Qaf · Makki · ayah 38 of 45

Qaf 50:38

وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضَ وَمَا بَيْنَهُمَا فِى سِتَّةِ أَيَّامٍ وَمَا مَسَّنَا مِن لُّغُوبٍ

“And We did certainly create the heavens and earth and what is between them in six days, and there touched Us no weariness.”

Saheeh International

Essence

He made the heavens, the earth and all between them in six days, and not the faintest touch of weariness reached Him.

A reflection

Not even a brush of tiredness

A weightlifter hoists a record weight above his head. The arena falls silent. He must hold it there until the referee signals. His arms lock. His legs begin to shake. Three seconds feel like a minute. When the signal comes, he drops the bar and sinks to his knees.

That shaking is the honest signature of every created strength. The greater the feat, the more it costs. Our best achievements end with us on our knees.

Now hear the ayah. 'We created the heavens and the earth and all that is between them in six days.' Every sky, every star, every grain of sand. And then: wa mā massanā min lughūb. No weariness touched Us.

The grammar presses the point down hard. Mā massanā: it did not even touch. Not 'it did not overwhelm Us', but not so much as a brush. A classical commentary adds that the indefinite lughūbin shrinks it further: not the slightest tiredness of any kind. Picture a feather landing on a sleeve, then remove even that.

This is where the ego meets its proper size. We admire ourselves for stamina. We tell stories of all-nighters and marathon weeks. Yet our strongest moment is the shaking bar. The making of everything did not register with Him as effort at all.

Does He say this in order to be admired? He needs no applause. If every human stopped praising Him, the heavens would hold exactly as before. The sentence is for us. It corrects a picture we carry without noticing: a God who is a bigger version of ourselves, strong but strained.

That correction is a mercy. A Lord who could tire would be a Lord you could exhaust. You would have to ration your requests. The ayah removes that fear at its root.

So the next time you feel proud of what you carried today, picture the shaking bar. Then picture the sky above it, held without a tremor.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.