Islam vs the Deity of Christ

Well, it is indeed a pleasure to be with you this morning here in somewhere in Texas. I'm really surprised we all have toll roads here. In Arizona, we have no toll roads. And I just sort of figured in the Republic, the well-armed Republic, that you would take some umbrage to someone stopping you in the middle of the road and taking money from you.

You all have given in to that, and we in Arizona haven't done that yet. So we have one leg up on the day. But you have actual football teams here. We have the Cardinals. So anyway, by the way, there are no Cardinals in Arizona, so I'm not really sure what they're doing there either.

I've often volunteered to go down there and help pack them up and move them to someplace else. But it is good to be with you. I am in the midst of a very busy period of time in my life. I just had the opportunity.

I'm going to have to add this to the bio on the website, because evidently it's not there right now. But we need to add to that, and the father of two children and of one gloriously beautiful grandchild.

Just in Atlanta, I flew from Phoenix to Atlanta. I spoke there. I was just on Redshift TV. Some of you might know Todd Friel. We just did a presentation on new text-to-text reliability. But my daughter and son-in-law live in Atlanta now, and I got to spend a period of time with my daughter Clementine.

Her name is Clementine James, J-A-Y-M-E-S. I had nothing to do with that, but I had a great honor. I'm not sure she can be overly honored when she's old enough to figure that out. But we'll deal with that when we cross that bridge.

But I spoke at her church and at my kid's church and went up front carrying my granddaughter. It's this grandpa's privilege when you just become a grandfather to do whatever you want with that grandkid, especially when they're as beautiful as she is.

So I did pass her off eventually. I didn't force her to carry her around the whole time I was preaching, but that was an enjoyable time. A busy time in my life. I will start off with a prayer request.

Literally three weeks from today, I will be in Johannesburg, South Africa, and I will be starting a seven-day period there where I will be doing five debates other than lectures and teaching during that period of time.

That is a ridiculous schedule. I shouldn't have agreed to all of that. I think that's part of the whole plan. This is just overwhelming with debates, to be honest with you. But I will be twice debating Shabir Ali, who is considered to be one of the leading Islamic apologists in the world.

Shabir and I have debated in America, Canada. A few years ago we debated in a mosque in Toronto. And in London, and now we'll be debating in South Africa. Shabir and I are actually co-authoring a book right now together on the Trinity and Tawhid.

You haven't seen too many books like that before. But a book by a believing Muslim and a believing Christian on the fundamental issue that separates Islam and Christianity. And of course, it's our view of God.

The Trinity versus the concept of Tawhid. Tawhid is the oneness of Allah in Islamic religion. And so, I'll be debating Shabir twice. I'll be debating Yusuf Ismail twice on the transmission methodology of the New Testament versus that of the Quran.

Which is a fascinating area, a very important area of discussion. Yusuf Ismail basically took over from Ahmed Digac, the IPCI down there in South Africa. And then another man by the name of Bashir Rahman.

So, I would pray, especially the primary thing that I really need during that period of time is not to get sick. I mean, honestly, it's an 11 ,000 mile journey in a steel metal case. With everybody coughing, hacking, and sneezing around me.

So, if we could pray that I'm alive and functional during that period of time. Let alone on the way back. That would be a wonderful thing. I don't know where all these opportunities have come from. Believe me, when I was in Bible college, I didn't know what an apologist was.

I learned about apologetics while I was at Grand Canyon College. As a double major Bible biology minor in Greek. And that's when I ran into my first two Mormon missionaries. And I didn't have anyone who trained me.

No one really to look up to. But, despite all of that, the opportunities that I have had now to engage in an amazing number of debates with an amazing number of people is truly something. It's certainly a tremendous encouragement to me to recognize the Christian faith.

Can engage all of its critics and provide an answer. We do not have to be embarrassed. But at the same time, we must be willing to forgive ourselves and to call everyone else to submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

I am concerned that in much of Christian academia today there is a reticence, a hesitance to openly say that. And to call people, including all Christian scholars, to bow beneath the Lordship of Christ.

