(4) The Jinns
The other half of the guilty creatures, those who leaned closer to Satan’s point of view and exhibited the biggest egos, became classified as jinns. It was God’s plan to assign one jinn to every human being from birth to death. The jinn companion represents Satan and constantly promotes his point of view (50:23, 27). Both the jinns and the humans are given a precious chance in this world to re-educate themselves, denounce their egoism, and redeem themselves by submitting to God’s absolute authority. Whenever a human being is born, a jinn is born and is assigned to the new human. We learn from the Quran that the jinns are Satan’s descendants (7:27, 18:50). When a jinn being is born and assigned to a human being, the jinn remains a constant companion of the human until the human dies. The jinn is then freed, and lives on for a few centuries. Both humans and jinns are required to worship God alone (51:56).
God Does Not Want Robots
The dispute in the Heavenly Community as stated in 38:69 and described above proves that God’s creatures possess the freedom of choice; they have minds of their own. The rebellion of a minuscule minority among God’s creatures has served to emphasize the wonderful fact that God’s creatures serve Him because they appreciate His infinite magnificence. Without the rebellion, we would have never known that freedom is God’s gift to His creatures.
Most Gracious, Most Merciful
Even in our worldly dimension, any enterprise expects its employees to be loyal and devoted to the welfare of the enterprise. If an employee is not totally dedicated to the enterprise, or is shown to have divided loyalties, he is immediately dismissed. Since the humans and the jinns sided with Satan, then turned down God’s offer to reconsider their rebellious acts, the angels expected Satan and his allies to be banished from God’s kingdom (2:30). It was immense mercy from God that He granted us this additional chance to denounce our crime and redeem ourselves.
To carry out this extremely merciful plan of redemption, God “created death” (67:1-2). The divine plan called for bringing the rebels into another existence, where they have no recollection of the heavenly feud. Under the circumstances of this life, the humans and the jinns receive both God’s messages and Satan’s messages, then freely choose either side. Based on their freewill decision, they are either redeemed to God’s kingdom, or become permanently exiled with Satan.
Satan’s Temporary Dominion
To emphasize the utter insignificance of Satan’s projected dominion, God created a billion galaxies, a billion trillion stars, within a vast universe that spans billions of light years. If we travel towards the sun (93,000,000 miles) at the speed of light, we will reach it in eight minutes. If we keep going, we will reach the border of our Milky Way Galaxy after 50-70,000 years at the speed of light. To reach the nearest galaxy, it will take us 2,000,000 years at the speed of light, and there are at least 2,000,000,000 galaxies in “our universe.” With the most powerful telescopes, the earth is utterly invisible from the edge of our own galaxy, let alone from the edge of our universe. As if our universe were not vast enough, God created six more, even larger universes surrounding our universe (2:29, 67:3).
