Sun Myung Moon
April 12, 1986
Excerpts
Seoul, Korea
It is an amazing, providential event that you couples become candidates for the first Blessing of the blessed children and become the second generation of blessed families. You should know that while there are many blessed couples in the Unification Church, God has not expected much from them; God is not happy with your parents. All Unification families, including the 36 Couples, have committed sins against God's will. Therefore your Blessing is a matter which worries God and worries me. From now on, your behavior should not be based upon the words and directions of your parents.
You should now pledge to set up and renew the true tradition of the Unification family at any cost. Along the path of God's will, you should not do anything just for the sake of your own family or clan. The Bible prophesied that in the Last Days your family would become your enemy. This means that at the turning point of history no one who thinks of his family or clan first can truly walk the path of God's will, but will go astray. You should not think that these words apply only to people outside the Unification Church; they also apply to Unification Church families. In getting married you are not just becoming someone's partner. Your marriage is not centered on any individual, but it exists to reform the Unification family.
At the Turning Point
Some of your parents may be among the many who have complained. You may have heard them criticizing or complaining about the church, the 36 Couples, various church leaders, or other members. Your parents may also have been among those who have been criticized by church members for their improper words or behavior. If you know of any words or behavior on the part of your parents that were not good or consistent with the way of God's will, then you must not repeat them. We are now at the turning point; therefore, you must annihilate any previous bad habits and begin anew.
Un Jin Nim is younger than you are. As yet she knows very little about the world. She knew nothing about her wedding until the day before. Three days ago her fiance was chosen and then she quickly prepared for her wedding. During this time she did not raise any questions or make any comments based on her own opinion. In God's providence, matters of importance must be done cleanly, with no satanic intervention whatsoever. Especially the Blessing should be centered purely and wholly on God and True Parents, and the concepts or opinions of any third party should not be involved.
Whatever your parents' feelings and opinions were during your Blessing, I completely ignored them. Your Blessing should not be influenced by them. If it is, it is bound to lose its meaning. In the original world parents are sup- posed to bless their own children. It was because I could not trust your parents that I had to bless you this time. I matched you very seriously and with greater care than I matched your parents. Therefore you should shake off your previous relationship with your parents and make a new start centering on the True Parents.
You should be grateful that the wilderness course has ended and that today you are opening up the 40-year era of settlement in Canaan. Now all of Korea, centering on Seoul, is being influenced by the will of God. No longer can there ever be any evil force which can block the way of the Unification Church. From now on, no individual nor any power greater than the individual can continue to prosper without following the Unification way. Today everybody, both the masses and the intelligentsia, knows what has been going on and must admit that nobody should be opposed to the Unification Church.
Heroes of the New Age
Then what should you do? You should just roll ahead, like a tank or a train. Make yourself a spiritual cannonball. You must understand that you represent the unfolding of a new history: you, not your parents, are the heroes of the new age. Your wedding ceremony is being held in the city of Seoul on the foundation of your having entered Canaan. You should keep in mind that both the physical and spiritual worlds are watching, so you cannot forget that you are called to become the new historical vanguard.
You are called, and you are chosen. Your mission is to form the advance detachment that will march in the front line. You should open a new page of history with a determination that befits your position and your calling. Any of you who do not live in accordance with my direction today will not b• able to avoid judgment before the nation and the world.
Furthermore, you must know that since the spirit world is still undergoing the process of restoration, any mistakes or failures you make in your missions must be indemnified immediately for their benefit. In the age of restoration through indemnity, any unfulfilled responsibility requires the payment of prolonged and aggravated indemnity. However, you are entering the age of restoration through responsibility and the age of restoration through indemnity is passing away. This is why you cannot reserve any mistakes for future indemnification, but should pay indemnity immediately. If your past lives were lukewarm, you should renew your fiery determination to march for- ward as God's vanguard on the path of His will.
Your Blessing is the starting point for the opening of the new age. Hence, I hope that you can fulfill your proper responsibility as standard-bearers who are called for the sake of all the people of the world. That is my first main point for you today.
