Need For a Guide
When we feel hungry, we try to satisfy our hunger, and we know that there is something in the form of food that can satisfy our hunger. We feel thirsty, and we perform some action to quench our thirst. We know that there is something in the form of water that can quench our thirst.
The same is true for Truth. An individual is always in search of Truth. The search itself proves that there is a Truth that one should know. Truth is much greater than eating and drinking. When the answers to our smaller requirements are present in this world, why won’t the answer to our greatest requirements be present here, too?
The question about the Truth is about discovering the reality of one’s self. Suddenly, one day, you are born into this world. You did not take birth on your own. You now find yourself in a vast world, a world that is separate from you. You live in this world for 50 or 60 years, and then you die. On your own you have no idea where you go after death. The question of the Truth relates to finding the truth about these realities of life and death.
You cannot learn about the Truth in the same way as you learn how to obtain food to satisfy your hunger and water to quench your thirst. Truth is limitless and eternal. If Truth were not limitless and eternal, it would not be Truth at all. But a human being’s reason and age are both limited. A limited mind cannot reach the limitless Truth. A person who has a limited age cannot discover the Truth by himself.
This inability to reach the Truth by oneself proves that in order to know the Truth we need prophets. What is prophethood? Prophethood means that the Truth, to which an individual cannot reach on his own, itself reaches him; the Truth that we cannot know through our own efforts itself appears and tells us about itself.
Through the prophets, God makes people aware of the Truth beforehand. The prophets announced that a person should obey God out of his own free will. Everything else in the world obeys God, but out of compulsion. A human being should do so, but out of his own free choice. On the basis of the freedom to choose that God has given him, a person should become choice-less and powerless in front of God. Despite the freedom that God has given him, he should willingly surrender to God. For those who do this, the reward is Heaven.
