Do Not Rejoice When Your Enemy Falls

Cheon Seong Gyeong 2067

We need the nation, and we need the world. There is no clear way to find these. When we look at this fact, you professors must also establish the ideal of the sphere of love, centering on the vertical love and connecting with the horizontal realm of love at 90 degrees. There’s no way to escape such a pursuit of the original universal history. That means you must listen to what I say. If you don’t, you won’t be on the right track. If you are on the right track, where will you be heading? You will go to the family. That’s why, when we say tong ban breakthrough activities, we’re talking about returning to the family and realigning yourself to the right track. Because all of you are the sons and daughters of Rev. Moon, I have unconditionally given you everything that I’ve prepared on the world level, from the realm of heart, the realm of participation and inheritance, to the realm of equal rank. Therefore, you must return to your hometowns and lay down your roots. If you just lay down your roots and stand up vertically aligned, then, through me, you will rise to the glorious position of victory in which you can inherit the worldwide domain and participate with me. This is logical. True Parents are absolute. That’s why all religions have come to the conclusion that the messiah absolutely must come. (176-124, 1988.5.3)

Cheon Seong Gyeong 804

    Later on, when you go to the spirit world, what will you say before God, who has guided the history of restoration and who toiled until this day in search of one Adam? Did He not search for the perfected person of Adam from the time of creation to this day? Now you all know the Principle. This is your weapon to save thousands and tens of thousands of people.
    To this day, God could not teach humankind. To replace God’s anguish over having to guide the providence in the dark, we should do greater things than He can do on this earth. We have the path to enlighten and bring hundreds and thousands of Adams through the Principle. Think about it. Where can we find a task greater than this? (230-28, 1992.4.15)

Forgiveness

A large hearted attitude of forgiveness to those who have done us wrong is advocated in all the scriptures. Forgiveness is at the heart of Jesus’ message; indeed according to the Lord’s Prayer it is incumbent upon the Christian to forgive. God is most forgiving. It states in the Qur’an that people who seek to draw near to God should likewise be full of forgiveness. Forgiving is natural to a parent; therefore if we can take a parental heart towards others, akin to the heart of God our Father, we can forgive them. While it may be difficult to forgive people who do us grave injustice or injury, it is far preferable to holding a grudge, which would only fester and poison the spirit.
Yet how can we forgive? Forgiveness is not a natural thing. It will not do to simply forget a wrong or sweep it under the rug. Such easy or ritualistic forgiveness is phony and can mask deeper feelings of lasting resentment. As theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday’s weather, but in the way of the great ‘in spite of’ that says: I forget although I remember.”19 Father Moon teaches that we need to find a positive reason to forgive, a reason to make a new beginning in relating to that person in spite of the painful memory of previous wrongs. thus he explores the reasons why God forgives us, and searches for that point of weakness and pathos in the wrongdoer that can evoke the heart of compassion.

Give us this day our daily bread;
And forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
    Matthew 6.11-12

If you efface and overlook and forgive, then lo! God is forgiving, merciful.
     Qur’an 64.14

Allah is All-Forgiving and loves the one who forgives others.
    Algama’ Alsaghair 2.1749 (Islam)
 
For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
    Matthew 6.14-15
 
Better and more rewarding is God’s reward to those who believe… and when angry, even then forgive…
 
Let evil be rewarded by like evil, but he who forgives and seeks reconciliation shall be rewarded by God. He does not love the wrongdoers…
 
True constancy lies in forgiveness and patient forbearance.
    Qur’an 42.36-37, 40, 43
 
Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, “I repent,” you must forgive him.
    Luke 17.3-4
The best deed of a great man is to forgive and forget.
    Nahjul Balagha, Saying 201 (Shiite Islam)
 
The truly great man must forgive people without being forgiven by them.
    Chu Hsi (Confucianism)
 
Release: The superior man tends to forgive wrongs and deals leniently with crimes.
     I Ching 40 (Confucianism)
 
Moses son of Imran said, “My Lord, who is the greatest of Thy servants in Thy estimation?” and received the reply, “The one who forgives when he is in a position of power.”
    Hadith of Baihaqi (Islam)
 
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”
    John 8.3-11
 
Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,
and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles;
lest the Lord see it, and be displeased,
and turn away his anger from him.
    Proverbs 24.17-18
 
Who takes vengeance or bears a grudge acts like one who, having cut one hand while handling a knife, avenges himself by stabbing the other hand.
    Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9.4 (Judaism)
 
Subvert anger by forgiveness.
    Samanasuttam 136 (Jainism)
 
Kuan Chung… could seize the fief of P’ien with its three hundred villages from its owner, the head of the Po family; yet Po, though he lived on coarse food to the end of his days, never uttered a single word of resentment. The Master said, “To be poor and not resent it is far harder than to be rich yet not presumptuous.”
     Analects 14.11 (Confucianism)
 
Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.”
    Matthew 18.21-22
 
Doing an injury puts you below your enemy;
Revenging one makes you but even with him;
Forgiving it sets you above him.
    Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac
 
Where there is forgiveness, there is God Himself.
    Adi Granth, Shalok Kabir, p. 1372 (Sikhism)
 
 

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