[2:28] How do you disbelieve in God, when you were dead, and He gave you life; then He shall make you dead, then He shall give you life, then to Him you shall be returned!
These are words to provoke astonishment and gravity in the servant. With the appearance of the signs, his heart should not incline to disbelief.
It is said He makes Himself known to creation by the glimmers of His proofs and the flashes of His signs. He said, 'When you were dead', meaning a drop of sperm, its parts all the same, 'and He gave you life' as a human being with some of the parts of the sperm designated to be bone, some parts flesh, some parts hair, and some parts skin, etc.
Then He shall make you dead in making you bones and fragments, then He shall give you life in raising you up after you were dead, then to Him you shall be returned, meaning to whatever He previously determined [for you] in happiness or misery.
You were dead through your ignorance of Us, and He gave you life in your knowledge of Us, then He shall make you dead to your witnesses, then He shall give you life through Him in taking you from yourselves, then to Him you shall be returned, meaning to preserving the precepts of the law in carrying out what is due.
It is said, you were dead because your lower selves remained and He gave you life through the annihilation of your lower selves, then He shall make you dead from yourselves from witnessing, so that you will not pay heed to [the annihilation] and corrupt yourselves. Then He shall give you life in taking you from yourselves, then to Him you shall be returned by your being turned about in His grasp (swt).
It is said He holds their states in check so that there is no perpetual life and no complete annihilation. The more they say, 'this is life' - while they are thus - the more He turns them and annihilates them. Whenever they become annihilated, He affirms them and gives them subsistence, so they are forever between negation and affirmation, between subsistence and annihilation, and between wakefulness and erasure. His way is like this with them.