Believers! If you fear Allah He will grant you a criterion and will cleanse you of your sins and forgive you. Allah is Lord of abounding bounty. 29 Remember how those who bent on denying the truth plotted against you to imprison you or kill you or expel you: they schemed -- but God also schemed. God is the best of schemers. 30 And when Our revelations are rehearsed unto them, they say: we have heard; we could if we willed, surely say something the like thereof; naught is this but fables of the ancients. 31 And when they said, 'O God, if this be indeed the truth from Thee, then rain down upon us stones out of heaven, or bring us a painful chastisement.' 32 But God would not choose to punish them while you are in their midst, nor afflict them when they are seeking forgiveness. 33 What (plea) have they that Allah should not punish them, when they debar (His servants) from the Inviolable Place of Worship, though they are not its fitting guardians. Its fitting guardians are those only who keep their duty to Allah. But most of them know not. 34 Their worship in the House of God has been no more than whistling and clapping. So they have to taste the punishment for disbelief. 35 Surely those who deny the truth spend their wealth to hinder people from the way of Allah, and will continue to so spend until their efforts become a source of intense regret for them, and then they will be vanquished, and then these deniers of the truth will be driven to Hell, 36 that God may distinguish the corrupt from the good, and place the corrupt one upon another, and so heap them up all together, and put them in Gehenna; those are the losers. 37