Sun Myung Moon
August 20, 1985
Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC, USA
God and Freedom Banquet on the day of True Father’s release from prison in Danbury
Photo date and location unknown
Honorable chairman, members of the God and Freedom Committee, distinguished clergy from all parts of the country, ladies and gentlemen: I am truly grateful for and humbled by the profound way in which you, representing all areas of the United States and so many denominations, are welcoming me back from prison. I would like to extend my sincere appreciation also to those of you who have supported me during my court battles, in the filing of amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, in the meetings and rallies for religious freedom, in prayer meetings, in the Common Suffering Fellowship and in the CAUSA Ministerial Alliance. Also, I thank you for your prayers and for the many letters you sent me while I was in Danbury, which I will never forget.
God’s Will and the perfection of human beings
I have suffered imprisonment six times in my life. As in the past, I had moving experiences with God during this time in prison. I was not there because of my personal actions or mistakes, yet I did not brood with resentment or hatred for those who persecuted me, nor did I spend my time in prison pleading my innocence. Rather, I dedicated my time in prison to prayer and meditation to understand what America needs to do to fulfill God’s Will for the world.
My entire life and ministry have been motivated by my determination to relieve the great and long suffering of God. Since the world is ignorant of God’s heart of suffering, my work and the work of the Unification movement have long been misunderstood and we have been persecuted. However, I understand the urgency of my mission before God and, despite the lack of understanding on the part of my family, not to mention the general public, Christian churches, nations, or even the whole world, this persecution has not really mattered very much to me. Throughout my life, I have communicated deeply with God, and through numerous spiritual experiences I have come to know His heart and His love. I have always testified to this. To me, God is not a vague concept residing in the realm of imagination. God is alive, and I relate to Him directly in my heart. I experience Him in every cell of my body.
I know that I am addressing clergy who also have been participants in the fulfillment of God’s Will. Your welcoming me here today, as you and I know, is not a personal welcome for the individual, Reverend Moon; it is a testament to that Will of God for which I have lived my life. Our common and utmost concern is to do the Will of God. Therefore, I would like to share with you some of my insights about God’s Will.
Our living, personal God is eternal, absolute and unchanging. Therefore, His Will is also eternal, absolute and unchanging. When God created human beings, He must have had a purpose and an ideal. God’s purpose and ideal are to establish a world united through true love, with God as the Parent of all people. Under the true love of God, all people would be brothers and sisters living in one harmonious, worldwide family. God’s ideal, then, is the creation of one world under God.
God, who is the essence of love, fashioned all of creation for the purpose of love. An isolated individual cannot express love; it takes both a subject partner and an object partner to express love. Therefore, God absolutely needs an object partner whom He can love. God created the universe motivated by love. Especially human beings, who are created in His own image, as we read in Genesis 1:27, are the visible and substantial object partners of God’s love.
God is the eternal, invisible and internal Parent and ancestor of all humankind. Once Adam and Eve had perfected their character, they were to be the eternal, visible and external parents and ancestors of all humankind.
The greatest, holiest love takes place when subject and object partners unite through giving and receiving love, maintaining God at their center eternally. In this realm of true love, perfect unity comes about naturally, all life interconnects, and God’s ideal is realized. God’s original Will was that His beloved children, Adam and Eve, would become the living, visible reflections of their invisible Creator, and thus would share eternal love, consummating the ideal of love and life.
It is commonly thought that the Creator and the created being can never be equal. If that were the case, then God would never be able to fulfill the ideal of love. God’s ideal of love was for His children, Adam and Eve, to become His visible, substantial object partners who would become one with Him. Indeed, as is stated in 1 Corinthians 3:16, God desires to dwell in us.
The ideal of love of the invisible God is realized when the essential natures of men and women become perfected. When a person places God in the central position and achieves complete unity between mind and body, then he or she attains maturity of character and becomes a true object partner of God. This means that he or she becomes an eternal object partner of God’s love, life and ideal.
