Sun Myung Moon
December 13, 2004
Address at the Common Legacy Breakfast Summit
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, DC, USA
Photo date and location unknown
Distinguished current and former heads of state, respected members of the clergy, leaders from America and around the world, ladies and gentlemen: I come to this gathering today to deliver a message from God, a warning for the 6.5 billion people now living on earth. I know all too well God’s timetable and the direction of His providence. Never in history has anyone understood with certainty God’s circumstances or His heart. However today, in this era of the providential Last Days, I can reveal them to you. In so doing, I hope to present a correct understanding of the responsibility we need to shoulder and the direction we need to take. I would like to speak to you on the topic, “Let Us Become Filial Children of God Who Liberate His Heart.”
God’s bitter sorrow
Why did God create human beings? God is the source of true love. Yet the joy of love wells up in the heart only in the context of a relationship. A solitary being cannot experience love. Even God could not experience any stimulation as long as He existed all alone. Alone, He could not love. For His love to blossom, God needed object partners to love. For this reason, God created human beings to be His children, partners in His true love.
God is the Parent of all humankind, and we are God’s sons and daughters. In creating us, God invested everything, the bone of His bone, the flesh of His flesh, and the marrow of His marrow. Parents raise their children hoping to reach that most exalted place where parent and child come together, that central point where their loves converge, their lives converge, and their ideals converge. In this way, the omniscient and omnipotent God created us to grow into a position on par with Him and equal to Him in rank.
Then, what is required to complete God’s ideal of creation? In addition to everything that God does, there is the human element. Because God’s ideal is the oneness of God and human beings, God cannot be perfect until human beings reach perfection.
How God must have yearned for our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, to become beings of infinite value, reflecting His image! Yet, because Adam and Eve fell, God no longer had His own true sons and daughters. Tragically, God could not establish a family capable of creating deep bonds of true love and propagating a divine lineage.
Instead, the false parent seduced Adam and Eve. Their family was entangled in the chains of false love, false life and false lineage. As a consequence we, their descendants, suffer from incessant struggles between our mind and body.
Adam and Eve fought constantly, and so did their children, and murder was the result. They did not become the exalted beings that God could relate to as His eternal son and daughter. God could not glorify them as the true ancestors and True Parents of humanity. They were the only son and daughter He had, yet with their Fall, He lost them.
The Fall and lineage
What happened between Adam and Eve that caused them to fall? Was it, as the Bible literally says, that they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Could merely eating a piece of fruit have been the original sin? Could our ancestors eating a piece of fruit doom thousands of generations of their descendants to be sinners? No. The root of sin continues on forever in accordance with the laws of inheritance because it was planted in the lineage. The only transgression that can have such lasting impact is the misuse of love, committed between two people of the opposite sex.
Eve committed adultery with the archangel Lucifer, and they became one body. When Eve then joined with Adam, she bound him in that same oneness. As a result, Adam and Eve built their family on a conjugal relationship that centered on Satan, the fallen archangel. Consequently, all human beings, because we are descendants of Adam and Eve, have inherited Satan’s lineage.
According to the Principle of Creation, love determines the right of ownership. In a relationship of love, the partners have a right of ownership with respect to each other. By this principle, Satan used his ties of illicit love to claim ownership of fallen human beings. Satan took over the role of humanity’s father, usurping the position of God, who is humanity’s True Father. This is why Jesus, in the Gospel of John, chastised the people as children of Satan, saying, “You are of your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” (John 8:44)
Christians today may think an almighty Jehovah sits on His royal throne and, because He is omniscient and omnipotent, gives orders as He pleases and has everything go exactly as He wants. In reality, God sits in a place of wretchedness and harbors tremendous grief. God intended that Adam and Eve become the ideal counterparts for His pure, essential love. Can you imagine the sorrow in God’s heart when they fell? It was infinitely worse than the sorrow that Adam and Eve experienced; indeed, no one in this world has experienced anything nearly as painful. The pain of loss is in proportion to the preciousness of what is lost. Carrying this grieving heart, to this day God has pursued the path of restoration to recover His lost children.
There is nothing vague or ambiguous about God. He possesses a definite character. He desires to form a relationship of the highest true love with human beings. He desires to share with each of us the most exalted love and joy eternally. Nonetheless, God lost the starting point for this, due to the mistake of our first ancestors. The Fall of Adam and Eve caused so much damage.
God is the original True Parent, yet He was robbed of His rightful parental position. How heartbroken He is over this! God looks upon His fallen children, who inherited the lineage of the enemy Satan and refuse even to recognize that He exists. How excruciating must be the pain in God’s heart each and every moment, as He observes humanity’s wretched condition!