To not follow the world in its rejection of the fact that wisdom is to be found.

It is to be found in the fear of the Lord.

And that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found in Jesus Christ alone. It is a radical thing that we believe in. That God, the creator of this entire universe, actually entered into his own creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

That he was the God-man. That God invaded his own creation in so doing to provide the perfect way of redemption. That's a radical message and fact from the world's perspective.

It is foolishness.

But that is what we are told in Scripture. We are told in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 that it is moronos, from which we get moron. It is foolishness of the world. And unfortunately many people in our day try to make it something other than foolishness.

Not realizing that it is that very foolishness, that it is the wisdom of God, that preaching of the cross, that is the means by which men and women are brought to faith and brought to forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

And so we must resist those temptations. If I would like to this morning, in the time we have together, to simply walk through some text of Scripture. We've made singles of text of Scripture. Charm chapters.

Not the entire chapter, obviously.

It's one of the longest chapters in Charm.

But just a few thoughts about the radical nature of this one that we call Lord. Given that my mind right now is primarily focused in the area of Islam. This is really one of the messages that I want to deliver in my debates to the Muslim people.

I try to honor the debate process and not wandering from the topic a great deal. But if you have seen any debates that I've done, I do try to bring the gospel, especially into the Islamic debates. Because I cannot assume for a second that the Muslims with whom I am speaking have never heard a clear and potent presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so I try to bring that in. And if I could take my Muslim friends to almost any text of Scripture, I would probably take them to this one. To try to disabuse them of the idea that they believe in Jesus.

Because I'll tell you, they believe in Jesus. The mighty prophet of God. They believe that Jesus was a Rasul, an apostle of God. In fact, they believe that Jesus performed miracles that you and I do not believe he performed.

In fact, let me just ask you a quick question of you. How many of you here have read the Quran? I was about to say, almost every single time when I say that, some will go, and some did that without even my having to ask them to do that.

If, and you didn't say part, so I have a feeling you've read the entirety of the Quran.

Yes?

A whole.

Oh, okay. Obviously, from the Islamic perspective, unless you are Arabic speakers, none of you have read the Quran. Because from the Islamic perspective, the Quran really only exists in the Arabic language.

And hence, I've only read portions of the Quran from their perspective. But the point is, if I were to ask an Islamic audience how many of them have read the Bible, we would have similar percentages of people who would raise their hands and probably say, part.

In other words, our two communities do not communicate well together. And what we know about the other is primarily derived, sadly, amongst evangelical Christians, from Fox News. Which is better than getting it from NFC, but it's still not enough.

And that causes a lot of problems. And so there's a lot of miscommunication. And many Muslims believe that they do believe in Jesus. They believe that Jesus committed miracles that we don't believe. If you've read the Quran, you know, for example, the Quran does not differentiate between what is in the canonical text of the Bible and what is in Jewish mythology or even Christian mythology.

For example, the Proto-Gnostic story of Jesus forming clay birds and breathing on them so they become alive and fly away, which is found in the infancy gospel of Thomas. Or the story in the Arabic infancy gospel of Jesus speaking from his cradle.

These are found in the text of the Quran. The author of the Quran could not and did not differentiate between those sources. But the reality is that the Muslim does not believe in the Jesus of the New Testament.

And many of you would like to know who the Jesus of the New Testament is. And so John chapter 8 is one of those texts that I would, if I were to have time to sit down and speak with a Muslim on just this subject, this is where I would want to go.

Very rarely do you get that type of opportunity unless you have Muslim neighbors or co-workers and things like that. Very often my opportunities are with a Muslim cab driver or something like that. So you have a limited amount of time, though sometimes the cab driver would like to extend that amount of time for some odd reason.

It's a very, very interesting opportunity because I didn't know whether they wanted to extend this ride or shorten this ride. So it's a good, interesting opportunity. Beginning in verse 103 of John chapter 8.

