World Unification and the Unification of Korea through True Love

Restoration of the True God's Homeland
True Parents' Textbook for the Unification of Korea and the World

World Unification and the Unification of North and South Korea through True Love

Distinguished guests whose fervent desire is for world unification and Korean reunification

Ladies and gentlemen!

The new millennium that just began is a time to clear away the divisions and conflicts of the past century and to actualize the ideal of a single global family of harmony and unification. I wish each and every one of your families blessings for the new millennium. I would like to begin by earnestly thanking you for having come here from all over the world to congratulate me on my eightieth birthday. Most of all, I would like to return all glory to God who has preserved me until this day.

In retrospect, there has not been an easy time in my life. I have undergone historical hardships together with our people who have walked the path of all manner of suffering on the Korean peninsula which has been sandwiched in the midst of the great powers.

As a boy of sixteen, I came into contact with the will of Heaven through prayer, and throughout my life after that I have devoted all my spirit and energy to accomplishing God's will. I came to understand that the fundamental cause of human unhappiness is that the relationship with God was severed owing to human beings falling into a state of spiritual ignorance as a result of the Fall of the ancestors of humankind. Through this, people fell into ignorance with regard to God, life, and the fundamental problems of the universe. I have spoken publicly on more than ten thousand occasions in many places around the world and set forth a true view of humanity, a true view of the world, and a true view of history based on Godism. These speeches have been translated into twelve languages and published in three hundred volumes. Their contents that I teach are not the result of a comprehensive study of historical documents or scholarly research, but are rather the principles and fundamental answers I arrived at through freely communicating with both the visible and invisible worlds.

Today, as I express my gratitude at this meaningful event, I am mindful of the fact that the issue of unifying the Korean Peninsula is the solemn desire of our people and the final act of bringing the global Cold War to a conclusion. Therefore, I would like to share with you the basic answer for unification under the topic, "World Unification and the Unification of North and South Korea through True Love."

The unification of our country does not just involve the unification of national territory, but rather is the blueprint for the unification of the world that has been divided between East and West, beginning with the unification of the human mind and body that were divided by the Fall. Thus, this issue must be understood from the perspective of God's providence of salvation and must be resolved on a providential level. The history of humankind is the history of the providence of restoration through indemnity in order to recover the original world that was lost due to the Fall of the ancestors of humankind. Accordingly, history consists of the struggle between good and evil, God's side and Satan's side, in striving for the goal of actualizing God's ideal of creation.

Throughout history, behind the scenes, good spirits have always cooperated with God's side and evil spirits have cooperated on Satan's side. The rift created as a result of the Fall expanded through the family, tribe, ethnic people, nation, and world. In modern times it has manifested itself in the clash between materialism and theism based on humanism and religion respectively. If Jesus Christ had been accepted by the Jewish people two thousand years ago, he would have unified the Jewish tribes and race, and also the Arabic realm inhabited by the descendants of the twelve tribes. Thereupon, his ideology and teachings would have spread through the Middle Eastern region and the Indian region to the Far East. He would then have conquered the Roman Empire and all of Europe and formed a new religious cultural realm in which he would have become the King of all kings. However, through his death on the cross, Hellenism, which had developed first as the humanistic cultural sphere based on the external human body, continued to form the central culture of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, Christianity representing Hebraism, which was the religious cultural sphere based on the internal human spirit, faced all manner of persecution within the empire for four centuries.

What is Satan's ultimate target behind the history of struggle between good and evil ever since this conflict was brought into being as a result of the Fall of the ancestors of humankind? 

Satan has his sights set precisely on God Himself. God is eternal, unchanging, absolute, and unique, and the standard of the ideal that He held at the beginning of creation must also have these qualities. Satan seeks to destroy God's absolute will. If you were to ask God directly, He would confirm what I am saying. How would God reply if Satan asked Him, "God, when You created me as an archangel in the beginning, was it out of love that was ephemeral or eternal?" God would reply that He did so out of a love that was eternal. If He were to say that His love was ephemeral, He would make Himself an ephemeral god. Unless He maintains a standard of loving Satan eternally, there will eventually come a time when He would no longer be able to exercise His authority as God with respect to Satan. 

Thus, however much Satan may oppose Him, God has no choice other than to establish the basis of loving him. Thus, God is a proponent of the philosophy of non-resistance toward evil. Why is that? It is because, until the world of the heavenly ideal is manifested on earth, God must love the archangel who has become Satan, regardless of the circumstances.

