The Words of Hyo Jin Moon |
Before I talk about the Purpose of the Messiah, I think it's important for us to recognize the existence of two intelligences.
According to the Principle, the first intelligence is the inner spiritual intelligence, which is realized through spiritual truth. The second intelligence is physical intelligence, which is realized through physical means or tactile truth. Just as we gain greater physical intelligence by understanding physical truth, we can ultimately gain spiritual intelligence as we truly tap into spiritual truth, which means God's will, or the inner desire of God. We all have some concept of right and wrong, and we can perceive signs of goodness and be inspired by certain people and events in our lives to commit ourselves to a life of faith. Those receiving inspiration which motivates them to become one with Heavenly Father are those who have put themselves in a position that enables them to understand greater and greater spiritual truth.
In order for us to truly understand Heavenly Father, first we must know God's will -- not just as a general idea, but the intricate details of how He intends to realize His ideals. Through Principle we understand that God needs mankind to realize His ideal purpose of creation. Man was created to become an ideal object to God and be able to receive and return the innermost essence of God. As man fulfills that responsibility of becoming God's object, he puts himself in the position to receive Heavenly Father and His truth.
I emphasize this because becoming the object to Heavenly Father has everything to do with improving our spiritual life and with understanding the Principle. I'm realizing more and more how important it is for me to become an absolute object to God and how with that attitude and commitment, I can gain spiritual truth and have more power to act.
What is becoming a true object? It means to give oneself completely, having an absolute faith in Heavenly Father and the works of True Parents. Once you start to dedicate yourself to that kind of lifestyle, your spiritual intelligence will expand.
Many of you understand conceptually, but you may lack deep spiritual wisdom because you simply don't practice your understanding enough. Or you don't have sufficient belief to push yourself to endure the process required to reach this position of understanding God's truth. You can't stop at just realizing what truth is. To absorb that truth into your intelligence, you have to live it. Without experience, it is not going to be yours. It will always be something conceptual rather than innate. Only through experience can you truly distinguish a false notion from a true notion. You have to apply it, and your heart has to be within that process. Your mind and body must absolutely unite in making the concept work in reality in order for the understanding to become part of you.
When Father talks, there is a resonance. The quality of love has resonating power. When something resonates, it is not only heard or seen, but also felt. Would you like to just hear about the experience of love, or would you rather feel love? What will make you understand more deeply? Without experiencing that kind of emotion that occurs when you embrace your spouse, you don't understand the deep, inner meaning of love. You have to feel it.
If I want my voice to resonate, I have to be in the kind of space where sound will reverberate. Through that reverberation, I will not just hear the sound but I will feel it. Then I like it more. That's why when I listen to my music I want to turn it up, because I don't just want to hear it, I want to feel it. I want to feel all the high and low frequency notes impacting on my body. It's exciting. This increases my experience of appreciating that music.
If ideals dwell within me, and if I want to share them with someone, my voice reverberating out into the universe, then I have to be where the voice of true love can resonate. I must find that ideal space where I can speak ideal things and where my ideal words will resonate.
Where do you think that space would be? True love exists only within God. If I want my true love to be ringing all over the place, I must find that space within God. That is why I want to become an object to God. Once we put ourselves in that position, we can start not just hearing our voice, but feeling our voice, feeling our emotions, and truly feeling and understanding our inner desires.
Only through experience can you truly taste and feel the love of God. Once you feel it, once you touch your wife, once you feel the great joy that lies behind love, you start craving it. You can't live without it. You must put yourself in the position to experience not just physical love, but heavenly spiritual love. I don't want to stress physical love; it's like the blueprint -- the experience that we feel physically should be felt spiritually. Once you experience such joy and happiness fully, it's not going to go away -- it is yours. If Adam and Eve had grown up to be the ideal object to God, that experience would never die. It would overwhelm them eternally.
Many of you are caught up in false experiences and manifestations. It is very difficult for you to break away from the bondage that has been manifested within you. But God planned our primary experience to be an ideal one. Only through the experience of spiritual truth can we become one with Heavenly Father and realize the value of True Parents. Only through responsibility can we attain God's will and become God's children. God wanted man to develop the same creativity that He had. Man's responsibility is to make that ideal choice to adopt the will of God and act upon that commitment to ultimately become like God. How can you receive God without becoming like Him? How can you experience the same love that I am going to experience without having the same faculties as I have? It is impossible.
