how can we achieve this historic transition from a materialistic civilization to a spiritual civilization? The transition begins with the emergence of God’s truth. Truth is called light. The dawn’s morning light is the power that liberates the night. That sun of historical transition is rising towards the highest point in the sky. This is what I have proclaimed as the Unification Principle and the great principle of true love.

Upon receiving a call from God, I endeavored to deeply understand the great principle of the universe that had been hidden from the beginning of human history. In my discovery, I realized that the truth humankind has been yearning for throughout history is this very principle, upon which we can return to true love and realize true world peace.

A physician needs to diagnose the cause of an illness in order to cure the patient. In the same way, the Principle clearly identifies why today’s human society fell into misery. It explains the course of the Fall of humankind, the event that led to the unprincipled world that we struggle with every day. Once the cause is determined, the cure can be applied. For the past forty years, I have traveled the globe with this cure. I have devoted myself to revealing the cure clearly to the world.

I want to explain some of these great principles. My explanation will be only skin-deep, as it is impossible to grasp the depth of the philosophical implications in a short period of time. One needs to study the Unification Principle sincerely with time and prayer, based on knowing that, if we do indeed live for eternity, it is clear that we need to reorganize our priorities.

The first great principle is that God is alive, and that God is the Parent of humankind. The relationship between God and humanity is that of Parent and child. This is the first truth that God revealed to me.

Secondly, God’s original nature is true love, and God created all things and human beings to realize God’s true love. Human beings are therefore the object partners of God. God wants to unconditionally pour unlimited true love into the hearts of His children.

Thirdly, God, the invisible Parent, established True Parents as God’s substantial expression on the earth. God tries to save the world through the True Parents. By uniting with the ideals of the True Parents and regaining true love, true life and true lineage, human beings can be eternally restored. Amazingly, we are now living in the era of True Parents. There has never been and will never again be a time of this magnitude of blessing in the history of human existence. This enables us to be called the lucky generation born with heavenly fortune. Two days from now, on August 25, Mrs. Moon and I will officiate at an international wedding ceremony for 360,000 couples here in Seoul. I consider this ceremony the authentic path to world peace. As I stated, the reason the world is not at peace today lies in the breakdown of the true family structure. The true family structure begins by unity with the true love of God.

This holy wedding ceremony will be simultaneously conducted in one hundred and sixty nations via satellite. It is a ceremony that will link human beings vertically with the True Parents, the substantial being of God, the invisible Parent. This ceremony affirms the participants as true brothers and sisters in front of God and True Parents, transcending territorial boundaries, races and religions. This wedding is a great transformation ceremony for humanity. It restores God’s true love, true life and true blood lineage, which were lost due to the Fall of the first human ancestors, Adam and Eve.

This is a moment of great excitement in which human beings, who have been suffering under the reign and dominion of Satan for six thousand biblical years, will be set free and liberated for the first time. It is a ceremony of great joy, where we will see the shackles break loose. Humankind will sing hosanna as we return to the liberated heaven and earth of God’s true love. This ceremony is possible at this time because of the appearance and manifestation of the True Parents.

True peace signifies returning to the originally created world

Ladies and gentlemen, this wedding is a ceremony in which men and women, bound in marriage before God, vow purity and fidelity to one other. The destruction of the true family means the destruction of chastity. Immoral love caused the Fall of our ancestors, and we descendants are victims of the same immoral, promiscuous love. This is the world phenomenon of today manifested in free sex, homosexual love, and decadent relationships. The promiscuity of today’s world is completely unnatural.

The time has come to return to the world of God’s original purity by completely liberating fallen human beings from our false ancestors. The True Parents are transforming and liberating this world. The bride pledges pure love to the bridegroom as her subject partner, recognizing him as God’s son who represents all men of the world and the substantial being of True Parents. The bridegroom pledges true love to his bride, accepting her as

God’s daughter representing all women of the world and the feminine incarnation of the True Parents.

Can a dreadful disease like AIDS penetrate into the husband and wife relationship united in mutual fidelity this way? It cannot. Diseases such as AIDS are a facet of the Last Days, testing the purity and fidelity of humankind. Modern society tries to prevent AIDS through the use of condoms and to cure it through new medicines, without any recourse to the Will of God. The message of AIDS and other such diseases is much more central than safe sex and new medicine. Its lasting solution lies in the restoration of morality rooted in true love. A Harvard University institute recently issued a research report stating that by the year 2010 AIDS will have affected about one billion people worldwide. This staggering number threatens the very existence of the human race.

The return to the true love desired by God, entailing purity and fidelity between man and woman, is the solution to diseases of false love. When I speak of fidelity, I do not mean the outmoded concept that it is to be enforced only upon women. The simultaneous purity and fidelity of men and women together is based on the principle of God. Fidelity is the ideal of one man for one woman. It calls man and woman to protect the sanctity and holiness of the act of love. It means not to engage in pre-marital relations and, after being blessed in marriage with their ideal counterpart, to love one another infinitely and eternally as subject partner and object partner.

Today, I want to enjoin the call for purity and fidelity more upon the men than women. It is not an overstatement to say that the damage caused by men who indulge in uncontrolled lust is the very cause of the destruction of the world’s chance for happiness.

True Parents and the true love revolution

It is not possible for today’s decadent world to return to the original order of true love that God desires by human power alone. The power of God is needed, and this power of God is manifested through the advent of the True Parents on earth. The True Parents of humankind came to the earth to ignite a revolution of true love. Establishing the order of true love is a revolution. This revolution of true love is now catching fire. The international holy wedding is indeed a celebration raising the flames of the revolution of true love. It opens the door for the re-creation of the world.

The event on August 25 comprises 360,000 couples, and when this spreads to 3.6 million couples, to 36 million couples, to 360 million couples, and to 3.6 billion couples, AIDS will be eradicated from human society and the world of pure love where God, man and woman become one body will be realized. This is not just a dream. The implementation of God’s providence for the heavenly kingdom on the earth is an inevitable future because it is not my work or your work, it is God’s work.

Today, twentieth century technology has reduced the world to the size of a small global village. Human beings are the global family living in this global village. Nationalism, racism and religious bigotry should never have existed, only the ideal world of God and human beings as one body of love. I want to tell you that true world peace is to return to the original world of God’s creation. Respected ladies and gentlemen, and participants in the third World Peace Conference, I sincerely wish for you to serve as apostles of true peace.

I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to you, precious colleagues and contributors to world peace. May God abundantly bless you and your families.

View of the Principle of the
Providential History of Salvation

April 16, 1996

Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, DC, USA
Inaugural Banquet of the Washington Times Foundation

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, today I sincerely thank God that you and I can meet as we face this era of great, historic change.

Religion and the purpose of the providence of salvation

God is the absolute One, the unique, unchanging, and eternal One. His Will is the same. If the human beings Adam and Eve had become one body under the love of God, everything would have been complete and ideal. God’s origin, purpose and process of creation, as well as cause, effect and direction are all absolute.

The human ancestors Adam and Eve entered into chaos after they fell due to their ignorance. This ignorance and chaos expanded from the individual level to the levels of family, nation and world. It has been the task of religion and God’s providence of salvation to liberate us from this sphere of the Fall.

In the Last Days, the Messiah comes and teaches clearly the absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal cause, direction and effect, from God’s viewpoint. He will cleanse the world of ignorance and chaos and return it to the original bosom of God. This is the completion of the Will of God.

If this does not happen, then in the Last Days all religions, systems of thought, “isms” and nations will pass away. Now humankind is facing the twenty-first century, entering the new historic era of the third millennium in just a few years. At this important moment, I would like to deliver this speech on the “View of the Principle of the Providential History of Salvation,” so that we can resolve to prepare ourselves for the new era.

To bring about completion and the ideal relationship between God and humankind, centering on true love, God required that human beings fulfill a condition of responsibility in order to attain unity with Him. Therefore, God needed to give the commandment to the first ancestors. In other words, God knew that they were in the growth period, on the way to reaching physical and spiritual maturity, so He established the commandment as the condition for His children to inherit the most precious thing, true love.

Originally, true love was to be gained through life experience and understood through internal realization. True love is not something that can be learned through words, a written text, or schooling. It is experienced completely only in the context of living our lives. Created as newborn infants, Adam and Eve were to grow and perfect themselves gradually through experiences of the heart of true children, true brother and sister, true husband and wife and true parents, encompassing their whole lives. Only after experiencing the true love of God in its entirety can one fulfill the purpose of creation and become an ideal human being.

All people desire their object partner of love to be many times more valuable, even infinitely more valuable, than themselves. In the same way, God desires that humankind, His object partner of love, become infinitely valuable. When human beings perfect themselves, then those persons come to possess godlike value by participating in God’s divinity and perfection.

God is absolute, however He cannot realize the ideal of true love alone. That is because love always requires an object partner, a beloved. At this point, we need to understand the relationship between God’s true love and humankind’s true love, and how they begin and are brought to fruition. What would have happened if God had not chosen human beings as His absolute object partners of true love, and instead had sought to realize true love in some other way? In that case, God and human beings would have pursued the ideal of true love with different motivations, directions and purposes. God would have had to achieve the ideal of love through an object partner higher than humankind and, by the same token, humankind’s ideal of love would have had no direct relationship with God.

True husband and wife perfect God’s absolute ideal of love

God, as the subject partner of true love, did establish humankind as the object partner of true love. Accordingly, God can fulfill the ideal of true love only through humankind. The fulfillment of God’s purpose of creation is the ideal world where God and humankind are united through absolute love. Human beings were created as the greatest object partners of God’s love. They alone in all creation potentially embody the full nature of God and they are born the visible bodies of the invisible God. If a person matures, they become a perfect temple of God—a visible, substantial body in which God can freely and peacefully dwell.

God’s overall ideal of absolute true love is realized and perfected through humankind in a vertical parent-child relationship. God created Adam first; he was to be the son of God and, at the same time, the substantial body of God. Later, God created Eve as the object partner of Adam so that Adam and Eve could fulfill the ideal of horizontal love in conjugal love. Eve was to be the daughter of God and also as a bride she was to realize substantially the ideal of the horizontal love of God.

The place where Adam and Eve are harmonized perfectly, consummating their first love by marrying under the blessing of God, is precisely the place where God meets His substantial bride. This is because God’s ideal of absolute love descends vertically and joins where the ideal of conjugal love between Adam and Eve is realized horizontally. In this way, the true love of God and the true love of humankind join in perfect communion at a single point, although they come from different directions, one vertical and the other horizontal.

God’s act of creation was necessary and we cannot imagine creation without a purpose. There was only one reason God needed the creation: to realize the ideal of true love. God developed life in pairs, from the simplest and lowest levels up to the human level, subject and object and positive and negative, to form reciprocal relationships under the ideal of love. The creation’s ideal of love and God’s ideal of ultimate love are not separate or different. The Principle of Creation is at work to complete the absolute love of God through the realization of true love between men and women in the human world. This is the reason why, in the beginning, God created one man and one woman, Adam and Eve.

God’s purpose of creation called for Adam and Eve to obey the commandment from God, who is the subject of true love, and fulfill their maturation as a true man and a true woman. Beyond that, they were to become a true couple united in the true love of God and then, by having sons and daughters through true love, they would have become true parents and lived in happiness. Had Adam and Eve matured in true love, they would have fulfilled God’s desire to wear a substantial body and when they perfected themselves as a true couple, the ideal of God’s absolute love would have been fulfilled.

By Adam and Eve having children of goodness and becoming true parents, God would have established substantially the position of parents eternally and achieved His ideal, which was to create infinite citizenship in the kingdom of heaven in heaven by means of multiplying myriad generations of loving descendants in the physical world.

Adam and Eve, the human ancestors, fell away from God. When they were expelled from Eden, they had not yet had children. Having driven them out, God had no basis to follow after them to bless their marriage. The entire human race has thus descended from our fallen ancestors. Humanity has multiplied without any direct relationship whatsoever with the love of God.

Human perfection includes the responsibility to love

Ladies and gentlemen, could the Fall have been the result of eating the fruit of a tree? The Fall of Adam and Eve was an immoral sin against the ideal of the true love of God. The fact that Adam and Eve needed to obey the commandment shows that they fell in a stage of immaturity, that is to say, during their period of growth. The archangel, symbolized by a serpent, tempted Eve to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she fell spiritually. She later tempted Adam, who was also too immature to eat of the fruit, and they then fell physically.

The only possible sin that could have been fatal in the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were in communication with God and living in joy, was the sin of illicit love. The first consummated love of the human ancestors, because it was supposed to have been the perfection of the love of God Himself, was to have marked the beginning of a celebration that would continue throughout history, filled with the never-ending intoxication of joy and blessing for God, Adam and Eve and the universe. It was supposed to have been a joyous occasion through which the love, life and lineage of God would have been established within humankind.

To the contrary, Adam and Eve covered their lower parts and hid themselves among the trees, trembling in fear. By disobeying heavenly law, they established an immoral relationship as the basis for false love, false life and false lineage. As descendants of Adam and Eve, all human beings are born with original sin. The Fall gave rise to conflict between the mind and body within every person, thereby causing our societies to be filled with tainted love and with people who do things that contradict the desire of their original minds.

According to the ideal of love, all love relationships in the animal and plant kingdoms are for reproduction only. Human beings are the sole exception. Humankind enjoys freedom in the conjugal relationship of love, which is humanity’s special privilege as the lord of all creation. God gave the blessing and infinite joy of love to His sons and daughters. However, the true freedom that God allowed requires human responsibility. When an individual insists upon and practices freedom of love without responsibility, how much confusion and destruction takes place! Achieving the highest ideal of human love is possible only when one takes responsibility for love.

We can think of this responsibility in three ways. The first is for one to become the master of true love, truly free and thanking God for the freedom of love, wherein one knows how to cultivate and control oneself. This responsibility for a love relationship is not to be taken merely because of law or social convention. Instead, a person needs to establish responsibility through his own self-control and self-determination within a life-committing, vertical relationship with God.

The second is one’s responsibility toward the object partner of love. By nature, people do not want their spouse’s love to be shared with others. Horizontal conjugal love, which differs from the vertical love between parents and children, loses its potential for perfection the moment it is divided. This is because the Principle of Creation requires husband and wife to become one in absolute love. Each spouse has the responsibility given by love to live absolutely for the sake of the other.

The third responsibility of love is toward children. The love of parents is the basis for children’s pride and happiness. Children want to be born through the total and harmonious unity of their parents in true love, and they would want to be raised in that kind of love. The most precious responsibility of parents is not only to rear their children externally, it is also to offer them life elements of true love that can bring their spirituality to complete fruition. This is why the family is so valuable. The daily experience of the heart of true children, true brothers and sisters, true spouses and true parents cannot be acquired in any place other than the true family.

The Messiah is the true person who brings the seed of new life If Adam and Eve had become a couple of true love centered upon God, God could have dwelt in Adam as His substantial body and thus loved Eve. What is more, Adam and Eve together could have become True Parents who substantially embodied God, and thereby could have become the origin of the love of goodness, a life of goodness and a lineage of goodness.

Due to the Fall however, Adam and Eve became the substantial body of Satan and ended up becoming the original fallen couple, fallen parents and fallen ancestors. Their union became the root of fallen love, fallen life and fallen blood lineage. Because human beings originated from this root, they descended from the adulterous Satan, who is the enemy of God, and inherited this lineage of fallen parents.

Ladies and gentlemen! How great God’s pain must have been when, by the Fall of humankind, our human ancestors destroyed His ideal of true love! Humankind was to have been the sons and daughters of God, yet they do not know God as their original Parent. Yet even though His sons and daughters serve Satan, God has worked for the providence of salvation. Because He is an absolute being, and the ideal of creation is also absolute, He has carried out the providence of salvation even amid great sadness. God’s providence of salvation is the providence of restoration, which means to recover the lost purpose of creation, centered on true love. The providence of salvation is also the providence of re-creation.

Based on this understanding, the root of the providence of salvation is the re-creation of the seed of the original child, the human being who will fulfill the ideal of creation. That which God abhors, the life and blood lineage that began with the false love of the adulterer Satan, must be cleansed. The essence of the providence is the task of setting up the birth of the True Parent, the Savior united with the true love, life and lineage of God.

Since the ancestors of humankind failed to fulfill their responsibility, inherited the immoral lineage of Satan, and came under the dominion of Satan, God could not directly intervene and return human beings to their original position. Furthermore, God can neither unconditionally accept humankind, who chose to go to the side of the evil archangel, nor punish them. Rather, God uses the strategy of placing a central figure on the side of the good archangel. Then, by being struck first, that figure fulfills the indemnity condition to recover what was lost. Satan strikes first and as a result, must take the losing position. The First, Second and Third, or Cold War, World Wars are good examples of this. That is, the side that struck first lost.

From the overall perspective of the providence of restoration, the foundation of cooperation between mother and son is very important. This was so at the time of Jacob, Moses and Jesus. God was working His providence to separate people from satanic life and lineage by establishing the foundation of cooperation between a mother, who needed to fulfill the responsibility of Eve, the originator of the Fall, and the second son of the family.

God cannot directly relate to the first son, because he stands in the position of having a direct blood relationship with Satan, who, through the Fall, was the first to dominate humankind. By having the second son, who represents the side of goodness, fulfill a condition, God has been restoring the blood lineage of goodness. Then God has had the first son, representing the side of evil, take a position subordinate to the second son.

In the family of Adam, God carried out the providence of recognizing the second son, Abel, and having him subordinate the first son, Cain. Even though Eve had fallen, as a mother she could have made an effort to foster unity between the two brothers. In the end, however, Cain murdered Abel and the providence of salvation was not fulfilled in Adam’s family, it was prolonged. There was also a required formula of cooperation between mother and son at the time of Noah, but that formula of meaningful cooperation was not realized until the time of Rebekah and Jacob.

The Fall was committed by three beings: Adam, Eve and the archangel. The archangel seduced Eve, causing the spiritual fall, and later fallen Eve seduced Adam, causing the physical fall. As a result, they turned their backs on God, and the fallen archangel became Satan. Since the providence of salvation is the providence of restoration, the principle of restoration can be carried out only by going in a direction one hundred eighty degrees opposite that of the Fall.

God lost Adam who had the seed of true love and true life. So God needed to find a son with the new seed, free from satanic accusation. Just as God created Adam first at the time of the creation, God must prepare a son first who has no relationship to the Fall, according to the providence of restoration which is the providence of re-creation. This is the basis for the idea of the coming of the Messiah. The Messiah rejects the sinful lives of those with a fallen lineage under the dominion of Satan. He comes as a true person who engrafts fallen humanity into the seed of new life. The Messiah has his roots in God and comes as the Second Adam, who wipes away all that was committed by the first Adam. This is the reason God cannot send a superman Messiah who will work only through miracles.