However much trouble Satan may cause, God cannot punish him or cut him off. He must establish the basis of having loved Satan whatever his situation. God can have complete victory only when Satan confesses to Him, saying, "Oh, God really is God. I surrender to You." This is the issue. 

Since the principled path of the providence of restoration is for God to bring about Satan's surrender by loving him, we who are to become His children must walk this same path. Whether we are persecuted around the world and considered a worldwide enemy, we must establish the basis of having loved those who oppose us. In this regard, God's Word, "Love your enemies," is His strategy to subjugate evil naturally. 

These words are simple, but no one realized that they have marked the boundary between victory and defeat between God and Satan. If God were to harbor the thought of treating Satan as His enemy and seeking revenge against him, then He would never be able to stand on the pinnacle of victory. On the contrary, He implemented a strategy of love, declaring, "Love your enemy."

It is remarkable that God's only begotten son Jesus prayed for Satan despite the fact that Satan was trying to kill him. If Jesus, while dying on the cross, had harbored any feelings of malice toward his enemies, God's providence would have suffered a total reversal. By overcoming death with a heart of loving his enemies and praying for their blessing, Jesus naturally subjugated Satan. This is where he qualified to remain as God's son eternally. Even Satan recognizes this qualification and gives his endorsement. We must conduct ourselves in such a way that we too would be able to stand before God and ask, "Hey Satan, am I not unmistakably God's child?" and he would reply, "Yes, without a doubt," and if we were then to ask him, "You have no problem, then, if people who live like me expand God's reciprocal realm, starting from the individual and moving to the family, tribe, people, nation, and world?" his answer would be, "That is the Principle, so I cannot do anything about it." It is under these conditions that God has guided His providence, with the Christian cultural sphere at the center.

Walking the path of sacrifice in the position of martyrdom even to the extent of shedding blood, I have been developing a movement of loving God and loving even my enemies. We too must develop this movement in our families, societies and nations.

Through a heart of love, Christianity subjugated the Roman Empire which severely persecuted it. Christianity thus became a worldwide religion. Until now Christians have thought about loving only their personal enemies, but this is not correct. We must love even the country and world where our enemies live. As the starting point on the path to heaven is within the enemy country, unless we create the foundation of the tradition of true love and set out on the basis of this foundation, we cannot bring about God's Kingdom on earth. When the tradition is established in this way, there can never be a philosophy or ideology greater than this.

When Korea was under Japanese imperial rule, the four providential nations -- Korea, Japan, Germany, and the United States -- were in a state of enmity. Given the circumstances of that time, Japan and Korea were enemies, Japan and the United States were enemies, and the United States and Germany were enemies. Yet I practiced the way of true love by taking Japanese and Germans to the United States, their enemy nation, and telling them that it was abandoning and losing God and therefore falling into ruin and that their help was needed to revive it.

Teaching this tradition of true love, I emphasized to the Japanese and Germans that they could not establish a new worldview capable of leading humanity into a new world that God desires unless they set the basis of having loved their past enemy, the United States, even more than their own homeland. Unless people erect a base and tradition by which they are able to love the nations that are enemies of their own, God's Kingdom cannot be realized on earth. It is only within God's true love that the establishment of such a historic tradition is possible.

Despite being humiliated by the United States federal government and unjustly brought before a court of law, I nevertheless devoted utmost effort to give life to that nation by founding the conservative newspaper the Washington Times and a broadcasting station. Recently, being concerned with the future of Russia and China after the collapse of communism, I have been supporting the production of materials for their youth in moral educational programs.

I was involved in the anti-Japanese underground resistance movement under Japanese imperial rule, and from that perspective the Japanese people were my enemies, both racially and individually. Yet, after Japan's defeat in World War II, I loved the Japanese. After the war, I could have denounced the police officers who had taken me into custody for my activities in the underground Korean independence movement and tortured me severely. Had I done this, they would all have been executed. Yet when I came across Japanese policemen who were running for their lives, I packed some things for them and helped them escape to safety under the cover of darkness.

Do you know why so many young Japanese people stake their eternal lives and pledge their loyalty to me? This is because there is a principle of cause and effect which dictates that they must return what has been given them. It is because I planted the seeds of true love in the world, transcending national boundaries in accordance with God's heart. It is because I planted the foundation of heart that leads people to a life of loving the countries that were the enemies of their own. Thus, without even realizing it, they are following God's command.

