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True Parents' Advent and the Era of True Parents
Adam and Eve, the first human ancestors, should have obeyed God's commandment, “Do not eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil,” and safely passed through the growing period.
Had they done so, they would have become perfected human beings, then received the marriage of Blessing as the first husband and wife, and become the good ancestors of humankind.
However, Adam and Eve were unable to overcome Satan's temptation. While they were still in the growing period before they reached individual perfection, specifically at the completion level of the growth stage, they ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and committed the original sin.
In doing so, they defiled God's lineage. As a result, Adam and Eve could not become the good human ancestors. Instead, they begat evil descendants, who formed fallen families, fallen tribes, fallen societies, fallen nations and the fallen world. This brought about hell on earth and in heaven. This was something that God never intended.
To save fallen humanity, God sent Jesus as the Messiah to the Jewish people, whom He had chosen and prepared for 4,000 years. Jesus was God's only-begotten Son and the Messiah, who was to fulfill the mission of the Second Adam.
If the Jewish people had believed in Jesus and united with him, he would have chosen a woman from among them as the Second Eve to be his Bride. Together, they would have received the marriage Blessing and become the first God-centered husband and wife and the True Parents of humankind. Thus, they would have fulfilled the work of the providence of human salvation.
Jesus came as the Messiah, and his true significance was that he was the Second Adam. When his path was blocked midway due to the disbelief of the chosen people, God had to carry out the dispensation to send the Messiah again, this time as the Third Adam.
The 2,000-year history of Christianity was a providence of spiritual salvation. The resurrected Jesus and the Holy Spirit led this providence by performing the work of rebirth. This work laid the foundation upon which humankind would welcome the Third Adam, the Messiah at the Second Advent.
The Returning Messiah will not descend from the sky; as in the time of Jesus, he will be born of a woman as a baby who is God's only-begotten Son. Just as the Jews were meant to attend Jesus, Christians are meant to believe in and attend the Messiah at the Second Advent.
The returning Messiah needs to uncover and clarify every detail behind how the first human ancestors came to commit the original sin. In so doing, he must reveal the identity of Satan and remove the root of sin.
Then, the returning Messiah must prevail over the realms of the spirit world in a life-and-death struggle and finally bring Satan to voluntary submission. Based on this accomplishment, he must be recognized by countless leaders and founders of religious traditions as the returning Messiah, the True Father.
Moreover, the Messiah at the Second Advent needs to find the embodiment of the Holy Spirit, God's begotten Daughter who has been prepared as the fruit of the providence of salvation. When he receives her as his Bride, God's Will finally can take root on earth.
What has just been described is how, through the Messiah at the Second Advent, God will fulfill the providence of inaugurating the True Parents. For this purpose, God enabled two people to be born on earth.
Sun Myung Moon is the True Father; he is the Messiah at the Second Advent and the Third Adam. Hak Ja Han is the True Mother; she comes as the Bride of the Messiah at the Second Advent, the Third Eve, and the embodiment of the Holy Spirit.
They were both born in Korea, a country with a long history, whose people have maintained its rich culture and traditions. The country's founding principle encompasses heaven and earth, “Benefit all humankind and transform the world with principles.” It is a country that has long cherished peace, and its suffering people have revered God.
True Father was born on the 6th day of the 1st lunar month in 1920, in Jeongju, North Pyeongan Province. God raised him through his childhood and youth for His special providence. Then, at Easter time, when he was 15 years old, Jesus appeared to him and urged him to accept God's call to inherit the mission of the Lord at the Second Advent.
For the next 12 years, he set out on a bloody path of suffering to clarify the truth. Finally, he discovered the Principle of Creation, the Human Fall and the root of sin, human beings' portion of responsibility, and the principles underlying the providence of restoration through indemnity. He also unraveled the tangled course of the history of the providence of salvation.
God sent the Returning Lord as the central figure of the providence of restoration through indemnity. At the same time, He also conducted the providence to restore the Third Eve, who is to come as the spouse of the Returning Lord.
Around the time of True Father's birth, a spiritual awakening began in Korea. True Mothers fathers and mothers also joined and became part of that movement.
True Mother was born on the 6th day of the 1st lunar month in 1943, at the home of her maternal grandparents in Anju, South Pyeongan Province. True Mother grew up in a family with three successive generations of only daughters – her grandmother Jo Won-mo; her mother Hong Soon-ae (Daemonim), and True Mother – a family that believed that the Returning Lord would be born on earth. Spiritual recognition of True Mother included a blessing on her when she was just six years old, that she would become Heaven's Bride. That blessing was given by the mother of Rev. Heo Ho-bin, of the Inside the Womb Church.
