223. God's Ideal Family and the Kingdom of the Peaceful Ideal World, Part I

Book 2: A Model for the Family Ideal and World Peace
Part 2: The Path to Exemplary Families and Global Harmony
Chapter 8: God's Ideal Family and the Kingdom of the Peaceful Ideal World, Part I

This speech was given by Reverend Sun Myung Moon at the founding rally of Universal Peace Federation on September 12, 2005, and then by Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon between October 3 and October 14, 2005 during a speaking tour in Japan to mark the launch of the Universal Peace Federation.

Good evening. I address you as leaders from around the globe who do not hesitate to make extraordinary efforts for the realization of world peace. I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your presence here tonight in spite of your very busy schedules.

Ladies and gentlemen, as we begin the twenty-first century, we find ourselves at a truly historic turning point. We are at a point of decision. Can everlasting world peace take root, or are we doomed to repeat the twentieth century's dark and oppressive history of war and conflict?

The twentieth century was a period of ceaseless struggle, including wars for colonial dominion, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Living through this era, my husband and I have dedicated our lives entirely to the accomplishment of God's ideal of peace. We have always prayed sincerely that the United Nations, founded after the Second World War, would be an institution of peace, and that it would uphold God's Will for the realization of eternal world peace.

The United Nations has made important contributions for peace. Nevertheless, at its sixtieth anniversary there is a broad consensus, both inside and outside the organization, that the UN has yet to discover the way to fulfill its founding purposes.

The number of member states is nearly 200, and the offices of these states do little more than represent and even insist on their own interests. They seem inherently unable to resolve conflicts and achieve peace.

For these reasons, I declare today before all humanity the founding of a new international organization, the Universal Peace Federation. Its mission is to renew the existing United Nations and provide a new level of leadership as an Abel-type UN—that is, an organization whose efforts for peace are offered to Heaven, that can invest itself ceaselessly in serving for the sake of others. To commemorate this day in its fullness, I am declaring a message from God to all people living in this age. It is entitled “God's Ideal Family and the Kingdom of the Peaceful Ideal World.”

Respected world leaders, what do you think God's ultimate purpose is for creating human beings? Simply put, it is to experience joy through relating with ideal families filled with true love. What does an ideal family look like? First, each person in the family is an owner of true love. When God first created human beings, He made Adam representing all men, and Eve representing all women, with the intention that they become owners of true love. The quickest way for them to cultivate a character of true love was to secure a parent-child relationship with God, whereby they could live in attendance to God as their Parent. They were to have followed the path of living as one family with God. 

I invite you to enter into a mystical state and prayerfully ask God, "What is the center of the universe?" I am sure that the answer you hear will be “The parent-child relationship.” Nothing is more important or more precious than the relationship between parent and child. This is because it defines the fundamental relationship between God, the Creator, and human beings.

Then, what defines the parent-child relationship? Three things define this relationship: love, life and lineage. Without our parents' love as a precondition, none of us would be alive today. God created us out of absolute love, to be partners with Him in love. This relationship forms an axis of love, linking God the Parent with human beings as sons and daughters.

Is there anything higher or more precious than to be a son or daughter of God? If anything were higher, then surely human desire would aspire to attain it. There is nothing higher. Do you think that when the omniscient and almighty God created Adam and Eve, He secretly reserved the highest position for Himself and made Adam and Eve to be only second best? We cannot imagine that God would do that to His children, partners who were created to share absolute love with Him. As our eternal True Parent, God invested 100 percent into our creation and endowed us with the right to have equal status with Him, to participate in His work as equals, to live with and to inherit from Him. God bestowed upon human beings all of His own attributes.

Though God is the Absolute Being, He cannot be happy alone. Adjectives such as "good" and "happy" cannot apply to any being that lives  in  isolation. They apply only where there is a robust reciprocal relationship. Imagine a professional singer who finds herself exiled to an uninhabited island. She may sing at the top of her voice, yet with no one to listen, will it bring her happiness? In the same way, even the self-existent God absolutely needs a reciprocal partner of love in order to experience joy and be happy.

Then how shall we live to become God's reciprocal partner and return joy to Him? In other words, how shall we live to become children of God, people whom God delights to call "My son” or "My daughter,” people who embody a divinity equal to His own? How can we become God's partners in completing the work of creation, partners who will inherit the entire creation? I answer: We must emulate the ideal beginning point of God's creative process. In the beginning of creation, God set up the principle of living for the sake of others. He set the practice of true love as the nucleus, and from that point He began to create.