Secondly, I want to make sure that you learn from the history of the Israelites. The first generation Israelites who undertook the exodus from Egypt failed during their 40-year course in the wilderness; they died in the desert because they did not become one with Moses centering on God's will. The second generation who entered Canaan also failed; they did not become one with God's chosen leaders and became contaminated with heathen customs, which led to their downfall. They wanted to be recompensed for their suffering. They became interested in leading a luxurious life; they enjoyed knowledge, desired power, and even married pagans if they were rich. In this way they sold away their spirit as the chosen people and were assimilated into the existing culture of Canaan. Then the nation of Israel was divided, and the tribes of both the North and South were conquered and taken away from their homeland as slaves. Thus the nation of Israel perished.
Do Not Repeat The Past
Even though you are already free of the fallen realm, you must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the past. In carrying out your mission for this age, you must gain wisdom from these historical examples to avoid any possible downfall. The Israelites perished after they entered Canaan. Today's Blessing may lead to future damnation for some of you. Your Blessing can be transformed into the very cause of your own demise. Nevertheless, I cannot but bless you. Everything is up to your own determination. Do not rely upon your parents, however, because they showed no exemplary conduct for you to follow.
You should learn this historical precept and be prepared to fight. Sticking stubbornly to secular habits can ruin you and the providence; you should not be influenced by the force of habit. You must renew your life daily, progress from today's position to tomorrow's, and continue to progress into the future world. New families, clans, nations, and a whole new world will be formed from you, so you cannot just stop here.
The problem of all Unification families, from the 36 to the 6,000 Couples, is that they are secularized. Your parents think, "My sons and daughters must go to college in order to rise in the world." However, God did not create humankind in order to give them a lot of knowledge. Your parents made a big mistake if they taught you that you could rise in the world only by getting a degree.
God's purpose for creating man and woman was to have them love each other and become one. Through them God wanted to establish the incarnation of His love and promote His joy; the family was to be the very foundation of such love. It is an absolute law that God's purpose for creating human beings was nothing other than love. Only through love can your advancement along the way of God's will and your outside activities harmonize with each other.
Therefore, after your wedding, go and take charge of God's love. It is for the purpose of love alone that you were born as man and woman. Since you are the divided incarnation of the polarity in God, seek God's love as the basis of your union. You will meet God's love and fulfill it by becoming one with each other. There is no other way. Knowledge, power, money, and even beauty have nothing whatsoever to do with reaching God. It is because Adam and Eve could become one with Him only through love that God demanded love from them and nothing else. Only through perfect unity in conjugal love, which develops into parental love, do we rise to God's level; then we come to stand right beside God.
Inheriting All That God Has
Once you are qualified to go up to the sphere of God, you can also come down to earth to inherit everything God owns. God will absolutely allow you to be His colleague. So great is the power of God's love that He wants to give it away, infinitely. Love, which moved God to give everything to Adam and Eve, urged Him to establish His children in a position where they could own the very ideal of love. This means God wanted to bequeath His heart and everything in the universe to them.
Adam and Eve also had an innate desire to inherit all that God owned. Infinite desire cannot be satisfied by anything but God's love. The original human mind knows that human beings are meant to go to the place of God and to be loved by God in order to inherit from Him. The original mind tends to form unity centering only on love.
Without receiving God's love, you cannot be admitted to the same level as God in the spiritual realm or inherit His ideal and ownership. Though you are meeting each other now for the first time, you will remain together in conjugal love forever. As soon as conjugal love is fulfilled, you are not two but one. Thus after your wedding you cannot just behave as you please. As husbands and wives you cannot act individually; you must take joint responsibility.
As husband and wife you should be able to realize where you are heading. Which of you two is higher, the husband or the wife, is to be decided on the basis of who loves God most. If the husband is inactive on the way of God's will, or is interested in something else, then the wife should recall his attention to his true direction. If he does not listen to her, she should continue by herself. If instead she becomes inactive due to her husband's influence their children are bound to perish.
Your path is to love God as an individual and then to develop your love centering on your family, clan, society, nation, and world. Your final task will be to liberate the spirit world and hell. You should clean up all the results of the human fall just as you clean up a trash can. Who should clean out your trash can? You who used that trash can should clean it, not God or True Parents. The environment of the future world will be connected to the descendants of the True Parents, and problems should be solved in that environment by those who Eve in it.
The Main Role in Restoration
Therefore, from now on you are to play the main role in the course of restoration. You should open the new age of restoration as its representatives. Those who accomplish restoration on the family level will be admitted into the family-level sphere of blessing in the Kingdom of Heaven; those who accomplish restoration on the clan level will be admitted into the clan-level sphere of blessing, and so on for the society, nation, and world. Your status in the Kingdom of Heaven depends on how deep and how far your love has extended. You should love your parents and brothers and sisters more than you love your spouse, and you should love the nation, world, and God more than you love your family. Without establishing this order of love, you have no true path along which to progress in life. God's love should overflow in your lives; otherwise, you and your families will perish. Those who lack love will lose their citizenship in God's nation and be left out of the world where love is the tradition.
