Father’s speech at True Parents’ Birthday Celebration, February 3, 2006 – Cheong Pyeong Heaven and Earth Training Center. The speech contains adjustments Father made for official publication after he had given it.
Distinguished guests, ambassadors for peace and blessed families from all parts of the world, I am truly grateful to all of you for coming thousands of miles to Korea in the midst of your busy schedules. As you may know, today marks my eighty-seventh birthday and my wife’s sixty-fourth birthday, by Korean reckoning. As the founder of the Universal Peace Federation, which is to break open the time after the coming of heaven, I would like to take the opportunity granted by this remarkable occasion to convey to you the essence of the truth of Heaven that I have taught throughout my life. I have chosen the title, “The Model Ideal Family and Kingdom.”
Ladies and gentlemen, as I look back upon my life, I see that it has indeed been like a dream. At the young age of sixteen, with nothing but the buoyant spirit and aspirations of youth, I received Heaven’s call and began to live for the will of God. This left no room in my heart for any worldly ambitions I may have cherished. Mine has never been an easy path, but I have followed it for the more than eighty years of my life, looking nowhere but straight ahead. It was a life I was fated to lead, with no choice but to shake off the hands of my beloved parents and of my brothers and sisters, who clung to me, wanting me to stay with them. They endured terrible sacrifices and walked a thorny path of dreadful suffering for my sake.
Mine has been a journey through the wilderness that not one among the six billion people living on earth will ever fathom. Even as I persevered through the hardships of prison life six times, I never let go of the key to the providence; such has been my life.
God’s heartfelt sorrow
This was all because I came to know only too well how anguished, aggrieved and full of bitter sorrow the heart of God has been as He waited for thousands of years to find us. It was because I realized that if God, who is the origin of billions of people and the Creator of everything in the universe, is not relieved of His sorrow, human life will remain completely without value.
Then when, where and how was God burdened with such agonizing sorrow in His heart? Who on earth could inflict this grief upon Him, the absolute and omnipotent being?
God created Adam and Eve and established them as the first ancestors of humankind. He committed Himself one hundred percent to raising them as His son and daughter. The parent–child relationship, which connected them to Him through love, life and lineage, is the highest and most important of all relationships. This is because establishing the vertical relationship between parent and child was the only means through which God could bequeath His lineage and thereby make His lineage eternal.
However, the Fall of Adam and Eve severed this parent–child relationship, a relationship more precious and important than life itself. As God’s own flesh and blood and as His eternal, only-begotten son and daughter, Adam and Eve formed a blood relationship with His enemy Satan and became Satan’s children instead of God’s. In the face of this, God’s heart has been crushed and wounded with grief and sorrow throughout history. His still remains the most mortifying and harrowing anguish, which no one in history could know or resolve.
The Fall frustrated the ideal of God at the time of the creation to establish a true family in that first generation through Adam and Eve, a family through which He could establish His eternal lineage. The only way to relieve His sorrow is to restore and establish a true family unrelated to the lineage of Satan. Herein lies the reason every one of us needs to establish a true family, which is God’s ideal at the Creation. Herein also lies the fundamental object and purpose of the founding of the Universal Peace Federation.
God’s purpose for creating Adam and Eve
The Old Testament tells us, “So God created man in His own image; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27) From the revelation of God’s creation expressed here, we can conclude that God is a being who comprises the essence of one man and one woman. Having these attributes, God could not enjoy a solitary life. He therefore created the universe as His object partner, that is, He created all things in the universe in the position of an object partner in image, and in the midst of all things He created human beings as His object partners in substance. In this manner, Adam was the first masculine representative created by God as His object partner in substance, and Eve was the first feminine representative He created. What objective did God have in mind when He created human beings as separate beings, one man and one woman?
First, though He is the subject being of harmonized dual characteristics, God is incorporeal. Therefore He needed to assume a physical form through which He could relate with the world of substance. This is because the incorporeal God, without a physical body, meets certain limits in dealing with the corporeal world of substance. He intended to communicate and work freely within the world of substance not only in the body of the man alone or of the woman alone, but from within the bodies of both Adam and Eve.
Therefore, if Adam and Eve had attended God in their hearts and had become one with God, and then had married on the basis of having perfected themselves and had had children, they would have become the external and horizontal true parents in substance and God would have become the internal and vertical true parent in substance. If this had come to pass, Adam and Eve would have resembled God one hundred percent, both in their inner nature and outer form. And if Adam and Eve, in perfect resemblance to God, had become the true parents of humankind, human beings would have perceived the true reality of God through them.
