Misuse and Proper Use of Freedom

God is the eternal source of every sort of beauty and goodness. God created human beings. Man is a complete being by himself. Man contains within himself every sort of ability, of perfect standards. Man’s brain contains some 100 million billion particles. These phenomena indicate that the Creator has blessed man with unlimited potentials.

Along with this, man has been given a unique sense of pleasure. Man has an unlimited capacity for enjoyment. For man, everything is potentially a means for enjoyment. God has created man with these unique abilities.

God has also made a beautiful world, Paradise. It is a perfect world, in which every sort of pleasure is present in its perfect form. Man and Paradise are, as it were, counterparts of each other. Man is for Paradise, and Paradise is for man. Paradise is that place where man can obtain complete fulfilment. Paradise is, as it were, the completion of man. Without Paradise, man is meaningless, and without man, Paradise is incomplete.

Man is a potential inhabitant of this Paradise. But Paradise is not obtained by anyone on the basis of birth or ethnicity. The condition for entrance into Paradise is that a person should prove that he is worthy of it in terms of his character.

God made the present world as a selection-ground for this very purpose. Conditions in this world have been arranged in such a way that everything here is a test-paper for us. Here, at every moment we are on trial. God is preparing a record of every person’s words and deeds here. On the basis of this record it will be decided which of us will be qualified to be settled in Paradise.

A human being has been given full freedom in this world. This freedom is not as a reward, but, rather, for the purpose of our being tested. God is noting how we use this freedom. Do we use it responsibly, to do good? Or, do we misuse it, to do evil? The person who uses this freedom in accordance with God’s creation plan, in the right way, will be chosen for being settled in Paradise. On the other hand, those who misuse this freedom will, on the Day of Judgment, find themselves to be a rejected lot.

Human life is divided into two phases: the pre-death period, and the post-death period. The former period is a trial period, while the latter period is the reward period. It is this that is the biggest reality. And in knowing this lies hidden a person’s success or failure.