And Jesus is saying to them, you are from below, I am from above. You are from this world, this world, or ek. How many of you are in a force to or are now currently suffering through? Okay, well you will note that I'm not using a translation.

I'm translating that so it gives you the idea of where I'm coming from. Jesus is saying there is a difference between us. You are of this world, I am not of or from. This world is not my point of origin.

I am not of this world. Therefore, verse 24, I said to you that you will die in your sins for unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. Now, if you are familiar with the overview of this chapter, you know it's going to have a clear division around the 30th verse.

Where there is a break and some of the Jews, hearing what Jesus has said, say, God, I sort of like what this guy has.

I think I might believe in him.

Except John uses the form of belief there. That in the gospel of John, if you followed it through, true saving faith is always an ongoing thing. It's a present tense thing. When, for example, in John chapter 2, certain people believed in Jesus. John uses a different tense.

He uses the aorist tense. It's a point action thing. It's not a continuous action. And Jesus' response to them is he did not literally entrust himself or believe himself to them. He did not entrust himself to them because he knew that was not a saving faith.

Same thing here.

These people have an interest in Jesus, but by the end of the chapter, remember what they are doing at the end of John chapter 8? They are picking up stones to stone him. Because he says to them, oh, you believed in me?

Well, if you continue in my word, then you will be my disciples and you shall know the truth. And then Jesus says something that religious hypocrites find incredibly offensive. You want to find out how many tares amongst the wheat in your congregation?

You want to start a church? You want to cause problems? You do what Jesus did in John 8. He did it in John 6, too. I love John chapter 6. John chapter 6, the founding of the church shrinkage movement.

I love it.

It's great. You start off with 5 ,000 excited disciples. That's just the guys. It doesn't include the nursery. It's a huge college. By the end of the chapter, you have 12 confused disciples wanting to put you to death.

That's how Jesus did it. And he does the exact same thing here. Jesus keeps saying things that offend people. And because he knows it's going to offend people, and people need to be offended by the truth.

So what does he say?

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. And what do these alleged new disciples say to that? I am offended.

Why do you say we need to be set free?

And then you've got Jewish people who at that very point in time would have to jump in response to a Roman soldier who says, Hey you, come carry my bag. Jewish people who are paying taxes to the Roman state.

Jewish people who don't have their own state any longer because they're under the dominion of Rome. A nation, an empire that is going to destroy them in just a few decades. You don't see how many times the people were enslaved right now in the past few years?

The Son sets you free. You'll be free indeed. You see, those are only words of life to someone who realizes that they're in shame. And people who think that they're free, just as people who don't think they need a Savior are not looking for a Savior.

It's a shame what we do today with the Gospel. When we present a Gospel to a people and we forget that the biblical paradigm is, The bad news comes first. That's what makes the good news the good news.

When you skip the bad news, when you don't follow Romans, you go, It's just really depressing that stuff. There's none that's righteous, there's none that understands. There's poison of asps on their lips.

You don't preach that stuff. Everything comes afterwards. About grace, justification, everything else. And so we come along and we're afraid to offend people.

And so we want to give them good news before the bad news.

That's what they do.

They think,.

Will Jesus help my kids be whiter?

And we wonder why we end up with churches filled with people who just don't seem to understand why the Word of God calls them to a godly life or anything of the kind. Because we don't follow what Jesus does.

And Jesus knew the hearts of these men. And He knew exactly what words to use to bring out from their hearts their rebellion. So by the end of the chapter, what does Jesus know? He has demonstrated what they are really all about.

By demonstrating who. By the end of the chapter, what does He say? That's the overview of the chapter. But notice, before they became offended to pick up stones, Jesus was already presenting that truth.

And He says to them, look above, you are not judging me correctly if you're putting me on the same level and you're thinking I'm just like Isaiah or Jeremiah or something like that. I'm telling you something about myself.

And I said you will die in your sin. Now I don't know about you. But if I tell someone you're going to die in your sins, that's a very negative statement. That's not, you shall die in your sins and everything will be okay because of that.

