Sun Myung Moon
January 27, 2004
True Parents' Birthday Celebration Banquet for participants of the World Summit on Leadership and Governance
Shilla Hotel in Seoul, Korea
Distinguished leaders from around the world, respected dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen: This banquet was prepared to celebrate my eighty-fourth 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 blessed families in the spirit world and to the participants of the World Summit on Leadership and Governance.
Humanity inherited false love, false life and a false lineage
I understand that you have been engaged in 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 to plant new hopes and dreams in a world that slides deeper into crisis with each day.
I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to each of you again for coming to my homeland, Korea, to join me in beginning the fourth year of Cheon Il Guk, the kingdom of peace and unification. This is a new year of great hope. Throughout my life of more than eighty years, I have maintained a tradition of speaking only Heaven's will. This evening, in keeping with this tradition, I would like to convey to you Heaven's message entitled, "The Messiah and True Parents."
In the beginning, God created human beings as his 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. Then with the True Parent God as their axis, they were to have become the substantial, 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 would have been completed. After living out their lives in this world, registration as citizens of the kingdom of heaven in the spirit world, where they would have lived eternally in freedom, peace and happiness would have been automatic.
Perfected Adam and Eve would have communicated directly with God using their five spiritual senses; at the same time they would have worked freely with the physical creation using their five physical senses. They would have lived as true owners, true parents, and true king and queen representing both the spirit world and the physical world. However, with the Fall, all humanity descended into a hell of hopelessness from which their efforts alone would never free them. Their five spiritual senses became paralyzed. They fell into a state similar to that of a blind person. Their eyes appear to be normal yet do not function at all. Forced to live with just their five physical senses, they were only half human. They could not see God. They could not hear his voice or feel his touch. How could they experience his love as their own parent or understand his suffering heart?
The Messiah is the True Parent of true love, true life and true lineage. Satan forced his way into the parental position that rightfully belonged to God, 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 is false. That exact false love, false life and false lineage first planted in Adam and Eve persist in us today. What great pain God must have felt as he watched human beings, born to be his direct lineal children, receive Satan's false lineage and descend to the position of servant of servants! Because God is a God of principle and law, he would not reject 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 salvation. Different religions refer to this person by different names, such as the Maitreya, the Man of the True Way and the returning Savior. However, the person humankind needs to open the path, and the person sought by God, is one and the same person, the Messiah, who is the True Parent.
Who, then, is the Messiah, and what is he like? He is the owner and substantiation of faith, hope and love, for the individual and also for the family, tribe, society, nation, world and cosmos. The faith and hope that remain on earth will finally bear fruit only in an age when humanity attends this person as the Messiah. This fruit contains the life and breath of human history.
On the same day that Father gave this speech at the World Summit on Leadership and Governance, True Parents public birthday celebration took place at the Jamshil Indoor Stadium in southeastern Seoul. Then President Roh Moo-hyun of Korea sent his congratulations. Then president (and the current president) of Palau, Tommy Remengesau spoke from the stage about True Parents. Here, Father is speaking after receiving a peace award from then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines.
Jesus came as the True Parent
Ladies and gentlemen, Heaven sent Jesus to earth two thousand 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 were unable 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 mistake meant God could not embrace a lineage of three generations, including his grandchildren. So God tearfully made preparations for a period of thousands of years, establishing the nation of Israel as his chosen people. He then sent Jesus, the Savior and Messiah, through the lineage of Abraham. Jesus came as the leader in the struggle to establish, for the first time in history, the sovereignty, land and people of the one nation of God. On that foundation, he could have changed the whole world from Satan's false bloodline to God's true, good bloodline.
