Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director
Summary:
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains how higher-dimensional creatures can appear in different shapes in our world, and why God let Satan appear as a snake: like a snakebite, sin harms us later, Satan sees us while we cannot see him, he sheds his skin with new names, and he lacks guidance.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, Satan appears to Adam and Eve in the form of a snake, talks to them, convinces them to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree, and causes them to be evicted from Paradise. Obviously, we know that Satan and snakes are two different creatures. However, the creatures of the higher dimensions, like angels, jinns and Satan, if God allowed them to enter our three-dimensional world, which He doesn’t in our time, but did in a few instances in the past, could enter our world in different shapes. For example, the angels appeared to Abraham in the shape of human beings, Satan appeared to Adam and Eve in the shape of a snake, and the jinns appeared to Solomon in other shapes.
How could this be? Well, when higher-dimensional objects enter lower dimensions, they can appear in different forms, depending on the angle of entrance and which part of their body entered. For example, a cone is a three-dimensional object. If we cause the cone to enter a lower-dimensional world, let’s say a two-dimensional world, then depending on the angle at which it enters, it can appear in that world as a circle, an ellipse, a triangle, a hyperbola or a parabola. In a two-dimensional world, these are five different shapes, but in the higher, three-dimensional world, they are simply cross-sections of only one shape, which is the cone.
In the same way, because the higher-dimensional creatures, like angels, jinns and Satan, live in as many as 10 dimensions, the number of ways in which their up-to-10D shape can appear in a 3D world increases drastically. If they have even a slightly sophisticated shape in a 10D world, they can appear in thousands or millions of different, precise, sophisticated shapes, depending on the angle at which they are allowed to enter this world. This means that God could have allowed Satan to appear and speak to Adam and Eve in the form of a lion, a crocodile, a wolf, a spider, or any other animal form, so that Adam and Eve could interact with it before they got deceived.
But why did Satan appear to them in exactly the form of a snake? Is it because snakes kill people? Well, lions also kill people; crocodiles, wolves and bears also kill people, and in so many ways they are more dangerous than the snake if you encounter them. But still, God allowed Satan to appear to Adam and Eve at an angle shaped like a snake. So why exactly a snake? It’s because God wanted to teach us something from this. The snake has many characteristics which teach us about who Satan is.
There are many such characteristics, but the main difference between the snake, as an animal which kills people, and the other animals which kill people, is that in the case of the snake, the action and the consequence are separated in time. If a wolf eats you, the time when it eats you and the time when it hurts you, or when you die, are the same. The same goes for the lion: when the lion suffocates its prey, it is killing it in real time. The same goes for the crocodile, and so on. But not so with the snake. The snake gives you only a small bite, and then you die hours or even days later, if left untreated.
As you can see, there is a gap in time between when the snake bites you and when you end up dying, and this teaches us a key thing about Satan. There is a time gap between when Satan touches you and when you end up being hurt by it. For example, Satan might touch you with a sin, such as theft, lying or adultery, and there is a time gap between when Satan touched you and when you get hurt by it. You get hurt by those sins hours, days, months or years later, or even towards the end of your life, and even after this life if you’re a disbeliever. So, as in the case of the snake, there’s a time gap between when Satan touches you and when you get hurt, and this time gap, this postponement of consequences, is what makes it more dangerous, and what makes it a sin.
You see, there are two types of harm: direct harm, which is simply called harm, and postponed harm, which is called sin. A direct harm, for example, is putting your hand in the fire. In this case, the action and the harm happen at the same time, which is why God did not mention touching the fire as a sin, but as a punishment. But when it comes to lying, let’s say, it is a postponed harm. The action and the harm happen at different times, which is why God revealed in the Quran that we should not do it. Given that there is a time gap between the action and the harm, we as humans would not be able to know that it is harmful if God did not tell us. This is why God tells us to avoid postponed harms, or sins, especially because those harms can be postponed beyond this life, in which case we end up in Hell.
God gave us minds to protect ourselves from harms where the action and the harm both happen at the same time, and God gave us the Quran for harms where there is a time gap between the action and the harm. So, symbolically speaking, God gave us minds for protection against wolves, but He gave us the Quran for protection against snakes. Because if people did not tell us that the snake has venom, we wouldn’t know. Men would naturally think that they could defeat it with their bare hands. The snake looks so weak on the outside. You can outrun it, squash it, and even kill it with your bare hands, but hours or days later, you are very likely dead too. So this is one feature which the snake and Satan have in common: there is a time gap between when they touch you and when you get harmed.
The second aspect which the snake and Satan have in common is that the snake can see us at night, while we cannot see it. Snakes have an additional sense, a sixth sense: they can sense infrared light, which enables them to see our warm bodies during the night. But a snake would not be able to see a dead body at night, because it is cold. So snakes can sense living bodies but not dead bodies, just as Satan can touch living bodies in this world but has no power over dead bodies, or over the believers who have left their bodies and gone to the next world. In this world, the Quran, in verse 7:27, tells us that Satan can see us while we do not see him.
Another aspect which the snake and Satan have in common is that the snake sheds its skin about 17 times during its lifetime. In other words, Satan tries the same old tricks, but under a new skin. For example, those who used to be called fools are now called atheists; Satan rebranded them to make the idea more enticing. Those who used to be called pagans are now called Christians. Those who used to be called the people of the scripture are now called Quranists, or Protestants, depending on which scripture you’re talking about. Those who used to be called the Children of Israel are now called submitters. Those who used to be called the opposition to God’s system are now called Jews. The word “Jew” in Arabic means opponent, or someone who turned back from faith, and the word “Israel,” among other things, in Hebrew means one who fights against God. So Satan simply changed the skin, but his ways and essence, which is rebellion against God, remain the same.
Another reason why God allowed Satan to speak to Adam and Eve in the shape of a snake is that snakes move with their heads kept low to the ground. This makes them shortsighted. A small stone, some grass, or any small bump in the ground is enough to block their field of view, which makes it impossible for them to make good long-term plans. Basically, they do not have enough guidance to find their way towards a goal. They only get places through trial and error. This feature of the snake is mentioned in the Quran. The Quran, in verse 67:22, says, “Is one who walks with his face on the ground better guided,” which is the snake, “or one who walks straight on the right path?” That is the human, who can stand up straight on two feet, look far ahead, and choose ahead of time where he wants to go. So there is guidance in being able to stand up straight.