Discovering the Divine Principle Session 4 The Fall part 1 - Script

1 Welcome, my name is ________________________ and it is my pleasure, once again, to be your host for this segment of our series, Discovering the Divine Principle – The Fall, Part 1

The content that we are studying comes from the Divine Principle, a revelation from God that was given to Rev Sun Myung Moon.

2 This topic, the Fall, is of special importance. It will answer the question that everyone asks at one point or another – 3 Why is there evil? 4 Where does it come from? 5 How can there be evil if there is a good and loving God?

6 Let’s begin by briefly reviewing God’s ideal of creation.

The center of God’s ideal of creation is love. God intended for man and woman to grow as individuals to maturity, to the point that they would be able to inherit God’s love. With that love they were to join together as husband and wife and expand that love within a family. Finally, all people would live together in peace, as one great family centered on God.

7 But how can we believe in such an ideal when there is so much 8 suffering and injustice in the world? Some believe that there is no ideal, that humanity will always be a mixture of 9 good and bad and that we are forever 10 destined to struggle. That is one possibility, but do we really believe that? No. We know that there are people who, having overcome their addictions and their selfish tendencies, have become better people.

11 We could all believe in the ideal – if it could be shown that there is something blocking us, preventing us from achieving that ideal.

12 You could have a watch that does not keep time. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. If you find a watchmaker, who can recognize what the real problem is, the watch can be fixed and it can run like new.

13 People are the same. We don’t seem to function very well. We can think of religion as the mechanic. We have to respect and honor the great religions of the world – because, to a certain degree they have helped to improve humanity – lifting up our conscience and our moral standards.

But by the same token, the human “watch,” although improved, is still not running very well. 14 It means that the religions of the past, although they have brought us as far as they could, have missed some critical points. They were not able to discover the fundamental root of our problems, the cause of evil.

The good news is that God is now finally able to reveal the root cause of suffering, that problem which is blocking us from fulfilling our ideals. This is the content we are about to study.

15 What is our human condition? We actually have two natures, 16 an original nature that comes from God, 17 and a fallen nature that came as a result of our deviation from God. St Paul expressed this state of affairs in the seventh chapter of Romans:

“Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.”

18 We all experience that struggle – we want to be good, but we do things that we are ashamed of. We pledge to love someone forever, and then do things and say things that destroy that relationship. We want peace, but again and again find ourselves at war.

Our problem is that we don’t really know where our fallen nature came from. This ignorance has prevented us from dealing properly with this problem and resolving it, and thus the history of evil has continued up to the present day.

19 The good news is that our original nature is permanent, it cannot be removed. It came from God. In contrast to that, our fallen nature is temporary. It is a distortion of our original nature and it can be changed.

Let’s briefly go back to the first chapter – 20 and re-examine the principle of human responsibility. This will help us understand how the Fall, the deviation from the ideal, took place. As was explained, God’s ideal is all about love. 21 God wanted to have a substantial experience of love with his children. 22 Now, everything in God’s creation, including our physical body, grows automatically to maturity by the guiding force of the laws of nature that God designed. But this is not true with love.

God gave the ability to love to his children, and with that ability He gave them freedom. 23 And, along with the freedom to love, God gave them 24 responsibility for that love. In other words, when it came to love, there was a possibility for a mistake. God could not force his children to love as He loves. This is why the Fall was possible.

25 Along with our portion of responsibility, there is a growth process in love. There is love between parents and children and there is 26 the romantic-sexual love between man and woman. 27 God’s plan was that we first mature as individuals, to the point that we could inherit God’s love, the love of our parents, who ideally would already embody God’s love. After achieving that level of maturity, 28 we would be qualified to engage in the romantic-sexual love as husband and wife, giving birth to children to whom we, in turn, would pass on God’s love.

The key is to keep these two loves in the proper order. 29 First you become a true person, 30 then you pursue marriage and family. God knew that if a person is tempted into 31 romantic-sexual love because of immature, selfish desire, that selfish love would 32 separate us from God and prevent us from inheriting God’s love. This is why God gave the commandment to the first man and woman, to not partake of sexual love.

