Sun Myung Moon
December 27, 1970
Today, our attitude is the problem. Of course, it is necessary to first desire the coming of the kingdom and wish for the Will to be done. Yet, what is more important is how we ourselves can personally become one with God's will.
If we take this one hour, we see that how we use it to become one with the Will is more important than to desire the Kingdom of God to come. Therefore, we must first create environments as individuals, families, tribes and peoples that will enable us to inherit God's will, whereupon we can then proceed to establish a relationship with God's Kingdom. Then, centered on God, how do we make a relationship with the Will in this one hour -- if you are given an hour -- within the sphere of your daily living? This is a very important issue.
Looking at the history of the providence of restoration, there were four thousand years from Adam's family through Noah's, Abraham's and Moses' families down to Jesus' family. Here, however, what led to their failures did not occur over the span of, say, a year. In Adam's family, the Fall of Adam and Eve was not something planned out and put into action over the span of a year or a decade or even several decades. Their mistake happened in a flash, and when we think about how that failure of one moment has been perpetuated over eons of time, we can understand the fearfulness and dreadfulness of that instant.
Due to the failure of that one moment, so many people who walked the path of righteousness in the course of history had to undergo untold suffering, and many races that could not follow the Will fell into the abyss of destruction. All these became the origin of a tremendous offering of indemnity. When we understand this, a single hour that we ordinarily live so casually in our daily life becomes fearful; but even more, we have to feel how fearful a moment is, even one second of one hour that goes by as the clock steadily ticks. Even the eternal Kingdom of Heaven does not exist without having an integral relationship with the single moment.
Eternity does not start when we die, but at the moment we come to know God's will. Here, if for even an instant there is a leap in the relationship of time or an abyss created, eternity will be interrupted. Therefore, while walking the path of faith in the course of your lives, do not procrastinate by deferring your providential responsibilities from this year to the next, and then to the year after that, or from your youth to your midlife and finally into your old age. We cannot live like that. People with such a lifestyle will die without having ever spent even one day of being one with the Will over the course of their lifetime. They cannot go to the Kingdom of Heaven.
However good your country of residence may be, you cannot go to the Kingdom of Heaven if you were unable to live even one day by a victorious standard; you cannot enter the eternal world if you failed to live even one year victoriously. Hence, while it is important for believers to go forth dreaming of eternity, what is even more important is how they actually eradicate evil and whether they become the standardbearers of goodness. This is preeminently crucial.
From this perspective, Adam's momentary lapse led to eons of anguish. It was in Adam's family that Cain and Abel had to dissolve the anguish of their parents and demolish the wall that existed between the brothers and create the origin of one family. Yet the murder of Abel, who was set up as the representative of the providence of restoration, was also an instantaneous incident.
In the 120-year course during which Noah toiled to build the ark, in only a brief moment God issued the command, "The day to fulfill My wish has come: all aboard!" Those who followed this order were able to receive the blessings of the eternal God; those who did not were buried within the realm of eternal judgment.
It was the same with Abraham: God's promise that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sands on the seashore" (Genesis 22:17) was bestowed in the twinkling of an eye. Abraham's sacrificial offering did not require decades but rather a mere day's work. The time it took him to cut the offering and place it on the altar was not more than an hour, yet that single hour historically bore the seeds of all life and death, curse and blessing.
Today, what believers should dread is not the visitation of judgment in the Last Days but the question of how they will harmonize their daily activities and face life's crossroads in alignment with God's will.