MAN

This ultimate reckoning should make us examine our lives with greater earnestness. Are we sufficiently aware of the fact—considering that none of us are immortal—that we cannot go through life allowing one opportunity after another to slip through our fingers? We cannot surely expect to be offered unlimited chances for our own salvation. And once death intervenes, looking for alternative possibilities beyond the grave becomes meaningless. There we are ineluctably faced with an eternity of success or an eternity of failure. 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 allseeing and ears that are all-hearing. His power is of such infinitude that it reaches the furthermost corners 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 Everyone in this world should behave as a morally responsible servant of God and everyone is given equal opportunities to do so.