Sun Myung Moon
August 15, 2003
World Peace Summit Conference 2003
Little Angels Performing Arts Center, Seoul, Korea
Photo date and location unknown
Respected present and former heads of state, world leaders dedicated to establishing the realm of God’s ideal, leaders of youth and university students, ladies and gentlemen:
I would like first to give thanks before God, who has left behind the darkness and melancholy of the past century to bless the new millennium with bountiful hope and dreams of peace. I have invited you to hold this conference in the Republic of Korea, the only nation on Earth where the sharp conflict between democracy and communism continues to this moment. I state this not out of an individual’s perspective, not because it is my homeland, but out of the perspective of God’s providence, because the Korean peninsula, though small in size, is the central country to bring about peace in the twenty-first century.
I will speak today on the topic, “The Owners of Re-Creation” in order to help you understand God’s providence and to clarify our mission and responsibility in building a world of peace.
The God of bitter sorrow becomes the God of joy
Respected guests, we live in an age of great providential revolution. All nations and religions now have to transcend past ways of living and understand that, for very practical reasons, it is necessary to live in exact accordance with a new understanding of God’s providence. This applies in the earthly world and also in the world after death, the spirit world, where we will all live after we shed our physical body.
The number of ambassadors for peace that I have appointed throughout the world now has reached the tens of thousands. The newly appointed ambassadors for peace sometimes ask, “How must we conduct our lives?”
I answer that you have to complete the course that the Unification movement has traveled in its history, which proceeds according to an established formula. You need to understand clearly the reality of the spirit world and its direct link to the earthly world. Awareness of this spiritual reality naturally forms the core and guiding content for your life. You must have conviction to live in accordance with this awareness and work in harmony with the spirit world. You have to develop confidence that this is the context in which you are to live.
Throughout the decades, the contents of my sermons have not changed. When someone lives for the accomplishment of God’s Will for the new world, and if they make these teachings their basic standard, that person will be a principal actor in the effort to bring about the ideal kingdom of heaven. We need to live according to a basic rule. We have based our lives on vague concepts; however we must now live based on awareness of reality. This will bring us into oneness with Heaven, including both the spirit world and physical world. We need to unite the spiritual and physical realms within our own lives and expand this to the national realm. This is the only way to bring about the kingdom of God on earth and in heaven.
You need to understand that the position of the owner of Cheon Il Guk, the kingdom of heaven, is someone who establishes a new standard that enables the peoples of the nations around the world to transcend their current ways of thinking, which have been based on traditional philosophies and concepts. The owners of Cheon Il Guk progress to a new and higher dimension.
I was twenty-five years old when I founded the Unification movement, and I hope you understand that I founded this association based on the essential points of God’s Principle. The people who joined this movement at that time lived together with the True Parents and helped usher in a new world. Due to the Fall, human beings completely lost the world God originally created, and even lost God Himself. So in pursuing the providence of re-creation, I was responsible to bring about the world God created, which was lost at the time of the human Fall. That is, I was responsible to re-create the position that Adam would have occupied had he not fallen.
Please understand that we have to liberate the God of grief to become the God of happiness. On the foundation of the Unification Church, I established the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification and, later, offered God the “Enthronement Ceremony for the Kingship of God” and “The Enthronement of the King of Blessed Families for the True Love, Peace, and Unity of the True Parents of Heaven and Earth.”
Our families are the owners of re-creation
Since the Fall, God has been unable to engage the created world, and yet now, through the True Parents, He can restore all things through indemnity and perfect this world. We need to understand that God is neither the owner of re-creation nor the owner who pays indemnity for Adam’s Fall. These are actually Adam’s responsibilities. Everything must be placed in its proper order within the time frame of Adam’s generation; otherwise, there will be no way to allow God to stand in His original position. For this reason, even though He is omniscient and omnipotent, God has worked laboriously through the long course of history from a position without sovereignty over the creation. We need to come to terms with this mortifying fact. I hope you each realize that your own spiritual development occurs only when God’s kingdom in the realm of daily life expands through the eras of the individual, family, tribe, people, nation, world and cosmos. If you do so, you will gain the ability to travel freely between the heavenly and earthly worlds. You will be able to attend God.
