Reaching Muslims with the Gospel

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It is indeed a pleasure to be with you.
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I want to start with a very serious question to my fellow believers in Jesus Christ.
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And that is, when was the last time you earnestly inquired of the Lord, requested of the
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Lord an opportunity to present the Gospel to someone of another faith, and specifically to someone of the faith of Islam?
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I have a real deep concern that for many Bible -believing, conservative
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Christians, especially in the that the majority of what we know about Muslims, about a major world religion,
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Islam, comes to us from, not from the pulpit of our church, not from the seminary classroom, but very often from the media sources that we watch to get our news.
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Those may be the few conservative media sources or the many liberal media sources, but the point being that we as Christians, I think we should recognize that if we're getting our information about a theological subject from any media source today, we're probably not getting the whole story.
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And did you know that the Quran comes 600 years after the birth of Christ and it addresses you by name?
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Most people don't know that. In fact, if I were to ask by raising of hands, how many of you have actually read all of the
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Quran? In most situations, I get one or two people, in fact, normally it's, well, parts.
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And if I were addressing a Muslim audience, I'd have almost the exact same percentages in reverse for how many of them have read the
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Bible. Which is interesting because their book of scripture, the Quran, makes direct reference to the
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Torah, the Torah, the law of Moses, and the Injil, the gospel.
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And specifically refers to the Al -Al -Kitab, the people of the book, which sometimes is
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Jews, sometimes it's Christians, sometimes we can't tell, but it specifically makes reference to our scriptures and refers to us.
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And so it's very strange to me that we have a major world religions that in many places are in conflict with one another and the scriptures of the one address the other people.
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And yet we don't hardly, any of us, know what the Quran says to us. And most
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Muslims have never read the Bible that's referred to in their own scriptures. And we wonder why it is that our two communities talk right past each other.
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In fact, let's be honest, have almost no communication with one another at all. That can only lead to further misunderstanding, to further feelings of distrust.
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What we need is to be able to speak to one another and to talk to one another. And as Christians, we are literally commanded to bear testimony of who
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Jesus Christ is, even to people who tell us, don't tell us that. Remember the apostles? Remember the book of Acts?
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Stop testifying in the name of Jesus. What did the apostles do? They continued testifying in the name of Jesus.
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And we have brothers and sisters this very day who languish in prison in Islamic countries, and they know exactly how they could get out of that prison.
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They literally have the key to that prison door in their hand. Now think, some of them are
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Christian women separated from their children, Christian fathers separated from their children or their grandchildren.
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And they want to be with those people and they literally have the key in their hand. All they would have to do is say, la ilaha illallah wa muhammadun rasool
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Allah. It's called the shahada. It's the statement of faith that makes you a Muslim. That's all they'd have to say.
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And that door would swing open. But they don't use the key because they know to say that would be to deny that Jesus Christ is the son of God.
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And so they can't do it. They've given their all. And so for us as believers who are not in a situation where we're going to be put in prison for testifying of who
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Jesus Christ is, should we not have an even greater desire to utilize that freedom, to speak to the
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Muslim people? But here's the problem. You and I both know. You and I both know.
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We will not put our lives in danger. We will not open up our hearts.
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We will not put ourselves on the line to testify of the faith to someone if we're afraid of them, if we're fearful.
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And the fact of the matter is, if we do not make proper distinctions between the various Muslim groups and to recognize that there are indeed
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Muslims who, because of their theology, view us as what are called coffers, unbelievers, and therefore as enemies of Islam, yes, there are
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Muslims like that. But if every Muslim believed that it was their right and duty to engage in jihad against all of the unbelievers, then this entire world would be a bloodbath.
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There's over a billion Muslims in the world. There are many, many Muslims who want to talk about Jesus.
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They want to talk about Jesus. In fact, amongst the Muslims, they say that we're the second largest religion in the world that teaches people to love
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Jesus. Do you know they say that amongst themselves? They believe Jesus is a prophet. And they believe that they are telling the truth about Jesus, whereas you and I have gone into what's called excess.
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We have gone into excess. We've gone beyond what Jesus actually taught and what his apostles actually taught, because from their perspective,
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Jesus and the apostles were Muslims. Oh, not in the sense that they knew who Muhammad was, though they do believe that Jesus prophesied about Muhammad.
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Maybe we'll have a chance to talk a little bit about that. But they believe that as far as believing in only one true
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God and saying prayers and doing those kinds of things, that Jesus was a
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Muslim. He was submitted to a law that the apostles were as well, and at least the original apostles.
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And how did we get into all this excess of believing that Jesus was the son of God and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and things like that that are denied in Islam?
