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Soul's Understanding of Creator (31:0) There is equal agreement in these texts that the soul’s ability to attain to an understanding of its Creator’s purpose is the product not merely of its own effort, but of interventions of the Divine that open the way. The point was made with memorable clarity by Jesus: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." If one is not to see in this assertion merely a dogmatic challenge to other stages of the one ongoing process of Divine guidance, it is obviously the expression of the central truth of revealed religion: that access to the unknowable Reality that creates and sustains existence is possible only through awakening to the illumination shed from that Realm. One of the most cherished of the Qur'an’s surihs takes up the metaphor: "God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.. Light upon Light! God doth guide whom He will to His Light." In the case of the Hebrew prophets, the Divine intermediary that was later to appear in Christianity in the person of the Son of Man and in Islam as the Book of God assumed the form of a binding Covenant established by the Creator with Abraham, Patriarch and Prophet: "And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee."
(31:1)
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