Cream of the Crop 20/Cream of the Crop 20 (Terry Blount) (1996).iso/religion/compleat.zip/COMPLEAT

Text File | 1995-01-09 | 38KB | 686 lines

     "True  Parents  and  the  Completed  Testament  Age"

 Honored Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:

 Today, we are at a crucial crossroads of history.  Therefore,  if
 we are to take the road to a bright future, it is essential  that
 we understand God's  original  purpose  for  creating  humankind.

 God's ideal in creating the first human ancestors, Adam and  Eve,
 was that they perfect themselves through true love so  that  they
 could then create a good family of true love, true life, and true
 lineage. Such a good family would have been formed on  the  basis
 of unified heart and mind among family members in front  of  God.

 In general, all people want their loved ones to  be  better  than
 themselves. All  parents  want  their  sons  and  daughters,  for
 example, to look better and achieve more  than  themselves.  This
 tendency comes from God. God wants His children to be better than
 even Himself.

 Similarly, 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. The nature  of  God  is  to
 give love 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.

 Moreover, God's purpose in creating the  world  was  to  have  an
 object of love. His purpose in  creating  parents  and  children,
 husbands and wives, and all things in this world in complementary
 pairs was to substantiate  true  love  throughout  His  creation.
 Likewise, parents are to live for their  children,  and  children
 for their parents. Husbands are to  live  for  their  wives,  and
 wives for their husbands. All beings in creation are to live  for
 and give to others.

 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  thence  over  all  the
 earth. 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 for a  Messiah  or  for  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.

 Therefore, the key goal in God's  dispensation  of  salvation  is
 that a man and a woman, representing  Adam  and  Eve,  should  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.

 The separation of fallen mankind into a Cain-Abel division occurs
 over and over again in Judeo-Christian  history.  Therefore,  God
 first of all separated fallen mankind into two "brotherly"  sides
 of Cain, symbolizing Satan, and Abel, symbolizing  God,  to  work
 out the hatreds resulting from the Fall. God used the  method  of
 having Abel be hit first and sacrificed. As a result, Abel  could
 stand on that very foundation to embrace  Cain  and  recover  the
 blessing given to the elder son. For example, the  religion  that
 most advances the purpose of salvation  always  receives  Satan's
 most severe persecution. It walks the path of constant opposition
 yet continues its sacrificial effort to save  the  sinful  world.
 Likewise, good people always  stand  in  the  position  of  being
 struck first and sacrificed.

 Looking almost anywhere in our fallen world, it is easy to notice
 struggles between good and evil, similar to the struggle  between
 Cain and Abel. 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.  It  has
 always  been  God's  intention,  however,  that  both  sides   be
 restored, not that  one  triumph  over  and  destroy  the  other.

 Some examples of this division are: the thief on the  right  side
 of Jesus on the cross, representing Abel, and the  thief  on  the
 left, representing Cain, and  South  Korea  versus  North  Korea,
 which represents the last conflict between right  wing  and  left
 wing on the world level. Moreover, there is the  Christian-Muslim
 conflict in the Middle East. So the key issue in  God's  work  of
 salvation has always remained how to unify  such  divided  sides,
 based on His ideal, in order to build a foundation  on  which  to
 reclaim the True Mother and True Father.

 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 breakdown. Moreover, a nation of  such  families  will
 also decline. 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. For this reason, God's work of restoration  begins  at
 the individual level. Since Satan  knows  this,  he  focuses  his
 efforts also on the individual level.

 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  div