Authors
1. I invite you to enter into a transcendent state and prayerfully ask God, “What is the center of the universe?” The answer you hear will undoubtedly be, “the parent-child relationship.”
Nothing is more important or more treasured than the relationship between parent and child. This is because it defines the fundamental relationship between the Creator God and human beings.
The parent-child relationship is the core of the universe
2. Then, what does the relationship between parent and child consist of? It is a relationship of three things: love, life, and lineage. We cannot have true life without the love of True Parents. In other words, God created human beings as the partners of His absolute true love.
This relationship forms an axis of love, linking God the Father with human beings as His sons and daughters. Could anything be of higher or greater value than being a son or daughter of God?
If anything were higher, surely human beings would aspire to attain it. But there is nothing higher. Do you think that when the all-knowing and all-powerful God created Adam and Eve, He secretly reserved the highest position for Himself and made Adam and Eve to be only second best? We cannot imagine that God would do that to His children, to His partners who share absolute love with Him.
3. God, our eternal True Parent, invested Himself one hundred percent in the creation of human beings and endowed us with the right to have status equal to His, to participate as equals in His work, to live with Him, and to inherit from Him. God bestowed upon human beings all of His attributes.
Though God is the Absolute Being, He cannot be happy alone. Adjectives such as “good” and “happy” cannot apply to any being that lives in isolation. They apply only where there is a dynamic mutual relationship.
Imagine a professional singer who finds herself on an uninhabited island. She may sing at the top of her voice, but will it bring her happiness if there is no one to listen?
In the same way, even God needs a partner with whom to share love to be happy. Then how shall we, who are created to return joy to Him, live as God's partners? In other words, how shall we live to be the children whom God can call His sons and daughters, who can stand in a position equal to His, share His work, and inherit all that is His?
4. We should substantiate the ideal that God envisioned at the beginning of His act of creation. God acted upon the principle of living for the sake of others. In other words, He acted for the sake of those whom He created as His longed-for partners in true love.
The practice of true love formed the core of His initial creative act. Therefore, to become God's children, our first responsibility is to emulate Him. We need to embody true love by living as a devoted child, then a patriot, a saint, and finally a divine son or daughter of God.
At that stage, we need to experience the innermost emotions of God's heart and resolve the grief that He has experienced for tens of thousands of years since the Fall of Adam and Eve.
5. God is almighty. It was not due to any shortcoming or lack of ability on His part that He has been imprisoned in great pain and has endured immense suffering behind the scenes of history.
Rather, there are provisions in the Principle of Restoration, which He has not been free to disclose, that called Him to wait with forbearance until Adam and Eve's positions, lost at their Fall, were recovered through the appearance of the perfected second Adam.
Although God is all-powerful, He cannot ignore the eternal laws and principles that He established. Do you know what has pained God's heart the most, causing Him the greatest grief since the Fall of Adam and Eve?
It was the loss of His lineage. With that, He lost His right of ownership. God lost this lineage, which is more valuable than life itself. Without His lineage, the seed of true life and true love was unable to germinate.
The importance of lineage
6. Lineage is more important than life and more important than love. Life and love come together to create lineage. We cannot establish lineage if either life or love is missing. Among love, life, and lineage, which are the three qualities that define the parent-child relationship, lineage is the fruit.
God's lineage contains the seed of true love and the body of true life. Hence, for us to become the ideal people God envisioned, people of ideal character, and to create ideal families, we first need to link to His lineage.
Only when we are linked to God's lineage it is possible to create God's homeland, the ideal nation, and establish the kingdom of the peaceful, ideal world. That world will be created through ideal relationships and by upholding the standard of absolute sex.
7. Please inscribe the importance of lineage in your hearts. I cannot emphasize this enough. Without lineage, neither life nor love can endure. Your tradition will endure only through your lineage.
Lineage is the bridge allowing the parents' spirit to carry on through subsequent generations. In other words, lineage is the first and final condition necessary for parents to harvest the fruits of their love, their life, and their joy.
We need to know this with certainty. Yet, this lineage, more precious than life, was lost. The fruits of true life and true love never matured. Everyone on Earth became the fruits of Satan, lacking any relationship with Heaven.
God intended for the seeds He planted in the springtime of the Garden of Eden to grow into a bountiful crop that He could harvest in the autumn. The ideal of God's creation was to raise Adam and Eve, His son and daughter, to the point where they would blossom with true love, true life, and true lineage.
God's desire in creating human beings was to harvest the owners of eternal love, eternal life, and eternal lineage, and His kingdom of the peaceful, ideal world.
8. The most valuable and highest of all relationships is the relationship between parent and child. This is the only relationship that can perpetuate the lineage of God. You have to understand clearly that there is no way apart from the passing of the blood lineage from parent to child.
