Allah is pure will; he determines everything; and he can change his mind. Because of this there is no such thing as right or wrong and there are no secondary causes.
Huston, we have a problem.
A good Muslim would probably take offense at the statement that there is no such thing as right or wrong, but if you modified the statement a little, he would agree with it. "The will of Allah is right and that which is contrary to his will is wrong." That second statement may sound very much like something we believe, but it is not. It is miles and miles away from the way we think and what we believe. As one Muslim teacher said, "Allah could blame you for another man's sins and cast you into hell forever, and that would be just." It would be just because it was something that Allah decided to do. Did you get that?
To the Muslim mind "right" has nothing to do with goodness, kindness, mercy, honesty, or fairness. "Right" is "whatever Allah wants to do or wants me to do." The other concepts are completely disconnected from the idea of "right."
Let me give you a couple of examples from the life of Mohammed. When he first started out, he taught tolerance for other belief's. Unbelievers were to be treated kindly. The reason he taught this was that he didn’t have very many believers! He had no way to impose his will on people. As his power grew, tolerance went out the window. He grew increasingly militant and began to teach his people to attack and kill unbelievers.
Here is another example. Mohammed had an adopted son. For whatever reason, Mohammed conceived of the idea that his son should marry a certain woman. His son and the woman weren't too wild about the idea, but Mohammed said it was the will of Allah, so the marriage took place. A short while later Mohammed dropped in to visit his son and accidently saw his son's wife in the bath. In other words, he saw her without a Burka on. In fact, he saw her naked. To put it another way, it was the first time in his life he had laid eyes on her. In Arab society at that time you didn't know what any woman outside of your own family looked like. You had no idea. You could probably get some sense of how much a woman weighed, but even that would be no more than an educated guess. All you ever got to see were a woman's eyes.
What Mohamed discovered that day was that his daughter-in-law was an extremely beautiful woman. And a short time later he came back with a new revelation. It was no longer the will of Allah for his son to be married to this woman. They must divorce immediately! And so they did. And then Mohammed married her; but not without controversy. To the Arab culture of that period, this was almost as bad as marrying the daughter-in-law of your biological son. People were very uncomfortable with Mohammed's actions. But Mohammed wasn't done yet. He had yet another revelation from Allah. It turns out that an adopted son isn't really a son at all, he's just sort of a person who happens to live in your household! These revelations are pretty convenient, aren't they?
But what about the conflicts in the revelations? People noticed the conflicts and they were troubled by them. But once again Mohammed "heard" from Allah. When two revelations conflict, obey the most recent one!
What can we learn from this?
It makes it easier to understand how someone could strap explosives on to a mentally retarded person, send them into a crowded shopping area, and then detonate the explosives blowing up men, women, and children, some of which were undoubtedly devout Muslims. Remember, the concept of "right" is completely divorced from concepts like fairness, goodness, truth, and love. Right is what Allah wants. Even if your conscience is bothered by it, if it's what Allah wants, it's "right."
The one true God has very little in common with Allah (who, if he exists as a single being, is probably a fallen angel).
God can't change. He can't change because He is perfect. The only way he could change would be for Him to get a little better or a little worse. If He could get a little better, He wouldn't be perfect right now. Being perfect means you can't improve; but he also can't become less perfect. Real perfection means that it is impossible for you to become less perfect. To become less perfect would require some sort of an inward weakness or susceptibility to change or decay. God is not subject to change or decay.
This concept brings the greatest comfort to Christians as we contemplate our many sins and failures. In the past few months the Holy Spirit has been teaching me about sin. Sin is much worse than we think it is and we are much more badly broken than we think we are. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me God has not made a provision for us to live in sinless perfection in this life. What this means is that I am going to be a moral failure today. It may fail less than I normally do or I mail fail more, but at the end of the day I will be a moral failure.
The only way I can avoid being a moral failure is to live today with absolute purity in thought, word, and deed. I must be perfectly good without being the least bit proud of myself. Every action, indeed, every thought, must be totally motivated by love and love alone. I don't know how to do that. I have never known how to do that. None of this means that I can or should allow myself to live in a sloppy manner. I can and should ask God for the grace to overcome the power so sin. I can and should, over time, make progress in personal holiness and become more and more like Jesus; but I will never reach moral perfection in this life. I will probably never have one day in which I am completely pure in thought, word, and deed.
When you have a baby, you expect to do some extra work. You know you will have a nasty job on your hands keeping that baby clean because they baby will be born without control over his bladder or bowels. But you don't let it get you down. It's not a fun job, but your love for the little fellow motivates you to do the same messy job over and over again. Eventually you will get out the M&M's or whatever and bribe the little booger into buying into the concept of using the toilet. Oh happy day when the last diaper is finally put away!
But that happy day doesn't come for everyone. You may have a child with a birth defect and they may never gain control over bladder and bowels. I take care of people with intellectual disabilities. Some have as much control as you or I do; some have no more control than a baby; and some manage a measure of control but continue to have the occasional "accident" their whole life long.
And so we keep cleaning them up because we love them. When our hearts and minds are right there is something inside of us that is like the heart and mind of a new parent cleaning up a messy diaper. We don't love the mess, but we sure do love that baby! And every day I need God to clean me up and His heart and mind is always right and He does it with love, and nothing but love in His heart.
There is nothing I can do that will surprise Him. He has never once said to Himself, "I know I made a covenant to forgive him, but I was certainly never expecting him to do that!" God sees everything in advance, He never forgets anything, and He never changes.
Next time we’ll explain why they don’t believe in the law of gravity.
