Sun Myung Moon
January 27, 2004
Congratulatory Banquet of True Parents' Birthday
Photo date and location unknown
Distinguished leaders from around the world, respected dignitaries from Korea and other countries, ladies and gentlemen:
This banquet was prepared to celebrate my 84th birthday and the birthday of my wife, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon. Instead of receiving congratulations on our birthdays, though, the two of us would prefer to offer this banquet to the saints and sages in the spirit world who are present here now, to the blessed families of the spirit world, and to the participants of the World Summit on Leadership and Governance. I understand that you have been engaged in many discussions and meetings during the past few days on the theme, "Good Governance for a World in Crisis." I know that your hard work and passion will combine to create the opportunity for new hopes and dreams to be planted in a world that, until now, seems to slide deeper into crisis with each passing day. I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to each of you again for coming to my homeland, Korea, to join me in opening the fourth year of Cheon II Guk (the Kingdom of Peace and Unification). This is a new year of great hope and this evening, in keeping with a tradition I have maintained throughout my life of more than 80 years of only speaking the will of Heaven, I would like to convey to you Heaven's message entitled, "The Messiah and True Parents."
In the beginning, human beings were created as God's children. They were destined to grow to maturity, form families with His blessing, and multiply His descendants for endless generations in a lineage of goodness unstained by sin. The first human ancestors, Adam and Eve, were to have attended God as their vertical True Parent, and with God the True Parent as their axis, they were to have become the embodied, horizontal True Parents. In such a world, the word "messiah" would never have come to exist. Their family would have been the ideal family reflecting God's ideal of creation, and the world would have been the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, where God's ideal of creation was completed. After living out their lives in this world, human beings would have automatically been registered as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven in the spiritual world, where they would live eternally in freedom, peace, and happiness. Perfected Adam and Eve would have communicated directly with God using their five spiritual senses, and at the same time, they would have freely worked with the creation using their five physical senses. They would have lived as true masters, true parents, and true kings representing both the spiritual and physical worlds.
But, with the fall of the first human ancestors, all humanity descended into a hopeless hell from which they could not escape by their efforts alone. Their five spiritual senses became completely paralyzed. They fell into a state similar to that of a blind man whose eyes only appear to be normal to an observer but do not function at all. Forced to live with just their five physical senses, they became only half human. They could not see God. They could not hear His voice, or feel His touch. So how could they experience His love as their own Parent or understand His suffering heart? Satan forced his way into the true-parent position that rightfully belonged to God, falsely pretending to be the parent. He placed humanity in complete bondage, making them his slaves. For this reason, the love, life, and lineage that we possess today are false. It is precisely that false love, false life, and false lineage first planted in Adam and Eve that persists in us today.
What great pain God must have felt as He watched humanity, though born to be His direct lineal children, received Satan's false lineage and descend to the position of servant of servants. Because God is the God of principle and law, He would not break the principles by which He created nor violate the ideal of creation that He established. So He has had to wait tens of thousands of years before introducing the Messiah to the course of the providence of salvation.
Different religions refer to this person by different names- such as Maitreya, the Man of the True Way, or the Coming Savior- but the person needed by humankind to open the way, and the person sought by God, is only one person- Messiah and True Parent.
Then who is the Messiah, and what is he like? He is the owner and substantiation of faith, hope, and love not only for the individual but also for the family, tribe, society, nation, world, and cosmos. And only in an age when humanity attends this person as the Messiah, will the faith and hope that still remains, finally bear fruit. The life and breath of human history is contained within this fruit. Our past, present, and future are linked to it. This fruit is linked not only to human beings but to Heaven as well. The Messiah comes for the sake of human beings, who became forlorn orphans after losing their parents through the Fall. He becomes our substantial True Parent, True Owner, True Teacher, and True King. He is the substantiation of God's true love, true life, and true lineage, coming to restore His lost children, who have been groaning in travail under a false parent, to bring them back to their rightful positions as the true sons and daughters of God.
Ladies and gentlemen, Heaven sent Jesus to the earth 2,000 years ago as the Messiah. Jesus was none other than the one who came to embrace the children who had lost their parents and to restore them back to the original ideal of Heaven. He was the True Parent. Through the Fall, Adam and Eve lost their positions as True Parents. They failed to receive God's blessing and so could not form a union as a true husband and wife and could not produce true children. Their failure meant God could not embrace three generations of His lineage, including His grandchildren. So God tearfully made preparations over a period of thousands of years, establishing the nation of Israel as His chosen people. And then he sent Jesus, the Savior and Messiah, through the lineage of Abraham. Jesus came as the commander-in-chief for the battle to establish the sovereignty, territory, and people of a single nation of God for the first time in history.
On that foundation, he would then restore the whole world from Satan's false blood lineage to the true blood lineage of God's goodness. Tragically, though, Jesus was unjustly put to death on the cross, because he was not received by the people of Israel, whom God had chosen. The Messiah, Jesus, who should have restored the position of True Parents, then produced true children, and risen to the position of King of Kings, was prevented from establishing even the position of a true husband with God's Marriage Blessing. Because of this, he could not establish the position of True Parents or multiply true children. Instead he died on the cross.