Shortly after Korea recovered its independence on August 15, 1945, it was divided into North and South. True Father began his public ministry centered on Christianity in South Korea. Because of the disbelief of the prepared spiritual groups, True Father had to go to Pyongyang in North Korea, where he continued to witness.
There, however, due to false accusations of the communist party and the jealousy of the established Christian churches, he was sent to prison. The True Father ended up going twice through an indescribable path of suffering.
Nevertheless, he was able to establish a victorious foundation of restoration through indemnity, both spiritually and physically, by the time he was released from the Hungnam Labor Camp during the Korean War.
Thereafter, he headed south and finally, on May 1, 1954, founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul. In the year in which True Father reached the age of 33, he set the condition to indemnify Jesus' suffering life of 33 years.
On that foundation, the True Father made a new beginning with an Abel-type religious organization to carry the providence on behalf of Christianity.
After the founding of the Holy Spirit Association, many Christian believers who heard the words of the Principle that the True Father introduced were moved and flocked to him. However, other Christian denominations felt threatened and redoubled their efforts to persecute him.
Their false accusations even caused him to be imprisoned again. Despite these troubles, his followers came to have even firmer faith in the True Father as the Messiah during the Second Advent. Their faith enabled him to set and fulfill the condition for success in bringing the providence of restoration to the completion level of the growth stage.
Hence, on April 11, 1960, 14 years after he began his public ministry following the liberation of Korea, he finally received his Bride. She was the True Mother, whom God had specially raised and prepared to be the embodiment of the Holy Spirit while protecting her and keeping her separated from evil.
On that day, the Holy Wedding of the True Parents was held, which instituted the marriage Blessing. With it, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb foretold in Chapter 19 of the Book of Revelation finally took place.
That prophecy denoted the Holy Wedding of the Messiah at the Second Advent when he would receive his prepared Bride, the embodiment of the Holy Spirit, and they would become the True Husband and True Wife.
That historic day opened the gate to the realization of the ideal of creation that God, the Creator of heaven and earth, had cherished since the very beginning. It ushered in the day when Adam and Eve, as originally envisioned at the time of Creation, could be manifested as True Parents.
Finally, it became possible for humankind to receive the grace of rebirth, by which they can completely be rid of original sin.
In 1994, after True Parents had worked for 40 years with the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity to bring unity and restore through indemnity all the conditions necessary to bring Satan to submission, they founded the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification to continue in its place.
Through the Family Federation, True Parents are proclaiming that the ideal world as originally intended at the time of creation will be built through the expansion throughout the world of ideal families, centered on the True Parents, who have come to earth as the true ancestors of humankind.
Through the Enthronement Ceremony for God's Kingship, which was held on January 13, 2001, and the Cheon Jeong Gung Entrance Ceremony and Coronation of True Parents as the King and Queen of Peace in Heaven and on Earth, held on June 13, 2006, True Parents dissolved God's bitter sorrow by restoring His sovereignty over the cosmos.
In this way, they laid the foundation for the kingdom of God to take firm root on earth. Finally, they established the 13th day of the 1st month by the heavenly calendar, in 2013, as the Foundation Day of the Cosmic Nation of Peace and Unity (of ).
In the final reporting prayer of his earthly life, 21 days before his Holy Ascension on the 17th day of the 7th month by the heavenly calendar (September 3) in 2012, the True Father declared that the providence of salvation had been concluded. He instructed all blessed members to take on the mission of tribal messiahs who can represent their nations, and he proclaimed, “Everything is finished.”
As True Father and True Mother together, True Parents perfected the dual characteristics of the incorporeal God in corporeal form. They are the models that humanity needs to emulate and learn from, by studying their lives, their teachings, the traditions they established, and their achievements.
True Parents are the original root. They are absolute, unique, and unprecedented, and they will never come again. True Parents' light will forever illuminate the world with the truth and love of God.
The perfected Adam and Eve
God created human beings to experience joy for eternity. Adam and Eve, the first ancestors of humankind, were created to be the object partners of God's absolute true love. Humanity had to originate from one ancestral couple. God created true love to flow in one stream; hence, He cannot begin another stream of true love from someone other than one man and one woman.
If Adam and Eve had become perfect through God's absolute love and multiplied good descendants, they could have realized an ideal family. Everyone in that family would have attended God the Creator as their vertical, incorporeal true parent and perfected Adam and Eve as their horizontal, substantial True Parents on earth.
Adam and Eve's true family would have expanded into Adam and Eve's clan.
