Can Christianity Answer the Question?
In Christianity, the meaning of life is rooted in faith
in the gospel of Jesus Christ, in finding Jesus as Savior. “For God so
loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should
not perish but have eternal life.” However, the proposition is not without
serious problems. First, if this is the purpose of creation and the precondition
for eternal life, why was it not taught by the prophets to all the nations of
the world? Second, had God turned into man close to the time of Adam all
mankind would have had an equal chance to eternal life, unless those before the
time of Jesus had another purpose for their existence! Third, how can people
today who have not heard of Jesus fulfill the Christian purpose of creation? Naturally,
such a purpose is too narrow and goes against divine justice.
The Answer
Islam is the response to humanity’s search for meaning.
The purpose of creation for all men and women for all times has been one: to know
and worship God.
The Quran teaches us that every human being is born
conscious of God,
“(Remember) when your Lord extracted from the loins of Adam’s
children their descendants and made them testify [saying]: ‘Am I not your Lord?’
They said: ‘Yes, we testify to it.’ (This was) in case you say on the Day of
Judgment: ‘We were unaware of this.’ Or you say: ‘It was our ancestors who
worshipped others besides God and we are only their descendants. Will you then
destroy us for what those liars did?’”(Quran 7:172-173)
The Prophet of Islam teaches us that God created this
primordial need in human nature at the time Adam was made. God took a covenant
from Adam when He created him. God extracted all of Adam’s descendants who were
yet to be born, generation after generation, spread them out, and took a
covenant from them. He addressed their souls directly, making them bear
witness that He was their Lord. Since God made all human beings swear to His Lordship
when He created Adam, this oath is imprinted on the human soul even before it
enters the fetus, and so a child is born with a natural belief in the Oneness
of God. This natural belief is called fitra in Arabic. Consequently, every
person carries the seed of belief in the Oneness of God that lies deeply buried
under layers of negligence and dampened by social conditioning. If the child
were left alone, it would grow up conscious of God - a single Creator - but all
children are affected by their environment. The Prophet of God said,
“Each child is born in a state of ‘fitra’, but his
parents make him a Jew or a Christian. It is like the way an animal gives
birth to a normal offspring. Have you noticed any young born mutilated before
you mutilate them?”
_-_The_Islamic_Viewpoint_001.jpg)
Figure 1 The marvel
of life. An unborn fetus sucking its thumb.
So, just as the child’s body submits to physical laws, set
by God in nature, its soul submits naturally to the fact that God is its Lord
and Creator. However, its parents condition it to follow their own way, and
the child is not mentally capable of resisting it. The religion which the
child follows at this stage is one of custom and upbringing, and God does not hold
it to account for this religion. When a child matures into an adult, he or she
must now follow the religion of knowledge and reason. As adults, people must
now struggle between their natural disposition towards God and their desires in
order to find the correct path. The call of Islam is directed to this
primordial nature, the natural disposition, the imprint of God on the soul, the
fitra, which caused the souls of every living being to agree that He Who
made them was their Lord, even before the heavens and earth were created,
“I did not create the jinn and mankind except for My worship.”
(Quran 51:56)
According to Islam, there has been a basic message which
God has revealed through all prophets, from the time of Adam to the last of the
prophets, Muhammad, may God praise them all. All the prophets sent by God came
with the same essential message:
“Indeed, We have sent a messenger to every nation (saying), ‘Worship
God and avoid false gods...’” (Quran 16:36)
The prophets brought the same answer to mankind’s most
troubling question, an answer that addresses the yearning of the soul for God.
What is Worship?
‘Islam’ means ‘submission’, and worship, in Islam, means
‘obedient submission to the will of God.’
Every created being ‘submits’ to the Creator by
following the physical laws created by God,
“To Him belongs whosoever is in the heavens and the earth; all
obey His will.” (Quran 30:26)
They, however, are neither rewarded nor punished for their
‘submission’, for it involves no will. Reward and punishment are for those who
worship God, who submit to the moral and religious Law of God of their own free
will. This worship is the essence of the message of all the prophets sent by
God to mankind. For example, this understanding of worship was emphatically
expressed by Jesus Christ,
“None of those who call me ‘Lord’ will enter the kingdom of God, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
‘Will’ means ‘what God wants human beings to do.’ This ‘Will
of God’ is contained in the divinely revealed laws which the prophets taught
their followers. Consequently, obedience to divine law is the foundation of
worship. Only when human beings worship their God by submitting to His religious
law can they have peace and harmony in their lives and the hope for heaven,
just like the universe runs in harmony by submitting to the physical
laws set by its Lord. When you remove the hope of heaven, you remove the
ultimate value and purpose of life. Otherwise, what difference would it really
make whether we live a life of virtue or vice? Everyone’s fate would be the
same anyway.
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