Creating a World of Peace - The Thought and Works of Sun Myung Moon by Joon Ho Seuk

Volume 1 - The Life and Teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon [Part 19 / 20]

3. The Deviation

The second part of the Divine Principle investigates the deviation from God's ideal of creation and the origin of evil.

Reverend Moon teaches how this came about through the Human Fall, namely the failure of the first human ancestors, the consequences of that failure for God's family, and the spread of conflict throughout history.

Creation of a False Family

From "True Parents and the Completed Testament Age," North American Speaking Tour, 1993.
God's ideal of 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. In fact, today's world is 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.

A. Failure of the First Human Ancestors

Sin originated with the first human beings, Adam and Eve. Their failure to realize a true family destroyed God's ideal of creation.

It is told in the Bible that God gave Adam and Eve a commandment: do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A serpent tempted Eve into eating the fruit, and Eve, in turn, shared the fruit with Adam. At that point the man and woman felt fear and guilt; they covered their sexual parts and hid from God. God then blocked their way to the tree of life and sent them out of the Garden of Eden.

Reverend Moon clarifies the meaning of this symbolic account. A fruit is that part of a tree that bears the seeds for reproduction.

The sin of the first human ancestors was sexual in nature, the fruit symbolizing the sexual love of Eve. God's commandment not to "eat the fruit" meant they should not enter into a marriage relationship until they had fulfilled the first blessing of individual maturity.

Then they were to fulfill the second blessing by uniting in physical love. By engaging in a sexual relationship prematurely, Adam and Eve let selfish love, centered on their physical bodies, take the place of true love, centered on God.

Original Sin

From "View of the Principle of the Providential History of Salvation," Inaugural Banquet of The Washington Times Foundation, Washington, DC, April 16, 1996.
Distinguished guests, could the Fall of Man have been the result of eating the fruit of a tree? The fall of Adam and Eve was an immoral sin against the ideal of the True Love of God. The fact that Adam and Eve needed to obey the Commandment shows that they fell in a stage of imperfection, that is to say, during their period of growth.
The Archangel, who is symbolized by a serpent, tempted Eve to eat of the fruit of good and evil, and she fell spiritually. She later tempted Adam, who was also too immature to eat of the fruit, and they then fell physically.
The only possible sin that could have been fatal in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were in communication with God and living in joy, was the sin of illicit love. The first consummated love of the human ancestors, because it was supposed to have been the perfection of the love of God Himself, should have marked the beginning of a celebration that would continue throughout history, filled with the never-ending intoxication of joy and blessing for God, Adam and Eve, and the universe.
It should have been a joyous occasion in which the love, life and lineage of God would have been established within human life. To the contrary, however, Adam and Eve covered their lower parts and hid themselves among the trees, trembling in fear.
By disobeying heavenly law, they established an immoral relationship as the basis for false love, false life and false lineage. As descendants of Adam and Eve, all people are born with Original Sin.
The Fall gave rise to conflict of mind and body within every person and caused our societies to be filled with tainted love, and people to do things that contradict the desire of their original minds.

B. Results of Failure

True love for the sake of others was to be the very center of human life, the essence of the kingdom of Heaven on earth. Instead, selfish love has become the way of human life and has created this world of Hell. When the first human ancestors fell through false and self-centered love relationships, they established a lineage based not on the selfless love of God, but on the corrupted, selfish love of Satan. The human Fall was the destruction of true love.

Results of the Fall

From "True Parents and the Completed Testament Age," North American Speaking Tour, 1993.
Because illicit, self-centered love invaded the first family, selfishness and greed have continued to dominate human history from the individual to the family, society, nation and world.
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 proper responsibility for their children; and 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.
Of all these, what pains God most is free sex. A world of free sex is absolutely contrary to the will of God and the ideal of the family. Love comes from the 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 nightmare 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 schoolchildren 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! 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.

Sexual relations were to be the most beautiful and holy expression of eternal love between a husband and wife. Today love has been so distorted that many people indulge in sex as a casual recreation.

The degradation of sexuality has always been a tragic phenomenon, but the problem has never been so acute as in our modern age. Adultery, promiscuity and prostitution, with their accompanying diseases and exploitation, lead to untold misery and human alienation. These are the results of the Original Sin of the first human ancestors.

Struggle between Good and Evil

From "True Parents and the Completed Testament Age," North American Speaking Tour, 1993.
Looking almost everywhere in our fallen world, it is easy to notice struggles between good and evil, similar to the struggle between Abel and Cain. These struggles start in the conflict between each individual's mind and body. The mind, which represents the Abel side, struggles to overcome the body, which represents the Cain side.
The struggle within individuals has expanded to the family, nation and world.
As a result, humankind has always been divided into two opposing camps, one good, or Abel-like, and the other evil, or Cain-like, locked in struggle at every level.

C. Multiplication of Evil

The origin of conflict in this world is the expansion of historical conflict in the first human family, and that conflict originates in the struggle between mind and body. When they fell, Adam and Eve began their family in a state of conflict, fear, and jealousy, which they passed on to their children like a hereditary disease. The consequences were tragic: Abel could not share God's blessing with his elder brother, and Cain's jealousy led to the first murder in human history. This was the beginning of a cycle of hatred and violence that has continued to this day.

The Origin of Conflict

From "True Family and I," South American Address, June - July, 1995.
Where does the struggle between mind and body originate? We inherit life from our parents and from the parents of their parents. If we continue going back in this manner, we eventually arrive at the first generation, that is, the first human ancestors.
It is a fact that the struggle between mind and body originated through a problem in the conjugal love of Adam and Eve. Our life originates in our parents' love. Since this struggle began before any of us were born, we have to conclude that the problem relates to the circumstances in which our first parents entered into a love relationship with each other.
The love of Adam and Eve was not a love of true happiness. Instead, it was conflict-ridden love. Because the roots of our life are in this love, we must conclude that the conflicts in our inner self originate there. The Bible teaches that because Adam and Eve sinned, they were expelled from the Garden of Eden.
After they were driven out of the Garden, they began to multiply children. God could not follow them and bless them in marriage, because it was He who had driven them from the Garden. Thus we must ask, under whose guidance did they marry? We must concur that, because of having fallen into sin, they married in the hands of Satan.
The fall consisted of Eve being tempted by Satan and her later temptation of Adam. Therefore, when our ancestors, Adam and Eve, established a relationship of conjugal love, that relationship was not a happy one. Instead, it was conflict-ridden.
Humanity, because of its roots in that relationship, cannot separate itself from that struggle between mind and body. This reality is very clear and my explanation is logical.
The fall began with immoral love. Due to a love relationship which God did not desire, Adam and Eve united with Satan. They did not become the ancestors of goodness, but rather the ancestors of evil, planting the roots of evil love, evil life, and evil blood lineage.

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