From now on, your footsteps must be deliberate ones. You are already engaged, and are about to be blessed. In such a position you can never possibly deny me. Anyone who complains about this wedding will create a big problem. If any of your parents, including the 36 Couples, interrupt or interfere with this wedding in any way, then I will never allow them to come before me, even if the whole world comes before me to receive God's will. If your parents cannot establish the true family tradition, then they will have to take responsibility for all of God's historical resentment, and for all the resentment borne in my course. You should not even be happy that you are about to be blessed. Just be grateful for being called; go forward centering on your call and cleanly liquidate your past lives.
My third point for you today is that you should be victorious over the entire world. However, you cannot rise on nothing. You must go through suffering that no one else in the world can handle. You should find the abandoned path that the people of this world would consider worthless. That is the path God is asking you to walk. If you try to rise automatically, Satan will not yield a place to you. Since Satan is blocking the way upward, you should take the opposite route, to the bottom of this world. None of you will be opposed in going downward. The deeper you go, the more easily your enemies can be subdued. This is the secret formula of the providence. Many religions throughout history sought the highest goal, but they could not attain it because they did not know the way.
I have been fighting to gain the summit of the world, but my method has been to penetrate the world's most miserable depths. Therefore to you, and to all of history, my course will be like a beacon. No one actually knows the path that I have walked. Even Mother and our children do not know its deeper aspects. You should come to learn about my path and teach others about it.
God's Strategy for Victory
You must realize how great and important your mission is. The purpose of the way of God's will is to make you victors of the world. But since the people of the satanic world will never allow you to lead them automatically, you must take the opposite direction from Satan and subdue them through your love before you guide them. First you must establish a relationship with God, with yourself, and with others that Satan cannot interfere with. Then you can counterattack him as you walk the path of persecution and suffering. Walking on this path will bring you to the highest place. When I traveled this path I was sure that I would win the fight for my spiritual life. Pushing the central figures of religion through the path of persecution has been God's strategy for gaining eternal victory.
Keep in mind that no one can ever avoid the path of persecution, not even those who have graduated from the highest educational institutions. I hope that you will become eternal victors by learning from my course. Therefore I will mobilize all of you as soon as your wedding ceremony is over. You must make a clear goal centered on the will of God and press forward without ceasing. Never forget that the Israelites perished because they were absorbed into their environment.
Although my course was one of suffering, it allowed me to uphold the authority of God in front of Satan. I never wanted to be welcomed in the environment of this world. If you cannot be welcomed in today's environment, then you will surely be considered victors in the future, and your descendants will welcome you. If your descendants do not welcome you, I will welcome you. Until now the Unification Church has never been welcomed; I myself prevented it, because otherwise you could easily have been absorbed into the outside world. From now on, however, there will no longer be any opposition to the Unification Church. I want to secure my proper position and vindication through you, the second generation. The problem is that you are not qualified for such a role until you experience the path of suffering. Therefore, you must be determined to fight against Satan with your whole heart.
Please keep in mind the three main points I have made. From this time forward your education will be taken care of by me. Right after your wedding you should go to your mission field like soldiers returning from leave. Standing on the front line, you should open the way of God's will just as Moses' 70 elders and Jesus' 12 disciples did. By now the education of IFVOC community leaders in Seoul is 70 percent accomplished. You are to participate in IFVOC activities and finish choosing and educating the other 30 percent. I want you to do your best.
About School
Because you have a providential task before you, you should not worry about going to school. I will not bless any of you who refuse to participate in IFVOC activities, so tell me now if you would rather attend school than participate in IFVOC.
You should not attend graduate school right now. After you have loved God, your family, your clan, and your nation, you can attend graduate school, if it is needed. If my own children are not going to graduate school, you should not go. This is the Principle. The leaves and branches of a tree can only sprout after the trunk grows up. The trunk should grow up high before the branches extend out to the sides; then the tree will grow normally. If the branches around the sides grow faster than the trunk, the tree will be a useless scrub bush. This is natural law. Since you are men and women who are to inherit the tradition, you should go to graduate school only if my children go.
