Who deserves to be Worshiped ?

The vast majority of Christians today pray to Jesus, claiming that he is God
(Allah). The philosophers among them claim that they are not worshipping
Jesus the man; they are only worshipping God (Allah), who was manifest in
Jesus the man. This is also the rationale of pagans who bow down to worship
the idols. As mentioned before, when a pagan philosopher is asked why he or
she worships an idol which was made by human hands, he or she replies that
he or she is not really worshipping the idol. Furthermore, he or she may claim
that the idol is only a focal point for the presence of Allah, and thereby claim
to worship Allah who is manifest in the idol, and not the physical idol itself.
There is little or no difference between that explanation and the answer given
by Christians for worshipping Jesus. The origin of this deviation lies in the
false belief that Allah is present in His creation. Such a belief (erroneously)
justifies the worship of Allah’s creation. 12
Islam has freed its followers from such superstitions by rejecting the doctrine of
the incarnation. 13 The divinity of Jesus has been rejected in the noble Quran in many
verses. Let us take two of them:
{They have certainly disbelieved who say: Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary…}
(Quran 5: 72)
{Say: He is Allah, [Who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is
born, nor is there to Him any equivalent.} (Quran 112: 1-4)
These two verses clearly specify that neither Jesus nor any other prophet
resembles Allah in an attribute or in essence, and hence, nothing can be an
incarnation of Him.
Consider the following. In the south-eastern region of the Amazon jungle in
Brazil, South America, a primitive tribe erected a new hut to house their main
12
13
Philips, The True Message of Jesus Christ, 69.
Incarnation: the belief that God came to Earth in human form and that Jesus was both
fully God and fully human. (Christian sects differ on some of the details of this
theology.)
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