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POSTED 03-26-2001
The Most Precious of All Knowledge
THE
KNOWLEDGE OF GOD AND SELF
by The
Honorable Minister
Louis Farrakhan
[Editor�s Note: The following
text is excerpted from a message
delivered by
Minister Louis Farrakhan on March 11, 2001 at Mosque
Maryam in Chicago]
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lecture!)
In the Name of Allah, the
Beneficent, the Merciful.
Life
and how we use it is exceedingly important.
Solomon, the prophet, said, to know God and to find
God in your youth is a blessing. When you know God as a young person
and live your life in obedience to God as a young man or a young
woman, you have put your life in order and the blessings of life
will come to you no matter how long or how short your life span is.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said it takes about 75 years to learn
how to live, but most of us never get to that point.
The reason it takes time is because most of us
have our own thoughts about how life should be lived. We don�t
consult the Giver of Life, the Creator of Life. And if we consult
Him, the way He wants us to live is a little bit much, so we say,
"I�ll do it my way." And that�s why we don�t make it
to 75. By the time we are in our 50s or 60s, we�ve lost our teeth
and our hair. Some of us begin even to experience senility. Both the
Qur�an and the Bible teach us that in the day when Allah is
manifest, He comes to give us life and to give it more abundantly.
This means that if you don�t know how to live in accord with the
nature of your own life, then everyday that you live is death. But
if you know how to live, if you know how to eat to live, if you know
how to think on that which is life, then you can preserve the gift
of life that God gives us.
Isaiah the prophet says that in that day a baby
shall die at 100. But those that are of God, they will be like the
planting of God, the trees of righteousness. You have trees that
live 1,000 years. You have turtles that are 300- and 400-years-old.
And you are the best of God�s creation with the best form of all
of His creatures, yet we find it difficult to get to 70, 80, 90, and
100 without losing the vitality of life itself. So there is
something that we need to know; there is something that we are
missing. And that is what I want to talk to you about today.
Life is in understanding the word of God. Power
is in understanding the word of God. One can be used as an
instrument of revelation, and revelation contains the highest form
of electrical energy. You are an electrical being; all of this
[human body] functions because of electricity. You can be physically
alive because there is electrical current in your body. But you are
not really alive until you are alive on the mental and spiritual
plane. You cannot be alive on the mental plane without knowledge
that gives you the ability to deal with your life�s circumstances.
You cannot be alive on the spiritual plane until you have the most
profound of all knowledge, which is the knowledge of God and the
knowledge of self. And the true knowledge of God and self gives you
the highest form of electrical energy that literally turns your mind
on so much so that your skin lights up and people see the mark of
life in your face because of the way that you think, because the
electrical energy of revelation has opened you up.
Man has not fully discovered his own potential.
It is revelation from God that opens man up to grow. And when I say
man, there is no man without woman. So revelation opens us up for
growth, for development on the mental and spiritual level which
manifests itself on the physical level.
Isaiah
the prophet says, "The spirit
of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to
preach good tidings unto the meek." There are many eloquent
people in the world, but eloquence cannot give life. It is wonderful
to be able to express yourself, but the spirit of God comes from our
belief in and observance of Divine Truth. When Isaiah says,
"the spirit of the Lord is upon me � to preach good tidings
to the meek � to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening
of the prison to them that are bound," this is the
Messianic Work that must be done in this day and time. People are
not free, so liberty not only has to be proclaimed, it must be
experienced. Somebody once sang a song, "Oh, I wished that I
knew what it means to be free." To be a slave all your life�your
fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers as chattel slaves
and you as a free slave, still bound to the same people that your
great grandfather was bound to and you don�t know how to escape
their power�you are a captive, brothers and sisters, of an alien
idea; alien to the nature in which you are created. You are not only
bound to your former slavemasters and their children, but you are
bound in a prison of ignorance.
Many
of us have great degrees from
colleges and universities, and it seems somewhat insulting that
someone would say that we are steeped in ignorance. But everybody is
ignorant of something. That�s why everybody could teach you
something if you are humble enough to learn. But there is a certain
kind of ignorance that allows you to be a tool and a slave. The
Bible says, "My people are destroyed for the lack of
knowledge." You can have degrees, but it lacks that certain
kind of knowledge that one must have in order to really be free. And
that is the true knowledge of God and the true knowledge of
yourself.
