Authors
1. Genesis 1:27 reads: “So God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” What kind of being is God? God is a being within whom there are subject and object aspects.
All seeds resemble their origin. Because God is the original cause of the universe, all created seeds are in God's image. When you look at a seed, regardless of what kind, you see there are two halves wrapped in one outer layer.
This reveals the image of God Himself. God's personality comprises plus and minus characteristics connected to the origin of life. In this way, God recreates His image and relates with those created beings as His counterparts.
Adam is His subject-partner image, and Eve is His object-partner image. Then, why did God create them as separate beings? It is because He wanted to have them each grow to perfection individually. (53-113, 1972.02.11)
The ideal family of God's creation
2. When man is perfected and woman is perfected, the two are to join as subject and object partners.
Before joining as one, they receive love as God's son and daughter. After they grow to perfection by receiving that love, they are to become one. They are brought into union and bound as husband and wife. That is the origin of the family. When they come into union, whom do they resemble?
They resemble God, the subject partner, and become His object partners. Then, as His object partners, they can do what God the absolute subject partner has done. That is, as they rise to the position where they can form a subject-object relationship with each other, as God can within Himself through the powerful force of love, a new life can emerge.
Just as God created people, people can also give birth to sons and daughters through the power of love. Through God's love, we are not only given the ability to create children and thus to stand in the same position as God but we are also given the heart to love our children so that we can feel the pleasure and joy God felt when He created His children and all things in heaven and earth.
In the end, we should fully inherit the filial love, the conjugal love, and the parental love that dwells within God. This is the wellspring of happiness that lies within us. (53-113, 1972.02.11)
3. The world in which we live is not the ideal world that God originally intended. Various religions pursue God's Will over human will. But what is the Will of God? Unless we clearly understand God's Will, we can't find a way to fulfill it.
God's Will is the fulfillment of the ideal of creation. What is that ideal? God created human beings after creating all things. Ultimately, God wanted not only to exercise dominion over the creation through the first human ancestors, Adam and Eve but also to bring about a family under His love. In the Unification Church, we define this as the fulfillment of the four-position foundation. (80-268, 1975.11.02)
4. God's Will is the actualization of the ideal of creation; concretely, it is the completion of the four-position foundation. To achieve this, Adam and Eve must be perfected as God's children and receive God's loving blessing in their marriage. Thus, they first become God's son and daughter, and later husband and wife.
They should have sons and daughters and build a family that God is delighted to see. This means guiding their children to reach perfection. In conclusion, the ideal world of creation is the ideal family of unified love, where God and His children, Adam and Eve, become one. Then, with God's love at the center, Adam and Eve become parents and create unity with their children. (80-269, 1975.11.02)
5. God's Will is to fulfill His ideal for the created universe; that is, His purpose of creation. God surely had a purpose in creating; therefore, He will bring it to pass. Adam and Eve were at the center of that purpose. In the Unification Church, we teach that God's purpose is to complete His ideal of creation.
The purpose of creation is to realize God's ideal through Adam and Eve's establishing the four-position foundation. Centered on God, Adam, and Eve were to attain total oneness within the realm of God's love, which they could never have left, even if they had tried.
Their family would have become the center and the starting point of love, attending God above as the Father while standing as the ancestors of humanity on the earth below. When God created Adam and Eve, He anticipated the moment when Adam could relate fully to Eve, when the two would attain oneness in heart and body through their union in love.
This was the ideal He wished to see become real. Adam and Eve were to become one in love as husband and wife and give birth to sons and daughters who would be one with their parents. God's Will would then have been fulfilled, based on His love, and the Adamic cultural realm would have emerged. (110-213, 1980.11.18)
6. God's purpose of creation is complete only when the four-position foundation is established and entered into God's love. The four-position foundation refers to true sons and daughters, true husband and wife, and true parents; in other words, Adam and Eve and their children, with God at their center.
Forming the four-position foundation entails the completion of the three-object-partner purpose. From the perspective of God at the center, there is a path of love going to Adam, a path of love going to Eve, and paths of love going to their sons and daughters.
This love is to bear one fruit: children. Sons and daughters are the fruit of the love of their parents, a mother, and father, and at the same time, the fruit of God's love. The fact that you can state, “I have true children,” means that you are finally standing in a position where you can relate to the love of the entire universe.
(82-276, 1976.02.01)
7. God's ideal for our first ancestors was that an ideal man and an ideal woman would create an ideal family. But the center of that ideal family would be neither the man nor the woman. The husband and wife would be bonded together, with God's love at their center.
A family is ultimately a gathering of parents and children. Accordingly, the completion of God's Will refers to the perfection of husband and wife and the perfection of a family, all centered on God's love. (127-010, 1983.05.01)
8. God did not create Adam and Eve just to gaze upon them. He did not create men and women to have them age and die. They were created to grow to maturity, to reach the age when their hearts would long to relate to someone of the opposite sex.
Then they were to build the true kingdom of heaven of humanity on earth. They were created to build a cozy home of love with God at the center, a home where the man, Adam, would represent heaven, and the woman, Eve, would represent earth.
Thus, although they were two, their horizontal union would unify heaven and earth. When the man and woman achieved perfect unity in God's love, the cosmos would naturally harmonize with them. (21-044, 1968.09.01)
9. The essence of the Unification Church's teaching is simple: the formation of an ideal family in which God can rejoice. The Divine Principle explains the attributes of God. Among them are the attributes of internal character and external form, and yin and yang.