33 Where in the Bible do we first hear of a commandment not to do something? We of course find this at the very beginning, in Genesis, when God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

You most likely know the story of the Garden of Eden, the dwelling place of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. According to the story, there were two special trees in the garden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that God commanded the man and woman not to eat. 34 Also in the Garden there was a serpent that tempted Eve to eat the fruit, which she then gave to Adam.

Most people have thought of this as only a story. But it is more than just a story. Hidden within the symbols of this story is the truth of how humanity lost the originally intended intimate and loving relationship with God.

35 For example, the serpent – we know serpents can’t talk, that they are not able to tempt human beings, and they don’t have the ability to know God’s commands. What could this serpent represent?

36 Revelation 12:9 speaks of this ancient serpent

“The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan … and his angels were thrown down with him.” 37

From this we can understand that the serpent is actually 38 a spiritual being, a leader of angels, an archangel, who was thrown out of heaven. The Bible as well as other sacred texts reveal his name to be Lucifer, an originally good being who fell and came to be called the Devil and Satan.

39 At the end of the second segment on the Principle of Creation, we discussed the spirit world. In that realm there are beings called angels. Angels are similar to people in appearance, but do not have a physical body and have a different role to play than people. Whereas the Bible speaks of men and women as God’s children, Hebrews 1:14 describes angels as God’s servants.

40 What about the two trees? A tree or plant in scripture is often used as a symbol of a person. In John 15:5 Jesus taught that he was the vine and we are the branches. There are two people in the garden and there are two trees. What was the Tree of Life? 41 What kind of life is it talking about, physical or spiritual? God said, “the day you eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, you shall die.” But after eating it they lived for many years. The death they experienced was thus not physical, but spiritual. So too with the other tree. The life we are talking about is not physical life.

It’s spiritual life, a person’s connection of love with God. The Tree of Life represents a person who has fulfilled God’s purpose for them, a person who has inherited God’s love.

And what about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? 42 In scripture the word knowledge has two meanings. In some places it means awareness of a fact, but it also means to have a sexual relationship. That’s the ultimate knowledge. In Genesis 4:1 “Adam knew his wife Eve and she gave birth to Cain.” And as we discussed earlier, love is the one thing in God’s creation which is our responsibility and which has the potential of being either good or evil. 43 If we first mature and become the Tree of Life, a person connected to God’s love, then when we engage in sexual love, we create God’s family and that is the knowledge of goodness. 44 But if we partake of this fruit before becoming mature, this experience becomes the knowledge of evil, separating us from God’s love and creating a very different kind of family.

45 What we are saying is that the fruit was a symbol of romantic-sexual love. The evidence for this is easy to see. Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were naked, without shame. After they ate, their shame caused them to cover their lower parts, their sexual organs. As a child, when I took cookies I was told not to take and my mother caught me in the act, I would try to hide the cookies and pretend to be innocent. Adam and Eve hid their sexual organs, because it was with their sexual organs that they committed their sin.

46 How did the fall take place? What was the angel’s motivation?

47 His motivation was jealousy. God created the angels in the position of servants, whereas man and woman were created to be God’s children, in the position to fully inherit God’s love. If Adam and Eve had reached full maturity, inheriting God’s love, they would have stood as lords of creation and they would have transmitted God’s complete love to the angels. But while man and woman were still growing, they could not give the angels mature love as their lords.

48 The Bible describes Lucifer leading the angelic world. 49 He assisted God in the work of creation. He felt jealous of Adam and Eve when he saw God love them as unique and precious children. 50 When he compared the love he had received from God to the love that God gave to Adam and Eve, even though God’s love for him remained unchanged, he felt as if he were receiving less love than before.

51 The archangel, seeking greater love, looked towards Eve. Eve was becoming a beautiful woman – and her beauty stimulated love in the archangel. When the archangel first approached Eve she rejected him, telling him it was forbidden. 52 But over time, the archangel, using deception and charm, was able to convince Eve to engage with him in the act of love. Through this violation of the Principle of Creation, the archangel Lucifer fell and became Satan.

Eve, after her relationship with the archangel, was also changed. Her understanding of love was shaped by the archangel, not God. She felt fear and guilt and she realized that Adam, not the angel, was meant to be her husband. 53 Wanting to return to where she had been with God, where she felt alive with God’s love, she went to Adam. But instead of confessing what had happened, she offered Adam the love she had experienced through her relationship with the archangel, and she seduced him.

