301. God Is the Origin of Peace

Book 3: Cheon Il Guk and Our Mission
Part 1: The Road to a World of Peace
Chapter 1: God Is the Origin of Peace

This speech was given at a series of Assemblies to Bring the Unity and Secure Settlement of the Parents of Heaven and Earth into the Life of the World, held between August 10 and September 30, 2002, in Korea, Japan, and the United States.

Respected peace-loving American dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen, I extend my warm greetings and gratitude to all of you for coming here this evening. You are now joining more than 70 million people worldwide, including seven million in Korea, and 700 million blessed couples in the heavenly spirit world who have participated in these gatherings for peace.

We are living in a truly historic and providential moment. This is a time of great heavenly fortune, the time when we will build the ideal world of peace that heaven and earth have longed to see for 6,000 years. It is time to build the Kingdom of God in Heaven and on Earth.

Throughout providential history, God raised up various religions in concurrence with different historical periods and regional cultures. Working among these diverse traditions, men and women of faith have made continuous efforts to achieve a world of peace.

Yet even today, human beings groan in travail, because we are still unable to free ourselves from all manner of unethical and immoral behavior. People everywhere are dismayed by the truth that a seemingly unstoppable tide of immorality is now rushing in with the power of a surging storm, threatening to sweep us all away in its turbulent waves. This is the tragic portrait of humanity in the present time.

Yet this does not mean there is never to be any hope. My husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and I have dedicated our lives to conveying the Word of God. Our prophetic messages have been proven to be a true witness that transcends the earthly limitations of this age and our environment.

Creation of humankind and the Fall

Today, once again I come before you with a message from Heaven. You can decide whether or not to believe it. However, I stand here, firmly resolved to act in God's stead to convey His message to the world in the time of the Last Days. The title of this message is "God Is the Origin of Peace.”

I sincerely hope you will open the doors of your heart. I encourage you to humbly receive Heaven's warning to all of us living in the Last Days. In this age of ignorance and confusion, we need to be wise in this way.

In the beginning, human beings were created to live centered on God in the garden of Eden and to live in freedom and peace for eternity. However, as a result of the Fall of our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, the vision of this originally intended world never became reality. Instead, from the day the Fall occurred, a history of suffering and sorrow unfolded on this earth.

God intended human beings to live with His true love and true ideals. However, we were unable to grasp those ideals and did not even comprehend what true love is. He wanted for us to sing songs of freedom and peace, to possess the complete happiness of becoming one in heart in the presence of the Creator, and to return glory to Him. He intended for us to live in an environment of perfect joy; however, we lost the garden of happiness.

Tragically, we have not been able to become a holy people. Satan invaded the human family, defiling the relationships of true parents, true family, and true brothers and sisters. Satan corrupted our true tribe, true society, true nation and true world.

That is not all. Satan is the one who has driven God to spend the past 6,000 years in a state of suffering and struggle. The Fall marked the beginning of the history of spiritual death. From that day on, this became a world of suffering instead of a world of peace. No matter where in the world we live, we have been doomed to the way of conflict and struggle instead of peace.

Within the individual there is continuous conflict between the mind and body. There has been conflict within families that has expanded into conflicts within nations and throughout the world. Today we find there is no place on earth free of conflict. We have to come to terms with the fact that we are responsible for this history of sin. I repeat: All conflict is the result of the Fall.

If the whole world had originally grown from the good seed of a good tree and in a good environment, then, without doubt, the world today would be a world of peace, a world of hope, and a world with a secure future. However, this was not the case. We live in a world in which good and evil are tangled together. Even a good seed has difficulty bearing good fruit when surrounded by an evil environment. The same is true for human beings. For humanity as a whole to be good, it is first necessary that each individual be good. However, for such individuals to bear good fruit, we must create a good environment in the nation and world.

Just as the natural world passes through four seasons, human history needs to continue eternally by revolving through cycles that are like spring, summer, autumn and winter. Because of the Fall, though, our world has never experienced that first moment of hope in which all humanity could take delight, the joyous springtime when we could greet the day of glory.

