O you who have attained to faith! If you remain conscious of God He will endow you with a standard by which to discern the true from the false, and will efface your bad deeds, and will forgive you your sins; for God is limitless in His great 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 communications are recited to them, they say: We have heard indeed; if we pleased we could say the like of it; this is nothing but the stories of the ancients. 31 And when they said: O Allah! if this is the truth from Thee, then rain upon us stones from heaven or inflict on us a painful punishment. 32 And Allah is not one to chastise them whilst thou art in their midst, nor was Allah going to chastise them while they were asking 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 And their worship at the (holy) House is naught but whistling and hand-clapping. Therefore (it is said unto them): Taste of the doom because ye disbelieve. 35 Those who are bent on denying the truth are spending their wealth in debarring others from the path of God. They will continue to spend it in this way till, in the end, this spending will become a source of intense regret for them, and then they will be overcome. And those who denied the truth will be gathered together in 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