INTRODUCTION 

 

Bismillāhir Rahmānir Rahīm, As-salāmu ʿAlaykum wa rahmatullāhi wa barakātuh. Peace be upon you brothers and sisters. 

 

Welcome back to the Muslim Converts Channel! 

 

Sometimes you have your really critical questions about God and religion such as the following ones: “how do we know that God exists?” or “why does God allow evil?”  

 

There are other questions that people wonder about that can be just as important as these ones. 

 

A common question we want to tackle here is the following. Why did God create us in the first place?  

 

Related to this question is the following: what’s the point of God creating humanity if so many people are bad? 

 

In this lesson, we will attempt to answer these questions. 

 

BODY OF TEXT 

 

I created the jinn and humankind only that they might worship Me. (Chapter 51, verse 56 of the Holy Qur’an) 

 

And We did not create the heaven and earth and that between them in play. (Chapter 21, verse 16 of the Holy Qur’an) 

 

If God is all great, what was the point of Him creating us? What need did He have in doing so? 

 

Especially with all the evil that we see in this world, the question is a baffling one. Even the angels, in some way, protested when God declared His intention to create humanity.  

 

The Qur’an says: 

 

Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: "I will create a vicegerent on earth." They said: "Wilt Thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood?- whilst we do celebrate Thy praises and glorify Thy holy (name)?" He said: "I know what ye know not." (Chapter 2, verse 30 of the Holy Qur’an) 

 

This reasoning doesn’t need much explanation, we all experience human evil, either directly or through the news. With all this bad stuff going on, why did God create humans anyways? 

 

The first way of looking at it is this way. God has lots of attributes, and some of these attributes are part of His essence. In other words, just like water is wet, God has attributes that are part and parcel of Himself. Of these attributes, we know that God is all-loving (al-wadūd) and all-merciful (al-rahmān).  

 

Since God is all loving and all merciful, He created us humans out of this love and mercy. It is out of His care and compassion that He wanted to give us life and give us the opportunity to earn eternal happiness in exchange for limited, finite acts of good and obedience to Him that He really doesn’t need. He only asks us to do them because it is for our own good! 

 

In this sense, we see the purpose of our lives. The purpose of our lives is to attain eternal happiness. But how is this done? The only way this happens is when we synchronize our hearts and souls with the essence of all of existence, the essence of all being, namely God.  

 

This act of synchronization in the Qur’an is called ibādah, or servitude to God. This isn’t just external servitude, but it is, fundamentally, an interior reality. In other words, it is our heart’s submission to God and acceptance of His light into the dark depths of our being. 

 

God doesn’t need this worship or servitude of ours. It is we who need it because it is the only way we can purify our inner selves. God is the source of all love, good, compassion, wisdom and everything in between. It is only by linking our hearts with Him that we can acquire these attributes in their fullest sense possible. 

 

So what is God doing for us? Well, He’s promised us eternal life and happiness if we accept a plan that will transform our souls and make us better people. It is a win win situation where it is not God that benefits, but it us who benefit in every sense you can think of. 

 

Now let’s turn back to the question of evil. We know that there is lots of evil in this world, but God still created us. A lot of times, it seems that there are more bad people than good. So wasn’t this all a waste anyways? What’s the point of creating us out of love if we’re just going to do evil? 

 

We can answer this in two ways. First, not everyone is evil in this world. There are also lots of good people. There are also some bad people who are really good but became bad because they were victims of their circumstances. God will judge all of us according to our circumstances so it is only He who can judge which one of us is truly good or evil. 

 

In Islam, God also sees hope in every single one of us. He sees hope that we may turn back and change, perhaps not in this world, but in the grave, the Day of Judgment or maybe even in hell. So not all is lost if we don’t make it in this world.  

 

Second, there are many humans who have fulfilled the ideal of being God’s vicegerents on earth. In other words, they are people who have purified their hearts and fulfilled what God expected of them. Why should these people be denied their existence because others would be bad? Why should evil people have a veto over the existence of Good people? 

 

Some may ask the following question: well why didn’t God just create good people only? The answer is the following: maybe the reason why these good people existed and continue to exist is because good people will descend from them, perhaps their grandchildren or their offspring many generations later will become pious servants of God? 

 

Consider, also, the following. Perhaps if evil people didn’t exist to test potentially good people, these so called good peopel wouldn’t be so good?  

 

Until Next Time, Thank you for watching. As-salāmu ʿAlaykum wa rahmatullāhi wa barakātuh