New Hope - Twelve Talks of Reverend Sun Myung Moon

God's Grief

When you are asked what is the most valuable thing in the world, you will name your life. Your life is the greatest and most important thing to you. However, if you think again, isn't there something greater than life itself'? Your answer would be love; it could be nothing else. No knowledge, no authority, no power - nothing is more desirable than love.

We want to live eternally - nothing less than that. But if you were asked what you would want to live with through that eternity, your answer could only be love. Life is in your possession already. If you live on through eternity, then you will have already attained your purpose or desire. But you need something else. You don't want to live without love.

There must be something corresponding in God, because He is the Creator of life. Can God enjoy His life without love? No. However omniscient or omnipotent He may be, by Himself alone He cannot enjoy happiness. He cannot be happy, He cannot have an ideal or feel joy.

Suppose you see a man dancing around and shouting out for joy. He is all by himself. There is no one else he is talking to or who is responding to him. He has no object with him. We would call this man crazy. You say you are happy because you have your parents, your husband or wife, your sweetheart. You say to someone, "I am happy because I have you with me." Any ideal, joy, happiness or anything of virtue cannot be achieved without having an object. Strictly speaking, you are not happy because a flower exists, but because you see the flower. The flower means something to you. You are not happy because there is music, but you are happy because you hear the sounds. You are not happy because smells exist, but because you can smell fragrances. You are not happy just because there is someone else beside you, but because you can see him, touch him, talk to him. You can finally say that in the world where you do not have an object to respond to you, there is no joy, no ideal , no happiness. If that is true with human beings, then the same applies to God.

God became grieved due to the human fall. What element in Him could allow that? What could respond to the fall? If you don't have a person united with you, you have nothing to lose. Without ever having met that person you cannot even say you are sad. It's only after you have lost your object where he had been before that you feel unhappiness and sadness.

Then in what position were human beings originally in relation to God that He was made so sad at the loss of them due to the fall? We can imagine that human beings were in the responsive position of object to God as the Subject. When we look through all the creation, we can find nothing greater than man; we are the masterpiece of God's creation. Looking into ourselves, we find that our bodies are full of mysteries. Even the appearance of the human being has something great and mysterious about it. God being the Lord and Absolute One, He would have chosen the one of greatest capacity in His creation to be one with Him. That must be man. If God exists, the Subject of life, then the object of His life must be man. Since God is eternal, He would not want man to be an ephemeral being. The eternal God must have wanted man to be eternal also.

We say that God created man as His object of life. But man was more than that to God - not just an object to look at, to walk with. We were created to be objects of His love. Nothing less, nothing more, nothing other than love.

After creation, God must have looked around at everything, and He saw that all the creatures were beautiful and good. When he saw the beautiful flowers blooming in the field, it must have brought joy to Him; chirping birds, flying butterflies - all these made Him happy. He could say that He was happy, all was good. It was because He loved those things. Anything you look at - the flowers or anything else - when you say, "It's cute," "It's lovely " - then you are loving that thing already. You have pet animals and love them. In America I have often witnessed people walking with pet animals and even kissing them. If you can love flowers, birds and animals, how much more should you love human beings! If you smile at the puppy, can it smile back at you? If you talk to a bird and tell him to sing with you, would he do that, could he understand you? However beautiful the flowers may be, if you want them to dance with you, would they do that? But with another person, if you want him to do something with you, he can respond to you. If you say, "Let's dance, let's sing," that person will begin to dance and sing with you.

We can see that man is the being of greatest virtue and value to God. God cannot but love man. You can be so confident as to say that without yourself God cannot be happy.

Man in the beginning had such a relationship with God. What made God sad? What took man away from the bosom of God? If there had been ,any enemy to God, he would have wanted to take away God's most valuable possession. Satan set his eye on what God treasured the most. He wanted to take away God's object to be his own. God has life and love itself within Him. Life is also within you; Satan could not take it away. But love is something unfixed or mutable, and that could be taken away. Life could not be taken from you because you are life itself, and you would fight against the loss of life. He could only take away something in the object position to you. Love is the thing of greatest value that had the possibility of being stolen away.

