Little Angels Performing Arts Center, Seoul, Korea
August 15, 2003 (On the occasion of the signing of the Seoul Declaration)
Respected present and former heads of state, world leaders dedicated to establishing the realm of God's ideal, youth and university student leaders, 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 even to this moment. I state this not simply because, from the individual perspective, it is my homeland, but rather because, from the perspective of God's providence, the Korean peninsula, though small in size, is the central country of the twenty-first century that must bring about human peace.
I will speak today on the topic, "The Owners of Re-creation," to help you understand God's providence and to clarify our mission and responsibility in building a world of peace.
Respected guests, we live in the age of a great providential revolution.
All nations and religions must now 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 not only in the earthly world but also in the world after death, the spirit world, where we all must go and live when we have shed our physical bodies.
The number of new Ambassadors for Peace that I have appointed throughout the world now reaches into the tens of thousands. The newly appointed Ambassadors for Peace sometimes ask, "How should we conduct our lives?"
According to an established formula, they must complete the course that the unification movement has traveled in the course of its history. They should clearly understand 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 their lives. They should have conviction to live in accordance with this awareness and become one with the spirit world. They must develop confidence that this is the context in which they now live.
Over the decades, the contents of my sermons have not changed. When someone lives for the accomplishment of God's will for the new world, these teachings form the basic standard to determine if a person becomes a principal actor in the effort to bring about the ideal Kingdom of Heaven. So we must now live according to this basic rule. If our lives have been based on vague concepts, then we must now lead lives based on awareness of this reality that brings us into oneness with heaven, including both the spirit world and physical world. We should unify 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.
We must 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 nations around the world to transcend their current ways of thinking that have been based on traditional philosophies and concepts. The owner of Cheon Il Guk progresses to a new, higher dimension.
I was twenty-five 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 all, humanity completely lost the world God originally created, and even lost God Himself. So in pursuing the providence of re-creation, I was responsible for bringing about the world God created but lost at the time of the fall. That is, I was responsible to create again the position that Adam would have occupied had he not fallen. Please understand, the God of grief must be liberated 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 "Coronation Ceremony of God's Kingship" and "The Coronation of the King of the Blessed Families for the True Love, Peace, and Unity of the True Parents of Heaven and Earth." Since the fall, God has been unable to involve Himself in the created world, and yet now He can restore all things through indemnity, and can perfect this world through the True Parents.
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. So 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, though He is omniscient and omnipotent, God has worked hard through the long course of history from the position of a God without true sovereignty over the creation. We need to know this mortifying fact.
I hope you each come to realize that your own spiritual development occurs only when God's Kingdom and the realm of daily life expand through the eras of the individual, family, tribe, people, nation, world, and cosmos. In this way, you will become people capable of traveling freely between the heavenly and earthly worlds. You will be able to attend God Himself. 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.
But with that goal in mind, they have worked 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 unified realm of the liberated earthly and heavenly worlds.
You need to know that, if you are unable to complete this mission while on earth, you will find that when you arrive in the world after death, you will need to go through a long training process to overcome challenges, and to restore the limited realm that you left uncompleted.
We must understand that the time we have on earth offers an opportunity more precious than anything else under heaven, for we have the opportunity during our earthly lives to perfect our love. It is urgent that we understand that the work we do now is for the sake of inheriting a path that is more precious than our own nation, more precious than the world we now live in, and more precious than our own love or life. The lives we lead from here on have 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 this were God's responsibility, He would not have allowed Adam and Eve to commit the fall. The staggering fact is that responsibility for the fall lies with the family of Adam. Not a single person has fully understood this point during human history up to this point. The owner of re-creation does not refer to God but to your 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. Then, as now, we need to make a new starting point from this original Adamic position.
Respected guests, do you know the main point of the speech I delivered at the ceremony marking the founding of the "Family Party", an educational movement to promote good governance? It concerned the registration of marriages and births. Here I refer not to the registration of my marriage, but the registration of God's marriage and God's birth. God never had a marriage ceremony. He never had a ceremony marking His marriage. God, as the owner of the creation of the cosmos, was never able to report His birth, or marriage. Why? It was because of the human fall.
Had there been no fall, God's own love would have blossomed at the time of Adam and Eve's blessed marriage. Due to the fall, that dimension of God's love was unfulfilled.
This is the reason that the True Parents must liberate God on the foundation of having offered to God the "Coronation Ceremony of God's Kingship." God originally stood in an autonomous position and could do as He pleased with every object 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 make this universe anew. So if, from this moment, you make determination with a deep conviction to renew your family in accordance with the direction of God's will, then all will go well for you.
Why do we need religion? Please be aware that religion is needed because of the fall. However, religions are being set aside today. Rev. Moon and Mrs. Moon, the True Parents, are remaking with their own hands everything new under heaven. They have even built God's original palace, where He can be completely liberated, 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 should mark this day as a new beginning and become sons and daughters of God with strong conviction to fulfill your responsibilities with confidence.
All that would remain then would be to have a family centered on God. You also should make a determination to stand with the political party that is on heaven's side and set straight the countries that until now have been associated with political parties of Satan's side that have caused heaven to suffer by persecuting religions.
