Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 370

Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 9: The Role of Nations in Realizing World Peace
Speech 14: ​​Breaking Down Barriers to Establish World Peace, pg 1387-1390 

Godible is made possible by listeners like you!
DONATE

​​Breaking Down Barriers to Establish World Peace

August 18, 2000 
United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA 
Universal Peace Award Congratulatory Banquet

 

Honorable and distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation for the Universal Peace Award I have received here at the United Nations, the historic landmark of world peace. Let me use this opportunity to speak briefly on the theme, “Breaking Down Barriers to Establish World Peace.”

The devil lurks in national borders 

Ladies and gentlemen, if we could break down all the barriers in this world, world peace would come. However, we have to remember that God is not the owner of barriers. Satan, the devil, was the first to make them.

You have to know that Satan and his followers dwell wherever there are barriers. Satan and the dynamics of Satan lurk around barriers. Satan sits on the barrier between eastern and western civilizations, for example.

God did not create the barriers that mark the antagonism between various cultures, traditions and races. God desires one united world, a world without barriers. God does not even have the concept of barriers. He does not tell us to take revenge on our enemies; if He did, it would imply that He had such a concept.

By loving our enemies and bringing oneness among us, barriers will naturally come down. Thus, God’s strategy and tactic is to have us love our enemies. That is a great strategy. It is unfortunate that throughout history to the present, human beings have not understood the value of the words, “Love your enemies.”

Unification Church members, as representatives of human history, have come to understand this strategy and put it into practice. By exemplifying these words, they have become leading lights that can bring peace to the world. 

Reason for carrying out a movement to end barriers

What do you think? When our hearts are not happy, when our bodies are not comfortable, when we are dissatisfied with our actions, when we speak angry words, don’t we create barriers? Therefore, unless we unite our mind and body and express that unity through our five senses, we will throw up barriers of many kinds. For this reason, we need to reflect upon how many barriers we are living with in our daily lives. When we say, “Go beyond having enemies. Stop building barriers,” some might think of what Jesus said, that if your eye offends you, pluck it out.

Actually, there are two kinds of eyes. If our eyes do not differentiate evil from goodness, and welcome anything we see simply as good, then enormous barriers will be built. The same is the case with our ears. If we rejoice when hearing the words of goodness or truth, and at the same time listen to the evil words of this world and support them, then our ears will build barriers.

Some Christian denominations have rules against singing popular secular songs, but members of the Unification Church are not prohibited from doing so. The question is not whether the songs we sing are popular or classical, it’s how we digest the lyrics of those songs. Does singing the song create a barrier, or does it break down a barrier? If by singing a certain song or by speaking through language a person breaks down a barrier and thereby creates a wider and less constricted world, certainly that will please God.

In sum, wherever we maintain barriers, whether through our senses or in our environment, we belong to Satan’s side. On the other hand, if we say, “There are no barriers anywhere!” we can stand on God’s side. If Satan is the champion at building barriers, God is the master of breaking them down. God, the King of kings, does not like barriers at all. He hates barriers the most.

Ladies and gentlemen, look at the Korean Peninsula. Do you think God appreciates a Korean who says that the demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the thirty-eighth parallel that divides the peninsula is a good thing? Of course not! Hence, if someone works hard to remove it, that person will become God’s favorite. If all the seventy million Koreans determine to live for the cause of removing the DMZ at thirty-eighth Parallel, the reunification of North and South Korea will arrive without doubt.

That task, however, will not be easy. We must understand that those who want the DMZ at thirty-eighth Parallel to continue on the Korean Peninsula are on the side of Satan, the devil. Satan is the master of keeping it, and God is the master of the efforts to remove it. That is why Unification Church members have been leading a reform that will render the DMZ unnecessary.

Ladies and gentlemen, when the day comes that people everywhere want their children to marry their enemies, desiring to have sons- and daughters-in-law from among their enemies, the entire world will be automatically united. This is the gift that I would like to offer to you tonight. Where barriers exist, certainly Satan and his followers reside. God and His people, born of His lineage, dwell where love and harmony abound, without barriers.

The reason Jesus must return

Today, Unification Church members are very interested in developing the leisure industry, which encourages people to travel around the world and live anywhere they desire. This is to envision a future international federation based on the United Nations, established someday in whatever location and by whatever name. When it is established, we would all come together under the banner of this international federation. For this purpose, Rev. Moon suggested to Unification Church members that they generate a special fund, called the Total Living Offering. In the future, we will use this fund to facilitate the development of this international federation of the United Nations.

In the Old Testament, animals representing the creation were sacrificed on behalf of human beings. They were divided into two, which represented two parties struggling against each other, the right side in the position of God and the left side in the position of Satan. Then, as a result of the mistakes of some of the central figures in the Old Testament Age, God and Satan came to struggle over Jesus who, as the Son of God, had a value far above that of the creation. As a result, when Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth, he shed his blood. His spirit belonged to God but Satan killed his physical body. Because Jesus wanted to recover his physical body, he proclaimed that he would return. 

Jesus, the Son of God, was divided between the two realms, and problems have continued to plague the spirit world and the physical world. Further, men and women were divided, and the mind and the body were divided. Continual conflict and struggle have persisted. Therefore, Jesus, who went to the spirit world to restore God’s dominion over that world, has to return to earth in order to restore God’s ownership of the physical world and bring oneness between the two worlds. What then would he do upon returning to earth? He would marry and establish his family.

Satan took Jesus’ body and the physical world with it, while God was able to claim Jesus’ spirit and the spirit world as His. In the spirit world, Jesus has been toiling for two thousand years to lead God’s dispensation centered on Christianity, to guide the hearts of people on earth to move in one direction. However, Christianity also was divided into two: East and West, and then Catholic and Protestant. Christians became enemies to each other and fought each other just as Cain, the elder son, fought his younger brother Abel.

This struggle between brothers has become a fight between Satan’s side and God’s side. The eldest son stood on Satan’s side and the younger son stood on God’s side. Thus human history has developed, constantly creating more barriers, multiplying conflict. We, therefore, have to liberate ourselves from this tradition of engaging in struggle and building barriers.

When the Lord returns, he will unite the heavenly world. Then, to bring oneness between heaven and earth, he will conduct marriage ceremonies, bringing together men and women from tribes and nations that have been divided for thousands of years. He will conduct this providence centered on the realm of Christian unity. This is the vision of the marriage of the Lamb prophesied in the Bible.

Asset 1@72x.png
Share this Godible. Start a conversation.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@godible.org.
You can also share your testimony about Godible here!


Godible is made possible by listeners like you!
DONATE