"If You Love God, Then Follow Me..."

If you love God, follow the Guide, and God will love you

“Say: ‘If you love God, follow me, [and] God will love you...’ ” (Koran 3:31)

When we look at the verse above, we recognize that it is different from what we generally think; that when we love our creator, He loves us back. Yet, this verse suggests that to say “I love God” by itself is not enough to receive God's love back. There's a condition, it posits: “follow me (the guide/the messenger).” But, why do we need to follow a guide?

My life is not transformed when I claim that I love God

When we look at our lives as people who claim to love God, we see that we are generally not transformed by this love. We don’t feel that we receive the love back. Our lives can still be miserable, our thoughts distracted, and our feelings hurt. We cannot comprehend many things happening in our lives and in the universe, and we become angry at the One behind all this. In summary, there is something missing with our claim.

The verse states that we won’t be able to feel the love of our creator in our daily life, except when we follow the guide. In fact, this love becomes a curse for us. Things, people, and moments that we love depart from us, leaving us with pain. We see things we don’t understand in the universe, and we become angry at the God we claim to love.

The verse starts by saying: “If you love God...” and pushes us to ponder that we are given the ability to love the creator of all good and brings us to this crucial point: “We witness that God creates everything with love, why don’t we feel it?” The answer is in the verse: “Follow me.” We are aware that we have freedom to choose many things in my life and my thoughts. So, in order to feel the love and close the loop, that is to recognize the meaning of my life and everything around us, we need to use our free will to follow the teachings of the guide on the meaning of the creation of the universe.

The verse above declares that loving the creator is not enough to receive and feel the divine love in every part of our lives. It pushes us to look for a guide. But what kind of guide do we need to follow, and why?

The beauty I witness necessitates an appointed guide

Here is the fast answer: We see that there is beauty everywhere in the universe, and this necessitates guides appointed by the creator. But why?

Let’s give an example to understand this necessity. Now, think of any meaningful piece of technology, like a laptop for instance. Thousands of engineers are working constantly to design it for specific purposes. Every activity of designing the laptop is specifically for it to be used. Now, would it make sense to spend millions of dollars to design and manufacture a laptop and then sell it to be used as a coffee tray? Or even destroy it after it is manufactured? If that was the case, wouldn’t you conclude that these engineers have no wisdom at all? Why would they spend all this time and money to manufacture such a high-tech tool and then not use any of its functionalities? This won’t make any sense.

Now, let’s look at everything in the universe. There is magnificent well-ordered manifestation of art, from atoms to galaxies. Science is a proof that there is an undeniable order, since all what we do in science is trying to discover this order and show it in formulas. Formulas show that nothing is haphazard; it is ordered. Even things we don’t like such as bacteria function orderly. This order shows that there must be someone who puts these in order.

In fact, we witness not only a perfect order, but an artistic beauty. Every creature is not only designed to do a specific job, but it is complexly artfully adorned. This artistry shows that whoever forms everything in the universe wills to adorn them. It further shows me that these perfect adornments and arts must come from the love of the one forming them. Thus, He must love what He is doing.

Using the same thought process we used in the laptop example, would it make sense that the maker of the universe to adorn and create everything with such magnificent design and artistry and then not inform us what it means and what its purpose is? Then, the creator would be not wise at all, which is contrary to what I witness in the universe. Everything is being designed and sustained in a perfect manner pointing to the fact that their Maker is indeed absolutely wise. So, there has to be an explanation from Him regarding what He means by this magnificent artistry surrounding us.

An explanation is especially necessary for us; human beings. We are not only conscious of our existence, but we are also conscious of the existence everything around us, from atoms to galaxies. We are connected to everything in the universe. Not only that, but we are created in such a way that we love the beauty we witness in creation. We are created in such a way that we are able to ask the very questions I am writing about now.

Would it make sense that our maker would create us with the ability to see and inquire about the beauty around us, yet not provide an explanation? No. The engineers would design a laptop to be able to do calculations, but not tell any user about it. So, why did they design it in the first place? Are they insane? No. Then, the same illogic is not possible about the creator of this miraculously ordered universe.

When we reach this conclusion, we can cry out that there must be a guide appointed by the creator, i.e. a manual by Him for all this to make sense. This is the result of our witnessing.

The guide closes the loop

The engineers close the loop between the engineers and the users by preparing sophisticated manuals and online tutorials (prepared by appointed guides who have mastered the manual.) As a result of this, the users become happy and thankful of using that particular laptop. More importantly, the sophisticated design of the laptop is an important indication that there are users who will use all its functions. Maybe not every user will use all of them, but the fact that these functions exist is a proof that there are “super users” who utilize all these functions. These “super users” are the best guides and trainers that the laptop producer would appoint to train others. They are the ones who directly communicate with the engineers and understand the wisdom of each function of the laptop.

The same way, the fashioner of this universe closes the loop between Him and us (his conscious creation) by sending a clear manual and exemplary human guides that live and explain the manual. In fact, the very fact that there is this perfect order and art in the universe is an indication that there must be conscious creatures that understand and appreciate all this art. These human beings reflect deeply on every art of the creator, admire it, get excited by it, thank the Creator for it, know the wisdom of its creation, and love the one behind it all. Wouldn’t they be the best guides for all other conscious beings? As a result of following the way of these “super users” that are appointed by the creator to explain the wisdom of everything in creation, other conscious creatures start to make sense of everything in this universe and of how to use their feelings, like the love of beauty. They recognize that the guides must be connected to the creator and His creation and explain us its meanings.