Tragically, it was false love, false life, and false lineage that infested the earth. God's love, life, and lineage fell into the hands of the adulterer Satan, the enemy of love. Heaven and earth were transformed into hell.
The world became a wretched place in which God's presence was completely obscured. Yet humanity to this day lives in ignorance of this.
9. People are deluded into believing that the lineage of the enemy is the lifeline upon which the world depends. This is the sad truth about humanity being descended from the Fall. That is why we refer to this world as hell on earth.
God views humanity's tragic situation with a heart full of pain. After creating Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, God intended to bless them in marriage through the Holy Blessing and bequeath to them all of Heaven's rights of ownership. God wanted Adam and Eve to inherit the ownership of the entire universe.
10. The right to God's lineage, His ownership, and the right of the eldest son came under Satan's control because of the Fall. God can be compared to a father who labors and sweats throughout his life to accumulate assets for his children, only to have a thief steal everything at night.
No one is aware of the grief-stricken heart of God, who lost His children when Satan took away His lineage, and who lost His nation and the entire world when Satan took away His ownership. There is only one way to recover this lineage and ownership.
This is the path to win the natural subjugation of Satan, that is, to have Satan surrender voluntarily. What is the secret to achieving this? It can only be accomplished by the power of true love, when we love our enemies more than we love our children.
11. Has there ever been a time when God could welcome with joy the True Father and True Mother of humankind and live His life with them in happiness for one day, one month, one year, ten years, or His entire lifetime?
The answer is no; God has not experienced such joy even for one hour. And has anyone been able to comfort God in His pain? No, because no one has known the reason for the unbridgeable gap that has separated God from humankind for tens of thousands of years. No one knows why God and humanity are in such a tragic situation.
The coming of the True Parents
12. Without exception, human beings are born through an evil lineage as the children of Satan. Ladies and gentlemen, please think deeply about the world around us. Isn't every moment and every step we take in our daily lives a fierce inner struggle between good and evil?
13. The conflict between Cain and Abel within Adam's family became the source of war and conflict throughout human history. We are in conflict on many levels, beginning with the war between mind and body within each individual and extending to wars between nations and even to the global conflict between materialism and theism.
Extreme selfish individualism threatens our lives even today. We wish young people would be the hope of humanity, holding the promise for the future, but drugs and free sex enslave them.
The advanced countries seem to believe that material goods are all that matter. They recognize only their interests while ignoring the misery of tens of thousands who die of starvation every day.
14. Who can untie this ancient knot of Cain and Abel? It has been entangled for thousands of years and grows ever tighter. Do you think the United Nations can do it? The United Nations, at its founding, proclaimed a movement for world peace and sixty years has dedicated itself to this task; yet world peace remains far distant.
Peace among nations can never come when those entrusted with the task have not resolved the Cain-Abel relationship between their minds and bodies. Therefore, the time has come to launch the Abel-type sovereignty for the peaceful world, the ideal kingdom that will set its course according to God's Will.
15. God longed with all His heart that someone would appear and resolve these tragedies, but no such person or nation appeared on earth. God waited and waited, looking for anyone who would take on the role of the True Parent.
If someone had come forward, I am certain that God would have appeared in his dreams, carried the sun and moon to him, showering him with the lightning of joy and thunder of ecstasy from the heavens. In that light, the fact that I, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, live in the same era as you, breathing the same air as you, is the greatest of all miracles.
For the first time in human history, after restoring the lost position of Adam, the owner of true love, someone has received the seal of the True Parent of humankind.
Relationships are destined, under heavenly law
16. As we make our way in the world, many connections, and relationships inevitably influence our lives. Most of these connections result from the choices we make and the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
We can change or sever these relationships through our effort, as we like. We acquire such relationships, forging them under human law, and can change or sever them by our effort when we choose. On the other hand, heavenly relationships, which God bequeaths to us at the moment of our birth, lie outside the realm of choice.
These fundamental and inescapable relationships are based on connections of blood. Even though you may dislike your parents or siblings, for example, you cannot change them by choice or vote them out of office. This is because they are connected to you through ties of blood. Once you are born into a family with the surname Kim, you live forever in the lineage of the Kim family.
17. Why can't humanity escape from the snare of sin? It is because people are born of the false lineage of Satan. Yet, that inheritance is not an original blood connection that Heaven bestows by the providential will and purpose. It is not based upon the Principle.
Rather, it is an acquired connection that resulted from a violation of the Principle. It was brought about by human error. Although we lost our parents through the Fall and became orphans, our fundamental relationship endowed by Heaven remains intact.
