“From time immemorial,” Bahá’u’lláh, speaking of God, explains, “He, the
Divine Being, hath been veiled in the ineffable sanctity of His exalted
Self, and will everlasting continue to be wrapt in the impenetrable
mystery of His unknowable Essence... Ten thousand Prophets, each a Moses,
are thunderstruck upon the Sinai of their search at God’s forbidding
voice, ‘Thou shalt never behold Me!’; whilst a myriad Messengers, each as
great as Jesus, stand dismayed upon their heavenly thrones by the
interdiction ‘Mine Essence thou shalt never apprehend!’” “How bewildering
to me, insignificant as I am,” Bahá’u’lláh in His communion with God
affirms, “is the attempt to fathom the sacred depths of Thy knowledge! How
futile my efforts to visualize the magnitude of the power inherent in
Thine handiwork—the revelation of Thy creative power!” “When I
contemplate, O my God, the relationship that bindeth me to Thee,” He, in
yet another prayer revealed in His own handwriting, testifies, “I am moved
to proclaim to all created things ‘verily I am God!’; and when I consider
my own self, lo, I find it coarser than clay!”
“The door of the knowledge of the Ancient of Days,” Bahá’u’lláh further
states in the Kitáb-i-Íqán, “being thus closed in the face of all beings,
He, the Source of infinite grace ... hath caused those luminous Gems of
Holiness to appear out of the realm of the spirit, in the noble form of
the human temple, and be made manifest unto all men, that they may impart
unto the world the mysteries of the unchangeable Being and tell of the
subtleties of His imperishable Essence... All the Prophets of God, His
well-favored, His holy and chosen Messengers are, without exception, the
bearers of His names and the embodiments of His attributes... These
Tabernacles of Holiness, these primal Mirrors which reflect the Light of
unfading glory, are but expressions of Him Who is the Invisible of the
Invisibles.”
That Bahá’u’lláh should, notwithstanding the overwhelming intensity of His
Revelation, be regarded as essentially one of these Manifestations of God,
never to be identified with that invisible Reality, the Essence of
Divinity itself, is one of the major beliefs of our Faith—a belief which
should never be obscured and the integrity of which no one of its
followers should allow to be compromised.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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