Cain and Abel, the children of our ancestors Adam and Eve, were not born out of God's love. Adam and Eve were to have created God's true lineage. They created Satan's false lineage instead, through the act of the Fall. So the children they bore were not truly God's children; they were actually children of the devil, Satan.

Adam and Eve became the sinful ancestors of humanity, and the Bible records that they were chased out of the garden of Eden. That is why, in John 8:44, Jesus scolded the people, saying, "You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires.”

Without the Fall, Adam and Eve would have received God's words of blessing. He longed to tell them, "My beloved Adam and Eve, I created you in order for you to build a world fulfilling the purpose of creation and to live in a garden of love. You are my children who will be the masters, the parents and the king and queen of peace and happiness.” Our ancestors Adam and Eve were destined to stand as the everlasting true owners, true parents and true king and queen of both the earthly world and the spiritual world.

We have the responsibility to liberate God

Then, what was it that pushed human beings onto the tragic path of the Fall? The Fall of humankind took place when human beings embraced self-centeredness instead of obeying God's Word. Today the fruit of the Fall is seen clearly in the extremes of selfish thinking and behavior that rage around us with impunity.

I am speaking of the reprehensible behavior of people routinely seeking their own benefit and convenience, regardless of others. I refer to the shameless attitudes of people trying to save themselves without concern as to whether others live or die. Such behavior stems from that which brought about the Fall.

This is certainly not the type of conduct envisioned by God at the time of the Creation. God did not desire to bring about such a world, and we never wanted to be born into such a world.

Therefore God has set His purpose to clear away this tragic, sorrowful and painful history and build the world of peace, happiness, freedom and goodness that He originally desired. He is working to set this fallen world right. This is the path of restoration and the path of the providence of salvation.

As the descendants of Adam and Eve, all human beings are fallen. However, within each of us there still exists an original mind and a conscience that direct us back toward the originally intended world. This is why people throughout history have always desired and longed for the world God originally sought to create. This long-cherished desire remains today as an ideal that cannot be extinguished or ignored.

God has carried out His providence again and again, in each historical period, so that He could inspire fallen human beings to return to His ideal with a new heart. In the end, we need a Savior, for if no central person capable of moving heaven and earth with this ideal appears, then true freedom, peace and all other ideals will never come about. Humanity will be fated to endure an endless path of sorrow and indemnity of astronomical proportions.

In these circumstances, God cannot appear to us in glory, peace or freedom, and the path of restoration cannot be an easy one. God appears in the midst of difficulties, and to meet Him we first must make ourselves a sacrificial offering. This is because the path of restoration is the way of indemnity.

This means that until we are able to wipe away the sorrow in God's heart and dissolve all the grievances there, we cannot hope to accomplish peace among humanity, much less see God's ideal of creation bear fruit on earth. Since God's pain was caused through the Fall, we are responsible to liberate Him from the burden of grief that weighs like a massive stone on His heart.

Yet who among us is truly thinking like that today? Even the most devout believers in Jesus are blind and deaf to this truth, thinking they will simply be forgiven. However, as fallen human beings, we need to return to the state before the Fall.

Having lost God, we must go back to the state of grace we would have enjoyed, had we never lost Him. Having lost the True Parents of humanity, we must return to the position we would have held, had we not lost them. We must return to live in a garden of peace centered on God and True Parents, as their children.

What strategy does the omniscient and almighty God use to change this hellish world into a world of peace? We need to be reminded that in order to accomplish this purpose, God has endured a history of sacrifice and bloodshed and has suffered through so many wearisome religious rituals and rules. This history is referred to as the providence of salvation or the providence of restoration.

Originally, if human beings had not fallen, our mind and body, being centered on God's love, would not contradict each other. Because of the Fall, however, the mind and body came to stand in opposing positions. Therefore, even if it were possible to somehow be transported to an ideal world, without each individual solving this mind-body problem and establishing a true standard of heart, living in such a world would not be ideal.

