Cheon Seong Gyeong Ⅱ - The family is the training center for life in the kingdom of heaven
15. The kingdom of heaven is the world in which we love all elderly people as we do our parents, we love all humankind as our brothers and sisters, and we love those of our own age as we do our spouse. The kingdom of heaven is the world where we live based on this universal view of people, expressed in the different realms of heart that we experience in the family. A social structure that expands based on families made up of such people is like the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is a global extension of our own family, filled with our brothers and sisters.
16. What is the kingdom of heaven? It is the place where we can love the people of the world as we love our own family members. People who can do that are the citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, couples, siblings and children make up four generations. They are a textbook in the form of a family, a textbook through which we can experience the true love of the universe as citizens of the heavenly kingdom. The family teaches us as if it were a textbook. People who live this way experience no national barriers, even after they go to the spirit world. Wherever they go, wherever they are, the road opens up for them.
17. The kingdom of heaven is where husband and wife go after attaining complete oneness through God’s love, and is where the children who are born to such a couple go. It is where we go with the family, tribe and people who have attained oneness with God at the center. Therefore Jesus, who did not have a family while he was on the earth, could not enter the kingdom of heaven; he dwells in paradise. Only husbands and wives who have been brought together based on God’s love can enter the kingdom of heaven. It is a world where the principle of relationship as husband and wife applies. That is why only families can enter the kingdom of heaven, and each family should bring its tribe and nation along with it.
18. Your family is in the position to represent the sovereignty of the heavenly kingdom. Parents represent the sovereignty, children represent the citizens, and material possessions represent the land of that nation. Consequently, being devoted to your parents is the same as being patriotic to your nation and also leads you to fulfill the way of a saint on the world level.
19. The four-position foundation is formed when the three types of love- parental love, conjugal love and filial love - are realized. God will surely appear in the place where this four-position foundation has been fulfilled. God dwells in the place where the love of the four-position foundation is secured. It is there that we live and attend God for eternity. That place is the foundation for the kingdom of heaven.
20. When people are perfected as the object partners of God, the incorporeal God’s ideal of love is substantiated. When people completely unite in mind and body and mature in character with God as their center, they become eternal object partners of God’s life, love and ideal. Once Adam and Eve become ideal individuals as God’s children, they will form an ideal family, then an ideal society, nation and world, and realize the kingdom of heaven of harmony and unity. In their lives they will experience ideal happiness and bliss in resonance with absolute love.
21. Life in the kingdom of heaven begins in the family, not elsewhere. The kingdom of heaven is a multidimensional extension of the family, not something separate from the family realm. When you embrace your husband or wife, therefore, you should think that you are in harmony with all the men or women of the world. In this way, you make the condition in your family of having loved all humanity.
22. The extension of the ideal family is the ideal nation, and the extension of the ideal nation is the ideal world. The extension of the ideal world is the ideal cosmos. When that is realized, since the heavenly kingdom is the extension of the family model, people who have experienced the way of true love in the family are set to be welcomed anywhere they go in the world. They will be able to travel freely in the heavenly world.
23. The family is a training camp that equips people to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is a training ground. The world is inhabited by people just like our grandfathers and grandmothers. If we expand the family, we have the world. The population of this world is composed of people of the age of your mother and father, the age of your spouse and the age of your children. Therefore, people who expand in all directions the training that they received in their families, and live within a realm of love that serves people in all directions, will enter the kingdom of heaven. The family is the training ground that makes it possible for people to go straight to the kingdom of heaven.
24. The family is the place where we can feel the joy of creation on behalf of the invisible God. When we look at the world, we find people who are like our children, people who are like us, people who are like our father and mother, and people who are like our grandfathers and grandmothers. Imagine that you had a yardstick to measure children, another to measure spouses, another to measure parents and another to measure grandparents. Putting all of these together, you could form the body of one family. When you extend the family, you have the world. Look at your own family’s situation. If you make all of them - children, spouses, parents and grandparents - the subject partners, and make the world their object partner, the two will go round and round as plus and minus. People who live on earth interacting in this way enter the kingdom of heaven. This world becomes the training ground that opens the way for you to go to heaven.
25. The family is the training ground that prepares you to conquer the ideal nation and the ideal world with love. Moreover, it is the training ground that prepares you to conquer the heavenly kingdom and even God Himself. There, if you cast a net of love and pull it in with all your strength, the world will be pulled to you, the spirit world will be pulled to you, and even God will be pulled to you. In the end, an ideal family is where we fish to catch the universe with love.
26. God is the vertical Parent. He will never be apart from you, for all eternity. The reason we have to attend our parents is to receive training in attending God, who is the vertical True Parent in the eternal world. The heavenly kingdom is the world of love. The world of love exists with the air of love, and the family is the place that trains you to adapt to that environment. True love contains the concept of giving. It does not mean that you can act as you please for yourself. If you think you can relax and be comfortable in your own home, you are wrong. It is actually a difficult path to follow.
27. People who go the way of filial piety - attending their grandparents and parents in the family - and apply these lessons to the world, will find that they can relate to everyone, anywhere. Even if they go to the spirit world and meet people who have lived in past ages, they will be welcomed. Right there, equality, harmony and unity emerge from the north, south, east and west. When this center of equality, harmony and unity appears, freedom emerges. Freedom means being with God. Once you reach that level, all things of creation will welcome you. That is freedom in the truest sense.
28. Our journey through life consists of becoming a son or daughter, a brother or sister, and a husband or wife who can receive and practice God’s love. It is a journey to become a husband or wife and love our sons and daughters from the position of second creators, just as God loved Adam and Eve. The beginning is love, the process is love and the end is also love. As the perfect product, after being manufactured according to the specifications of love, we go to the kingdom of heaven. When we actualize the kingdom of heaven, we do not do so as individuals but as whole families.
29. In a family there are grandfathers and grandmothers, father and mother and also sons and daughters. It is the same in the world. If you are trained to love people in the world who are the same age as your grandfather and grandmother, your father and mother, and your children, more than you love your own family members, you will become a perfect being who can relate at any time to the multitudes in the heavenly world.
30. Is yours a family in which the father and mother, the couple and the children are united in unchanging love? Is your family a treasure that the universe cannot continue without, a family everyone aspires to emulate? If we expand such a family horizontally, we create a tribe that God can love and cannot release. Yet even if we expand that foundation to a people and a nation, that nation is not enough. We need the world, and even that is still not enough. We cannot reach perfection unless we reach the stage of governing by the authority of the love that connects and unites the spirit world with the earthly world. If we do not reach that stage, there is no way for humanity to be liberated.
31. Love is the reason God created man and woman as the ideal of His creation. That is why people who have lived centered on love enter the kingdom of heaven. If you compare the kingdom of heaven to a barn where the harvest is stored, the family is the harvest. A man and a woman who have become husband and wife centered on love enter the kingdom of heaven with their family. When you perfect your home on the earth by creating such a family, your entire hometown will welcome you. You will be a model son or daughter and model grandson and granddaughter whom God can embrace and love. When you put these teachings into practice in your own family, you will stand in a position from which you can go straight to the heavenly kingdom. |