The Nursery of the Hereafter
The first thing that a person in this world should discover is the creation plan of the One who created human beings and the universe. From a study of the Quran it is clear that God first made a vast and perfect world—the world of Paradise. Then, He made humans and settled them there. God bestowed humans with complete freedom of choice. It was desirable for people to freely acknowledge their Creator and, through this free choice, lead a self-disciplined life. But people did not pass this test. They misused their freedom.
At first, human beings had been settled in Paradise on a general basis. But when they failed to live up to the established standard, God decided that the decision of Paradise was to be made on a selective basis—that is, only those people would be settled in Paradise who fully lived up to the desired standard of self-discipline. For this purpose, God made a temporary world, a world in addition to eternal Paradise.
This temporary world is Planet Earth. The Earth is, as it were, a temporary nursery to feed the garden of Paradise. On this planet, people are being ‘cultivated’, like saplings in a plant nursery. Here, people are given the opportunity to live amidst different conditions. Throughout this period, they are under the supervision of recording angels. These angels are continuously watching how people behave in different situations and what sort of personality they are developing. Then, if someone proves, through his character and his thoughts, words and deeds that he is in sync with the standards of Paradise, he will be taken out of the temporary nursery of the world and planted in the eternal garden of Paradise so that he can flourish in the atmosphere there forever and continue on a never-ending journey of progress. Death for him is the day when this transplantation will happen.
In the Quran (51:49), a principle of creation is described as follows: “We created pairs of all things so that you might reflect.” Nature’s system is such that here everything has been created in the form of pairs. In the same way, the present world has also been created as a pair. Planet Earth is one member of a pair. The other member of this pair is the world of the Hereafter, where Paradise is located. Paradise is the complementary part of the present world. Without Paradise, the present world is incomprehensible, but with it, it becomes fully comprehensible.
