The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1983

Why We Must Love Our Enemies

Sun Myung Moon
April 3, 1983
Excerpt
God's Will and the World
Total Indemnity

Unless you have your own home church area, which is your own Cain-type tribe, you can never restore your Abel-like tribe. Before you can restore your Abel-type family, you have to restore Cain first. No one has ever understood this point so far.

It's important to love your enemy. Why did God make efforts to teach us that loving our enemy is important? Satan says to God, "In order for You to be God, You must always maintain the standard of ideal, eternal love." God replies, "Yes, that is true." Then Satan says, "God, when You made me the archangel, did You do so just in order to love me temporarily, or to love me forever?" And God says, "Forever." If God loved only temporarily, then He would be like Satan. By the same token, if one has no standard of loving forever, he cannot show God's dignity to Satan. In order for God to be God, He must love Satan no matter how much Satan is opposed to Him.

Satan says, "I fell and became evil, but You who are good can never change, and You can never do the things I do. I enjoy attacking and fighting, but you hate fighting. You must be silent even if You are beaten." Hence, God cannot forcibly resist Satan's aggression. Why? God cannot crush Satan just like that. He must love him unchangingly so that Satan will finally come to say, "Oh, indeed You are God. I surrender to You." No matter how much suffering you may have to experience, you have to love the archangel until the ideal of heaven is completely established in this world. God's hands are tied by that demand. As you go on your way to the Heavenly Kingdom, Satan will test you. Just as God must love Satan and let Satan surrender to Him in that way! So God's children must love the archangel if they want to go to the Heavenly Kingdom.

How much love would that take? Even though you are persecuted by all of this world, which is the realm of the enemy, you must love the evildoer with your whole heart. That is the condition you have to fulfill. God is most concerned about that condition, so those people who are striving to be God's children should also be most concerned about it. This standard of loving might appear simple, but it is the very boundary line between God and Satan. No one has fully understood this before. In order to go beyond this boundary, God cannot even regard His enemy as an enemy, and He must not take revenge.

The conclusion for us is to love our enemy. When Jesus prayed for those people who were killing him, it was the greatest victory. If he had hated his enemies when he was about to die, then the providence of God would not have been successful. But as Jesus overcame his difficulties through love, Satan began surrendering, and Jesus obtained the qualification of God's perfected child. You have to come to the point where you are able to say, "Satan, don't you agree that I am a child of God?" and have Satan concede, "Yes, that's true." You must be able to say confidently, "I'm following God's direction, expanding His sphere of love from the individual level through the family, clan and nation, to the worldwide level. You have no objection to that. Right, Satan?" And Satan must say, "I have to agree with you because it's the Principle."

This is the way God has proceeded with His dispensation, centering upon Christianity. It has been the path of sacrifice and martyrdom and, through its bloody history, Christianity has been a movement to expand God's love to the family level, the societal level, the national level, all the way to the worldwide level. Through the standard of Christian love, which loves the enemy, enemy nations can be conquered; Cain is won over. 

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