On the Occasion of the Signing of the Seoul Peace Declaration

 

The Owners of Re-creation

 

Keynote Address

Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon

 

August 15, 2003, Seoul, Korea

 

  

Respected present and former heads of state, leaders dedicated to accomplishing God’s ideal, youth and university student leaders, ladies and gentlemen:

 

I would like first to give thanks to God, who has left behind the darkness and melancholy of the past century to bless the new millennium with bountiful hope and dreams of peace. I have invited you to hold this conference in Korea. This is the only nation on Earth where the sharp conflict between democracy and communism continues even to the present. From an individual perspective, this is my own homeland, but, from the perspective of God’s providence, the Korean peninsula—though small in size—is the central country of the twenty-first century that must bring about peace for humankind.

 

I will speak today on the topic, “The Owners¹ of Re-creation,” to help you understand God’s providence and to clarify our mission and responsibility in building a world of peace.

 

Respected guests, we live in the age of a great providential revolution. All nations and religions must now transcend past ways of living, and understand that, for very practical reasons, it is necessary to live in exact accordance with a new understanding of God’s providence. This applies not only in the earthly world but also in the world after death, the spirit world, where we all must go and live when we have shed our physical bodies.

 

The Ambassadors for Peace I have appointed throughout the world now number in the tens of thousands. Newly inaugurated Ambassadors for Peace sometimes ask, “How should we conduct our lives?” They have to live according to the established formula that the Unification Movement has followed in the course of its history. They should clearly understand the reality of the spiritual world and its direct connection with the earthly world. Awareness of this spiritual reality should naturally form the core guiding concept for their lives. They should have conviction to live in accordance with this awareness so as to become one with the spiritual world. They must develop confidence that this is the framework within which they are to live.

 

Over the decades, the contents of my sermons have not changed. To fulfill God’s will in the new world you must live according to these teachings. Whether or not you do so determines whether or not you can play a central role in the realization of the ideal Kingdom of Heaven. Now that you know this, if you have lived a life based merely on vague concepts until now you must change and live a life that substantially embodies these ideas. Through such a lifestyle, you can unite Heaven, the spiritual world and the physical world. The Kingdom of Heaven on earth and in the spiritual world can only be realized if we reach beyond our individual lives and live for the nation.

 

We must understand that an owner of the Peaceful Universal Homeland² is someone who establishes a new standard that enables people in nations around the world to transcend their current ways of thinking that have been based on traditional philosophies and concepts. An owner of the Peaceful Universal Homeland is someone who progresses to a new, higher dimension.

 

I was twenty-five or twenty-six when I launched the Unification Movement. Please understand that I founded this association based on the essential unification principles. Those who joined this movement at that time lived together with the True Parents and helped in the work to usher in a new world.

 

Due to the Fall, humanity completely lost the world God originally created, and even lost God Himself. In doing the work of re-creation, therefore, I have been responsible to create again the position that Adam would have occupied had he not fallen, that is, to work to rebuild the world God created but lost at the time of the Fall. I have to liberate God from being a God of grief so that He can become a God of happiness.

 

On the foundation of the Unification Church, I established the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), and, later, offered God the “Coronation Ceremony for the Kingship of God” and “The Coronation of the King of the Blessed Families for the True Love, Peace and Unity of the Cosmic True Parent and the True Parents of Heaven and Earth.” Since the Fall, God has been unable to involve Himself in the created world, and yet now, through the indemnity offered by True Parents, He must completely restore it.

 

We need to understand that God is neither the “owner of re-creation” nor the owner who pays indemnity for the Fall. These were actually Adam’s responsibilities. So everything must be placed in its proper order within the time of Adam’s generation. Otherwise, there will be no way for God to stand in His original position. For this reason, although He is omniscient and omnipotent, God has worked hard through the long course of history without true sovereignty over the creation. We need to know this deeply lamentable fact.

 

God’s Kingdom and the realm of living with God in daily life expanded through the time periods aligned with the individual, family, tribe, people, nation, world, and cosmos. I hope each of you realize that you have to become a liberated person who can travel freely between the spirit world and the earthly world and become a person who can serve God. The mission of the perfected Adam will not be fulfilled until God’s Kingdom, beginning with His palace, is created and dedicated to Heaven.