No.

And then there's purgatory afterwards and you'll get out.

No.

There's post-mortem evangelism. You will die in your sins. From the Jewish perspective, what they're saying is, you're just going to be like all the Gentiles. And that's very offensive. You will die in your sins.

For what reason?

For unless... Now, there are some who will say, he's just simply saying that he can stop it. That's all he's saying. We can provide an object here. And in English, most things are translated. But the reality is, what is John speaking?

There can be no question. When you think of the Gospel of John, his response is, they pick up stones and stone Jesus. And you don't stone people. What do you stone people for in the Jewish law? Blasphemy and adultery.

It certainly wasn't adultery. So there was something here about blasphemy, right? So they understand Jesus to be saying something about himself that removes him from the merely human realm. He's making a claim of deity for himself.

And then the other one is in verses 5 and 6. Remember the soldiers come to arrest Jesus? And John even sort of belabors the point. If you've looked at it really carefully, he belabors the point. Because he says, they come up to Jesus.

And he says, who are you seeking? And they say, Jesus. And he says, ego heimi, I am. Then John says, now Judas, who was betraying him, was also with him. And so when he had said, what happens? The soldiers fall back on him.

If you want to find out if Jesus Christ is even semi-serious, find out what they say about that text.

It's amazing.

The people come up with, for verses like John 20, 28, John 18, 56, when it comes to the deity of Christ. About the only thing I've ever heard that they come up with is, well, the soldiers were so amazed at the beauty of Jesus that they fell back on him.

To develop a special kind of armor that protects you from falling back upon the ground. When you run into morally pure people.

It's amazing. Take a look at John 20, 28.

Thomas Ames even said to him, my Lord, my God. Well, what it really is is Thomas Ames said to him, my Lord, my God.

Really?

I mean, the excuses that people come up with are absolutely amazing. At least someone like Bart Ehrman is honest. He says, yeah, John believes in the deity of Christ. John preaches the deity of Christ.

Just the rest of the Gospel writers don't believe in the deity of Christ.

For him, it's just obvious.

He just cut the Bible up into pieces, and it's obvious that John wasn't with anybody. What John's intention. But there's one other place where I am saying, It's not as popular. To me, it's even more amazing.

Chapter 13.

And I'm not going to jump out of this just to go there at the moment. But take a look at it sometime. It's in the context of Jesus telling the disciples what's going to happen in the future. And he says, from now on, before it happens, I'm going to tell you about it so that you might believe that I...

I don't care. Term papers?

Any of you professors mean, terrible, oral people of Jesus?

Well, it isn't.

I don't realize how much work that actually is. But it is fun. I love term papers. Back when I was in Bible college, when I first started, It was before, it was BP. Before computer. And this was, how many of you have read the term paper about an IBM?

We are joined together, aren't we? Correction tape.

White out.

And then, the worst thing in the world is when you need to put a footnote on a page,.

And you, remember that?

You get to the bottom of the page, you may have even typed it perfectly, And then you forgot the footnote, and you know what you do? These young people don't believe this. You pull the paper out, you crumple it up, and you start all over again.

That's why we were the greatest generation! Anyway, it was the suffering that did it for us. I actually got my first computer while I was in Bible college. It was a compact portable. HP bought them and told me.

But it was the size of a Singer sewing machine the same way. And that was portable.

It literally was the size of a suitcase.

And you would pop the bottom of it down, And there was a six inch green screen, And two 360K floppy drives. No hard drive, but I got the upgrade. I had 640K of RAM. Anyone remember? There's a wall. Dot Command.

Who heard of Dot Command? Weren't they great?

Oh, man.

I was very zealous in witnessing. He was not a part of a church.

And I warned him.

Huge project.

I didn't need to do a project this big, But my teachers at Great Canyon already realized that was weird, So they let me do what I wanted to do. So I'm writing this big huge thing on the key passages of the Deity Christ.

