40 Years in America

True Parents And The Completed Testament Age

Mrs. Hak Ja Han Moon

Former U.S. President Gerald Ford speaking at the Inauguration of the Family Federation for Unification and World Peace, Washington, D.C., July 30, 1996

Excerpts from speech at the Women's Federation for World Peace Rally, June, 1993, Seoul, Korea

Honored Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to you for coming here today. I am truly moved to see so many of you committed to building a peaceful world. As we all know, our world today is not a world of peace and happiness but a world filled with conflict and despair. We are confronted with the breakdown of our families and the moral decline of our society.

We have become a nation of talk shows. We debate the issues over and over again and yet find no solutions. Why is this? This is because a true solution must include God and deal with the root of the problem and not just the symptoms. To find this root, we must first understand God’s purpose of creation and realize that we, today, face the most important turning point in the history of God’s providence.

At this crucial time, God asked my husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, to bring a new revelation to the American people. My husband, accordingly, just delivered this new message of hope in 12 major cities across America. Now, I would like to give you this same message, entitled "True Parents and the Completed Testament Age."

God’s Original Ideal

God wants to give limitlessly to His children. God is not content in giving just 100 percent. God’s desire is to give a thousand times more than what He has already given. The nature of God’s Love is to give completely and then forget what He has given. Unlike some who calculate how much they have given and decide that it is enough, for God enough is never enough.

If God’s ideal of true love had been realized through Adam’s family, that family would have become the beginning of the heavenly kingdom. It would have expanded throughout all of history to the clan, to the nation, and to the world. This would have been the world of true love -- the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Furthermore, there would have been a parallel expansion of the heavenly kingdom in the spiritual world.

If God’s original ideal had been realized, then there would have been no need of a Messiah or of God’s providence to save humanity. Adam’s family, though it was merely a single family, would have been the center of the clan, of the nation, and of the world. It would have been the blueprint for all families in the future. It would have been the model for the realization of God’s ideal world.

Because of the fall of the original human ancestors, God’s work of salvation had to begin. Salvation history had to be repeatedly extended through the complicated and suffering courses of the Old Testament Age and the New Testament Age, culminating in today’s Completed Testament Age. God’s ideal of the true family and the heavenly kingdom, which He wanted to realize through Adam’s family, was destroyed because Adam and Eve fell away from God.

Due to the Fall, this present world is far from the good world of God’s ideal. Today’s world is, in fact, a "false" world, in that it is flooded with self-centered love. This came about because Adam and Eve became false parents based on false and self-centered love with Satan. They multiplied evil rather than goodness, creating a false family and passing on false life and a false lineage to their descendants. Thus, false clans, false nations and a false world came into being.

Formula for Reconciliation

Therefore, the goal in God’s dispensation of salvation is for a man and a woman, representing Adam and Eve, to be restored as True Parents centered on God’s true love, so that the true family can be formed. From them would eventually flow the true clan, the true nation and the true world. In other words, the seed from which God’s true love, true life and true lineage can grow must be created.

My dear friends, have you ever wondered how a world filled with such evil and corruption could come from a God of love and goodness?

If you read the Bible carefully, you will see that the fall of man involves the loss of Adam’s entire family. First, the position of parents was lost through the fall of Adam and Eve. Second, the position of children was lost as Cain murdered Abel. God’s "blueprint" for an ideal family and world perfection was lost. Therefore, to restore the original family, God works in reverse to reclaim the positions of Cain and Abel, and then the positions of True Mother and True Father. This pattern of reconciliation of Cain and Abel as the foundation for restoring the True Parents has been God’s consistent formula throughout the history of restoration.

Ladies and gentlemen, if a family is not centered on God’s ideal of love, there will be conflict among the members of that family. Without God’s love as an absolute center, such a family will ultimately break down. Moreover, a nation of such families will also decline.

It is not by chance that self-centered individualism has become the dominant way of life in these last days. People feel increasingly alienated from those around them, and bear little sense of responsibility for the well being of their country, society, or even their own families. Rising divorce statistics indicate that husbands and wives feel little responsibility toward their marriages; parents do not take responsibility for their children; individuals, devoid of any sense of human dignity, fail even to take responsibility for themselves.

America has seen such phenomena at work beginning with the youth movement of the sixties. Idealistic youth rejected the materialism around them in order to seek love and peace, but in the process, they also abandoned morality and responsibility. Unable to attain the true love they sought, many disillusioned young people resorted to suicide, drug abuse and free sex.