Therefore, to become God's children, our first responsibility is to resemble God. We need to embody true love. The way to embody true love begins by living as a filial child, then a patriot, a saint, and finally a divine son or daughter of God. At that stage we can experience the innermost emotions of God's heart and resolve the grief that He has experienced for tens of thousands of years ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve. God is almighty. It is not due to His shortcoming or lack of ability that He has been imprisoned in great pain and has endured immense suffering behind the scenes of history.

This tragedy was the result of provisions in the Principle of Restoration, which God was not free to disclose, that required Him to wait with forbearance until Adam and Eve's positions, lost at the Fall, could be restored thanks to the appearance of the perfected second Adam. Although God is all-powerful, He will not set aside the eternal laws and principles that He established.

Do you know what has pained God's heart, causing Him the greatest grief over the long history since the Fall of Adam and Eve? God lost His lineage. And with the loss of His lineage, God lost His right of ownership. Let me talk about lineage for a moment. Lineage is more important than life and more important than love. Life and love come together to create lineage. Lineage cannot be established if either life or love is missing. Therefore, among the three qualities that define the parent-child relationship—love, life and lineage—lineage is the fruit.

The seed of true love is embedded in God's lineage. God's lineage provides the context and environment for a true life. Hence, for us to become the ideal people envisioned by God, people of ideal character who can create ideal families, we first need to be linked to His lineage. To take it a step further, only when we are linked to God's lineage is it possible to create God's homeland, the ideal nation. Only when we are linked to God's lineage is it possible to establish world peace. Please inscribe the importance of lineage in your hearts. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Without lineage, neither life nor love can endure. You strive to set a good tradition, yet it will endure only through your lineage. Lineage is the bridge allowing the parents' spirit to carry on through subsequent generations. In other words, lineage is the first and final condition necessary for parents to harvest the fruits of their love, the fruits of their life and the fruits of their joy. We need to know this with certainty. 

Yet, when Adam and Eve fell, this lineage, more precious than life, was lost. The fruits of true life and true love never matured. They became the fruits of Satan, lacking any relationship with Heaven. From them descended the six billion people now inhabiting the earth. God intended for the seeds He planted to grow into a bountiful crop to be harvested in the autumn in the garden of Eden. The ideal of God's creation was that He would raise Adam and Eve, His son and daughter, to the point where they would blossom in true love, give bloom to true life, and bear fruit in a true lineage. God's desire was to harvest owners, families and nations of eternal life, eternal love and eternal lineage.

False love, false life and false lineage infested the earth. God's love, life and lineage fell into the hands of the adulterer Satan, the enemy of love. Heaven and earth were suffocated and transformed into hell. The world became a wretched place, far from God's presence. Yet humanity to this day lives in ignorance of this. People are deluded into believing that the lineage of the enemy is the lifeline upon which the world depends. This is the wretched truth about humanity descended from the Fall. That is why we refer to this world as hell on earth. God sees humanity's tragic situation with a heart full of pain.

After creating Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, God intended to bless them in marriage and bequeath to them Heaven's right of ownership. God wanted Adam and Eve to inherit from Him the ownership of the entire universe. Because of the Fall, however, all this fell under Satan's control. God is like a father who worked and sweated his entire life to accumulate assets for his children, only to have a thief steal everything in one night.

Who can comprehend the sorrowful, painful heart of God? God lost His lineage, lost His children, and was forced to hand over ownership of the nations and the world to Satan. There was only one way to recover this lineage and ownership.

This was the path to win the natural subjugation of Satan, which means to have Satan surrender voluntarily. What is the secret to accomplishing this? This can happen only by the power of true love, by loving our enemies more than we love our own children.

Was there ever a time when God, as our True Father and True Mother, could rejoice with human beings, enjoying the natural bonds of parent and child? Has God enjoyed even a year of comfort with His children, knowing that what He created was good? The answer is no. God has not enjoyed this even for one hour. And has anyone been able to comfort God in this pain? Again, no, because no one knew the reason for this unbridgeable gap between God and humankind. No one has known why God and humanity are in such a tragic circumstance.

The biblical account of Cain and Abel reveals the beginnings of human conflict right in Adam's family. It provides the archetype for humankind's unending history of struggle, war and conflict. We are conflicted on many levels, beginning with the war between body and mind within each individual, extending to wars between nations, and culminating in the global conflict between materialism and theism. Extreme selfish individualism threatens our prosperity even today. We deem young people to be the hope of humanity, holding the promise of the future, yet drugs and free sex enslave them. Advanced countries seem to believe that material goods are all that matter. They recognize only their own interests while ignoring the misery of tens of thousands who die of starvation every day.