 

The saints and sages now in the spiritual world are not yet living in glory. But with that goal in mind, they have been working continuously to achieve perfection. Please be sure that they will continue their efforts until they achieve the true love ideal, that is, the unified realm of the liberated earthly and spiritual worlds.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, you need to know that, if you are unable to complete this mission while on earth, you will find that, when you arrive in the world after death, you will need to go through a long training process to surmount all obstacles and fulfill whatever steps you could not complete.

 

We must understand that the time we have on earth offers an opportunity more precious than anything else in the universe. Please be aware that the work we do now is for the sake of inheriting and developing a path that is more precious than our own nation, more precious than the world we now live in, and more precious than our own love or life. The lives we lead from here on have indescribable value.

 

It is important to understand that it is not God’s responsibility to bring about His own liberation. It is our responsibility. If this were God’s responsibility, He would not have allowed Adam and Eve to fall. The staggering fact is that responsibility for the Fall lies with the family of Adam. Not a single person in history has fully understood this point. The phrase “owner of re-creation” does not refer to God but to your families. This is the reason our families are so important. The foundation of the Peaceful Universal Homeland, the world of God’s original ideal, is the family.

 

Please understand that when I founded this movement at the age of twenty-five, I did so with full knowledge of all these facts. You must therefore make a new beginning from that same original position.

 

Respected guests, do you know the main point of the speech I delivered at the ceremony marking the founding of the Family Party, ³ an educational movement to promote good governance? It concerned the registration of marriages and births. Here I refer not to my own marriage registration, but to God’s marriage registration and God’s birth registration. God was unable to hold a wedding ceremony together with Adam. He could not have a celebration of marriage. God, the owner of the creation of the cosmos, was unable to experience, together with Adam, the registration of a child’s birth. Why was this? It was because Adam had fallen.

 

Had there been no Fall, God’s love would have blossomed at the time of Adam and Eve’s blessed marriage. Due to the Fall, that dimension of God’s love went unfulfilled. This is the reason that the True Parents must liberate God on the foundation of having offered to God the “Coronation Ceremony for the Kingship of God.” God originally had complete autonomy and could do as He pleased with anything created in heaven or on earth, whether small or large. However, because of the Fall, He could not even take the initial steps as the owner of the Peaceful Universal Homeland. He could not assert Himself freely. We must understand this deeply regrettable reality.

 

It was the family of Adam and Eve that damaged the realm of freedom and re-creation that was originally to have liberated God. Therefore, only if the perfected family of Adam and Eve restores God’s authority of re-creation as it was in the original, unfallen world, can the universe at once be made anew. So if from this moment you resolve with deep conviction to renew your family in accordance with the direction of God’s will, then all will go well for you.

 

Why do we need religions? They came into existence due to the Fall which led to pain and grief. But the need for them will pass. You should know that Rev. Moon and Mrs. Moon, the True Parents, are working directly to liberate God so that He can live in His palace, and restore everything in the spiritual and earthly spheres to the domain of the kingship of Heaven.

 

If you understand these things, you should celebrate this day as a new beginning and become sons and daughters of God who have the strong conviction to fulfill your responsibilities with confidence. All that would then remain would be to raise a family with God at its center. You should also resolve to stand with the political party that is on Heaven’s side and go and set straight the countries that until now have been associated with parties on Satan’s side that have persecuted religions and thus brought grief to Heaven.

 

You must become owners who build the original homeland and hometown where you would like to live. You must become people who give true love to all of nature. All things, even plants and animals, must be re-created. Because of the Fall, they were cut off from true love. The sphere of true love only existed until Adam and Eve reached age sixteen, their age at the time of the Fall. After their Fall, this realm was rent asunder. We must now take responsibility as though it were our mistake, committed by our own hands, that led the entire world to ruin. A blessed family that resolves to take responsibility to restore this will be an owner of the Peaceful Universal Homeland.

 

Please realize that all humanity today stands in the position of having been born simultaneously into the realms of heaven and hell, or, one might say, the spiritual and earthly realms. But these two realms are now like brothers in one family. Therefore, you have to experience the heart of being in the kind of a family where the older and younger brothers are equally loved by their parents. Otherwise, when you go to spirit world, you will not be able to live as a perfected family qualified for the royal palace. Instead, you will wander around in circles for thousands, even tens of thousands of years.