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Well, for most Muslims today, it was that rascally Paul. Oh, Paul was a bad guy.
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He came along afterwards. He wasn't one of those original apostles and he came along and he perverted everything.
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And so we follow after him and we have gone into what's called excess. We've gone beyond what he taught.
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But the Muslim believes that they believe in Jesus in the proper way. And did you know that Muslims have an even more developed eschatology than we do?
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That's pretty hard to believe. Given all the books we crank out on the subject and how many debates we have amongst ourselves on the subject of eschatology, it's pretty difficult for us to realize that you go into a lot of Islamic lands and you go to the book sales and they will have stacks and stacks of books on eschatology on the coming end times.
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And Jesus is always central to that. Jesus is coming back from their perspective as well. He's gonna come back and he's gonna destroy the cross and kill the pig and lead
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Muslim armies to victory, but he's coming back from their perspective. And so they want to talk about Jesus.
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I mean, we bend over backwards to try to get secularists to even talk with us for a few moments about spiritual things, right?
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We struggle to get people to talk with us. You will find the vast majority of Muslims to be wide open to hearing what you have to say about Jesus Christ.
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And all you've got to do is show an interest and then the other element is to know a little something about what they believe.
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They find that to be such an amazing act of respect on your part that you will have opportunity to introduce them to the
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Jesus they've never heard of before. Because I can guarantee you something. I've read the Quran many times.
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The name Jesus in the Quran is Isa. Isa bin
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Maryam, Jesus the son of Mary. His name appears 25 times.
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He all total he's referred to somewhere around 90 times or so, 90 verses of the
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Quran. But interestingly enough, Jesus in the
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Quran only one time speaks from an identifiable location.
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What do I mean by that? Well, how many times do we read in the gospels that, well,
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Jesus was in the synagogue in Capernaum and he said these words, John chapter six, for example.
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Well, we know where the synagogue in Capernaum was. We have excavated it. You can go visit it.
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He's by the seashore at this particular location. I mean, the story of Jesus in the gospels is rooted in history.
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You can follow it. You know what its context is. Only one time in the Quran does Jesus speak from an identifiable location.
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And interestingly enough, it's from his cradle. It's the only time. Now, interestingly enough, that's actually borrowed from a fifth century
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Arabic infancy gospel, which is an issue for the Muslims. But be that as it may, other than that, the Jesus of the
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Quran is just a disembodied voice that just sort of floats around and makes arguments for monotheism and the prophethood of Muhammad.
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Why do I mention this to you? Because it's absolutely impossible for a
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Muslim to love a disembodied voice. The Jesus of the
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Quran is not a person. He's just an argument. And so they can talk about honoring
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Jesus. They can talk about believing in Jesus. But the idea of having a passionate love for a voice that floats around in the air, doesn't work.
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It doesn't work. And the Muslim truly does not understand why you and I could be so focused upon this one man, because of course, they don't believe that Jesus was divine.
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He was a Rasul. He was a prophet of God. He was sent by God, but there were many
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Rasul before him. There were many who were sent before him. And he's not even the last or the greatest of God's prophets, that would be
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Muhammad. Now they will say that he was sinless, but then again, some of them will say that all the prophets were sinless.
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What they deny was that he was the son of God. And the big question is, does the
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Quran even understand what that means? Did the author of the Quran understand what we as Christians believe by that phrase?
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That's very, very important. And then in one verse of the
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Quran, we'll talk about this a little bit more later on. In one verse of the Quran, the crucifixion is denied. Jesus did not die upon a cross.
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So obviously if you don't have the crucifixion, then you don't have resurrection. You don't have the gospel.
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You don't have atonement. And the Muslims do not believe there is any need for atonement. A law can simply forgive sins and they are forgiven.
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God's law does not have to be fulfilled. God's law can be broken. There does not have to be atonement made.
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And so from that perspective, they don't see why you and I are so passionate and why you and I could actually say with Paul in the
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New Testament that in Jesus, all the treasures of wisdom are hidden, that he is our all in all, that all of history pointed to the cross, all of history since then points back to the cross.
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All of that seems like excess to the Muslim. But they honestly wonder why.
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And if we give them the opportunity to ask, they will give us the opportunity to answer. So it's a wide open mission field.
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It truly is, especially here in the West. And so we have that opportunity. But to be able to do that, you need to sort of buy some time.
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Well, how do you buy some time? By showing some respect to them by knowing something about what they believe, by having some accurate knowledge of what they believe.
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So what I want to do is I want to give you just a little foundation upon which to open up that conversation, buy that time, and likewise to accurately interpret some of the things that you see in our world today, to have some understanding of why
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Muslims think the way that Muslims do. Now, there are what are called five pillars of Islam.