Their clan would have prospered, expanded into society and nation, and ultimately built a world that fulfilled God's three great blessings to “be fruitful, and multiply, and have dominion over all things.” That world would have been nothing less than the ideal kingdom of heaven that God intended to build on earth.
1. From seeing Adam and Eve who were created in His image, we can understand that God exists with the dual characteristics of masculinity and femininity. It is because God has both of these characteristics that God created Adam and Eve.
Therefore, Adam and Eve needed to become one as subject partner and object partner, as a perfect man and a perfect woman. Had they done so, they would have reached a position equal to that of God. Then they would have given birth to sons and daughters and given them the same love that God gave them when creating them.
Human beings were God's greatest masterpieces among all created beings. He created them so that they could also stand in the position of creating such masterpieces, human beings, as their children. God therefore expected Adam and Eve to become completely one as husband and wife. Then, when looking at the children born from their perfect union, Adam and Eve would have inherited the tremendous joy that God experienced when He created them.
God imbued Adam and Eve with the love that would have enabled them to give birth to children and love them with that very love. In other words, Adam and Eve, being God's beloved children, totally received every single thing that God, the Absolute Being, had within Him. (053-166, 1972/02/19)
2. The original Adam and Eve were God's body. What I am saying is that these originally good ancestors of humanity were to be a substantial manifestation of God. God wanted to enter their minds and become one with them in physical form. In that state, even as God wanted to give them more and more, God and human beings would revolve around each other. Spinning like a rotor, they would become completely one.
Had such seeds of love been sown, their descendants, humankind, would have borne the fruit. Then, no matter how far you dissected that seed, its core substance would never change. However, because of the Fall, that seed needs to be dismantled and repaired; it must be fundamentally repaired, but this is impossible unless they bring God back into their lives and attend to Him.
God created heaven and earth to share His life and love. This is why God, the incorporeal One, brings forth a man and a woman as the eternal embodiments of His love. They are the True Parents, the good human ancestors, whom He now introduces to humanity as the central substance of His love. (038-173, 1971/01/03)
3. The original Adam and Eve were to have been the True Parents. As fathers and Mothers, they would have been the center of the family and regarded as the king and queen of the family. Their sons and daughters would have been the heirs who could become future kings and queens. If the original ancestors, Adam and Eve, had not fallen, God would have been the grandparents who bequeathed His kingship to their family. That is why the True Father and True Mother are the kings and queens of their family and represent all families in all nations. They are the original king and queen of the family, and you as their sons and daughters are in the position of princes and princesses who will inherit their kingship in the future as members of the royal family. (221-255, 1991/10/25)
4. Due to the Fall of the human ancestors, God lost the true ancestors of humankind as He had envisioned them according to the ideal of creation. Human beings, no matter how great or how wealthy, even if they have the power to move the entire world, are still from the lineage of their fallen ancestors. This is a most lamentable truth. People who are descended from fallen ancestors are bound to plummet down to Satan's hell. People throughout history have been searching for the original Lord, the original Parents who are the true ancestors who can embrace fallen humanity as their true children. For this, God strove to recover the positions of Adam and Eve before the Fall, following the path of restoration continually for 4,000 years, (154-261, 1964/10/03)
5. Adam and Eve, had they not fallen, would have become the true ancestors of humankind. They would have become the True Father and True Mother, the True Parents of humankind, in the flesh. However, Adam and Eve fell, and humankind became Satan's children. Suppose Adam and Eve had not fallen, but instead had become a man and woman imbued with God's heart. They would have joined in holy matrimony as God rejoiced over them, and become the True Parents of humankind. Then the created world would have united with them in harmony, and joyfully provided their family with everything they needed.
Had Adam and Eve become a true son and daughter before God, had they become a true husband and wife as the model for all human beings, and had they become the True Parents of humankind who could attend God as their eternal Parent, they would have been able to sing with joy and happiness throughout their lives. No one would ever have been able to lead them away because they would have belonged solely to the one Lord. Their heart and their love would have belonged to the one Lord. Their one Lord would have been God. (009-137, 1960/05/01)
6. The Fall disrupted Adam's family. Therefore, the goal of restoration, to return to the original state before the Fall, is to restore Adam's family. God first strives to recover one individual who will be His partner; then he strives to recover one central family. Only after that can He strive to recover a church, a people, a nation, and then the world.
Throughout history, God has been seeking a family that could become His ideal object partner. Such is the True Family. The True Family is fundamentally different in substance from ordinary families. Unless that God-centered family can be recovered and aligned with God's ideal, there is no way to recover the ideal for the nation or the world. This is the reason that God must first establish the original True Family.
