Responsibility from the Perspective of the Principle

Hyo Jin Moon October 10, 1989 Belvedere

I would like to talk about responsibility from the perspective of the Principle. We all understand that man's responsibility was to obey the commandment of God. Then what was God's purpose in giving the commandment to man? According to the Principle, the first reason is because there was the possibility of man falling. Secondly, in giving the commandment, God is ultimately saying to mankind, "In order for you to embody me, to represent me, to become the recipient of my love, to become the ideal object, you must fulfill the responsibility that I have given you." God expected man to obediently follow His direction. If man followed the direction that God set forth through the period of the indirect dominion, then ultimately he would become like Heavenly Father and have give and take with His love.

Within the indirect dominion, the most significant aspect is that each individual must fulfill his responsibility to choose to act as God desires in order to ultimately become the embodiment of God. God wants to have give and take with someone who has everything that He possesses within Himself, including creativity. That someone must have the capacity to realize what God represents, and be able to choose to manifest those qualities. The fall is possible, therefore, because man is free to make the wrong choice.

Once you become married to someone, your life and everything that you possess will be shared by that person, right? If I do not know all about my wife, all the intimate aspects, it is not possible for me to truly love her and for her to truly feel honest in front of me. So in order for God to realize His love, He must have an object who can truly understand His expectations, His will and purpose. That is why the object must become like God.

Entering the Direct Dominion

In I Cor. 11:7 it says man must bring glory to Heavenly Father and woman must bring glory to man. That is important. Man brings glory to God by becoming one with Him, which means becoming His object. Man fulfills his responsibility through the indirect dominion and ultimately is blessed by God with a wife; through their marriage relationship they will come to understand each other. To man, woman is essential because through woman in the object position, man will learn the way of becoming the ideal object to God. At the same time man is essential for woman because only through man in the subject position will woman understand and possess the quality of becoming the subject to their children, responsible to raise, nurture and guide them. These are essential qualities in becoming an ideal man and woman.

Then what is direct dominion? When man fulfills his responsibility within the indirect dominion, he becomes the ideal object to God; then the ideal consummation of marriage will take place and the beginning of the ideal family and ideal civilization will occur.

But this was never realized because we did not know clearly the responsibility, the position or the role that man and woman had to fulfill in the purpose of creation.

Jesus emphasized many times how important it was for man to understand the will of Heavenly Father. One example is in Matt. 7:21: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven." You first must understand the will of Heavenly Father in order to become citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. The most significant thing to realize is why there has to be a Messiah, the absolute subject in man's world.

Everything has to do with responsibility. According to the Principle, all of you are separate individuals and each must choose to participate in the process of ideal love in order to attain God's love. Only through an ideal object can God attain ideal love. Only through an ideal subject can an ideal object attain ideal love. Can anybody tell me why the power of love is greater than the power of the Principle? So that once man matured in love with God, it would be an eternal and unbreakable relationship. God didn't want just robots. He wanted to have beings who would give a full one hundred percent emotional response to His love.

Power of Love

Having responsibility means to make choices. We are standing in the position to make the decision to become an ideal object to God, or we can fall and just become nothing.

If the power of Principle were greater than love, the power of Principle would bring the ideal result, and there would be no power that could sway or derail man from the path of God.

But the ultimate goal of man is to become the embodiment of God. Just as God chose to form the creation, prompted by His heart's desire to love, man must also stand in the position to make choices and ultimately be guided by true love, not only Principle.

Just forget the notion of ideal love for a second. Generally speaking, love can also mean the kind of individualistic love that we can indulge ourselves in. What is the effect of love? Joy. Love comes through a reciprocal give and take action with an object, realizing joy. That effect can be realized ideally, but also realized un-ideally. You can have a lot of joy indulging in your own self-interest and in material things. There is joy in ideal love but there can also be joy in un-ideal love. We must realize the way we can reach the ideal status of man is by knowing the will of God and fulfilling our responsibility to go according to God's will. Man has the responsibility to understand what's going on within the indirect dominion period and to resist the temptation to indulge in unideal love and joy. If the power of Principle was greater than the power of love, there wouldn't be this temptation to engage in un-ideal love or to deny the Principle. Even though you know the Principle, you can deviate from it; that's why love is described as being greater and more powerful than the Principle.

