The fourteenth hope

 

The Fourth Ray, explaining the luminous Qur’anic statement, God is sufficient for us (3: 173), says in the beginning, in summary:

Due to the worldly people having isolated me from everything, I was suffering five sorts of separation. Without looking to the consoling and helpful lights of the Risale-i Nur, because of heedlessness arising from distress, I turned to my heart and spirit. I saw that together with an infinite impotence and boundless neediness, an extremely powerful love of permanence, an intense attachment to existence, and a great yearning for life were dominating me. But an awesome mortality was extinguishing that permanence. In that mood, I exclaimed like the poet who suffers separation:

 

While my heart desired permanence, God, the Truth, judged the mortality of my body;

I am afflicted with an incurable ill; how pitiful it is that Luqman is unaware of it!

 

I bowed my head in despair. Suddenly the verse, God is sufficient for us; how excellent a Guardian He is! (3: 173), came to my aid, and asked me to read it attentively. So I recited it five hundred times every day. While reciting it, out of its numerous invaluable lights, nine aspects of God’s sufficiency21 were unfolded to me, not only at the level of “certainty coming from knowledge,” but at that of “certainty coming from observation.”

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi

21 Six aspects of God’s sufficiency are mentioned here. (Tr.)