The mission of the perfected Adam will not be completed until God’s kingdom, starting with His palace, is created and dedicated to Heaven. The saints and sages now in the heavenly world are not living in glory. Instead, with that goal in mind, they work continuously in order to achieve perfection. We need to understand that they will continue their efforts until they achieve the true love ideal, that is, the united realm of the liberated earthly and heavenly worlds.
You have to know that, if you are unable to complete this mission while on earth, when you arrive in the world after death you will find that you will need to go through a long training process to overcome challenges and complete what you were responsible to do on earth. Please understand that the time we have on earth is an opportunity more precious than anything else under heaven. It is our opportunity to perfect our love. It is urgent that we understand our work now is for the sake of inheriting a path that is more precious than our nation, more precious than the world, and more precious than our own love or life. The life we lead from now on has indescribable value.
It is important to understand that it is not God’s responsibility to bring about God’s liberation. It is our responsibility. If it were God’s responsibility, He would not even have allowed Adam and Eve to commit the Fall. The staggering fact is that responsibility for the Fall lies with the family of Adam. During history before now, not a single person fully understood this point. The owner of re-creation does not refer to God; it refers to our families. This is the reason our families are so important. The foundation of Cheon Il Guk, which is the world of God’s original ideal, is the family.
Please understand that when I founded this movement at the age of twenty-five, I did so with full knowledge of all these facts. As it was then, so it is now. We need to make a new starting point from this original, Adam-like position.
Bequeath the tradition of purity
Respected guests, do you know the main point of the speech I delivered at the ceremony marking the founding of the Family Party? It is an educational movement to promote good governance, and my speech concerned the recording of marriages and births. It begins not with the recording of my marriage, but with the recording of God’s marriage and God’s birth. God, along with Adam, never had a marriage ceremony as the Lord who created the universe. God was never able to record His birth or marriage. Who was responsible for this? It was Adam, who fell.
This is the reason that the True Parents have to liberate God on the foundation of having offered to God the Enthronement Ceremony of the Kingship of God. God originally stood in an autonomous position and could do as He pleased with every object partner in the creation of the heavens and the earth, from the smallest to the largest. However, because of the Fall, He could not make a start as the Owner of Cheon Il Guk. He could not assert Himself freely. We must understand this mortifying fact. Because it was the family of Adam and Eve that ruined the realm of creation and freedom that was originally God’s, the perfected family of Adam and Eve has to remake this universe anew. Therefore, if from this moment you determine with a deep conviction to renew your family in accordance with the direction of God’s will, all will go well for you.
Why do we need religion? Please be aware that religion is needed because of the human Fall. However, people are sending religions to the sidelines today. Rev. Moon and Mrs. Moon, the True Parents, are making everything under heaven new with their own hands. They have even built God’s original palace, where He can be completely liberated, can enter the realm of kingship, and be restored to the rightful realm as the Owner of the heavenly kingdom. If you understand this content, you need to mark this day as a new beginning and become sons and daughters of God with strong conviction and confidence to fulfill your responsibility.
All that would remain then would be to have your family centered on God. You must make a determination also to stand with the political policies on Heaven’s side and set straight the countries that until now have been associated with political policies on Satan’s side and have caused Heaven to suffer by persecuting religions.
You must become owners who build the original homelands and father-lands where you would like to live. You must become people who give true love to all of nature. All things, even plants and animals, must be re-created. Because of the Fall, they lost the reciprocal realm of true love in which to exist. The realm of true love only existed until Adam and Eve reached age sixteen, their age at the time of the Fall. After their Fall, this realm was divided. We must now take responsibility as though it were a mistake committed by our own hands that ruined the entire world. The blessed family that makes the determination to take responsibility to accomplish restoration will be the owner of Cheon Il Guk.
Please realize that all humanity today stands in the position of having been born simultaneously into the realms of heaven and hell. However these two realms of good and evil are now like brothers in a family. Therefore, you need the heart to embrace a family and help the parents equally love the older and younger brothers. You need to feel a love that, based on your own experience, deeply understands and sympathizes with this family’s situation. Otherwise, when you go to spirit world, you will not be able to live in a family qualified for the royal palace. Instead, you will wander continuously around that vicinity for thousands and even tens of thousands of years.
As ancestors of the coming generations, you have to dedicate all your sincerity and effort to the task of passing on a lineage of chastity and fidelity, a pure lineage based on pure love. You have a responsibility to your family that you need to fulfill before you die, even if it means that you offer up your life hundreds or thousands of times before you are able to go over that mountain. You must travel this path with a constant spirit of one heart, one body and one thought.