The Third Blessing promises that through becoming perfect and being married and multiplying, centering on God, you are to have dominion over the creation. How are you going to take that responsibility without having the ability to embrace and embody Heavenly Father?
When people really get serious about Principle study, they are going to emphasize the Korean version of the Principle much more than the translated one. Unless you understand Korean you are going to be left behind. Actually, the meaning is even more specifically expressed in the version with Chinese characters. I always refer back and forth between the Chinese version and the Korean one. To not know Korean is a very serious matter, especially if you are a Principle lecturer.
The purpose of the coming of the Messiah is to establish the everlasting Kingdom of God here on earth. But in a deeper sense, the purpose of the Messiah is to bring both spiritual and physical salvation to fallen man. Most Christians believe that Jesus came to die for the sins of the world. By shedding his blood he would redeem the sin of man, and ultimately uplift fallen man to the standard of God.
This leaves a very big question. To understand the responsibility of the Messiah we must first understand the significance of the two-sided predictions concerning Jesus. In Isaiah 9:6-7 it was promised he would reign over the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth: "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called 'Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.' Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this."
But according to Isaiah 53, Jesus' life was to be one of suffering and great tribulations. Why the difference? [Because God did not know what man would do when Jesus was sent.] When Jesus came people would ultimately accept him or betray him. It was man's responsibility, a point repeated over and over again throughout the Principle.
At the end Jesus knew his dying on the cross was unavoidable. But at the same time he bore the responsibility of fulfilling the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. The purpose of the Messiah is to save mankind, not just physically, not just spiritually, but both. What course must he take? If I am to die, and if I have a portion of responsibility still to fulfill, then I must do everything within my power to go as close as possible toward reaching my goal. How could Jesus, who could not bring the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, at least bring about the spiritual salvation of man? [By accepting whatever the final course was and not rebelling against God.] Okay.
What I just read in Isaiah is very significant. Jesus was to represent God and become the everlasting Father in the everlasting Kingdom. Jesus won a foothold on the earth because he fulfilled the role of absolute Son. He gave his life for God, not just for our sins. Restoration has to do with fulfilling God's ideal. He died, not just for the sinners and whoremongers, but primarily so that his Father's suffering would be lessened. Don't ever put him in a lesser state by saying that he merely died for our sins.
When Jesus died on the cross, he asked Heavenly Father, "Why are You abandoning me?" According to the Level Four Divine Principle Lecture Guide, what was God's motive? [Because God was abandoned by Adam, when He saw Jesus dying on the cross, He had to abandon him so that Jesus could pay indemnity for Adam.] The significant aspect is that Jesus wanted to comfort God's heart by putting himself in the same lonely place occupied by God when Adam and Eve abandoned Him.
A teacher bears a responsibility to the pupil. Through the example of the teacher, the students will learn what is right and wrong. The question going through the disciples' minds as Jesus was being crucified was: If Jesus came to earth to become the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, why is he dying on the cross? Everyone must have thought: "He is not the Messiah. He is nobody." But even under those circumstances, Jesus knew who he was. He was the teacher of his disciples. He knew the difficult course they would have in the future. He said to them, "If you want to follow me, you have to abandon everything and ultimately bear the cross." Even in his last moment on earth, he taught the disciples with his dying breath to obey the will of God by setting an example for them to follow. Fie died for the sake of God's ideal.
Of course he knew how much God was suffering inside. If God sends His son to earth to become Lord of Lords, as described in Isaiah and Luke, do you think He is having a jolly good time seeing His son being crucified by these sinners? All the people who were prepared, including John the Baptist, failed their responsibility. John knew Jesus was the Messiah. He confessed it in John 1:33, and in John 1:23 he acknowledged he was sent beforehand by God to prepare the way for the Messiah. He knew his responsibility but failed in it because he couldn't see beyond Jesus' external appearance and position.
There is a parable that Jesus gave in Matt. 25:1-13:
"Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom." There the five wise ones were waiting with a lamp and oil, but the foolish ones were waiting with just a lamp. When the bridegroom came, the five foolish ones asked, "Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out." But the wise ones answered saying, "Perhaps there will be not enough for us and for you; go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves."