Our responsibility is to understand the will of God and to make the right choices in our lives according to God's will. Jesus describes the status of those who fail their responsibility in Matt. 11:11: "Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he." Because he failed his responsibility to bring the Israelites to Jesus, John stands below those who are least in the Kingdom of Heaven. You cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven without fulfilling your responsibility because the Kingdom of Heaven means becoming one with God. And how can you become one with God if you don't even know what God is all about? If you don't understand the will of God and become the embodiment of God, how do you expect to become the ideal object of God? There is no way.

You must also realize that the doubters, the skeptics, and all those people who deny God, possess the potential to accept the Principle and the will of God. Therefore all of mankind can become the children of God.

Jesus says in Matt. 10:32-36: "So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in Heaven; but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in Heaven. Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and man's foes will be those of his own household." Those are very strong words.

Setting a New Standard

Jesus wanted his followers to be willing to abandon their father, mother, brothers, sisters, children -- everything. You must absolutely make a separation between yourself and the satanic world. Why? Because of the fall there is a strong tendency in this world that is completely contrary to loving your enemy. When Jesus was talking about loving one's enemies, he was telling the disciples that there had to be absolute restoration in order for the ideal world to exist. You must stand in the position of denying the worldly standards and then adopt the new way of living, thinking and doing things. You must do away with the old way of life, the old concepts of love that existed within the family and realize the new concept. There has to be a new concept of ideal relationship between father and mother, parents and children, brothers and sisters, husband and wife. There has to be a new standard set and people who will follow the tradition set by the bearer of the standard. You must act according to the Principle, which gives you God's ideal perspective of how things should be and how we should try to live our lives.

Loving your enemy can be expressed in many ways. Jesus expressed his love very strongly when it came to sin. When I was going to school, I knew one boy who was very conceited. He was very arrogant and obnoxious, but nobody was willing to challenge his way of life. I was willing to and I did. That's love because by continuing that kind of life, the only thing he would become is a criminal. After a while he changed his way of thinking and even tried to be on my good side. He didn't want to stay as my enemy. You must understand what loving your enemy means.

How does fear come? I am afraid when I walk in a dark alley because I know that some kind of threat might exist that could ultimately take my life. When there is a possibility of losing something that is valuable to you, you fear. Adam and Eve felt that fear when they fell because through the fall they realized what the Principled relationship was and they knew they messed up. They felt fear because they realized that they had lost the chance of attaining ideal love.

Ultimately we can go beyond our fears. Once we become one with God there is no fear. There is only true freedom. We can transcend fear and even death if we can hold onto an ideal. There were a lot of saints and sages -- even criminals -- who could transcend the fear of death. You can become one with God's will, or you can become one with Satan's will, and with either you can reason and act according to it.

When you are little, you want to become the greatest. I used to imagine myself to be a superman. I saw a lot of movies where the bad guys were portrayed as heroes. They were very attractive because the law enforcement officers made clumsy, obvious mistakes. The bad guys always knew what was going to happen three or four steps ahead of the law enforcement people. In some movies, when the bad guy died, he died with grace. It was very dramatic, but very intense and there was no weakness in it. I said to myself, "Hey, if that guy can die like that, then I've got to die better."

I'm sure, you were pretty inspired, by the lives of saints and sages -- the good people of the world. That's why you are here. You want to be better than the good people of history, or at least comparable. Once you become absolutely one with the will of Heavenly Father, you can. You can do whatever you want because it is in unison with God's will. The fulfillment of God's will comes through realizing our responsibility: man becoming object to God, woman becoming object to man, and children becoming object to their parents, following the ways of the elders. That is the ideal way.

The important thing is responsibility. Please keep that in mind and have a nice week.