Numerous verses in the Qur’an mention about “meeting God” (liqā Allāh) but we know that God does not exist in time and that the absolute is not a temporal reality. Therefore, meeting the divine cannot occur in time either. A crucial point to always remind ourselves is that as long as we are bound by the shackles of time, we cannot have a proper understanding of God and the hereafter. The experience and realization of timelessness is a necessary condition to decoding the profundity of religious teachings.
The verses mentioning “meeting God’ obviously refer to the event of Resurrection where this meeting would take place. Meeting God actually means encountering God and those who deny such an encountering are the ones who do not expect to ‘return’ to God. God says:
Indeed those who do not expect to encounter Us and who are pleased with the life of this world and satisfied with it, and those who are oblivious of Our signs. (10:7)
These disbelievers deny the Day of Recompense and, by extension, they deny their moral accountability and the notion of divine recompense as a whole and, therefore, the divine promise of reward and threat of punishment, and divine commands and prohibitions. The logical effect of this is to invalidate revelation, prophethood, and the idea of divine religion that flows from these. God also says:
O human being! You are laboring toward your Lord laboriously, and you will encounter Him (84:6).
In this world, we are travelers on the path of meeting the divine where we are constantly laboring hard toward that meeting, but the meeting is not realized until we actually encounter Him [in the hereafter].
There are many other verses in the Qur’an in this regard, saying that the Almighty God is the end, goal, final destination and returning point of all beings. In short, encountering God means returning to Him and eventually achieving the decisive knowledge about the signs of our Lord.
References: al-Mizan volumes 16 & 19
