The God Who Needs Liberation

Sun Myung Moon November 15, 1998 Cheon Seong Gyeong: The Holy Scripture of Cheon Il Guk, Book 1, Chapter 4 - Excerpt

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Since it was our first ancestors who committed the Fall, it was natural that they would suffer sorrow. But the Fall brought sorrow even to God, who had created them with such great hope. That is, when human beings fell into sorrow, they wronged God and brought Him to a miserable and painful state. This should never have happened on the earth; it should never have occurred under the sun. Nevertheless, the mistake of our first ancestors led to the unimaginable incident that we call the Fall.

God was supposed to have emerged as a glorious being. Our joy should have been God’s joy, and God’s joy should have been our joy; this would have been the ideal of creation. But due to the Fall that ideal was lost, and God ended up miserable. The God who appears to us is not the God of glory. He is incomparably more wretched and deserving of pity than anyone in all of history. God originally should have been the God of glory, but since the day of the Fall His situation has been the opposite. God should have been able to entrust everything to human beings, and we should have been able to entrust everything to God; but this sort of open relationship with God became impossible. How deeply painful it is for parents if their children see them in deep misery. Accordingly, God does not want to reveal His painful heart and situation to His children. Though He is toiling endlessly, He does not want to show His sad face.

To this day, we human beings have thought of God as the God of glory, not the God of suffering or pain. Many religions in history have taught this, and believers have led their lives of faith with this idea. But the truth is that God is in the situation where He has lost His family, His children, His property, His nation and His world. Our Father is in that kind of situation. We have thought that once we meet our Father, all our pain and suffering will be dissolved and all our wishes fulfilled. However, when I came to meet our Heavenly Parent after seeking Him for so long, I discovered that everything He owns - His children, His property, even the whole world - was in the hands of the enemy.

You must become filial sons and daughters who can attend the God who has suffered in sorrow throughout history, who can comfort Him, and offer Him joy and glory. Even now, God laments in disappointment.

Hence, you must reach the point where you can welcome the day of God’s victory; and not only you but all humankind with you. To comfort God’s heart of bitter sorrow, you must attend Him, beyond your own people and beyond the world, to advance with the full authority of the cosmos. You need to devote yourselves to becoming children of God whom God wants to bless rather than judge. You have to become a group of people who can endure. No matter what cruel situations or adverse circumstances you suffer, you should be able to say, “Even if no one else remains, I will survive.” Only with this kind of heart can you connect your life to God.

If you have this kind of relationship with God, even though strong winds and mighty storms may come against you, nothing can destroy that bond of heart, which holds the power of life.

Why God is the Lord of sorrow

God is the Lord of sorrow and the Lord of pain. Our Father, whom we are supposed to attend, wants to experience joy and glory, yet He has never had the chance. God is in bitter sorrow due to the Fall, yet He carries still more grief and suffering. We think that heaven is a garden of happiness, but in reality that is not the case. I have thoroughly searched in every corner, looking for anything to rejoice over, but I could not find anything. God is supposed to have the power and authority to rule the world; He is supposed to experience glory and honor, and to sing in happiness. Yet the elements of joy, glory and goodness are all gone, while all that remains are sorrow and pain. This is God’s lament. In heaven and on earth, there is no greater suffering than this.

God is the most sorrowful being. He is more sorrowful than a son who weeps in front of his dying mother. He has been treated more unjustly than a person wrongfully sentenced to death as a traitor to his people when they should have recognized him as a champion of goodness. God is the Lord who holds the title as the most wronged and most miserable. Religions should be teaching this to the point that people’s hearts are deeply moved. God does not wear a robe of glory; His robe is soaked in blood and sweat. That robe was made by the bloody hands of sons and daughters who desperately tried to hold onto Him but could not. God’s feet are scarred from walking the thorny paths of His children’s struggles throughout history. When individuals sought Him and fell down on the way, God took the blows on their behalf. He chose one people even as other peoples fell away, but when even that people betrayed Him, He allowed Himself to be struck on their behalf in order to continue the fight. The God in whom we have believed is, in fact, a being deserving of sympathy.

God is the Lord of the world, but He has never been able to wield His authority as the Lord. He is the subject partner of love, but He has never been able say to us, “I love you.” Even though He is in the position to own everything, He cannot say to us, “You are mine,” and hold us as He wishes. Among the countless human beings on earth, God never had His own son or daughter, not even one brave soldier who could totally defeat Satan. Even though there are countless Christians on earth who believe in Jesus, among them God has not had even one commander-in-chief who could order a total offensive against Satan. God tried to relate to the earth by having Jesus give orders to the angelic world, but this did not succeed. God also gave a vision for the ideal of the bride to the people on earth and searched everywhere for her. Yet He never met even one such woman whom He could proudly present before Satan. Indeed, as a group of people, we ought to feel deeply repentant before God.

God, the eternal being, sheds tears for us. His tears are to eliminate the way of death, the way of pain and the way of sorrow. God sheds tears to eliminate all of these paths. We need to understand that God is shedding blood, sweat and tears for us to eliminate the ways of sorrow, pain and death. Then, it is only right that we take His Will upon our shoulders so that He does not have to keep going to the point of death on our behalf. Thus far, God has placed our ancestors in positions where they had to shed tears, shed their blood and sweat, and confront death. It was not because God had no love that He did this; He did so in order to ultimately eliminate such situations. Yet God Himself experienced much greater suffering than they. How painful it is for a father and mother to see the death of their beloved child! How their heart is grieved to watch their child suffer! It is more painful than if they were to die themselves. With such a painful heart, God has been suffering throughout human history. We may have to endure pain, but it is just within our one generation; then we are done with our responsibility. But God had to endure that kind of indescribable pain every time our ancestors went the way of death, the way of tears, the way of blood and sweat, and the way of sorrow and suffering.