"THIS MOST GREAT ORDER"
It should be noted, in this connection, that in the third Vahíd of this Book [the Bayán] there occurs a passage which, alike in its explicit reference to the name of the Promised One, and in its anticipation of the Order which, in a later age, was to be identified with His Revelation, deserves to rank as one of the most significant statements recorded in any of the Báb’s writings, "Well is it with him," is His prophetic announcement, "who fixeth his gaze upon the Order of Bahá’u’lláh and rendereth thanks unto his Lord. For He will assuredly be made manifest. God hath indeed irrevocably ordained it in the Bayán." It is with that self-same Order that the Founder of the promised Revelation, twenty years later — incorporating that same term in His Kitáb-i-Aqdas — identified the System envisaged in that Book, affirming that "this most great Order" had deranged the world’s equilibrium and revolutionized mankind’s ordered life. It is the features of that self-same Order which at a later stage in the evolution of the Faith, the Center of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant and the appointed Interpreter of His teachings, delineated through the provisions; of His Will and Testament. It is the structural basis of that self-same Order which, in the Formative Age of that same Faith, the stewards of that same Covenant, the elected representatives of the world-wide Bahá’í community, are now laboriously and unitedly establishing. It is the superstructure of that self-same Order, attaining its full stature through the emergence of the Baha’i World Commonwealth — the Kingdom of God on earth — which the Golden Age of that same Dispensation must, in the fullness of time, ultimately witness.
Shoghi Effendi
GOD PASSES BY (pp.25-26)
How can any faithful Baháí after reading the above words of Shoghi Effendi and gaining thereby an understanding of the momentous significance of the "most great Order," prophetically announced by the Báb, subsequently identified by Bahá’u’lláh with the System revealed in His Most Holy Book and then formally delineated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His divinely-conceived, sacred and immortal Will and Testament, believe that this God-given Order destined in the fullness of time to usher in the long-promised Kingdom of God on earth as it is in Heaven in this, the Day of God, was brought to an untimely end, a mere thirty-six years after its inception while still in its embryonic form upon the passing of Shoghi Effendi? Or how can any true believer suffer under the illusion that this divinely-conceived "most great Order" can ever be supplanted by a man-made administrative organization that is without the Guardian as the "Center of the Cause,"a so-called Universal House of Justice minus the living Guardian presiding as its "sacred head"and without the institution of the Hands which has been ignominiously erected outside the provisions of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's Will and Testament by those who, in their lack of faith in the indestructible Covenant of Bahá'u'lláh, and fidelity to its divinely-conceived "Child," have repudiated this sacred, immortal and immutable Testament – extolled by Shoghi Effendi as "this Divine Masterpiece which the hand of the Master-builder of the world has designed for the unification of the world-wide Faith of Bahá'u'lláh"and as the "Charter of the New World Order"– by declaring the Guardianship of the Cause of God dead?
