Sun Myung Moon
August 20, 2005
Olympic Park Gymnastics Hall, Seoul, Korea
First anniversary of the Coronation of the King of Peace
Photo date and location unknown
Respected guests from home and abroad and beloved blessed families:
I would like to express my deepest gratitude for the work you are doing in many places around the world to establish God’s homeland and bring peace to humanity.
We are gathered here today to commemorate the historic days in 2004 when ceremonies were held at venues on both Capitol Hill in the United States and at the National Assembly in Korea honoring me with a coronation as “King of Peace.” As it happens, this is also the twentieth anniversary of the day I was freed from Danbury prison in the United States, after having achieved a victory despite the difficulties of incarceration there. That was the last of six times in my life that I had been imprisoned, each time as a result of persecution and unjust accusations.
On this meaningful day, I would like to convey to you Heaven’s message concerning the significance and value of the holy marriage Blessing. The title of my remarks is “The Holy Marriage Blessing Is the Path to Unite the Virtues of Heaven and Earth and Harmonize and Unite the Cosmos.”
The family of the ideal of creation
Beloved guests, in what form does God exist? The Creator of all things in the universe exists as the unitary embodiment of the dual characteristics of a subject partner in the male position and an object partner in the female position. God created the first human ancestors, Adam and Eve, when He divided the male and female positions within Himself. Then the original couple were to have created children in the same pattern of male and female as a result of their union.
God’s creation takes place according to this principle of origin, division and union. God is the first generation, Adam and Eve were the second generation, and the children of Adam and Eve were to have stood in the position of the third generation. These three generations were to have formed a single family. God gave His blessing so that sinless descendants could be multiplied through myriads of generations. This is the ideal upon which God created human beings.
If Adam and Eve had achieved individual perfection in accordance with God’s Will -- that is, if they had achieved the perfection of their characters, entered into conjugal relations with His blessing, and accomplished perfect oneness with Him -- a bond would have been formed enabling God to reside within them. Also, Adam and Eve’s children would have been linked to a holy order of love enabling them to form a parent-child relationship directly with God. This was to have been God’s greatest blessing to humanity.
In general terms, to bless someone means we pray for their good fortune. What then is the zenith, the apex, of good fortune? What is the most precious aspect of good fortune? It is not money, fame, power or knowledge. If Adam and Eve had only been able to marry with God’s blessing and multiply sinless children, this would have been the most precious of all blessings. All creation would have responded with joy, and it would have been the day of God’s greatest joy as well. It would have been the place where the kingdom of heaven on earth and the kingdom of heaven in heaven would have met.
What would have happened if God’s creation in the Garden of Eden had stopped with man and had not included woman? The miracle of all miracles is that men and women exist together in this world. For only one to exist would be the same as having no existence at all. Humankind would have died out in less than a hundred years. It is only when men and women exist together that the heavenly path can be established and ethics and moral principles can begin.
So the marriage of perfected Adam and Eve would have been in a very real sense God’s own marriage. While God would have remained God, Adam and Eve would have become the embodiment of God. The couple would have become God’s body, and God would have settled within their minds to become their True Parent, and thus the True Parent of all humanity, both physically and spiritually.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a result of the Fall committed by the first human ancestors, human history deteriorated into an endless spectacle of sin and struggle. Human beings, as a matter of course, were to have attended God as our True Parent; instead we became the prisoners of hell, dominated by the false parent, the devil Satan. The bodies of Adam and Eve were to have become temples of God, in which God’s spirit would dwell, and they were to have become people of divine value. Instead their bodies became the haunts of Satan, hotbeds of all manner of sin and falsehood, and the devil used them for empty pleasure.
In practical terms, the Fall of humankind meant that the marriage of Adam and Eve, which was supposed to have been performed with God’s blessing, was instead performed centered on the false love and selfish desires of Satan. According to the Principle of Creation, true love, true life and true lineage are inherited from parents. This means that human beings, born with Satan as our parent, have all inherited false love, false life and false lineage through no choice of our own.
The Fall and Restoration
We became a pitiful humanity, perpetually exhausted by the struggle between our minds and bodies, forced to leave this world having been unable to resolve this problem even at the moment of death. We ignore the voice of our conscience, which represents the voice of God within us, and we conduct our lives driven by the desires of our body, which has become the slave of Satan. This is a picture of the human condition.
Most people are not even aware they have fallen to the point of living in such a wretched and oppressed state. They look around and see that others are like them, so they think it is quite natural to appear to be able to see, when in fact they are blind. They become foolish and pitiful people. How much longer will we live oblivious to this tragedy?