True Love vs. Free Sex

Of all these, what pains God most is free sex. A world of free sex is absolutely contrary to the Will of God. Love comes from stimulation of unblemished emotion, but free sex is totally devoid of purity or true emotion. How many of us have been touched by the cruelty of infidelity and divorce? Where is God in all the one-night stands? What about the nightmares of the children who are sexually abused by a parent? Is free sex worth the price of a broken child? Equally alarming is the policy of giving school children condoms, teaching the illusion of safe sex, and surrendering to the assumption that premarital sex is inevitable. Indeed, where there is homosexuality, free sex, drugs and alcoholism, the world of true love is far away.

In this world, Satan openly tells people, "Drink! Smoke! Take drugs! Have sex!" Those who do God’s Will, on the other hand, live a lifestyle that is 180 degrees different from this. Throughout history, those who chose to walk a spiritual path of self-sacrifice have been bitterly opposed and persecuted by the rest of the world.

Rebecca and Tamar

In the Bible, one of God’s great heroines is Rebecca, the spouse of Isaac. As the mother of Jacob and Esau, Rebecca held the same position in Isaac’s family that Eve held in Adam's family. Unlike Eve, however, Rebecca understood God’s providence and helped her second son, Jacob, representing Abel's position, to gain the blessing destined for the first son, Esau.

Just as Cain killed Abel, Esau wanted to kill Jacob when the blessing went to his younger brother. But with Rebecca's help, these brothers eventually reconciled in a warm embrace, rather than resorting to violence.

This reconciliation was a major victory for God. This victory, nevertheless, was not complete, since the reconciliation represented only a symbolic purification of blood lineage. The substantial purification of blood lineage had to be accomplished in the womb. This is the reason for the paradoxical story of Tamar. By understanding that Tamar, like Rebecca, was in the position of fallen Eve, it becomes possible to understand why Jesus was born of her lineage, the tribe of Judah.

I am sure that many of you have read the story about the birth of her twins. She conceived with Judah, her father-in-law, the twins Perez and Zerah. The Bible tells us that the two sons struggled even in the womb for the position of first-born. During Tamar’s labor, Zerah’s hand emerged and the midwife tied a red string around his wrist. Then, Zerah’s hand disappeared back into the womb and Perez, the younger, was born as the elder! Thus, the positions of Cain and Abel were restored even before birth took place. It was from this point that the Israelite people became the nation chosen to receive the Messiah. In terms of conventional morality, the stories of Rebecca and Tamar would be questionable at best. Why God blessed them was a theological mystery until today. As we now see, God needed to reclaim His lineage from Satan so that Jesus could be born. Purified, true-love blood lineage was the point from which the Israelite nation started expanding. The word Israel means victory. Their victory was the purification of blood lineage.

Mary’s Life-Risking Course

The lineage of Judah developed for generations, expanding to the levels of tribe, society and nation. From this same lineage, Mary was born in Israel 2,000 years later. Mary had the responsibility to unite Cain and Abel figures on the family, clan and national levels through paying appropriate indemnity and restoring elder sonship. Mary responded to God's call and conceived Jesus even though, in the eyes of others, she had betrayed her parents and Joseph, to whom she was engaged. At that time, it was customary to stone to death any woman who became pregnant out of wedlock. However, Joseph, standing in the position of Adam, courageously protected his fiancée and resisted abandoning her.

Because of Mary’s faith, and the work of Rebecca and Tamar, Satan could not claim sovereignty over Jesus in Mary’s womb. Jesus was born in the position of a true son under God’s complete, direct lineage. He is the first true son of God after the purification of the fallen blood lineage. That is why Jesus, the first-begotten son of God, is the saint of all saints and the ancestor of God’s true blood lineage.

A Dream Unfulfilled

Mary, in the position to restore fallen Eve, had to build a unity between Jesus, who was in the position of Abel, and his elder cousin, John the Baptist, who was in the position of Cain. This unity was essential for the people of Israel to identify Jesus as the Messiah. John the Baptist should have helped Jesus reach the religious leadership of Israel. If John had fulfilled his role, then Judaism, in the position of Abel, and the nation of Israel, in the position of Cain, could have united centered on Jesus. This would have laid the foundation for the Marriage of the Lamb. Jesus would have stood as the True Father of humanity, and his bride would have stood as the True Mother of humanity.