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Now, I'm primarily talking about Sunni Islam this evening. You might ask, well, why not talk about the
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Shiites or any of the other rather small groups? Another group that most Muslims would not identify as Muslims are called
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Ahmadi Muslims. They're a very peaceful group that are very much persecuted by especially the
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Sunni Muslims. But the Ahmadi would certainly call themselves Muslims, but they're viewed by the rest of Muslims like we view
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Jehovah's Witnesses because they had a prophet after Muhammad. But they have all the same objections to Christianity that all the rest of the
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Muslims do. But why focus upon the Sunni? Well, because about 90 % of the world's
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Muslims are Sunni. And I hope you realize only about 16 to 19 % of the world's
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Muslims are Arabic. For most Americans, it's just you think of Muslim, you think of Arabic.
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The largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia. And so if you wanted to stereotype something, it would be
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Asian, not Arabic. But the Sunnis make up the vast majority.
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So you've got a nine out of 10 chance that you'll be talking to a Sunni Muslim rather than a
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Shiite or an Ahmadi or anybody else like that. And so there are some differences.
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The Shiites have some very interesting beliefs about atonement and sacrifice that can actually be helpful in our reaching them in regards to the gospel.
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But trying to explain where all that comes from requires a fair amount of discussion of Islamic history and how the division took place and all the rest of that stuff that is beyond our scope this evening.
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But the Sunni have five pillars of Islam.
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The five pillars of Islam. Every Muslim would know these backwards and forwards. The first and most important is called the
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Shahada. The Shahada, which you heard me say in Arabic just a few moments ago.
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The central act and the central belief, the central belief of Islam is called
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Tawheed, Tawheed. Now you're gonna go, man, you're throwing a lot of Arabic words out there.
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It's impossible to discuss Islamic theology without some Arabic. It's just impossible.
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It cannot be done. It doesn't matter what your language is. Arabic has absolutely placed its stamp.
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In fact, you may even wonder, you just start showing off saying that in Arabic. No. When you make your profession of faith, if you want to become a
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Muslim, you will be led to say the Shahada, La ilaha illallah wa muhammadan wazirullah, in Arabic.
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You cannot say it in English. It is invalid. You can't say it in German, French, or anything else.
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You have to be led in making the statement of faith in Arabic because that is the only valid way of doing so.
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In fact, so central is Arabic to Islamic thinking that the
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Quran itself, I said I've read the Quran many times. From a strictly
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Islamic perspective, I've never read it because I've never read it completely in Arabic. I've read sections in Arabic, but I've never read it all in Arabic.
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And the Quran only exists in Arabic. Even the English translations, that 80 % of the
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Muslim population would be dependent upon because as I said, only 16 to 18 % are actually Arabic themselves.
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Even the English translations, French, German, whatever that is, those are not even considered translations.
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They're considered interpretations, but they're not truly the Quran. The Quran exists only in Arabic.
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And interestingly enough, for Sunni orthodoxy, the Quran is as eternal as a law.
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It is uncreated. It is equal with God in eternity. It exists only upon a heavenly tablet and always has, and always in Arabic.
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Now you and I sit back and go, but Arabic's a Semitic language. We know exactly what other
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Semitic languages it developed from. It was not the first Semitic language. How does all of that work?
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Well, those are some objections and issues that we'll leave to another time. Those are,
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I think, valid questions to ask, but it is important to understand that from an orthodox
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Sunni perspective, Arabic is central and the Quran was written in Arabic and has eternally existed in that language.
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It is the language of heaven itself. So very, very central. So we go back to that central belief of Islam is
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Tawheed. Tawheed comes from Wahad, which means one, to make one. Remember, Semitic languages are related to one another.
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39 books of our scriptures were written in a Semitic language called Hebrew. And many of the roots of Hebrew and Arabic are related to one another.
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We have in Deuteronomy something called the Shema. Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad.
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Here, Israel, Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is Echad, one.
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Well, Echad is related to Wahad in Arabic, which means one.
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And so from their perspective, Tawheed is the oneness of Allah. Remember that Muhammad first was reacting against the polytheism of his day.
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If you've ever seen pictures of the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and you'll see thousands of people, what's called circumambulating, going around the
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Kaaba, especially during Hajj. And in the middle is this mainly squarish -looking black building.
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That's the building toward which all Muslims are facing when they pray. I mean, Muslims have watches and have things on their phones that are
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GPS that will give them the exact direction to face when they pray. Their mosques are built with something called a
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Qibla, and the Qibla points toward the Kaaba in Mecca.