Suppose you are a husband; there is the possibility of your wife being taken away by someone else. There are two ways that she could be taken from you - either by force or with more love than you can give her. The fall of man therefore could have only come about centered on love. According to Genesis, Eve was tempted or taken away by Satan. That could have happened either by force or by more love than her spouse would have been able to give her. At that time, then, Adam and Eve must not yet have been in perfect love with each other. If that had been true, then nothing could have taken Eve away from him. First love is the strongest. Until your death you will never forget your first love. Their first love being the strongest one, nothing could have separated Adam and Eve if that love had reached maturity. In other words, then, life was present in its perfected form in the creation, but love had not yet reached its maturity.

When we are striving to come closer to God, we have to go through three points of love. There are three kinds of love: the love of parents, the love of husband and wife, and the love of children. Out of the three, what kind of love would come first? Love of parents would come before the other two. Then we can as well say that love started from parental love. We know that all love originated in God. Love began in God as the Parents, who created man out of that love. After creation man and woman would come together in the position of parents to their children. Thus there would come about parental love, marital love, and children's love in human families. Love begins from God, and then with man and woman put together, resembling God, they experience love in their marriage. Toward their children they feel parental love, while the children feel children's love toward their parents, who return their love to God.

However, due to the fall of man, love began separated from God, in an evil world dominated by Satan. And the love we enjoy has the quality of not being centered on God's love. In order to restore these loves and return to God's heart, we must experience them in reverse order. First we must bring children's love under God's dominion, then love in marriage, and finally the love of parents, When children of God marry with God's blessing, in their unity, loving God as the Subject to them, then they can restore all three loves at once.

Because of the fall we lost three loves - parental love, marital love, and children's love. In bringing them to be centered on God, we must raise all our love to a higher dimension than what we have known on earth up to now. We can raise love above the level of Satan's dominion and back to the original standard and value of love, to the standard that matches God's love. We will find the standard of love in man as the children of God in the perfect love of God, as the married couple in the perfect love of God, and as the parents in the perfect love of God. Out of the world of Satan's control, God must find at least one such person as His child and raise him through these positions, finally bringing him to the standard of parental love. That person can be the core of God's love. The first man who wins this course of love can be called the Messiah. In him you will find the true qualities of love as the Son of God, as true husband, and as True Parent. (Isaiah 9:6).

All of these three loves must be revealed in one person because all were lost at once through Adam's fall. God is to restore these three types of love in the man He has found as His son. By having this person restore all three human loves, God can begin to restore all other people of the world as His children.

People are alienated from the love of God, but if and when they have a deep desire to love God or to be loved by Him, God's love has magnetic power. That person will inevitably be drawn to God and join the mainstream of the flow of His love. Love is the only element that can draw us to God, and the path of love alone can lead us to reach God.

Your parents, your spouse and yourself, with your children, make three levels in one family. God is the origin, you and your spouse represent the present world, and your children represent the future. So you must be able to become one at least with your own parents and children. Only love can unite those three generations of people. Only when you can enjoy those three levels of love can you say you are really happy. There will never be unhappy people in that kind of family. If you and your husband or wife are one like this centered on God's love, you can never be separated from each other. There will be no divorce there, and no quarreling.

You are in a position to inherit the tradition formed by your parents. Anyone who mistreats his parents or the older generation, will suffer. You must love children as God would love them. In the home, the young couple must love their parents and exemplify this to their children. If you fail to educate your children properly, your home will be broken.

Our heart of love, centered on God's love, must be enlarged and elaborated to reach out to the whole world. That is our way of advancement and how we are walking our road of faith. You as the central figure must love your spouse as God would have you do - as God would love him or her; and in loving your parents, you must be loving them as God would love them; and in loving your children, you must be loving them as God would love them. If you do that, your children will do the same toward you and their grandparents, and the parents will love you and your grandchildren in the same way. That is the measure of love, that is the true tradition of love.

By loving each other alone, a couple are not entitled to enter the kingdom of God. When they love their parents as dearly as they would love God, then they are entitled to the kingdom. And when the couple raise their children, they must not think that the children belong to them alone, but that they are God's children. The parents are responsible to raise them and educate them as God's children. If you love your children in that way your whole family may enter God's kingdom.

If there is any family receiving God's love perfectly, with God's love abiding in the family, that family can be the core of the whole world. In the Providence of God, not Noah alone, but Noah's entire family would count. God was interested in Abraham's family, Moses' family, Jesus' family - not just individuals alone.

