Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 421
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 10: True Parents, the Hope of God and Humankind
Speech 13: A Providential View of the Pacific Rim Era in Light of God’s Will I, pg 1575-1579
The Era after the Coming of Heaven: A Time of the Sovereignty of Goodness
Respected President George Bush of the United States, President Julio Maria Sanguinetti of Uruguay, former and current heads of state from Central and South America, ladies and gentlemen:
First of all, I would like to extend my appreciation to you, on behalf of my family, for taking part in this International Leadership Conference despite your busy schedules.
I also wish to express my deep appreciation to the United States of America and to all those nations that participated in the Korean War, and especially for the sacrifices your veterans made on behalf of the founding ideals of the United Nations and the noble cause of world peace. Knowing that this was related to God’s Will, I express my heartfelt gratitude to you.
Ladies and gentlemen, God’s desire is to save humankind from evil and sin, and to actualize the ideal He envisioned for all that He created. From the viewpoint of God’s providential plan, the Korean War was not a simple war involving one country. It was a historic, righteous war that played a decisive role in bringing God’s providence to fruition. This understanding will become an important principle and tradition for the Abel UN. Due to constraints of time, I cannot explain in detail today the profound providential plan God has had for my life’s work and for the Korean Peninsula. I will therefore speak about some aspects of God’s providence dealing with the Pacific Rim era that I have recently announced.
Distinguished guests, I have declared 2007 and 2008 as jubilee years in God’s providence. God has greatly blessed these holy years. It is a time of jubilee, the likes of which God and humankind have never experienced in thousands of years of history.
God’s heart has been in pain throughout history because human beings have been confined under Satan’s dominion. Human beings endured oppression under the sovereignty of evil throughout the Era before the Coming of Heaven. That time has finally come to an end. From this year on, the gates have been opened wide to the revolutionary Era after the Coming of Heaven, ushering in the time of a new sovereignty of goodness in which humanity can serve and attend God as the Central Being.
Without your being aware of it, Heaven’s providence has been expanding in extraordinary ways. Now ambassadors for peace in one hundred eighty-five nations, numbering in the tens of thousands, have received my teachings and are working day and night in response to a special decree from God. Hence, today I would like to convey to you Heaven’s message, which is entitled, “A Providential View of the Pacific Rim Era in Light of God’s Will: The United States and the Future Direction of the United Nations and the World.” It is a declaration of God’s plan for His dispensation and the direction humanity needs to take.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you carefully examine the progress of history, you will undoubtedly discover God’s plan and sense His presence as He worked tirelessly behind the scenes. Consider the history of civilization, which began centering on four of the world’s great river basins. We are familiar with the Egyptian civilization that flourished along the Nile River, the Mesopotamian civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the Harappan civilization surrounding the Indus River, and the early Chinese civilization around the Yellow River.
Over the passage of time, the center of civilization shifted to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where the Mediterranean peninsular civilizations flourished in Greece and Rome. History continued to progress, and the European continental civilization emerged. This continental civilization in turn gave birth to the island civilization of the United Kingdom, which flourished in the Atlantic sphere.
The British Empire, which dominated the seven seas and wielded its might as “the empire on which the sun never sets,” passed its splendid culture on to North America. We know these facts from history.
Civilization on the North American continent raised the banner of democracy, which was rooted in Christianity. It bequeathed to the world the principles of freedom of religion and respect for equal human rights as it led the struggle against fascism and communism, which had established atheistic, evil sovereignties. Through victories in the First and Second World Wars and the third international conflict, the Cold War, it won victory over totalitarianism and communism.
However, that victory does not simply mean that America is great or that it was the ultimate development of human civilization. Victory came because God had chosen and raised the United States of America as the Second Israel, in accordance with His providential plan, and had raised and trained the American people through Christianity. God worked through America to bring His providence to its present stage of fruition.
Ladies and gentlemen, the present era marks an important milestone in the development of civilization. Civilization has completed a circuit of the entire globe and has now arrived on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. History’s course has come to the point in God’s providence where it has to be concluded in the Pacific Rim region.