Tragically, the people of Israel whom God had chosen did not receive Jesus; as a result, he was put to death unjustly. This prevented the Messiah, Jesus, who could have restored the position of True Parents, produced true children and risen to the position of king of kings, from establishing even the position of a true husband with God's 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 of which the Book of Revelation in the New Testament speaks is none other than the ceremony by which the Messiah receives his bride and forms the union of true husband and wife. If Judaism had received and attended Jesus at that time, realization the world of God's earnest desire, the world of his original ideal of creation, the peaceful kingdom of heaven, would have been on earth at that time through Jesus' descendants.
Receiving the mission of the True Parent
Heaven gave its blessing by sending the Messiah at the Second Coming. He appears on the foundation of the spiritual restoration Jesus carried out throughout the two thousand 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 achieve victory over Satan's realm. He then needs to go on to achieve victory in the spiritual realm as well. He has to fully engage both realms, neither of which can be sensed with the five physical senses, and be victorious in the life-and-death battle to subjugate the devil, Satan. Additionally, he has to win over the religious and philosophical leaders who are in the spirit world. He can accomplish none of this, however, by means of force. Centering on God's character of absolute love, he has to convince them by revealing the universal principles of religion and the universe and in this way bring them to a natural surrender. Rev. Moon, who stands here before you, is the one who has appeared in this world bearing this incredible mission of the True Parent.
Wishing True Parents a happy birthday and presenting a gift is Kim Chung-seok, the mayor of Yeosu, where True Parents hosted many marine activities from their seaside residence, Blue Sea Garden.
The position of True Parents carries with it the vertical missions of Savior, Messiah and returning Lord, opportunities that have never been fulfilled in history and will never visit us again in the future. For this reason, people still affiliated with the fallen realm have to 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 need to cast everything aside and follow the True Parents. They have to follow the True Parents above friends, teachers and even their parents. Only when we have cast aside everything and reached the standard of a total living offering can Heaven bestow blessings and grace upon us. This means that all people need to steadfastly separate from Satan's world, showing not even the slightest attachment, and return to the zero point to mark the dawn of a new creation.
Second, they need to complete a revolution of conscience. This means that they have to maintain a tradition of true love, true life and true lineage in accordance with the predisposition of the original mind and conscience endowed by God. They need to do this without compromising with any worldly sovereignty or philosophy they may encounter. They have to live a life of "high noon settlement," in which they neither cast shadows nor carry a speck of shame in the presence of the spirit world and physical world. We complete the revolution of conscience when we reach a harmonious state of one mind, one body and one thought. Thus, they will establish the realm of pure love and pure lineage as an eternal and unchanging tradition. In it, the age of unity and harmony will blossom.
The third condition is a revolution of heart. This means that all people will establish a world of true love, in which God will want to come to us, consult with us and reside with us. The revolution of heart is a revolution of true love, of living for the sake of others, practicing unchanging, sacrificial love. Think of what it would be like if we each 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? Where the revolution of heart has been completed, there will be no such thing as family breakdown, racial strife, international disputes, friction between religions or any other vestiges of Satan's world.
Indemnity, conscience and heart
Respected guests, in 1996, my wife and I declared an end to the Unification Church and made a new beginning as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification to fulfill the heavenly command to build a world of peace on earth. Heaven's will resides not in the progress of any particular church or religion; it resides in world peace through true families. During the past decades, we have carried out countless inter-religious and international activities. On this foundation, we founded the Inter-religious and International Peace Council, that is, the Peace UN, in New York City on October 3, 2003. This was a substantial beginning toward realizing a world at peace.
A movement to remove crosses from church buildings, in accordance with my declaration, is spreading in many areas of the world. Thousands of clergy members have journeyed to Jerusalem, the epicenter of strife in the Middle East, to participate in inter-religious and international peace rallies. On December 22, 2003, Jewish, Christian and Muslim clergy members took each other by the hand, sang 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 twenty thousand people. This day resolved Jesus' grief and declared True Parents' victory 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 before Heaven is to join hands with us in building a peaceful kingdom of heaven on earth. Heaven's time has now arrived. I pray that you will return to your communities and work passionately as messiahs and true parents yourselves, in the effort to bring about world peace.