Sun Myung Moon
February 6, 2003
Excerpt from Pyeong Hwa Gyeong, book 2, speech 6.
Jamshil Indoor Gymnasium, Seoul, Korea
True Parents' Birthday
I would truly like to thank all of you who have gathered here to congratulate me on my eighty-third birthday, and my wife, Hak-Ja Han Moon, on her sixtieth birthday. Above all else, I would like to return all this glory to God, who has protected and looked after me until this day. The living God's promise and my absolute faith in him are the driving forces that have preserved my life during times of suffering, even when I was on the brink of death.
God is not just the God of believers. He is the God of all people. Especially at this time, we are living in an age in which God stands in front of the world not just as some vague and abstract being, but as a God with a definite purpose and will. It is an age of great change, when all people need to awaken to this God. All people need to awaken to the fact that the contemporary world is being sucked down into a maelstrom of individual, family, national and world-level problems, which we will never solve if we ignore God.
The ultimate purpose of religion is to recover the original parent and the original homeland. True religion must not espouse vague ideas about God; it has to be able to give a clear picture of God so people can understand him.
One cannot call any religion that compromises the relationship between God and humankind a high-level religion. Such a religion ultimately will decline. True religion has to teach people how to know God clearly, how to become one with God and how to build the original world of creation.
The purpose of religion is to bring about a world without sin, the ideal world where we make original relationships with God. God is not seeking a religious world. He is seeking his ideal world of creation. The purpose of religion is not for religion itself; rather, it is to realize the world of God's ideal. So we have to think about the original purpose and ideal at the time of the Creation. God created the world, so it is necessary to explain his ideal of creation.
What do you think God's will is? It is to complete his ideal of creation. What do you think God wanted to achieve through creating our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden? God, who is the essence of love, created human beings because he needed a partner of love. We were created as the true sons and daughters of God so that he could realize his ideal of true love through us. The original pair was created to grow into a true man and true woman, become husband and wife, create an ideal family, and then build an ideal nation and world. To repeat, centering on God's true love, they had to perfect an ideal family and expand it to build the ideal world. However, our human ancestors fell, and this destroyed God's ideal of creation at that time.
Accordingly, the purpose of religion is to find a true person, a true family and a true nation, and build a true world where all people can live together in peace. This is the purpose of God's providence for the world.
Religion is seeking a good world. However, a good world cannot be realized without first establishing a good country. Moreover, for a good country to appear there must first be a good society, and before there can be a good society there must first be a good tribe, and before there can be a good tribe there must first be a good family. Before there can be a good family, there must first be a good man and a good woman.
After the Adam fell, Israel's the four-thousand-year history ensued. What was its purpose? Regardless of the world's external developments, internally the sole purpose of this period was to find one true Adam and one true Eve. God's deepest grief and resentment were that because of the Fall, there was not one son or daughter that could inherit life and bloodline by centering on his love. The savior whom God sent to the world is the person whom God made to be the owner of true love, true life and true lineage. God's will, the original hope of humankind, is for each human being to become the ideal person of God's originally intended world of creation and to complete the ideal world of creation. This means that after a man and woman achieve God's ideal as individuals, they will then become a husband and wife having true love and then true parents. In order for this to happen, God absolutely needs the True Parents as the source of his true love, true life and true lineage. Thus, in order to complete God's providence of salvation, for one man to appear as the savior, the Messiah, or the returning Lord is insufficient. The True Parents have to appear as a husband and wife that resemble God completely and that have completely realized his true love.
Respected leaders, ladies and gentlemen, leading a religious life is not something you can prefer to do or not to do. Fallen men and women were born with a connection to fallen parents through fallen love centered on Satan. Therefore, without exception, all people absolutely need to pass through the repair shop of religion, meet the True Parents and establish a connection of true love and true life with them. There is one important point you need to understand. When you go to the repair shop, you cannot stay there forever. You need to come out reborn. While the religious life is the required course for all humankind, it is not the basic purpose or whole purpose of life.
The ultimate purpose of human life is to graduate from the religious life, a life of restoration, and live as a men and women of the original world of creation. Religion came about only because of the Fall. Hence, does it make sense to say that the sole purpose of life is to live buried in a religion? If there had been no Fall, how would men and women originally have lived? Human beings were originally God's children. Thus, we are destined to live with true love, realize a true family and establish a free, peaceful, united and happy world. We are supposed to live in the kingdom of heaven on earth.
God did not originally create men and women to have them break down so that he could repair them as his children reborn through religion. Do any parents want to see their children suffer in conflict, while endlessly repenting of their sins? Do you think the original will of God the Father, the omniscient and omnipotent Lord of the Creation, was that his children suffer in sin? The fallen world is not the world God originally planned. The first ancestors' disobedience prevented God from realizing the world he had originally planned. However, God is absolute, and his will is absolute. Thus, God will realize his will as he had intended in the beginning. He wills the complete recovery to the original state.
This is why God's providence of salvation is the providence of restoration, the providence of re-creation.
Religion is the central means for the providence of restoration; however, people are not supposed simply to meet True Parents and go through the course of a religious life. They are supposed to become God's children, establish a Parent–child relationship with him, attend God, and build a world where the values of faith are inherent in their daily lives. No one in history revealed this precious truth; namely, that people must graduate from religious life. Knowing this truth from an early age, I did not want to create another sect or denomination.
Because Christianity, which was the central religion of God's providence, did not accept my teaching of Heaven's way, I had to create the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. Although it was an association, not a sect or denomination, the Christian world continued to reject it, to persecute us, to label us heretical, and to turn its face away from us. As our movement grew, the world began to call us the Unification Church rather than use the long, official title. That is how we became the Unification Church.
For many, many years, I have lived in hope of seeing the day we could take down our church sign. I even prophesied about that day. Finally, in 1996 we took down that sign and started the Family Federation for World Peace. This was a very important event in humanity's history. It was the beginning of a new world. It marked a change from the old world, where people lived with the burden of sin inherited from false parents.
They were living in suffering and conflict, practicing a life of faith in which the only way to find God was through prayer and repentance. However, with this event, the world changed. From then on, people could be reborn by receiving the blessing from the True Parents, and going forward while reporting to God about what they were doing.
Ladies and gentlemen, let us unite with the blessing from Heaven that has come to us. I call upon all the people that make up humankind to graduate from the religious life, receive the blessing of true love, establish a true family and keep the standard of a true child throughout their lives. Those who receive the blessing on earth and live a life of true love can enter the eternal homeland of the ideal world, namely, God's nation, the kingdom of heaven.