These are connected and centered on God's love. Thus, we can say that love is the mainstream of all of God's attributes. God's love has the attribute of absoluteness. It is also unique, unchanging, and eternal. Therefore, a husband and wife bound together through God's love are an absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal couple. The same is true for their children.
God's ideal is to build families that form the realm of three generations connected to God's love. In such a family, the parents would be absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal parents, and the same would be true for the husband and wife and the children. That united entity, absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal, constitutes God's ideal family.
God is present in such a family. As such a family expands to become a tribe, a people, a nation, the world, and the cosmos, the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven comes into being. In the midst of this, God exists as the Parent, Teacher, and King. (391-195, 2002.08.22)
The ideal base upon which we live in attendance to God
10. Adam and Eve were the substantial manifestations of God's dual characteristics. In God's heart, there is nothing greater than the ideal of love in the perfect family, which is the supreme ideal of love: the perfect love of children, siblings, husband and wife, and parents. Even the invisible spirit world and the visible substantial world came from the division of God's dual characteristics.
The perfection of the heart of children, siblings, husband and wife, and parents is the highest goal and purpose that God desires to attain. Once these are substantially perfected, God descends and engages with them in their perfection. Conjugal love is the point where not only children's love and siblings' love but also all other types of love, meet.
Thus, the realm of union in love is created on the first night of the marriage of a man and woman. At that point of union of east, west, north, and south, the man and woman become completely one with God and experience the greatest joy. It is the same for God, who can experience the true joy of creation only through the perfect maturity of Adam and Eve. (235-027, 1992.08.24)
11. Where would Heaven's palace have emerged had Adam and Eve not fallen? It would have been in the place where heaven and earth meet as one. Then why did God create Adam and Eve as two? It is because they each needed their period to grow to maturity.
They should have reached maturity on the horizontal level and then entered the stage where they could reach perfect oneness. Then and there the vertical God could have come into them and brought them into union.
This means that the vertical God would have entered the place where Adam and Eve horizontally became one, and their family would have become the home of true love. The home of true love where God could dwell was to have been Adam and Eve's home. That would have been God's dwelling place.
(161-307, 1987.03.01)
12. Adam and Eve were meant to live with the hope of receiving God's Blessing in marriage. If Adam and Eve had believed in and followed God's commandment not to eat the fruit, they, as God's only son and daughter, would have brought into being a family that realized God's Will.
This was intended according to the Principle. People need to keep hope alive in their hearts. With hope, we have to pass through a process and period of faith to build an eternal relationship. Our hope and faith are fulfilled on the day we can receive God's love for the first time. That is the Principle. (5-108, 1959.01.04)
13. God is the subject partner of love for young children, men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. When we look at families based on these criteria, it becomes clear that the family is the highest realm of love.
Had Adam and Eve reached perfection through love, without falling, they would have become the first son and first daughter of God. Their family would have become the home of love. (219-022, 1991.08.25)
14. Through Adam's perfection, Eve would also have attained perfection, and through Adam and Eve's perfection, God would have seen the beginning of the family centered on love. Had that happened, there is no question that from this perfected family the tribe, people, nation, and world that could attend God would have arisen and God, Adam and Eve would have been at the very center of them all.
With God as their center, Adam and Eve's way of life and their life course would have remained in history as the tradition by which to live together with God. In that case, their habits, customs, rituals, and way of life inevitably would have stood as traditions bound up with God's love throughout history. (091-240, 1977.02.23)
15. Had our original ancestors, Adam and Eve, not fallen but instead become a family centered on God, on that day they would have fulfilled God's ideal of creation and ushered in the day of God's joy.
It would have been the first day on which the love uniting God and humanity would have taken root on earth. It would also have been the day Adam and Eve embarked upon the journey of becoming the True Parents. On that day, all people, and all things of creation would have rejoiced. (28-008, 1970.01.01)
16. Adam's family should have realized the true love of God's ideal. God created Adam and Eve, our first ancestors, with the expectation that they would substantiate and complete His internal nature and convey His Will and love to the universe. Had they done so, Adam, Eve, and their children would have established the fundamental Principle for all humanity to follow.
Their descendants would have achieved mind-body unity and become individually one with God, creating families in which husbands and wives and parents and children were united. These families would have created a stable foundation overflowing with freedom, peace, happiness, and hope that would have spread throughout the earth.
Under God's ideal, this model would not have been limited to the family or nation; it would have expanded to the world and the entire universe. The model of the kingdom of heaven realized in the family was to expand to a nation; the kingdom of heaven in a nation was to expand to the world; and the global kingdom of heaven was to expand to the cosmos. (288-167, 1997.11.27)
17. When children become God's princes and princesses, they enter into a parent-child relationship with God and inherit everything from Him. When these children marry and attain conjugal oneness based on true love, they form families living in attendance to God, and those families become the foundation of peace and the ideal.
Man and woman, each being half of the whole, unite and complete God's ideal love as His partners. Looking at God and Adam's family, God would be considered the first generation, Adam and Eve the second generation, and their children the third generation.
God was to have been in the position of grandparents, Adam and Eve in the position of parents, and their children in the position of sons and daughters.
Through these three generations settling in one family, the grandfather, and grandmother would have had the position of God in the kingdom of heaven in heaven and the position of the king and queen representing the earthly realm and the heavenly realm.
The parents would have taken the position of the king and the queen of the kingdom of heaven on earth, and the children would have held the position of princes and princesses, inheriting the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven while representing the future. (254-107, 1994.02.01)
Sun Myung Moon