Providence of the restoration of lineage centered on Tamar

For a son to be born on earth with this seed of God’s love and life, there first must exist a mother. Such a mother cannot give birth to this child in a conventional way. Conception must happen in accordance with the formula of restoration. All the cooperation between mothers and sons in the providence of restoration is a preparation and a condition for the Son of God to be born with the seed of new life, free from satanic accusation. By making conditions to avoid Satan’s attacks, and by subordinating the firstborn son who represents evil, mother and son restore the love, life and lineage that were taken over by Satan.

The Bible, which records the providential work of God, contains many stories that are difficult to understand. For example, Rebekah deceived her husband Isaac and her first son Esau, and helped her second son Jacob receive the blessing. God took the side of that mother and son, and although they used methods that at first glance seem unjust, God still blessed them for their actions.

In Adam’s family, Cain and Abel fought and their struggle resulted in the death of Abel, the second son. Then came Jacob. On the merits of many godly people who paid indemnity and sacrificed after the time of Abel, Jacob at last caught up to the level at which Satan first dominated humankind. Jacob had to deal with his twin brother, Esau. At the ford of Jabbok, Jacob set up the condition of spiritual victory over the angel, and through winning over Esau, who was in the position of the archangel, Jacob consequently was blessed as the first victor in history, and was given the name “Israel.” (Gen. 32:28)

By then, however, Jacob was forty years old. Satan had sown the seed of false love within the womb of Eve, which gave birth to evil life. Therefore, God needed to purify a mother’s womb from which the heavenly son could be born. That purification period of separation from Satan had to begin at the time of conception and continue to age of forty. Even though Jacob was victorious, he made only one step toward meeting that criterion. The great mother who assumed the responsibility to meet this condition was Tamar.

Tamar had married Er, the eldest son of Judah, but Er displeased God and he died. According to the custom of that time, Judah gave Tamar to his second son, Onan, that they might bear a child for Er. Onan, knowing that Tamar’s child would not be his own, spilled his semen on the ground. This was a sin in the eyes of God, for which Onan died. Then Tamar wanted Shelah, the third son of Judah, for a husband, but Judah did not give him to her. Judah thought that his two sons had died because of Tamar, so he was afraid that Shelah would die and end the family lineage.

Tamar had the conviction that she was meant to carry on the lineage of the chosen people. In order to do that, she disguised herself as a prostitute and slept with her father-in-law, Judah, and became pregnant with twins. At the time of birth, one of the twin sons, Zerah, stretched out his hand from the womb to be born first. When he was pulled back into the womb, the second son, Perez, was born first, taking the position of the elder brother.

Thus, within the womb of Tamar, the first and second sons fought, and their reversal of position was the condition that separated them from Satan. In other words, this became the condition for restoration in the womb. Upon this condition, the Messiah could be conceived within the blood lineage of the chosen people, on the foundation of the nation of Israel, which could stand up to the Roman Empire two thousand years later. The victorious foundation on the national level could then be formed in the womb of a mother free from Satanic accusation, prepared for the seed of the Son of God. On this foundation, the Holy Mother Mary emerged in the mainstream of God’s providence.

Jesus can solely possess God’s first love

Mary, when she was engaged to Joseph, received from the archangel Gabriel the surprising message that the Messiah would be born through her. (Luke 1:31) In those days, if an unmarried woman became pregnant she was killed. However, Mary accepted the Will of God with absolute faith, saying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

Mary consulted with the priest Zechariah, who was her relative and was highly respected. Zechariah’s wife Elizabeth, with the help of God, was pregnant with John the Baptist. Elizabeth said to Mary, “...Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! Why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:42-43) With these words, she testified to the coming birth of Jesus.

In this way, God let Mefry, Zechariah and Elizabeth know about the birth of the Messiah before anybody else. All of them had the absolutely crucial mission of following the Will of God and serving Jesus. Zechariah’s family let Mary stay in their house. Jesus was conceived in the house of Zechariah.

Elizabeth and Mary were cousins on their mothers’ side. According to God’s providence, they were considered sisters, with Elizabeth as the elder (Cain) and Mary as the younger (Abel). Mary received Elizabeth’s help in the presence of Zechariah. Through this cooperation, Zechariah’s family, on the national level, indemnified the lack of unity between Leah and Rachel in Jacob’s family, and their failure in mother-son cooperation. This allowed Jesus to be conceived. For the first time in history, there could be generated on earth, free of satanic accusation and through a prepared womb, the seed of the Son of God, the seed of the True Father. In this way, the only begotten Son of God, the owner of the first love of God, was born for the first time in history.

Mary had to achieve something that could not be understood by common sense, nor easily tolerated under the law of those times. Mary, Elizabeth and Zechariah had been spiritually moved. They followed the revelation that came from God, and unconditionally believed that it was the will and desire of God.

Although the Son of God could be born on earth, he needed a wall of protection to grow up safely in Satan’s world and fulfill the Will of God. God had hoped that these three people in the family of Zechariah would establish that protective foundation. There are many points to consider with regard to how seriously the three had to dedicate themselves to protecting and serving the Son of God, and how long they were to have been united with each other.

In the Bible it is recorded, “And Mary remained with her [Elizabeth] about three months, and then returned to her home.” (Luke 1:56) After that, there is no biblical record of any further communication between Mary and

Elizabeth and Zechariah. From the time Mary left Zechariah’s house, difficulties began for Mary and Jesus. The family of Zechariah ought to have been the wall of protection for Jesus until the very end.

A short time later, Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant. How great must have been his shock at that moment! Mary, his beloved fiancée, without having had any conjugal relationship with him, had become pregnant after a three-month stay in another place. It was natural for Joseph to question Mary about who the baby in her womb belonged to. What would have happened if, at that time, Mary had explained everything candidly? If she had exposed everything, it could have been the end of a clan. So Mary simply responded that she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit.

Mary’s pregnancy began to show, and the people of the surrounding area became aware of it. What would have happened if Joseph had declared that he didn’t know anything about it? However, Joseph was a righteous man. He believed in the revelation of God and defended Mary, saying the pregnancy was his responsibility. Mary may have been ridiculed for becoming pregnant during her engagement, yet she avoided being stoned to death.

Joseph, who loved Mary, protected her this way in the beginning. However, there was a great deal of anguish deep in his heart. Once Jesus was born, Josephs suspicions about the father of Jesus only increased and his heart ached. As Jesus grew older, the two became more and more distant in heart. And because of this, family problems frequently arose. Jesus was viewed as an illegitimate son and, lacking the protection of Zechariah’s family and the love of Joseph, he grew up with an indescribable loneliness in his heart.

Jesus’ solitary three-year course

Jesus was aware of his path as the Messiah, and he lamented by himself these lonely circumstances and the serious obstacle they presented to fulfilling the Will of God. The Messiah is the True Parent. To fulfill that mission, however, he needed to receive his substantial bride. Jesus had to reverse, at the very root, the false love by which the archangel had caused the Fall of Eve, who was originally growing up as the sister of Adam. Consequently, Jesus, in the place of Adam as the Son of God, ought to have received as his bride the younger sister of someone in an archangelic position. That bride was to have been none other than Zechariah’s daughter, the younger sister of John the Baptist. To fulfill this in a world where Satan plays the role of owner and lord, Jesus needed a foundation of protection formed by absolute faith. Tragically, the entire foundation ended up collapsing around him.

This would not have happened if Zechariah and Elizabeth, who had received the revelation and spiritual support from God, had maintained absolute faith. If they had fulfilled their responsibility, Mary would have been in contact with them continually, even after her three-month stay at their house. God chose Zechariah’s family as the foremost representatives of the entire world, so that even after the birth of Jesus they would protect, serve and witness to him as the Messiah. They not only would have served Jesus as the Son of God and Messiah with utter devotion, they would have learned the Will of God through Jesus and followed him absolutely. Also, John the Baptist was born to serve Jesus, and ought to have fulfilled his responsibility to guide everyone whom he led to repentance to believe in Jesus and receive salvation.

Unfortunately, although Zechariah, Elizabeth and John the Baptist testified at first to Jesus as the Son of God, there is no evidence that they served him as such. The respected priest Zechariah was simply a spectator. John the Baptist stood separate from Jesus. These circumstances blocked the people from following Jesus and made his path very difficult. Once this family lost faith in Jesus, looking at him through human eyes, there was no room for them to help him receive his bride.

We also need to consider the influence that Joseph and Mary’s relationship had on Jesus. Mary had to restore the positions of Eve and Tamar through indemnity, so she was supposed to have remained as only the fiancée of Joseph. Providentially, they could not be husband and wife. It was God’s desire that they not have sexual relations either before or after Jesus’ birth. Joseph still loved Mary after Jesus’ birth, however Mary ought to have separated from Joseph and raised Jesus as the Son of God.

The real circumstances did not make this easy to do. Even though Mary’s original mind told her that she was not to do so, she had sexual relations with Joseph and they had children, which was a repetition of Eve’s mistake. With this condition, Satan established a claim on them. With the exception of Jesus, everyone who ought to have protected Jesus came under the dominion of Satan: his father, his mother, his Abel-type brothers, John the Baptist and his brothers, and his Cain-type brothers, the children of Joseph.

When Satan influences someone, that person loses all spiritual support and inspiration. Trust in God, as well as any sense of gratitude to Him, is lost. One begins to see everything through human eyes. Mary did not help Jesus with the wedding he desired. She even opposed it. This was the direct reason that Jesus could not receive his bride, and could not become the True Parent. Ultimately, this compelled him to go the way of the cross.

Jesus’ words to Mary during the wedding at Cana, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?” (John 2:4), reveal a reproachful heart to a mother who helped in the weddings of others and neglected to help Jesus receive his bride, the most important requirement of the providence. With this perspective, we can now understand why Jesus asked, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” (Matt. 12:48)

Faced with the opposition of Mary, Zechariah, Elizabeth and finally John the Baptist, Jesus gave up hoping to gain their protection as he sought to fulfill his mission. Therefore, Jesus left his home in search of a new spiritual foundation to restart the providence of salvation. Now without a family and household, Jesus lamented, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matt. 8:20) Having lost his family-level foundation, Jesus sought to replace it. This was his three- year course.

The history of the providence of salvation from the viewpoint of the Principle

In the end, as people disbelieved and the disciples lost faith, Jesus endured Satan’s attack and, as his foundation crumbled, he went the way of the cross. Originally, Jesus came to the earth as the Messiah to give blessings to his disciples and all humankind. He was to build the sinless kingdom of heaven. Because of the lack of faith in him, Jesus could not receive his bride, they could not become the True Parents, and he could not complete his mission. This is why he promised to return.

The Lord of the Second Advent comes to complete the foundation of God’s providence of restoration left uncompleted by Jesus. That is to say, he comes as the seed of the original true child to complete the ideal of creation. He comes to complete the ideal of True Parents, who are the origin of the true love, true life and true lineage of God. He comes on the victorious foundation of the fundamental providence of God’s side up to the time of Jesus.

He also stands upon the victorious foundation of Jesus’ life and will find the bride that Jesus could not find. Together they become the True Parents to save all humankind.

Through the marriage Blessing that passes on God’s original blood lineage, the True Parents will be able to give salvation to all humanity. People will become true persons engrafting into the true love, true life and true lineage of God. Furthermore, the Messiah will establish a true family, creating the kingdom of heaven on earth. Thus, it is the international holy weddings that establish this new blood lineage when the Lord of the Second Advent comes in the flesh.

On the level of the great worldwide family, the Lord indemnifies that which was lost in the family of Adam and restores the true eldest sonship, true parentship, and true kingship Adam’s family was to have realized. He will transform this world into the kingdom of heaven on earth under the dominion of God, opening the kingdom of heaven in the spirit world for registration. Humanity will enter into the era of kingship both spiritually and physically centered on God, establishing a world of freedom, peace, unity and happiness, and create the heavenly kingdom on earth and in the spirit world, which is God’s ideal of creation. This is the “View of the Principle of the Providential History of Salvation.” I hope that in the future all of you can also receive this joyous new marriage Blessing.

Distinguished leaders of this nation and honored guests!

I would like to express again my deepest appreciation to you for coming here this evening to celebrate the inauguration of The Washington Times Foundation. In particular, I sincerely congratulate those who are being honored as the first recipients of The Washington Times Foundation National Service Award for making a positive contribution to this society.

Thank you very much.

Liberation of God’s Homeland

July 13, 2001

National Assembly Building, Seoul, Korea
Federation for World Peace and
Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace
Rev. Sun Myung Moon Invitational Lecture

Respected guests from home and abroad, ladies and gentlemen: I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the members of the National Assembly of Korea and the distinguished guests who have come to participate in this meaningful gathering despite your busy schedules. I am honored to have this valuable time to speak to you in this great chamber of the National Assembly, which, from the viewpoint of God’s providential history, represents all the people of Korea.

This year, which marks the beginning of the new millennium, I held the Enthronement Ceremony for the Kingship of God on January 13. Then, in the fifty-two-day period from February 25 to April 17, I successfully completed a fifty-state speaking tour of the United States, in which I addressed the public in fifty-two cities and also spoke before members of the United States Congress and at the United Nations.

During this time I addressed more than one hundred thousand religious leaders, mainly from the Christian faith. I presented a course that is based on God’s Will and that all people need to follow, those in the spirit world as well as the physical world. Furthermore, I visited Uruguay and, at a gathering of current and former heads of state and leaders from the nations of South America, I opened the South American headquarters of the Federation for Cosmic Peace and Unity. I also renewed and restructured the organization. For the purpose of realizing a world of peace, I educated some seventy thousand leaders representing all levels of society from one hundred ninety-one nations of the world, appointed Ambassadors for Peace in six continents, and returned to Korea after having prepared this international foundation for the reunification of our homeland.

After my return, from July 3 to 12, I held the “Rally to Establish God’s Homeland” in twelve major cities of the Republic of Korea. At the rally I proclaimed that the time has come to create God’s homeland, where He can take root in this land He has chosen. I emphasized that we all need to step forward to become pillars for the reunification of the homeland.

When I was sixteen years old, I met Jesus Christ in the early morning of Easter Sunday. Since then I have embarked on this path of God’s desire in order to accomplish His Will and to liberate Him from sorrow. I persevered unyieldingly for the past eighty years of my life, even as I was subjected to all forms of misunderstanding and persecution. I exerted myself fully until now to realize a world of peace based on true, ideal families. In particular, in accordance with God’s command, I went to the United States in 1971.1 invested my entire being for thirty-plus years so that the United States could understand and fulfill its God-given mission as the Second Israel on the global level.

During the past couple of years, through hundreds of conferences for United States leaders, I urged politicians and religious leaders to transcend their political affiliations and denominations to work together cooperatively for the sake of their community, their nation and the world. In addition, through the fifty-state speaking tour I strongly encouraged clergy to go beyond their denominations and unite in solidarity. In reality, through an association of churches formed by the American Clergy Leadership Conference, one hundred and forty-four thousand churches are leading a movement for world salvation.

At the same time, I proclaimed at the United Nations the need for a movement to abolish all types of divisions between nations for the sake of world peace. This proposal is already being implemented vigorously. The Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace is leading this movement, which has expanded rapidly across the oceans from the UN headquarters to all of the world’s continents. The World Association of Non- Governmental Organizations (WANGO), a UN-affiliated NGO, is playing a central role in this effort.

Ladies and gentlemen, we now are ushering in the era of a new millennium, corresponding to the seventh millennium in biblical history and the third millennium since the time of Jesus. Throughout human history God has longed for peace, and through religion humankind has also dreamed of an era of peace. Now is the time when this era of peace shall take root on earth.

Human beings have been looking forward to the time when God’s ideal of creation is realized. Starting with the appearance of an individual whose mind and body are completely united, with God at the center, we will see the emergence of a perfected family, society, nation, world and cosmos based on true love. Therefore, this era refers to fulfillment of the Completed Testament Age, when the kingdom of God in heaven and on earth is established, the covenant prophesied in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible is fulfilled, and the spirit world is perfected. The Completed Testament Age means an era in which all people receive the holy marriage Blessing at the original standard.

Until now, everything created by God was unable to stand within the realm of the Blessing due to the Fall of the first human ancestors. God, however, raised numerous religions, focusing on Christianity, and educated people along the path of the providence of salvation. He gradually raised their spiritual standard to enable them to usher in the Completed Testament Age. In concert with this, all of us have become substantial fruits of faith, completing God’s providence of salvation to restore the foundation for kingship on the cosmic level. That process began with kingship on the level of the true individual and expanded to kingship on the levels of the true family, tribe, people, nation and world. Eventually we were able to attain the position to hold the original Enthronement Ceremony for the Kingship of God. -This ceremony can be held on that foundation only when all people in heaven and earth form true families and nations, receive the Blessing and create one lineage, one human race with a single, united lineage.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you consider love, life and lineage, which of these is most important to human beings? Many people say that love is most valuable. However, no matter how valuable love and life are, they are horizontal in the sense that they end in a single generation. However, lineage is vertical and is passed down through the generations for eternity. That is why lineage is most important.

In the original world, had the Fall never occurred, a true family would have been formed with God at the center. A family of true sons and daughters, a true lineage, would have been established. To become a child of true parents, there must be a connection of lineage. It would be absolutely impossible to link the terms “parent” and “child” unless they were connected by lineage. Once this lineage was established, not even God could cut it apart. Not even fallen Satan could divide it.

That is why the true lineage, received through True Parents’ Blessing, can restore through indemnity the mistakes of the Old and New Testament Ages. By engrafting onto God’s lineage, which is the original standard, even a field of false olive trees can go beyond the realm of life and death. Such involves becoming one in body, heart and mind with the lineage of the true olive tree, based on true love. Satan cannot interfere with people who have determined in their hearts to transcend even the realm of life and death on the levels of the individual, family, people, nation and world, no matter what the sacrifice. Once you go beyond the national standard, you have already entered the realm of perfection, the realm of God’s direct dominion. It then becomes impossible to enter into a relationship with Satan.

If Jesus had been able to marry, he would not have gone the way of the cross. No one would have been able to kill him. That is because he would have been able to connect with the realm of God’s direct dominion under the ideal of being God’s object partner. In terms of the Principle, he would have satisfied the standard of having completed his portion of responsibility. That is why he would have entered the realm of God’s direct dominion, which is connected to God’s lineage. There would have been no way for Satan to sever this connection.

During the process of growth, the first human ancestors were not able to reach the position of uniting with God’s heart; they fell. That was the problem. If Adam and Eve had become a couple and engaged only in true love, they never would have fallen. Satan would not have been able to tear them apart. Yet, in their course of growth, they represented fruit that had not fully ripened. If you plant a fruit in the ground before it is ripe, its seed will never produce a root. It does not have eternal life and will be disposed of as if it were devoid of life. That place is hell. It is a place that is unrelated to God.