For God, nothing was more precious than to have flesh and blood counterparts who could share His true love. God would not have traded His beloved children for the entire universe. His sorrow upon losing them was equal to what it would have been had He lost the entire creation. He felt that His entire purpose for creating the universe had collapsed. He became a God whose enemy robbed Him of His cosmic throne. The fact that God invested His heart so completely, in keeping with the principles of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, made the results of the Fall even more devastating. God was plundered of His ideal, plundered of His beloved son and daughter, and plundered of His sovereignty over the cosmos. And yet, the innocent God has had to suffer all these years and endure Satan’s accusations and slander.
Seeing the history of lamentation that befell the world following the Fall, the Book of Genesis says that God grieved in His heart. (Gen. 6:6) Also, the Apostle Paul said that the creation has been groaning, eagerly awaiting the appearance of the sons and daughters of God, and that we ourselves groan inwardly as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom. 8:23) All creatures desire to escape this realm of lamentation.
God’s inmost heart is broken as He surveys people struggling, leading lives of no value, having lost the glorious value with which they were originally created. God cries out in grief and agony, saying, “You are supposed to be my direct lineal children, possessing My love, My life and My lineage. You ought to be enjoying all the glory of the kingdom of heaven. My heart is grieved to see you wearing the mask of the defeated, struggling in pain and lamenting in despair until the end of your meaningless lives.”
God’s providence of restoration
Do you think that God, omniscient and omnipotent, seated on a glorious throne, would say to His children, “Come up here; I’m not going to leave this seat?” Or is it more likely that He would kick the throne out of the way and come down to where we are? It is important for you to know that for tens of thousands of years, even millions of years, God has been wailing tearfully, crying out, “O My son! O My daughter!” You may ask how the omniscient and omnipotent God could be in such a pitiable state. God cannot get over the shock of losing His beloved sons and daughters.
If there were a way for God to solve this problem on His own, He would not have had to travel the long, lonely path of suffering through the providence of restoration. No caring parent would stand by idly while his or her child suffers. And because we are His children, it is impossible for the all-loving God to abandon humanity, and let us perish eternally. God is absolutely committed to recovering us and, with us, the world that He originally envisioned. This is the reason that God has ceaselessly worked His providence of restoration to save human beings.
You need to be aware of how intensely God has labored to make progress in the providence of restoration. God is our True Parent. As He carried out the providence, His heart felt human pain as His own pain. Yet it was excruciatingly difficult for God to carry out the providence of salvation, because our first ancestors, who committed the sin that constitutes the Fall, received Satan’s false love and false life. Ever since, Satan has acted as humanity’s false parent and false lord.
You may raise the question, “How could God, who is omniscient and omnipotent, stand by, seemingly impotent, while humanity went down the path of destruction?” The reason is that human beings committed sin in a sphere for which they are exclusively responsible. Therefore, they must fulfill the conditions needed to resolve that sin. God cannot liberate us from sin unconditionally. If He could, He would have liberated our first ancestors in the Garden of Eden instead of casting them out. Furthermore, restoration has been even more difficult because Satan uses his lineal relationship to enslave people as their master.
The Fall was something that would never have happened under the original standard of the ideal of creation. Therefore, God was not in a position to intervene, even though He was the Creator. Having been robbed of His position as our original Parent, He could not cover for His children’s mistake. On the other hand, neither can the omniscient and omnipotent God solve the problem simply by casting judgment on the fallen human world and on Satan. Since God created people to be His eternal partners in true love, He cannot just annihilate them. Instead, God has labored with true love to carry out the providence of restoration. While continually enduring Satan’s contempt and accusations, His response has always been to sacrifice and give endlessly.
Satan has been mocking God, saying, “How can you hold fast to your principles, now that the lineage of true love, which was supposed to be the foundation of the ideal world, has been utterly degraded? Your ideal of creation, the absolute realm of love where true people live together as one, is something You will never see.” In this situation, how can God reply? It has been an impossible situation.
Why does God carry on with His work of restoration while enduring such suffering? Is it because He is omniscient and omnipotent? No, that is not the reason. The ideal of true love is the reason that He seeks to recover
His beloved sons and daughters. With true love, God ignores His own circumstances and works to understand our circumstances. If people are sad, God approaches them by comprehending their sadness. If people are angry because they have been treated unjustly, God approaches them by first understanding the reasons for their anger.