In principle, the person who causes a problem is responsible to resolve it. So, because humanity fell by false love, we have to eradicate false love, even to its last vestige. On that foundation, we need to receive the holy marriage Blessing and set out to build true families centering on God’s true love. In this way, we need to put down true roots that will enable us to multiply true descendants, generation after generation.
However this is not something that one can achieve just by wishing for it. Is it not true that, during the tens of thousands of years since the beginning of human history, no one has been able to achieve this state and save humanity from evil and sin? The many religions that have risen and fallen over the course of history have done their best to achieve this goal, yet even they have been unable to overcome the debilitation of fallen nature and have either failed or been forced to take detours.
God is a Parent of true love. God gave Jesus the status of His only begotten Son and made Himself incarnate on this earth, as He had originally intended to do through Adam and Eve. Jesus came with the mission of the Savior and Messiah, and dedicated his life of thirty-three years to bringing about the Will of Heaven. Yet in the end, even he passed away, midway through his course, as a sacrifice on the cross.
I am not attributing any failure to Jesus himself. Jesus, who was the perfect human being or second Adam, searched earnestly for his bride. Although Heaven had prepared Judaism and Israel for thousands of years, the people of Israel were unable to understand Heaven’s Will regarding Jesus, and their ignorance forced him to go the way of the cross. Jesus was the incarnation of Heaven’s seed of true love, sinless and pure, yet in the end he had to return to heaven without being able to plant that seed on this earth. Jesus came to find a bride on earth, hold the Marriage of the Lamb in the presence of both heaven and earth, establish a family of true love and multiply Heaven’s sinless and true lineage. Yet this mission was blocked midway through his course.
The incarnation of True Parents and the value of the Blessing
God’s love is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, and so too are the attributes of His Will. Therefore God’s ideal of creation absolutely will be completed on this earth. The providence by which Heaven has sought the children of God, who were lost due to the Fall of Adam and Eve, will be fulfilled.
Please understand that upon the foundation of Jesus, who passed prematurely into the spirit world due to the disbelief of the religious leaders two thousand years ago, today Heaven has sent to this earth the True Parents as the saviors of humanity, the Messiah and the returning Lord. God is bringing the history of the providence of salvation to a close. He is carrying out His absolute and eternal providence in accordance with a plan for the providence of salvation that cannot be delayed or extended any further.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are standing today at the historic turning point of God’s providence. Let those with ears to hear, hear. Let those with eyes to see, see with certainty. Let those with mouths to speak give witness to all nations. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who now stands before you, is the Savior, Messiah, Second Advent, Peace King and True Parent. He has appeared on earth with Heaven’s anointing as the one for whom humanity has waited with eager yearning for such a long time.
This is not my own claim. Founders of the major religions and tens of thousands of other saints and sages in the spirit world have sent messages testifying to this fact. God, Himself, has sent a message asking that the world’s six billion people work to establish the kingdom of peace on earth, centered on the True Parents. These messages have already been widely published. If you cannot believe these facts, please seek to confirm them in desperate, all-out prayer. Heaven will absolutely give you the answers that you seek through such prayer.
Ladies and gentlemen, what then is the necessary path for all human beings, who became wild olive trees as descendants of the Fall? It is to receive the holy marriage Blessing from God through the True Parents. A wild olive tree will always be a wild olive tree, even after a thousand years. To change its pedigree, it must be grafted onto a cultivated, or true, olive tree; in the same way fallen humanity must secure the true blood lineage. The holy marriage Blessing that the True Parents bestow is the blessing and grace of being grafted onto the true olive tree.
People sometimes say that Rev. Moon’s holy marriage Blessing is nothing more than an ordinary marriage performed according to the custom of the Unification Church. This ceremony, however, is much more than just a wedding to mark the joining of a man and a woman and the beginning of their family. Weddings held until now were centered on the two individuals involved, but the holy marriage Blessing centers on returning joy to God. It is meant to be a precious condition for indemnifying the history of sin. It is a holy and grand ceremony of blessing and grace. Please understand that in this ceremony we resolve the grief of God, stemming from the Fall of Adam and Eve, and pass through the standard Jesus himself came to accomplish, that of bride and groom cleansed of the original sin.
The term holy marriage Blessing did not just begin with me, or the Unification Church. Instead it has existed within the innermost heart of God since the time of creation. After the Human Fall, it became one of His most poignantly cherished desires. Please understand that God has always pursued this as a goal and has longed to see it realized.
