The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 4) — Page 269
another time are subject to decay and decadence and in due course are succeeded by another people. In fact spiritual and physical developments bear a close resemblance. Both of them have to pass through seven stages of development. Next, the Sūrah develops the theme, viz. that all things are sent down into the world according to a determined measure and each continues to exist and is afforded protection till an appointed time. When at last it has served its purpose it decays and dies. In the same way the Divine teachings, sent down before the Quran, died when they had served their intended purpose. Thus the mere fact of a teaching being Divine does not entitle it to immunity from decay. It is only the Quran which has been granted continuity of life and which will therefore provide spiritual food to all humanity for all time, because it is the last revealed Divine Law. The Surah then recounts some of the favours which God has bestowed upon man and which are necessary for his physical sustenance, and draws the moral lesson that when God has taken so much care to provide for man's physical needs, He must have taken equal, even greater, care to provide for his spiritual requirements. Next, we are told that the most essential prerequisite to ensure spiritual progress is belief in the Unity of God which since the inception of the world the Prophets of God have taught and preached. But the enemies of truth have always protested that some superhuman being should have been sent by God for their guidance, but in spite of this persistent protest of disbelievers God has always commissioned only men to guide men, who in the face of determined and organized opposition and persecution succeeded in their mission. (It is a strange irony that before the advent of Jesus the disbelievers always demanded that a superhuman being, preferably an angel, should have been sent as a messenger of God to guide them. How a mere mortal like them, they said, could arrogate to himself the position of being a Divine Messenger. In the time of Jesus, when he metaphorically said that he was a Son of God, they said that it was highly preposterous and blasphemous for a mere human being to claim to be a Son of God, and in the time of the Holy Prophet disbelievers said that a Prophet could not come from outside the House of Israel. In fact man in his perversity and waywardness always has found some foolish excuse to reject God's message). The Surah then deals at length with the subject of Divine Unity and says that Noah preached and propagated the Oneness of God. After Noah came a galaxy of Prophets. All of them taught that God was One and those Divine teachers who came after them also emphasized and stressed it. The devotees of darkness, however, always opposed and persecuted the Prophets. The result of the struggle between truth and falsehood invariably was that the believers were successful and those who disbelieved and rejected the Divine 2183