God is our Parent, and we are His children. As a result of the Fall, we became ignorant, as if in a vegetative state, unable to recognize our Parent, even though He has always been within and beside us.
Therefore, all people, regardless of their other qualities, belong to the fallen lineage, and all people without exception have to be born again and change their lineage. This is the only way we can be restored into the lineage that God originally intended for us.
The restoration of true lineage
18. Our bondage to the lineage of Satan has caused so much suffering throughout history. Humanity has to boldly step forward to sever that tie and be engrafted onto the root of the lineage of the True Parents.
Why should we foolishly continue to live and die as wild olive trees? A wild olive tree, even if it lives a thousand years, will only continue producing the seeds of more wild olive trees. Where can we find the path to escape this vicious cycle? It is through the Holy Blessing.
The Blessing ceremony offers the grace of being engrafted onto the true olive tree, the True Parents, who bring God's true lineage to humankind.
It is necessary because you cannot change your seed without changing your lineage. The Holy Blessing is received in three stages: rebirth, resurrection, and eternal life.
19. A cross-cultural marriage is the best way to receive the Holy Blessing, raise an ideal family, and produce the pure seed that is without sin. This contributes to the enormous task of transcending the barriers of race, culture, nationality, ethnicity, and religion and creating one human family.
Skin color makes no difference to God; He does not recognize national borders. God does not stand behind the barriers of religion and culture. They are nothing more than tricks of the devil, who has used them to rule over humanity as a false parent for tens of thousands of years.
20. Imagine two enemy families who have cursed each other throughout their lives, people who would never dream of living together. What would happen if these families gathered through a cross-cultural holy marriage Blessing?
The lineage of vengeance would disappear, and there would be only the lineage of true love. If a son from one family and a daughter from the other became husband and wife, loved each other, and built a happy home, would the parents in these two families curse their grandchildren?
If that son were to love this beautiful daughter of a hated enemy, and she, as the daughter-in-law, were to give birth to Heaven's grandchildren, perfectly pure and good, his parents would smile with pleasure. In time, the two lineages once soaked with enmity would be transformed.
What method other than cross-cultural marriage will empower whites and blacks, Jews and Muslims, Orientals and Westerners, and people of all races to live as one human family? The family sets the pattern for living together in harmony.
For this fundamental reason, you should receive the Holy Blessing from the True Parents and establish an ideal family, which is Heaven's tradition; even if it means risking your very life.
21. Humanity is traveling down a dead-end street. The only way to survive is to practice my teaching, the peace philosophy of true love, true life, and true lineage.
Now that we have entered the Era after the Coming of Heaven, your good ancestors are active, and heavenly hosts are sweeping down upon the earth. Soon, the countries and peoples that appear strong and mighty will have to change course and shift in this direction.
Heaven's special envoys
22. I believe you have learned many things through this message from God. You represent Heaven, and humanity, which has lost its way and drifts aimlessly, needs your help now more than ever. Please take this opportunity to make a new determination to become Heaven's envoys, prepared to uphold Heaven's commands.
23. What did I say we lost by the Fall of Adam and Eve, who were created as God's children? First, we lost the lineage given to us by God. Lineage is the most special among all the honors parents bequeath to their children.
Through the Fall, Adam, and Eve inherited the false lineage of Satan and descended to the status of his children. We must understand with certainty that we today, without exception, are descendants of the Fall and have inherited the lineage of Satan.
When God created Adam and Eve, He invested His entire being, one hundred percent. He created them based on the standard of absolute love, absolute faith, and absolute obedience.
He gave them His lineage as the seed for their love and life. Likewise, from this moment on, God is re-creating you as a new person. You stand in a position different from before. The path is open wide for you to change your lineage through the Holy Wine Ceremony that the True Parents have instituted.
24. Second, we lost siblings' love when, in the family of Adam, the older brother Cain killed his younger brother Abel. God's original family structure was full of blessings, including love and harmony among siblings.
The Fall degraded the sibling relationship to a rivalry filled with envy and resentment. To solve this problem in the lineage, I am leading humanity worldwide to join in cross-cultural marriages.
These marriages restore the original family structure, when those who are Abel, relatively closer to Heaven's side, take on an initiating role in the position of the elder brother.
25. Please know that the ideal, peaceful world, which God envisioned at the time of the Creation and desired when He created humankind, is now being built right before your eyes.
If this is not a miracle, then what is? All over the world, the couples blessed in cross-cultural marriages are putting down roots of the true love of Heaven. The new heavenly lineage is bearing fruit.
The day draws near when this beautiful earth will become the original Garden of Eden, where we will enjoy everlasting peace and happiness and where, for countless generations, our descendants will shout “Hallelujah for Cheon II Guk!”
Sun Myung Moon