Isaiah 46:5 · World English Bible
Isaiah 46:5 Meaning To Whom Will You Compare Me
To whom will you compare me, and consider my equal, and compare me, as if we were the same?
What does Isaiah 46:5 mean?
Tanzīh: Keeping God clear of every likeness Al-Ghazali uses this word for the refusal to measure God by anything else. The mind works by comparison, so it grabs the biggest thing it knows and quietly puts that in God's place.
From the Sufism reading below.
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The same verse, read by one tradition.
Sufism
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Tanzīh: Keeping God clear of every likeness Al-Ghazali uses this word for the refusal to measure God by anything else. The mind works by comparison, so it grabs the biggest thing it knows and quietly puts that in God's place. Letting the comparison go feels like losing your grip, until a person sees they were only ever holding their own picture.
Whatever comes to your mind, God is other than that: images stop short The tradition repeats this line from the early Egyptian teacher Dhu'l-Nun. Anyone trying to think about God ends up with something: a light, a vastness, a father, a force. Each of those came out of your own memories, so the mind never gets past what it has already seen.
Shirk: Setting something else beside God as an equal Islam's word for that swap covers more than carved statues. A person can hand the weight of a whole life to a job, a bank balance, or a name they built. Nothing that size holds up a life, and the strain shows sooner or later.
Tashbīh: Speaking of God in familiar terms Ibn Arabi held this alongside the refusal of likeness and said neither works alone. Someone who strips away every human word is left with a blank they cannot love or speak to. Someone who keeps only those words has shrunk God to their own size, so both stay in play and each keeps the other honest.
Ḥayra: Bewilderment Ibn Arabi counted this among the highest states a person can reach. When every comparison has been refused, the mind runs out of moves and goes quiet. The blank that follows is the same quiet as standing at the edge of the ocean and giving up on measuring it.
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Live Isaiah 46:5 today
- When your mental picture of God shows up today, a light, a vastness, a stern face, a warm one, let it go gently rather than defending it. It came out of your own memories.
- Let one person today be bigger than the file you keep on them. Ask something you do not already know the answer to, and let their answer surprise you.
- When you hit the part you cannot understand, let the not understanding sit quietly instead of counting as failure. Running out of moves is not the same as being lost.
What picture have I been holding so tightly that I mistook it for the real thing?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 1
The Tao you can put into words is not the Tao. The moment you have a tidy account of it, you are holding your account, not the thing.
Hinduism · Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
The old teachers answered every description with not this, not this. Each image is set aside, not because it is worthless, but because it stops short.
Buddhism · Zen
The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, and a painted cake feeds nobody. Teachers kept knocking the picture out of students' hands so they would look up.
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