1) The Significance of Marriage

Marriage can be said to be a ceremony that allows you to open the door of a palace of happiness and to enter into it. Therefore, marriage is the biggest event for humankind. Love transcends time and space and is the greatest thing for humankind. Marriage is a ceremony that reveals and confirms this greatest love.

Why do we term the marriage ceremony "receiving the Blessing"? According to the Principle, had Adam and Eve not fallen and had become perfected, they would have stood in the position to receive the Blessing. That is to say, they were to remain the substantial objects of God. Once they were perfected, they would have been objects who totally received love from God as the subject. Through their Blessing, or marriage, God's complete love would have appeared in the world.

If there were no marriage, then what is called love would not have come about in the human world. Who is the master of that love? We must know that the master is not man or woman, but God. When God's love is manifested in us, it becomes God's joy and pride, and we are able to feel this as God's love.

Love cannot be realized alone; it is realized only through a reciprocal relationship. Therefore, when man tries to realize love, he cannot do it by himself alone. The same can be said about woman. When Adam and Eve unite through love, they are able to receive God's full love for the first time. From this viewpoint, we can understand that we human beings are born from God.

When two people who love each other give and take in a reciprocal relationship, consoling each other when they are sad, sharing joy when they are happy, helping each other when they have difficulties, and going forward together before God, this is married life founded on God's love.

The reason God created man and woman not in heaven but on earth was to realize God's love horizontally. When you form a subject and object relationship and unite horizontally, the love that combines the two with the subject God is a vertical relationship of love. This fact is extremely important.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus came on earth as a man. Before building God's nation as the King of kings, Jesus as a bridegroom was to meet a bride on earth. Jesus came as the highest standard of all love. Jesus was to appear as a man on a horizontal base, pick a perfected woman, and unite with her centering on the one hundred percent original love of man given from God and the one hundred percent original love of woman also from God. Then God would come down to seek His lost dignity and honor. When heaven and earth unite through this give and take of original love, all things in heaven and earth will harmonize and always respond.