Second, God created human beings as separate entities for the sake of the fulfillment of love. He intended that Adam and Eve reach perfection and embody love in complete union with each other. On that basis, He would have come and dwelt with them and become the parent of true love for all humanity. Adam and Eve, standing in the position of the parents of substance in the image of God, would have established an ideal family and consequently an ideal world through multiplying their own children. If this had come to pass, human beings would have linked the spirit world and the earthly world. We can conclude that God created us for the purpose of our serving as the connecting point between the spiritual and physical worlds.
By coming to dwell in Adam and Eve based on true love, God could stand as the true parent, the parent of humankind in substance. Moreover, when the time came for Adam and Eve to end their lives on earth and pass on into the spirit world, even in that world He could put on their spirit bodies and manifest as the true parent through their form. However, due to the Fall, God has not seen that dream fulfilled.
God does not need money, knowledge or power. Since He is the absolute, almighty being, He does not need such things. Modern science may be accomplishing spectacular advances, but these are no more than part of our process of discovering new facts and truths about the realm of God’s creation. The vast expanse of the universe operates in accordance with laws following an order that cannot be fathomed by human thought or science. In this sense, God is also the absolute scientist.
God’s ideal at the Creation
What would have been the ideal that God hoped to achieve through the creation of humankind? It was to fulfill the “four-position foundation.” The four-position foundation signifies Adam and Eve in a state of complete union with God. The four position foundation is the foundation of a family with God as its center, established when husband and wife have achieved complete oneness not only with each other but also with God, have become an ideal husband and wife and have given birth to ideal children. When the family four-position foundation is thus completed, that family fulfills the ideal of the Creation desired by God. In this state of oneness there is no possibility that human beings would depart from God’s realm of love, or even dream of it.
Generally speaking, a family is formed through the coming together of parents and children, and of husband and wife, and at the center of that family group there must be God’s love. At this point, the husband represents heaven and the wife earth. Although they are two separate beings, when husband and wife have become one, horizontally speaking, their union symbolizes the unity of heaven and earth. Simply put, the way to bring unity in the universe is opened when husband and wife are in unity based on God’s love.
Ladies and gentlemen, God created the world in order to eventually receive joy from it. Joy cannot be learned, but can only be experienced through a partner. Since even the absolute being, God, cannot feel joy while alone, He needed a partner with whom He could share the giving and receiving of love.
To put it in another way, God created this world in order to feel joy from seeing humankind and all things of the creation become one through His love and form a harmonious and peaceful world of love. On this basis, human beings were meant to form true conjugal relationships centered upon His love, and to establish families, tribes, peoples, nations and a world of true love. God created this world to observe this and to feel joy from it.
We can conclude that humankind is absolutely essential to the perfection of God’s ideal of love. In light of this, we can better understand the concept that absolute value is derived from an absolute partner.
God as the Father and humankind as His children were to form a vertical axis, and this was the purpose for the creation of human beings. If this axis had aligned perfectly, that is, if a relationship that united humankind and God as one through true love had been established, that relationship would have been absolutely inseparable; no force in the universe would have been able to break it apart. How could anyone who has been embraced in the original love of God and who has tasted it to the depth of his being ever separate from it?
With the coming of spring, honeybees awaken from their long slumber and develop a taste for the fresh nectar of blooming flowers. Try pulling the abdomen of a honeybee that is lost to all else but sucking on that nectar. You will see that it cannot tear itself from the nectar, even if its abdomen is pulled off. How about you? Once you really get to know the taste of God’s true love, you won’t wander far before you come back and cling to it once again. The power of the vertical true love that connects us to Him is greater than the power of life.
The value of family
Ladies and gentlemen, the reason we miss the family we have left behind today is because at home there is love for one another. Home is where the love of mother and father, the love of elder brothers and sisters and younger siblings, and the love of one’s spouse and children and close neighbors are all deeply embedded. It is a place of mutual affection, where all our core relationships and affinities are brought together through mutual love. This makes you want to cherish each and every member of your family. Every wanderer who has left his family behind desires to appear before his family once again, boldly as a liberated being, and to embrace the familiar mountains, streams and trees, love his kith and kin and sing songs of ecstasy. However, the lot of humankind, descended from the Fall, has been different—banished from their hometown and destined to wander forever in isolation and defeat, human beings have been unable to go back, no matter how much they have missed their families, for they lost the root of the heart of their original homeland.
