Islam: The principle of correct human devt – Part 26

If personalities like Moses, Jeremiah, Jesus and Mohammed and all those being referred to as truly great personalities were not aware about a certain method of human development, they could not have been able to develop the kind of abilities they developed that made them to stand out among the rest of their peers in history. While the rest of humanity were comfortable living in the traditions of the old covenant, these people were already living ahead of their times. They were living in the spirit of the new covenant. Covenants as I had said before are about laws and God himself did not deny the fact that He gave the world, the old covenant. The old covenant style is what you typically get in the Jewish traditions of Talmud and the Islamic traditions of the sharia.

But Paul in the bible gave us a very vital statement of what God wants the old covenant to achieve in our lives. He said ‘before faith came, we are kept under the law, shut up unto faith, which should afterward be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster, for ye are all children of God by faith in Christ. I had allayed the fears of religious parochialists that reference to Christ in this statement is not an attempt to introduce anybody into the Christian religion, but that those of healthy religious perception overtime have come to appreciate the truth that the concept of Christ is another name for the Holy Spirit and it is the common property of every human who has mastered the true techniques of Islam — submission to the will of God, which I made clear means faith with Jesus Christ.

So when Paul said ‘before faith came, we were kept under the law; simple deduction will show that what he was saying was that before the truthful understanding of Islam came, we were kept under the law. The law he was talking about was personified by what you call the old covenant, whose techniques are ably expressed in Talmud and Sharia. When, however, he went on to tell us that ‘but after that faith is come, we are no longer under a school master for ye are all children of God by faith is Christ, then we ought to be able to conclude by ourselves that he was talking about new covenant. It is in this spirit that Mohammed and Jesus operated to make them exceptional among human beings. They were never bothered to operate the laws that you would find in the statute book but such laws that I had referred to several times in my writings as the laws of mental operation. These are laws arising from the rule of intelligence. They are tapped directly in ones direct connection with God after you have learnt through the proper rules of moral operation how to effectively submit to the will of God. This is the spirit of the new covenant.

It is a process of mental and emotional orientation grounded on a very good sense of what is right and what is wrong. That truth of Psalm one in the bible will begin to manifest in one’s life, which says the righteous man ‘shall be like a planted tree by the rivers of water that bringeth forth fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper’. This is what the spirit of the new covenant will achieve in the lives of everybody, which made Jesus to confidently tell every man on earth that what He was able to do anybody else with the correct development of the spirit of submission to the will of God will do the same. That is faith. In the correct functions of faith in the lives of everybody, Jeremiah said of God ‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts and will be their hearts and we their God and they shall be my people… for they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord for I will forgive their iniquity and will remember their sin no more. This is the ultimate gain of the truth of Islam for the entire race of man. It is simply having an effective knowledge of submission to the will of God.

Ayo-Vaughan, a psychologist, lives in Lagos
babatund_2@yahoo.com