God has been true to His promise, that is, His promise to you of assistance if you are patient and Godfearing. So long as you remain in this state of yours, with [your] intense endurance of the struggle and certainty of [God's] assistance, remaining firm upon that certainty, united in word in your orientation towards the Truth, wary of contravening the Messenger and the inclining of [your] souls to the adornments of this world and away from the truth, struggling for the sake of God and not for this world, then God will be with you granting you assistance and fulfilling the promise. Indeed you were, by His leave, cutting them down and making them retreat, until you lost heart, that is, [until] you became cowardly and weakness intruded into your certainty and the your belief spoiling what it would have deserved by right by allowing it to be fraudulent in [the coveting of] the spoils, and you quarrelled, over the conduct of the battle after having been in accord. You were not patient for the share of this world, but contravened the Messenger by ignoring his command to you to hold your position and you inclined to the adornments of this world, after He had shown you what you longed for, in the way of victory and spoils, when the time for giving thanks to God and turning to him with zeal was upon you. [Instead] you were distracted from Him, the noblest of you desiring the Hereafter and the rest desiring this world, but there remained none who desired God. [Thus] He withheld His assistance from you, then He turned you away from them, so that He might try you, with what you did. And that trial was a kindness and a bounty to you [from Him], and God is Bounteous to the believers, in all states, either through [His] assistance [to them] or through trial. Indeed trial is a bounty and a subtle kindness [to believers] so that they might come to know that the [spiritual] states of servants attract the manifestations of the descriptions of the Truth onto them. And so what they have prepared their souls for is bestowed on them from God, as has been mentioned already in His words 'the obeyer of the one who is obedient to Me'. God is with them as they are with Him; and lest they sleep on their states without [seeking to acquire] the natural dispositions and so that they might be trained [spiritually] to be patient in adversity and to remain firm in the abodes [of their spiritual stations] and to become fixed in certainty making this a natural disposition of theirs and a station, and that they might verify [the truth of] that God does not alter the state of a people unless they have altered the state of their souls [Q. 13:11], and so that they might not incline to this world and its adornments or be distracted from the Truth or sell it in exchange for this world and the Hereafter; and so that it might be a punishment hastened for some of them now in order for them to be purged of their sins and to attain the degree of witnessing by the removal of the veils, especially the veil of the love of one's soul, and so that they might then encounter God as pure ones. That is why He says yet now He has pardoned you [Q. 3:152], for the trial was the cause of the pardon.