Is there anyone who knows the circumstances of God, who had to walk a path of unspeakable suffering in order to bring about this historic day? This day marks the resolution of grief and is a providential day when God’s cherished desire is being fulfilled. Seen from this perspective, the holy marriage Blessing is an incredible blessing, and it can also be an incredibly fearful judgment.
The holy marriage Blessing can bring closure to all the sorrow in history, from the furthest past to the very present. It marks a new beginning for the fulfillment of the cherished desires of God. It is a new starting point, an opportunity to create a new future for humanity, and it is the most certain way to extricate oneself from the dominion Satan has exercised during the Era before the Coming of Heaven.
Only through the holy marriage Blessing can you inherit the bond of True Parents’ love. It is the process and end result of the transfer of Heaven’s full authority. When a family who has received the Blessing goes to the spirit world, True Parents will be responsible for them. This means that such a family will live under the protection of True Parents. Once a heavenly bond is made with the True Parents through the holy marriage Blessing, this becomes an eternal and unchanging bond, and the key to opening the gates of heaven.
The fulfillment of the Blessing in the Era after the Coming of Heaven
Then, ladies and gentlemen, what kind of time and age is it when the Blessing becomes a reality? The Era before the Coming of Heaven, when the world was under Satan’s dominion, has ended, and we have entered the Era after the Coming of Heaven, when the peace kingdom will be established. This is the best of times, when the grief of God, who has toiled for six thousand years to see this day, is being resolved and the cherished desires of humankind for peace are being realized.
It is the time when we will begin to see the fulfillment of the cherished desires of Jesus, who came to this earth and left before he could fulfill God’s Will for the holy marriage Blessing. In addition, it is the time when true love is blooming and bearing fruit for the very first time since the creation of human beings, and the time when we can feel welcomed by nature as never before, with full respect and glory.
How strongly God has yearned to see this day! We come to a new era in which evil will disappear. At this time, a new heaven and new earth are being established under the bright fight of the sun, all things are beginning to commune together, and the entire universe is starting to dance in a bright new morning of victory.
I have said that the heavenly ideal cannot be fulfilled without establishing a family of true love through the holy marriage Blessing. The heavenly ideal is completed when the Will of God is fulfilled and the heavenly way is established in the family, centering on true love.
So what kind of love is true love? True love exists for the benefit of all. It is a love that seeks first to give and live for the sake of the whole. It is a love that gives and does not keep a tally of what it gave, and so it gives without end, imparting unending joy. It is the heart of love of a mother embracing her child and feeding it at her breast. It is the love of a child who brims with joy by practicing filial piety toward his or her parents. It is the true love of God when He created human beings. True love is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, without a condition or expectation of receiving anything in return.
True love is the original wellspring of the universe and the core of the universe. It is the love that creates the owner of the universe. True love also represents God’s root, His determination and His power. So when we are bound together in true love, we can be together forever and never tire of each other’s company. The universe and even God will follow whenever we pull them with true love.
The value of true love is reckoned by its power to bring an eternal end to the barriers that fallen people have built, including national boundaries, racial tensions and even religions. An absolute prerequisite for entering the kingdom of heaven is a life lived for the sake of others, that is, a life of true love.
What is the heavenly way? In short, it is the tradition of Heaven, the tradition of practicing true love rooted in God. A life of the heavenly way is an exalted life that transcends the man-made laws of this world. Violent social or political revolutions are unnecessary when there is true love and the life of the heavenly way. You need only follow the path of true love, the heavenly way, practicing a life of sacrifice and service for the sake of others. This is the path that will bring about an explosion of God’s love. It is the path to develop and expand God’s lineage and to preserve it forever.
You now need to advance rapidly in this Age after the Coming of Heaven with a determination that says, “As long as God does not change, I will not change. No matter the circumstances, I will continue on this path. Even if the life, love and ideals that I have preserved until now amid Satan’s world are all taken from me, I will continue on this path. Even if God were to change, I will bring God back and continue on this path with Him. If God is not absolute, I will make Him absolute, if necessary, and continue on this path.”
Ladies and gentlemen, pursuing this theme of true love, why do we marry? I have said we marry in order to enter the kingdom of heaven and to save humankind. We must understand that when a man and a woman become husband and wife through the holy marriage Blessing, the husband is called to see his wife in a new light, as a daughter of God and a daughter of humanity. If the man can love his wife as much as humanity loves her and as much as God loves her, then he is qualified to be her husband. The same is true for the woman. Just because a man is your husband, don’t say, “It’s all settled; that’s my man.” Before you claim him, think of him as God’s son and as a man who represents all the men in the world.