If Adam and Eve had attained this ideal as God’s true, substantial children, they would have naturally created an ideal family, and from that family an ideal society, nation and world would have eventually developed. As a result of humankind’s complete response to God’s absolute love, everyone would have attained the highest joy in life, the ideal of happiness, and eventually the kingdom of heaven. God created Adam and Eve on earth so that the kingdom of heaven would be realized first on earth. After living on earth, the spirits of those who led ideal lives in this world would go to the kingdom of heaven in the spirit world, where they would live eternally.
All things are created in pairs and exist for the sake of relationships with human beings. This enables all things to dwell in harmony under the principle of love. With God’s love flowing through human beings, all of creation participates in fulfilling God’s life and ideal.
When Adam and Eve were growing up, all things of creation essentially formed a textbook of love for them, displaying an endless variety of manifestations of love. Adam and Eve, representing God’s masculinity and femininity, were to gradually awaken to love through their life within God’s textbook of love, which is nature. They were to become perfectly mature and realize the ideal of marriage. That was God’s ultimate purpose of creation. God directed His love toward the vertical relationship between Himself and human beings and, after the perfection of vertical love, also toward the horizontal relationship between Adam and Eve. God, who has existed as the invisible subject partner ever since the beginning, was yearning for someone who would respond to His love. He was waiting to meet His perfected visible object partners, man and woman. How stimulating and fulfilling that love would have been!
That moment was the very moment when God, the internal Parent, was to have resided within Adam and Eve, the external parents, to be completely one with them. In that moment, the ideal of love would have been accomplished. The invisible Parent, God, would have resided in the visible parents, Adam and Eve, and would have become the eternal Parent in the visible world. In this manner, Adam and Eve were to have become the True Parents, the true original ancestors of all humankind.
The history of salvation is the history of engrafting onto God’s lineage
So precious was this true love that to violate such love was the ultimate crime, a crime of universal magnitude. Immorality, juvenile delinquency, the breakup of families, incest, homosexuality, and crimes inexpressible in words, are the world’s reality today. God agonizes over this. The ideal of creation is to achieve a perfect family, founded on noble and eternal love, so how did today’s tragic reality come about? As the Last Days draw near, the crime of the Fall is manifested clearly in society. We are reaping what was sown.
I do not have time to discuss the details of the Fall, but I will say that I struggled for years to discover the truth of the Fall, and I testify that its cause was immoral relationships involving the first human family and an archangel.
In the Unification Principle, Satan is not a conceptual being or hypothetical entity. He is a real being, the very villain who destroyed the ideal of love and shifted the human lineage from God’s dominion to his own dominion. Jesus himself said very clearly, as recorded in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, that the devil is the ancestor of humankind. The devil, Satan, is the very adulterer who ravaged the ideal of love that God intended to realize through Adam and Eve, the love that would have raised Adam and Eve to the position of God’s own external self.
This understanding may be new to many of you, yet it is the truth. I discovered it by enduring through hard-fought struggles in the spirit world, as I sought for answers to the fundamental problems of life. If you pray seriously and deeply, you will receive confirmation of the truth of these answers.
Then why has it taken so long for God to punish Satan for his crime? Satan stole the ideal of love from God and controls humankind as a false parent through false love, usurping God’s position. Therefore, God had to begin by reclaiming human beings from Satan’s dominion by changing their lineage.
Because of the Fall, the relationship between God and us was severed. Consequently, the righteous relationships between people, through give-and-receive interactions centered on true love, was also lost. Harmonious unity among people, based on true love, and the joy of life were destroyed, and people became enemies of one another. The world became hell, filled with mistrust.
In the process of creation, God’s plan was to create men and women as true olive trees and make the earth a garden of plenty. Instead, the Fall allowed Satan to have dominion over the human ancestral lineage, creating a wilderness of wild olive trees. God wants to cut the wild olive trees and engraft them into the true olive tree, which is Christ. However, God cannot cut and engraft those wild olive trees, which Satan possesses, without some foundation being made. The very reason God established religion was to create His own garden in which He could cut the wild olive trees and engraft them into the true olive tree. On the foundation of religion, God would send the Messiah and engraft humankind into His lineage through the Messiah, the true olive tree. This is the essence of the messianic ideal.
