Allah, the Exalted, affirms the reason for wudu in the Qur’an, He says: “O you who believe! When you intend to offer As-Salat (the prayer), wash your faces and your hands (forearms) up to the elbows, wipe (by passing wet hands over) your heads, and (wash) your feet up to the ankles. If you are in a state of Janaba (i.e., after a sexual discharge), purify yourselves (bathe your whole body). But if you are ill or on a journey, or any of you comes from responding to the call of nature, or you have been in contact with women (i.e., sexual intercourse) and you find no water, then perform Tayammum with clean earth and rub therewith your faces and hands. Allah does not want to place you in difficulty, but He wants to purify you, and to complete His Favour to you that you may be thankful.” (5:6) Another translation has “God does not want to impose any hardship on you, but wants to make you pure, and to bestow upon you the full measure of His blessings.”
We can’t receive his complete favour, light and baraka until our body is purified and the effects of sin impeding it are washed away spiritually (at the quantum level). He (swt) then connected this act to our ability to be thankful, which means having the ability to appreciate Him, and that is the foundation of sincerity, and of being Sidiq (truthful), the two matters most at the heart of reaching Ihsan (Human Perfection).
Perceiving Allah’s worth is achieved by perceiving the meaning and worth of things He created this is the essence of finding happiness in life because the best kind of happiness is the one accompanied by knowledge and understanding of what we are happy with, and connecting our heart to Him gives meaning to our good acts making them easier to perform, we can’t have the ability to be thankful and happy until we perform wudu regularly.
We can say wudu is the key to Jannah (heaven) and everything in the unseen world because it allows man to receiving the full measure of Allah’s spiritual favor and blessing (braka) upon us.
When Iblis (satan) took an oath in front of Allah to misguide man “
His manner of attacking us is to stop all the means by which we will understand the reasons why we should be thankful to Allah.
“Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him) explains that when Iblees (satan) said he will come to you from your front (Qur’an 7:17) this means Iblees will cause you to doubt the hereafter (the most direct path to doubting Allah). When Iblees comes to you from the back, he will cause you to have hope in the dunya (worldly life).
[All our aims and intentions revolve around this life, so he will cause man to solely focus on it. Dunya comes from the word adnaa which has two meanings: something close and also something debased and low (a reference to the lowest state of matter). Iblees is coming to people to make them doubt in the hereafter and also to give them hope in this life, this is the effect of materialism, his goal is to make people absolute materialists because when that is our nature we are incapable of anything else until we remove our self from it.]“Ibn Abbas (r.a) continued that the attack from the right is to cause people to have doubt in regards to their religion, to make problems in the religion, and to give you a hard time and cause you to question the religion. The way to cure doubts is to ask someone who knows”, “So ask the people of knowledge, if you do not know.“(16:43) (educate yourself).
The Prophet Muhammad (saws) said: “Acquire knowledge: it enables its possessor to distinguish right from wrong, it lights the way to heaven; it is our friend in the desert, our society in solitude, our companion when friendless – it guides us to happiness; it sustains us in misery; it is an ornament among friends and an armor against enemies.” The prophet (saws) also said “seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave”, and an hours study of nature is better than a years adoration”; “to listen to the words of the learned and to install unto others the lessons of science is better than religious exercises”; Allah mentions in the Qur’an “Thy lord is the most Generous who taught man by the Pen”. (96:4-5)
The last thing that Ibn Abbas (ra) mentioned is the attack from the left which is falling into sins. All of this becomes more significant to us when we have a goal and aim to achieve and then search for ways to achieve it, because it all starts with the self and what is in our heart.