Similarly, salvation cannot be attained by individuals; rather, the basic unit of salvation is a true family.
Had it not been for the Fall, Adam, and Eve would have become the ideal husband and wife and, one step further, the True Parents. They would have become the True Parents to their posterity and all humankind.
Had humanity prospered with Adam and Eve as the True Parents, they would have built one great family and established a world of peace in the Adamic cultural sphere. (294-067, 1998/06/11)
7. The history of God's providence of restoration is sorrowful. The fact that God lost Adam and Eve is something to grieve over. The problem is that this loss did not end with those two individuals alone. Losing them meant losing their clan, and this lost clan has since expanded into peoples, nations, and the world. By losing Adam and Eve, God lost them all. Thus, the loss of Adam and Eve meant that God's kingdom and His sovereignty were lost. It meant the loss of God's family, God's call, and the people for His kingdom. It meant the loss of the ideal of man and woman, the loss of God's only son and daughter.
That is why the history of salvation, namely the history of the providence of restoration, is to recover one man and one woman, Adam and Eve. If Adam and Eve had not fallen but had prospered, today every single human being among the many billions of people on our planet would be registered in the heavenly kingdom. Everyone would naturally enter the heavenly kingdom as one family. (143-025, 1986/03/15)
8. Due to the fall of the first human ancestors, people could neither have true ancestors nor be true descendants. Even God could not stand in the position of True God. Nothing was centered on God, so there was no basis to build a true family, a true society, or a true nation. For this reason, we must seek the true root, and when we find it, we will also find a nation in which everyone can live together as one true family. That is why, through the providence of salvation, God has sought to build the one world, the world of hope, true peace, love, and oneness. To realize this purpose, God sends the Savior.
The True Parents must come to earth and teach humanity to make God their central focus as individuals, and to put God at the center of the family, the nation, and the world; by doing so, they are trying to return all humankind to the original world. Such is the course of the providence. (267-297, 1995/02/05)
9. God's hope is not for the Lord to return to the clouds in the sky and build a spiritual kingdom like a fantasy world. The reason he returns is to plant his feet on the ground and find the one Bride who can receive God's total love. He does this work to recover all that was lost because 6,000 years ago, the first human ancestors became the false ancestors.
Therefore, in the course of history, a perfect woman must emerge who is connected to God's love. She must join with the perfect man who lives in oneness with God's love. She can stand as the Bride of the Returning Lord, who comes as the Bridegroom. That time is at hand.
When they unite in this position, they are at the level of Adam and Eve before the Fall, when they are loved by God in the Garden of Eden. They have reached the point of receiving from God the three great blessings. With them emerges the foundational point on earth that Satan cannot invade. Had Adam and Eve stood in this victorious position as the ancestors of humankind, the archangel Lucifer would not have become Satan; rather, he would have attended them as a faithful servant. This is the Principle of Creation.
Because they lost that position, since that time, human beings have been orphans. Therefore, the True Parents of humankind, who can recover this position, must appear on Earth. (022-084, 1969/01/26)
10. The original Adam was one individual, yet he was meant to be the center of the family, the tribe, the nation, and the world. The culture would have been Adam's culture. From that culture, a language would have begun. Thus, everything would have developed and prospered. Accordingly, all the events that connect to True Parents can become sources for creating a new culture. From this new culture, a true history of humankind can finally unfold. True families, societies, peoples, nations, and a true world can emerge.
The teachings that True Parents have established as the tradition will be central in every age. Thus far, human beings have based their hope for the world on a vision of the future, but no longer. Rather than looking forward to something yet to be realized, we will advance centering on the teachings that True Parents are practicing here and now. It is based upon their teachings that history will advance.
The heavenly nation to be erected based on those teachings will establish the center of the past, the present, and the future. Once this nation is inaugurated, its culture will not be short-lived. It will extend to the world, and remain alive and well, becoming the source for future cultural development. There will be total oneness. It will be the same, whether at the beginning or the end. (050-251, 1971/11/07)
The true olive trees
We read in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, about the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that grew in the Garden of Eden. These two trees symbolize the perfect father and mother. Originally, the human ancestors, Adam and Eve, perfect and having nothing to do with the Fall, were to have been the roots of humankind. Having grown from those roots, all people were destined to live in the kingdom of heaven on earth. After death, they would pass on to the kingdom of heaven in heaven and live there eternally.
God's purpose of creation is for humanity to form a single God-centered family, in which all would be kin. Fallen human beings are wild olive trees, stemming from wild roots. They need to receive a graft from the true olive trees, True Parents, and be reborn as true human beings. By so.
