Sun Myung Moon
November 21, 2006
True Children’s Day
Korea International Exhibition Center, in Goyang
Today is a significant day in the history of God's providence. It begins the forty-seventh year since I declared Children's Day. To commemorate this significant day and renew our resolve, I would like to convey Heaven's message on today's topic. This is a summary of the message from Heaven that I delivered to the 6.5 billion people of the world over the past year intended to remind you again of your role and mission from the viewpoint of God's providence and of the importance of the age in which you are living.
God’s purpose of creation
Respected leaders, what do you think God's ultimate purpose was for creating human beings? It was to experience joy through relating with ideal families filled with true love. What does an ideal family look like? When God first created human beings, he made Adam representing all men and Eve representing all women, with the intention that they become owners of true love. What was the quickest way for them to cultivate a character of true love? Simply put, it was to secure a parent-child relationship with God, whereby they could live in attendance to God as their parent and form a model family embodying God's ideal of peace. They were to have followed the path of living as one family with God, experiencing joy eternally. God created Adam and Eve and established them as the first ancestors of humankind to form the model family and realize the ideal of peace.
Adam and Eve were to establish a model, peaceful, ideal family. God, the Absolute Being, created human beings as his children in order to instill in them absolute values based on an absolute standard. Thus, we have to follow the way of that absolute standard in keeping with the demands of the heavenly path. This means we must follow our destined life course in order to attend God, the Absolute Being, as our parent. In other words, for people to perfect themselves in resemblance to God and obtain the stature of people of character who can be called sons or daughters of the Absolute Being, they need to follow the path based on the absolute standard determined by God. The essence of this path is the standard of absolute sexual morality.
Absolute sexual morality
The first stage of absolute sexual morality is to maintain a standard of absolute sexual purity before getting married. After we are born, we go through a process of growth. We pass through infancy and childhood in a very safe and secure environment formed by our parents' love and protection. We then enter the period of adolescence, which signals the start of a new and dynamic time of forging relationships on an entirely new level with the people and things of creation all around us. This is the time we begin to travel on the path of becoming a truly mature person, internally through the perfection of our character and externally by reaching adulthood.
Yet all people, no matter who they are, must meet one absolute requirement if they hope to grow to spiritual maturity. That requirement is to maintain their sexual purity. True love among true people is based on the model of absolute sexual morality. God gave this direction to his children as a preordained responsibility and duty necessary to fulfilling the ideal of creation. The only way to perfect the model of absoluteness in conjugal love is to follow this heavenly path.
What was the one and only commandment God gave to Adam and Eve, the first human ancestors, after he created them? It was the commandment and blessing to maintain an absolute standard of sexual abstinence until God's approval of their marriage. We find the basis for this in the Bible passage that indicates that Adam and Eve would surely die on the day they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If they had refrained from eating and observed Heaven's commandment, they would have perfected their character and stood as equal cocreators with God, the Creator. Furthermore, they would have taken dominion over the creation and become lords of the universe, enjoying eternal and ideal happiness.
It was God's blessing that he warned Adam and Eve to preserve their sexual purity, so that they might marry with his blessing as true children, become true a husband and wife, give birth to true children and become true parents.
The second stage of absolute sexual morality applies to the relationship between husband and wife. More precious than life itself, this is the heavenly law of absolute fidelity. A husband and wife are eternal partners given to each other by Heaven. By having children, a husband and wife become cocreators of true love, true life and a true lineage, and the origin of that which is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. It is a heavenly principle that one person alone cannot give birth to a child, even in a thousand years. How can people who preserve their purity before marriage, and whom God binds together in a pure marriage as husband and wife, deviate from the heavenly way and go astray, following the wrong path? People are different from animals. If we understand God's purpose in creating us as his children, we will realize that the wrong path is one of unimaginable betrayal and defiance of the Creator and thus a path of self-destruction along which we dig our own graves. Resulting from the Fall, this path is outside the realm of the ideal of creation.
Absolute sexual morality is the greatest blessing that Heaven has bestowed on humankind. Without adhering to the standard of absolute sexual morality, the path to perfecting one's character and attaining spiritual maturity is closed. Furthermore, without securing the foundation of absolute sexual morality through perfected individuals in a true family, it is impossible for God to manifest his stature as a God who is personal and incarnate in us.
In order for God, the Absolute Being, to have direct dominion over our lives and to live and share joy with us, we, whom God created as his object partners and his children, need to form perfected families based on the standard of absolute sexual morality, as he intended. Only by living within the boundaries of absolute sexual morality is it possible for a family to create lifelong relationships based on the ideal model God originally intended for us. This model life includes the three-generational realm of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren. Please understand clearly that God's eternal life and our eternal lives are possible only on this foundation.
Our mission
What kind of place is the kingdom of heaven? In brief, it is a world overflowing with God's true love. True love is its axis. True love is everywhere, in the outward expression as well as in the inward thought. True love fills everyone's life from beginning to end. In the kingdom of heaven, people receive life through true love, live in the embrace of true love and follow the way of true love until the day they pass on into the next world, the spirit world.
The kingdom of heaven is a natural world where all people live for the sake of one another. Consequently, antagonism and jealousy cannot be found anywhere in that world. Neither money, position nor power governs that world. In that world, the success of every person represents the success of the whole; the likes of every person represent the likes of the whole, and the joy of every person represents the joy of the whole. The kingdom of heaven is a world filled with the air of true love, where everyone breathes true love. Its life throbs with love, everywhere and all the time. All the citizens of that kingdom link together through their common membership in God's lineage. There, the whole world and its people connect in an inseparable relationship, like the cells in our bodies.
True love, the love that is God's essence, is the kingdom of heaven's only governing power. Accordingly, God also exists for true love. Our bondage to the lineage of Satan has caused so much suffering throughout history. Let us now boldly step forth to sever it and graft onto the root of True Parents' lineage. Why would we foolishly continue to live and die as wild olive trees? A wild olive tree, even if it lives a thousand years, will only continue producing the seeds of more wild olive trees. Where can we find the path to escape this vicious cycle?
It is through the holy blessing. The holy Blessing Ceremony offers the grace of grafting onto the true olive tree. True Parents, who bring God's true lineage to humankind, have established this. Once you change your lineage to God's lineage, your offspring will belong to God's lineage naturally. We receive the holy blessing in three stages: rebirth, resurrection and eternal life. These marriages contribute to the enormous task of transcending the barriers of race, culture, nationality, ethnicity and religion, thereby creating one family of humankind.
I have said that in the Era after the Coming of Heaven we must recover the true lineage that was lost when Adam fell, by receiving the marriage blessing through the True Parents. Through five stages, the individual, family, tribe, people and nation, the providence of the blessing becomes perfect. In this way, let us fulfill our divine mission as blessed families in the Era After the Coming of Heaven by restoring and establishing the ideal three-generational family on the world level.
Please become true princes and princesses who live in attendance to God as your True Parent, for he is the peace king of the multitudes. Let us build the everlasting peace kingdom by attending True Parents, who have been enthroned as the King and Queen of Peace in heaven and on earth in the realm of eternal liberation and complete inner freedom, where there is no need for a savior, a messiah or a returning lord. Let us fulfill the dutiful way of filial children in the family, patriots, saints, and divine sons and daughters.
By following God's commandment to uphold absolute sexual morality, let us establish exemplary families, inherit True Parents' victory of restoring through indemnity the realm of three generations and perfect the world as it would have been without the Fall.