All religions in the past, such as Buddhism and Catholicism, have upheld the practice of celibacy. This was not because they disliked marriage but because providential revelation ordered them to abstain. Similarly, I am only reluctant to send you to school because the providence of this age is so urgent.
Your parents have committed themselves to your education, hoping for you to become successful. What about me? I have been exerting myself on behalf of God, you, and all of humankind. How could I be concerned with my own children's education? Your parents made a big mistake in front of God and me by worrying about your education, and you must share responsibility for this with them.
Instead of worrying about yourselves you should encourage Hyo Jin to catch up on his own studies quickly. Since Unification Church members could not fulfill their responsibility, Hyo Jin has trouble keeping his mind centered and stable. You should be concerned about Hyo Jin and cooperate with him and your other elders. This is the way of the Principle.
Forgiveness and Grace
It is up to me to allow you to receive grace for this Blessing. If you do not receive my permission to be blessed, you must undertake a pioneer course for seven years. If I do not recognize you, you cannot claim to have completed your responsibility. According to what I have told you today, I will judge whether you have passed or not. If you cannot pass my judgment, your families will be in trouble and will crumble.
Even Col. Pak will not be an exception. During the promotion of the Little Angels Col. Pak once rejected me and the Unification Church. He made an announcement about the Little Angels on his own and tried to pursue his own success. Therefore the way for Hoon Sook and Jin Sung to marry my children was blocked. I had his own children speak to him and ask him to repent. Col. Pak, what did you do? (Col. Pak: I repented.)
If anyone of you commits a sin, I will inform your family about it; if you repent I can then take responsibility for that sin. On the foundation of Col. Pak's repentance I married his children and mine for the sake of Heung Jin and in order to bring the spiritual environment under control. In Principle such a marriage was not possible; only love made it possible. Then, for the first 40 days after I came out of prison, I gave Col. Pak a hard time whenever I saw him. If he had minded it he might have left the Unification Church, but since he sincerely repented he has been continuing to follow me.
I am now thinking seriously about those in the Unification family who talk carelessly about me or criticize me. If these people are not cleansed, history cannot be restored. God does not freely forgive anyone who commits a sin -- that is, without the appropriate indemnity conditions. Mistakes your parents have made cannot be left unrestored and cannot be easily forgiven. Those who are opposed to God's will in any way are bound to leave a trace of their sin behind them. If you were trying to rise on your own in the outside world, you would never be able to go beyond the high mountains of the providence without somebody else's help. Following my direction is the only way to go beyond the mountains.
First, love your spouse and create a family of love. Having already returned to Canaan, you are responsible to establish God's nation. That is why this year's motto is "Creation and Building of the Kingdom of Heaven" Overcome all the mountains that I myself have overcome. Fight at the risk of your lives to fulfill your responsibility and create a new history.
No Compromise
Second, learn the historical lesson from the people of Israel, who perished after they returned to Canaan. Do not perish after your Blessing by aiming at worldly goals requiring knowledge, money, and power. In my own life I have never known compromise; the Principle alone has been my guide. Therefore, never surrender yourselves to the power of secular habits. Keep one of my favorite proverbs in mind: You must complete dominion of yourself before hoping to have dominion over the universe.
Worldly people live for their own convenience. They even sell out their conscience to rise in the world. If you follow them, your deeds will destroy your spiritual progress. Only through love, even in the face of suffering along the way of God's will, can you inherit God's ideal and all that He owns, and come to stand on the same level as God Himself. Eternal values should be your goal.
Third, become leaders who can take the greatest historical responsibility by going the way of suffering with love in your hearts. In order to go this way, you will all have to go to the front line. If your spouse is opposed to this, reject your spouse and continue on your own. The center of the family is the one who considers God's will to be the first priority. According to the Principle, those who live for the sake of others are closer to God.
I have never avoided the path of suffering. I was never afraid to stand before enemies or to endure prison. You will become victors when you determine to inherit my tradition and live by it. Become a love bomb or a heavenly fighting squad to blow up Satan. Without taking a stand on the front line, you cannot create and build the Kingdom of Heaven. Be willing to sacrifice yourselves and live for others. Let your path of sacrifice become a source of heavenly patriotism, and I will be ready to join you at any time.
I hope you remember the points I have made today. If you do, a bright future will open up before you, and you will become eternal victors who will leave your names forever in history.