By doing so, humanity can realize the world according to God's ideal of creation, the eternal ideal kingdom of heaven that should have sprouted from the Garden of Eden. Humanity hopes, to receive the True Parents, adopt the good traditions of their God-centered family, hand them down generation after generation, and thus build a united world of one language, one culture, and one sovereignty of God.
11. True Parents are united with the love and lineage of the absolute God. Hence, we can call the True Parents' family, which they established after their Holy Wedding, the true olive trees, while people in the fallen world are false olive trees. Then, if we make a cut in a false olive tree and graft a cutting from a true olive tree onto it, it will eventually belong to the family of true olive trees. This will connect people to God's true love, true life, true lineage, and true conscience, and they can reach perfection. When they do, the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven will unfold.
God could not have His third generation, His grandsons, and granddaughters. Satan has them and even has tribes of his own; they have multiplied to this day and built numerous countries. God, on the other hand, has never had even one perfect man or one perfect woman. The Messiah is the one who comes as the perfect man. He must find his Bride and establish the position of the True Parents through their marriage and by having children. On this basis, he can restore the original family of humankind. (344-198, 2001/03/09)
12. Had Adam and Eve become the True Parents of humankind, we would not have needed the Savior or religion. God would have found joy in the world of goodness that did not need religion. God wanted to build such a world on earth, but His desire was not fulfilled. The Fall means that Adam and Eve failed to unite with God. As a consequence, they failed to become True Parents; they became false parents instead.
Therefore, you must move from the false parents' lineage and return to God through the True Parents' Lineage. You are all descendants of those false olive trees. You should have been true olive trees, but you became false olive trees who need to be reborn by receiving a graft from the true olive trees. (023-162, 1969/05/18)
13. True Parents come as God's true olive trees. They are the ones who will give you rebirth. We cannot be born without parents; it is the law of heaven. True Parents come to earth having the root of God's true love, true life, and true lineage. Their mission is to cut down to their stumps the trees of fallen people, which were born from the root of false love, and graft the cuttings of true love onto them. We human beings must find the root of God's true love that comes from the true olive trees. Only in True Parents, it is possible to find that root. (494-013, 2005/04/27)
14. True Parents come with true love and true lineage. The false parents entangled human beings in false love and false lineage. We must build God-centered true families in the original world free of the Fall. To build families of true sons and daughters, we need to connect to the true lineage. To become True Parents' children, we must connect to their lineage. The parent-child relationship, or the father-son relationship, is impossible without the bond of blood. Not even God can sever that bond. Nor can Satan do it.
For this reason, to usher in the Completed Testament Age we must receive the marriage Blessing of True Parents. That way we can restore through indemnity the failures of the Old and New Testament Ages.
You were an orchard of false olive trees, but now you must become an orchard of true olive trees by receiving the graft of God's true lineage, the original standard. For this, you must achieve oneness in heart, oneness in body, and oneness in thought with True Parents, based on true love. (347-174, 2001/07/04)
15. True Parents refer to perfected Adam and Eve. It is this Adam and Eve who come to establish true families, true tribes, true peoples, true nations, the true world, the kingdom of heaven on earth, and the kingdom of heaven in heaven, finally even liberating God. True Parents stand in the position to fulfill everything on every level. They are the most precious beings that God ever sent to this world.
When you follow them with absolute faith, absolute love, and absolute obedience, you are certain to overcome any obstacle.
True Parents bequeath true love, true life, and true lineage. As children, we inherit these. The purpose of all religions is to lay the foundation on earth to inherit True Parents' accomplishments. Salvation cannot be accomplished without a connection to true love, true life, and true lineage. The world has fallen because the false parents bound humankind with false love, life, and lineage, with the result that human beings fell into hell. To turn this around 180 degrees, True Parents must emerge and connect humankind to true love, true life, and true lineage. The marriage Blessing engrafts cuttings from the true olive trees onto the false olive trees. (362-011, 2001/12/02)
16. True Parents come as the true olive trees. When the false children of this world receive a graft from the true olive trees, they can then be harvested as restored, reborn fruits that are free from the Fall and stored in the barns of the heavenly kingdom. This is the responsibility of the Messiah on earth. The
The Messiah comes with the seed of true children based on true love. Due to the bonds of false love, false life, and false lineage that resulted from the Fall, human beings became children of the enemy Satan, children whom God did not desire. Since they were tied to that lineage by false love, God has been conducting the providence of salvation to purify them. (252-228, 1994/01/01)
Dr. Sun Myung Moon