 

As the ancestors of coming generations you must dedicate yourselves sincerely to initiating a pure lineage that preserves the proper order of love. You have a responsibility to your family that you must fulfill before you die, even if it means that you give your life hundreds of times. You must travel this path with a spirit that is constantly of one devoted heart, body, and mindset.

 

God Himself has been so serious, and I myself, who founded the Family Federation, have been deeply serious to establish a clear family tradition of purity and fidelity. So, like it or not, you must also do your best to run down this path with all your strength in order to achieve the goal.

 

A new age of heavenly understanding is coming. The age has arrived when nations can be established based on the families that have received God’s Holy Marriage Blessing. So you need to set everything straight and be on full alert. You must become families that produce unblemished princes and princesses fully qualified to accomplish God’s ideal of Creation. You need to know very clearly that our overall purpose is to inherit the foundation of such a victory, to live in attendance to God, and return to one nation, one culture, and one world—one realm that is an expansion of one brotherhood and one family—in eternal peace on earth and in heaven.

 

How wonderful it is that an organization such as the Family Party has emerged! Had Jesus completed the providence of restoration through indemnity, then married and raised a family, he could have also established a foundation for the Holy Marriage Blessing that would have brought the people of Israel into Heaven’s realm. He could have gone on to give the Holy Marriage Blessing in Rome. Then the Kingdom of God on earth and in heaven would have been realized by the time he was in his forties.

 

Israel and Palestine are fighting each other today because of Jesus’ death. Brothers are unable to become one in heart. At the time of Jesus, one religion, one culture, one nation, and one realm of heart should have emerged. When that did not happen, Islam, Judaism and Christianity came to exist separately. Please understand how much heartache this has given to God.

 

Currently, in America, there is a movement among the churches to take down their crosses, but it’s still a fledgling one. Jesus came as the True Parent of humanity but he was killed. Even if all of humankind were destroyed, they could never be worthy of forgiveness for the sin of killing the True Parent. The suffering of Israel over the past two thousand years, however dreadful and appalling, could not pay the price of forgiveness for the death of Jesus. It could not be forgiven even if the suffering were tens of times greater. There is actually no way for Israel or any nation to pay for the sin of killing the True Parent. Because humanity was still under a burden of sin for having killed the True Parent, God could not intervene even when Hitler committed genocide against the Jewish people. We must all learn the lesson of how valuable True Parents are, because we are in a similar period of history today.

 

We have arrived at a time when Judaism, Islam, and Christianity around the world must come together centering on the Unification principles. Restoration through indemnity is accomplished through parallel historical periods.⁴ The present age is parallel to the age of Jesus, although on the cosmic rather than the worldwide level.

 

For this reason, the returning Lord must be the Messiah and Savior. The Savior must transform this world into the peaceful Kingdom of Heaven, and in that kingdom there can be no discord among religions. The purpose of the Second Coming is to fulfill what the first Messiah could not realize. Having returned, he must become a True Parent and establish a sphere of liberation in the earthly and spiritual worlds. We have not understood this reality, which is interwoven with the history of God’s providence. 

 

Now that you know this, you also should practice these things and be able to reach the summit of the mountain to be in God’s holy presence and enter the liberated, ideal realm. You need to know that it is still your destiny to gain respect and praise from the highest souls of the heavenly kingdom, to register yourselves in the Peaceful Universal Homeland, which is the new global nation, and to enter that nation as new citizens. If you die and go to the spirit world without accomplishing this mission, you will find yourselves held back.

 

This is the reason that you need to sincerely dedicate yourselves to accomplishing all that is required of you while you are alive on earth. No one can take responsibility for your life, or for your part in the history of God’s providence, if you commit an error on the path. Even if you give up your five senses—or ten if we include the corresponding spiritual senses—hundreds of times over, it will not be adequate to atone for such an error. Could God be held responsible for that? No, He couldn’t. If He could take responsibility, He never would have allowed Adam and Eve to commit the Fall in the first place.

 

Who is the owner of re-creation? It is not God. It is you and your families. That is why we speak of our families as the owners of the Peaceful Universal Homeland. From the smallest animal created by God to the spirit world, and to the whole universe that is more than a hundred billion times larger than the solar system, everything is arranged in a pair system. This is the orderly existence of all things within the sphere of God’s love.

 

Satan introduced divisions into all of this by defiling the lineage. So the True Parents need to gather all things together for re-creation. You also are responsible to resolve God’s grief by loving the plants, the animals, and the land with God’s true love, and to resolve the grief caused by humanity’s failure to become true owners. That is the reason that a new view of life, the universe, and the cosmos has been established.

