Al-Tawba (Repentance)
Chapter 9: Verse 111
 The
Supreme Transaction:
"Verily God bought from the believers their selves and their possessions
in exchange for Paradise."
People ask: “Everything will leave our hands, perish,
and be lost. Maybe there is a way to make it eternal, to preserve it.?”
While engaged in such thoughts, they suddenly hear the Quran’s heavenly
voice say: “There is a beautiful and easy way that offers five advantages
or profits.” What is this way? To sell the trust - your body, spirit,
and heart, and so on, as well as your outer and inner senses (e.g., sight,
taste, intelligence, imagination.) – to its real owner. The resulting
five profits are:
First Profit: Transient property becomes everlasting. This waning life, when given
to the Eternal and Self-Subsistent Being of Majesty and spent for His
sake, is transmuted into permanence and gives everlasting fruits.
Second Profit: The price paid is Paradise.
Third Profit: The value of each bodily limb and sense is increased a thousand fold.
For example, if you sell your eyes to its All-Seeing Maker and use it
on His behalf and within His limits, it rises to the rank of a reader
of the Great Book of the Universe, a witness of the miracles of His
creation, a blessed bee sucking on the blossoms of Mercy in the garden
of this world.
Fourth Profit: If you do not rely on the All-Powerful One of Majesty, trust in and
submit to Him with full confidence, your conscience remains troubled
by vain torment, pain and regret, all of which destroy your understanding.
Fifth Profit: Those who unveil the true nature of things and experience the truth
agree that the reward for worshipping and glorifying God performed by
your limbs, senses, and faculties will be given at the time of greatest
need, in the form of Paradise’s fruits.
If you refuse, you suffer the following five-fold loss:
First Loss: Your beloved property and off-spring, your adored self and its caprice,
your foolishly loved youth and life all are replaced by pain and sin.
Second Loss: You are punished for betraying the trust, for you wrong yourself by
using the most precious tools on the most worthless objects.
Third Loss: By debasing your precious faculties to a level much inferior to animals,
you insult and transgress God’s Wisdom.
Fourth Loss: In your helplessness and poverty, you shoulder life’s heavy burden
and continually groan under the blows of transience and separation.
Fifth Loss: You convert the Compassionate One’s fair gifts, meant to be used
for laying the foundations of everlasting life and blessedness in the
Hereafter, into ugliness.
Why do many people not want to sell? Is it so hard? By
no means! The resulting burdens are not hard. The
limits of the permissible are broad and adequate for your desire, and
so you do not need to indulge in what is forbidden. The
duties imposed by God are light and few. To be His servant and soldier
is an honour beyond description.
Source:
"Humanity,
Belief, and Islam" - Said Nursi pp. 40-48 |