The Absolute Being, who is the Lord of Creation, created the entire universe in order to share love and oneness. He formed humans, the highest among created beings, to stand in the position of lords of creation. To do this, we must be able to embody God's heart. Becoming one with God's heart does more than establish the parent-child relationship between God and ourselves. It is also the link connecting humanity with the rest of creation.

In restoring the ideal world of peace, the world of the original ideal of creation, it is first necessary to establish certain conditions. We must go through the process of restoration through indemnity.

What is meant by restoration through indemnity? Whenever something or someone loses its original position and state of being, it cannot be restored to its original position and status without first paying a certain price. The setting of such conditions is referred to as restoration through indemnity.

If there were only God and us in heaven and on earth, we would not need the word "indemnity." It exists because of Satan, who caused our first ancestors to fall. If Satan and the world of evil did not exist, there would be no need for indemnity. There also would be no need for the phrase "unity of religions,” which we now proclaim with all our might, nor would we need expressions such as "the liberation of God" or "the liberation of humanity.”

The Fall brought about the degradation of human life and turned history into a record of anguish and failure, a chronicle of war. In order to wipe away this history and unravel all of humanity's fundamental problems, God needs to establish anew the original starting point of human history. He does this through a person who can live a life of true love for the sake of God, humanity and all creation. This is the mission of the Messiah.

What did Jesus do when he was on this earth? Although he was persecuted and died on the cross, he truly loved all humankind. Jesus left this world giving the supreme example of love through the cross. Throughout his life, Jesus never said he wanted to receive love. Rather he said he came to serve, and that he would love even his enemies.

Without that kind of love, we cannot find the origin of peace; and without the origin of peace, we cannot establish a world of peace.

The world of peace can never come to exist as long as we focus only on receiving love. In the realm of true love, our physical parents are not our only parents, nor are our physical siblings our only brothers and sisters. Even our own biological children are not our only children. Once we become people of true character, we will come to feel that every person is our parent, sibling or child, and we will want to treat them as such. We will not be able to see all the people now wandering in the world of death without tears filling our eyes. With such love, when we see young people thrashing about in a quagmire of drugs and debauchery, we will feel compelled to devote our full heart and soul to saving them, as if they were our own children. This is a manifestation of the love that unconsciously and naturally seeks to give rather than receive.

Unity is a prerequisite for freedom and peace

Unity is another prerequisite of freedom and peace. Consider the life of a husband and wife. If the two have not become one, how can they enjoy the freedom of husband and wife in a true sense? If a husband and wife are not one, then there is no hope for harmony in the family. Peace in the family will be an impossible dream.

A person blasphemes God if he stands before the unchanging God and says he will vacillate. We blaspheme love if we stand in the presence of His unchanging love and practice a vacillating love. The foundation for peace begins in our own heart when we share both sorrow and joy with God. From there, we can expand the base of freedom and happiness in the world.

For this reason, a religious movement must arise on this earth that teaches us to achieve complete mastery over the body and is able to unite the people of the world. Jesus started such a movement.

Please bear in mind that these words are a warning from God, proclaimed to human beings wading through the muddy waters of a corrupt world in the Last Days. We all are called to fulfill this task of restoration. It is our destiny. We can never escape our destiny, which is Heaven's absolute mandate.

I think everyone, at some point in life, searches for the origin of peace and happiness. Yet, from where do peace and happiness really come? They do not originate from America or Korea or the United Nations. The crucial issue is how we human beings, whose minds and bodies are in conflict, can come to embrace a true view of the universe and find peace and happiness in our own hearts.

In our own hearts, the remnants of 6,000 years of war between good and evil continue to flare. The First World War was horrendous, as was the Second World War. Such wars, though, were relative skirmishes in a much larger conflict, and neither lasted more than six years.

Yet, the struggle between mind and body that goes on within each of us is the worst kind of war. It is a war that seemingly knows no end and whose inevitable result speeds us to ruin. Everyone feels the torment of this struggle in his or her own life. The confrontation between mind and body is a fierce battle of good versus evil, representing the prolonged struggle between God and Satan.