54 The fallen love between Eve and the archangel was spiritual, whereas the act of love between Eve and Adam was physical.

In the next segment we will discuss in more detail the significance of these two acts. But the essence of what happened is that love, which should have begun based on God’s ideal, was instead initiated by the archangel’s deception, temptation, and seduction.

What happened next? God came to them and tried to offer them a way out of their predicament. The only way out was for them to take responsibility for what they had done and choose to go back to God. 55 But when God confronted Adam – Adam said ”the woman beguiled me and I ate,” 56 and he blamed the woman. And when God confronted Eve, 57 she also refused to take responsibility and told God it was all the archangel’s fault.

58 And so nothing could be repaired at that time. Adam and Eve abandoned God and continued in their fallen relationship. Eventually they had children. And those children, instead of being the result of God’s love, born into a family of God’s love, were born as the result of the love that the archangel had initiated. The first child – reflecting that corrupted root, ended up murdering his younger brother.

59 The human family should have begun with the first man and woman coming together in love as husband and wife, inspired and blessed by God.

We can imagine this first family as a seed – a seed that was to sprout to become a great and beautiful tree. Every cell of this tree would be like a family. Each one inheriting the same love, connected to the same root. This was to have been the Kingdom of God – God’s ideal of creation.

60 But instead the first family inherited a corrupted love, which has since then infected every part of the tree. We are all extensions of that first couple, that first fallen love. This is why Jesus said to the people in John 8:44 – “you are of your father the Devil.” This is the reason the story of humanity has been so tragic, and it is the reason that that tragedy continues even as we speak.

From here we can begin to understand how God, with our help, is going to go about solving this problem.

61 Think of the fallen family as the fruit of a seed of a lemon tree, when the original tree that God wanted was an apple tree. How would one go about changing the lemon tree into an apple tree, when all you have to work with are lemons, the people now living in the world? The answer is you can’t. The only way to get an apple tree is to start anew with an apple seed.

62 In other words, to solve this root of all problems, God needs to plant a new seed. And that seed must consist of a man and a woman.

This is where the concept of a Messiah originates. God needs to bring into the world a new Adam 63, a person whom God can claim to be His true son, a person whose wife would be considered by God to be his true daughter 64 and whose children would be the result of God’s love.

The first parents, Adam and Eve, became false parents. The world needs a man and a woman who can stand with God as the True Parents.

And if we have such True Parents and they begin such a tree, 65 how will the rest of us be saved? We can do so by being adopted into that family tree. Or using the analogy that Jesus gave us in John 15:5, we can become the branches of the vine – grafted onto the good tree. True Parents would reconnect us with the love of God as our Original Parents.

What are the lessons we can learn from this revelation?

66 First, Rev Moon wants us to know how painful this was for God. We are often blind to the fact that God feels great pain because of this event. It was a betrayal of love. Nothing can be more painful for a parent, who grieves along with the tragic situation of His children.

67 Second, we need to realize that keeping the proper order of love is important. For the human spirit it is the difference between life and death. Free sex kills the spirit. It can make you feel good in the moment, but it destroys families and it will eventually lead humanity to destruction.

68 Third, please pray about this revelation. At first it may be hard to believe that an angel had sex with the first woman. But if you pray about it, and if you look around you, you will see evidence of the fall in every corner of human life.

69 Fourth, we need a Messiah. But not only a Messiah, who can become the son that Adam failed to be; we also need a woman who can become the daughter of God that Eve failed to be.

70 Although this presentation has been about a tragedy, it gives us reason to have hope, because, as we said in the beginning, if we can understand the root cause of our problem, we will begin to understand how to solve our problems. And therefore the future is bright!

But to get to that future, we need to ask some questions about this story. For example, you might be thinking, why am I responsible for all this? Religions talk about sin, but how does a mistake made by people thousands of years ago affect me today? I’m a pretty good person, why do I have to deal with all this?

71 At the same time, I know I’ve got problems, real problems, and so do lots of people around me. There’s disrespect, abuse, guilt… there’s chaos everywhere. But why highlight sex as the cause of all that?

And, anyway, if God is all powerful, and all-knowing, He must have known it was happening. Why didn’t God intervene to prevent this?

72 These are really important questions, and we’re going to focus on them in the next presentation. I hope you will join us.