While the five foolish ones went out to buy the oil, the bridegroom came and "those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast; and the door was shut." Afterward the other maidens returned saying, "'Lord, Lord, open to us.' But he replied, 'Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.'"
I read this verse because it has everything to do with the Blessing. Do you know what the Blessing means and how important it is? Through you, your lineage will ultimately receive redemption. Through the Blessing you can become citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven as those beings who existed at the time of the Garden of Eden should have been. You represent the lineage which will ultimately bring great joy and diversity to Heavenly Father. Within eternal love there are so many beautiful things. That is why human beings are here on this earth.
How do you become an ideal being? Your physical body must unite with your Shim Jung; there must be harmony between the sung sang in the subject position and the hyung sang in the object position.
What does that mean? Your spirit, or your original mind, must always unite with the will of God. It longs for union with Heavenly Father. The yearning to become one with God and to see oneself as the son of God should overwhelm one's physical self. We must put ourselves in that kind of absolute object position to Heavenly Father, saying, "You are my God, my Father in Heaven. I am going to love You no matter what. I want to dwell within You and I want You to dwell within me forever. We are inseparable beings. It means everything for me to have You in my presence, in my life, in my body. I am willing to do everything for You. Just like You, God, I want to make this world an absolutely pure world of goodness. I am willing to sacrifice my life. If You are willing to suffer for the sake of that ideal, I am willing to suffer, paying any price that a man can bear. There is no limit to my yearning to become part of You and to bring fulfillment to Your ideal expectation."
For us to have the Kingdom of Heaven in the spirit world, there has to be a Kingdom of Heaven on earth. God exists in the Kingdom of Heaven. Why do we need True Parents? Because if we are to have the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, God's presence must be here, and that requires True Parents.
In the spirit world the main emphasis is unity. How can we unite the different races? Only through blood lineages. That's why True Parents exist, so that through them all people can be engrafted into God's lineage, physically becoming bonded through the blood lineage. That's the purpose of the Messiah. If you expect the Kingdom of Heaven on earth to exist, there has to be the presence of True Parents.
In the eyes of God all of us have equal value. But you must realize that in order for ideal relationships to exist within our lives there has to be subject and object within your marriage, at your workplace, between brothers and sisters, and so on. As it says in I Cor. 15:41: "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory."
The mission that has been given to you by True Father is very important. All of you first have the responsibility of understanding the Principle completely. To understand, you must put yourself in the ideal object's position. To experience the ideals of God you must put yourself in the right position. Nobody in this room is excluded from that responsibility, starting with me. I must learn to become an ideal object to my Father. That means I must possess within myself the unchanging, absolute and everlasting quality of love. I always have to check myself and clear out whatever blurs my path to become that object to my Father. When I put myself in those shoes, when I live it, then I will experience the ideals of God.
But living that ideal is difficult, I can tell you with certainty. I want to help Father. I feel what he feels. He has a physical body; it is limited. But there is so much to be done, and so little is being done. Somebody has to reflect his desires. Because. I realize my Father's heart, I have to go out of my way to do these things. Without having a clear direction, your efforts are meaningless. In revolting against Satan, you must have a clear purpose; otherwise you are a rebel without a cause.
Why do I say all these things? I am stressing your responsibility. That is important. We are trying to relate to one another heart to heart. We have to be together through thick and thin. I certainly hope that in the future we can have more joyous times with Father. No matter what, we must cut through all the physical things and have dominion over them and understand the heart of Father.
In order to have this experience, we have a lot of work ahead of us. We have to be responsible. Let us do our best and perform our utmost, for the sake of Father, our Father. I will do my best for my Father, you must do the same for my Father, because he is your Father, too. Don't you like to be called brothers and sisters?
I hope you caught my heart today. Once you take it, you are bearing a responsibility. Please bring joy to our lives. I try to bring joy to your lives. The reason Father encourages you to experience hardship is because that is the only way you can understand the suffering of God. Without experiencing it, it's not yours completely. You must first understand the suffering heart of Heavenly Father to become worthy to receive His blessings. Please have a nice week and let's go bring victory!