Isaiah asked the question, "Shall the prey
be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? But thus
sayeth the Lord." Listen to the strength of those words,
"But thus sayeth the Lord." And there is one thing God can�t
do; He just can�t lie. He has the power to make His word bond. You
can say what you�re going to do and can�t do it. But whatever
God says, He will do. Trust it brother. Trust it sister. He will do
it because there is nothing that can stop His will.
"Thus sayeth the Lord. �Even the captives
of the mighty shall be taken away.� " This is a prophecy
about you. As the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us, we are
captives in the hand of our slave masters� children. You think you
are free, but they won�t let you go and they won�t give you
justice. So you are just in their hands as a prey. "Even the
captive of the mighty shall be taken away and the prey of the
terrible shall be delivered." The Caucasian has been terrible
in his treatment of our fathers and of us, the children of our
fathers. And that is not something that has changed. He is so
skillful today that he doesn�t have to kill you now. He has your
brother so silly that your brother will kill you. So he stands back,
he kills a few and we take care of the rest. But he has many more
skillful ways of killing people today.
The book says, God talking, "I will contend
with him that contendeth with thee and I will save thy children. And
I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh." This
means that you can look for another type of war that Europe will be
involved in and white folk will start killing each other. This also
means revolution in the streets of America. You can believe it or
let it alone, but I�m not here to play with you and I�m not here
to tickle your ears. If you live you will walk right into this that
God has said through the mouths of His prophets.
America is the place where God will make His
power known. He will let no foreign bombs drop on this nation. She
has destroyed cities in Europe and Africa and Asia, but no power has
destroyed one American city. This is a reserved place and a
preserved area for the God of Power to make Himself known, because
everybody on this earth fears America. All you have to do is travel
outside of this country and see the terror that America brings to
little nations in Africa and the Middle East and in Asia. Her power
is awesome. Her reach is awesome. America says, like the Bible says,
"I sit, a queen and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow."
Not so. America�s cities will come down under earthquakes,
terrific storms, rain, hail and snow.
America
has been blessed more than any
nation on this earth. She is so blessed with produce. Sometimes in
order to keep prices high she will throw food away, rather than give
it to the poor. Yet, the greatest nation on the earth has nearly 13
million people homeless. The richest nation on the earth has
millions in poverty and people going to bed hungry. Her insane
asylums are filled and the prisons are bursting with people.
Then he says, "they shall be drunken with
their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I
the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of
Jacob." The book talks about the day of vengeance
of our God. That�s really some kind of language, to use the
possessive pronoun "our" God. We know that Allah is the
Lord of the Worlds. But here is a prophecy of God fighting for a
particular and peculiar people�the Lord of the Worlds, but a focus
on a people that were no people at all.
Jesus says, "I thank Thee, Father in Heaven,
for keeping these things from the wise and the prudent men and
revealing them unto babes." What do you mean, babes? God doesn�t
waste time revealing heavy wisdom to little babies. So the baby is
not a literal baby, but a baby here, or babe, is an innocent or
inexperienced person. It�s talking about a people without the
experience of a free people. They are considered babes. They are
considered children because they have not matured mentally to take
responsibility for themselves and their children and their future
and their destiny. They keep begging their former slave masters to
educate them, to give them a job, to build a home for them when they
are capable of doing all of these things for themselves.
"I thank Thee for keeping these
things," what things? Here are wise men, prudent men, and
certain wisdom has been kept from them. The people that this is
referring to are the rulers of the society in all spheres of human
activity. There is wisdom that has been kept from them and it has
been revealed unto babes.
What is revelation? When you say something is
being revealed, that means you can�t go to the library and get it
because it�s not there. I don�t care how many books you have the
command of; there is knowledge that is not in the library. We are
living in a universe of plenty of knowledge. But when God chooses to
reveal knowledge, it means He�s disclosing or opening up truth
that has not yet been known in the world. If it has not yet been
known in the world, then the people that run the world, the people
that rule the world, don�t know this.
When God chooses an innocent, inexperienced
babe-like people to give them revelation, He is giving you the
scepter or rulership over those that once ruled over you.
More next issue, Insha-Allah.
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