By MW Kay
A student enters an examination hall. There, for his use there is a room, tables, chairs, light and water facilities, and perhaps several other things. But the student is not the owner of any of these things. All the items that are present in the examination hall are for him objects to be used by him to facilitate his writing the examination. They are not items that are for him to own personally.
The same is true of the vast number of things that man finds himself surrounded by in this present world. The body that he takes birth with, the entire life support system that exists on Earth and beyond which he extracts many sorts of benefit from, and even those things that he appears to obtain by putting in his own efforts and hard work—all of these are actually from God and have been given to man as items that he can use for the purpose of ‘writing’ the ‘examination’ that he is undergoing while in this present world. He has the right to use these things until the moment of his death, but as soon as death arrives, this right is taken away entirely from him.
The success of the student who enters the examination hall lies in how he answers the questions that appear in the examination paper. If he answers these questions satisfactorily, he will be deemed successful. But if he does not answer them satisfactorily, he will be unsuccessful and will be declared to have failed.
Like a student sitting in an examination hall, we who are present in this world now are undergoing an examination—the examination of life. The examination that we are undergoing here is that our Creator wants to see what sort of actions we do with the items that He provides for us in the course of the short period of time that He has sent us here for. Our Creator, by giving us these items for the period we spend here on Earth and by leaving us free to use them as we wish, is examining us to see what sort of people we become in the process of availing the many gifts He has bestowed us with here.
The period before our death is the period of this examination of ours, and the period that comes after our death is the period where we get the result of this examination.