Extra Early Bird Registration for the Urban Life Teaching Abstinence and Achieving Blessed Marriage Conference on November 24 to 26 in Harpers Ferry, WV is now open. Save up to $20 per ticket by registering by September 30th: http://bit.ly/2x9trEQ.
Exodus 1
The Hebrews kept increasing 22 until finally, the king gave a command to everyone in the nation, “As soon as a Hebrew boy is born, throw him into the Nile River! But you can let the girls live.”
2 Kings 19
You let your officials
insult me, the Lord.
And here is what you
have said about yourself,
“I led my chariots
to the highest heights
of Lebanon’s mountains.
I went deep into its forest,
cutting down the best cedar
and cypress trees.
24 I dried up every stream
in the land of Egypt,
and I drank water
from wells I had dug.”
25 Sennacherib, now listen
to me, the Lord.
I planned all this long ago.
And you don’t even realize
that I alone am the one
who decided that you
would do these things.
Let Us Experience the Sorrow of God
Sun Myung Moon
In our hearts we try to feel the heart of God, but the evil elements and the social environment, our surroundings, cause our bodies to take the course which is opposite to our minds. In this way our minds and bodies are often in conflict with each other.
When we look at ourselves, we can experience two dimensions of grief. There is the grief that one feels as one adores goodness. There is also the grief one feels for one’s own desires. In other words, one can grieve for the sake of one’s own heart’s desire or one can grieve to satisfy the desire of the mind.
If we are fallen human beings who will feel anguish no matter what, then which grief must we feel to escape from this realm of the fall? We must feel the anguish that can reach even to the heart of God. Otherwise there is no way that we can liberate ourselves from the realm of all this anguish.
However, people who are living on this earth cannot stand on the side of God on their own, become connected to the situation and heart of God, and create the environment in which they can mourn with God. Therefore, God sent one person, Jesus, who could represent the sorrow of God, and had the people believe in him. The Jesus you believe in came to cut people off from the sorrowful bonds of the satanic world and to raise them to the position of objects of God, who feels their grief.
What did Jesus bring to the earth? He came with love. However, to establish this love, he had to cross over the hill of sorrow. Yet Jesus had to conclude his thirty years of life without being able to cross the hill of sorrow. Jesus possessed a heart that no other understood. He shed tears for the sake of the people and out of concern for Judaism and Heaven.
Therefore, even if fallen humans want to understand the heart of Jesus, they cannot do it in the state they are in. When we serve Jesus as the Lord, from the position of having taken responsibility for his heart, will and mission, he who had penetrated through all the elements of sin that had tainted the 4,000 long years of history, we can finally feel his grief. Accordingly, the believers of Judaism who had average faith, the Israelites who boasted about their rights as the chosen people, had nothing to do with the sorrow of Jesus.
The reason that Jesus felt anguish after he came to the earth was because he agonized for the sake of God. He prayed not for his own sake but on behalf of the ideology that could stand on the side of God. Although Jesus prayed only to soothe the lamenting heart of God, longing to build the garden of God’s love, there was no one, among the people of the time, who listened to the voice of those prayers. No one could realize the center of the Gospels Jesus talked about. Thus, though Jesus should have created the environment in which people could feel his agony and sorrow on behalf of God, because this will was not transmitted to humankind, Jesus felt deep pain even after he went to the spirit world. Accordingly, we have to understand that the sorrow of God still leaves its marks on the course of providential history because the purpose for which Jesus came was not achieved.
Now you must experience the sorrowful heart of God and the sorrowful heart of Jesus. With the sorrowful heart you have experienced, you have to learn to become a true person who can worry for Heaven. However, although you agonize in anguish, centering on yourselves, you do not yet agonize in anguish representing the heavenly relationship that gives us new life and pioneers the course of restoration. Therefore, if you forsake every worldly sorrow you feel and shed tears while feeling the anguish of Heaven, then you will be able to make a new beginning of hope. You have to understand that if there is one true person who can cling to the sorrow of God, shed tears unbeknownst to others, and get rid of sorrow on behalf of all people, then the fortune of the earth will move centering on where that person stands.
The people who cannot feel sorrow on behalf of God will perish. The church, family, society and nation who cannot feel grief on behalf of God will be doomed. If this nation had united from the top to the bottom, and from the rulers to the common citizens had clung to the altar of the heavenly principles and shed tears as a people and mourned, then they would not have become as they are today. The time has come when we must now make a new determination.