If you love creation, you come to know that you have been raised by God's love

Welcome everyone to this Sunday Peace Service. I would like to share the core teachings of the Family Federation with those who have come to this Sunday peace service. In every country in the world, the words of Exposition of the Divine Principle are becoming like salt and light. The Divine Principle reveals the existence of God and presents a clear understanding of the Creation, the Fall and salvation. When you understand the teachings of the Divine Principle, you discover your identity.

True freedom and liberation come from a true encounter with God. The Divine Principle vividly illuminates the heart of God at the time of the Creation, the sorrow of the Fall, and the pain of the providence of salvation. You will experience true encounters with God through the teachings of the Principle. The Divine Principle will open a new world for you. It will become your heart’s manna and quail and your light. The Divine Principle is the truth discovered by wandering around the vast intangible world. This truth, which only Heaven had known was revealed by walking up a path of bloody hardship.

John 8:32 says, “and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” If God is the creator of humanity, God must have had a reason for creating us. If we knew the reason, we would know the purpose of our existence, because the purpose of the Creation is the purpose of our existence. What does it say that humanity does not know for certain why it has existed so far? It suggests we do not clearly know the being that caused humanity to be on earth.

How can we know God? The way to know the intangible God is to know God’s purpose for creating by looking at all the things God has created, just as you can see the artist through his or her work. What is the reason that God created humanity? Was it because God should not be alone? The Bible says that God saw what he had made and that “it was very good.” We can surmise that God created to feel joy. According to the Bible, God created man in his likeness (Genesis 1:26), blessed them and said, “Be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion over all things.” (Genesis 1:28). The reason God gives blessings is because man’s joy is God’s joy. Just as the health and happiness of a child makes the child’s parents happy. God’s feels joy when man, whom he created as objects of joy, feels joy. Therefore, God created Adam and Eve in his likeness, and blessed them to create the kingdom of heaven on earth.

What is the meaning of God’s blessing, “Be fruitful, multiply and have dominion over all things?” You can see that these words express God’s wish. Parents love their children, hoping that they will grow up to

be good and healthy. When a child has become an adult, the parents hope the child has a good partner and has many children, builds a blessed family, is respected by others, and lives well. This heart is unchanging with parents who have children. This unchanging heart of a human parent is the “heart of God”, our parent, who said “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” “Be fruitful” means to develop and let your body and mind grow. Wanting your mind to grow is wanting to become mature.

Wishing for children to become mature is wishing for them to be filial. Therefore, in this blessing from God, “be fruitful” means “love your parents.” When a child grows up, he or she wants to marry. The heart wants to find a partner. God gave us that heart. That is how our bodies were created; that is how our minds were created.

This is to achieve the God blessing, “to multiply.” The word “multiply” means to marry, have children, to fill the earth. God blessed us to travel on the path of love, saying, “multiply.” That is why people want to marry and have children. We love our husbands or we love our wives, and we love our children. We want to create a loving family and then a loving people, nation, country and world. To achieve this, we must first love our parents, love our wives or husbands, love our children and love our neighbors. This is how God’s blessing, “multiply,” can be fulfilled.

To “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth,” means to love all the creation with the heart of loving parents, brothers, spouses and children. We must make all the creation grateful to God for creating Adam and Eve. In that way, God, who said, “Have dominion over all things” and gave man the right to do so, will also be happy.

If you love creation, you come to know that you have been raised by God’s love, a love which is greater than your parents’ love, the love from those who gave birth to you and raised you. That is how you meet God. Because God wants it to be like that, he said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) Here, God’s blessing expresses the wish that man be a being of love. These are called the “three great blessings.” Realizing the three great blessings fulfills God’s purpose for creating and us the purpose of a man’s life.

It is not easy to live happily in the world with a good heart. Some blame the world when they cannot be happy even though they are doing good, but there is no denying that unhappiness is created within oneself. This is because within the individual there is the original mind and an evil mind that confront and fight against each other for different purposes; the evil mind is the cause of one’s unhappiness.

For humans to achieve happiness, we must come out of the abnormal state of having two natures and have only one nature, which is our original state. To do that and to do good, which is what the original mind

wants, we need to know why we came to have an evil mind.

We did not know clearly why we, who were supposed to have only one nature, came to have two minds. The Divine Principle teaches the cause of this misfortune, saying that Adam and Eve, the human ancestors, fell by eating the fruit of good and evil that God had commanded them not to eat. The reason Adam and Eve, who before the fall were not ashamed even though they were naked, covered their lower bodies after they ate the fruit of good and evil is because they had sinned with their lower bodies. It is human nature to cover up faults. We must reassess God’s expressions in the Bible, which could only be conveyed using metaphors and symbols.

What caused Adam and eve to lose God’s great love? What caused the children to separate from their loving parent? What is it that made them ignore God’s warning, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”? What made them decide not to care about dying if they could eat the fruit of good and evil? It cannot be anything less than the temptation of love. The Fall was an act of adultery. The Bible story clearly shows this. Adultery destroys an individual’s personality as well as the family, society and nation. Adultery destroyed the garden of Eden, the kingdom of God. As Jesus said, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.” (John 8:44) We feel ashamed of the lewdness in the human mind — traces of our ancestors’ sins.

Up to this day we have thought that lewdness is simply an ethical issue for individuals, but we now know that demons and Satan are behind lewdness. So how can we leave this to be as it is? From now on, we cannot permit ourselves to live with such unrighteous desires. We must fight these sinful desires with all of our being. We have been called to this truth for this fight, to save the individual, family, nation and world. This sinful world is a world in which humanity grieves and God grieves (Genesis 6:6). Therefore, God will surely save this world, which due to the Fall has become a world of pain and sorrow.

As the prophet predicted, God sent Jesus as the Savior. The distrust of the Jewish people drove Jesus to the cross. Jesus, who came as the Savior, bore the sins of humankind and took the path of death on the cross to save fallen humankind. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Matthew 23:37)” This was Jesus Christ’s sorrowful heart. Jesus is to return to fulfill the mission that he could not realize when he first came. Jesus comes again so that we can become God’s sons and daughters, who do not have original sin, people of heaven, so that God can dwell in our temple, and to achieve a nation in which no more tearful prayers nor sorrow arise toward Heaven.

We traditionally call God “Heavenly Father,” but God is the oneness of father and mother, so “Heavenly Parent” is a more accurate expression. God is our Heavenly Parent because man and woman were created in God’s likeness. Therefore, Jesus must come as a groom and meet his bride, the only begotten daughter, and they are together to manifest as the True Parents through the marriage supper of the Lamb. They are to declare the new, more explicit truth, saving all humankind, and finally completing the kingdom of God.

The Divine Principle is a new truth that enlightens us of the principle and purpose of existence. Luke 5:38 says, “New wine must be poured into new wineskins.” I hope you all received great enlightenment in the peace service today. May the grace of the Heavenly Parent be with everyone who came to the peace service. As Matthew 7:7-8 says, “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”