Sun Myung Moon
October 16, 2002
Rally for Harmony and Unity in Heaven and Earth
Unification Church Central Training Center, Guri, Korea
Photo date and location unknown
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 lives. 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 decadeslong 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, Heavens 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!