Because of this conflict, the ideal of the true human potential has been hidden away in a dense fog and trapped behind a high fence. We must generate a wind of truth and love that is strong enough to sweep the fog away. We must tear down the mighty fence between our mind and body that stands so high as to pierce the sky. The course of overcoming this struggle is our destiny.

To win this battle, we must overcome the desires of the body, such as for sleep, money and unprincipled sexual satisfaction. When he set out on his course decades ago, my husband, Reverend Moon, declared as his personal motto, "Before seeking dominion over the universe, you must first control yourself.” And that is how he has lived throughout his life.

We must be honest about the state of the world and of our nation today. The Bible says that in the Last Days the hearts of humankind will grow cold, and that the world's people will live like orphans. It also predicts that nations will flounder in confusion and despair. Have you ever experienced true peace in your heart, even for a moment? And does our nation have a true leader?

Where are the true patriots who truly love this country and its people to the extent that they are willing to offer their lives to bring about peace? Who can put forward a philosophy or teaching with the power to save the young people of this country, who are morally sick and spiritually declining? Their plight is truly pitiful, and we cannot help feeling intense grief for them.

All this goes back to the fact that none of us has been able to establish a standard of one heart, one body and one thought within ourselves. Without individual mind-body unity, how can we hope for harmony in the family or peace in the country or the world?

Throughout the ages, our original minds have longed for peace, happiness and unity. The problem has always been our physical body, which is at war with the desires of the mind. Yet our flesh is the container that holds our mind, so we cannot just discard it as we wish. The important thing is how we govern this physical body, whose impulses and directions change minute by minute.

After the Fall, the human body became Satan's dwelling place. As the apostle Paul laments in Romans 7:23-24: "I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"

When we look honestly within ourselves, we all can see elements of good and evil. Our mind or conscience is oriented toward good, and our body pulls in the opposite direction, toward evil. If we cannot resolve this conflict of mind and body, then sin will indeed torment us for eternity. This was true even for so great a saint as Paul.

Perfection of character through the unity of mind and body

Ladies and gentlemen, what is the true way to world peace? War cannot be the answer. Neither is wealth, power or knowledge. Nor can peace be achieved through the political or diplomatic power of the United Nations. Nothing really can be expected from the forum of the UN as long as its fundamental concerns are the desires of factional individuals and the national interests of each member state.

As long as fallen nature remains within us, history will always be riddled with struggle and turmoil, and this will be the case, no matter how much we may sing of our ideals or cry out for peace. This is why we conclude that we will not find the path to peace until we have pulled out this fallen nature by its root.

The way to world peace does not lie far off at the ends of the earth; rather, it will be found only in the place where each of us is able to unite our divided mind and body. The wider the gap between someone's mind and body, the greater the struggle and the stronger the resulting pain.

The mind is God's sentinel, while the body is Satan's vanguard. We need to narrow the gap between the mind and body and finally unite them entirely.

To pull out our deeply rooted fallen nature that was inherited from our false parents, we need True Parents. They alone are able to free us From Satan's false lineage.

We must meet the True Parents and achieve mind-body oneness and unity of thought by learning from them how to practice true love and how to live a life for the sake of others.

Ladies and gentlemen, look at the world. There are so many problems. They begin with struggles between mind and body and husband and wife and go all the way to conflicts and wars among nations. They can be traced to countless causes. However, if we dig down to the root cause, we will always arrive at the problems between mind and body and man and woman.

The history of human suffering began with a false relationship between a man and a woman. Disharmony within the family quickly developed into a multitude of problems in the society and then the world.

If we could just resolve the problems involving men and women in every family, every society and country, and on the worldwide level, and establish one model family, then the world would be able to unite as a world of peace. It would become the ideal world of the original creation.

God originally wanted a world of true peace to take root on this earth centering on our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. If they had not fallen and had grown according to God's Will and developed a mature character, they would have received God's blessing, formed an ideal family and built the ideal Kingdom of Heaven, free of evil and suffering.

