6. GOD AND HIS CREATION
Islam emphasizes that God and His creation are distinctly different entities. God is neither a part of His creation nor is He mixed in with it. His creation is neither equal to Him in His attributes nor a part of Him. Indeed, God is the Most High; He is above all creation, above the heavens and above His Throne, as He informed us about Himself in the Quran and in the previous scriptures. This might seem obvious, but man’s worship of creation instead of the Creator is to a large degree based on ignorance or negligence of this fact. The wrong belief that the essence of God is everywhere in His creation or that He is a part of His creation, has provided justification for the worship of God’s creation. Philosophical idol worshipers justify their idolatry by saying that they do not actually worship the stone or metal image, but God who becomes concentrated in it during their rituals of worship! They claim that the stone idol is only a focal point for God’s essence and is not itself God! Anyone who accepts the concept of God being present in any way within His creation will be obliged to accept this argument in justification of idolatry.
Actually, those who have claimed divinity for themselves down through the ages have often based their claims on the mistaken belief that God is present in humans. Taking this belief one step further, they claim that God is more present in them than in others, and that other humans should therefore submit to them and worship them as God incarnate or as God concentrated within their person. Similarly, those who have asserted that others were God, after their deaths, have found fertile ground among those who accept the false belief of God’s presence in man.
Some idol worshippers try to justify what they are doing by saying: “We treat idols as mediators and intercessors between us and God.” This is also an incorrect belief because God does not need mediators between Him and people. He hears everything and knows all the needs of His creation. In fact, this argument reduces God to the level of His creatures who often use intermediaries to achieve their goals. In hundreds of Qur’anic verses God invites humans to have a direct relationship with Him without any mediator or intercessor, and He prohibits them from worshipping anything other than Him under any circumstance or for any justification. God, the Most Wise, did not prescribe for people religious rites that would affect the direct relationship between Himself and humans, such as baptism confession, or belief in man as a savior, or as an intermediary. Indeed, God is too great and perfect to do a thing that would lower Himself to a level of weakness and inferiority. To claim that God humbled Himself and took a human form is to claim that He became feeble. And to claim that He decided to die means that He decided to be as weak as His weakest creature. It also means that those who were alive when He died would have been superior to Him!
To conclude, all false religions have in common one basic concept with regard to God; that God and His creation are one. They either claim that all men are God, or that specific men are God, or that nature is God, or that God is a figment of man’s imagination or that man is a mediator between people and God. Thus, it may be said that false religions invite humans to the worship of creation instead of the Creator by calling the creation or some aspect of it ‘God’.
by Majed S. Al-Rassi
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