The parent-child relationship has to be connected with True Parents’ lineage. It cannot simply connect to that lineage on its own accord. The lineages of a man and a woman have to be combined. Under the fundamental laws of the universe, human beings were created and are to be perfected when the inner nature and external form of their lineages unite as one. They can be perfected when the mind, representing the inner nature, and the body, representing the external form, rejoice together in love. Each family needs to stand in the position of substantial object partner of the perfected Adam’s family, which is like a large and substantial tree. Then each family is expected to multiply and expand to form “branch factories” that in turn will produce countless citizens of the heavenly nation.

Thus, God in the spirit world and substantial parents on earth can live together on earth and cooperate in producing heavenly citizens, who can then form a united body living eternally in the spirit world. When the citizens of the heavenly world and earthly world unite, with the earth as the center, the ideal kingdom of God on earth and in heaven will be completed.

Who will deliver that kingship to God? Who was the one who made a mess of the kingship in the first place? It was Satan, Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve did not become true parents. They allowed Satan to enter their relationship and did not establish the standard of true parents’ lineage on earth. Due to the Fall, Satan’s lineage took root. Neither God nor Satan can negate and reverse this completely. It is difficult for Satan himself to destroy the nation he has been building until now. Nobody likes someone remodeling something that they made with devotion. It is the same with Satan. God cannot reverse this lineage. If He could, He would not have lost Adam’s family in the garden of Eden in the first place. There was no principle that allowed God to touch it. Then who can touch that which God could not touch? It is perfected Adam, in his original state before the Fall.

The only family that can be in the position of the original, true family is none other than the family of the true Adam and Eve. The issue is the center. Can restoration be completed without a center? What is at the center of blessed families? Who gives the Blessing? It is the True Parents. Who officiates at the marriage ceremony? Who bestows the Blessing at that marriage ceremony, connecting your children, who resemble their parents, to God’s lineage? Were it not for the Fall of humankind, all parents, who would have been in the position of true parents, would have given the Blessing to their children.

Until today, someone in the position of the archangel has led weddings. Thus, a famous person or someone well known in society officiates at the wedding. It is like climbing up a ladder that is lying on the ground. These days, the order of marriage is a total mess. Marriage cannot be done randomly. It needs to be done in the proper order. Yet people do it in reverse and make a fuss about it these days. Restoration means to line up with the proper order. Originally the first son and second son were to marry in the order of their birth.

Sexual decadence has now reached serious proportions. Incestuous relationships are proliferating. I am referring to fornication. In some nations a grandfather may live with his granddaughter or a father-in-law may live with his daughter-in-law. These kinds of incestuous relationships are spreading. People going into the spirit world do not know the central standard and thus live following their lusts. If this is not hell on earth, then what is?

Who will resolve this entire mess? Even God was unable to intervene when Adam and Eve fell in the garden of Eden. He could not even interfere in the marriage Satan conducted. Then would He be able to intervene at all in the Last Days? Eventually false love, false life and the false parents entangled everything into a false lineage. Therefore, the True Parents need to come and restore this situation through indemnity. In other words, they have to completely negate and reverse this situation and fulfill God’s Will.

The biblical phrase “those who lose their life will find it” means that until indemnity is paid, anything that lives in the world of death can remain alive only if it has the strength to live beyond death, to go through this world to the place of death. A person who is saddened by death or feels like running away from it will not enjoy the realm of resurrection for eternity. That is why the Bible says that those who try to make their life secure will lose their life, while those who lose their life will find it.

It is the same in the case of God and True Parents. What about people who say they are going to the heavenly nation? Even God has to go to the place of death in order to save that life. Otherwise, it cannot have the support it needs to live. When using a rope to save someone who fell off a cliff, you need to pull that person up with all your strength. Only when your standard is higher than this can people and even God gain life.

Don’t people in the modern world talk about freedom? No matter how good the structure of the modern education system may be, your concept of freedom still lies within the fallen realm. You cannot understand the value of freedom from an individualistic perspective. What about the notion of freedom for the tribe, people, nation, world and cosmos? How will you help people understand the issues from the broader perspective? Rev. Moon has been teaching that we have to develop a holistic outlook toward the individual, family, society, nation, world, cosmos and God, and that we need to liberate God.

I began from the lowest level and rose to the highest level of liberating God. How did I accomplish this? I began by uniting my mind and body. From the position of absolutely uniting your mind and body, you can advance to the levels of the family, nation, world and God. No matter how much you want to reach the higher positions, you cannot do so if you hold on to an individualistic perspective. That concept is your enemy. It is God’s enemy, the enemy of the religious world, the enemy of the world of conscience and the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the enemy of all because it is connected to the position of Satan, the archangel.

Promiscuity, homosexual love and drug addiction potentially lead to infection with the virus that causes AIDS. Drug abuse and AIDS are threatening to devastate humankind. It is reported that in Africa, AIDS is reaching dangerous proportions. If you consider the fact that the AIDS virus is dormant for eight to twelve years, it is not impossible to imagine that the population of a given area could be wiped out in two generations.

Non-governmental organizations affiliated with the United Nations are burdened with many problems. If you asked them to do the most difficult tasks, would they present anyone to carry them out? Officials at these NGOs may point out many issues related to the current regimes and social ills. However, do they talk about the role of the UN or about digesting communism and humanism or other core issues, as I have done? You can debate with me only if you can address such high-level issues; otherwise, you cannot. These organizations do not know how to solve problems such as the degradation of youth, family breakdown, drug addiction and AIDS, and they especially do not know how to establish a pure lineage. Leaders of nations and global institutions such as the UN do not know the solutions to such problems. They just say whether something seems right to them or not.

Now that I have completed the Enthronement for God’s Kingship, I will teach the world’s leaders clearly about the steps that need to be taken. The problem until now was the problem of restoring the lineage. Lineage is the most important factor. Being a social organization, a government, or a school makes no difference. There are many nations in the world; none of them is connected to God’s lineage. They are all under the dominion of Satan. There is nothing they can do about this, except to follow the way of God and True Parents. If they do not, they have no center.

What will you do now, in this era of the new millennium? Until now, God had not been liberated and True Parents had not been liberated. I tell you, do not fear. The liberated Parents of Heaven and Earth and their children have emerged through the establishment of God’s kingship. Do not be afraid, even if you find yourself in prison. If there were people who wanted to go to God’s kingdom quickly, what a blessing it would be if they could go when they were young! Would it damage anything? Why reject this opportunity when the entirety of the universe and heaven is in your grasp, with you as its owner? You don’t have to worry whether you live or die.

Do you know how to perfect your individuality? Do you know the path by which to unite the mind and body of an individual? The power of love that carries on Satan’s lineage from the Fall has been stronger than the power of the conscience. That is the problem. Whatever happens, do not obey the commands of your body.

From now on, here is the ironclad rule you need to follow: First, at the cost of your life, do not stain the pure lineage that Heaven bequeathed to you. Second, do not violate human rights through erroneous personnel decisions. Men and women, whites and blacks are all equal. I am urging you not to exercise prejudice against others or violate their human rights. Leaders cannot dismiss a person just because they don’t like that person. The mainstream guidance on human rights consists of becoming people who have true love, that is, people who live with love for the sake of others. God created heaven and earth based on that principle. Discarding that mainstream belief system is unforgivable. It is the second sin of all sins.

The third rule is to not steal public money and to not use public money for your personal purposes. These are the three rules. All of these problems originated from fallen Adam as an individual, and his family. More than seventy percent of the people in jail are there for these very reasons. If you go to prison, you can confirm this fact. The prisoners violated human rights or stained the lineage and were incarcerated because of problems in relationships between men and women. The next problem is that of money and power. In this regard, money, knowledge and power are your enemies. Those who received the Blessing belong to God’s lineage and carry on God’s true love and true life. Thus, you must not stain the lineage with the habits you acquired while living in the fallen world.

Can you protect the lineage? Whether you are a couple or a single individual without a partner, today can be the day that you resolve and pledge not to stain the perfect lineage. Article One of the constitution of the heavenly nation is “You shall not stain the lineage; you shall preserve its purity and eternally protect the pure lineage.” Article Two is “You shall not violate human rights.” Article Three is “You shall not embezzle public money’’ This constitution is absolutely necessary for all of you to maintain the kingship of the heavenly nation and become its people, a parent, a spouse, a child and siblings before that kingship. That is why you must not ignore your elder sibling. You must not ignore your younger sibling just because he or she is physically challenged. University graduates who believe they are knowledgeable may not disregard those who have only a high school diploma. That would constitute a violation of human rights.

Destroying the public environment is just as serious as embezzling national assets. People who live like that will not receive heavenly fortune. No matter how hard they try, they will not be successful. The entire universe dislikes those who are indebted to others. If a person in a particular clan causes a problem, he or she will be driven out of that clan.

When living according to God’s laws, in what kind of environment and with what kind of people do you live in order to say that you are living well? It is simple. There are three ways: It is within a parent-child relationship, conjugal relationship and relationship between siblings. Siblings are children with common parents. The relationship between such children is that of siblings. In your family, you have a mother and father, a husband and wife, and brothers and sisters.

Therefore, just as I have relationships with my siblings, likewise, through our parents our first cousins and third cousins of our in-laws are all related. That is why the fundamental relationships in a family are the parent-child relationship, conjugal relationship and sibling relationship. Once the parent-child relationship is established, relationships between siblings are automatically generated. If you cannot present your family as an example, you are not living in the right way. That is why, during your life, you need to set the example in front of your parents, husband and wife and children. Only then are you living well.

What will happen when you are prospering in this way? The family model resonates with the models of the nation and the kingdom of heaven. We give an award to a family that has lived according to the ideal of the four-position foundation, where the three generations of the grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and children have lived in that way. That is why no one can exclude a person from the heavenly nation if that person, when living as a .subject partner, influenced and reconciled others under the joint responsibility found in the sibling relationship, or the relationship between children.

From now, if you live while upholding this law, you will surely become part of the royal family of the heavenly nation and become a family endowed with freedom, unity and liberation wherever you go. That is why today I am designating this as the motto for commencing the third millennium. On the one hand, we have to take the lead in protecting the pure lineage, the standardization of human rights, and the assets of the nation. On the other hand, we have to become the model for relationships between parents and children, husband and wife, and siblings. If everyone in the village can say, “I want to follow that person,” and, “I want to emulate that person and live with that person,” then he or she surely will become a citizen of the kingdom of God and one who is remembered in the heavenly nation. I, Rev. Moon, also am living in this way.

I taught you three central and ironclad rules, the most important rules that were proclaimed at the Enthronement for God’s Kingship. All people need to uphold these rules and thereby be public persons. These rules must never be violated, not in the family and not in the nation.

You need to know clearly about the heavenly world at this time of the Completed Testament Age, when God’s omnipotence, omniscience, full authority and true love are manifested directly on the earth. I pray that you will study diligently about the spirit world, receive the Blessing with God in the central position, form families of the true lineage, and prepare for eternal life through a lifestyle of living for the sake of others. People now have to know that the time has come for the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth and in heaven and the fulfillment of God’s ideal. They need to invest their efforts to perceive the hand of heavenly fortune, which cannot be compared with our limited abilities. A person who walks the path of a filial son, patriot, saint and divine child, spreading Heaven’s true love with warmth and humility in the presence of the living God, shall be blessed to belong to the kingdom of God.

Ladies and gentlemen, the twenty-first century, with which the new millennium has commenced, is a time to eradicate the relics of division and conflict from past centuries and to realize the vision of one great global family of reconciliation and unity.

I understood from early on God’s Will in choosing the Korean people to establish a new world based on a culture of peace. Thus, for the past fifty- plus years, I have been investing my entire self in building a foundation for the reunification of the Korean peninsula, on the platform of a movement based on Head-wing Thought and Godism, in Korea and abroad.

To this day I have been advocating Godism. This is the only teaching that will integrate the conflicting value systems of theism and atheism and, as it does, liberate humankind from secular humanism. This truth has already been validated by leaders of different nations of the world and by many scholars in the academic circles of philosophy and ideology.

Honorable members of the National Assembly, ladies and gentlemen with the grand mission of leading the Korean people to leap and soar into the world, let us all establish our value system with Godism based on true love, and rise up to empower our people with this teaching nationwide. Let us make this movement for the reunification of Korea as part of our faith, for the sake of ourselves the Korean people, and world peace. Let us become individuals and leaders who can spearhead this movement for the unification of the Korean peninsula, South and North, with true love so that we can live together with a heart of loving even one’s enemy!

On the occasion of the era of God’s kingship, let us all become partners in establishing the reunification of Korea, placing God at the center. Let us create a world based on the culture of God’s heart that transcends nations and achieve the liberation of God’s hometown and homeland. I pray that God’s blessings may be with your nation and family for all eternity.

The Nation and World of Peace Sought by God and Humanity

October 29, 2001

Hotel Riviera Yuseong, Daejeon, Korea
Korea Rally for the Nation of Cosmic Peace and Unity

Respected leaders, ladies and gentlemen: At this transitional point in human history, we have gathered as leaders from around the world who are concerned about the unification of Korea and world peace. The tragedies that took place in New York, Washington DC. and Pennsylvania on September 11 truly shocked the entire world. Along with our concerns over peace and safety, we have come to reflect upon fundamental and serious questions of modern civilization and the future of humanity.

The Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace and the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations held a timely and significant conference in New York on October 19-22. These two organizations, both of which I founded, brought together more than four hundred participants from one hundred and one countries. The participants included current and former heads of state, top leaders of major religions including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, and representatives of academia and non-governmental organizations. The participants debated seriously on how to find peaceful solutions to today’s crises.

Our homeland, the Korean peninsula, remains a divided country and a trouble spot that, along with the Middle East, attracts the world’s attention. In my opening address at the New York conference, I communicated my vision for lasting and fundamental peace. Again I would like to share my view with you leaders assembled here today. The title of my address is “The Nation and World of Peace Sought by God and Humanity.”

Throughout history, people have continuously aspired to a world of peace, but we have never realized that dream. Consider the end of the Cold War, which concluded a time of fierce political and military conflicts and struggles.

Many people expected that the long-awaited era of peace and stability would arrive, supported by our highly developed science and technology.

Nonetheless, we came to realize that the seed of conflict, hatred and selfish desire embedded deeply within each of us is still alive, and is creating ever more serious disasters in new shapes and forms. Violence against innocent people is certainly an inhumane criminal act, and it must be stopped. However, what can eradicate our inner conflicts and struggles and resolve fundamental human problems at their root? Where was the seed of hatred, conflict and struggle sown, and how did it come to be rooted so deeply within us?

That seed was planted in the family of our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. The conflicts and struggles that resulted have continued from generation to generation until the present time.

Then how can we resolve those conflicts and realize peace on earth? Historically, people have attempted to overcome conflicts and pursue peace through economic, political, diplomatic and military means. However, such methods obviously do not provide fundamental solutions, as we are still struggling with many unresolved problems.

There is only one fundamental way to resolve these issues. It is clear and simple. We must restore the family that our first ancestors lost; that is, the ideal family with God at its center, the family that has achieved perfection in true love, both vertically and horizontally.

God exists as the Original Being of true love and the invisible True Parent of humankind. Nonetheless, love cannot exist alone. It exists in relationships, and it bears fruit only through relationships. That is why God created us, as His children, through whom He would seek to realize true love.

God’s first blessing to human beings, to “be fruitful” (Gen. 1:28), called God’s children to become the object partners of His true love by becoming true persons. When we love someone, we want our object partner to be better than ourselves. Thus God, as our loving Parent, wants His children to be better than He is. That is why God repeatedly invests Himself in human beings, His object partners of love; He forgets about what He has already given while constantly desiring to give infinitely more and more love. This is so because love has its origin in the desire to live eternally for the sake of others.

God then bestowed the second Blessing, to “multiply” (Gen. 1:28). Our first ancestors were to have grown to maturity as the children of God. After reaching maturity and becoming one in heart with God, they were to be blessed as true husband and wife. Then they were to become substantial True Parents to their children, inheriting and passing on true love, true life and true lineage from God.

God’s ideal of creation was to perfect true love both vertically and horizontally, beginning in the first family of our common ancestors. Since God’s love is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, that family also was to have been the absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal family, centered on true love. Human beings were to be the substantial embodiments of love, totally united with God in heart, and obtaining perfect freedom, happiness and the realization of all ideals. Then they would have become the lords of true love whom all beings in the universe would have loved and welcomed. This was God’s third blessing (Gen. 1:28). This is the blessing to create a living environment in which we experience joy and happiness, having dominion over all of creation. This includes the care and preservation of the world’s ecological balance as true stewards of the creation.

Tragically, our first ancestors could not inherit the three blessings of God and establish the family of true love. That means they did not become true individuals, true spouses, true parents and true lords centered on true love. Because they disobeyed God, He expelled them from the garden of Eden. As fallen people, they became false spouses to each other with false love that had nothing to do with God’s blessings. They gave birth to children and those children multiplied to populate the world of today.

Since the Fall occurred at the very beginning of human history, people have not been born on the foundation of true love, in attendance to God. Instead, we have lived in a state of conflict, struggling between our minds and bodies. This conflict manifested in the tragedy of hatred and murder between two brothers, Cain and Abel, in the first family. This was the miserable reality in that family once it departed from God.

A family built on human relationships alone cannot become a family of the original ideal of creation. An ideal family must connect to God vertically and have a true person as its axis. Only under the true love of true parents, and among siblings who have and share a common axis, can a family enjoy relationships of ultimate harmony and peace. True love is experienced within an ideal family that bears good fruit. The family is the original and best school of love. Neither power nor knowledge can create true love.

Honorable leaders! What do you feel when you look at the reality of our society and the youth in our contemporary world? Do you feel hope for a bright future? I believe that you must agonize over the increasing rates of crime, violence, drug abuse, immorality, corruption, teen pregnancy and so forth. These arise out of a confusion of values, and portend greater darkness enveloping our youth.

How did we arrive at this point? Better school systems and social improvements might have delayed the onset of these problems, but would not address their fundamental cause, which is the breakdown and loss of our families. This breakdown is a product of the time we are living in, a time when humankind is harvesting the fruit sown when we lost the first family of true love.

It was that family’s failure to realize true love that has led to phenomena associated with family breakdown, including individual breakdown, as well as countless problems on the national and worldwide levels. Of particular concern is the emotional instability of youth, which leads to diminishing life goals, spiritual aimlessness, and unhealthy, self-destructive lifestyles. World leaders who are concerned about the future have to be very serious in order to solve the real problems of young people avoiding marriage, rampant divorce and so forth; trends that destroy the fundamental foundation of families.