That would have been an eternal world of peace. From generation to generation, human beings would have enjoyed a life of happiness. We would have been able to communicate directly with God as His direct sons and daughters and to commune freely with our ancestors in heaven. The world would have become a place in which good would have had absolute dominion and people would have been incapable of sinning.

Human history began on the wrong foot; yet our Heavenly Parent did not forsake us. Instead, for 6,000 years, God has devoted His heart and soul for the sake of finding His lost children. Not once has He regretted that He created human beings. He has never been discouraged in the face of Satan's ability to have his way. With single-minded devotion, God has worked with true love and forgiveness to carry out His providence of restoration.

It is not by mere happenstance that we are able to study and learn a little more deeply about God today than we could before. We need to be grateful for Heaven's grace and thankful to our ancestors who guided us to this truth.

Our utmost task is to perfect our character through the oneness of our mind and body, to set right the families that have splintered under Satan's rule, and to establish ideal true families.

God's hope is to dwell eternally with a family that is united through three generations. The greatness of true love is that it enables us to become God's object partners and also enables God to become one with us. The ideal family attends the grandparents as they would attend Heaven, shows absolute obedience to the parents, and creates children through the absolute relationship of a husband and wife who raise their children in purity and without sin. When we do this, our families will attain a unity of heart with God and become the birthplace of eternal happiness and peace.

Ladies and gentlemen, human beings originally were created so that our mind and body would respond to God's true love and unite into one. Many people on the earth today, however, live in ignorance of the role of the mind. They do not know that the mind actually is the basis upon which we can develop the character that can find peace centering on God's love. There is enough room in every human mind to embrace God.

Any person who comes to have such a righteous mind will immediately yearn to bring all people into the palace of peace. Because we are God's children created in His image, we all possess the potential to be free of mind-body conflict and to establish the origin of true unity in ourselves.

We need to heed God's final warning

There is no possibility of contradiction or conflict within God, the Absolute Being. His divine character is reflected throughout creation and in human beings in the dual structure of mind and body and male and female. God exists in a state of absolute and total unity within Himself. So it stands to reason that human beings, who were created to resemble God, the great King of all creation, have the ability to achieve the full unity of mind and body.

Yet, as a result of the Fall, human beings lost the standard of harmony and unity between the mind and body and live instead in a quagmire of struggle and contradiction.

In a world in which the forces of evil are rampant, it is nearly impossible to live a life in which the mind has complete governance over the body. This is why God in His wisdom has permitted necessary and appropriate religions to arise for the sake of saving fallen humanity, giving consideration to every age, culture, regional environment and circumstance.

Throughout history, human beings have tried to follow the teachings of religions and to steadily pioneer the path of life centered on the mind. We have learned the path of self-denial and how to place our hope in the eternal world and not be attached to the present reality.

In Christianity, for example, we are taught to focus on God's Kingdom and His righteousness, not this world. The scriptures warn us not to be selfish or to seek to live lavishly. Christianity has always emphasized the peace that originates in the world of the mind and heart.

A good illustration of this is Jesus' teaching, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” This concept of the Kingdom of Heaven has nothing to do with worldly affluence or power and is echoed in many other faiths. Buddha's declaration "In all of heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one” can be understood in the same way.

Methods may differ from one religion to another; however, the mission of all religions is to strengthen the internal hope and aspirations of human beings. They guide us to examine ourselves and to live a life in which the mind governs the body. In this way, God has carried out His providence for human salvation through religion for 6,000 long years.

The fact is, up to the present no religious leader or sage has been able to show us how to completely overcome the conflict between mind and body and bring about eternal unity and lasting peace. No one could teach us how to subdue the body, once and for all, by centering on the mind.

No one could show us how to find true peace. No one could bring us to that point of complete unity where parents become eternally one and husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children, and the extended family can eternally unite as one.