The "Marriage of the Lamb" that the Book of Revelation in the New Testament speaks of is none other than the ceremony by which the Messiah receives a bride and forms a union of true husband and wife. If Judaism had received and attended Jesus at that time, then the world of God's earnest desire, the world of His original ideal of creation, the peaceful Kingdom of Heaven, would have been realized on the earth at that time through Jesus' kinsmen. As it was, the True Parent providence intended to be fulfilled by Jesus, the second Adam, was thwarted midway by the faithlessness of those who had been chosen. As a result, humankind was forced to wait for the Second Coming of the Messiah. Heaven, though, had mercy yet again on pitiful humankind.
Heaven gave its blessing for the Messiah of the Second Coming to appear on the foundation of the spiritual restoration Jesus carried out throughout the 2,000 years of Christian history. The returning Messiah comes with the incredible burden of completing the mission of True Parents. To accomplish his mission, he must first, above everything else, achieve victory over the satanic realm. He must then go to achieve victory in the spiritual realm as well. He must fully engage the satanic and spiritual realms, both of which cannot be sensed through the five physical senses, and be victorious in the life-and-death battle to subjugate the devil, Satan. Additionally, he must win over the many religious and philosophical leaders who are in the spirit world. None of this, however, can be accomplished through forced subjugation. Centering on God's character of absolute love, he must convince them by revealing the universal principles of religion and the universe and in this way bring them to a natural surrender. Reverend Moon, who stands here before you, is the one who has appeared in this world bearing this incredible mission of the True Parent.
The phrase, "True Parent," does not appear in any encyclopedia. It is not a phrase that I created, nor is it something that anyone in the world can attach to my name easily. Instead, it is the destiny and blessing that Heaven has bestowed on my wife and me. The position of True Parent carries with it the vertical missions of Savior, Messiah, and returning Lord, responsibilities that have never been realized before in history or will ever be seen again in the future. For this reason, human beings still affiliated with the fallen realm must fulfill a number of conditions in order to attend the True Parents and accomplish Heaven's will.
First, they must participate in and complete a revolution of indemnity. This means they must cast everything aside and follow the True Parents. They must cast aside their friends and teachers, even their parents, and follow the True Parents. It is only when everything is cast aside and a standard of "total living offering" is made that Heaven can bestow blessings and grace upon us. This means that humanity must mercilessly eradicate all bonds and relationships with the satanic world, not showing even the slightest attachment, and in this way, return to the zero point and mark the dawning of a new creation.
Second, they must complete a revolution of conscience. This means that they must maintain a tradition of true love, true life, and true lineage in accordance with the predisposition of the original mind and conscience endowed in us by God. They must do this without even the smallest variance, regardless of whatever worldly sovereignty or ideology they may encounter. They must live a life of "noon-time settlement," where they do not leave any shadow or even a speck of shame in the presence of the spiritual and physical worlds. The revolution of conscience is completed when our lives reach a harmonious state of one mind, one body, one mindset, and so establish the sex of purity, pure blood, and pure love as an eternal and unchanging tradition in which the age of unity and harmony blossoms.
The third condition is a revolution of heart. This means that humanity must complete a world of true love in which God will want to come to human beings, consult us on all manners, and will want to reside with us. In other words, the revolution of heart is a revolution of true love. "Living for the sake of others" speaks of the practice of unchanging, sacrificial love. Think what it would be like if all of us lived for the sake of others more than for ourselves. God, the root source of true love, would reside within us and would live for our sake. What greater joy and glory could there be for us? Wherever the revolution of heart has been completed, there will be no such thing as family breakdown, racial strife, international border disputes, friction between religions, or any other vestiges the satanic world. An eternal Peace Kingdom will be established.
Respected guests, in 1996 my wife and I declared an end of the Unification Church and gave it a new beginning as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in order to fulfill the heavenly command to build a world of peace on the earth. The will of Heaven resides in human peace grounded in true families, not in the progress of any particular church or religion. Over the past decades, we have carried out many activities on inter-religious and international levels. On this foundation, we founded the lnterreligious and International Peace Council, that is, "the Peace U.N.," in New York on October 3, 2003, as a way of making a substantial beginning toward realizing a world of peace. A movement to remove crosses from church buildings in accordance with my declaration is spreading like wildfire in many areas of the world. Thousands of clergy have journeyed to Jerusalem, the epicenter of the strife in the Middle East, to participate in inter-religious and international peace rallies. On December 22, 2003, many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim clergy took each other by the hand, sang the praises of peace, and performed a ceremony to crown Jesus as the King of Kings. It was a miracle performed in Jerusalem's Independence Park before a crowd of some 20,000 people. This was a day when Jesus' grief was resolved and the victory of True Parents could be declared to all of heaven and earth.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the same way that the mission of True Parents, to which my wife and I have been called, is a matter of heavenly destiny, your mission and that of heaven is to join hands with us in building a peaceful Kingdom of Heaven on this earth. Now, Heaven's time has come.
I pray that each of you will return to your communities and become passionate workers as messiahs and true parents yourselves in the effort to bring about world peace. Thank you.