Going back to the example, although we say we love to use the laptop, we may not even be aware that it is a laptop and think that it is a coffee tray. We become angry at using it as a coffee tray, since it is heavy and bulky, and not the best tool to use to serve coffee. So, our love of it is not sufficient to receive the benefits from the laptop. Only when we learn from the guides we recognize the purposes of the laptop. We start to admire it more and we recognize the necessity of learning from the guides. And then we start receiving our love back from it.

This is similar to closing my eyes and thinking that the room and everything in it is dark, but when we open our eyes, everything that we thought to be in darkness turns out to be lively and bright. The guide reminds us that we are “users” too, and tells us how great it is to use the laptop. Similarly, when we use our free will to open our eyes, we realize the beauty of life and recognize that the one who gave us this life loves us. We receive the love back.

We need to look for the guides who comprehensively respond to the creator’s artistry by conscious reflection, admiration, thankfulness, and who explain to us with certainty that all this art that we witness must be fashioned by the absolute artist who is capable of doing so. Only when we use our free will to follow these guides, we start to feel the love of the artist and we recognize the meaning of this life. We start to feel the love, since we start to understand how to use our love of beauty and how to make sense of everything in life.

Like the laptop user who becomes ecstatic when he discovers how to use the laptop other than as a coffee tray, we become delighted at every insight we gain from these “super users.” And we recognize the significant importance of the verse above, which urges us to look for the guides appointed by the one who has created this universe full of art and meaning.

I cannot but thank my creator for guiding me to find Him through this verse. My next journey would be to look for these appointed guides and their specific attributes.

With Peace,
Omar

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Assalamu alaikum, Dear br. Omar,

Al-hamdu lillah, today i was able to read this beautiful piece of study. Your language is quite fluent, you can try to do more writings about the points you get from the Risales. InshaAllah i would like to receive more. You can send this and the following ones, inshaAllah, to popular magazines for publication. I do not know any particular ones but you may know some.

This article made me reflect on the matter further:

1- Our love of the Creator needs a little bit more explanations. What does "We love God" mean for us in practical life?

I feel that a special emphasis needs to be put on this point: When we are happy to have or to own something that we try not to lose, that means we are pleased with them. If we realize and admit that they are given to us, consequently, we love the One who provided us with the things that we are pleased with. That is love of God. If we say, we love, say, our power of sight or our reasoning ability, we do not want to lose them, then, it means we love the One Who gave them to us. Love can be summarized with this kind of expressions, "I do not want to lose my life," or, for example, "the ecological balance should not be disturbed." We may or may not attribute them to a Creator, but these expressions of feelings include in themselves the love of the giver. If someone attribute them to God, this person is a lover of God, if another person attributes them to nature, then, this one is lover of nature etc. But the one who attribute the existence to nature cannot really love the nature because, by definition, nature is not a conscious being.

"We start to admire it more and we recognize the necessity of learning from the guides. And then we start receiving our love back from it."

2- When i read this sentence, i felt the need for an explanation how we start receiving our love back from it. But then the following sentence explained it. And this is a perfect explanation of the process.
"we realize the beauty of life and recognize that the one who gave us this life loves us. We receive the love back."


Yes, when we realize that the one who gave us these things that we are happy with, must love us. He is giving them to us in order to make us feel happy because of His love for us. There is no other reason for us to explain why this conscious and deliberate preparation of this beautiful, enjoyable existence should take place if it was not a willful choice of the Creator to make us realize that He loves us.

When we realize that He loves us, this realization of His love itself is the sign that He loves us. Even if we do not realize that He loves us, He still loves His creation, but our ignorance of His love deprives us of His love, because even He loves us but we do not realize that He loves us. Consequently, we remain without entertaining His love for us; we live a miserable, meaningless, purposeless life. We punish ourselves with being an orphan in this world waiting to perish away and become compost.

3- When we use the things we love according to the purpose in their creation, then, we understand that the Giver must be happy with us because He gave them to us for a purpose and the purpose has been fulfilled. This is the point we need to be sure whether we are using the gifts given to us in the way that they are meant to be used. How can we be sure of this appropriate usage of the gifts? Then, the verse, as you explained in the article, tells us that we should follow the ones who use them in the most appropriate way to their purpose of creation (super users, in your article).

Of course, these "super users" must be trained by the Creator and appointed as official trainers; the name given to them by the Creator is "Messengers". "Say, then, follow me.." explains that we should follow the ones who use these gifts in the most appropriate way to their creation. They are the prophets and we can recognize them by being the best examples "uswah al-hasanah" in using the existence in the way that they can be best utilized for the purpose of the creation.

4- Those people who see that the existence is accidental, nature happens to be by itself without any volitional choice or will behind it, should not really talk about love at all, because there is not deliberate choice and purpose behind the existence. Their claim to love nature is really baseless. Human consciousness cannot be satisfied with accidental love. For example, if a person finds a piece of paper accidentally thrown on the street with a statement on it "I love you", this person does not get really excited. But, the same person receives the same piece of paper deliberately sent by a conscious being whom s/he too loves, to his/her address, then the person pays attention to it and get really excited about it.

Conclusion: Those people who love God must always be happy because of the realization that their Creator Loves them. And, since the Creator is eternal, then they are loved by an Eternal lover. There have no fear or sorrow for their future because their Creator is their Eternal Lover; He would not leave them lonely in their existence. He will be with them forever. On the other hand, those who do not recognize the Creator, can never be really happy; their claim of happiness is temporary and baseless, their conscious realizes it. They can feel no hope for their future, because nature has no will and it is not conscious at all. By denying the reality they torture themselves.

These are my reflections after being inspired by your article. Thank you very much for exciting my thoughts about this delicate matter, which is the foundation of belief in the "Messengership".

Waiting for your other articles reflecting your thoughts, inshaAllah.

May Allah be pleased with you and with your family.

Fi amanillah,

ali