Having lost the first and second blessings, humankind does not understand the importance of completing one’s individual growth, which is the foundation for sacred and eternal conjugal love. Most of our young people are not aware of the importance of keeping purity before marriage and reaching personal maturity through true love. This is why they do not understand the value of true love, which is the fundamental root of joy, happiness and all ideals.

The tendency to make light of trust and fidelity between husband and wife and to ignore the sacredness of marriage is an internal cause of indescribable disasters and tragedies for humankind. True love has been driven out by the so-called free love culture, in which people seek only sexual release as the cardinal yet momentary pleasure. The rapid spread of HIV- AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases threatens the very existence of the human race.

It is said that there is no safety zone against the AIDS virus. A greater terror than the terrorism from which the entire world has been trembling is before us. Once contracted, its victims must give up their dreams for happiness, ideals and life itself. Unless we resolve this catastrophe plaguing our planet, how can we consider ourselves leaders?

Nor have we taken responsibility for the third blessing endowed by God, to “have dominion over the creation.” This requires that we take care of all creatures with true love. What would happen if the natural world were to rebel against the abuse and misuse it suffers at the hands of human beings who lord over it? Are not those symptoms beginning to appear? Before the natural world punishes our intolerable arrogance we have to stand before nature in true love as people of restored integrity.

Respected leaders, in order to examine today’s problem at a more fundamental level, I would like to consider the relationship between the true “I” and the true “we” in the context of God’s ideal of creation.

As a result of the Fall, human beings did not achieve the position of the true “I.” For this reason, God has never been able to use the word “we.” That is to say that God has never been able to stand within the realm of the consciousness of His ideal of creation and establish a relationship that would allow him to say, “This is my creation” or “This is my child.”

So our present concept of “I” has no relationship with the original ideal of God’s creation, and it is for this reason that we have to deny ourselves absolutely.

God has conducted His restoration providence so that He could establish true men and true women, that is, His sons and daughters, whom He could freely include within His concept of “we.” Because God is the subject partner of love, life and lineage, He sought true sons and daughters who would live eternally with a complete and unbreakable standard.

To achieve that, we first have to perfect our individual character through uniting our mind and body and, on that foundation, to build a vertical parent-child relationship with God. A vertical relationship by itself, however, is not sufficient to bring the word “we” into being. We also need to create a horizontal relationship in harmony with the vertical. To do this, man and woman must form a true husband-wife relationship through a Blessed marriage, bear children, build a true family and form a four-position foundation involving three generations. Only then will God use the word “we” with reference to a family unit.

How, then, can we advance to such a position? God created all things from a position in which His mind and body were completely one. His creation was an act of total investment involving absolute love and absolute faith. There was no possibility that He would consider His own interests or situation. This was the fountainhead of love that seeks to give one hundred percent and then still continues giving. This is true for God and it is true for our families as well.

Parents, who stand in the position of God, have to invest themselves completely and absolutely with true love. In terms of the logic of origin-division-union, they give birth and rear children from the position of the origin, thus establishing a vertical axis for the concept of “we.” If the husband and wife, who stand in the position of division from the origin, become one with each other based on true love, they will establish the horizontal axis. Then the children, who are in the position of union, will align themselves automatically with the vertical and horizontal axes and become one; they will establish a new axis reaching from front to back. There will be an original family that accomplishes this, substantiating the concept of “we” that is complete vertically, horizontally and front to back.

This is the reason the family is so important; it is the most valuable gift given to us from Heaven. If the environment we call the family did not exist, how would we establish this absolute standard of “I?” If not for the family, we would never even dare to think of a “we” that is complete vertically, horizontally and front to back. The cradle of love, peace and happiness is nothing other than this family.

How, then, do we establish the true “I?” This is possible only through a life of true love for the sake of others. The person who denies him or herself completely, to the point of selflessness, and lives for the sake of the family, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of all humanity and for the sake of God, will automatically establish the true “I.”

We must never put ourselves forward arrogantly and use the word “I” in a casual manner. God has worked, steeped in grief in the back alleys of history, to push forward His providence of restoration. His only desire has been to establish children who could speak of the true “I.” Anyone who knows this heart of God can never claim the word “I” for him or herself in a casual manner.

When we establish God’s original ideal for world peace and the ideal families for which God has been waiting for tens of thousands of years, we will have the starting point for the kingdom of heaven on earth. Beginning there, we will be able to resolve the grief of the pitiable God.

I would like to call upon everyone here to join with me. First, let us work to establish the true “I” that can look at the sun without shame, look at the ocean with a clear conscience, and have nothing to hide before nature. Then let us establish the family to which God will refer as a part of His “we.”

In this way, we must establish a relationship of true parents and children between God and ourselves. Furthermore, God, who is the True Parent of humanity and the origin of love, life and lineage, is the ancestor of humanity and the true King who reigns over all. God lost the positions of ancestor and King as a result of the human ancestors’ Fall in the garden of Eden.

In accordance with the progress of the providence of restoration, I declared the return to the ocean, to the land, to the cosmos and to the realm of the heart of the fourth Adam. Then, on January 13, 2001, I performed the historic “Enthronement Ceremony of the Kingship of God.” Adam’s family, as the first human family, should have become the godly ancestors of humanity and set the foundation for the institution of the family. Originally, the king of the family eventually would have inherited the positions of king of the nation and king of the cosmos. Only in that way was humanity to have connected to the heavenly realm of the original ideal.

We can institute the king of the nation because the age of indemnity is ending and we are entering the age of settlement through the process of family registration. This will develop further into the kingship of the world. This is why, on the occasion of True Children’s Day, 2000,1 declared that the Parents of Heaven and Earth now reign as King of the family in the Unification Church. This means that we are now able to enter the age in which families that have been registered can attend the Heavenly Parent as our King. Thus, each Blessed family must be aware of its responsibility to establish the tradition of humanity attending the King of heaven and earth. This is the reason that the age of the church has ended and the age of the Family Federation has begun.

The entire universe is linked as one connected body centered on one nucleus. Each one of our families must stand in the position of this nucleus, nurture the creation and love all creatures that God created in love. By loving God’s creation, which exists in His love, we can stand in the position of true owners.

If you can feel that your family is like one body that constitutes a realm of true love before God, your family can stand as a cornerstone of the place of settlement where you can attend the King and the Parents of heaven and earth. This is how you become a blessed family and inherit the realm of victory.

Respected leaders! Now is the time for humanity to voluntarily repudiate all pride, ignorance, selfishness and hatred. Let us follow the laws of heaven and be humble before God. Ever since God called me at the tender age of sixteen, I have committed myself totally to the realization of world peace, which has been God’s deepest wish. At this time, I would like to set forth several crucial steps that are necessary for bringing peace to the world.

First, live for the sake of others. A self-centered life not only causes discomfort, it also violates the laws of heaven. Living for the sake of others, on the other hand, is the way we can resemble God. Loving our family, our community, our nation and the world is the way to inherit God’s true love and it is the way to live in accord with the fundamental order of the universe. Only through practicing true love can we become true individuals, true parents, true teachers and true lords. Only then can we finally become the leaders who can bring about peace on earth. A life of living for the sake of others opens the gate to peace.

In this sense, the path to peace ultimately must be based on Godism, or head-wing thought. This is the teaching that can reconcile and embrace all sides in a conflict from the seed to the fruit, by dealing with the starting point of conflict in the relationship between Cain and Abel. How can we break the chain of hatred and violence that we perpetrate against one another? Returning hatred in response to hatred only leads to more hatred, terror and destruction; this is certainly not the path to peace. We can touch, educate and reconcile the conflicting parties only by true love.

True love that places God in the center disregards national boundaries; therefore it is international. True love transcends the high walls dividing religions and races; therefore it is interreligious and interracial. True love centered on God’s ideal of living for the sake of others can generate the power to touch a person’s heart and spirit. Only by true love can the various reasons and causes of conflicts on earth be overcome, whether the confrontation is between right and left, front and rear, above and below, or inner and outer. Only by true love can we establish a world of eternal peace.

Second, the family is the fundamental unit for building peaceful nations and ultimately a peaceful world. As I already mentioned, the root of conflict originated in the first family. Therefore, until the family of the True Parents appears, it is impossible for us to enter the era of world peace.

The international Blessings that I promote worldwide are not the wedding ceremony of a particular religion, they are a movement to save all nations and the world. We teach youth to keep their purity before marriage and, when they reach adulthood, to marry with the Blessing of God. However, as a condition to receive the marriage Blessing, they first pledge to their spouse that they will maintain absolute trust and fidelity. Thus, the Blessing is a holy movement to build true families and lift up each couple as true parents who live according to the standard of true love.

Families built upon such an ideal and such an education have no need to feel threatened by the AIDS virus. For them, preventing AIDS is easier than preventing a cold or flu. If we educate the youth of the world in this vision and practice it, we will completely eliminate the AIDS epidemic and also eliminate the scourge of family breakdown.

Further, these families of true love will serve as the cornerstone for peaceful nations and a peaceful world. In particular, if individuals of enemy nations, who have lived in discord throughout history, come together in true love as in-laws, their reconciliation will bring nations and races together. It is a high wall to overcome. Nevertheless, here is the supreme formula for bringing true peace to the world: bring together children from enemy families and nations for the “exchange marriage Blessing.” These interreligious and international families can build a realm of Blessing, perfecting true families of true love that both heaven and earth desire. From that point, the world of eternal peace that God and all humankind have desired will begin.

Third, interreligious reconciliation and cooperation is an essential condition for world peace. I have campaigned tirelessly for interreligious harmony and dialogue. We have always devoted a far greater proportion of funding to that purpose than for the growth and development of the Unification Church. Do you think that practicing such sacrificial love with an unchanging heart is easy? By no means! However, we cannot expect world peace unless religious people reconcile and cooperate.

World peace is the original ideal of God; therefore religious leaders and believers need to be the guides who lead people to peace. If religions only emphasize narrow-minded denominationalism and fail to teach true love for God and the universe, we will never free humankind from the horrors of war. In the face of this global crisis, religious leaders have to practice true love, humbly following God’s Will, walking hand in hand beyond the perimeters of their own religion.

The inner power of religion touches our hearts and can recreate us as citizens of peace. It can cultivate our ability to practice self-control from within and it can overcome historical hatreds and resentments among us. This is the root from which true peace and stability arise. If religions demonstrate love for each other, cooperate with each other, and serve each other, putting the higher ideal of peace ahead of their particular doctrines, rituals and cultural backgrounds, the world will change dramatically.

Fourth, I once again emphasize the proper role of the United Nations in realizing world peace. As a representative organization for world peace, the UN has made many contributions. Last year, I presented my proposals to solve the fundamental problems plaguing this world, given that its circumstances have changed and the complex situations in which nations find themselves today are unlike those at the time of the UN’s founding.

One of these proposals was to establish a special body that would discuss and evaluate the religious, spiritual and moral dimensions of world problems. The UN must serve the world and God’s ideal of creation effectively. To do so, it has to transcend the power of politics and national diplomacy, which reflect the motives of nations ruled by self-interest. Only then can it truly protect the human rights of all peoples and nations and build world peace.

This is not limited to the United Nations. Maintaining order in the world and protecting public prosperity and peace will be impossible as long as political sovereignty operates on the principle of national self-interest, and ignores and undermines moral and spiritual values. High-level leaders have to ground themselves spiritually and morally upon God’s ideal and govern according to universal principles. No political power or earthly authority stands above God and the laws of Heaven.

Moreover, the UN has to listen to and embrace many of the views of the non-governmental organizations. This is the reason we established WANGO. I encourage all NGOs, while not losing your original founding spirit, to dialogue and cooperate with one another. I request that you continue to be of service to the world, to be unselfish, and to stay free of corruption.

Respected leaders! A person who only talks about world peace without practicing it is not a true leader. Given the current world situation, we cannot leisurely sit back and wait for the arrival of world peace. It is a time of urgency. Each of us, the ambassadors for peace and everyone else, has to hold back nothing for the creation of world peace. Let us all take active roles as leaders in the movement for peace.

I wish and hope that, centered on the peace embassies, all international organizations including the United Nations will participate actively in the movement for world peace. It is our historic quest.

Let us be united in mind and heart. Let us become pioneers for world peace, by first building ideal families of true love and living for the sake of others. May God’s hand be upon you and bless you forever.

Thank you very much.

With Heartfelt Love and Thanks

February 15, 2002
Hilton Hotel, Seoul, Korea

World Culture and Sports Festival 2002 and General Assembly of the
Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace
(True Mother’s speech)

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: I am very happy to welcome you to the opening ceremony of the 2002 World Culture and Sports Festival in my homeland, Korea.

I have witnessed many miraculous changes taking place in Korea throughout my life. I hope those who are visiting Korea for the first time will be able to experience Korean culture and see with your own eyes how it has developed in leaps and bounds.

We began the new millennium with the expectation that, if we utilized all our modern technology, surely we could bring about a world of peace and prosperity and end the violence and pain of the past.

However, in reality, a series of events that occurred last year demonstrated otherwise. Even though we are enjoying incredible comforts and benefits from a remarkable material civilization, we are still unable to resolve the serious conflicts that persist due to moral confusion, as different cultures are based on different value systems.

Today’s world is troubled by moral and ethical relativism. My husband, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, has dedicated his entire life to teaching the world about absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience to God, as well as absolute sexual morality based on the true love that all humanity and all of creation have hoped for.

I believe many of you already know Rev. Moon through the projects and activities he has been promoting throughout the world. However, today, I would like to introduce another side of him that only I know. I have been married to him for forty-two years, and I believe that only God knows my husband better than I do.

A life dedicated to the realization of world peace

What do the absolute values that Rev. Moon teaches have to do with his life? I see him living for the sake of others from early morning until late at night every day, working to break down all barriers in every sphere of human activity, for the ultimate purpose of breaking down the barriers between God and human beings.

When I met my husband for the first time, the world was divided into two camps, with opposing military powers facing off along one national border. The Cold War between East and West had led to the tragedy of the Korean War, which divided Korea into North and South. In just a few years the war destroyed almost everything in this country. My husband built his first church from discarded boxes and mud bricks. Even in that situation he believed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God would fulfill the promise of new hope He had bestowed upon this land.

Rev. Moon never prayed to God to help him, even under the most difficult circumstances. For example, he escaped death several times while enduring severe torture in prisons under the rule of the North Korean communists. In addition, he endured imprisonment as a result of false accusations from leaders of other Christian denominations in South Korea.

Rather than defend himself, he would endure persecution in silence while consoling God and promising to himself thousands of times that he would, without fail, achieve world peace, which is the Will of God. No matter what difficult circumstances he encountered—when he was on the verge of starvation, or when Christians and the media conspired with the government against him—his love for God and sympathy for humanity only increased.

Like God’s prophets throughout history, he did not submit in the face of opposition. Instead he proclaimed the message of truth ever more intensely.

Rev. Moon has set us an example of absolute faith in Heaven. At the age of sixteen, he received a revelation from Heaven and came to understand that he had been chosen to fulfill the mission of leading humanity into a world of purity, freedom and happiness, a world that God has longed to see since the beginning. To fulfill his mission, my husband had to expand the scope of his life from the level of the individual to that of the family, tribe, people, nation and world, on the foundation of absolute faith in accomplishing God’s Will.

The path of sacrifice and absolute obedience Ever since he received his calling from Heaven, Rev. Moon has taken a path of total sacrifice, accompanied by indescribable suffering and pain. Most painful for him is that those he has endeavored to save have ridiculed and falsely accused him.

Nevertheless, Rev. Moon has not once compromised or hesitated in the course of accomplishing the mission that Heaven bestowed on him. He has taught us the way of absolute faith in God by setting the example himself.

Most important of all, what my husband has taught about absolute love is second to none. Many religious leaders and scholars have dedicated themselves to building their religious denominations or spreading their doctrines. Some have worked on a bigger scale, through charity or humanitarian projects. Yet from the beginning, my husband was different.

Even when the Unification movement was small and beset by financial difficulties, he always taught that we needed to devote more than two- thirds of our resources to the service of others before taking care of ourselves. He has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to supporting interfaith work, seeking to bring all religions closer together, because he knows that this is God’s desire. He has spent far more on interfaith efforts than he ever allowed the Unification movement to spend on itself.

Students at the Unification Theological Seminary, which he founded in 1975, are required to spend far more time studying other religious traditions than their own, and to engage in dialogue with scholars and clergy of other religious denominations.

When the United States government unjustly prosecuted him and was in the process of sending him to prison, my husband founded The Washington Times to help America put an end to the Cold War and fulfill its providential role for world peace. As you know, he financially supported many world media organizations and even now he is increasing their budgets rather than investing in the publications of the Unification movement.

I am certain that his way of living for the sake of others before looking after himself, as well as his indomitable spirit, come from God’s unconditional love. I believe that this is the true meaning of love, which is the solution to breaking down the walls existing in today’s world.

Setting the example of absolute love

Rev. Moon teaches us by setting the example himself. Absolute love between a couple does not allow for infidelity or divorce. This kind of love is the only true way to prevent the sexually transmitted diseases that are so widespread in today’s world.

There have been people who misunderstood his unwavering and sacrificial dedication to practicing and teaching his ideals through the way he lived his life. Sometimes, because of his absolute standard, he was falsely accused by people who were jealous of him or misunderstood him, or who would have rather taken an easier path. However, as time passed, more and more people came to understand that there is no negotiation or compromise in matters of right and wrong, or good and evil, and that there is no yielding when it comes to devoting our lives and love to God.

The time that he might have spent with me he almost always shared with others. We weren’t even able to enjoy a honeymoon as most people do. Nevertheless, I can say honestly that I have received greater love from my husband than any wife has ever known.

His love for our family and his devotion to education have yielded remarkable results. He has taught us to become as absolute in our dedication to God, and as universal in our love for humanity, as he has been in his daily life. Although we never took an ordinary family vacation, our thirteen children and more than twenty grandchildren live with gratitude for God’s grace and blessing.

Rev. Moon: True Husband and True Parent

When we moved to New York, we lived with hundreds of Unification Church members. My husband was eager to learn how to use the riding lawnmower, and he would mow the lawn with the heart of wanting to present a beautiful lawn to God and to the people. He learned how to lay a carpet, and as he nailed it down, he poured that same heart into each nail.

