Ash-Shu'ara 68: And verily, your Lord is Azeez (Exalted) and Raheem (the One Who very generously accepts repentance).

We have come to verse 68 of Surah Ash-Shu'ara. Surely your Lord, He is the absolutely prevailing one and the possessor of vast mercy. How beautifully He says it. Ve inne Rabbeke le hüve'l- azîzü'r-rahîm. Surely my Lord, that Lord of mine, ve inne Rabbeke le hüve'l-azîzü'r-rahîm. He is the absolutely prevailing one and the possessor of vast mercy. Absolutely prevailing: you know, people prevail once, prevail twice, prevail three times. When you say absolutely prevailing, does He prevail in all of them? Yes, Allah Almighty is that absolutely prevailing one. How will we prove this? Ah, the proof is very simple.

Did Allah Almighty create these worlds from nothing? Yes. If He created them from nothing, He has created no being that He cannot hold within His rule and over which He cannot enforce His rule. So what is it, in this case? All these worlds enclosed by the seven heavens and the Throne, the heaven and the earth and what is between the two, He created within His rule. He destroys them the moment He wishes. That is what absolutely prevailing means. Because He created from knowledge; if He wishes, He makes it vanish from knowledge. He has created nothing that rivals Him or that He cannot cope with. All of it, within His own rule, He destroys whenever He wishes, however He wishes.

What is this? Just as He created with His knowledge, surely we can also bring it out with an analogy. Now Allah Almighty has created 17 thousand, 18 thousand worlds. He created each of them so that He can destroy it the moment He wishes. Like what? Now let us make a robot. Let us run the robot with a remote control. It has a signal. That robot runs on that signal. Let us make a second robot. Another signal. Let us make a third robot, another signal. What? Within our rule, we run the robots with signals, we shut them off with signals. So Allah Almighty too created this universe with His knowledge, the living beings likewise within His own rule, with the signals they too emit, all programmed to our Lord; He destroys whatever He wishes whenever He wishes.

That is what absolutely prevailing is. And this is an attribute of Allah alone. It is an attribute of the Creator. Yes.

Surely your Lord, He. See how beautifully He reinforces it. He, that is, Allah, is the absolutely prevailing one and the possessor of vast mercy. Why the possessor of vast mercy? Because His creatures (?). He placed His creatures at the command of man. At the command of man. And He made man the vicegerent on earth. And He created man limited in mind. He created him deficient. And because He created him deficient, when he knows his helplessness and turns back to his Lord, when he repents, Allah Almighty grants him pardon and forgiveness. The possessor of vast mercy. In line with this verse, the Prophet says this hadith: Even if your sins reached the clouds in the sky, when you repent once with the heart within you, Allah Almighty will change your sins into good deeds, he says. This hadith corresponds to this verse.

Yes.

So Allah Almighty is the absolute power and absolute ruler in the universe. In this respect, Allah does not call anyone to account for something He has not made known. So Allah Almighty addresses people in the worlds through His miracles, His prophets and His books, and also through His scholars. Whoever does not believe in Allah and the hereafter, if they turn their backs on Allah's prophets and books, they should know that they cannot do Allah even an atom's weight of harm. What does Allah Almighty say in one of His verses? Even if humans and jinn gathered together, they could not harm Allah.

That is also the verse corresponding to the matter I just described. Yes, but people, through what they do, wrong their own souls. But since man is created deficient in mind, he may find himself in a swamp of rebellion. Then if this person, out of this swamp of rebellion and kufr, sees the truth and asks Allah for mercy and repents, he finds Allah to be Most Forgiving. Just as He forgives their sins, He also changes these sins into reward. Such people attain salvation. These last words I said, this sentence, correspond to the hadith I mentioned a moment ago. Even if your sins reached the clouds in the sky, when you repent once (?) in the heart, Allah Almighty will change your sins into hasanah, that is, into reward, he says.

Yes.