Quran Garden

Session 343

Chapter 3

Verses 17

Those who are patient, truthful, genuinely devout, who give, and who pray before dawn for forgiveness.’ (Chapter 3: Verse 17)

Who are the people described in the verse? They are the believers who will be rewarded in the hereafter as discussed in verses 15 and 16 ‘with their Lord, theirs shall be Gardens underneath which rivers flow, where they shall live forever, and purified spouses and pleasure from God.’   They are the believers who supplicate, "Our Lord, indeed we have believed, so forgive us our sins and protect us from the punishment of the Fire."

Would you like to be one of them? Would you like to earn the wonderful rewards of paradise? Let’s study what they do to earn this great honor.  We start with patience. Implementing God’s teachings is not easy because obligations require hard work and determination.  Religious obligations feel difficult because they limit your freedom.  Allah created you and gave you free will.  So when it comes to actions, you can choose to do or not do.  When, for example,Allah says to you ‘pray at dawn,’ then He has limited your freedom in staying asleep.  This creates two levels of difficulty.  First, if you usually wake up late, then you must push yourself to get up and pray.  Second, you must resist the temptation of falling into sin by abandoning God’s command.  Both these matters require a great deal of patience.  

Likewise, you have to exercise patience when Allah commands you ‘not to do’ something that you desire.  For example, when it comes to the opposite sex, Allah asks you to lower your gaze.  Abstaining from sin requires a great deal of patience. 

We covered two scenarios that require patience.  The first was following God’s teachings in doing something, and the second involves following God’s teachings in not doing something.  This leaves out one possibility: events that do not fall within the scope of do and do not do, but are destined to happen to you.  You may face a situation where you have no choice, such as being involved in a car accident or falling ill.  How are you supposed to handle the ugly events of life?  A believer is patient over the pains of life because he or she has trust in the Lord.  God is your creator, and no one ruins his or her creation.  To the contrary, God takes ultimate care of us.  Sowhen He afflicts you with a sickness or an emergency, then rest assured that there is divine wisdom behind it.

Patience is the ultimate expression of believing in the wisdom of the Creator.  If a problem befalls you that is not the result of your actions, then certainly God has wisdom behind it.In such cases, you should remain patient, and this is not an easy matter.  In fact, one of the doors of heaven is reserved for those who were patient. 

To summarize, patience falls under one of three categories: patience over obedience and its hardships, patience over sins and its temptations, and patience over the fateful events of life.If you happen to know someone who showed patience in all three areas, then realize that he or she is truly devoted to God.

The second characteristic of the believers who will be handsomely rewarded by Allah is the ‘truthful.’  If you ask your friends, what does it mean to be truthful? Most would answer that being truthful is saying something that matches reality.  It is the opposite of lying.  We answer that being truthful goes a bit deeper than that.  Every time I speak, my speech passes through three different levels.  The first level is mental where, before I speak, I run the issue in my mind.  The second level is lingual which happens after my brain gives the signal to my tongue to speak.  The third level is a question whether what I say matches reality or not.  Only when there is agreement on all three levels, I am being truthful.

To better understand this concept, listen to the following verse:

When the hypocrites come to you, they say, ‘We bear witness that you are the Messenger of God.’ God knows that you truly are His Messenger and He bears witness that the hypocrites are liars (63:1)

This verse is often pointed out by the critics of the Quran.  It relates the incident of the hypocrites coming to the Prophet Muhammad to declare their faith.  God affirms that their statement is correct, yet at the same time, He calls them liars.  How could this be? The answer is found within the hypocrites’ hearts. 

Let’s measure the statement of the hypocrites against the three levels of speech.  Does the statement ‘you are the Messenger of God’ match reality? It does.  God affirmed it in the verse: ‘God knows that you truly are His Messenger.’  Did the hypocrites voluntarily say this statement to Prophet Muhammad? Yes they did.  So where is the lie? It is in the statement ‘We bear witness.‘  The hypocrites only testified with their tongues that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, while their hearts denied it.  For a person to be truthful, what he or she saysmust match what is in the heart.  Thus, although the statement ‘you are the Messenger of God’ is true, the hypocrites were liars. 

This brings us back to the verse.  Allah praised the truthful because their words and actions are not only aligned with the teachings of God, but they are also affirmations of what is in their hearts.  They believed and testified that "there is no one worthy of worship but God," then they fulfilled the obligations of faith to the best of their ability.

As for the one who says with his tongue, ‘there is none worthy of worship but Allah’ and then opposes the Lord’s teachings day in and day out, we say to him or her: you are a liar and a hypocrite.  God says:

You who believe, why do you say things and then do not do them? It is deeply abhorrent to God that you should say what you do not do. (61:2, 3)

It is interesting to learn that both the believer and the disbeliever are honest with themselves.  How, you may ask? We answer that the believer has faith in his or her heart, and then declares that faith with the tongue: “I testify that there is none worthy of worship except God, and I testify that Muhammad is His messenger.”  The belief in the heart and the words of the tongue are then reflected in everyday actions.  The disbeliever is also honest with him or herself.  He or she denies God in the heart, and then, words and actions reflect faithlessness honestly.  

Now we come to the hypocrite, whom we discussed in detail at the beginning of Chapter 2 -Surah Al Baqarah-.  A hypocrite is not truthful to the people around, not even to him or herself.  God says:

wavering all the time between this and that, belonging neither to one side nor the other. And whomever Allah leads astray, you will never find any way for him. (04:143)

The hypocrite says, "there is no god but Allah," yet this statement does not match what is in the heart.  A hypocrite acts one way in public and the opposite in private.  He or she is not sincere to himself, his Lord, or the people.

To fully appreciate the value of truthfulness in Islam, listen to what Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, taught us.  He said, “The adulterer is not a believer at the moment when he is committing adultery; the wine-drinker is not a believer at the moment when he is drinking wine,and the thief is not a believer at the moment when he is stealing.”  In other words, the moment a believer violates the requirements of his or her faith, it does not matter what he or she says, because actions speak louder than words.