There is no greater gift from God to humankind than the family. The family is where God intended for human beings to experience the deepest, most meaningful and most joyful relationships. God’s love for people is similar to the love that parents feel for their children. Through the family, God intended that people experience His love within their relationships. Parents first come to know God’s love through the love they feel for their children. As children receive love from their parents, they naturally reciprocate that love in their love for their parents. Love then multiplies to the love between brothers and sisters, who share common parents. Finally, the culmination of love comes about when a man and woman from different families come together with their parents’ blessings to join in the supreme union of love, which represents the inner harmony of God’s being. When this man and woman have a child, they become parents and the cycle begins again. A family that lives and breathes God’s love and that has God at the center of all its relationships is a true family.

Tragically, in today’s world we find many problems that would not exist if the world were comprised entirely of true families: divorce, abortion, unwanted pregnancies, painful relationships, abusive relationships, disloyal spouses, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, etc. According to the Exposition of the Divine Principle, a collection of teachings of the Reverend Dr. Sun Myung Moon, the origin of all sin and evil in the world is the fall of humanity, an account of which is given in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Adam and Eve fell through entering an illicit love relationship with the archangel Lucifer, who later was given the name Satan. As a result, humanity lost its connection to the love of God, which we call true love. The love shared between Lucifer and Eve was then shared between Eve and Adam, and consequently passed on to all subsequent generations. God’s original ideal of creation was to have a world full of true families that manifested true love. Because God created human beings to be eternal beings, and because his love for human beings is eternal, unchanging and absolute, he could not abandon humanity to ruin. Instead, God has been striving throughout human history to bring about the complete salvation of humanity. He first looked for a family that united with his will; in this, he found the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. From that family, God raised his chosen people, the Israelites, as the nation that could receive the Messiah. The Messiah was to cleanse the influence of Satan’s love from humanity and to create a true family onto which all humanity could engraft. The person God chose to fulfill the mission of the Messiah was none other than Jesus Christ.

Jesus, as God’s representative on the earth, was perfect and sinless as God Himself. However, he could not fulfill God’s will on his own. He needed the faith and cooperation of the Israelites, who were the chosen people prepared by God to receive him. Tragically, the very people who were meant to serve Jesus put him on the cross. However, even as Jesus’ body was taken away, his spirit remained and in spirit he raised the Christian faith and has guided Christianity ever since his passing. Those who did believe in him became the apostles and laid the foundation for the enormous expansion of Christianity, which is now one of the largest religions in the world.

During the two thousand years since Jesus’ passing, God prepared the world for the Second Coming of the Messiah. We believe that the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is the Second Coming and that he is bringing complete salvation of humanity through his works. Specifically, the Blessing of Holy Marriage is a sacrament given by Reverend Moon and his wife, the True Parents, which allows people to separate from the love of Satan and connect to God’s love. Through receiving the Blessing, couples can establish true families as God originally intended for all of humanity.