God’s Ideal Family and the Kingdom of the Peaceful, Ideal World – I

…I invite you to enter into a mystical state and prayerfully ask God, “What is the center of the universe?” I am sure that the answer you hear will be “the parent-child relationship.” Nothing is more important or more precious than the relationship between parent and child. This is because it defines the fundamental relationship between God, the Creator, and human beings. Then, what defines the parent-child relationship? Three things define this relationship: love, life and lineage.

The first is love

Without our parents’ love as a precondition, none of us would be alive today. God created human beings out of absolute love, to be partners with Him in love. This relationship forms an axis of love, linking God the Parent with human beings as sons and daughters.

Is there anything higher or more precious than to be a son or daughter of God? If anything were higher, then surely human desire would aspire to attain it. There is nothing higher. Do you think that when the omniscient and almighty God created Adam and Eve, He secretly reserved the highest position for Himself and made Adam and Eve to be only second best? We cannot imagine that God would do that to His children, partners who were created to share absolute love with Him. As our eternal True Parent, God invested one hundred percent into the creation of human beings and endowed us with the right to have equal status with Him, to participate in His work as equals, to live with and to inherit from Him. God bestowed upon human beings all of His own attributes.

Though God is the Absolute Being, He cannot be happy alone. Adjectives such as “good” and “happy” cannot apply to any being that lives in isolation. They apply only where there is a robust reciprocal relationship. Imagine a professional singer who finds herself exiled to an uninhabited island. She may sing at the top of her voice, yet with no one to listen, will it bring her happiness? In the same way, even the self-existent God absolutely needs a reciprocal partner of love in order to experience joy and be happy.

Next is life

Then how shall we live to become God’s reciprocal partner and return joy to Him? In other words, how shall we live to become children of God, people whom God delights to call “My son,” or “My daughter,” people who embody a divinity equal to His own? How can we become God’s partners in completing the work of creation, partners who will inherit the entire creation? I answer: We must emulate the ideal beginning point of God’s creative process. In the beginning of creation, God set up the principle of “living for the sake of others.” He set the practice of true love as the nucleus, and from that point He began to create.

Therefore, to become God’s children, our first responsibility is to resemble God. We need to embody true love. The way to embody true love begins by living as a filial child, then a patriot, a saint, and finally a divine son or daughter of God. At that stage we can experience the innermost emotions of God’s heart and resolve the grief that He has experienced for tens of thousands of years ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve. God is almighty. It is not due to His shortcoming or lack of ability that He has been imprisoned in great pain and has endured immense suffering behind the scenes of history.

This tragedy was the result of provisions in the Principle of Restoration, which God was not free to disclose, that called Him to wait with forbearance until Adam and Eve’s positions, lost at the Fall, could be restored thanks to the appearance of the perfected “second Adam.” Although God is all-powerful, He will not set aside the eternal laws and principles that He established.

Finally, lineage

Do you know what has pained God’s heart, causing Him the greatest grief over the long history since the Fall of Adam and Eve? God lost His lineage. And with the loss of His lineage, God lost His right of ownership. Let me talk about lineage for a moment. Lineage is more important than life and more important than love. Life and love come together to create lineage. Lineage cannot be established if either life or love is missing. Therefore, among the three qualities that define the parent-child relationship, love, life and lineage, lineage is the fruit.

The seed of true love is embedded in God’s lineage. God’s lineage provides the context and environment for a true life. Hence, for us to become the ideal people envisioned by God, people of ideal character who can create ideal families, we first need to be linked to His lineage. To take it a step further, only when we are linked to God’s lineage is it possible to create God’s homeland, the ideal nation. Only when we are linked to God’s lineage is it possible to establish world peace. Please inscribe the importance of lineage in your hearts. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Without lineage, neither life nor love can endure. You strive to set a good tradition, yet it will endure only through your lineage. Lineage is the bridge allowing the parents’ spirit to carry on through subsequent generations. In other words, lineage is the first and final condition necessary for parents to harvest the fruits of their love, the fruits of their life and the fruits of their joy. We need to know this with certainty.

Yet when Adam and Eve fell, this lineage, more precious than life, was lost. The fruits of true life and true love never matured. From them descended the six billion people now inhabiting the earth. God intended for the seeds He planted to grow into a bountiful crop to be harvested in the autumn in the garden of Eden. The ideal of God’s creation was that He would raise Adam and Eve, His son and daughter, to the point where they would blossom in true love, give bloom to true life, and bear fruit in a true lineage. God desired to harvest the owners, families and nation of eternal life, eternal love and eternal lineage.

False love, false life and false lineage infested the earth. God’s love, life and lineage fell into the hands of the adulterer Satan, the enemy of love. Heaven and earth were suffocated and transformed into hell. The world became a wretched place, far from God’s presence. Yet humanity to this day lives in ignorance of this. People are deluded into believing that the lineage of the enemy is the lifeline upon which the world depends. This is the wretched truth about humanity descended from the Fall. That is why we refer to this world as hell on earth. God sees humanity’s tragic situation with a heart full of pain.

• Pyeong Hwa Gyeong, Book 4, Speech #11 (“God’s Ideal Family and the Kingdom of the Peaceful, Ideal World — I”)