When you truly grasp what it means that you should submit to the will of God, the result you will get is in the true and practical meaning of faith. When the understanding of the principle of Islam truly focuses your attention on the understanding of the nature of God and His will, you will not only begin to understand the concept of faith from the perspective of Jesus. You will also begin to understand the secret of what went into the development of people like Jesus and Mohammed themselves and all other truly powerful personalities in history that turned them into what you can call un-usually remarkable figures.

It is all in the secret of Islam being the principle of correct human development. Everything I had been saying all along should have proved, it to all who believe in the one God of the unity of mankind that indeed if there should be a religion from God at all, there could not be more than one religion. It is clear that all the different religions of mankind negate the will of God for His entire creation.

If Mohammed had not been badly misunderstood especially by those who unfortunately created another organised mode of worship out of His clearly stated universal principle of Islam, perhaps today, all of humanity would have been very close to the realisation of the programmes of the new covenant predicted by God for mankind though Jeremiah. We can talk about a new covenant because there is an existing old covenant by the same God. The same God that gave mankind the old covenant has turned round to promise us the new covenant. Both the old covenant and the new covenant are about laws of God. We are all conversant with the method of the old covenant. The secular world has even bought into it.

They are usually about laws written on tables or statute books. They can also come in the nature of creed and dogma. They are largely based on instructions and warnings such as ‘thou shalt not do this and thou shalt not do that.’ But it had never stopped humanity from violating them because at the end of the day, intelligent people have come to know that laws and instructions can only work when you have created an enabling environment to make them work. So, God Almighty too, or Allah in the Infinite Intelligence that He has promised through Jeremiah that even though He was the author of the old covenant, a better covenant in the form of a new one will be coming that must make for the easy practice of law for the whole of humanity.

I presume The Talmud is what the Jews call the body of their laws, which must include the Ten Commandments. That of the Muslims of course is sharia. The truth of the matter is that they all belong within the purview of the old covenant and nobody is contesting the fact that they might be divine in origin.

But to prove that there is nothing iron-cast about the nature of any law however divine must have made God Almighty Himself through Jeremiah to tell the world that a new mode of legal operation in the form of a covenant will be coming for all mankind at a date to be expected. Jeremiah through whom the promise of a new covenant was made lived before both Jesus and Mohammed. Both Jesus and Mohammed came after him and it could be seen from the statements of both Jesus and Mohammed that they were statements leading to a new method of looking at the issue of the law that should not be oppressive to man.

In the laws of the old covenant such as you will get in perhaps Talmud and sharia, you will get such laws as ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’ and ‘thou shalt not steal.’ The truth of the matter is that when you have able leadership of a nation such as you get under Moses and Mohammed, you might never want to steal or commit adultery because such able leadership would have created such an enabling environment that might not even make you to think of evil.

But when you have a terrible environment such as you have under the Pharisees during the time of Jesus when the temptation were there to commit all sorts of vices, it can only take the merciful nature of a person like Jesus to know that for someone to want you cut your hands for stealing or to be stone to death because you committed adultery is an act of injustice in itself for which somebody like Himself must try to save you because He knew through His empathic nature that the environment in which such a victim was operating is hostile.

Ayo-Vaughan, a psychologist, lives in Lagos
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