Our life has not been like the lives of others. I see the result of his lifelong sacrifice: the millions of families that have begun to follow this same tradition, and their children and grandchildren. I know that God is truly proud of His dedicated son, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

I cannot suppress my joy over this opportunity to introduce my husband to you this morning. I am happy to publicly express my overwhelming love and gratitude to him for the first time. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the founder of this World Culture and Sports Festival, a true son of God, a true husband, a true father and a true teacher, my husband, Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

God Is the Origin of Peace

August 10, 2002

Shinyang Park Hotel, Gwangju, Korea
Realm of Life speaking tour in Korea
(True Mother’s speech)

Respected peace-loving American dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen, I extend my warm greetings and gratitude to all of you for coming here this evening. You are now joining more than seventy million people worldwide, including seven million in Korea, and seven hundred million Blessed couples in the heavenly spirit world who have participated in these gatherings for peace.

We are living in a truly historic and providential moment. This is a time of great heavenly fortune, the time when we will build the ideal world of peace that heaven and earth have longed to see for six thousand years. It is time to build the kingdom of God in heaven and on earth.

Throughout providential history, God raised up various religions to accord with different historical periods and regional cultures. Working among these diverse traditions, men and women of faith have made continuous efforts to achieve a world of peace.

Yet even today, human beings groan in travail, because we are still unable to free ourselves from all manner of unethical and immoral behavior. People everywhere are dismayed by the truth that a seemingly unstoppable tide of immorality is now rushing in with the power of a surging storm, threatening to sweep us all away in its turbulent waves. This is the tragic portrait of modern human beings.

Yet this does not mean there is never to be any hope. My husband, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and I have dedicated our lives to conveying the Word of God. Our prophetic messages have been proven to be a true witness that transcends the earthly limitations of this age and our environment.

Creation of humankind and the Fall

Today, once again I come before you with a message from Heaven. You can decide whether to believe or not to believe it, however I stand here firmly resolved to act in God’s stead to convey His message to the world in the time of the Last Days. The title of this message is, “God Is the Origin of Peace.”

I sincerely hope you will open the doors of your heart. I encourage you to humbly receive Heaven’s warning to all of us living in the Last Days. In this age of ignorance and confusion, we need to be wise in this way.

In the beginning, human beings were created to live centered on God in the garden of Eden and to live in freedom and peace for eternity. However, as a result of the Fall of our first ancestors Adam and Eve, the vision of this originally intended world never became reality. Instead, from the day the Fall occurred, a history of suffering and sorrow unfolded on this earth.

God intended human beings to live with His true love and true ideals. However we were unable to grasp those ideals and did not even comprehend what true love is. He wanted for us to sing songs of freedom and peace, to possess the complete happiness of becoming one in heart in the presence of the Creator, and to return glory to Him. He intended for us to live in an environment of perfect joy; however we lost the garden of happiness.

Tragically, we have not been able to become a holy people. Satan invaded the human family, defiling the relationships of true parents, true family and true brothers and sisters. Satan corrupted our true tribe, true society, true nation and true world.

That is not all. Satan is the one who has driven God to spend the past six thousand years in a state of suffering and struggle. The Fall marked the beginning of the history of spiritual death. From that day on, the earth became a world of suffering instead of a world of peace. No matter where in the world we live, we have been doomed to the way of conflict and struggle instead of peace.

Within the individual, there is continuous conflict between the mind and body. There has been conflict within families that has expanded into conflicts within nations and throughout the world. Today we find there is no place on earth free of conflict. We have to come to terms with the fact that we are responsible for this history of sin. I repeat: all conflict is the result of the Fall.

If the whole world had originally grown from the good seed of a good tree and in a good environment, then without doubt the world would today be a world of peace, a world of hope and a world with a secure future. However this was not the case. We live in a world in which good and evil are tangled together. Even a good seed has difficulty bearing good fruit when surrounded by an evil environment. The same is true for human beings. For humanity as a whole to be good, it is first necessary that each individual be good. However for such individuals to bear good fruit, we must create a good environment in the nation and world.

Just as the natural world passes through four seasons, human history needs to continue eternally by revolving through cycles that are like spring, summer, autumn and winter. Because of the Fall, though, our world has never experienced that first moment of hope in which all humanity could take delight, the joyous springtime when we could greet the day of glory.

Cain and Abel, the children of our ancestors Adam and Eve, were not born out of God’s love. Adam and Eve were to have created God’s true lineage. They created Satan’s false lineage instead through the act of the Fall. So the children they bore were not truly God’s children, they were actually children of the devil, Satan.

Adam and Eve became the sinful ancestors of humanity, and the Bible records that they were chased out of the garden of Eden. That is why in John 8:44 Jesus scolded the people, saying, “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.”

Without the Fall, Adam and Eve would have received God’s words of blessing. He longed to tell them, “My beloved Adam and Eve, I created you in order for you to build a world fulfilling the purpose of creation and to live in a garden of love. You are my children and will be the masters, the parents and the king and queen of peace and happiness.” Our ancestors Adam and Eve were destined to stand as the everlasting true owners, true parents and true king and queen of both the earthly world and the heavenly world.

We have the responsibility to liberate God

Then what was it that pushed human beings onto the tragic path of the Fall? The Fall of Humankind took place when human beings embraced self-centeredness instead of obeying God’s Word. Today the fruit of the Fall is seen clearly in the extremes of selfish thinking and behavior that rage around us with impunity.

I am speaking of the reprehensible behavior of people routinely seeking their own benefit and convenience regardless of others. I refer to the shameless attitudes of people trying to save themselves without concern as to whether others live or die. Such behavior stems from that which brought about the Fall.

This is certainly not the type of conduct envisioned by God at the time of the Creation. God did not desire to bring about such a world, and we never wanted to be born into such a world.

Therefore God has set His purpose to clear away this tragic, sorrowful and painful history and build the world of peace, happiness, freedom and goodness that He originally desired. He is working to set this fallen world right. This is the path of restoration and the path of the providence of salvation.

As the descendants of Adam and Eve, all human beings are fallen. However within each of us there still exists an original mind and a conscience that directs us back toward the originally intended world. This is why people throughout history have always desired and longed for the world God originally sought to create. This long-cherished desire remains today as an ideal that cannot be extinguished or ignored.

God has carried out His providence again and again, in each historical period, so that He could inspire fallen human beings to return to His ideal with a new heart. Finally, we need a Savior, for if no central person capable of moving heaven and earth with this ideal appears, then true freedom, peace and all other ideals will never come about. Humanity will be fated to endure an endless path of sorrow and indemnity of astronomical proportions.

In these circumstances, God cannot appear to us in glory, peace or freedom, and the path of restoration cannot be an easy one. God appears in the midst of difficulties, and to meet Him we must first make ourselves a sacrificial offering. This is because the path of restoration is the way of indemnity.

This means that until we are able to wipe away the sorrow in God’s heart and dissolve all the grievances there, we cannot hope to accomplish peace among humanity, much less see God’s ideal of creation bear fruit on earth. Since God’s pain was caused through the Fall, we are responsible to liberate Him from the burden of grief that weighs like a massive stone on His heart.

Yet who among us is truly thinking like that today? Even the most devout believers in Jesus are blind and deaf to this truth, thinking they will simply be forgiven. However, as fallen human beings, we need to return to the state before the Fall.

Having lost God, we must go back to the state of grace we would have enjoyed had we never lost Him. Having lost the True Parents of humanity, we must return to the position we would have held had we not lost them. We must return to live in a garden of peace centered on God and True Parents, as their children.

What strategy does the omniscient and almighty God use to change this hellish world into a world of peace? We need to be reminded that in order to accomplish this purpose, God has endured a history of sacrifice and bloodshed and has suffered through so many wearisome religious rituals and rules. This history is referred to as the providence of salvation or the providence of restoration.

Originally, if human beings had not fallen, our mind and body, being centered on God’s love, would not contradict each other. Because of the Fall, however the mind and body came to stand in opposing positions. Therefore even if it were possible to somehow be transported to an ideal world, without each individual solving this mind-body problem and establishing a true standard of heart, living in such a world would not be ideal.

The Absolute Being, who is the Lord of creation, created the entire universe in order to share love and oneness. He formed humans, the highest among created beings, to stand in the position of lords of creation. To do this, we must be able to incarnate God’s heart. Becoming one with God’s heart does more than establish the parent-child relationship between God and ourselves. It is also the link connecting humanity with the rest of creation.

In restoring the ideal world of peace, the world of the original ideal of creation, it is first necessary to establish certain conditions. We must go through the process of restoration through indemnity.

What is meant by restoration through indemnity? Whenever something or someone loses its original position and state of being, it cannot be restored to its original position and status without first paying a certain price. The setting of such conditions is referred to as restoration through indemnity.

If there were only God and us in heaven and earth, we would not need the word “indemnity.” It exists because of Satan, who caused our first ancestors to fall. If Satan and the world of evil did not exist, there would be no need for indemnity. There would also be no need for the phrase “unity of religions,” which we now proclaim with all our might, nor would we need expressions such as “the liberation of God” or “the liberation of humanity.”

The Fall brought about the degradation of human life and turned history into a record of anguish and failure, a chronicle of war. In order to wipe away this history and unravel all of humanity’s fundamental problems, God needs to establish anew the original starting point of human history. He does this through a person who can live a life of true love for the sake of God, humanity and all creation. This is the mission of the Messiah.

What did Jesus do when he was on this earth? Although he was persecuted and died on the cross, he truly loved all humankind. Jesus left this world giving the supreme example of love through the cross. Throughout his life, Jesus never said he wanted to receive love. Rather he said he came to serve, and that he would love even his enemies.

Without that kind of love, we cannot find the origin of peace; and without the origin of peace, we cannot establish a world of peace.

The world of peace can never come to exist as long as we focus only on receiving love. In the realm of true love, our physical parents are not our only parents, nor are our physical siblings our only brothers and sisters. Even our own biological children are not our only children. Once we become people of true character, we will come to feel that every person is our parent, sibling or child, and we will want to treat them as such. We will not be able to see all the people now wandering in the world of death without tears filling our eyes. With such love, when we see young people thrashing about in a quagmire of drugs and debauchery, we will feel compelled to devote our full heart and soul to saving them, as if they were our own children. This is a manifestation of the love that unconsciously and naturally seeks to give rather than receive.

Unity is a prerequisite for freedom and peace

Unity is another prerequisite of freedom and peace. Consider the life of a husband and wife. If the two have not become one, how can they enjoy the freedom of husband and wife in a true sense? If a husband and wife are not one, then there is no hope for harmony in the family. Peace in the family will be an impossible dream.

A person blasphemes God if he stands before the unchanging God and says he will vacillate. We blaspheme love if we stand in the presence of His unchanging love and practice a vacillating love. The foundation for peace begins in our own heart when we share both sorrow and joy with God. From there, we can expand the base of freedom and happiness in the world.

For this reason, a religious movement must arise on this earth that teaches us to achieve complete mastery over the body and is able to unite the people of the world. Jesus started such a movement.

Please bear in mind that these words are a warning from God proclaimed to human beings wading through the muddy waters of a corrupt world in the Last Days. We are all called to fulfill this task of restoration. It is our destiny. We can never escape our destiny, which is Heaven’s absolute mandate.

I think everyone at some point in life searches for the origin of peace and happiness. Yet from where do peace and happiness really come? They do not originate from America or Korea or the United Nations. The crucial issue is how we human beings, whose minds and bodies are in conflict, can come to embrace a true view of the universe and find peace and happiness in our own hearts.

In our own hearts, the remnants of six thousand years of war between good and evil continue to flare. The First World War was horrendous, as was the Second World War. Such wars, though, were relative skirmishes in a much larger conflict, and neither lasted more than six years.

Yet the struggle between mind and body that goes on within each of us is the worst kind of war. It is a war that seemingly knows no end and whose inevitable result speeds us to ruin. Everyone feels the torment of this struggle in his or her own life. The confrontation between mind and body is a fierce battle of good versus evil representing the prolonged struggle between God and Satan.

Because of this conflict, the ideal of the true human potential has been hidden away in a dense fog and trapped behind a high fence. We must generate a wind of truth and love that is strong enough to sweep the fog away. We must tear down the mighty fence between our mind and body that stands so high as to pierce the sky. The course of overcoming this struggle is our destiny.

To win this battle, we must overcome the desires of the body, such as for sleep, money and unprincipled sexual satisfaction. When he set out on his course decades ago, my husband, Rev. Moon, declared as his personal motto, “Before seeking dominion over the universe, first control yourself” And that is how he has lived throughout his life.

We must be honest about the state of the world and of our nation today. The Bible says that in the Last Days the hearts of men will grow cold, and that the world’s people will live like orphans. It also predicts that nations will flounder in confusion and despair. Have you ever experienced true peace in your heart, even for a moment? And does our nation have a true leader?

Where are the true patriots who truly love this country and its people to the extent that they are willing to offer their lives to bring about peace? Who can put forward a philosophy or teaching with the power to save the young people of this country, who are morally sick and spiritually declining? Their plight is truly pitiful, and we cannot help feeling intense grief for them.

All this goes back to the fact that each of us has been unable to establish a standard of one heart, one body and one thought within ourselves. Without individual mind-body unity, how can we hope for harmony in the family or peace in the country or the world?

Throughout the ages, our original minds have longed for peace, happiness and unity. The problem has always been our physical body, which is at war with the desire of the mind. Yet our flesh is the container that holds our mind, so we cannot just discard it as we wish. The important thing is how we govern this physical body, whose impulses and directions change minute by minute.

After the Fall, the human body became Satan’s dwelling place. As the apostle Paul laments in Romans 7:23-24, “I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

When we look honestly within ourselves, we can all see elements of good and evil. Our mind or conscience is oriented toward good, and our body pulls in the opposite direction, toward evil. If we cannot resolve this conflict of mind and body, then sin will indeed torment us for eternity. This was true even for so great a saint as Paul.

Perfection of character through the unity of mind and body

Ladies and gentlemen, what is the true way to world peace? War cannot be the answer. Neither is wealth, power or knowledge. Nor can peace be achieved through the political or diplomatic power of the United Nations. Nothing really can be expected from the forum of the UN as long as its fundamental concerns are the desires of factional individuals and the national interests of each member state.

As long as fallen nature remains within us, history will always be riddled with struggle and turmoil, and this will be the case no matter how much we may sing of our ideals or cry out for peace. This is why we conclude that we will not find the path to peace until we have pulled out this fallen nature by its root.

The way to world peace does not lie far off at the ends of the earth, rather it will be found only in the place where each of us is able to unite our divided mind and body. The wider the gap between someone’s mind and body the greater the struggle and the stronger the resulting pain.

The mind is God’s sentinel, while the body is Satan’s vanguard. We need to narrow the gap between the mind and body and finally unite them entirely.

To pull out our deeply rooted fallen nature that was inherited from our false parents, we need True Parents. They alone are able to free us of Satan’s false lineage. We must meet the True Parents, and achieve mind-body oneness and unity of thought by learning from them how to practice true love and how to live a life for the sake of others.

Ladies and gentlemen, look at the world. There are so many problems. They begin with struggles between mind and body and husband and wife and go all the way to conflicts and wars among nations. They can be traced to countless causes. However, if we dig down to the root cause we will always arrive at the problems between mind and body and man and woman.

The history of human suffering began with a false relationship between a man and a woman. Disharmony within the family quickly developed into a multitude of problems in the society and then the world.

If we could just resolve the problems involving men and women in every family, every society and country, and on the worldwide level, and establish one model family, then the world would be able to unite as a world of peace. It would become the ideal world of the original creation.

God originally wanted a world of true peace to take root on this earth centering on our first ancestors Adam and Eve. If they had not fallen and had grown according to God’s Will and developed a mature character, they would have received God’s blessing, formed an ideal family and built the ideal kingdom of heaven, free of evil and suffering.

That would have been an eternal world of peace. From generation to generation, human beings would have enjoyed a life of happiness. We would have been able to communicate directly with God as His direct sons and daughters and to commune freely with our ancestors in heaven. The world would have become a place in which good would have had absolute dominion and people would have been incapable of sinning.

Human history began on the wrong foot, yet our Heavenly Father did not forsake us. Instead, for six thousand years, God has devoted His heart and soul for the sake of finding His lost children. Not once has He regretted that He created human beings. He has never been discouraged in the face of Satan’s ability to have his way. With single-minded devotion, God has worked with true love and forgiveness to carry out His providence of restoration.

It is not by mere happenstance that we are able to study and learn a little more deeply about God today than we could before. We need to be grateful for Heaven’s grace and thankful to our ancestors who guided us to this truth.

Our utmost task is to perfect our character through the oneness of our mind and body, to set right the families that have splintered under Satan’s rule, and to establish ideal true families.

God’s hope is to dwell eternally with a family that is united through three generations. The greatness of true love is that it enables us to become God’s object partners and also enables God to become one with us. The ideal family attends the grandparents as they would attend Heaven, shows absolute obedience to the parents, and creates children through the absolute relationship of a husband and wife who raise their children in purity and without sin. When we do this, our families will attain a unity of heart with God and become the birthplace of eternal happiness and peace.

Ladies and gentlemen, human beings were originally created so that our mind and body would respond to God’s true love and unite into one. Many people on the earth today, however, live in ignorance of the role of the mind. They do not know that the mind actually is the basis upon which we can develop the character that can find peace centering on God’s love. There is enough room in every human mind to embrace God.

Any person who comes to have such a righteous mind will immediately yearn to bring all people into the palace of peace. Because human beings are God’s children created in His image, we all possess the potential to be free of mind-body conflict and to establish the origin of true unity in ourselves.

We need to heed God’s final warning

There is no possibility of contradiction or conflict within God, the Absolute Being. His divine character is reflected throughout creation and in the dual structure of mind and body and male and female in human beings. God exists in a state of absolute and total unity within Himself. So it stands to reason that human beings, who were created to resemble God, the great King of all creation, have the ability to achieve the full unity of mind and body.

Yet as a result of the Fall, human beings lost the standard of harmony and unity between the mind and body and live instead in a quagmire of struggle and contradiction.

In a world in which the forces of evil are rampant, it is nearly impossible to live a life where the mind has complete governance over the body. This is why God in His wisdom has permitted necessary and appropriate religions to arise for the sake of saving fallen humanity, giving consideration to every age, culture, regional environment and circumstance.

Throughout history human beings have tried to follow the teachings of religions and to steadily pioneer the path of life centered on the mind. We have learned the path of self-denial and how to place our hope in the eternal world and not be attached to the present reality.

In Christianity, for example, we are taught to focus on God’s kingdom and His righteousness, not this world. The scriptures warn us not to be selfish or to seek to live lavishly. Christianity has always emphasized the peace that originates in the world of the mind and heart.

A good illustration of this is Jesus’ teaching, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” This concept of the kingdom of heaven has nothing to do with worldly affluence or power, and is echoed in many other faiths. Buddha’s declaration, “In all of heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one,” can be understood in the same way.

