Sun Myung Moon
September 11, 1972
Unofficial Translation
Excerpt from Japanese language God's Will and the World - Why We Have to Go Through Hardships
A true parent-child relationship, a true husband-wife relationship, and a true brotherly relationship cannot be established unless we relate with sacrificial love. The genuineness of those relationships depends upon that standard.
Children know that their parents truly love them when they truly sacrifice themselves for them. Although the sacrificial position is a sorrowful one, if the children perfectly appreciate it and return love to the parents, then the parents can feel more joy.
Likewise if a true couple sacrifices for each other, then love can constantly be restored in addition to the power of sacrifice. Therefore, husband and wife can become one eternally if they share their suffering with each other. True friends are those who sacrifice themselves for each other. The position of love can be established when one sacrifices oneself and gives himself for others. Thus sacrifice accompanies love.
God could not truly love man up until now because man fell and did not achieve his perfection. Thus God's love could not be returned by a perfect object.
If someone truly desires love, he should stand in the same position as God and give everything until the perfection of his object of love, as God does. Parents give everything until their children grow up and get married. They have to sacrifice everything and give everything until their children understand the sphere of parental heart. If the children appreciate it and give filial piety to their parents, then the parents feel joy, forgetting all of their sacrifice. This is the way of love.
From the Principle and God's point of view, it is absolutely impossible for us to reach the perfection level unless we go through sacrifice. It is the way of restoration to work and recreate the ideal self so that one can reach God's standard.
God created the archangel and Adam in order to achieve His ideal of love. In the course of restoration, therefore, we must go through the principle of recreation. We human beings must restore the sphere of the archangel first.
The way of faith requires the restoration of the invisible substantial sphere, or the realm of the archangel. This is the sphere of process, during which we need to have a life of faith. In the process of our life of faith, we must restore the path of the archangel through history.
Viewed from the principle of restoration, we go up from the age of servant of servants to the age of servant. After that, we must go up to the level of adopted son and into the realm of true son, which is the original standard of perfection. This is the standard upon which the bridegroom and bride, perfected Adam and Eve, can establish ideal horizontal love.
We must go through the process of the archangel and the process of Adam's growth, receiving God's vertical love until we reach perfection. Then we can make a departure to the horizontal level. Accordingly, God's goal in history up until now has been to complete one person, Adam, who can stand in the position of God's object. Thus, Adam becomes the central figure on the horizontal level. If God and Adam become one and Adam and Eve become one, then God and Adam and Eve become one. At that point the vertical and the horizontal are perfectly united by love. Wherever they go, they are filled with joy. We call this environment the Heavenly Kingdom.
Since God's ideal of the Heavenly Kingdom was destroyed because of the fall, we must recreate it.
Here the problem is the existence of Satan, but if the archangelic sphere is perfected, Satan must disappear. The perfection of the archangel is not done by the archangel but by the perfection of Adam. If Adam is perfected, the ideal of the archangel is also perfected, and Satan has no place to exist in this cosmos.
Since the archangelic sphere is imperfect, Satan can still exist, but once perfection is accomplished, he cannot remain. Therefore, the perfection of Adam is the ultimate and most important task. That is why God has been working up until now to achieve the perfection of Adam. The perfected Adam is the Messiah.
To go back to God, fallen man must first become the servant of the servant, who is the archangel. The best master is the master who works for the sake of the servant. And the servant must find this master. The fall destroyed God's ideal by centering love upon oneself. God's ideal is love. Therefore, where one's love is self-centered, the way of restoration can never be born.