However, this glorious destiny could not be realized. It was the religious people themselves who rejected Jesus’ words and called for His crucifixion. Confronted by the faithlessness in Israel, Jesus determined to give his life to achieve spiritual salvation for humankind. However, he would have to come again in order to bring physical or earthly salvation in addition to spiritual salvation.

The Unity Imperative

God’s preparation for the Second Advent required a world-level foundation of successful Cain-Abel reconciliation. This dispensation was carried out through the events surrounding World War II. God's representative came to bring His word and was met with tremendous persecution and almost universal misunderstanding. This paralleled Jesus’ situation 2,000 years ago. Just as the Israelites of Jesus’ time awaited the Second Coming of Elijah on a chariot descending from heaven, Christians awaited the Second Coming by expecting Jesus himself to descend on a cloud from the sky.

In Revelation, Jesus reveals to the Apostle John that he will come with a new name. This foreshadowed that Jesus would come again through another man, just as Elijah had done.

At this crucial time after World War II, then, God instructed my husband to bring a new message of truth to Christians in Korea. Korean Christian leaders, however, rejected the possibility that he, a humble young man, had been chosen to bring this new message. Because the New Testament Age is an extension of the Old Testament Age, they could not believe that the Second Coming would be born as a man on earth any more than the Jewish people could believe it at the time of Jesus.

If the Christian churches had become one with my husband, the heavenly kingdom would already have been established on earth as well as in heaven. During the seven-year period from 1945 to 1952, when the New Testament Age ended, the entire world could have united in accordance with the providence of God. Instead of uniting with him, however, these religious leaders became jealous of the growing number of his followers. They blindly opposed my husband without hearing him out. They even spread lies about him. Rumors of sexual misconduct and greed, the very antithesis of his teachings, were used to assassinate his character.

For decades, my husband has been completely misunderstood. For three years, he was imprisoned in a North Korean communist concentration camp. Altogether, he has been wrongly imprisoned six times for doing God's work. My heart is broken when I think of how my husband has suffered. But he always comforts me, reassuring me that God has deep compassion for those persecuted for doing His work.

The truth that God revealed to my husband is contained in the Divine Principle. Looking at the history of humankind and the stories of the Bible from the providential viewpoint, the Divine Principle unlocks the answers to questions unsolved for thousands of years. Those who have sincerely studied its contents have found it to be a true gift from God, providing the only solutions to the problems facing our society today.

There are countless other testimonies to the power of the Divine Principle to give hope and new life to young people. Last year, in Korea, we held a wedding celebration for 30,000 couples, all dedicating their lives to one another, to God, and to the world. In most families today, parents cannot effectively guide their children, especially on such intimate matters as love and marriage. Yet, my husband and I brought together young people from 131 different nations and realized their most cherished dreams of love in a historic way. This was indeed a great miracle of the modern world.

Extension of the Messianic Ideal

Ladies and gentlemen, at the dawn of the Completed Testament Age, the time has come for each family to take up the messianic mission of completing the work of salvation all over the world. After restoring your family, the next step is to restore your community, tribe and nation. We call this process "tribal messiahship." In the Completed Testament Age, the mother’s role will be crucial.

She must unite her children and her husband, and link her family with the True Parents. Already, we have sent thousands of Tribal Messiah missionaries around the world. Soon, the original ideal of the family will be achieved worldwide. In every completed family, grandparents will be in the position of kings and queens representing God and good ancestors. Parents will be in the position of kings and queens representing present humanity, and children will be in the position of princes and princesses representing all future descendants. When all three generations are united, past, present and future will live together in harmony.

With such families, the symptoms of our decaying society will vanish. As confident children of God, we will no longer be enslaved by the temptations of alcohol and drug abuse. Moreover, by understanding the holiness of love between a husband and a wife, we will possess the moral strength to stand strong against infidelity and promiscuity. Finally, we will work as a whole to eliminate war, racial prejudices and world hunger.

Based upon this foundation, we can realize a world of true happiness, freedom and peace. God is very much alive, and His original ideal for humankind is unchanging and absolute. It is our destiny to fulfill this ideal and liberate God’s heart.

My dear friends, the Women’s Federation for World Peace is called to this task. Let us work together to bring about its successful completion. It is my hope that all Christians, and people of all faiths, will understand this message with a deep heart and an open mind. I sincerely pray that, by upholding the Will of God, we can all reach the place of God’s blessing. May God bless you and your families. Thank you very much.

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