 

Originally, there would have been no need for the Family Party. What is needed is families that attend God as their parent. There have never been families like that, but, no matter what course of indemnity must be undergone, such families must appear now. The Family Party was established to educate everyone about how this can be accomplished.

 

You must go forward conscious of the fact that yours is a family of princes among princes, princesses among princesses, and a family of devoted children, patriots, saints and sons and daughters of God. We are pioneering the path that God would like to travel. Yet we are traveling down it in His place, as the offering.

 

Even if you were able to receive God’s love and remain in His heart for tens of thousands of years, you would shed tears of shame when you came face to face with God, who has suffered unimaginable grief throughout the ages. Even if you were to shed blood and sweat for God so that your entire being was on fire, this is the path that you must go as one family—despite feeling your limitations—in order to free yourselves from the burden of having failed to accomplish your responsibilities as princes and princesses on the quest to find God.

 

It was by our hands that what God created—His kingdom, including the heavenly palace—was destroyed, so we must re-create everything for God by our own effort. On that basis, families will bring forth children who are thousands of times more devoted, patriotic, and saintly sons and daughters of God than would have appeared if the Fall had never occurred. If this is achieved, could hell still exist? Such people will be the core of the royal palace of the heavenly kingdom, and God will be able to dwell anywhere on earth as if He were in His palace.

 

I have traveled a suffering course in the process of founding and leading the Unification movement, but I have not thought of any of my experiences as suffering. I can feel this way because I have arrived at a point in my heart where I can profoundly comprehend—through my experience—God’s deep, wide, and exalted blessing, and be grateful for this. Those who have not experienced such a state would not understand.

 

Even though God is the Creator and is almighty, in light of what I have accomplished, He feels He has nothing to be proud of. No one had been able to liberate God from the pain of the beginning of history and thus take the position of a son whom God could love. God’s position needs to be recovered. That is, He needs to regain the position of the Father so He can give and receive love with His children. Because the children committed the Fall and these things did not come about, history has been full of anguish. Without God’s marriage registration and birth registration, His kingdom cannot exist.

 

The lives of True Parents have also been a course of grief and pain. Their historic work has divine value: there will be wailing and lamentation day after day when the world comes to fully understand the significance of True Parents’ lives. People will weep in the same way the Jewish people repent in tears at the Wailing Wall. The sphere of liberation must be established in which all grief and pain is erased.

 

We have finally entered the age when God, having liberated all of heaven and earth, could hold a wedding ceremony. Because God has accomplished the registration of marriage, He could register the births of His sons and daughters. Since God has transcended the realm of the first Israel, the second Israel and the third Israel, He is able to return to His original position.

 

On the basis of the victory of the True Parents—the Parents of Heaven and Earth—you can now fully inherit the authority to register your marriages and births. I hope you have faith that when, through your own determination, you live this way and become citizens of the Peaceful Universal Homeland—living day and night with one devoted heart, body, mindset and harmony—you will surely become members of God’s royal family.

 

We have here tonight leaders who signed the Jerusalem Declaration, the Washington Declaration, and, now, the Seoul Peace Declaration—representing the first, second and third Israel respectively. Participants in the Seoul Peace Declaration include youth leaders of the second generation who participated in the International Youth Leaders “Lasting Love” Conference held at Sun Moon University, and others who have been attending this IIFWP Summit of World Leaders. I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to all of you.

 

You are leaders of the first and second generations who can inherit the position of Heaven’s chosen people. I earnestly ask that you remember that you are here today at the site of the Seoul Declaration to join together in one heart and answer the call to the historic task of renewing the United Nations.

 

I offer gratitude to God for all these things, and pray that His abundant blessings be with each of you, your families, and your nations.

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Endnotes

 

¹ “Owner” here is in the sense of one who feels fully responsible and committed to ensuring wholesome development.

² “Peaceful Universal Homeland” is based on the Korean Cheon Il Guk.

³ The Family Party for Universal Peace and Unity was founded in Korea in March 2003.

⁴ One period of history repeats the events of a previous period, albeit with differences in scope and degree. God works through a historical dispensation or “providence” to re-create His lost ideal, and the people whom God calls in a particular age must accomplish what others failed to do in previous ones.