Between a husband and wife, the husband is the right foot and the wife is the left foot. Together they need to leave footprints of a life lived for the sake of God and humankind. These footprints are, in fact, your family. If either the right or the left foot is not whole, the person will stumble. Will you be people who leave footprints that reveal stumbling? When you become a couple in which the wife upholds the husband as she would heaven and the husband holds the wife in esteem and protects her as he would the earth, then the place where they embrace will be where the virtues of heaven and earth are harmonized and where the cosmos is harmonized as one.
Our mission
Respected leaders, we are now entering a glorious age. The kingdom of heaven on earth that is God’s ideal of creation, the peace kingdom, is being established before your eyes. The life that I have lived for more than eighty years, a lonely path spattered with blood and sweat and lived only for the sake of Heaven, is now bearing the fruits of victory for the sake of the six billion people in the world.
In more than one hundred eighty countries, ambassadors for peace who have inherited Heaven’s will and tradition are working hard, day and night, proclaiming the values of true love and true family. They are moving forward with full force to establish a world of peace on this earth.
In the Middle East, one of the world’s most explosive tinderboxes, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have found the resources in my philosophy of peace to engage in a new dimension of peaceful dialogue. The Unification Thought of Rev. Moon also played a decisive role in ending the Cold War, and it will help to pave the way toward the unification of my homeland of Korea.
That alone is not enough to satisfy me. I began my life’s work at the command of Heaven. I have come as the True Parent of humankind with God’s anointing, and I am determined to keep my promise to Him to build His kingdom.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take the opportunity provided by this extraordinary forum today to declare a truly historic and revolutionary project for the sake of peace and the welfare of humankind. This is a combined bridge and tunnel project across the Bering Strait, where Satan has historically divided East and West, and where the North American and Russian landmasses are separated.
This World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel will be connected to a future international highway system, enabling people to travel by car from Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to Chile’s Santiago and from London to New York, knitting the world together into a single community in a new way.
Heaven warns us that separation and division can no longer be tolerated. This project will help bind all nations together as a single community, help tear down the walls dividing race, culture, religion, and nationality, and help establish the world of peace that has been God’s cherished desire. The United States and Russia need to unite, along with the European nations and with China, India, Japan, Brazil and all other nations. All of the world’s religions need to unite as well. They need to combine their energies to make this historic project a success. It will play a decisive role in establishing a peace kingdom where there is no benefit to war or division.
Ladies and gentlemen, some may question how such an enormous project can be completed. Where there is the Will of God, there is a way. The science and technology of the twenty-first century has advanced to a level where boring a tunnel under the Bering Strait is no problem. The construction costs are also no problem. For example, do you know how much money the United States poured into the war in Iraq during the past three years? The figure is soon going to reach $200 billion. That is more than enough to complete the Bering Strait project.
Why do the United States and so many other countries continue the foolishness and barbarism of war, pouring endless funds into the exercise of killing one another? Humankind must stop repeating the perversity of sacrificing our children’s lives and squandering astronomical amounts of money for the sake of war. The time has come for all the countries of the world to pool their resources and dash forward toward establishing the world of peace that is the desire of God, the master of this great universe.
Humanity has entered a dead-end street, and the only way we can survive is by upholding the peace philosophy of true love, true life and true lineage as taught by Rev. Moon. When your good ancestors are mobilized and the heavenly forces of the Age after the Coming of Heaven sweep down upon the earth, even countries and peoples that appear strong will have no choice except to surrender to the way of true love.
The choice is now before you. There can be no perfection in ignorance. This message I convey to you is both a warning and a blessing from Heaven. Will you join in step with me so we all may rise and gain victory in accordance with heavenly fortune? Will you become principal actors in establishing true families, true societies, true nations and a true world? Or will you be content to remain captive behind the same old walls that Satan relishes -- the wall of your religion, the wall of your culture, the wall of your nationality and the wall of your race -- and spend the remainder of your lives in agony and regret? Heaven today is summoning brave leaders who will turn this world of evil upside down and establish a new heaven and new earth.
Today I have delivered Heaven’s message. Please inscribe it deep in your hearts and remember that the holy marriage Blessing received through the True Parents has the uniting value of bringing together the virtues of heaven and earth. Please use this information to set new coordinates for your lives so you may become wise leaders.
Let me end my remarks by asking you to please pledge that you will become brave leaders, who will maintain the heavenly way that has become the tradition of the Era after the Coming of Heaven, and who will help to usher the world and humankind into the realm of true love.
Thank you.