Who can untie this ancient knot of Cain and Abel? It has been tightened for thousands of years and grows ever more tangled. Do you think the United Nations can do it? The UN at its founding proclaimed a movement for world peace, and for sixty years it has dedicated itself to this task; yet world peace still remains far distant. Peace among nations can never come when those entrusted with the task have not resolved the Cain-Abel relationship between their own mind and body. Therefore, the time has come to launch an Abel-type UN that will set its course according to God's Will.

God eagerly anticipated that someone would come to resolve these tragedies, yet no such person appeared on Earth. God waited and waited, looking for anyone who would take on the role of the True Parent. If someone had come forward, I am certain that God would have appeared in his dreams, carried the sun and moon to him, and showered forth lightning of joy and thunder of ecstasy from the heavens.

In this sense, it is a miracle of miracles that for the first time in history a man has succeeded in establishing the position of Adam, securing the position of the owner of true love, and received God's anointing as the True Parent of humanity. It is an amazing fact that his lifetime coincides with yours, and that you and he breathe the same air. My husband gained victory in the position of the horizontal True Parent, who comes to rescue fallen humanity. On that foundation, on January 13, 2001, we dedicated to Heaven the Enthronement Ceremony for the Kingship of God. Through that ceremony we liberated and released God, the vertical True Parent who has taken responsibility for the providence of restoration. In all of history, this was the highest and greatest blessing humanity has ever received. This victory was absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. Through this absolute providential victory, God's body and mind are completely liberated!

Respected leaders! Our bondage to the lineage of Satan has caused much suffering throughout history. Let us now boldly step forth to sever it and be grafted onto the root of the lineage of the True Parents. Why would we foolishly continue to live and die as wild olive trees? A wild olive tree, even if it lives a thousand years, will only continue producing the seeds of more wild olive trees. Where can we find the path to escape this vicious cycle? It is through the marriage Blessing.

The marriage Blessing offers the grace of being grafted onto the true olive tree. It was inaugurated through the True Parents, who bring God's true lineage to humankind. Once you change your lineage to God's lineage, your offspring will belong to God's lineage naturally. The grace of the marriage Blessing includes three stages: resurrection, rebirth and eternal life. Once you receive the True Parents' marriage Blessing, you can give birth to pure, sinless offspring and build an ideal family.

The best way to receive the marriage Blessing is with someone from another race, nationality or religion, to join in a cross-cultural marriage Blessing. This contributes to the enormous task of transcending the barriers of race, culture, ethnicity and religion and creating one family of humankind. In God's sight, skin color makes no difference. God does not stand behind the barriers of religion and culture. They are nothing more than the devil's tricks. The devil has used them to rule over humanity as a false parent for tens of thousands of years.

Imagine two enemy families who have cursed each other throughout their lives, people who would never dream of living together. What would happen if these families joined together through a cross-cultural marriage Blessing? Would the parents of two such families curse their son and daughter who became husband and wife, who loved each other and built a happy home? If their son were to love this beautiful daughter of a hated enemy, and she were to become their daughter-in-law and give birth to Heaven's grandchildren as pure and clear as crystal, the grandparents would smile with pleasure. In time the lineages once soaked with enmity would be transformed.

What method other than the cross-cultural Marriage Blessing will empower whites and blacks, Jews and Muslims, Asians and Westerners, and people of all races to live as one human family? The ideal family is the model for living together in peace. The ideal family is the nest where we live and learn to become one. There we have the foundation of love and respect between parents and children, shared trust and love between husband and wife, and mutual support among siblings. For this fundamental reason, you need to receive the marriage Blessing from the True Parents and establish Heaven's tradition of ideal families.

Let me reiterate: To resemble God, the original Being of true love, we need to become the owners of true love. We must embody true love and practice it in order to develop our character. This is the way each of us can become true parents.

Then, what is a life of true love? True love is the spirit of public service. It brings the peace that is at the root of happiness. Selfish love is a mask for the desire to have one's partner exist for one's own sake; true love is free of that corruption. Rather, its essence is to give and to live for the sake of others and for the sake of the whole. True love gives, forgets that it has given, and continues to give without ceasing. True love gives joyfully. We find it in the joyful and loving heart of a mother who cradles her baby in her arms and nurses it at her breast. True love is sacrificial love, as with a filial son who gains his greatest satisfaction in helping his parents. God created the universe out of just such love—absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal—investing everything without any expectation or condition of receiving anything in return.