Up to the present time, people have been inclined to think religious life belonged to some airy plane far above human life, and imagined that God would just sweep them away to heaven with His power. But the way to heaven is to broaden the scope of our love by loving the people in our homes, by loving our neighbors, by loving our friends, relatives, clans, nations, and the whole population of the world. God would take delight in living in the home where that kind of love is lived. But He would want to expand that home to ever-broader levels until the whole of mankind could become one huge family under God as our Parent. Wherever you see men of your own age, you must be thinking of them as your brothers. When you meet women older than you, you must think that they are your aunts or your mother. And toward elderly women, you should feel as though they were your grandmothers. The outgrowth of that kind of heart will be one family over all the world.

We have been talking about how to restore big things - the family, nation, and world - but the core of everything is to restore yourself into God's full love. You must establish and build the three levels of love in yourself by deeply living your life. Unless you give birth to your own children, you don't realize fully the love of God in you. Anything in the world can be understood only by our own experience of it. In restoring yourself, you can realize the true love of God in yourself. Then through love in your marriage love is broadened or elevated to the next level. When you are a parent to your children, your love is still more elevated, and reaches a greater dimension.

You must be very eager to find those experiences and restore them in yourself. You must be able to really feel God as your loving Parent, abiding in you, illuminating you. To feel that, your mind and your body must be united into harmonious oneness. Only then can you be loved by God. If you are experiencing God's love to that degree, you will be full of gratitude and feel even intoxicated in God's love. Even Adam and Eve did not experience such love; if they had they could never have fallen away from God.

As individuals, our desire is first to experience God's love personally. Any man who becomes fully one with God in love would think, "I am the happiest man in the world. I am loved by God in the true sense." Any woman receiving that fullness of love would feel she is the happiest woman in the world. When that man and woman reached maturity, God would be happy to bless them in marriage, and there they could experience the love of God on a higher level. By their being put together, they would feel the whole world is united into one around them. With the whole creation around them, protecting them and giving them joy, they would feel love surrounding them love coming from God above them, and love coming from their children below them.

In the Western world, people often marry without their parents' consent. But that is not according to God's standard. More than anything else, you must think that marriage is for your descendants. Think back. You are born out of the lineage of your forefathers. You don't belong to yourself. You were not initiated by you. Love itself is the source of lineage. Love being more than your life, your lineage must be, more to you than your life. You will love your family more than your own life. Matrimony passes on the tradition of your love to your descendants. When you leave the earth, your children and grandchildren and all of their children will be left behind you, seen by other people, even though your love is not visible. Love cannot be seen; it dwells invisibly within you and works through you. But when you find a husband or wife with God's love, together with that person you can create children, making your love concrete in them.

In loving your spouse, you are transcendent of your two lineages. When you love your husband or wife, remember that that person is the fruit of past generations and the starting point of future generations. You must put such vast value in your husband or wife.

Love is something you inherit from your forefathers. In the West, you are blessed in marriage by a minister or sometimes by a person of high rank, such as a judge. But ideally your parents bless you in marriage, just as God would have blessed His children, Adam and Eve, when they reached maturity. In that case, the parents would bless their children, saying, "You are my life, you are my love, you are my everything. I am so happy that you have reached maturity. I am now blessing you to be man and wife. I want you to love each other as we, your parents, have done. Become one with each other, resembling us, and give birth to wholesome children, multiplying your future generations forever." In that situation you would long to be like your father and long to be like your mother and long to have the love that they had. Such an event can only be imagined in a world centered on God's love.

As children to your parents, you would never want to see your parents separated. You would want to have harmony in the family. Would you like to fight your parents? Never! Then, where does the harmonious tradition begin? From your parents, from your grandparents, their parents, and their parents. And they inherited that tradition from God ultimately. Children's love, marital love, and parents' love must be put together in one in you. You must always have three levels of love in yourself.

Of the three kinds of love, which one is central? Which is closer to God? Parental love. If you have your grandparents, you must really be able to love those elderly people as you would God. Age- wise, you must unite the three loves within your own heart - love for the old, love for the middle-aged, and love for the young. You must be able to experience those three types of love. If your grandparents are dying, both your parents and yourself must be in the same degree of grief and sadness. If your parents were to pass away first, both your grandparents and yourself must feel the same grief about that. In a situation where there is joy, too, if one of the three has joy, the other two will be equally joyful. In your family, all will be one in heart.

