Estimated reading time: 13 minute(s)
By The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
I thank Allah (God) so much for remembering His promise to Abraham, that his seed would be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and they would serve a strange people in that strange land who would afflict them for 400 years; but He said to Abraham: “After that time I will come, and I will judge that nation which they shall serve, and afterwards shall they come out with great substance.” That’s a great promise—and Allah (God) never breaks His promise.
Black people have wondered, “Why, God, have You allowed us to suffer like this? What have we done to deserve what You have caused to be put upon us?” And the scripture teaches of Jesus: When he met the man born blind, and the disciples asked him, “Who did sin? Did he or his parents?,” Jesus answered, “Neither did his parents sin, nor did he sin. He is born blind, that the works of God may be manifest in him.” (John 9:1-3) In other words, his suffering was a part of a well-thought-out plan; that Satan would have his (Abraham’s) seed and put the seed into such a condition that only He (God) could get them out of it. In essence, we were put in this condition so that the people who have not known God in these last 6,000 years of the rule of a strange people: that our rise on The Call of God when He comes would make Him known to a world that has not known Him. They know of Him—we talk about “God”; but in that day, His people are going to learn about Him, and have a personal relationship with Him. And as the scripture teaches (Ezekiel 37:13): “When (not if, “when”) I have raised you out of your graves, then shall you know that I, The Lord, am God, and beside Me there is no Saviour!”
I greet you, my dear brothers and sisters, thanking Allah for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, this great master teacher that I have been blessed to be taught by. Today, we want to know him better, and we want to know Al Mahdi, his Teacher, better.
Keys for enduring trials
Sometimes in a basketball season, you have to have someone do an extraordinary thing to seal the knowledge that he or she is “the best.” You can’t claim to be the best until you have shown your prowess and defeated all the rest.
God allowed Pharaoh to become great: He allowed Pharaoh to be looked upon by the people as a god beside God; so, He had to show on His coming that He, in fact, was God. He was so much of a God that He took one of the slaves and made him a god over Pharaoh, to declare to the world that the one that He made a god over Pharaoh was one of millions that He would bring back to where they originally were.
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I have been among you a long time … and the scripture says you would treat me “like a lovely song”—like it was with David. The scripture teaches that he had “a lovely-sounding voice, and he played well on an instrument.” But the people: Even though they loved to hear him, they hardly ever did what he taught them; but after he was gone from among them, they really recognized that a prophet of God was among them.
Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, lived for 62 1/2 years. Do you know that I have been preaching this word in America for all the years of The Prophet’s life? Sometimes people, when they walked by Noah, they laughed at him and mocked him. I said, “Poor man! A prophet of God was building an ‘ark’ (a ship, a boat) in a desert where it doesn’t rain.” When I think on Noah, I’m so inspired, because I can imagine this poor man, with his poor little family around him, whispering: “I think daddy is … I think he’s ‘off’ a little bit. Don’t tell him I said this, but for him to be talking about a flood, water coming—and we haven’t seen water in a long, long time. …” That poor man, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, taught for 150 years. So, people want to know: “Well, why do you keep saying the same thing over and over again, Farrakhan? I heard this yesterday. I heard it the day before. I heard it 10 years ago, I’ve been listening to you. … When is the ‘new’ message coming?”
I say, “Why do you think you deserve a new message when you have never acted on the old message that you received?” When a man stays this long on a post teaching his people, either he is crazy, or, he believes so thoroughly in what he is teaching, and he knows the results of what he is teaching, that it doesn’t bother him (the insults of the people and their mockery of him), because all the prophets knew they would be the winner in the end. When they came, the prophets threatened the people. Not that they had the power to fulfill the threat, but the word of God always is accompanied from the mouth of a prophet with a threat. The people, after they heard the threat so many times, said: “Why don’t you bring on us what you threaten us with?” The prophets would say, “Wait. I, too, am waiting.”