Methods may differ from one religion to another, however the mission of all religions is to strengthen the internal hope and aspirations of human beings. They guide us to examine ourselves and to live a life where the mind governs the body. In this way, God has carried out His providence for human salvation through religion for six thousand long years.

The fact is, up to the present no religious leader or sage has been able to show us how to completely overcome the conflict between mind and body and bring about eternal unity and lasting peace. No one could teach us how to subdue the body once and for all by centering on the mind.

No one could show us how to find true peace. No one could bring us to that point of complete unity where parents become eternally one, and husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children and the extended family can eternally unite as one.

Now, however, the time for peace has come! Heaven’s long wait has ended. We are living in the final moment of the Last Days of human history. Heaven cannot extend or allow any further delay of the providence for human salvation.

This is because the True Parents, whom heaven and earth have hoped would come and have longed to see, are now on this earth. They are taking all responsibility upon themselves and are successfully completing the providence of restoration. In a world entangled in chaos and debauchery, they are establishing an order of true love.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is said that those who believe will be blessed. My husband, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and I, who are bringing this truth of Heaven to you, are standing as the True Parents.

The teaching and thought of True Parents revealed to Rev. Moon is a truth that promises peace to humanity. Both communism and democracy have tried and failed to bring peace. The thought that will prevail is “Godism,” which is the philosophy and tradition of “living for the sake of others.” Only this sacrificial way of life based on Heavenly Parentism is capable of leading us to eternal life and peace.

In this way, we will come to the amazing realization that, as God’s reciprocal partner of love, we will come to possess a value even greater than God’s. We must praise God for this. This love is the only way that we can at last connect to the eternal world of peace. It is the starting point of eternal life in the kingdom of God on earth and in heaven.

The counsel of messages from the spirit world

In our capacity as the True Parents of humanity, my husband and I have already united the entire spirit world. We are receiving messages of support and unity from the founders of the four great religions centering on Jesus, including Buddha, Confucius and Muhammad, and from one hundred twenty major disciples of each of these leaders. They sent these messages after having studied our teachings in the Divine Principle and Unification Thought seminars in the spirit world. These leaders are filled with hope and feel immense gratitude toward the True Parents.

Even communist leaders in the spirit world, beginning with Marx and Lenin, have completed the Divine Principle seminar in accordance with True Parents’ direction. They too are sending tearful messages of repentance and deep lamentation.

All these people in the spirit world now have only one hope. This is that their representatives and followers on earth will accept the teachings of the True Parents as quickly as possible, work for peace, and prepare themselves for their eternal life.

Their messages implore us not to waste our precious, fleeting time on earth, instead to prepare wisely for life in the spirit world, where all people will live together for eternity after casting off their physical bodies.

What does this mean for men and women now living on earth? First, it means that all people, men and women, young and old, rich and poor alike, must believe in the unequivocal fact that God is actually alive and is working His Will. We ought not think of Him only conceptually. God is watching our every step and every act with eyes bright with expectation.

God is waiting for the day when all human beings, who left His bosom and went to Satan, repent and return to Him. Long ago, He painted a picture of what it will be like when the prodigal child, who once left Him, returns to the Father with tears of repentance. Now His urgent request is that we actually do this. As a first step, God wants us to comfort and attend the True Parents, who still remain on earth and who walk the path of blood, sweat and tears for the sake of human restoration.

God’s desperate hope is that we will receive the warning He gives in these Last Days with an earnest heart, correct the errors of our lives, and live in a way that we will not regret later.

Second, we are being warned that we must accept as fact the existence of the spirit world and live every aspect of our lives in accordance with heavenly law. God is sternly telling us to discover our higher selves, grow our spirits, and establish a world of peace on this earth without delay.

God is watching us. Tens of thousands of wise men and women, together with all our ancestors, are watching our daily life. When we realize this for certain, how will you be able to go against heavenly law?

Soon you too will begin having spiritual experiences. The time has come when your ancestors will directly observe and guide your life and even your thoughts. Numerous Unification members who believe in and follow the True Parents’ teachings are already experiencing this.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for coming here this evening. You are truly blessed, because you are able to live in the historic and providential age when the Messiah, the True Parents of humankind, has returned to earth.

This is the time when North and South Korea and all other nations will be unified, not by guns and knives, but with love and truth. This is the time when all the religions of the world will become one under the guidance of the True Parents and when all the sages and ancestors in the spirit world will come down to earth to live with us and communicate directly with us.

I would like to conclude this address by urging all humanity to fulfill the responsibility to which we have been called by uniting to build a world of peace that transcends race, belief systems and national boundaries.

I pray that God’s boundless blessings will be upon your family and nation in abundance.

Thank you very much.

God’s Homeland and One World

October 16, 2002

Unification Church Central Training Center, Guri, Korea
Rally for Harmony and Unity in Heaven and Earth

Leaders of religion, politics and academia who have gathered from around our country and renowned ambassadors for peace: Today you have assembled here with hopes for a peaceful world. In this meaningful venue, as the founder of the International and Interreligious Federation for World Peace, I would like to convey a message concerning God’s original ideal, “God’s Homeland and One World.”

People who are living on the earth in the present day are unable to find the kingdom and the righteousness that God promised. God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness have been the hope of people who have lived throughout the course of thousands of years of history, and they remain our hope today.

Then how is it that the hope still remains as our final objective, and why wasn’t it accomplished in the beginning of human history? It is because human beings fell. Due to the Fall of our human ancestors, human beings, who could have become the center of God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness together with God, found themselves unable to form any sort of relationship with God. In other words, they were degraded so that they became ignorant of the Father, the family and the nation that are the center of God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. Therefore, God has been working hard in the course of history up to this day to enlighten all people who have been groping in darkness, to teach them about Father, the family and the nation.

Therefore, seeking and establishing God’s kingdom and His righteousness have remained both our hope and our objective. Presently numerous nations exist in this world. However, even among those many nations, not even one can be truly beloved of God. So the goal behind God’s dispensation of six thousand years to this day has been that we deny this fallen world and create a new nation of God.

This is why God has carried out the providence of seeking a nation throughout history. It is because God’s Will to restore human beings cannot be realized without the cooperation of a nation. There must be a true nation centering on a true religion. Thus, God sought a particular nation at a particular time. That was the history centering on the chosen people of Israel, both their nation and their religion, Judaism.

What kind of nation is the nation that you hope for? It is not like the nation you are living in today. This kind of nation eventually must say its farewell. We still do not have a nation of God. People without a nation have no permanent address.

Without a nation, there is no nationality. That means that there are no grounds on which you can have your name entered into a national family registry. Therefore, what we need to do in this current world is to find that nation. We must form the heavenly kingdom and, with that nationality, we must live on this earth as the victorious sons and daughters who have inherited the lineage of true and good parents who love their nation and their people. As such, we must lead our family and our clan so that we can enter the kingdom of heaven in the heavenly world. That is the Principle.

Only when we have a nation will we have a tradition that we may peacefully leave behind for our descendants for all time. Only then will all our efforts of shedding blood and sweat remain. Only then will a commemorative tower appear on the earth to congratulate God for His hard work. Only then will traces of all glory remain on the earth. If we cannot establish a nation, everything will be for naught.

Please understand that seeking and establishing God’s nation is the most important issue. Always have the conviction that, “Our family is a family that protects the nation that can receive True Parents’ love. Therefore, I must become a dutiful child of True Parents and fulfill the duties of a patriot to the nation.” This means that you have to receive God and True Parents’ love.

However, you cannot receive God’s love freely without a nation. This is because the heavenly nation’s establishment takes place after Satan’s kingship has been defeated. We admire God’s nation. That is because it is a place where there is love. It is not a place of momentary love; it is a place of eternal love. It is a place where each person can be raised to fulfill their potential and each person’s value can be acknowledged one hundred percent. In other words, it is a place of eternal happiness. Therefore, people long and yearn for the heavenly kingdom.

The path that we have to traverse is a path that we truly want to walk, and the nation that we have to seek and realize is a nation where we truly want to live forever. Our possessions belong both to the cosmos and to ourselves, they belong to this age and to the past, and we must make sure that we can guarantee them for posterity. And we need to have the authority and knowledge that will move heaven and earth to cry when we cry, and to rejoice when we rejoice. It will be a world of one heart, where God’s love and His truth are actualized through His children living as a one family under God. This is the greatest desire and hope that fallen people can realize in the current age.

Every person must live in his or her own nation. That is an absolute condition bestowed on each one of us. Each nation would exist in harmony with all other nations, and every person, without exception, would live a righteous life full of hope for the sake of God’s kingdom. I am saying that we have to long for the ideal hometown and establish the rules of righteousness through our lives as we live for the sake of God’s kingdom and His righteousness.

Do you have that nation? Since you do not, wouldn’t you seek to realize it? What kind of nation did I say it would be? It would be a nation of our ideal, a nation of unity. It would be a nation that all people could go to. There can be no exceptions in realizing this nation. Families will cooperate, as will tribes, peoples and the entire world. Thus, individuals can be united and, moreover, families, tribes, peoples, nations and the world can be united. God certainly must realize His providential Will on this earth. Then what will be the result of His Will being realized? It will be that all the people of the world will be saved and God will be able to govern them. God’s providential Will is rooted in His desire to see this day.

If you are unable to completely restore the nation on the earth during your lifetime, then even when you go to the spirit world, you will not have the value of someone who is a part of the heavenly kingdom. I am saying that you must go to the spirit world with the record of having been governed within God’s dominion, because that is the original standard of God’s creation.

Ladies and gentlemen! I have nothing to envy in this world. I have no interest in the things of the world. My life’s wish is only this: “Can I die in a nation where God can protect me? If I don’t live that way before I go, will my life not have been a miserable one? Therefore, before I die, I have to seek that nation and live within that nation, even if only for a single day’’

I am going forward with the mindset of investing the sacrifice of thousands of days for that one day. I am going forward, even if you who do not understand are resting. If you cannot do it, then I have to inspire foreigners to do it, and if this nation cannot do it, then I have to use the strategy of encircling this nation with other nations.

Ladies and gentlemen, what is the goal of our faith? It is to become a citizen of God’s nation. If we cannot become citizens of that nation, the path to freely express our pride to all people and to the natural world and thus be loved will not emerge. A person without a nation will always be attacked. They will stand in a pitiful position and can easily be caught helpless. Therefore, the question is, “Where is the nation of God’s desire?” In other words, where will we find the nation that God can use as His foothold?

The reason that we shed our blood and sweat for this nation and for this people is, in the end, to realize the eternal heavenly nation, the beloved community that every generation of our descendants will praise forever. There is no question that it will be a nation where children of direct descent will uphold God’s divine commandments. In other words, they will govern the nation whose order and kingship represent God. There will be neither democracy nor communism there. Once the nation has been formed, it will remain as an eternal national system. When you think about these matters, don’t you feel mortified that you have not become citizens of such a nation? You need to lament that you do not have a single such nation and bemoan that you cannot live in such a nation. We need to repent that we do not have this single, unchanging sovereignty.

People have established nations throughout history in order to build their sovereignty, nation and land. We know that in the process, numerous people died, numerous patriots were sacrificed, numerous nations perished and numerous sovereignties were replaced. Among those countless people who were sacrificed, there is no doubt that those on Heaven’s side, the people who were sacrificed for the sake of Heaven’s Will, want such a nation and world to be realized. There is no question that history, since the Fall of the first human ancestors, has been governed by Satan and not by God.

God originally was supposed to be the master of this world. If a tribe, nation and world had been realized centering on a true family, composed of children directly descended from God, bound in love with Him, it truly would be a world that God could govern, a nation that God could govern, a family that God could govern and individuals whom God could govern. However due to the Fall, everything, starting with the individual and expanding to the family, tribe, people, nation and world, came to oppose God. You must understand this history of the Fall and this world of the Fall. If God leaves this world as it is, He can never realize the world of eternal love of the original ideal of creation. As the Absolute Being, if God cannot realize the original ideal of creation, He cannot recover His original authority. Therefore, with that position as His target, God deals with the evil world and guides us to the original world of His ideal. This is God’s providence concerning the fallen world.

Although on this earth there have been many nations with sovereignty stemming from the Fall, there has not been even one nation of God’s desire. In order to establish the nation that could realize His Will, God has been moving through the ages of history unknown to human beings. God created Adam with the desire to govern a family, a society, a nation and the world through that one individual being, and He raised Adam toward maturity with that desire in mind. However, through the Fall of Adam, the history that began with one was divided into fours and fives. The providential history of salvation has been God’s work to repair and heal those divisions. Adam is the ancestor of all people, so the loss of Adam, in effect, was the same as the loss of all of humanity.

Therefore, God has to call and establish that one individual being again. The person who will be established again has to be someone who can let go of and forget his tribe, his people and his nation. In other words, he has to be someone who will move forward in complete devotion to God’s Will and God’s Will alone.

Ladies and gentlemen, all religions have the ultimate common aim of realizing God’s Will. Let’s examine the history of Christianity, a good example of which you may be well aware. Although Noah may have been placed in a social environment, he did not desire to be under its sway, and although he belonged to a national environment, he was not tied to it. Instead, he sought out the nation of his own desire. In order to seek and establish that nation, he had to pass through untold trials and hardships. Noah had relatives and a people that he could call his own, and he pursued God’s Will more than that of his relatives and his people. God’s hope was that Noah would seek out God’s kingdom and righteousness while subjugating his own personal environment.

Can you imagine the ordeal that Noah had to endure, without skipping even one day throughout the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, for one hundred and twenty years? Even his own family members ignored him. Yet Noah took all the arrows that came his way and broke through in his decades-long course. Noah was well aware of the principle that he would have to pay indemnity if he enjoyed eating and drinking before he sought for God’s kingdom and righteousness.

Later, God chose Abraham and Sarah and had them depart from Ur of the Chaldeans. They did not know that the place where they were heading to live was the land of Haran. They just followed the path as God guided, with unconditional faith and the heart of obedience. Sarah never complained or resented Abraham, even when he let the Pharaoh take her away.

In this way, their minds, which were pursuing the nation of their hope, did not change even in the face of extraordinary trials. Their grandson Jacob had the strong conviction that the nation and people of his hope were promised within the blessing he received, so no one could break his spirit. In this way, the Will expanded from the individual to the family to the tribe, and the prophets gradually went forward presenting hope for the entire world. Due to disbelief and persecution in Israel, Jesus became a wanderer and could not realize completely both the spiritual and physical dimensions of these hopes.

However, the Messiah is the person who comes with the mission to break down all the walls of heaven and earth and to unite everything into one. The nations founded on philosophies of this earth may perish. However, the nation founded on the belief system that is demanded by the moral laws of family relationships must be established without fail; that is God’s Will.

God’s hope for Adam was not focused on him as an individual; His hope was that from Adam would come a family, a tribe, a people and a nation. When the people of Israel failed to unite with the Messiah or to support him in leading their nation, Israel collapsed. Thus, the returning Lord has the responsibility to perfect Adam and to complete the mission of the Messiah. I tell you that he has the mission of perfecting Adam and then perfecting Adam’s family, tribe, people, nation and world.

Although God has advanced the work of establishing one absolute nation by sending His beloved sons and daughters to the earth, at each point in time there was no base through which a nation could be restored. Because that work has always failed, God has had to continually send people of Heaven to this earth to manage the work, to push it ahead and to accomplish it. This is how the history of the providence of restoration has been unfolding up to the present day.

We ought to be grateful even if God were to sacrifice us as individuals, and we ought to be grateful if God were to sacrifice our family, tribe, people or nation. It is only when we can have that attitude, and when a nation with that attitude appears, that the world can be changed through that nation.

However, no matter how much an individual may sacrifice, if that nation is not established, the sacrifices of individuals, and the sacrifices of families, tribes and people, also will have to continue. It is under that principle that God has pushed forward the providence to find a nation during the course of history. Therefore, whenever there was an individual who could think of such a nation and benefit that nation, God used the family that had inherited the individual’s tradition of sacrifice for that nation, and God had tribes and peoples inherit that family’s tradition so that they could sacrifice for the nation. In this way, God has pushed forward the providence to find that nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, what was the purpose for which we were born on this earth? It was so that we could love that nation. The purpose of God’s providence up until now was also to love that nation. A person without a sovereign nation to call his own is pitiful indeed. Therefore Jesus said, in consideration of this: “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matt. 6:31-33)

Did Jesus say to first seek a son or to first seek God’s kingdom? He said to seek the nation that God is seeking. God’s hope to establish His kingdom and His righteousness is not realized apart from us and the things of creation. Rather, it is realized through us.

God’s hope is that true people will serve as the center of harmony between God and all things. Therefore, God sent Jesus to this earth as a substantial being that represented Him in front of fallen people, as a person who could represent the lineage of Heaven. In other words, Jesus was the very first person who came to the earth to realize God’s historical hope. He was the first Son of God, established in such a position after four thousand years. Jesus was the Son established on the earth as a seed within one nation, centering on Judaism, in the family of Joseph. At the time, Satan already had established nations through which he was attacking Heaven’s side. Therefore, Heaven’s side also needed a national standard as a perfect foothold. Therefore, God worked hard for four thousand years in order to form a nation. God’s achievement would have been crowned when the Israelites accepted Jesus and become a global foothold so that the entire world would center on God and Jesus.

However, due to Jesus’ passing, that world was realized only spiritually. In his three-year public course, Jesus tried to restore through indemnity everything that had been lost centering on Judaism. However, when Jesus died on the cross, the Israel that God had established as His foothold nation and as a substantial entity on this earth was broken both in spirit and in flesh.

In the end, through the death of Jesus, Christianity had a national base in a spiritual sense. Moreover, the Israelites became the outcasts of Satan’s world, a people forced to wander in isolation without a nation. As a result, no nation embodies Christianity in both spirit and flesh. The returning Lord must restore the providence of God that established Israel based upon four thousand years of preparation, which was lost due to ignorance and disbelief.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jesus came to the earth to find a nation. He came to establish a single nation. However, while Jesus was unable to establish a nation of both spirit and flesh, he did establish it spiritually. Therefore, the Christianity of today does not have a substantial nation on the earth.

This means that there is no nation or people on the earth of whom God can say, “This is my beloved nation; this is my beloved people.” It means that there is not yet a foundation for God’s nation on the earth. If Israel had become one with God’s Son, Jesus, at its center, in his time, that nation would have become God’s nation and God would have restored the world centering on that nation. However, the death of Jesus, in other words, the loss of the substantial being, meant that the base upon which God wanted to connect to the earth in spirit and in flesh was restored only in spirit. Until now the church has had neither a nation nor sovereignty. Thus saintly believers have been killed wherever they went. Christianity developed through the shedding of martyrs’ blood. Because Christianity was planted that way, its development could not have been otherwise. Now that the era requiring persecution with bloodshed has ended, Christianity is not supposed to die out. Instead, based on the belief that the Messiah will return, people need to eagerly await the Lord and revere the lost ideal of the substantial nation that must be sought and realized globally, centering on the spiritual foundation of Christianity.