God’s situation and comforting God’s heart
Respected leaders, in your communion with God, have you fathomed His suffering heart? Have you shed tears for God? Have you ever attempted to take on a task that would lighten God’s load, even a little? Have you struggled to do it even when it meant that each of your limbs might be torn from your body? You haven’t. On the other hand, God ever draws near to comfort us in our difficulties. Through the long ages, with an unchanging parental heart, He has sought out the children who betrayed Him. God, our Parent, will remain in suffering until every last person has been freed from their lamentation. Because He is in this position, we need to comfort God and bring Him liberation.
How are we to liberate God? God lost His beloved children. God is confined in a place where He cannot love humanity with the original love that parents give their children. Therefore, our task is to establish a realm of liberation for God, where He can freely love humankind. God’s confinement was brought about when human beings fell, so human beings have to become victorious sons and daughters who transcend the limits of the Fall. This is what will bring God liberation.
We have been ignorant of the tremendous pain in God’s heart. When I first understood the pain of God, I wept for weeks. Please know that such profound circumstances He behind the founding of the Unification Church. Longing for those who betrayed Him, those who were enfolded into the bosom of the enemy, God has been calling out, “My son! My daughter!” Yet have you even once cried out, “My Father!” so loudly that it made you hoarse? Have you ever passionately called for your Father until it dried out your tongue and you began to choke? As fallen people, what do we have that would enable us to relate with God? Our emotions and the perceptions of our five senses are entirely profane. Nothing in us is acceptable. Under the laws of justice, there is nothing that will permit us to relate to God. Nevertheless, under the law of love there is a way.
God’s liberation and complete freedom
Because human beings fell, God could not be free. Hence, our first ancestors also were imprisoned; they lost their original freedom. Following this, the angelic world, all religious people, and ultimately all humanity came to be imprisoned. God lives in prison. How can we free Him? We must become devoted sons and daughters of God, more so than the first children whom He lost. We need to do even better than the first children were supposed to do, had they been devoted and had they not fallen. I know that even if we were to accumulate ten times as much merit in every aspect of life and relate to God with great filial piety, it would not be easy to bring God’s heart back to its original state and allow Him to dwell in true freedom. Nonetheless, at an early age, I resolved to truly liberate God with my own hands, and I have lived accordingly throughout my life.
What is the real mission of religion? It is to truly liberate God, truly liberate humanity on earth and in the spiritual realm, and truly liberate planet Earth with a heart of love. People have thought that God will liberate us, but now that we recognize that God’s heart is imprisoned, we understand that we must liberate God and bring Him into complete freedom.
God has long been searching for people burning with zeal for true love, having the faith that says, “I see now that God is in prison because of me. I see now that Satan is accusing God because of me. I see now that Jesus suffered because of me. O Father, I will carry You to the place of true liberation. I will carry Jesus and the Holy Spirit as well to the place of true liberation.”
To this day, there has been no sovereign country on earth where people of true love have established God’s dominion. Despite this, people are singing praise to the Almighty. Under such circumstances, how can God’s heart be free? From God’s perspective, there have been no children of filial piety. There have been no social and political structures founded upon true love that would enable people to fulfill the way of the patriot, the way of the saint, and the way of divine sons and daughters in heaven and on earth. Hence, there has been no way to establish and protect the heavenly kingdom. These circumstances have left God with no place to stand. Consequently, He has remained imprisoned until now, in a state of virtual captivity.
How are we to resolve this grievous situation? The only way is to carry out a movement practicing the love that is God’s original essence. The final stage of religion needs to teach people in detail about God’s pitiful suffering and injustice, and connect us to the world of His original heart.
Let us join in a true love movement to bring true liberation and complete freedom to God. If we do not set this standard of love, we will not establish the heavenly way properly and bring the ideal world to exist on earth. This is the true love movement, and it is bringing an end to the history of division between Cain and Abel by bringing together the Inter-religious and International Federation for World Peace and the Peace UN in the Abel position, and the Mongolian Peoples Federation for World Peace in the Cain position, to form a single body.
I call on America to take the role of the eldest brother, representing the free world, and lead all nations toward the fulfillment of God’s Will. To do this, America needs to put aside selfish and individualistic thinking. When political parties and ethnic groups place priority on their self-interest, they divide and mislead the people. America needs to build a true nation, blossoming with true freedom and peace. Then God will want to reside in your families and in your communities.
For this noble goal, let us all stand hand in hand and establish the kingdom of heaven on earth, the peace kingdom, where God’s ideal of creation is fulfilled. There, God will enjoy true liberation and complete freedom.
I pray that God’s blessings may be with you forever.