God is the Sustainer
God is our Sustainer, who provides us with abundant blessings. This should make a person worship God alone and not associate anything or anyone else with Him.
In the second chapter of the Quran the believers have been told “to worship your Lord, Who created you and those before you, so that you may become righteous, Who made the earth a bed, and the sky a canopy; and it is He who sends down rain from above for the growth of every kind of fruit for your sustenance. And do not knowingly set up rivals to God.” (2:21-22)
God alone has created human beings and all that is in the heavens and on earth. He has invested the world with profound significance and He constantly looks after its needs. The proper course for an individual is to take God as his Creator, Master and Sustainer, and not attempt to set up anyone as a partner with Him; that is, a person should give himself up entirely to God. But since He is invisible, it often happens that a person comes to give importance to some visible object and starts worshiping it instead of God. He equates the created with the Creator—sometimes partly sometimes wholly, at times calling it by the name of God and at times doing so without taking God’s name.
Therein lies a person’s basic error. The prophets taught people to glorify God alone, and forsake any other things that they had elevated to a position of glory. A human being is such a creature as cannot stand on his own. At all times, he needs different things to support his survival on earth. He needs an earth which has gravity so that he may stay on it. He needs an atmosphere which at all times supplies him with oxygen. He needs a sun which gives him continuous heat and light. He needs a continuous flow of water in this world because no life is possible without water. He needs such food as constantly gives him strength and energy.
God has provided abundant quantities of innumerable things in this world, and that enough for a person to worship God alone and not associate anything or anyone else with Him.
