Address at True Parents’ Birthday Celebration Banquet for participants of the World Summit on Leadership and Governance January 27, 2004 / Shilla Hotel, Seoul, Korea
Distinguished leaders from around the world, respected dignitaries from Korea and other countries, ladies and gentlemen:
This banquet was prepared to celebrate my eighth-fourth birthday and the birthday of my wife, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon. Instead of receiving congratulations on our birthdays, though, the two of us would prefer to offer this banquet to the saints and sages in the spirit world who are present here now, to blessed families in the spirit world, and to the participants of the World Summit on Leadership and Governance.
In the beginning, God created human beings as His children. They were destined to grow to maturity, form families with His Blessing, and multiply His descendants for endless generations in a lineage of goodness unstained by sin. The first human ancestors, Adam and Eve, were to have attended God as their vertical True Parent. Then with the True Parent God as their axis, they were to have become the substantial, horizontal True Parents. In such a world, the word Messiah would never have come to exist. Their family would have been the ideal family reflecting God’s ideal of creation, and the world would have been the kingdom of heaven on earth, where God’s ideal of creation would have been completed. After living out their lives in this world, human beings would have automatically been registered as citizens of the kingdom of heaven in the spirit world, where they would have lived eternally in freedom, peace, and happiness.
Perfected Adam and Eve would have communicated directly with God using their five spiritual senses and, at the same time, they would have worked freely with the physical creation using their five physical senses. They would have lived as True Owners, True Parents, and True King and Queen representing both the spirit world and the physical world.
However, with the Fall of the first human ancestors, all humanity descended into a hell of hopelessness from which their efforts alone would never free them. Their five spiritual senses became paralyzed. They fell into a state similar to that of a blind person. Their eyes appear to be normal yet do not function at all. Forced to live with just their five physical senses, they were only half human. They could not see God. They could not hear His voice or feel His touch. So how could they experience His love as their own Parent or under-stand His suffering heart?
The Messiah is the True Parent of true love, true life and true lineage His direct lineal children, receive Satan’s false lineage and descend to the position of servant of servants!
Because God is a God of principle and law, He would not reject the principles by which He created, nor violate the ideal of creation that He established. So He has had to wait tens of thousands of years before introducing the Messiah to the course of the providence of salvation. Different religions refer to this person by different names, such as the Maitreya, the Man of the True Way, and the returning Savior. However, the person humankind needs to open the way, and the person sought by God, is one and the same person, the Messiah, who is the True Parent.
Who, then, is the Messiah, and what is he like? He is the owner and substantiation of faith, hope, and love, for the individual and also for the family, tribe, society, nation, world and cosmos. The faith and hope that remain on earth will finally bear fruit only in an age when humanity attends this person as the Messiah. This fruit contains the life and breath of human history.
This fruit links human beings with Heaven. Our past, present and future are linked to it. The Messiah comes for the sake of human beings, who became forlorn orphans after losing their parents through the Fall. He becomes our substantial True Parent, True Owner, True Teacher and True King. He is the substantiation of God’s true love, true life, and true lineage, coming to restore His lost children who have been groaning in travail under a false parent, to bring them back to their rightful position as the true sons and daughters of God.
Jesus came as the True Parent
Jesus was none other than the one who came to embrace the children who had lost their parents and to restore them back to the original ideal of Heaven. He was the True Parent. Through the Fall, Adam and Eve lost their positions as True Parents. They were unable to receive God’s Blessing and so could not form a union as a true husband and wife and could not produce true children. Their mistake meant God could not embrace a lineage of three generations, including His grandchildren.
The Mission of True Parent
Heaven gave its blessing by sending the Messiah of the Second Coming. He appears on the foundation of the spiritual restoration Jesus carried out throughout the two thousand years of Christian history.
The phrase, True Parents, does not appear in any encyclopedia. It is not a phrase that I created, nor is it some-thing that anyone in the world easily attached to me. In truth, it is the destiny and blessing that Heaven has bestowed on my wife and me. The position of True Parents carries with it the vertical missions of Savior, Messiah, and returning Lord, opportunities that have never been fulfilled in history and will never visit us again in the future. For this reason, people still affiliated with the fallen realm have to fulfill a number of conditions in order to attend the True Parents and accomplish Heaven’s Will.
First, they must participate in and complete a revolution of indemnity. This means they need to cast everything aside and follow the True Parents.
Second, they need to complete a revolution of conscience. This means that they have to maintain a tradition of true love, true life and true lineage in accordance with the predisposition of the original mind and conscience endowed by God. They need to do this without compromising with any worldly sovereignty or philosophy they may encounter. They have to live a life of “high noon settlement,” in which they neither cast shadows nor carry a speck of shame in the presence of the spirit world and physical world. The revolution of conscience is completed when we reach a harmonious state of one mind, one body and one thought. Thus they will establish the realm of pure love and pure lineage as an eternal and unchanging tradition. In it, the age of unity and harmony will blossom.
The third condition is a revolution of heart. This means that all people will establish a world of true love, in which God will want to come to us, consult with us and reside with us. The revolution of heart is a revolution of true love, of living for the sake of others, the practice of unchanging, sacrificial love. Think of what it would be like if we each lived for the sake of others more than for ourselves. God, the root source of true love, would reside within us and would live for our sake. What greater joy and glory could there be? Where the revolution of heart has been completed, there will be no such thing as family breakdown, racial strife, international disputes, friction between religions, or any other vestiges of Satan’s world. An eternal peace kingdom will be established.
Let’s achieve God’s Will
Respected guests, in 1996, my wife and I declared an end to the Unification Church and made a new beginning as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, to fulfill the heavenly command to build a world of peace on earth. The Will of Heaven resides not in the progress of any particular church or religion; it resides in world peace through true families.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the same way that the mission of True Parents, to which my wife and I have been called, is a matter of heavenly destiny, your mission before Heaven is to join hands with us in building a peaceful kingdom of heaven on earth. Heaven’s time has now arrived. I pray that you will return to your communities and work passionately as messiahs and true parents yourselves, in the effort to bring about world peace.
Thank you.