Quran: Full of Lessons

We have set it up as a lesson. Does any of you wish to learn?
(54:15)

Lessons come in many forms. There are life lessons—if you touch a hot stove you’ll get burned; if you drop a china cup onto the floor it will break, but if you drop it onto carpet it might not; if you hit someone you will hurt them—and they might just hit you back. We learn these kinds of things through experience, through day-to-day living. The dictionary definition that covers this says: “an experience or observation that imparts beneficial new knowledge or wisdom.” Each of us learns these lessons for ourselves.

Lessons also come through instruction. Many life lessons might be learned without negative consequences if we paid attention to various teachers. Mom said “Don’t touch the stove; it’s hot.” If you listened, you wouldn’t burn your finger. But you think you know better or you just have to prove it to yourself, so you touch the stove and sure enough, it’s hot. You hit a first-grade classmate and make him cry, until one day he’s fed up and he hits back, and suddenly you’re the one who’s crying. How many times did the teacher say, “Don’t hit.”

Lessons also come through studying the past. Many students find history classes dull and inapplicable to their lives. However, the saying that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it is absolutely true. And nowhere in our lives is it truer than in our submission to God.

The Quran covers all forms of lessons and repeats them and strengthens their message and embellishes on them, all trying to get us to pay attention and learn. Sura 26 repeats the statement: “This should be a lesson, but most people are not believers” several times as God tells the history of various communities. Those same com-munities are recounted in Sura 51 with the statement: “We set it up as a lesson….” Aad, Thamoud and Midyan are lessons for us to learn from or else be doomed to repeat their mistakes. Noah and the whole story of the ark and the flood—it’s not a children’s fable; it’s a lesson from history. We can learn much of how not to behave from the lesson of Pharaoh and his tyranny. "Today, we will preserve your body, to set you up as a lesson for fu-ture generations." Unfortunately, many people are totally oblivious to our signs. (10:92)

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