1) The Meaning of the Engagement Ceremony After you go through the engagement ceremony, you participate in the holy wine ceremony and then the marriage ceremony. What are these engagement, holy wine, and marriage ceremonies? These are not ceremonies following some kind of precedent. They are unavoidable ceremonies necessary to indemnify the Fall by making all the contents of the Fall reappear symbolically. In what stage did Adam and Eve fall? They fell at the stage of engagement. That is, they fell in the process of growing toward the goal of perfection. Then what is the purpose of engagement? It is marriage. Because Adam and Eve, in the position of having been engaged, fell by marrying in the wrong way, that false marriage has to be denied and rectified centering on God. However, this restoration cannot be done in any arbitrary manner. It has to have the opposite content from that of the Fall. There is a ceremony needed for inheriting a pure lineage. First, there is the engagement ceremony. You must know why we hold the engagement ceremony. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were in an engagement period. Right now their fallen descendants cover the world, and thus each person's eyes turn to some other man or woman. In the Garden of Eden there was only Adam, Eve, and the archangel. Since the archangel fell and became Satan, we have to be victorious over Satan. In order to be victorious over Satan, we must know what kind of being Satan is. Satan is someone who coveted love centering on himself. We must establish love centering on God. You are being engaged on this standard. You must cleanse the inheritance of lineage tainted by the Fall and restore the good lineage of the original creation. Unless you participate in the ceremony that cleanses all of the 6,000 years of history, you cannot go on to the Blessing. We hold the engagement ceremony because we must be restored to the status of Adam and Eve before they fell in the engagement stage. The engagement ceremony is the ceremony that restores the fact that the human ancestors Adam and Eve fell during the engagement period. Those Blessed families who received the engagement and the Blessing at the same time should, by establishing a true family, attend God, and in the position of true parents liberate the resentment of all things. The engagement ceremony is the beginning of the day of promise to liberate man's resentment as well as God's resentment.
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