The Twenty-Eighth Flash

THE NINETEENTH SUBTLETY

Question:

How can it be just for someone to remain in Hell for all eternity on account of unbelief that lasted only a short time?

Answer:

According to a calculation based on a year of 365 days, the law of justice requires that a murder committed in a single minute be punished by imprisonment for seven million eight hundred and eighty-four thousand minutes.

Since, however, a single minute of unbelief is equivalent to a thousand murders, someone who spends twenty years of his life in unbelief and dies in that state deserves, according to the law of justice, a prison sentence of fifty-seven trillion, two hundred and one billion, two hundred million years, even by human standards of justice.

Thus, it becomes clear how the expression

فِيهَآ اَبَدًاTherein forever.

accords with Divine justice.

The mystery underlying the relationship between these two seemingly vastly different numbers is as follows:

Both murder and unbelief are forms of destruction and aggression, and their consequences therefore extend beyond those who commit them.

A murder committed in a single minute deprives the victim, according to the ordinary course of events, of at least fifteen years of life. The murderer, as it were, takes the victim’s place by serving a term of imprisonment.

But a single minute of unbelief entails denying a thousand and one Divine Names, belittling their manifestations, violating the rights of the whole of creation, denying its perfections, and rejecting the countless proofs and testimonies of Divine Unity.

Thus, it casts the unbeliever into the asfal as-sāfilīnThe lowest and most degraded state. for more than a thousand years and confines him within

خَالِدِينَAbiding forever

—abiding therein forever.