No force can stop God’s providence now. Though there were both victories and defeats during the course of indemnity under the evil sovereignty in the Era before the Coming of Heaven, now nothing can prevent the rise of the Pacific Rim era. Herein lies the special reason that Heaven declared this a jubilee year.
Ladies and gentlemen, the arrival of the Pacific Rim era signifies many things. What do you think the world would have been like if Jesus had fulfilled the complete messianic mission during his life on earth? Jesus came as the savior and Messiah, to save all humankind. He did not come to save just the people of Israel, a small nation located on one end of the Mediterranean Sea. At that time, Rome, based at the center of the Mediterranean, was the center of human civilization. Rome was ready to rule the seas. Heaven earnestly wished for Jesus to teach and transform Rome first and then rule her empire. Heaven was eager to bring salvation to all humanity by working through Rome’s strong civilization. Yet Jesus was cruelly put to death on the cross, as we know all too well through the biblical record.
After thousands of years of preparation, God finally had sent Jesus to earth as His only Son. There is no way to fathom God’s heart as He anxiously watched Jesus’ each and every action. Jesus’ death was a tragedy that broke God’s heart. It brought Him anguish even more extreme than He had felt at the moment Adam and Eve, whom He had created as the first ancestors of humankind, were lost due to the Fall in the garden of Eden.
During the two thousand years after Jesus died on the cross, God, in the background of history, has walked a path of suffering beyond human imagination. Through this course, He prepared the United States of America to serve as the nation of the Second Israel. As a Christian nation that includes Catholicism and Protestantism as well as the Orthodox world, the United States’ mission is to bring harmony and unity to Christianity as soon as possible and, in the twenty-first century, to fulfill the responsibility that had been the Roman Empire’s, which was not realized in Jesus’ time. On America’s shoulders rests the responsibility, within God’s providence, to bring harmony and oneness among the world’s 6.5 billion people and to expedite the creation of a peaceful, ideal world. These are not simply the words of Rev. Moon. This is Heaven’s decree.
Then how can we unite Christianity? God has already revealed the solution through me, Rev. Moon, the True Parent of humankind. God has given me the supreme command to practice a life of true love, to understand completely the reality of the spirit world to which we go after we die, and to establish a model, ideal family, a true family. Then what kind of love is true love? And what kind of family is a true family?
Ladies and gentlemen, God’s absolute true love does not instill a desire to have one’s partner exist for one’s own sake. Rather, true love’s essence is giving, living 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, such as that of a devoted son who finds his greatest satisfaction in dedicating himself to his parents with all his body and mind.
When we are bound together in true love, we can be together forever, continually increasing our joy in 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 with the value of true love. It has the power to dissolve the barriers fallen people have created between nation, race and religion.
The main attributes of God’s true love are that it is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. Whoever practices true love will live with God, share His happiness, and enjoy the right to participate as an equal in His work. A life lived for the sake of others, a life of true love, is the absolute precondition for entering the kingdom of heaven. This is the new way of life in a family where the members live together peacefully, centered on God. It is the ideal model of peace for all creation.
The path is now wide open for humanity to establish true families. God’s true family establishes the pattern for people to live for the sake of others.
The warm environment of oneness based on true love and respect between true parents and true children, mutual fidelity and true love between a true husband and wife, and trust and mutual reliance among siblings, is what is created by the model, true family.
This means that you need to establish a true family wherein the stem of true love emerges from the root of true love and bears the fruit of true love. In this manner, the three generations of true grandparents, true parents, and true children live together as one family and serve the eternal God. God desires to see such families, and it is your responsibility as tribal messiahs, ambassadors for peace, and anointed representatives to seek after and establish families of the kingdom of God.
If only the entire world were filled with such true families! It would be an orderly world where people govern themselves by the heavenly way and heavenly laws, with no need for lawyers, prosecutors or judges.
FFWPU, USA