1) The Significance of Marriage
Marriage can be said to be a ceremony which allows you to open the door of a palace of happiness and enter into it. Therefore, marriage is the biggest event for humankind. Love transcends time and space and it is the greatest thing for humankind. Marriage is a ceremony that reveals and confirms this greatest love.
Why do we term the marriage ceremony "to receive the Blessing"? According to the Principle, if Adam and Eve had not fallen and had become perfected, they would have stood in the position to receive the Blessing. In other words, they were to be 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 love would have appeared in the world.
If there were no marriage, then what is called love would not have started 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 only realized 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 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 together when they are happy, helping each other when they have difficulties and going forward together before God, this indeed is married life on the foundation of God's love.
The reason God made 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 to 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 given 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, then everything in heaven and earth will harmonize naturally and respond.