Now, however, the time for peace has come! Heaven's long wait has ended. We are living in the final moment of the Last Days of human history. Heaven cannot extend history or allow any further delay of the providence for human salvation.

This is because the True Parents, whom heaven and earth have hoped would come and have longed to see, are now on this earth. They are taking all responsibility upon themselves and are successfully completing the providence of restoration. In a world entangled in chaos and debauchery, they are establishing an order of true love.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is said that those who believe will be blessed. My husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and I, who are bringing this truth of Heaven to you, are standing as the True Parents.

The teaching and thought of True Parents revealed to Reverend Moon is a truth that promises peace to humanity. Both communism and democracy have tried and failed to bring peace. The thought that will prevail is Godism, which is the philosophy and tradition of living for the sake of others. Only this sacrificial way of life based on heavenly parentism is capable of leading us to eternal life and peace.

In this way, we will come to the amazing realization that, as God's reciprocal partner of love, we will come to possess a value even greater than God's. We must praise God for this. This love is the only way that we at last can connect to the eternal world of peace. It is the starting point of eternal life in the Kingdom of God on Earth and in Heaven.

The counsel of messages from the spirit world

In our capacity as the True Parents of humanity, my husband and I already have united the entire spirit world. We are receiving messages of support and unity from the founders of the four great religions centering on Jesus, including Buddha, Confucius and Muhammad, and from 120 major disciples of each of these leaders. They sent these messages after having studied our teachings in Divine Principle and Unification Thought seminars in the spirit world. These leaders are filled with hope and feel immense gratitude toward the True Parents.

Even communist leaders in the spirit world, beginning with Marx and Lenin, have completed the Divine Principle seminar in accordance with True Parents' direction. They too are sending tearful messages of repentance and deep lamentation.

All these people in the spirit world now have only one hope. This is that their representatives and followers on earth will accept the teachings of the True Parents as quickly as possible, work for peace, and prepare themselves for their eternal life.

Their messages implore us not to waste our precious, fleeting time on earth and instead to prepare wisely for life in the spirit world, where all people will live together for eternity after casting off their physical bodies.

What does this mean for men and women now living on earth? First, it means that all people, men and women, young and old, rich and poor alike, must believe in the unequivocal fact that God is actually alive and is working His Will. We ought not to think of Him only conceptually. God is watching our every step and every act with eyes bright with expectation.

God is waiting for the day when all human beings, who left His bosom and went to Satan, repent and return to Him. Long ago, He painted a picture of what it will be like when the prodigal child, who once left Him, returns to the Father with tears of repentance. Now His urgent request is that we actually do this. As a first step, God wants us to comfort and attend the True Parents, who still remain on earth and who walk the path of blood, sweat and tears for the sake of human restoration.

God's desperate hope is that we will receive the warning He gives in these Last Days with an earnest heart, correct the errors of our lives, and live in a way that we will not regret later.

Second, we are being warned that we must accept as fact the existence of the spirit world and live every aspect of our lives in accordance with heavenly law. God is sternly telling us to discover our higher selves, grow our spirits, and establish a world of peace on this earth without delay.

God is watching us. Tens of thousands of wise men and women, together with all our ancestors, are watching our daily life. When we realize this for certain, how will we be able to go against heavenly law?

Soon you too will begin having spiritual experiences. The time has come when your ancestors will directly observe and guide your life and even your thoughts. Numerous Unification Church members who believe in and follow the True Parents' teachings are already experiencing this.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for coming here this evening. You are truly blessed, because you are able to live in the historic and providential age when the Messiah, the True Parents of humankind, has returned to earth.

This is the time when North and South Korea and all other nations will be unified, not by guns and knives but with love and truth. This is the time when all the religions of the world will become one under the guidance of the True Parents and when all the sages and ancestors in the spirit world will come down to earth to live with us and communicate directly with us.

I would like to conclude this address by urging all humanity to fulfill the responsibility to which we have been called by uniting to build a world of peace that transcends race, belief systems and national boundaries.

I pray that God's boundless blessings will be upon your family and nation in abundance. Thank you very much.