Even Jesus said he is waiting in paradise. I tell you that he could not approach the throne of Heaven. Jesus was supposed to establish a national sovereignty for God, govern that nation and create a nation that would have the authority to connect people directly from the earth to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus could not make such a nation, so he cannot stand directly before God.

Paradise is a waiting room on the way to the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is a place that one cannot enter alone. If the Fall had not happened, the kingdom of heaven would have been the place that blessed families would have entered centering on Adam and Eve. We must enter there together with our sons and daughters. In order to restore that through indemnity, Heaven fought for two thousand years and made the base to connect with the world up until now; yet on this earth without a national standard, who will inherit the national base? God has prepared to fulfill this purpose by gathering many holy people through a new religious movement centered on Christianity.

Respected leaders, now, as we enter the third millennium after Christ, we are the beneficiaries of new heavenly fortune. All religious people ought to join together in one accord to act upon the proposal that a council representing all religions become an upper house of the United Nations.

The loftiest achievement the United Nations could accomplish would be to recover a universal human spirituality based on God’s true love. What could be greater than that? Therefore, I have been selecting responsible people from all areas of society, the religious sphere and the political, philosophical, economic and cultural spheres also, and teaching them about true love, about “living for the sake of others.”

On that foundation, I already have appointed many tens of thousands of ambassadors for peace. These people now are carrying the flag of the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, which I founded, in all parts of the world, and are doing their utmost to realize the peaceful world that God and humanity have desired for so long. The Will of the all-knowing, all-powerful and absolute God will be realized soon.

In conclusion, I want to express my hope that all of you leaders in attendance today will re-establish your families and nations with true love and become stars who realize a true and everlasting peaceful world beyond borders. I pray that Heaven’s blessings will be with you and your families.

Thank you very much!

God and a United World of Peace

December 27, 2002

Sheraton National Hotel, Arlington, Virginia, USA
Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace
Conference for Clergy

Honorable current and former heads of state from around the world, eminent religious leaders, peace ambassadors from various nations, representatives of all areas of society, respected ladies and gentlemen:

I would like to thank you for participating in this profoundly significant conference, where we will explore fundamental issues regarding the realization of a world of peace, which is a common ideal shared by all humanity.

At this time, when the need for peace and security is more acute and critical than ever before, we who are leaders in our various fields share a grave responsibility to resolve issues related to discord, war, and the evil and unhappiness rooted in the world’s behavior of keeping God at a distance.

God is the Parent of true love

In accordance with Heaven’s Will, I have offered my life to investigate the difficult issues facing humanity, and I am offering a plan to implement fundamental solutions. Today I would like to speak about a portion of this plan. I have not derived these words from theological research or any books. Rather, I am articulating some fundamental principles I have learned through experience, as I overcame all forms of difficulties and communed directly with God and the spirit world.

The path of following Heaven’s Will in a state of empathy with God is not one that many people can find through common sense. I would like to tell you, however, that a person who opens his or her original mind and exercises keen insight can discover a new consciousness by which to perceive the spirit world and the Will of God, who is alive and carries out His work in the world of reality.

This conference will not analyze humanity’s afflictions and areas of despair, nor the symptoms of crisis in the modern age. Rather, it will investigate the foundation for the ideal of peace. We need to identify and treat the root of the disease. For this purpose, we have to understand the original relationship between God and ourselves, a relationship that lies at the foundation of the universe, and enlighten ourselves regarding the Will of God, who lives and carries out His providence in history.

God is the original entity of true love. True love has the attributes of unconditional giving and giving again; investing, not remembering the investment and then investing again; and living for the sake of others time and time again. The reason righteous people and evil people alike are allowed to breathe the same air in the atmosphere God created is that God, though He is all-powerful, is the original entity of true love. This is also the reason good people and sinners alike are able to carry on their lives by tilling the fields and enjoying the blessings of nature.

Exercising His almighty and absolute power, God could pass summary judgment on sinful humanity at any time. However, He has embraced the world of sin with true love throughout these long years, enduring the pain and waiting for us to repent. God, our Creator and Parent, has been subjected to all types of insults from those who refuse Him, betray Him, and go so far as to claim that He does not exist or is dead. In spite of all this, He has endured with an unchanging heart. Since God knew that love is perfected only with a partner, He has been working to build a world of love through His love partner.

Respected leaders, have you ever heard God complain? Have you ever met a God who gave excuses? In the beginning, God established true love as the absolute standard, and He took the lead in demonstrating absolute obedience to that ideal as He manifested His creation and carried out His providence. Just as the ocean takes in sewage and garbage and then cleanses itself, God, as the original entity of absolute true love, cleanses the human world that deviated from the principles of His creation and works to bring this world to complete goodness.

God is the absolute True Parent, absolute True Teacher and absolute True Owner, with His focus on true love. Therefore, God needed an object partner to whom He could give His true love. This was His motivation for creating. God’s creation was a necessary act. The creative ideal of true love cannot be realized by a being that exists in isolation. This ideal exists so that God can share with human beings the joy of His exalted and righteous Will. When we have a correct understanding of the God of true love, it becomes self-evident that this unhappy world of sin and strife was not His original plan.

God carried out His creative act with the utmost sincerity, dedication and investment. He established the standards of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, and then invested absolutely. All created beings are the object partners of love that God produced by investing with greatest sincerity.

God created human beings, the most precious of all beings, to have the closest relationship with Him, the relationship of child and parent. God is our incorporeal True Parent and we are His sons and daughters, or His substantial object partners.

In the world of true love, there is no difference in value between large and small or high and low. To be united in true love is to form a single harmonious entity marked by generosity, with no bad feelings about the distinctions between upper and lower or different strata. The unity produced between true subject and object partners will exist forever without interruption. So in true love, subject and object partners share a common value, with joint participation and a common residence, and they share the right of inheritance. Thus human beings achieve completion within God’s love and inherit His position as true parents, true teachers and true owners.

In this way, God’s plan is to have His children, human beings, perfect the true love ideal and become one with Him, residing with Him and inheriting all that is His. True freedom and equality, true peace and unity, and true ideals and happiness can exist eternally only within true love. So true love is the fountainhead from which springs the power and life of all beings in creation, and it is the fountainhead of joy and happiness. True love is the absolute element that brings happiness, hope and peace.

People often view the relationship between God and humanity from the perspective of God’s majesty and holiness, and we usually conclude that God and humanity will exist in dramatically different dimensions for all time. Certainly, the Creator occupies a level that differs from that of His creation. Yet, the original relationship that is most central and meaningful is the true love relationship between parent and child. True love makes it possible to achieve unity in the relationship between internal character and external form, and between male and female.

The ideal family and the Fall

God created us to become one in heart with Him, to share His value in true love, and to experience an inseparable parent-child bond with Him, enabling us to relate with Him through our strongest emotions in daily life. God’s ideal of creation, which entails this perfection comes with the perfection of human beings, who would be His partners in love as sons and daughters. This elevation is the accomplishment of the ideal of true love.

To summarize, God’s purpose in creating the first human ancestors Adam and Eve was for them to establish a family of goodness that would fully ripen the fruit of God’s true love, true life and true lineage. On the foundation of their family, Adam and Eve were to nurture the heart of children, heart of siblings, heart of husband and wife and heart of parents. In this process, as discrete manifestations of God’s dual characteristics of masculinity and femininity, they were to proceed step by step to master the ability to express God’s love, bringing it to perfection at a place of safe settlement.

If Adam’s family had fulfilled the true love ideal in this manner, with God in the central position, it would have been the first family of the kingdom of heaven. Starting from this ideal family, with Adam and Eve as True Parents, the kingdom of heaven would have naturally expanded in scope to produce tribes, peoples, nations and the world. The tradition of the family of true love would have become the tradition of the world.

In this ideal world, the incarnate True Parents would be at the single central position. They would resemble and inherit all the attributes of God, the spiritual absolute True Parent, absolute True Teacher and absolute True Owner. In the kingdom of heaven of true love, the incarnate True Parents, who are united with God, would create the vertical axis. Keeping this axis at the center, all relationships between created entities, occupying positions such as upper and lower, left and right, front and back, and internal and external, would be in harmony. Thus, all of creation would dwell in freedom, peace, unity and happiness.

When our life on earth in our physical body comes to an end, our spirit self transitions into the spirit world, which is the ultimate world. It is an extension of our life on earth and also a place where we are to perfect the ideal of the kingdom of heaven. If this ideal had been fulfilled in the beginning, there would have been no need for God’s salvation providence through religions or the advent of the Messiah.

Unfortunately, as a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve, God’s intended ideal of the kingdom of heaven in Adam’s family was not realized. This was because Adam and Eve became false parents when they indulged in false love with Satan in the central position. Without receiving God’s Blessing of marriage, they formed a false husband-wife partnership and a false family, and they bequeathed false life and false lineage to their descendants. They left God in grief, because the enemy, Satan, had altered their original lineage.

In this way, they lost God and did not establish their bodies as temples by which they were to have lived in attendance to God. In fact, their bodies became the den of Satan’s devils, and their spiritual desire to seek absolute values was shut down, rendering them incapable of knowing about the spirit world, the ultimate world. Because the first human ancestors deformed themselves, their descendants and all people never came to know that God is our True Parent. We inherited Satan’s selfish desires and lived unrighteous, self-centered lives, parading our fallen nature. Unaware that God created us as brothers and sisters who would live in attendance to Him, we lived in sin, strife and dispute. We do not even know that to kill another is to kill oneself, and so we live in unhappiness.

The world has inherited the tradition of Adam’s family, in which Cain killed his own brother, Abel. The outcome for us, the descendants of false love, is the unhappiness, sin and ruin manifested in family breakdown, the moral degradation of youth, and diseases such as AIDS. Consider the world’s situation. The acute crises of the modern age are manifested in struggles between our mind and body, the confusion of values, criminal activities, drug abuse, the breakdown of the family that holds humanity’s future in the balance, destruction of the environment, conflict and hatred, terror and war, and even conflict among religions and civilizations. With each passing day, these crises turn more serious, more complex and more pervasive. We can no longer stand by and do nothing as the world careens along this course. There is no time left. Who can take responsibility for this world? Where is the leader who will present a fundamental plan to solve the world’s problems?

At the same time that we lost God, we also lost true love, peace and happiness. Throughout history, we have tried to liberate ourselves from unhappiness and achieve peace on our own, excluding God from the process. Such efforts have been fundamentally flawed. We cannot defuse the crises by human effort alone. True peace and happiness have their origin in God’s true love, true life and true lineage.

God is absolute, so His Will for the creation is also absolute. This means that God is working to reverse what went wrong as a result of the Fall and return us to the original state. Thus, God’s providence of salvation is a providence of restoration. Its purpose is to recover the original world that existed prior to the Fall. In other words, God’s intention is to establish a couple in the position of restored Adam and Eve, or True Parents, practicing true love. God wants to give them the marriage Blessing and have them form a true family, which will be the point of origin of true tribes, peoples, nations and world.

Peace movement carried out amid misunderstanding

Respected leaders, going through indescribable hardship to follow God’s call, I have established the foundation for peace to settle in various fields of life. More than thirty years ago, I founded the Unification Thought Institute and began to guide the field of philosophy. Since 1972, I have sponsored nearly thirty global meetings of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, for the purpose of exploring absolute values and creating harmony and unity among the various fields of learning. I have founded and continuously supported a movement for peace transcending individual nations. This movement for peace includes the work of the Professors World Peace Academy, the Summit Council for World Peace, the International Federation for Victory Over Communism, CAUSA, the Federation for World Peace, the Federation of Island Nations for World Peace, the Federation of Peninsular Nations for World Peace, the Federation of Continental Nations for World Peace, and the Citizens Federation for the Unification of the Fatherland.

I have also promoted culture and the arts, fostered peace through sports, and developed elementary, middle school, high school and university level educational institutions. I founded and supported the Women’s Federation for World Peace, various media organizations for the purpose of bringing about responsible and ethical journalism, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, the Youth Federation for World Peace, the Pure Love Alliance, international conferences on the environment, the International Relief and Friendship Foundation, Service for Peace, the Religious Youth Service, the voluntary service organization Aewon, the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Holy Marriage Blessing and true family movement. In addition, I have supported efforts to renew the United Nations for the sake of achieving God’s desire for peace.

These are some of the initiatives for national and worldwide salvation that I have instituted around the globe. I have pursued these efforts continuously, without funding from any government or corporation, even in the midst of unsympathetic public opinion and outright persecution. As I worked to lay the foundation for the establishment of the ideal world, all I had was my determination to fulfill the mission of humankind’s True Parent that God entrusted to me, and to accomplish God’s Will.

In bringing about the ideal of peace implicit in God’s true love, it is most important for the various religions to achieve harmony with one another and provide a model for the world. Withstanding the cold-hearted attitudes and persecution by narrow-minded religious bodies in various countries, I have placed my greatest emphasis on creating a movement for unity and cooperation among religions, nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I have offered all kinds of sacrifices in doing everything I could to build one world in this area. For example, I founded an inter-denominational seminary, the New Ecumenical Research Association, the Council for the World’s Religions, the Youth Seminar on World Religions, and the Assembly of the World’s Religions. Besides supporting conferences promoting harmony among the world’s religions, I commissioned the publication of World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, and I founded the Interreligious Federation for World Peace.

Taking these efforts a step further, I founded the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), to serve as an overarching structure for unity and world peace. This organization is intended to go beyond the goal of harmony among the world’s religions to embrace leaders in the fields of academia, politics, journalism, finance and NGOs, which are areas where I have already laid the necessary foundations.

Since the founding of IIFWP in February 1999, we have appointed tens of thousands of leaders in a wide variety of fields from one hundred and eighty-nine countries as ambassadors for peace. In line with my philosophy of peace, these ambassadors are practicing true love by living for the sake of others and engaging in activities that help break down barriers between nations, races and religions. Their practical activities range from AIDS prevention and service projects to the development of true family values, the education of youth and leadership, and the improvement of the environment.

My philosophy is known as head-wing thought, which is based on Godism. This thought places God, the standard of absolute values and our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, in the absolute center. We can therefore call it the “three subject partner’s principle.” During our life on earth and in the spirit world, we have to live in accordance with this thought, being God’s object partners and attending Him as our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner. We will then be creating the kingdom of heaven, the place where true love is practiced.

We have to surpass atheistic and communist philosophies that deny God and the spirit world, as well as the secular humanism and moral relativism that ignore the importance of absolute values and the vertical standard. It is also time to rise above the hypocritical faith that uses God’s name and lacks true love, and abandon all selfish works that violate original human rights and result in injustice. The head-wing thought that I propose transcends right-wing and left-wing philosophies, resolves the conflicts between countries, races and religions, and brings about wide-ranging harmony and unity, with the absolute God at the center. This task will be carried out with the help of both heaven and earth. We are in a period of great transition, and during this time the United Nations and the nations of the world need to unite and cooperate with one another.

Modern society lacks an understanding or philosophical system based on absolute values. There are no absolute values that we can consistently apply to individuals, families, societies, nations, the world and the cosmos. This is the reason our thinking is confused, human relationships are disordered, and human society is chaotic. In the face of unreflective pluralism and modernization, and in the absence of a fundamental guiding axis in their hearts and daily lives, people in the modern age suffer due to an ever-worsening confusion of values. We are endlessly tempted and live enslaved by our physical appetites, drifting aimlessly through life.

I need to tell you that we must never turn away from a life based on values.

Absolute values form our vertical axis. At the center of absolute values is God’s true love, expressed in living for the sake of others.

Substantial ways of realizing a peaceful world

Respected leaders, peace is not something that is realized only in the external world. It is realized initially within each individual. First of all, it requires individuals to achieve harmonious unity within themselves. As a result of the Fall, conflict arose between our mind and body. To control us, Satan uses our body as his stronghold. He has turned us away from our original nature and spiritual nature and toward the attempts to satisfy our selfish and individualistic desires. The only path to escape from Satan’s dominion lies within God’s lineage of true love.

If you live unselfishly for the sake of others and work for the sake of others, Satan will not be able to follow you. This is because Satan is essentially selfish. This is why fallen human beings can transform their character and recover their spiritual nature through the practice of God’s true love. Our faith cannot be in a conceptual God; we need a true faith that connects us to the living God.

Because God originally created us as the object partners of His true love, we can practice this true love naturally. Values such as truth, goodness and beauty appear in the practice of true love. People whose minds and bodies have united based on God’s true love are individual embodiments of truth, happiness and tranquility, satisfaction and peace. Such people become subject partners of character; they serve as prerequisites for a world of peace.

Second, no institutions of power, materials or knowledge, nor any other external factors, will bring about a world of peace. Only true love, involving living for the sake of others, will accomplish it. True peace, unity and happiness cannot be found apart from a loving relationship of living for the sake of others. This is the basic principle of God’s creation. Unconditional giving, investing and living for the sake of an object partner, is both the cause and purpose of God’s creation.

God created us in His image, as beings whose purpose is to live for the sake of others. It is only by living for the sake of others that we become central beings, subject partners of peace and unity, and the eternal owners of love and ideals. Only through a life of true love, or living for the sake of others, can we find the path to meet God, our absolute True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, receive His inheritance, and then ourselves become true parents, true teachers and true owners. On the path of true love, different parties overcome conflict and division naturally. True love harmonizes and unites us with one another and our environment. This is not conquest through struggle. Instead, it is a path of natural subjugation leading to eternal unity.

Third, the basic unit of the world of peace is not the nation; it is the peaceful family. The basic unit is the family formed by a man and a woman who have the character to attend God, a man and woman who have each accomplished harmonious mind-body unity and are joined by God through His holy marriage Blessing. These are the first blessed families in history, established through the True Parents. These are peaceful and happy families. True love joins their members in harmonious unity. When these families multiply, they will bring about a world of peaceful tribes, peoples and nations.

In God’s original ideal, humankind is one family under one God and the cosmos is one family, with true love in the central position. The place where the problems of the family can be resolved, with True Parents at the center, is the foundation for the world of peace. In the ideal world of blessed families based on true love, there can be no barriers of nationality, race or religion.

Respected leaders, we have to find God and cast away our ignorance concerning our spiritual True Parent. Living within the eternal and profound order of this universe, which manifests His omniscience and omnipotence, we shall never again make the mistake of being ungrateful to our Creator for His magnificent accomplishments. Fallen humanity is to rid itself of the arrogance that makes us think we are the owners of our own life. Instead, we will nurture an enlightened spirituality in the presence of the absolute nature of God’s true love.

