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Days with God
\r\n Al-Hajj (The Pilgrimage) Chapter 22: Verse 47

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"They challenge you to hasten the coming upon them of God's punishment. Let them know that God never fails to fulfill His promise; but a day with your Lord is like a thousand years in your reckoning."

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This verse touches on certain important facts from the perspectives of astrophysics and the sociology of history:

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First of all, it draws attention to the relativity of time. A time or duration which people see as being long may be very short in the sight of God. In addition, God Almighty\r\n does not consider time as people do. He is not contained by time or space, and His Wisdom that directs things and events considers each thing and event both as an individual entity and as an indispensable part of the general fabric of creation and history. As each thing in the universe has an intrinsic relationship not only with every other thing individually, but also with the whole universe at the same time, so too, is each event in human history interrelated with every other event individually and with the whole of history. Human beings cannot grasp this relationship in its entire web; they cannot know the past perfectly, grasp the present completely, nor guess the future well. Besides, the wheel of both the universe and history does not revolve according to the desires of human beings.

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Secondly, a day for humanity is the time it takes the earth to make a single rotation around itself. The earth has another day, which consists of its revolution around the sun. This day lasts 365 days according to the reckoning of a day by humanity. So too does every other planet and all systems, like the solar system, have a day that is peculiar to each. This means that the concept of a day differs according to the planets and the systems.

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Thirdly, God has laid out certain laws concerning human social life. He judges a community according to the creeds, world-view, and conduct of, at least, the majority. Thus, there are eras and ages in human history and eras of foundation, rising, fall, and decline for communities and civilizations. Thus, we can consider the whole life of a state or community or civilization as a day.

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Compiled From:
\r\n "The Quran: Annotated Interpretation in Modern English" - Ali Unal, pp. 696, 697

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