From this viewpoint alone can we correctly understand the biblical doctrine of rebirth. God pulls people away from the false dominion of Satan, giving them rebirth through a love that is much stronger than Satan’s love. Since all people are born from parents and ancestors of false love into a lineage of false love, all people have to be born a second time, this time from Parents and Ancestors of true love into a lineage of true love, becoming true children and people of God. The blood of Jesus and the Holy Communion both relate to the process of the change of human beings from Satan’s lineage to God’s lineage.
All people have to be born again. This is the destiny of all fallen people. No matter how difficult it may be, all of us have to tread this path. Salvation cannot be obtained except through rebirth, being taken out of Satan’s lineage and grafted into God’s lineage. Since we are born into Satan’s lineage, the process of rebirth requires total self-denial, including willingness to deny our possessions, our own tradition or culture, and even our concepts about the world. God cannot recognize our possessions in Satan’s realm. We have to renounce them to be born again. To engraft ourselves to the true tree, we need to sever ourselves from everything else.
Jesus, who came as the true olive tree, is himself the True Parent. Since he came as the True Parent to give us rebirth, he told us to sever all our old relationships and attachments before coming to God. In Matthew 10:36-37 Jesus warned that a person’s enemies will be members of his or her own family, and that a person needs to love him more than loving his or her own parents and family. We can understand this in light of the fact that the family represents the false lineage.
Christians are privileged to live and die for God and the Messiah
My dear clergy, our task is to learn about God’s Will and to carry it out. We have to become men and women who are living in God’s hands. We need to become those who are willing to respond to God’s call. We must never ask God only for our individual salvation or personal heaven. As true Christians, is it not our privilege to respond to the Messiah’s call and to live and die for him and his cause?
Our religion and our denominations have to exist for the Will of the almighty God, not just for the propagation of narrow views. God cannot reside within narrow views. God is nonsectarian and looks far beyond denominationalism. He is not confined within exclusivist dogmas. He is, rather, a Parent of us all, and His boundless love makes no distinctions between races or colors of skin. He does not recognize the walls of nationalism or cultural exclusivism. He is trying His very hardest today to embrace all of humanity.
My dear clergy, do you think it is mere coincidence that in America, the haven of religious freedom, a nationwide movement for religious freedom flared up as a result of Reverend Moon’s imprisonment? Truly, this is not an accident. This is God’s dispensation working behind the scenes. And would you consider it a coincidence that America, as a nation that carries the banner for the free world, and which has come to scoff at the real threat of communism, is now becoming aware of the seriousness of the present danger through the CAUSA Ministerial Alliance? CMA is a truly interdenominational movement, without walls, which has spread like wildfire across this nation. Can we call it a mere accident?
America is a nation founded on the spirit and love of God. Especially after World War II, God raised up America as a leader of nations for the salvation and unity of the world, based on the love of freedom. Internally, He was preparing this nation for the Second Coming of the Messiah, and to be the country that cares for the world.
Unfortunately, this country continues to ignore the monumental Will of God. America is withdrawing more and more from its global responsibilities, preferring to enjoy false comforts as if this nation were a world unto itself. This attitude, of course, merely multiplies America’s problems, both inside and outside its borders. Serious racial problems; deterioration of social, ethical and moral values; decline of religious life and Christian faith; and the rise of materialism and communism will not disappear just by ignoring them.
God called me to come to America because of these problems. Christianity needs to repent with great anguish and unite. We clergy have to reexamine ourselves and repent as well. We are recapitulating the time when Jesus came to earth and called the world to repentance. That call is being repeated now. We have to fulfill the worldwide mission that God has bestowed upon us. Without question, America has to change. A new religious reformation has to take place. Christianity needs to transcend denominationalism and ascend to a higher dimension. We need to realize and consider seriously the mission of Christianity to lead a supra-denominational cultural revolution on a worldwide scale.
To commemorate this reunion tonight, we need to make the determination to pursue the original path of Christianity. We have to march forward on that path, that we might receive our coming Messiah and help fulfill the Will of God.
May God's abundant blessing be with you, with your families and with all the churches of America