However, with the ushering in of the era of a new heaven and a new earth after the coming of heaven, human beings have been pulled out of the quicksand that was sucking them down; and the way has been opened for them to return to their hometowns, which they could not forget even for a moment, and meet their families. Could there ever be a day of greater blessing for humanity? The time of heavenly power and fortune has now come, allowing us to reestablish the original family that was lost through the Fall of Adam and Eve.
A family of three generations living in harmony
When you seek the lost original family, you should set out from the position of the perfection of Adam, the position of the perfected Jesus, and the position representing the Second Coming of the Lord. God will dwell with you in such a family. That family will be composed of three generations—grandparents, parents and children—living in harmony. You need to live in service and attendance of your grandfather as the historical root of your ancestors.
The family sets the pattern for humankind living together in harmony. The family wherein parents and children love and respect each other, husband and wife are grounded in mutual trust and love, brothers and sisters trust and rely on each other, and all live at home together as one is the model ideal 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 such a family the root of history is alive. The root of the kingdom of heaven extends into it; in fact, it is in such a family that the kingdom of heaven on earth takes root. It is also where the everlasting root of kingship is firmly planted. The grandparents, parents, and grandsons and granddaughters represent, respectively, the roots of the past, present and future. The root of the past represents the spirit world, the root of the present is the palace representing the present world, and the root of future establishes the grandsons and granddaughters as princes and princesses and erects the palace of peace representing the two worlds, the spiritual world and the physical world.
In such a manner, the three generations of grandparents, parents and grandchildren should live together as one family, serving the eternally existent God. You should know that to seek after and establish such a family of Cheon Il Guk, God’s kingdom, is the responsibility of tribal messiahs, the mission of the peace ambassadors and the desire of God.
You should form families that God will miss and yearn to return to after He has been away. You should raise families to which He can come freely as a parent visiting His children. That is the meaning of living in the service of God. In such a family, God becomes the subject of our conscience, acting vertically. Following that vertical subject, your mind stands in the position of the vertical subject of yourself and brings your entire being into unity. That is where parental love, conjugal love, children’s love and siblings’ love—in short, the four realms of love or the four realms of heart—are perfected. Only in such a family can the upper and lower, front and back, and left and right connect as one and circular motion continue forever. This brings forth the everlasting kingdom of model ideal families.
The purpose of marriage
Ladies and gentlemen, why should we marry? We marry in order to restore the position of the owner. A man or woman alone is but half of the whole. That is how God created us and as He did so, He interchanged ownership of the reproductive organs, the love organs. The owner of the wife’s reproductive organ is the husband and the owner of the husband’s is the wife. Only when each is rooted in love for the other can they each be in the position of the owner of their spouse. We marry to secure this position of the owner.
Then what are we trying to achieve by restoring the position of the owner? It is in order to gain the position from which we can conquer God’s love. God is the subject of the three great loves. As the owner of the universe, He is the teacher, owner and parent of true love. This is the genuine “three-great-subjects thought.” All such teachings and truths emerge as an expression of the life of true, model families. Once they expand, the society, nation, world and even heaven and earth can be transformed into the peace kingdom of the model ideal family.
Distinguished leaders, you are now living in the most blessed and exalted time in history. I now proclaim the launch of the time of a new heaven and earth after the coming of heaven, long-awaited and yearned for by billions of your ancestors in the spirit world who have come and gone in history. This is the era of the kingdom of the peaceful, ideal world. Not only the four great religious founders but also billions of good ancestors have come down to earth to guide you on the heavenly path. The age in which irrationality and corruption play havoc, allowing those who are evil to prosper more than others, is passing away.
Rev. Moon, who received the seal of heaven, has come as the True Parent of humanity and the king of peace. I will be true to my promise to heaven. I will make flourish the era of the kingdom of the peaceful, ideal world on earth, without fail. Therefore, please bear in mind that all of you here today are central figures for the establishment of the kingdom of the peaceful, ideal world on earth, in attendance of the king and queen of peace, the True Parents.
Under the banner of the Abel-type UN, let us sweep away the absurdities and the evil of the world. Let us become the proud “peace kingdom police” and “peace kingdom army” of the Universal Peace Federation and protect the blessed families of the world. Let us fulfill our roles as the sentinels watching over this blessed land that is our planet.
I would like to conclude this speech with this wish: that the blessings and grace of God may be with all of you world leaders, whose presence has elevated this historic occasion. Thank you.