Understanding God

Greetings, I have promised my English followers to write a post in English so here it is. I often receive questions from Muslims and Non-Muslims about understanding God. They ask me, why God created us? Why would God do something like that? And other popular questions. The simple answer is; Human beings can never understand or learn about all the reasons behind God’s works.

You might wonder if that’s the case then all the Books God revealed to his Prophets should be false because God, is something human beings including Prophets, can't understand! This includes his words as well. The Prophets should also be false and liars because no human being can understand all the reasons behind God’s works, if they can’t understand that, how they are supposed to understand God so they should be liars! How Prophets, Spiritual Leaders, Scholars claim this is what God wants?

The issue is such people didn’t understand a critical matter. When we say we can’t understand [All] the reasons behind God’s works, doesn’t mean we don’t know or understand anything at all! We may understand one reason why God allowed one thing to happen but we can never know all the reasons. This happens even in our life, an author may use a cover for his book to reflect many different meanings, we may only discover one of the reasons why he used that cover but there might be many other reasons for selecting specific photo as the cover of his book.

As for understanding the words of God well that’s easy, we all can understand them, the reason for that is because God revealed his Book to Prophet in a language human being can understand so claiming human beings cannot understand the words of God revealed to us through his books is a wrong claim. However, understanding the secrets behind the verses in his book is something not all of us can, of course understanding all the reasons or what we call in Arabic (الحكم) or reasons/wisdoms why God used specifically this word and didn’t use other words having the same meaning, why he specifically said it in that specific order, etc… are things we may discover some of them but can never discover all the secrets. Also God revealed many of the secrets behind his works in the Quran and other books revealed to his Prophets. For example he says he created human beings to worship him, or created stars to be a guidance, created mountains for such and such reasons. Example from the Holy Quran:

“O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another. Verily, the most honourable of you with Allah is that (believer) who has At-Taqwa [i.e. one of the Muttaqun (pious). Verily, Allah is All-Knowing, All-Aware.” God told us a reason why he made us into nations and tribes, the reason: “so we may know one another” similarly you would find many other examples in the Holy Quran where God reveal to us some of the secrets behind creation.

Now why God created the human in that form, the cow in such form, the bat, why I am white and you are black, why my eyes are small and yours big…etc we may understand some of the reasons behind that but we can never discover all the secrets behind such creations, that’s why we Muslims believe in God’s great names such as: “All Merciful, The Wise, The Great, etc…” we Muslims believe there nothing in this universe God created for no reason otherwise God wouldn’t be perfect, because anyone who do something for no reason even among human being is considered sometimes ignorant! Why would we can even think that God designed his creation in the way we see today for no reason! Depending on One’s knowledge he/she may discover some of the secrets behind that, that’s why we find God saying in his book (such and such are signs for those of you who understands).

There is a different level of understanding among human beings, I may understand 10 reasons why God did that, you dear reader may understand 20, another scholar may discover 1000 secrets, the level of understanding is different, we see this in our daily life, school, university, work, etc… and since we are created and God is the creator, we are human and he is God, our knowledge, power, wisdom, mercy, love, etc… cannot be compared because we are limited and God is unlimited. You dear reader, may understand few things in my mind, but can you claim you that you know everything in my mind? No human can say that, similarly to understand everything about God, or all the reasons behind his works at least you need to be God! Since we can never be Gods, why should we believe we can understand everything about God?