THE WORD OF GOD

receiving it. Nobody can receive guidance without his own personal desire to have it. Woe to those who love this life more than the Hereafter; who turn others away from the path of God and seek to make it crooked. They have gone far astray. Each messenger We have sent has spoken in the language of his own people, so that he might make the message clear to them. But God lets go astray whom He will and guides whom He pleases. He is the Almighty, the All Wise. (14: 3-4) God has made the path of guidance extremely clear and well illumined; signs are spread all around on the Earth and in the sky; the Book of God provides undeniable arguments in its favour; human nature bears testimony to its veracity; in other words, all the evidence in nature are in its favour. This being so, those who do not seek out guidance certainly refrain from doing so in consideration of their worldly interests and not for any real reason, though such people advance a number of ‘arguments’ in order to justify their behaviour. But the actual purpose of these ‘arguments’ is to find something wrong with a straightforward statement. They are intended purely to justify their rejection of divine guidance in the eyes of the people. In view of this, only that person will be deprived of guidance whose desires of self-interest and worldly inducements have made him completely blind and deaf. It was the way of God to raise prophets from among the addressees’ own community, fully taking into account their mentality, so that they might be able to call upon the people in their own understandable language to accept the truth. But it was very strange that the way adopted for the betterment of the people led to the very opposite effect. When they saw that the prophet was a man like themselves and talked in their own familiar language, they rejected him, considering him to be an ordinary man. The way adopted to make the process of guidance easier was turned by them into a source of misguidance. It is not the way of God to display magical feats in order to attract people towards Himself, for example, by sending to a community a prophet who speaks a strange language or making the people wonderstruck by discoursing in a magical style. God does not cater to the wonder-loving nature of human beings. God’s way is that of simplicity and realism. He has established His world on the basis of realities; therefore, He also carries into effect His scheme for the guidance of man on the basis of realities, not of magic.