Under the rule of Japan, I had reason to harbor resentment even toward its emperor, but he had already been defeated. Heaven does not strike a person who is defeated, but rather shows mercy toward those who repent their sins and apologize. As this is Heaven's way, those who raise their sword to strike a defeated person will find their own descendants driven to ruin.

The United States is also a country that considered me its enemy. Yet I left my family behind and diverted my attention from my Korean homeland to bring salvation to that nation which had fallen into great moral decay. I threw away everything that belonged to me in order to bring salvation to the world of Cain.

How much have established churches hated the Unification Church? Yet we must not fight each other as enemies. We must come together in love. When we do that, we will lead the Republic of Korea into fulfilling God's will so as to digest North Korea. If the established churches and the Unification Church had become one immediately after Korea's liberation from Japan, all problems would have been solved.

Yet because that did not happen, we have had to overcome all kinds of hardships through offering endless sacrifices to establish the basis so as to avoid fighting the enemies of the individual, family, tribe, people, and nation that we faced.

Distinguished guests!

All North Korean citizens are equipped with Kim Il-Sung's Juche ideology. We must equip ourselves with the ideology of true love that is capable of assimilating them. North Korea is a part of northern civilization which has been influenced by the cold winds of soviet civilization. We must work to naturally melt them with our temperate zone civilization. Otherwise, both our countries will come to ruin. 

Thus, we must thoroughly equip ourselves with the ideology of true love. This ideology must not be one that seeks the fulfillment of individual desires, but must rather seek the salvation of all humanity. It must not be self-centered, but instead serve the greater good. Communists have the idea that everyone should work for the sake of a few top party leaders. This is why they eliminate any person who stands out as a potential rival. We are not that way. Our idea is to unite with the corresponding environment in order to establish a higher reciprocal standard, that is, for Cain and Abel to unite so as to receive their parents who are on a higher level. 

In other words, we must become able to impress them with how we live. We must be able to amaze those people equipped with communist ideology in terms of our view of life and our standard of character.

We cannot restore the Cain-type nation unless we obtain the circumstances by which we are able to exert influence over them. If we cannot restore the Cain-type nation, we cannot establish the restored nation capable of being transformed into a global nation as God's Kingdom. Though North and South Korea be divided against one another, we must liberate North Korea without fighting them. As such, they must seek the love that will benefit them mutually.

Ladies and gentlemen

At the moment North and South are going in different directions. One is trying to go south and the other north, and they are on two divergent paths. They are at cross-purposes. The question of how to reunify our nation is a serious one. Who must play the leading role for this? If the South did, the North would oppose it, and vice versa. Doing things one's own way does not work. If both sides insist on their own positions, it is certain that the situation will again result in breakdown. The question is what is to be done to overcome this. South Koreans must emerge who love North Korea more than their country. Also, North Koreans must emerge who love South Korea more than their country. There is no option or solution other than this. If there is anyone whose patriotism is greater than that of any South Korean and greater than that of any North Korean, then this is where a transnational scheme for unification will emerge. Can there be another way? However hard you may think, there is no other way.

The question is how to put this into practice. The answer is that we must suffer even more than North Koreans and even more than South Koreans.

Establishing transnational patriotism amidst such suffering is the solution that will enliven both North and South. The same principle applies to uniting the world of goodness and the world of evil. Only when someone emerges who can uphold the way of loyalty exceeding that set by our ancestors thus far can our enmeshed history be unraveled.

Jesus was particularly remarkable in this regard. In the situation of having no other option but the way of the cross owing to the disbelief of the Jewish people, Jesus realized that the only way for him to live for the sake of God and the people of Israel was for him to die for them. This was the reasoning behind the crucifixion. As Jesus' love for God and humanity exceeded that of anyone else in history, the Christian cultural sphere caused a doomed history to take a new direction toward a world designed to serve the greater good. This is historical fact. Thus, the only way to unite North and South is to become a people who can give their lives for them both. There is no other path to achieve unification. There has to be a heart of truly wanting to live together.

As regards how we should lead our lives, the fundamentals can be expressed as: the way of devoted sons and daughters, the way of loyal citizens, the way of saints, and the way of God's holy sons and daughters. It is the heart of wanting to live with others eternally and of wanting to be with others. Isn't that the case without regard to whether they are higher or lower, transcending front and back, left and right, day and night, and life and death? Such is the conclusion we arrive at. What is the common denominator among those who say, "I want to live in harmony with others?" It is not power. Power cannot transcend history. Power is limited to a specific period. The same is true with knowledge. The world of knowledge is developmental.

