“When it becomes full” means when its light gathers, reaches completion, and becomes perfect. This occurs on the nights of the full moon. Allah, Mighty and Majestic, swore “by the night and all that it envelops”—that is, all that it gathers—and by the moon, because it is a sign of the night. He then said, “You will surely pass from one state to another.” This sentence is the response to the oath and is reinforced by three forms of emphasis: the oath, the prefixed lām, and the emphatic nūn. The address here is directed to all people; that is, you will surely move from one condition to another. This means that circumstances change, encompassing the conditions of time, place, bodies, and hearts:

First, the conditions of time shift and change: “We alternate such days among people” [Āl Imrān: 140]. One day brings happiness, relief, and high spirits, while another day brings the opposite. A person may even feel this without there being any known cause. As the poet says:

One day is against us, and one day is ours;
One day we grieve, and one day we rejoice.

This is something everyone knows from personal experience. One day you awaken cheerful and happy, while the next day you feel the opposite for no apparent reason. Yet this is how it must be: a person will surely pass from one state to another. The conditions of the times also change from security to fear, from war to peace, from drought to rain, and from barrenness to abundance, along with all the other fluctuations of circumstance...

Second, places change. A person stays at one lodging today, another the next day, then a third and a fourth, until these stages culminate in the Hereafter. The graves, which precede the Hereafter, are only temporary lodgings. They are not the final destination but merely one stage. A Bedouin once heard a man reciting Allah’s words, “Competing for more distracts you until you visit the graves.” The Bedouin remarked, “By Allah, a visitor does not remain.” By his innate nature, he understood that beyond these graves lies another destination, for, as is well known, a visitor visits and then departs.

This also tells us that the expression we read in newspapers—“So-and-so passed away and was then taken to his final resting place”—is a grave error. What it implies is disbelief in Allah, Mighty and Majestic, and disbelief in the Last Day, because if you regard the grave as the final resting place