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Gracious God! So great is the folly and perversity of the people, that they have turned their face toward their own thoughts and desires, and have turned their back upon the knowledge and will of God—hallowed and glorified be His name!

 

Paragraph 23 of the thirty paragraphs that look at the station of "pure abstraction and essential unity", the first of the two stations of the Manifestations of God.

And here He goes again. "Gracious God!" You can just hear the exasperation. But, as He points out, God truly is gracious.

So let's go back a second. Why is this here? Why does He feel the need to point out this attribute of God here?

As usual, we're not really sure, but it follows a series of paragraphs in which He is describing how the people have taken some verses, like the "Seal of the Prophets", and rejected others, even though they have no basis for picking and choosing from sacred Text. They do this, He says, because the former verses "accord with their inclinations and interests" and the latter "are contrary to their selfish desires". Over and over, throughout history, we have done this. When Moses came down with the Ten Commandments, He found the people reverting to their previous idolic behaviour.

Here, Baha'u'llah is seeing it again.

But what exactly is He seeing?

Well, He says, that the people have great "folly and perversity". Not just a little. A great amount.

What is folly? What is perversity? Why does he choose these particular terms?

Folly, quite simply, is a lack of good sense, foolishness. Perversity, on the other hand, is a deliberate desire to behave in an unreasonable or unacceptable way.

To understand why He is using these terms, let's look at what He is describing. We can easily picture a person standing there. Their face is turned towards "their own thoughts and desires", which means their back is turned away from "the knowledge and will of God". These are not the same things. We want one thing, God wants another. As He says so poetically in the Persian Hidden Words, "How long wilt thou soar in the realms of desire? Wings have I bestowed upon thee, that thou mayest fly to the realms of mystic holiness and not the regions of satanic fancy." Or more simply, "Prefer not your will to Mine, never desire that which I have not desired for you..."

Why on earth would we ever turn away from what God desires for us? That is utter foolishness. This is true folly. But to do it deliberately? It's one thing to accidentally turn aside from something, but to do it on purpose? That is the epitome of perversity, according to the definition of the word.

Fortunately, God is gracious.

One last question, though. Why does He finish this paragraph off with "hallowed and glorified be His name"?

We are reminded of the inescapable and absolute sovereignty of the Manifestation through this phrase. The King's messengers often begin, "In the name of the King", letting us know for whom they are speaking, and under whose authority. Same with the Messengers of God, those divine Manifestations.

It puts us in mind of the beginning of the prayer from Jesus. "Our Father Who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name." We're also reminded that this very book begins with the intonation, "In the Name of our Lord, the Exalted, the Most High". Part Two begins, you may recall, "Verily He Who is the Daystar of Truth and Revealer of the Supreme Being holdeth, for all time, undisputed sovereignty over all that is in heaven and on earth, though no man be found on earth to obey Him." Now we feel we have a far deeper understanding of how this applies to our reality.