God’s Abundant Knowledge

The Life of This World is but Chattels of Deception #18

From the Quran:

“It is He (God) who holds the keys to the unknown.

No one knows of it except Him.

He knows what is on the land and what is in the water

Not a leaf falls except with His knowledge

Not a grain in the darkness of the earth

And not a fresh or a decayed thing except

That is all a part of a timeless unambiguous record.”

Quran, 6:59

Also, from the Quran:

“If the seas were ink for the words of my God,

Surely the sea would be exhausted before

My God’s words are exhausted,

Even if we replenish the sea with another”

Quran, 18:19

Also:

“If it was so that all the trees on earth

Turned into pens, and the sea (were ink),

With seven more seas lined behind it,

The Words of God would not be exhausted,

Behold, is Almighty, All-wise.”

Quran, 31:27

It is clear that God’s essence is something that we could never comprehend. These metaphors and verses from the Quran, however, serve to help us understand God’s attributes — one of them being the vastness of God’s knowledge.

We get a glimpse of that vast knowledge when we compare it to the vastness of the sea and the world at large — and still that is a mere fraction of what God knows. But that enormity should not be a source of uncertainty and anxiety, rather a source of comfort. In the things that we do not know or cannot control, there is a higher power that knows and has it under control for us.

We often times blame God when bad things happen to us or our loved ones and that is one of the greatest examples of our ignorance and lack of knowledge. When the Quran says, “It is [God] who holds the keys to the unknown,” that also means that it is God who is the arbiter of what is good and what is bad, according to the Quran. Sometimes the thing that seems bad, is protecting you from something worse or guiding you to the best.

The Quran says that Allah knows every leaf that falls, and that for example, may not seem so shocking to us because we can open up our and have access to vast knowledge. But in the time of the prophet, that vast knowledge was not as obvious with the limited resources then, and so people took God’s word for what it was and fully believed in them. In the Quran, God says that there is great virtue in that and thus, great blessings. But the same rings true for us now. When we concede that we do not know all that lies under the sea or reigns in the skies above, for example, then we are simply left to believe. That act of humbling and submitting your trust to God is faith, and there lies reward.

There is another thing I urge readers to take away from these verses. Comparing God’s knowledge in the context of nature is indicative that God exists in every flora and fauna, highlighting God’s abundant beauty and blessings. In the Quran it says if you try to gather the blessings of God, there wouldn’t be anything large enough to store it.

These verses are also a mere fraction of the vast knowledge that exists in the Quran about the world, there hereafter and our Creator.

There is a quote that Ibn Rumi said over a thousand years ago that I think speaks to the abundance of knowledge and beauty in the Quran and in God:

“If you look at Quran, with your eyes, you’ll see words.

If you look it with your brain, you’ll see the knowledge.

If you look at it with your heart, you’ll see love.

If you look at it with all your soul [or all your faculties], you will see God.”