Quran — Page 163

Yet if the people of those communities had but attained to faith and been conscious of Us, We would indeed have opened up for them blessings out of heaven and earth: but they gave the lie to the truth - and so We took them to task through what they [themselves] had been doing.

Can, then, the people of any community ever feel secure that Our punishment will not come upon them by night, while they are asleep?

Why, can the people of any community ever feel secure that Our punishment will not come upon them in broad daylight, while they are engaged in (worldly] play?

Can they, then, ever feel secure from God's deep devising? But none feels secure from God's deep devising save people who are [already] lost.

Has it, then, not become obvious unto those who have inherited the earth in the wake of former generations that, if We so willed, We could smite them [too] by means of their sins, sealing their hearts so that they cannot hear [the truth]?

Unto those [earlier] communities - some of whose stories We [now] relate unto thee -there had indeed come apostles of their own with all evidence of the truth; but they would not believe in anything to which they had once given the lie: thus it is that God seals the hearts of those who deny the truth;

and in most of them We found no [inner] bond with anything that is right -and most of them We found to be iniquitous indeed.

AND AFTER those [early people] We sent Moses with Our messages unto Pharaoh and his great ones, and they wilfully rejected them: and behold what happened in the end to those spreaders of corruption!

And Moses said: "O Pharaoh! Verily, I am an apostle from the Sustainer of all the worlds,