It was late at night. My dear wife was already in bed asleep. I was at this little apartment, You know, a poorest church in my history. I had to, because I was looking, I'm pretty certain, Because I was looking at John 13, 19, And I was looking at it in grief,.

And I was going,.

Isn't it Bible works or. Lagos,.

Or accordions,. Or olive tree,.

Or, you know, stuff like that.

I didn't have any of that.

And so I got out there sitting in the dark.

I wanted to tell him about it,.

Because there was no tweet. And so I was all excited by myself. And it was tough. But I found where Jesus is called the Forgotten Trinity.

Some of you may have seen it.

There's a whole section on the I Am sayings of Jesus in the Forgotten Trinity. But Jesus is drawing directly from Isaiah 43. Does Isaiah 43 .10 ring anybody's bells in the audience? Because if you witness to Mormons, Isaiah 43 .10 is one of the first verses you'll remember.

Why?

Because the final portion of the verse says, Before me there was no God formed, And there shall be none after me. And so you quote Isaiah 43 .10. We used to go over there. We have a conference at the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City every six months.

We did it for 18 years. It wasn't the Mormons that stopped us. It was independent feminist Baptists carrying signs and yelling at Mormons that stopped us from being able to do that work. I think James only got that to do with me when they hated Mormons.

But anyways, we did that for 18 years. And I don't know how many times I quoted Isaiah 43 .10. Before me there was no God formed.

There shall be none after me.

It cuts the Mormon logic and home aggression right in half. But there's something else about Isaiah 43 .10. Isaiah 43 .10 is the very verse from which Jehovah's Witnesses get their name. Because it starts off, You are my witnesses, says Yahweh.

Or as they slaughter in English, Jehovah. But then read the middle part. You are my witnesses, says Jehovah. And my servant has chosen me.

It's in the context of prophecy and it says,.

And I shall reveal these things to you. So that when it happens you may know and understand that I am he. You look at the Greek Septuagint and Jesus is drawing directly from that verse to identify himself to his disciples.

The very verse that Jehovah's Witnesses use for their name teaches the deity of Christ. Now is that irony or not? I mean it's amazing. But the very verse they get their name from.

Fascinating. Fascinating.

So there are the I am sayings. John 8 .24 .13 .19 .18 .5 .6 in the Gospel of John. It's clearly what John is seeking to communicate to his readers. Is that this one who walked amongst us identified himself by that word that goes all the way back.

And by the way, don't jump from John 8 .58 or something like that all the way back to Exodus 3. When at the burning bush,.

I am who I am.

In the Greek Septuagint that is Ego-I-Mi-Ha-Om. I am the being. The one who exists. And they would say the emphasis there is on Ha-Om not on Ego-I-Mi. The actual connection, the stronger connection is through the line of Prophets Isaiah.

Because you will find that phrase Anahud in Hebrew translates to Ego-I-Mi being used as the name of Yahweh numerous times in the prophetic books. That's where the connection is. Once you've made that connection, then you can trace it back to Exodus.

But if you just jump straight back to the burning bush, there are Jehovah's Witnesses going door to door that will be ready to cut you off from these. Remember, they spend five hours a week preparing to debate you.

Most of us do not spend five hours a week preparing to debate them. And if you spend five hours a week preparing to debate someone, that's going to give you an advantage no matter whether you're wrong or not.

It's still going to give you an advantage. So keep that in mind. Returning back to the text now. Jesus said, You will die in your sins unless something happens. Unless a condition is fulfilled. And that condition is to believe that I am.

Now, in the context, this cannot be, well, you have to believe that Jesus existed because everyone is standing in front of him at this point in time.

To believe he existed.

And so people today who present the, what I call, mere Christianity perspective, who try to sort of take out the offensive stuff, and the gospel is no longer definitive and things like that, and liberals who try to say, well, you know, as long as someone just in some way, shape, or form acknowledges that Jesus was specially related to God or that he did the things that the Bible says that he did there's something along those lines.