Let us follow the tradition of the Parents of Heaven and Earth

God is our True Parent. It is time to discover the living God, whose heart to invest greater true love is unchanging, absolute and eternal. We need to know the Heart of God, who created us as object partners, completely inheriting His absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal true love, true life and true lineage.

In this way we will establish God—the absolute True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner—as the axis of absolute values for our individual self, our family, nation, world and cosmos. This will form the basis for our life as individuals, families, nations and the world. We will have the unchanging desire to follow eternally the path of tradition set by the Parents of Heaven and Earth, the path of living in true love, which is for the sake of others.

If we do that, we can resolve all problems, whether of the family, society, race or religion. We will arrive at an age in which God and humankind live together as one in the original ideal world, the world of heart. We will arrive at an age in which we realize that living for the sake of others holds greater eternal value than living for ourselves. The blind age of self-centered life will pass away, as we build an other-centered world of interdependence, mutual prosperity and universally shared values.

For this purpose, let us attain accurate knowledge about God and the spirit world; let us lead humanity on the right path by testifying to the world about God’s true love, true life and true lineage; and let us build the universal family of heaven and earth in God’s homeland on earth. Let us completely establish the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven through absolute love, unique love, unchanging love and eternal love and seek to live for the sake of others, and offer heavenly kingship to God.

May God bless you, your family and your country. Thank you.

Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom

March 23, 2004

Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC, USA

Coronation Ceremony for the King of Peace of the Third Israel
and Ambassador for Peace Awards Ceremony

Respected members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, religious leaders from around the world, distinguished guests:

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your presence here this evening in such large numbers, in spite of your busy schedules.

Ladies and gentlemen, The starting point to unravel the problems humanity faces today is in knowing God, with certainty, as the Parent of all creation and on that foundation the building of true families that live in attendance to God. This calls for us to establish and attend God in our families, conceptually and as the substantial Parent of us all. To do this, we have to first clarify the relationship between God and humankind. God is the original entity of true love, true life and true lineage, and God is the True Parent of all people.

Perfected human beings automatically go to heaven

If human beings had not fallen, we would have reached perfection in God’s true love as true children and lived in attendance to God as our Parent. God’s plan was for perfected human beings to bond as true husbands and wives, bear and raise true children so that they would live in the kingdom of heaven on earth, and then live together eternally in the heavenly world as families in the kingdom of heaven.

Think about it for a moment. If your father went to hell and only your mother went to heaven, what kind of heaven would that be? If your parents were to go to hell and only you children went to heaven, how could that be called heaven? The kingdom of heaven is where the whole family lives together in an eternal peace kingdom. On earth as well, God will reside where a whole family has established a kingdom of heaven. In such a family, the world of God’s original ideal, the kingdom of heaven on earth, takes root.

The path to realizing family heaven on earth

How, then, are we to bring about this family heaven on earth? First, each member of the family has to complete his or her individual character. Each person has to shed the fallen nature that has passed from the Fall down through the generations, and achieve the perfection of his or her character. Each person has to become victorious in the struggle between mind and body. Then the world of harmony will bear fruit in each individual’s perfected character, a state of one heart, one body and one thought. Fallen nature, which causes jealousy, envy, greed, hatred and all other evils, will never again take root in a person who has achieved this state.

Shedding one’s fallen nature is not easy. The reality of fallen human beings is that we vacillate even when trying to break habits like smoking or drinking alcohol, which are formed during the relatively short span of a few years or decades. We cannot expect, then, that it will be easy to cast off fallen nature, which we inherit through lineage going back thousands, even tens of thousands of years.

This is impossible by human effort alone. We need to stand on the foundation of absolute faith, and strive our entire life to establish God as our vertical axis. Even then, it is a difficult fight. We cannot think we will gain victory unless we enter a state of absolute love for God, loving God even more than we love our own parents and children, and attending God as our True Parent. We cannot hope to win this fight without a foundation of absolute obedience, following God even at the cost of laying down our lives.

Herein lies the reason why religions consider practicing spiritual disciplines such as fasting, sexual abstinence, sacrifice and penance to be of utmost importance. We can be born again, recast as new persons in whom Heaven can reside and with whom the spirit world can cooperate. In such a state, we will not have anything of which to be ashamed, even if our entire life and being is exposed before all of God’s creation. We need to be people of upright character, of “high noon settlement,” casting not even the slightest shadow. When we achieve this, Satan will flee from our presence for eternity.

Perfecting the four realms of heart leads us to the heavenly kingdom Individuals who achieve maturity of character come together to form true families, and the members of these families work together to establish what I call the “four great realms of heart.” Such families resemble an individual who has accomplished the complete oneness of mind and body. The kingdom of heaven is a place we enter family by family. Not every family, however, is qualified to enter Heaven automatically. You need a foundation to be a true family and to complete the four great realms of heart. A true family that can enter the kingdom of heaven is composed of true individuals who have each engaged fully in the four great realms of heart and whose lineage centers on God.

What do I mean then by the four great realms of heart? I refer to the heart of parents, the heart between a husband and wife, the heart of children, and the heart of siblings. This is found in a true family bound by God’s original true love, true life and true lineage through a pure three-generational lineage of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren. Here, the love between parents and children establishes the vertical relationship between upper and lower; the love between the husband and wife establishes the horizontal relationship that brings left and right into definitive oneness, and the love between siblings establishes the relationship between front and back. In this way, God’s ideal of creation is no longer a mere concept or dream. It is perfected in reality through the completion of the four great realms of heart centered on true lineage, family by family.

The realm of parental heart is acquired naturally as parents go through the process of bearing children and then raising and educating them with true love. In other words, it is the heart that enables the parents to own true love with respect to the children. With no relationship to children, no one can own love as a parent.

Next, the realm of conjugal heart is the love relationship that extends true lineage. In this, husband and wife each are grateful for the other having established them as an owner of love, and each learns true love through giving and receiving with the other. They learn and experience true love when the husband lives for the sake of his wife, even if it means sacrificing his own life, and the wife attends her husband with the heart of attending God. The perfection of the husband-wife relationship is possible only on this basis.

The moment a bride and groom share love with God’s blessing on their wedding night, they inherit the palace of true love, true life and true lineage.

The wife, through her husband, receives God’s ideal son, who is also Heaven’s older brother, Heaven’s husband and Heaven’s parent. The husband stands in the corresponding position in receiving his wife as Heaven’s older sister, Heaven’s wife and Heaven’s parent. When the realm of conjugal heart is perfected, the relationship between the husband and wife also becomes absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, because God is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. The notion of divorce will become obsolete. Theirs will be a life of happiness, filled with only blossoming flowers of mutual respect and love.

Three generations of true love is the model of heaven

Next, how can we describe the heart of children, and how is it obtained? Parents are the center, in God’s position in the family, and it is impossible for a child to be born without parents. The relationship between parent and child is established not by human morality, it is established by a heavenly morality. Thus the parent-child relationship is a vertical relationship, not horizontal. It is not a relationship that exists as destiny, by which I mean that human effort can change it. It is a relationship of absolute and eternal fate.

Children experience and learn the heart of true love as they attend their parents in daily life, placing their parents in a position higher than themselves. Through a natural process, they come to understand that the love, life and lineage that they inherit from their parents originates in God. Children who watch and learn from their parents in this way will grow up to become husbands and wives who have no fallen nature, and who ultimately obtain the position of true parents themselves. The cyclical and spherical motion of the family unit that continually repeats the three-generational pattern in this way is the basic model for building the kingdom of heaven.

Lastly, the realm of the heart of siblings is realized through brothers and sisters who live as a family in attendance to the same true parents. The heart among brothers and sisters establishes the relationship between front and back. True parents are a husband and wife living in truth, and children who attend such parents will naturally learn to live according to heavenly morality and ethics among siblings.

It will be a beautiful sight, where a younger brother or sister attends and reveres an older brother or sister and the older sibling looks after his younger sibling with a loving heart. The older sibling represents “front” and the younger sibling represents “back.” The older sibling represents the father, while the younger sibling represents the mother. The perfection of the realm of heart between siblings is the foundation for all people to live for the sake of others through love and service.

The importance of establishing a true family

Respected guests, as the number of “true peace family kingdoms” that have perfected the four great realms of heart increases, “true peace tribe kingdoms,” “true peace nation kingdoms,” and ultimately the “true peace world kingdom” will appear. This will become the original world of God’s ideal, the kingdom of heaven on earth, the eternal kingdom of peace on earth. I am declaring this here and now. Humanity has lived without knowing that to establish true families is the most serious and foundational commandment of Heaven.

A new era has arrived today. The number of people around the world who have received my teaching and are standing resolutely for the sake of building the kingdom of peace is growing by leaps and bounds. Heaven and earth are shaking with the cries of bright young people who are determined to build true families even if they give their lives in order to protect their purity. Already, we find hundreds of millions of Blessed families around the world. They are turning the tide of a world in which ethics and morality have been rapidly washing away.

That is not all. The spirit world is one step ahead of us in breaking open the age of the peace kingdom. Starting with the five great saints—Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Muhammad—more than one hundred twenty billion Blessed families are working day and night to cooperate with us on earth and prepare for the day that is to come. According to the Principle of Creation, God’s ideal world has to be completed first on earth.

God’s homeland and carrying out the revolution of true love

Although people today are descendants of the Fall, God’s unending love and the spirit world’s cooperation now allow us to understand the nature of the heavenly kingdom. Please recognize that it is time to accomplish a true love revolution of overwhelming proportions, taking as our example the miraculous transformations in the spirit world.

The time has come for you as well to open your hearts and receive the secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me. In one sense, I am a human being living with a physical body like each of you. However, in the context of Heaven’s providence, I am God’s ambassador, sent to earth with full authority. I am sent to accomplish God’s command to save the world’s six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in which they were created.

The five great saints and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx, Lenin and Stalin, central to all manner of barbarism and murder on earth, and dictators such as Hitler, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons. Emperors, kings and presidents who enjoyed opulence and power on earth, and even journalists who had worldwide fame, have now placed themselves at the forefront of the true love revolution. Together they have sent to earth a resolution expressing their determination in the light of my teaching of the true family ideal. They have declared to all heaven and earth that Rev. Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s Savior, Messiah, returning Lord and True Parent. This resolution has been announced on every corner of the globe.

Respected guests, it is now only a matter of time. Look at the world. Do you see anything that gives you genuine hope for the future? Sooner or later, we have to give what we have to our descendants and leave this world. What gift would be more precious than that of completing the family ideal in your family, so as to guarantee eternal peace and happiness for your children? Surely no one who has such an opportunity hesitates to take up the task of building the peace kingdom on earth, for which God has waited thousands of years.

I have reached the advanced age of eighty-five years, by the Korean way of counting. All the same, I will continue to work harder than anyone else until the day the earth overflows with God’s true families, guns in the Middle East fall silent and give way to fireworks of peace and joy, and shouts of eternal victory celebrating the unification of my homeland Korea echo across the Pacific to be heard in America.

I hope that you leaders, representing the world’s six billion people in this ceremony, will join hands with me. I call you to take the lead in building what is God’s original ideal and the desire of all humanity, the peace kingdom on the earth.

Thank you.

Let Us Build a World of Peace
through Living for the Sake of Others

September 16, 2004

Little Angels Performing Arts Center, Seoul, Korea
Invitational banquet for US finance and business leaders

Distinguished financial and business leaders from the United States! Respected political and financial leaders from the Republic of Korea, and ladies and gentlemen: I welcome you with all my heart to this banquet. As a person who has lived my whole life following a standard of absolute values centered on God, I have prepared this banquet to invite your interest in some recent projects.

Upholding the decree of heaven, I have persevered my whole life for the realization of a world of peace. Recently, I have begun the development of a large-scale tourist resort, inspired by the ideal of harmony and unity among all people, in the district of Hwayang-myeon, Yeosu City, South Jeolla Province, which has been designated as a part of the Gwangyang Gulf Free Economic Zone. I would now like to tell you a little about the fundamental spirit behind my doing this.

The human desire to achieve the ideal of peace has been consistent throughout history. Yet eternal peace has never been manifested. This is the problem. Human beings have lived in ignorance, chaos, division and strife. To this day, we have been unable to establish an absolute value system that can be shared by all people. An absolute value system cannot arise from human beings who harbor internal conflicts and are always changing. The root of this system can only be found in God, the Absolute Being and the Creator. God, who is the essence of love, created human beings to be the recipient of His absolute love. One cannot claim for oneself the status of owner or master of love, and that is true even for God. Only one’s partner grants that status. This is a fundamental principle. One needs to live for one’s partner and neighbor. This absolute value system of love stands above any political ideal or principle of economics. It is the heavenly law that transcends all ages.

What kind of being is God who created this universe and the heavenly laws? God has manifested Himself in the universe as the quintessence of living for the sake of others. Though He is the King of knowledge, He does not, ask us to come to Him through knowledge. Though He is the Owner and King of power, authority, money and material, He does not view these as conditions to come before Him. God says that anyone can come to His side as long as they live for the sake of others. Only those who live for others can become the counterpart of the center, and stand in the position of a central figure.

God is not an egocentric dictator. Rather, God invests Himself for humankind’s sake. Thus, for tens of thousands of years our original minds have sought to follow God.

All beings must exist for the sake of other beings in order to maintain their place in this universe, as governed by the laws of Heaven. The principle of living for the sake of others has been valid throughout all ages and in all nations. An egocentric and self-centered way of life will bring about evil, while a life of living for the greater good will bring prosperity. All things can be brought into harmony by living for greater goodness. This opens all doors to individuals, families, tribes, races, nations, the world and heaven.

The self-evident truth of the benefit of living for the sake of others must be put into practice on the path of a true life. This principle is valid no matter where you may be. It is unchanging and eternal. If God were to appear before such a sage as Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, or Muhammad, and ask them what he thought about this principle, they would surely reply that this principle is true. Do you feel the same way? Please keep in mind that this is the law of the universe, which is needed for men and women to live in their truest form.

What standards set by people in history do people of today aspire to reach? Only the standards of people who lived for the sake of others with a spirit of sacrifice remain as something worth striving toward in the world today. Those who set such standards are remembered as saints, great men and women, patriots and children of filial piety. That which was accomplished through a spirit of self-sacrifice is remembered.

Sacrificial effort benefits the greater good. Please think about this.

The reason my teachings will emerge as the dominant thought of the twenty-first century is that I have been espousing a world where people live for the sake of others, which is the direct opposite of a world where people live for themselves. Consequently, the hope of human beings can be found in the Unification movement. You may think that I am being overbearing in saying this, but please understand that I take full responsibility for such an assertion. The world of the future, for countless years to come, will follow in the footsteps of this group, which chooses to live for the sake of others rather than for its own sake. The world does not follow those who live solely for their own sake. The world doesn’t like such people.

How will we achieve harmony and unity? It is not achievable through force, money, power or knowledge. Everything can be resolved based on love by living for the sake of others. We can conclude that by living based on true love and for the sake of others, we can restore the world of hell into the heavenly world. You will see for yourselves. Is there anyone here who opposes me? In the past, individuals, families, nations and the world united against me. And now there is no one who does not acknowledge me, because they can see the results! They can see the results in the heavens, on the earth, in the people themselves, and in the winds of peace. Please don’t be offended by the conclusions I’m expressing.

The way for someone to come to your side is not through struggling with that person, it is by thinking of them as if you were his or her parent, teacher or supervisor. That is the way. I ask you to live sincerely for the sake of others for three years. Then you will come to understand what I am saying. You must be aware that action in line with the principles of the universe is what moves someone’s original mind.

Please live more for the sake of others. Those who do so can be entrusted with responsibility. If there are ten people, the person who loves and lives most for the sake of the other nine will become the central person. All nine will go to that person. In general, people think that living for others entails loss, and is not beneficial to one’s self. However, you must know that the truth is otherwise: this principle enables you to become the owner, the central figure and heir. This is how heavenly law works.

Distinguished guests, renowned leaders of Korea, in my lifetime I have been able to create a global foundation that transcends race, religion and nationality in one hundred ninety-one countries, despite constant misunderstanding and persecution, and God, the spirit world and the earth have recognized me as the True Parents of Humankind and King of Peace. The reason for this is that I have practiced the heavenly way of true love that calls one to be the first to give, and to live for others. I did not ask to be made the King of Peace. This title was given to me.

Harmony and unity can be achieved and the ideal of peace can be realized only when we are motivated by genuine love to live for the benefit of others. I have guided humanity under this practical principle of true love, true parents and true families according to the heavenly way.

The ideal family movement, which is based on the marriage Blessing ceremony and peace initiatives that transcend nationality, race and religion, are aspects of the true love movement. This movement calls us to live a personal, exemplary lifestyle by investing ourselves to the advantage of others. The various educational institutions established in a number of nations worldwide were created through my sacrificial investment in an effort to manifest the founding ideals of loving heaven, loving humankind and loving one’s nation. The global media institutions within News World Communications, including The Washington Times and The Segye Times, were created for the sake of guiding the world in true love through a responsible, just and fair press.

Interreligious peace initiatives, education in life’s philosophy, projects showcasing culture and arts, the promotion of technology transfer, activities of education and science that bring people together across religious and national divides, service activities, guidance for youth, the women’s movement, the cultivation of sports, and all the other projects I have founded are grounded in the principle of true love.

I act with a clear sense of purpose and direction under the ideal of the interdependence of all human beings, based on absolute values that are above the pursuit of personal gain.

Men and women must walk the path of the truth and true love in accordance with heavenly law. The path of true love is the fundamental root that takes priority over any human activity or undertaking.

No matter how great your fortune or power, without the foundation of living for the sake of others, all those things are transient and are destined to disappear. On the other hand, a life of giving and living for the sake of others automatically enables a person to become the subject and central figure.

If you go beyond self-interest and focus your work on the macroscopic ideal of peace, and further on reconciliation and peace on the Korean peninsula, then I truly believe you will be able to attain something of greater value than just material benefit.

In accordance with God’s principles for the providence of re-creating His original ideal, the Era Before the Coming of Heaven that was shaped by egocentric lives has passed away, ushering in the Era After the Coming of Heaven, which will bring about the ideal fruits of this absolute value system. People who say they will live self-centeredly will remember their words when they cross the dividing line between the era before and the era after the coming of Heaven.

All barriers will be eliminated in the era of God’s eternal kingdom of peace, as people who live with true love become the owners and central figures of that age. Conflicts arising from narrow-mindedness and self-centeredness, over differences of skin color, language, customs and geographical territory, will disappear. Now is the time to build the ideal world in which we can live for one another together, based on a system of absolute values.

In conclusion, I pray that God’s eternal blessings will be with you all as you engage in your work in the spirit of altruism in accordance with the heavenly principles.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Go Home to True Love
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