I never said that it is impossible for God to communicate with the Messengers, but it is impossible for God to communicate with ordinary people and the reason is because ordinary people only have a human nature, they do not have a spiritual nature. Messengers of God are a different order of creation than ordinary men because they have a
twofold nature that ordinary humans do not possess. That is why it is possible for them to understand communication from God through the Holy Spirit. No ordinary human could ever understand communication from God if God communicated to them directly, and that is 'one reason' God never communicates to ordinary people, only to His Messengers.
“Unto this subtle, this mysterious and ethereal Being He hath assigned a twofold nature; the physical, pertaining to the world of matter, and the spiritual, which is born of the substance of God Himself. He hath, moreover, conferred upon Him a double station. The first station, which is related to His innermost reality, representeth Him as One Whose voice is the voice of God Himself. To this testifieth the tradition: “Manifold and mysterious is My relationship with God. I am He, Himself, and He is I, Myself, except that I am that I am, and He is that He is.” …. The second station is the human station, exemplified by the following verses: “I am but a man like you.” “Say, praise be to my Lord! Am I more than a man, an apostle?” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 66-67
You said: "If God cannot manifest physically he cannot communicate."
You hit the nail right on the head! That is very good logical reasoning and you are the first atheist who ever figured that out so you get the door prize!
That is
exactly what God does. God manifests physically so He can communicate to humans. Messengers of God are also Manifestations of God, as both descriptors refer to the same entity.
Jesus was God who was
manifested in the flesh and communicated to humans but God did not become flesh, as Christians believe.
1 Timothy 3:16 And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.
All the Messengers of God were God who
manifested in the flesh and that is why they are also referred to as Manifestations of God.
However, being
manifested in the flesh is
not the same as being
incarnated in the flesh. The excerpt below from a longer article explains the
difference between a Manifestation of God and an incarnation of God (
bold emphasis mine).
“The Christian equivalent to the Bahá'í concept of Manifestation is the concept of
incarnation. The word to incarnate means 'to embody in flesh or 'to assume, or exist in, a bodily (esp. a human) form (
Oxford English Dictionary). From a Bahá'í point of view, the important question regarding the subject of incarnation is, what does Jesus incarnate? Bahá'ís can certainly say that Jesus incarnated Gods attributes, in the sense that in Jesus, Gods attributes were perfectly reflected and expressed.
[4] The Bahá'í scriptures, however, reject the belief that the ineffable essence of the Divinity was ever perfectly and completely contained in a single human body, because the Bahá'í scriptures emphasize the omnipresence and transcendence of the essence of God…..
One can argue that Bahá'u'lláh is asserting that
epistemologically the Manifestations are God, for they are the perfect embodiment of all we can know about God; but
ontologically they are not God, for they are not identical with God's essence. Perhaps this is the meaning of the words attributed to Jesus in the gospel of John: 'If you had known me, you would have known my Father also' (
John 14:7) and 'he who has seen me has seen the Father (
John 14:9)…..
The New Testament, similarly, contains statements where Jesus describes Himself as God, and others where He makes a distinction between Himself and God. For example, 'I and the Father are One (
John 10:30); and 'the Father is in me, and I am in the Father (John 1038); but on the other hand, 'the Father is greater than I (
John 14:28); and 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone (
Mark 10:18;
Luke 18:19). These statements do not contradict, but are complementary if one assumes they assert an epistemological oneness with God, but an ontological separateness from the Unknowable Essence.”
Jesus Christ in the Bahá'í Writings
