Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 78
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 2: God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom
Speech 9: Fifty Years on the Providential Path to Realize God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom, pg 265-268
Salvation means recovering one’s original state, that is, restoration. It means returning to the original state before the Fall and restoring the relationship with God that was lost. Fallen human beings must inevitably go the path of restoration through indemnity. Therefore, in each era and in each region of the world, God has raised religions and has led humanity along the progressive path of restoration.
Religion is a training center and an educational institute to remake dysfunctional human beings and return them to their original state. Religious teachings are not for the sake of religion itself. Religion is the means to realize God’s will, which is to educate and recreate us as God’s children. It is impossible for God to be contained within the limited doctrines and rituals established by religion. The mission of religion is to cultivate our character through a life of faith that embraces both enlightenment and personal growth, so that we can attend God in our everyday lives.
We can graduate from school only after completing a prescribed course of study. In the same way, all faiths need to attach greater importance to educating and training individuals to perfect their character than they do to merely bringing people to their faith through witnessing and sermons. Humanity was not originally created to relate to God through religion and a life of faith. In the original garden, religion did not exist. There was no need for the formalities of ritual in the original relationship between God and human beings. It was to have been a relationship of true parent and true child living as an ideal family, intoxicated in the bliss of true love.
I have tried to teach and offer guidance on this heavenly law and principle through the established faiths, in particular, through the Christian foundation that God had prepared for me. Unfortunately, due to ignorance, self-righteousness and denominationalism, God’s central providence could not advance. Instead it met with persecution. Under these circumstances, I was compelled to establish the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. As I had no desire to establish a separate religion, I have, from the early years of this movement, promoted ecumenical and interdenominational activities.
The world has come to call us the Unification Church in place of our full name. Many years ago, I said that I was looking forward to the day when we could bring an end to the Unification Church. That is because the mission of the Unification Church has been to restore and recreate the ideal of God on earth. The ideal kingdom of God is the original world that He envisaged at the time of the creation. This can only be realized when the mistakes of our ancestors, who betrayed God, are completely eradicated, and when the supra-religious, supra-national realm of liberation and complete freedom is perfected. This is to realize the original realm of love, the four-position foundation ideal. To accomplish this transcends the mission of any one church or denomination; it means perfecting the family ideal of true love. Yet the focus of churches and religions has been on individual salvation. No religion until now has ever put emphasis on the salvation of the family.
Crucial to the salvation of the family is receiving and maintaining the Blessing Ceremony of marriage, through which people receive the blessing of God’s true love. Because our fallen ancestors failed to achieve the ideal of true parenthood, we their fallen descendants on our own cannot attain it. It is only possible through the Savior sent by God, because the Savior is the True Parents, the true ancestors who can replace the fallen ancestors. Fallen men and women can be likened to wild olive trees that multiplied the false lineage that they received from the first ancestors, which has no relationship to God. Engrafting into the True Parents, who come as the true olive tree, restores fallen men and women. The ceremony for this is the Blessing Ceremony of marriage.
On the foundation of pure love education and the true family movement worldwide, I inaugurated the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification on July 31, 1996, in Washington D.C., the capital of the United States of America. Four thousand people attended, including many heads of state and high-ranking world religious leaders. On that day I officially announced the end of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. With the inauguration of the Family Federation, the providential age has begun in which families may receive salvation that transcends the boundaries of religion, nationality and race.
The Old Testament Age and New Testament Age were not ages for realizing the ideal family. Those ages belonged to the providential age for the salvation of the individual. Then the main focus was on individual salvation alone. The age of the salvation of the family is the Completed Testament Age. When families combine as a federation, they move into the age of the providence for the salvation of clans, and beyond that, to the salvation of nations. The Blessing ceremony eradicates the fallen lineage, which had been the inheritance of fallen humanity, transfers ownership of the lineage back to God, and brings about a transformation of heart. Indeed, there is no greater grace than this!
Heaven does not come under the banner of a particular religion. God transcends religion. Heaven is the place where people who have regained the parent-child relationship of true love with God, attend God and are intoxicated in God’s true love. People who receive the Blessing, create families of true love, and live in attendance to God can enter heaven along with their clans and nations.
Throughout history, people have sought and cried out for their own liberation and salvation. What about God? Is God not in need of liberation? Does God exist intoxicated in joy? Was it possible for God’s heart to be filled with the joy of liberation when, as the Parent, God had to watch His children groaning in sin and suffering throughout history?
That was never possible. God’s heart can be liberated and enjoy complete freedom in accordance with the degree of the completion of the ideal family and ideal kingdom on this earth and in heaven. Only then can people be liberated and completely released through a family life of true love. In turn, the creation, and further, the spirit world, can be liberated and completely released through us.
Heaven can be likened to a palace of true love. There, we as God’s children, who live centered on the living God, the origin of true love, can share joy with God and respond to God’s heart. The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification has promoted the true family Blessing movement worldwide with the purpose of substantially realizing the kingdom of heaven, which is beyond religion, race, and nation.
Respected leaders and beloved members, throughout history, humankind has dreamed of heaven, an ideal world, yet what is the reality that we see today? Society today has become the kingdom of free sex and individualism amid family breakdown and the loss of values. In such an environment based on fallen human beings, it is impossible to have the correct view of life and values, let alone a correct view of the world and the universe. We, therefore, cannot hope to create or perfect harmony, either within the individual or as a whole.
FFWPU, USA