The God of True Love

1. God is omniscient and omnipotent. He can obtain everything He desires and do everything He wishes. It seems ideal, and that there is nothing God could need. Nonetheless, there is still one thing that He requires: love. Even though He is absolute, even God cannot have love by Himself.

This is because love can be had only in a mutual relationship. No matter how all-knowing and all-powerful God is, He cannot possess love on His own. Of course, He has love's attributes, but love's signals and love's stimulation can come only from another person, not from within oneself. Such is love. That is the power of love. (138-246, 1986.01.24)

2. For what purpose did God create us? He created us and established the standard for our perfection based on love. Hence, love is the standard. In other words, becoming a perfect person is based on God's love, not on our ability or level of leadership.

Once we become a perfect person centering on God's love, we can unite with God in love, play with Him, and enjoy everything together with Him forever. The perfect person, the one who meets the highest standard of God's desire, is the person who is one with God in love. (138-246, 1986.01.24)

God governs by His love

3. True love began from God. Love started from Him, is sustained by Him, and has to return to Him in the end. God is the King of kings. Since God is absolute, His love is eternal.

Therefore, if you stand in the position of object partner to that absolute love, you are bound to have eternal life. This is what God intended from the very beginning of creation. It is for this reason that we want to live eternally. Naturally, we have such hope. (224-127, 1991.11.24)

4. You can realize true love only through a mutual base with another person. But true love is not only about husband and wife. Your husband-wife relationship has to be centered on God's ideal of creation. The absolute Owner of true love is God.

When you desire to unite with your partner in true love, the true love of the absolute God will abide with you. Thus, a true couple moves toward the future world with one hope, cherishing God's true love.

Upon this foundation, true children can be born, and the family will enjoy prosperity. Our ultimate hope is to transcend the sphere of a couple's life through true love and form a family harmonizing with God's ideal of true love. (294-066, 1998.06.11)

5. If there were no God, living on earth would be no fun. What do you want to see with your eyes?

You want to see good things. When you go to a movie, you want to see a good movie, not a bad one. You want it to move you and inspire you. You also would like to hear good things; you would rather not hear bad things. Among all good sounds, you want to hear the best.

People want to see, hear, smell, and touch the best of everything. What is the best thing of all? It is love. Then who owns love? Who is the King of kings of love? It is God, who created heaven and earth. (037-021, 1970.12.22)

6. The omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God, the King of wisdom, uses His power to transform the worst things in the human world into the best things. While doing this, God inevitably finds Himself making absolute demands on people based on love, as appears most fitting to Him.

But being such a boss, what should God do? In that position, it seems as if God sometimes uses His power to make things as He likes. But even if He does so, He is making these demands out of love because He takes this position not for Himself but for others.

For this reason, those who live for themselves have nothing to do with God. To have a relationship of love with God, you cannot live for yourself. If you do so, you move far away from God.

However, if you live for others rather than for yourself, you too may sometimes have to act like a boss. Nevertheless, if you do so for the sake of others, you absolutely will become the owner of love. That is God. Therefore, we can say that in essence, God is the One whose existence as a unique being is based on love and caring for others. (175-155, 1988.04.16)

7. God is a loving ruler. He is a loving ruler who eternally lives for the sake of others. He is such a God. Therefore, if you want to have a relationship with Him, stay together with Him, and enjoy His reign in the realm of love, you too have to assert yourself through a life of loving and caring for others. Otherwise, you are neglecting your relationship with God. (175-157, 1988.04.16)

8. Even the absolute God wants to obey true love absolutely. This view is not to be found in Christian theology. In the history of Christian civilization, people seeking power caused much bloodshed. They believed that everything could be achieved through power.

They also believed that God could do whatever He pleased, but this was wrong. Even the God of absolute power is searching for a place where love can settle, a place where love can be secured. God adores love. How much does He adore it? He adores it more than He likes exercising His absolute power, more than He likes being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

What does this mean? For the sake of love, God absolutely obeys love, even if He has to abandon everything else. Only then does it all make sense. We say God is the Father of all humankind, don't we? If He is, could He, as the Father, tell His sons and daughters that they must obey the law of love if He did not live in obedience to Himself?

It is an indispensable root principle that God can teach His children to live in absolute obedience to love only because He does so. He can affirm that they should live that way because He is doing so. (207-261, 1990.11.11)

9. If you ask what is true, I would answer, “absolute love.” Even the absolute God must absolutely obey true love. When a man and a woman love each other so much that they cannot live without each other, they can each go beyond their life. Each can sacrifice his or her life for the sake of the beloved.

To become one with their beloved, they are willing to sacrifice everything, the past, the present, and the future. If this is true of love even in this fallen world, how much stronger is perfect love, the love God wanted, in the original world? Life is not the issue. God can deny even His own life for true love.

That is the power of true love. If God could do whatever He pleased with love, the world of peace could not come about. By the arbitrary use of His power He could bring about one unified world, but without harmonious giving and receiving between people who love and care for one another, it would not be a world of peace and unity. (289-274, 1998.02.01)

We are born for true love

10. Why did God create all things? It was to have object partners whom He could love. He wanted to create a realm of object partners with whom to share love. He wanted people to be able to live on earth and then return to the original world and dwell in His eternal, original homeland of love.