God has had this level of seriousness, and so Rev. Moon, who founded the Family Federation, has had unsurpassed seriousness to establish a clear family tradition of purity and fidelity. Like it or not, you have to do your best and leap ahead on this path with all your strength in order to achieve the goal. A new age of heavenly understanding is coming. The age has arrived when we can establish nations based on blessed families, that is, families that have received God’s direct Blessing. Therefore, you need to set everything right and be on full alert. Please become families that produce heavenly princes and princesses who are hilly qualified to attend Heaven’s ideal purpose of creation.
Please understand very clearly that the overall purpose is to inherit this foundation of victory, to live in attendance to God, and return to one nation, one culture, one world, one brother and sisterhood, and one realm that is an expansion of the one family that lives in peace on the earth and in heaven forever and ever. It is incredible that something such as the Family Party could emerge.
Jesus and the cross
Had Jesus completed the providence of restoration through indemnity, married and formed a family, he could have established in one fell swoop a foundation of marriage Blessing that would have brought the people of Israel into Heaven’s realm. He could have gone on to give the Blessing in Rome. He could have accomplished the kingdom of God on earth and in heaven by the time he was in his forties. Israel and Palestine are fighting each other today because the mission of Jesus as the True Parent was not accomplished. Brothers fight and are not able to unite, because there are no True Parents. At the time of Jesus, the world would have come to have one religion, one culture, one nation and one realm of heart. When that did not happen, Islam, Judaism and Christianity separated. You must know that these developments brought God into a realm of supreme grief. Currently in America, a movement of pastors removing the cross from their churches is underway. Jesus came as the True Parent of humanity to establish God’s lineage on earth; nonetheless, he was killed on the cross before he could complete this.
The value of the True Parent is greater than that of all humankind. It follows that atonement for this sin would not be made, even by the offering of the entire human race. The suffering of God’s people for the past two thousand years was dreadful and appalling, yet it did not earn forgiveness for the death of Jesus. Even suffering of many times that much would not be enough. There is actually no way for any nation to pay for the sin of killing the True Parent. Because humanity still carried the sin of killing the True Parent, God could not intervene to prevent cruel persecution and genocide. We have to digest this lesson of how valuable True Parents are because we are in a similar period of history today.
We have arrived at a time when Judaism, Islam, and Christianity must overcome their historical divisions and unite throughout the world centering on the Unification Principle. The parallel historical periods of restoration through indemnity are reaching completion. This age is parallel to the age of Jesus, not on the worldwide level, but on the cosmic level. For this reason, the returning Lord must be the Messiah and Savior. The Savior must turn this world into a kingdom of heaven of peace, and in that world there can be no discord among religions.
The word “returning” means that this is the Lord who has come again. This is because the position of the Lord, as True Parent, was not established to the fullest extent when he came the first time. The Lord, having come again, must become the True Parent and bring about the liberated realm in the earthly and heavenly worlds. Human beings did not understand this historical fact, which is interwoven in the history of the providence. Now that you know this, you can climb over this mountain, enter into God’s holy presence and dwell in the liberated, ideal realm.
Our destiny to register our families for the heavenly kingdom
You need to know that it remains your destiny to gain respect and praise from the highest beings of the heavenly kingdom, to register yourselves in Cheon Il Guk, which is the new global nation, and to enter that nation as new citizens. If you die and go to the spirit world without accomplishing this mission, you will be held back.
This is the reason that you need to sincerely dedicate yourselves to accomplishing all your tasks while you are alive. No one can take responsibility for your life in providential history if you commit an error on the path.
It is a great task. Exhausting your five physical senses and five spiritual senses hundreds or thousands of times over is just the beginning. Can God take responsibility for it? No, He cannot. As I said earlier, if He could take responsibility, He would never have allowed Adam and Eve to commit the Fall in the first place.