You must become owners who build the original homelands and fatherlands 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 being in the reciprocal realm of true love. 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 was our 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 hell and heaven. But these two realms of good and evil are now like brothers in one family.
Therefore, you need to develop a heart that is able to embrace a family where an older and younger brother are loved equally by their parents, and 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, even tens of thousands of years.
As ancestors to coming generations, you must dedicate all your sincerity and dedication to the task of passing on a lineage of chastity and fidelity, a pure blood, and a pure love. You have a responsibility to your family that you must 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 Rev. Moon who founded the Family Federation was so serious to establish a clear family tradition of purity and fidelity. So, like it or not, you must also do your best and run down 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 the nations can be established based on blessed families, that is, families that have received God's direct blessing. So you need to set everything right and be on full alert. You must become families that produce heavenly princes and princesses who are fully 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 brotherhood, and one realm that is an expansion of the one family that lives in peace on the earth and in heaven forever and ever.
How incredible it is that something such as the Family Party could emerge. Had Jesus completed the providence of restoration through indemnity, then married and formed a family, he could have established at once a foundation of marriage blessings that would have brought the people of Israel into Heaven's realm. He could have gone on to give the blessing in Rome. Then the Kingdom of God on Earth and in Heaven would have been accomplished 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 should 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 need to know that these developments put God in much grief.
Currently in America, there is a movement to remove crosses from churches and this is just starting. Jesus came as the True Parent of humanity, to establish God's blood lineage on earth; but he was killed before he could do this. The value of the True Parent is more than all humankind.
Therefore, this sin cannot be forgiven even if all humankind were destroyed. The suffering of Israel over the past two thousand years, however dreadful and appalling, could not pay the price of forgiveness for the death of Jesus. It could not be forgiven even if the suffering were tens of times greater. There is actually no way for Israel or any nation to pay for the sin of killing the True Parent. Because humanity was still under the burden of the sin of killing the True Parent, God could not intervene even when Hitler committed genocide against the Jewish people. We must all learn a 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 around the world centering on Unification principles. Restoration through indemnity reaches completion through parallel historical periods. This age is parallel to the age of Jesus, although 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 the religions. Also, the meaning of "returning Lord" is that this is the Lord who has come again. This is because the position of the Lord, as True Parent, was not realized 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. Humanity did not understand this historical fact, which is interwoven in the history of the providence.
Now that you know this, you also should be able to climb over this mountain to go before God's holy presence and enter the liberated ideal realm. You need to know that it is still 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 or providential history if you commit an error on the path. It is so difficult. It is not enough even if you burn your five senses, or ten senses (including your spiritual senses), hundreds or thousands of times over. Can God be responsible for this? No, He cannot. As I said earlier, if He could take responsibility, He would never have allowed Adam and Even to commit the fall in the first place.
Who is the owner of re-creation? It is not God. It is you and your families. 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 animal created by God to the heavenly world and the whole universe that is more than a hundred billion times larger than the solar system, everything is arranged in a pair system. This is the orderly existence of all things within God's realm of love.
Satan divided all this by defiling the blood lineage. So the True Parents need to relate to all things again and recreate them. You also are responsible to resolve God's grief by loving the plants, the animals, and the land with God's true love, and to resolve the grief of humanity's failure to become true owners. That is the reason that a new view of life, a new view of the universe, and a new view of the cosmos are 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, no matter what may happen during the course of indemnity. The Family Party was established to educate all people about the purpose of carrying out this task.
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. However, 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 so that your entire being is on fire, you will still feel that you are so inadequate. This is the path that our families must go in order to free ourselves of the mistake of having failed to accomplish our responsibility as princes and princesses seeking after Heaven.
Fallen human beings destroyed the heavenly kingdom, even the heavenly palace. So we should 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 recreate everything, then how can hell exist? The recreated world will be the core of the royal palace of the heavenly kingdom, and God will be able to dwell anywhere on earth in the same way as when He is in His palace.
I have traveled a suffering course in the process of founding and leading the Unification movement, but none of these experiences until now really feel like suffering to me. I can feel this way, because I have arrived at a place in my heart that enables me to profoundly comprehend, through my own experience, God's deep, wide, and exalted blessing, and be grateful for this. Those who have not experienced such a position will not understand.
Even though God is the Creator and is almighty, He feels He has nothing to be proud of when He sees what I have accomplished. By Himself, He could not be liberated from His irreconcilable grief, nor begin the process of truly loving humankind 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 and these things did not come about, humanity was forced to go through a history of grief. Without the registration of God's marriage and God's birth, the nation cannot exist.
The life of the True Parents has also been a course of grief. The historical nature of True Parents' work has divine value. There will be wailing and lamentation day after day when the world comes to fully understand the content of True Parents' lives. People will wail the same way the people of Israel repent in tears at the Wailing Wall. We must 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 registered His marriage, we, as His sons and daughters, can register our births. Because God can go beyond the realm of the three generations of God's Covenant, He is able to return to His original position.
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, then you will unmistakably become members of the royal family.
We have here at the Little Angels Performing Arts Center tonight 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 youth 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 IIFWP 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 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.