True love is the wellspring of the universe. Once a person possesses it, true love makes him or her the center and the owner of the universe. True love is the root of God and a symbol of God's Will and power. When we are bound together in true love, we can be together forever, continually increasing in the joy of each other's company. The attraction of true love brings all things in the universe to our feet; even God will come to dwell with us. Nothing can compare to the value of true love. It has the power to dissipate the barriers that fallen human beings have created, including national boundaries and the barriers of race and even religion.

The main attributes of true love are that it is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. Whoever practices God's true love will live with God, share His happiness and enjoy the right to participate as an equal in His work. Therefore, a life lived for the sake of others, a life of true love, is the absolute prerequisite for entering the kingdom of heaven.

Respected leaders, you are now living in an age of blessing. God's promises are coming to fruition. The kingdom of heaven on earth, the kingdom of peace that is God's ideal of creation, is being established before your eyes. My husband’s life of more than eighty years, this lonely path trod solely for Heaven and stained with blood, sweat and tears, is now bearing victorious fruit for the sake of the world's six billion people. From the spirit world, the founders of the world's religions, along with tens of thousands of saints and your own good ancestors, are watching your every move. Whoever strays from the heavenly path will reap the consequences. 

In more than 180 countries, Ambassadors for Peace who have inherited Heaven's Will and tradition are making serious effort, day and night, to proclaim the values of true love and true family. They are moving forward with full force to establish peace on this earth. In the Middle East, one of the world's tinderboxes, Jews, Christians and Muslims have found the resources in my philosophy of peace to engage in a new dimension of dialogue. In past decades, Unification Thought played a decisive role in ending the Cold War. Now my husband is successfully leading vital efforts to bring about the reunification of my homeland of Korea.

However, he is not yet satisfied, because he began his life's work at the command of Heaven. He has come as the True Parent of humankind with God's anointing, and he is determined to keep his promise to God. He is determined to obliterate all national divisions and barriers that have poisoned this earth and to establish the world of peace, where all people everywhere can live hand in hand. 

Respected Ambassadors for Peace: I believe you have learned many things through the message from God that I am conveying to you today. As humanity continues to drift aimlessly, your help is needed more than ever before, as people who represent Heaven. Please take this opportunity to make a new determination to be Heaven's envoys, prepared to uphold Heaven's command. With this in mind, I would like to summarize the message I have given today so that we can all take the mission given to us by Heaven and inscribe it deep within our hearts. What did I say was lost by the Fall of Adam and Eve, who were created as God's children?

First, the realm of the lineage given to us by God was lost. Lineage is the most special among all special rights that parents pass on to their children. Through the Fall, Adam and Eve received the false lineage of Satan and descended to become Satan's children. We have to understand with certainty that all human beings today without exception, regardless of who they may be, are the descendants of the Fall who have inherited the lineage of Satan. When God created Adam and Eve, He invested His entire being 100 percent and created them on the standard of absolute love, absolute faith and absolute obedience. God gave them His lineage as the seed for their love and life.

So from this moment, you are in a different position. The path has been opened wide for you to change your lineage through the Holy Wine Ceremony handed down by the True Parents and rededicate your marriage so that you may establish true families.

The second loss at the time of the Fall was the realm of siblings when, in the family of Adam, the older brother, Cain, killed his younger brother, Abel. God's original structure and blessing were that siblings in a family would lead a life of love and harmony; yet sibling relationships were degraded to become enemy relationships of envy and resentment.

This is the reason humanity needs to completely restore this divisive lineage through the worldwide cross-cultural marriage Blessings led by Reverend Moon. Only when the younger brother, who is favored by Heaven, can establish a relationship as a loving subject partner to his elder brother, can the original family structure envisioned by God be restored.

Ladies and gentlemen, because my husband has spent his life exposing these evil secrets of Satan, it was inevitable that he would face intense persecution and suffering which words cannot describe. Now, however, he has been victorious over all obstacles and has declared the Age after the Coming of Heaven, when the power of Heaven becomes manifest. On this foundation we are building a representative Abel realm on the world level that brings together religions and nations representing 70 percent of the current world population. To create a representative Cain realm on the world level, we are bringing together those with the Mongolian birthmark, which includes some 74 percent of the world's population.