They just don't want to push the full revelation of who Christ was. This doesn't fit into that paradigm. It's not enough to say, Jesus was a historical figure, Jesus was a great teacher, he taught good morality, and so on and so forth.

That is not enough. Because certainly the people to whom Jesus was speaking would not have questioned the fact that he existed. The Jews would call him rabbi, they would call him teacher, they would recognize that he was obviously very much in the line of the great prophets of the Jewish people.

They wouldn't have had any problem with that. And in fact, if Jesus had just limited his assertions to being Messiah,.

They probably wouldn't have had any problem with that either.

I mean, they were looking for the Messiah, and remember what happens in John chapter 6. After we feed the 5 ,000, what do they want to do? They want to make him king. I mean, this guy is great, we don't have to worry about supplies for our armies, he can just simply turn anything into food, and we'll overthrow the Romans, and they're going to come and make him king by force.

So, Jesus wanted just to be a Messiah, a political deliverer, a king, lots of people wouldn't have had any problem with that at all. He says, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sin. That is far too high a standard, because what we're saying is, there is only one Jesus to save.

Jesus will not be a co-savior with anyone. Jesus will not join together with some kind of ecumenical movement where he will stand alongside of Mohammed, or stand alongside of the Buddha, or whatever else it might be.

That saving faith has to be focused upon who I really am.

We're interested in what he was saying,.

And these people believed he existed,.

And they would have accepted a lot of assertions about Jesus,.

But isn't it interesting,.

The one thing that liberalism today cannot allow is that Jesus really was who he said he was. I mean, I like to show people.

A little. P -52,.

A papyrus from World War II, reading about World War II and everything, at least back then. So I try to differentiate between papyri and fighter planes, and I left some people confused when I didn't make that differentiation, but if you're familiar with the P -52, it's a little scrap of papyri, about the size of a credit card.

And it was discovered in a basement in London, obviously it was a part of a bunch of papyri that had been, you know, the English went all over the world and stole everybody else's cool stuff and brought it all back to London.

And a man was thumbing through these boxes of papyri from Egypt when he found this little fragment and recognized that it was from the New Testament. And it was sent to the four greatest living papyrologists of the day, and three of the four dated to around 125, as you probably know, it's a 50-year window, so it's 25 years one direction and the other.

Three of the four dated to 125, that means as early as 100, as late as 150. One placed it in the first century, so around 95 A .D. And there are people who would argue that some papyri are older than P -52.

Generally, there is an agreement that at least right now, this is the earliest fragment of the New Testament.

That we possess.

And there are some who are saying that there have been new papyri that have been found. These results haven't been published yet, so we really can't say much about it, but there might be some real buzz in the New Testament area over the next year or so, hopefully when these finds are actually published, that may make P -52 less.

The rock star.

That it currently is.

But what was really neat about it is if you had gone to seminary back in the 1870s in Germany, you would have been informed with great seriousness.

That the assured results of scholarship.

Are that the Gospel of John could not have been written before 170 A .D. And the reason for this, of course, is because we know that Jesus could not have been, like the Gospel of John says he was, we know that he could not have been God in human flesh, and so this was the result of evolution over time.

And so the Gospel of John would be written around 170 A .D. If you really want to be in the cutting edge of scholarship, that's what you need to do. I should have used, actually, a German accent, rather than a British accent, but I'm telling you, it's a little bit different.

But anyways,.

So anyway,.

That's what you would have been told.

What does it contain?

It's John chapter 1 through 34, and the backside is John chapter 18,.

Verses 37 and 38.

Now what's John chapter 18? It's discussion between Jesus, it contains the discussion between Jesus. And what I love is on the backside of this, is the very sentence where Jesus says, the one who is of the truth hears.

I think God personally assigned a particular angel to that little piece of papyri.

Because can you imagine what it is surviving?

Do you know what it's like to be a 2 ,000 year old piece of papyri? What are you going to look like in 2 ,000 years? You know? I mean, seriously.