How We Ruin Our Good Deeds - 30 Verses For 30 Days 3/30
Salamun alaykum, dear brothers and sisters, and welcome to the third Tafsir Clip of the month of Ramadan. Today Insha Allah, we will delve into a verse of the Qur'an that is situated in the third Juz of the Qur'an and that is verse 264 and 265 from Surat ul-Baqara. The verse starts out like this: "ya ayyuha alladeena amanu, la tubtilu sadaqatikum bi 'l-manni wa al-adha"(2:264). O you who believe do not take the Sadaqat that you give, the charity that you give or the good deeds that you do. Do not take them and ruin them, "bi 'l-manni wa al-adha", don't ruin them by constantly reminding the person that you did this good to going back to them and reminding them and telling them, hey, you remember I did this for you; "wa al-Adha" and bothering that individual after you have done good for them.
And then the verse continues: "kalladi yunfiku malahu ri'ya'a an-nas" (2:264), because the person who does this, he does a good deed and then he comes back and he ruins it, is like the person who does ri'ya. The person who does ri'ya, he thinks there is a good deed waiting for him on the Day of Judgment, but then when he shows up on the Day of Judgment, he finds that his good deed is nowhere to be found.
Now, this is a concept and an idea that can be implemented in so many different areas of our life. There are so many different situations where we might do something good and we put in time into it and we put effort into it. But after we are done with it, then the person who benefited from the good that we did, we start creating problems for them. Either, for example, we go back to them and we put them down, and we humiliate them, because of the help that they needed in a particular situation. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes al-adha happens you're nice to somebody, but then in other situations to the same person, you bother the person, or you annoy the person, or you have bad Akhlaq towards that same person.
Sometimes this happens, for example, a mother and a child or a father and their child. And this works both ways. Maybe I do something for my mother or father, but then two days later I lose my temper with them. What I am doing here is I am taking that good deed that I had worked so hard for and I am ruining it. And I assume that that good deed is going to be waiting for me on the Day of Judgment, but because I ruined it with this other sin, for example, of yelling, shouting, bad Akhlaq lock, for example, then I've already ruined it and it doesn't show up for me on that day.
The analogy that the Qur'an gives is like a person who wants to take a seed and plant the seed. And when he wants to plant the seed, he thinks he put it in the ground and therefore it is going to be planted and it's going to remain for him, it is going to grow for him, it's going to show up for him on the Day of Judgment. But the Qur'an says this person because he did it with the wrong intention, in the case of ri'ya or he ruins it afterwards "bi 'l-manni wa al-adha", this it's like placing the seed on a rock and then a storm comes and before this seed can even be planted within the ground, it is swooped up in the air and it is gone. And when this person shows up on the Day of Judgment looking for his seed, aka his good deed, it is nowhere to be found.
But now verse 265 says if you do things with the right intention, then Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala will take that deed of yours and it is as if He has planted it in a place where it gets a lot of rain. So instead of it giving one reward for you, He doubles the rewards for you. Yes. It says it is like taking that seed and planting it in an area where it gets extra rain. It gets extra water.
Why? Because he did it with the right intention. So if we do things with the right intention, inshaAllah, they will show up for for us in the Day of Judgment. God forbid if we don't, it might look like we planted a seed, but in reality we never planted any seed.
