surah as sajdah, verse three.......

'He directeth the ordinance from the heaven unto the earth; then it ascendeth unto Him in a Day, whereof the measure is a thousand years of that ye reckon. '
[ ayat 5, surah as sajdah, translated by pickthal  ]

friends, dato and tansri,

ayat 5 of surah as sajdah, i am not qualified to comment. any ayat of the qur'an for that matter.
how can i, even up till now i still read the qur'an like a new mualaf.
but i think if i can put the perceivable size of our current universe into perspective, then all of us can at least fathom the gravity and meaning of the above ayat. 

but let me try to expand on the translation....in the above ayat, allah is giving an inkling of the long distant journey HIS angels have to thread, up and down, up and down, the journey of which is likened to a thousand years, earth years that is, in carrying out HIS every detail to the minutiae all HIS qada' and qadar for each and everyone of us., allahualam.

.....and some random thots to keep things in perspective about the 'seen' and the 'unseen':

angels are from light; iblis and jinn from fire; and we mere mortals from clay.
the fastest human dynamo today is usin bolt at just over 45 km per hour!
light traverse space at 300,000 km per second!
'kursi' or god's foot stool, and 'arash', the throne are part of the 'unseen' and 'unmeasurable'.
one sufi saint once opined that the whole of the universe if put on the 'kursi' would be like looking for  a pin in a haystack. 
likewise, the 'kursi' when compared to the 'arash' would be  a pin in another haystack!
and even this comparision is 'problematic' for us mere mortals according to some 'purists'.
allahualam

ok, now back to the real world, back to history, but still on the subject of the 'unseen'. 
imam j'aafar, the well known mufassirun and fuqaha of the past, when asked about where is allah, replied in an oblique way:
" HE is where HE was before  HE created the arash...  ", a very wise answer, tip toeing a great issue of not giving human attributes and human dimensions to God.

now, back to the world of the seemingly,'seen'.
well, how big is the universe?
it is very very very very very big. 
imagine this: 
light travel at 300,000 kilometres per second. 
if we use light as our 'tape measure', it will take our tape measure travelling at this speed,
some '14 billion earth years' to traverse one edge of the universe to the other extreme edge.

translate this figure into kilometres, for better understanding, the diameter of the universe is
8,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, km.
to compound this 'bigness', the universe is forever expanding every second!
[  http://phys.org/news/2015-10-big-universe.html  ]
and there are seven other 'universes' , ie 7 heavens.
mind-boggling!

let us  get back into 'cyberspace', over to my other blog, tafseerkoran.blogspot.com, to attend class 4 of ustaz haroon hasif's tafseer class on surah as sajdah,
commenting on ayat 3 to ayat 5.
[  http://tafseerkoran.blogspot.my/2013/04/surah-as-sajdah-prostration-32verse-1-12.html  ]
dr nik

ps: 
...and omg! the secularist and the agnostic still say  this.
the universe is too 'old' [ 32 billion years old! ] and too vast and too complex....this cannot be the work of any god!
these clowns cannot accept that 'god' is scientific, create orders in HIS creations.
they would rather accept that all these are random acts, a collection of random acts and accident of time.
the probability of this universe sooo very complex formed itself is like something to the power of 10 with several thousand zeros behind it. 
....what is time, sir  anyway? is is also a created entity.