An interesting question is: how does divine judgement actually occur on the Day of Judgement? For a long time, I thought the answer was that a person needed to believe in Baha’u’llah. But now I have revised that to a person needs to sincerely love Baha’u’llah. It doesn’t matter what ideas you hold in your head, because those are fleeting. We change our ideas on a daily basis as our understanding develops. And in any case, we should be detached from our ideas. Furthermore, my experience is that a person who believes in Baha’u’llah can nevertheless be arrogant and conceited.
What is everlasting is whether our heart is true. This concept is captured in the first Arabic hidden word, which makes it clear that eternal life is linked to the state of our heart: “O child of spirit, according to the first word, reign over a heart that is true, warm and bright so that you might reign over an ancient kingdom that does not have a beginning or an end and does not go away.”
In a delightful work called Tablet to Husayn, Baha’u’llah uses the metaphor of a cosmic magnet to capture this idea. He says that, in this Day, the Word of God is like a magnet that is situated between heaven and earth, and it attracts to itself the one whose heart is a pure essence. He says that the judgment of rejection is passed on the one whose heart does not ascend from the earth. In other words, that person’s heart is attached to the world or to the self, and therefore not occupied with the love of Baha’u’llah. Such a person might talk about Baha’u’llah all day, but never get that what really matters is having a heart filled with the light of the All-merciful. Even the most insignificant and humble person on the planet, who harbours a sincere spark of love for Baha’u’llah will be drawn up to him.
“This is the day in which the Word of God is suspended between earth and heaven, drawing to itself, even as a magnet, the very essences of the hearts of all creation, while the judgment passed on the peoples of bygone ages—the pronouncement of rejection—is passed by God on whatsoever ascendeth not from the denizens of this earthly realm. I swear by the sun of divine knowledge that if an atom’s worth of essence, nay smaller, were to be hidden in the heart of a mountain, the magnetic power of that Word would assuredly attract that essence and extract it from that mountain.”
Baha’u’llah, Tablet to Husayn, trans Adib Masumian