Where does God's grief begin? In the path of true love, on the way of heart, either happiness or grief will be found. Everything starts from love. When love is created, there is happiness. But when the loving heart is lost or wounded, there is grief. The loss of love made God grieve; nothing else could have made Him sad. He did not want wealth, position, knowledge, or any such thing. He wanted love, and He wanted also to exercise love. If God can find love in you, find in you His love, God will be happy. But if He cannot find the love of God in you, He will be saddened. He will be saddened if He cannot find His love in couples and if He cannot find the love of God in parents. How much do you want to have God's love? You must be a dynamic, responsive object to Him, so that His love may explode within you.

Have you ever experienced such love? Have you ever been so happy in the love of God that you had almost to weep from that love? But that's not enough; you must experience that degree of love in all three kinds of love. The love of God must be so powerful as to connect God, mankind and creation and bring them into absolute harmony and oneness. Love must flow from one to the other.

God is grieved over the fact that man lost His love. In order to reach you, God has gone through the whole course of the history of restoration, struggling through the long years to regain true love. So from your part, you must not stay idle. You must work for the sake of God and the world, rushing to meet Him from your side. If you fight against Satan and win over his power spiritually and physically, you will stand in the position where no evil power can ever invade you. You will become perfectly one with God. There you will meet Him, and you will find that He has been at that point all along, waiting for you and looking for you.

Where is the point where you can meet God - in your room, or on the front-line of the world? On the front-line. Then are you going to enter the struggles of the world reluctantly and tearfully, or willingly? Our desire is the unity of our minds with God, our bodies with our minds, and our whole being with other people. Only by achieving that unity can we restore ourselves on the individual, family, national and worldwide levels. We must come to the position where we long for God very, very much. When we miss any other individual, any family, any nation, or the whole ideal world, very much then to that extent and to that degree God will be there waiting for us. And we will meet Him when we have found those things we are longing for. Then will you not go that way?

More than anything else, God has been sad because there has been no one who knew His heart in this way. There has been no one who knew the world that God wanted to restore and who was willing to fight and endure all trials and difficulties in order to meet Him in that world. Since you know these things, you have the responsibility to win the whole world and bring all things back to God's bosom. Only in that way can we realize His long cherished hope of unity among God, man, and every true element.

God sets His hope in us, and we also have our own hopes, flickering like fires within us. But we have to multiply that fire and multiply our love to destroy the whole world of evil. We may now have only a flickering candlelight, but we want to shed light into the whole world. The light will be multiplied, and the whole world will be illuminated by it in God's love. We are the soldiers for that cause, and we are eager to liberate God from His grief.

We must not ask God to help us, but we must be willing to relieve God's agony. As Christians, we can restore God's heart through our prayer. He is praying for us. He is praying for sons and daughters to end His suffering and the suffering of the world. Can you ever pray to such a God to give you a blessing, to help you? Since we have begun from so far away from God, we can relieve God's heart little by little, as we walk the course of restoration step by step. When we walk through difficult ways, we must always pray to God, "As I taste this difficulty, I know this much more of your heart. As I go through all these things, I understand the more what you have experienced." In that way you can always have the courage and zeal to continue.

Since you know all these things, you must be doing everything for the sake of God. When you read, feel that you are reading to dissolve God's sorrow. When you sing, when you recite poetry, when you write literature, when you do anything, you must realize that you are doing that in order to make God happy. We must be different from Adam and Eve; we must be different from all people of the past. We must become such people that God can say to us, "Because of you I am so relieved. Because of you I have found again my joy, my smile, my son, my everything." If you are such a person to God, He will want to talk with you, to confide things to you. And God would want to bestow everything He has on you.

If you can relieve God's agony, if you can make God happy at last, then there is no more that can be expected of you. You can enjoy everything of virtue. Then you will have restored yourself, your family, your nation, and the whole world back to God. By doing this, we can liberate God from His grief. You can do this yourself.

If you should shed tears, sweat and blood for the sake of the whole world, you will find God has been shedding tears, sweat and blood for you.