Who is the owner of re-creation? It is not God. It is you and your family. That is the reason we say in the Family Pledge to God each morning, “As the owner of Cheon Il Guk, our family...” From the minutest organism created by God, to the heavenly world and the whole universe that is more than a hundred billion times larger than the solar system, all things are arranged in a pair system. This is the orderly existence of all things within God’s realm of love. Satan destroyed all this by defiling the blood lineage. So the True Parents need to relate to all things again and re-create them. You also are responsible to resolve God’s grief by loving the plants, animals, seas and lands with God’s true love, and to resolve the grief that accompanies humanity’s inability to become true owners. That is why a new view of life, a new view of the universe, and a new view of the cosmos are to be established.
Originally, there would have been no need for a Family Party. What was needed was a family that lived in attendance to God as the Parent. Because such a family was not established, however, it must be accomplished now, bearing all costs during the course of indemnity. The Family Party was established to educate all people about the purpose of this task and how to carry it out.
True Parents’ life is a course of deep sorrow
You must go forward with the self-realization that yours is a family of princes among princes, princesses among princesses, and filial children, patriots, saints and sons and daughters of God. We are pioneering the path that God would like to travel. We travel in His place, as offerings. Even if you are able to receive God’s love and remain in the realm of His heart for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, you will shed tears of shame when you face the God who has suffered unimaginable grief throughout the ages. Even if you shed your blood and sweat for God to the point that your entire being is on fire, you will still feel that you are inadequate. This is the path that our families must follow in order to free ourselves of the mistake of not accomplishing our responsibility as princes and princesses seeking Heaven.
Fallen human beings destroyed the heavenly kingdom, even the heavenly palace. So we have to determine to recreate everything for God. On that foundation, our families will create filial children, patriots, saints, and sons and daughters of God, to an extent a thousand, or even tens of thousands of times greater than would have been achieved if the Fall had never occurred. If we re-create everything, then how can hell exist? The re-created world will be the core of the royal palace of the heavenly kingdom, and God will be able to dwell anywhere on the earth in the same way that He dwells in His palace.
I have traveled a suffering course in the process of founding and leading the Unification movement, but to this day none of these experiences really feel like suffering to me. I can feel this way because I have arrived at a place in my heart that profoundly comprehends, through my own experience, God’s deep, wide and exalted blessing. With that, I am grateful for everything. Those who have not had experiences in this position will not understand. God Himself doesn’t stand up displaying pride in front of me, for He has not been in the position to love me as His son who is liberating Him.
By Himself, God could not be liberated from His inconsolable grief, nor begin the process of truly loving human beings as His children. God’s position needs to be recovered. That is, He needs to regain the position of True Parent so He can give and receive love with His children. Because the children committed the Fall, the giving and receiving of love did not come about. Human beings were forced to go through a history of grief. The marriage and even the birth of God could not be recorded, because His nation did not exist.
The life of the True Parents has also been a course of grief. The historic work of True Parents has divine value. There will be wailing and lamentation day after day when the world comes to hilly understand the content of True Parents’ lives. People will weep the same way the people of Israel repent in tears at the Wailing Wall. We have to go this way to establish the realm of liberation from grief. We finally have entered an age when God can liberate all of heaven and earth through His marriage. Because God has recorded His marriage, we, as His sons and daughters, can record our births. Because God has fulfilled the covenant of three generations, He is able to return to His original position.
Citizens of Cheon Il Guk are the royalty of Heaven
On the basis of the realm of the victory of the True Parents, who are the Parents of Heaven and Earth, you can now completely inherit the authority to register marriages and births. I hope that you will have faith that when you make your determination to live in this way, and become citizens of Cheon Il Guk, living with one heart, one body, one thought, and one harmony, you will absolutely become members of the royal family.
Here at the Little Angels Performing Arts Center tonight we have leaders who signed the Jerusalem Declaration, the Washington Declaration, and, now, the Seoul Peace Declaration, representing the unity of the eras of the First, Second and Third Israel. Participants in the Seoul Peace Declaration include young leaders of the second generation, who participated in the International Youth Leaders Conference held at Sun Moon University, and world leaders who have attended the International and Inter-religious Federation for World Peace Summit of World Leaders. I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to all of you.
You are leaders of the first and second generations who can inherit the realm of Heaven’s chosen people. I earnestly ask that you remember that you stand here today at the site of the Seoul Declaration. You are here to become one with each other in mind and body, and answer the historic call to renew the United Nations and so recreate a new United Nations that expresses God’s original ideal.
I offer gratitude to God for all these things, and pray that God’s abundant blessings will be with each of you, your families, and your countries.
Thank you.