The Reality of Khilafah — Page 163
An Announcement for Public Awareness 163 wrong by the words of Jesus, and that we do not find any instance whereby physical descent has ever taken place at any time in the past; it can then be concluded that the descent of Jesus refers to a spiritual descent. If it had been the practice of God to cause people to physically return to the world, why would He put the Jews in such a quandary that to this day they believe that the true Messiah will only come after Elijah has descended from heaven? When God had clearly promised that Prophet Elijah would return to the world and that the Messiah would come after him, He should have fulfilled this promise in its literal sense by causing Elijah to come down physically from the sky so that the Jews—who, along with their jurists and scholars and narrators, had incorporated the physical descent of Elijah into their core beliefs—would have seen the literal fulfilment of this prophecy and have been in no doubt about the prophethood of the Messiah. Instead, they were placed in such a dilemma that while their scriptures told them in clear and unequivocal terms that Elijah would come back into the world and that the Messiah who appeared after him would be the true Messiah, this prophecy was not fulfilled according to their expectations and they were faced with great difficulties when the Messiah did appear. Ultimately, the prophecy was interpreted in such a far-fetched manner that the Jews had no choice but to declare Jesus to be false and an impostor who, for his own vested interests, had interpreted a clear prophecy of physical descent to mean spiritual descent. For this reason, millions of people became Hell-bound as infidels and apostates. O Muslims, study this episode carefully because you have become one with the Jews in your beliefs. Know, that it is the nature of a believer to learn from the mistakes of others.