The man was born for women, and the woman was born for man, all because of love. Why do men and women desire love? It is for the sake of God's love. This is the truth. (142-076, 1986.03.01)

11. God is absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal; these are His attributes. Therefore, His love is absolute, unique, unchanging,g and eternal. If you are seeking the path of love while leading a self-centered life, you will come to a dead end.

When a man and a woman love each other with absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal love, God's attributes manifest as absolute love, unique love, unchanging love, and eternal love. We are born resembling the eternal God so that we may attain eternal life; hence, we ought to live our lives based on eternal true love. True love is not two, but one; it is unique.

But no matter how unique and absolute love is, there would be serious problems if it were changeable. Therefore, love also must be eternally unchanging. (400-067, 2002.12.27)

12. The ownership of absolute love, which is one of God's main attributes, develops in an unbroken line from the individual to the family, tribe, people, nation, world, and cosmos. This is how it develops.

Upon achieving this, the ages of the individual, family, tribe, people, nation, and world will lead to one extended world of which they will all be a part, connected to the one center, God.

If we had grown up naturally as we should have, we would have reached a vertical position centered on the internal attributes of the incorporeal God, which we originally should have possessed.

Our center would have been God, the original absolute Owner, whose position is that of the masculine subject partner. This is as it would have been in the world without the Fall. (404-246, 2003.02.05)

13. Adam and Eve are the body of the absolute Creator. They were made to be His body. The substantial world was meant to stimulate Him, but God, being an incorporeal existence, cannot relate to it directly.

So God, who was dwelling in the minds of Adam and Eve, hoped that they would grow to maturity. However, while God was waiting for them to mature, Adam and Eve fell. If they had not fallen,

their children would have been God's sons and daughters, inheriting His direct lineage. God was to have been the root of our lineage. He was to have been the root of love. But due to the Fall, the root based on God's love was not secured. (141-039, 1986.02.16)

14. After He created our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, what standard did God want to uphold for them? He absolutely did not intend to keep them in a milieu of sorrow, pain, and unhappiness.

God created Adam and Eve as the base of His work, the nest of His heart, and the object partners of His love. God is naturally the God of goodness. Since the God of goodness created this world, He created it to be good.

The environment in which Adam and Eve dwelt should also have been good. This was God's purpose and idea at the time of creation. (8-173, 1959.12.13)

15. What was God's attitude when He created Adam and Eve as His object partners of love? It was to invest everything for them and then forget how much He had done. This is the basic spirit behind the origin of the cosmos. However, when Adam and Eve fell, they reversed this principle.

God sacrificed Himself and invested Himself completely to create them as His second selves and His object partners. He wanted His object partners to be even better than Himself. But human beings, ever since the Fall, are inclined to sacrifice others for their own sake.

That is why this fallen world promotes selfish individualism. It brings about destruction and a hell on earth that has spread worldwide. This is our present world. (254-028, 1994.02.01)

The ideal of creation, which is fulfilled through love

16. God is incorporeal. From the origin, He divides Himself to such an extent that He becomes invisible. That is, since He divides Himself infinitely, He becomes invisible. Then, when these divisions come into union, God is born again, grows up, and reaches the zenith. Then how can God perfect Himself?

This may be the first time you have heard such a question, but it makes sense. God too has to reach perfection. I am not talking about the perfection of knowledge, for God is omniscient. The ideal of creation is not about the perfection of wealth or power, but the perfection of love. (222-316, 1991.11.06)

17. God is the Absolute Being, but He also absolutely needs love. God also exists because of love. He lives for love. Each human being was born to embody the internal quality of one of God's dual characteristics.

Adam resembles half of God's character and Eve resembles the other half. Therefore, neither can reach perfection alone. A man cannot reach perfection on his own and a woman cannot reach perfection on her own. A man has to meet a woman, and a woman has to meet a man. (166-206, 1987.06.07)

18. How can human beings reach perfection? There is no way that, on their own, a man can perfect himself or a woman can perfect herself. This is because each is only half complete.

They can only be perfected fully through total unity in love. Furthermore, to reach perfection, Adam and Eve needed God. They require a vertical relationship with Him.

That is, for their perfection, Adam and Eve require both vertical and horizontal relationships of love. Otherwise, they cannot engage in the circular and spherical motions of love. For this reason, Adam requires his horizontal relationship with Eve. By the same token, Eve requires Adam. (145-321, 1986.06.01) 19.

For the sake of love, God divided Himself into man and woman. The invisible God, as one united being, cannot experience the stimulation of love. It was to feel this stimulation that He divided Himself into man and woman, manifesting His incorporeal substance into corporeal substance. He manifested His incorporeal internal nature and external form in the substantial realm of corporeal internal nature and external form.

These must become one if they are to return stimulation to the realm of incorporeal substance. Since God exists as the incorporeal substantial being, corporeal substantial beings must become one with God through the love of their incorporeal internal nature and external form.

So when a man and a woman become substantial object partners by becoming one with each other, they finally become the partners of God's love.
(253-255, 1994.01.30)

20. The creation of human beings, God's manifestation in substance, reflects God's growth. God finds this process interesting and stimulating. Human beings feel the same way.

An artist paints with the idea of creating a masterpiece that can express his or her inner attributes fully and substantially. To achieve this, the artist has to wrench the essence and energy from deep inside his or her bone marrow and invest that into the work. (225-200, 1992.01.20)