Now these two, the worldwide Abel realm and the worldwide Cain realm, must become as one body, with the Universal Peace Federation in the position of the Abel UN. To establish a world of peace the conflicts and barriers on every level must be dispelled; we are to reach a level that transcends religion and nations. I would like to remind you that this is how all humankind will be able to enter the world of the original ideal of creation. It is humanity's destiny to fulfill our responsibility to establish the original right of ownership that was lost by the Fall of Adam and Eve.

Please remember that now is the time when the Abel realm, which is on the side of Heaven, must embrace the Cain realm on a cosmic level. Then we can make a new beginning toward establishing the new heaven and new earth, the kingdom of God on earth and in heaven, with Heaven's complete authority.

Leaders from around the world, let me take the opportunity provided by today's distinguished forum to reiterate the proposal my husband and I have made for a truly providential and revolutionary project. For the sake of peace and human welfare, and to build God's homeland and original hometown, we propose that we build a passage for transit across the Bering Strait, which is the last remnant of Satan's historical division between East and West, North and South, and where the North American and Eurasian landmasses are separated.

This passage, which we call the World Peace King Bridge and Tunnel, will link an international highway system that will allow people to travel on land from Africa's Cape of Good Hope to Santiago, Chile, and from London to New York, across the Bering Strait, connecting the world as a single community.

God is warning that separation and division will be tolerated no longer. Carrying out this project will bind the world together as one village. It will tear down the manmade walls of race, culture, religion and country and will help to establish the world of peace that has been God's cherished desire.

The United States and Russia can become as one. The European continent, China, India, Japan, Brazil and all nations, along with all the world's religions, can combine their energies to succeed in this project. The success of this project will be decisive in establishing a peace kingdom where people no longer will make war with each other. 

Ladies and gentlemen, some may doubt that such a project can be completed. However, where there is a will, there is always a way, especially if it is the Will of God. The science and technology of the twenty-first century render it possible to construct a tunnel under the Bering Strait. The construction costs are also not a problem. Think of how much money the world is wasting on war. Humanity needs to realize that we are committing fearful sins in the presence of history and our descendants. Let us take one example. How much money has the United States spent on the war in Iraq during the past three years? It is approaching $200 billion. That budget would be more than enough to complete the Bering Strait project.

War is a most primitive and destructive means of resolving conflict; it will never lead to lasting peace. Now is the time, as the prophet Isaiah taught, to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Humankind must end the perverse cycle of sacrificing our children's lives and squandering astronomical sums of money to fight wars. The time has come for the countries of the world to pool their resources and advance toward the world of peace desired by God, who is the Master and Parent of this great universe.

Ladies and gentlemen, humanity is traveling down a dead-end street. The only way to survive is to practice the peace philosophy of true love, true life and true lineage that I am teaching. Now that we have entered the Age after the Coming of Heaven, your good ancestors are mobilized, and the heavenly hosts are sweeping down upon the earth. Soon the countries and peoples that appear strong and mighty will change course and shift in this direction.

I leave you with a choice. There can be no perfection in ignorance. The message from Heaven that I convey to you today is both a blessing and a warning to this generation. Reverend Moon and I will take the lead in establishing true families, true societies, true nations and a true world. Will you join with us in this work as we rise and gain strength to bring this new age in accordance with heavenly fortune? Or will you remain captive behind the same old barriers—all of them Satan's handiwork—that make a wall out of your religion, a wall out of your culture, a wall out of your nationality and a wall out of your race, and spend the remainder of your time on earth in agony and regret? Heaven is summoning you to be the wise leaders who will set aright this world of evil and establish a new heaven and new earth.

Today we are participating in the inauguration of the Universal Peace Federation. It represents God's victory, the fruit of the True Parents' blood, sweat and tears, and the world's cherished hope. It will carry out the role of an Abel-type UN in relation to the existing United Nations for building Cheon Il Guk. Think of the peacekeeping role of the United Nations in the past. Sometimes it withdrew its forces before their mission was completed. The Korean War is a good example. Under the banner of the Universal Peace Federation, we will serve as the Peace Kingdom Police Force and Peace Kingdom Corps to safeguard global peace. For the sake of humanity's future, I hope that you will put on new true-love armor in this new age and be wise and brave activists in this worldwide peace force.

Please inscribe this warning from Heaven deep in your hearts. Remember that the only way to inherit Heaven's lineage and establish the realm of liberation and complete freedom is through the marriage Blessing established by the True Parents. Moreover, the marriage Blessing provides the means to establish God's ideal family and everlasting world peace.

In closing, I ask you to devote your best efforts for the development and success of the Universal Peace Federation.

Thank you.