Does knowledge give us the heart to say, "I want to live with this particular piece of knowledge forever"? Clearly, we cannot live with knowledge or money forever. From that perspective, what is the common denominator that transcends above and below, front and back, left and right, and the time constraints of past, present, and future? This cannot be anything other than true love centering on God. Thus, filial sons and daughters are those who lead lives of loving their parents profoundly in their families. Also, patriots are those who lead lives of loving their nation profoundly; saints are those who love all the people of the world profoundly; and God's holy sons and daughters are those who lead lives of loving all humanity and God profoundly.

Accordingly, the issue is to develop a true foundation of heart by which people can want to have the hearts of patriots who would want their lives to be in concert with the fortunes of the nation, look upon any difficulties faced by the nation as their own personal pains and difficulties, and look upon any joys experienced by their nation not as temporary but rather as eternal joys to be shared with everyone. Those blessed with the ties of true love and true heart are accorded the privilege of joining the realm of unification.

Ladies and gentlemen

If an illiterate woman married a Ph.D. holder, wouldn't she suddenly become the wife of a Ph.D. holder? Likewise, those abundantly blessed with the ties of heart and desiring to live with others in harmony have the privilege of joining the realm of unification today. As God Himself is a being with such a heart, if we live such lives in which we are one with God, we automatically become qualified to participate together with Him. Then from where and with what should the unification of North and South Korea be achieved? If we were to subjugate the other side forcibly, then eventually they would develop a force stronger than ours, and the conflict would begin all over again. There would be no way of achieving unification by this method. Only when each of us has the heart to say, "Even though I live in the South, I truly want to live in harmony with those people in the North. I truly want to unite with them" will the way to unification be opened.

Suppose people in the South were to consider our compatriots in the North and shed tears over their miserable living conditions. Suppose we were to tell them, "I am leading my life in a way that I can share in your difficulties." Suppose we were to promise them, "Someday soon, I will appear before you having completed the preparations for your day of liberation" and a movement actualizing true love for the sake of unification unfolded; the day of unification would not be far off.

Ladies and gentlemen!

The first step for us is to think how we can live in harmony in our hometown. No one can be a patriot if they do not want to live with their parents or in their hometowns, and any claim such people might make to being patriotic would be a lie. People must be able to live in harmony in their own country before they can live in harmony in the world. Also, people must live in harmony in the world before they can live in harmony with God. Thus, they cannot be patriots unless they first love their hometowns and local societies. How much do our political leaders love their nation? Any politicians who lack a heart of truly wanting to share in the life of common citizens will soon pass on. It does not matter how well bred or educated they may be. They will disappear like an air bubble formed on a water surface.

Healing the division between North and South is not a simple process. As fellow patriots struggle to bring this about, they will need a determination of heart to work through many sleepless nights, transcending time and overcoming all manner of difficulties. The movement for the unification of North and South Korea begins when both sides have such a heart toward the other: "I truly want to live with them. I do not want to die unless with them. I do not want to live unless with them." When that reunification is accomplished, the unification of the democratic and communist worlds will begin from here. We must consider the future of our people and of the world, as representatives of the world, the six billion members of humankind, and the three billion people of Asia. We must be resolved to develop a movement that will truly enable us to share in the lives of all of them. When such efforts connect you to the way of saints, then you will come to resemble saints. If you practice this with respect to God with the loyalty of His sons and daughters, then you will become His heirs and the successors to His will. I convey these things to you today because I have already confirmed their truth in my life.

Distinguished guests!

When people enter into a relationship of true love with God, they must be accorded the privilege to have the rights of dominion, ownership, and inheritance. In dynamics, input exceeds output, but in the world of true love, output exceeds input.

What is true love? It is altruistic love that naturally gives and forgets. No memory is kept of how much was given. It is a love that never tires of giving. There would be nothing strange about a nonagenarian mother warning her septuagenarian son, "Be careful when you cross the street." Even if she has repeated those same words countless times over several decades, she will always say them one more time.

