God, prophethood and life after death

God, prophethood and life after death

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1993 10 October 7-10 God, prophethood and life after death (1170)

The world we live in is a material one in which symbols, richly representative of life’s realities, have been given a concrete form. Those who are sincere in their search for truth, and who look deeply into things, will recognize their significance, thus finding for themselves such a great diversity of proofs of God’s existence as will fully satisfy their intellectual curiosity and silence their skepticism. What started out as tentative beliefs will thus be given the solid grounding of unshakable conviction.

A likeness of God

A Likeness of God is to be found in man, for is not the existence of man a proof of the existence of God? What is the nature of God? He is a live, self-sufficient Being, with a mind that is all-knowing, eyes that are all-seeing and ears that are all-hearing. His power is of such infinitude that it reaches to the furthermost comers of the universe, and no object of His will is too great or too small to escape its force. And quite independent of all objects of creation, God has His ego.

Man may not, like God, be omniscient and omnipotent, but he certainly thinks, sees, hears, has a will, acts of his own volition and understands quite precisely what is meant by the ‘ego – the ‘I’. To believe in God is to have faith in a higher form of the ‘I’. Man’s experience of himself, his attributes, his characteristics, make it possible for him to apprehend the eternal Being who possesses these very attributes and characteristics, but to a superlative degree. This is the Being whom we call God, or Allah.

If one is sure of one’s own existence, why should one not be sure of the existence of God? Here am ‘I’, sitting in one place, observing the universe. Why, then, should there not be a Being greater than I am, situated elsewhere in the universe, watching over it? We ourselves direct the movements of machines in outer space by means of remote control, so why should we have any difficulty in accepting that there is a God who controls the universe by His own invisible system? Man metes out punishments and gives rewards according to his own concept of justice, so why should there not be an all-powerful God who administers reward and retribution according to his own, unique concept of justice?

Indeed, believing in God is no different from believing in one’s own self. It is no more difficult for man to accept the existence of God than it is for him to accept his own existence. Belief in God is doubtless an extraordinary feat of the imagination, but it is no more extraordinary than believing in man. Once one has accepted one such extraordinary phenomenon, what is there to prevent one from accepting another?

A likeness of prophethood

“This is London. Here is the latest news.” These words are uttered by a newsreader sitting far away from us in London. We cannot hear him directly, but the moment we switch on our radio sets, his voice comes over so loud and clear that the distance between the broadcasting station and our home seems to have shrunk to nothing.

This purely physical phenomenon gives us an idea of what prophethood is like. In the way of the radio set, the prophet provides a link between us and God’s ‘broadcasting station’. Just as a radio or transistor picks up news and programmes from the broadcasting station, the prophet ‘picks up’ words coming from God Himself and relays them to us in exactly the form that they left God’s lips, without addition, subtraction or changes of any kind.

But for the prophets – the living radio sets between man and God – we should not be able to hear the words of God, just as we should not be able to hear programmes from far off radio stations, without the aid of the radio. So prized are radios and transistors for the information and entertainment that they bring to people that there is hardly a home throughout the entire world which is without one or the other. How wonderful it would be then if people were to realize the importance of divine ‘broadcasts’, and were to listen to the prophets with the same rapt attention that they give to their radios. They would then begin to be influenced by them and would follow them heart and soul. The functioning of prophethood is not any more difficult to understand than the workings of a radio. While the latter is powered by electricity, prophethood functions on the basis of sheer divine inspiration.

A likeness of life after death

People sit in a room conversing with each other. They are conscious of what is visible, audible, tangible. The world is before them, to be apprehended through the senses. They feel that they know everything about it that is humanly possible to know, and do not suspect that another world might exist in their midst – of which they know nothing.

Just then, someone switches on the television, suddenly a different and hitherto unseen ‘world’ appears on its screen. Darting figures, a hubbub of voices, rows of houses, mountain scenery – all kinds of visual and auditory phenomena make their impact upon the senses of the viewers.

The experience of television is an earthly analogy of the concept of life after death – a world beyond our world, just as complete in every detail as the one before us. It shows how another world can exist within the present world, yet remain out with the range of normal human sensitivity unless we are attuned to it. The world shown on television is already present before us, but it only becomes visible when the set is switched on. In like manner, the world of the hereafter is already omnipresent, but it will only impinge on the senses when it is ‘switched on’ for us by God.

In the realm of science, concepts are very often demonstrated and understood by means of models. Our present world is like a natural model, by means of which we can understand supernatural realities. Our world is, in away, a reflection of them. If one seriously contemplates the world around one, one will find in it the answer to everything.

God, divine revelation and life after death are concepts which man cannot grasp with his present limited vision. They lie in the unseen world. But, it should be remembered that there are many things in this very world, which cannot be seen with the naked eye. In fact, all higher realities are of this nature, and these are accepted solely on the basis of scientific ‘clues’. The same applies to God divine revelation and life after death. True, these things cannot be seen with our present sight, but there are clear indications throughout the universe which provide convincing proofs of their actuality. There can be no doubt about their existence. If we think seriously about them, we have no choice but to accept them.