If this is true with parents in the fallen world, how can we ever grow tired of giving and receiving God's love in the essential world? When we establish the realm of God's true objective partner in our own lives and understand the unchanging glory of true love for the first time, we will then be able to validate the logic of eternal life. In 1984, I was lying in bed alone unjustly incarcerated in prison in the United States, when God came and told me that I was the only person He could trust and that He wanted me to resolve the situation in Nicaragua. Am I really the only person God can come to with such a command? The United States is said to be a great country standing at the forefront of all developed countries. It has a population of 240 million and innumerable religious leaders. How wretched God must have been that He could not go to any of those people but had to come to me. Yet as God knows how to find people who have a great love for humanity, He came to me, who had been worrying about the world day and night. Had I not already established the Washington Times, and extended help at that time, South America would have fallen into ideological chaos.

Ladies and gentlemen!

The unification of North and South Korea fervently desired by our people is also God's earnest desire in this age. It is Heaven's desire that North and South Korea be united and that God's dwelling place be established in your families, churches, and nation. How then are we to attend God? How can we cleanse everything? What can we use to cleanse everything so that God will say it is completely clean? Nothing else matters. We must establish a foundation centering on true love surpassing our love for our parents, spouse, and children. Only when our offerings are placed on the altar centering on such love will the ideal North-South unification come. The ideal blending of Eastern and Western cultures will take place. The ideal unification of the divided physical and spirit worlds will come about. The realm of liberation of hell and heaven will come into being. The key of true love is needed.

Mind-body unity through love can always be interrelated with the unification of family love. A loving couple with a harmonized family can interrelate with the tribe, nation, and world. If a loving husband and wife are united, who would disparage and trample on them? Wouldn't a cosmos unifying harmonized families, races, governments, worlds, heaven and earth, true human love, and God be the utopia of true love? In the same way that plants receive life elements by absorbing the rays of the sun, love will be the life element for all humankind. Our fervent desire is to build God's Kingdom on earth and in heaven, where we can live while idolizing true love eternally. Yet how many people in this world are the subject partners or object partners of true love, can stand as people of character qualified to be the lords of all things, and possess both the value of a remarkable life and the privileges that come with such a life?

I sincerely hope that all of you participating today will not forget all this, and work to unite your minds and bodies, and that you will start by becoming people who live for the sake of your spouses, and go on to become true people who live for the sake of your families, races, nations, and the world. If you do that, then Korean reunification will be as good as done. However strong North Korea's Juche ideology may be, it is effortlessly absorbed and disappears when placed in the midst of God's love. Once we are equipped with hearts of true love, Korean reunification will never be a problem. Not only that; east-west differences and the global North-South divide between rich and poor nations can also be completely resolved through God's true love.

Realizing the boundless realm of peace of the ideal world that links the ideal of the nation to the ideals of the race, family, and individual, through assimilating the ideal for the world and the nation through God's ideal that I have described, is without a doubt the way that the world of peace of true love will be built on earth.

Distinguished guests!

I declared the fundamental principle for unification more than forty years ago, initiated an ideological movement centered on Godism both domestically and overseas, and laid the international groundwork for unification in the four great powers surrounding the Korean peninsula. Millions of members in Korea, Japan, and the United States have worked through the International Federation for Victory over Communism (IFVOC) and CAUSA to lay non-governmental foundations in each of these countries. Over the years, leaders of many countries and the philosophical world have recognized Godism as the only philosophy capable not only of unifying materialism and atheism, its diametrical opposites, but also of liberating secular humanism.

My patriotic compatriots burning with hope for the reunification of our country!

Let us together establish our view of value on the basis of the Godism of true love and totally rally together in arming our citizens with this ideology. Let us make Korean reunification a matter of faith for ourselves, the Korean people, and world peace. Let us stand and answer the calling of this age, history, and of Heaven to become leaders and people of righteousness standing at the forefront of the movement for the unification of North and South Korea. In particular, as history went awry at the beginning due to Eve's error, so in the Last Days women with their motherly love need to take the lead in overcoming conflict and strife in the age of division and create a new history of reconciliation and unity.

It is especially the mission of women to restore young men and women and students, who are in the position of being their children, through true education. Then mothers and their children together should set examples for educating even their husbands in becoming God's sons, following the True Parents in attending God in order to restore the ideal of God's Kingdom on earth. In conclusion, once again I hope that the words that I have shared with you today will bring to fruition a nationwide movement that will hasten the day when North and South Koreans can meet each other in true love. I pray God's blessing may be with your families. Thank you.