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And it's not the building that's the most important thing. The building has been torn down and rebuilt many times, once within fairly recent memory.
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Embedded in the corner of that building is something called the Black Stone. The Black Stone's a meteorite.
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It fell from heaven. Theoretically, it fell as a white stone and has turned black because of the sins of man, but that was there in the
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Kaaba. And before Muhammad, there were 360 idols inside the
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Kaaba of various gods. And Muhammad rebelled against that.
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He preached against that. He became a minority prophet who was persecuted, whose uncle,
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Abu Talib, had to keep him alive and protect him because the rest of the family wanted to kill him because he was harming the trade because they were in control of the
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Kaaba, and that's how they made their money, was from people coming to pilgrimages to worship these idols. And so all of a sudden, you've got somebody in the family saying there's only one
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God, Allah, all these idols are fake, and so he was persecuted. And in fact, he started his prophethood, according to Muslim sources, in 610
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AD. And then in 622, he and his followers fled from Mecca to a little town called
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Yathrib. It was renamed Medina, the city of the prophet. And that's actually the beginning of the
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Islamic calendar. The Muslims have that as year zero, is when they left Mecca and went to Medina.
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And by the way, the reason that their years are always different than ours is not just where they start, but they use a lunar calendar.
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They don't use a solar calendar like we do. And so you may have noticed that you hear sometimes about the celebrations of various Islamic holidays, and specifically the month of Ramadan.
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And you may notice it moves forward in our year, 10 to 11 days per year.
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That's because the lunar calendar is not in sync with the solar calendar. And so it moves forward until they eventually have to add a month to sort of make things work out.
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But that's why there are differences in their celebrations, because they use a lunar calendar.
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It starts in 622, and then Muhammad dies in 632.
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And just for a historical perspective, from 632 to 732 is the 100 years of Islamic expansion, where Islam spreads all across North Africa, all across the
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Middle East, out toward India and Pakistan, up toward Constantinople, goes across into Europe, into Spain and Portugal, and finally is stopped at the
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Battle of Tours in 732 by Charles Martel. And Islam looks back to those 100 years as the golden years, when
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Islam ruled supreme at that particular point in time. So anyway, this doctrine of Tawhid comes from Muhammad's reaction against the polytheism of his day.
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And one of the reasons this is important to us is that there's one unforgivable sin in Islam.
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It's called shirk, shirk. If you die as a mushrik, a person who has committed shirk and has not repented, has not been forgiven, if you die as an idolater, a mushrik, there is no forgiveness for you, the
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Quran says. God can forgive anything else. God can forgive mass murderers. But if you die as a mushrik, there is no forgiveness for you.
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Well, what is shirk? Shirk is association of anyone or anything with Allah.
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We would call it idolatry. We would see it primarily in parallel to Romans chapter one and the idolatry that's laid out there, the twisting of the creator -creation relationship.
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But for them, it is association of anyone or anything that is not
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God with God. Now we see where that came from, because from Muhammad's perspective, what's going on in the
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Kaaba? Well, shirk, they are associating nonexistent gods, idols, so on and so forth, with Allah himself.
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And this is a complete rejection of the worship of Allah.
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Now, why is this important to us? Well, if the central positive teaching of Islam is tawhid, and the worst sin you can commit is to be a mushrik, so much so that Muhammad's parents died as mushrikun, that's the plural form, and Muhammad asked of Allah the right to pray for his parents, and he was not allowed to even pray for his parents, because they died having committed shirk.
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That's how serious shirk is. Why is it so serious?
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Because it violates the central affirmation of the Islamic creed, there is only one God, Allah.
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Now, why is that important to us? For the vast majority of Muslims around the world.
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Some exceptions in the West, but a small number. For the vast majority of Muslims across the world, you and I are mushrikun.
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We commit shirk every time we worship Jesus. Because they believe we are associating a mere man, a mere prophet, with Allah.
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Now, that's a serious charge. In fact, if we had more time, when
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I teach this in a fuller context, we work through the Quran, and we see the repeated statements of the
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Quran directly addressed to you and I. Do not say anything other of Allah than what is true.
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Do not go into excess. Do not say three. Do not say three.
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And so the question for you and I, well, all right, you believe that this is scripture.
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Why should I believe that this is scripture? Because your book acknowledges and teaches that the
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Torah was sent down from God to Moses. And it contains light and guidance.
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It's divine revelation. And your book says that to Jesus was given the
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Injeel. And it contains light and guidance. There's absolutely no evidence that I've ever found from anyone that the author of the
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Quran had any firsthand knowledge of anything in the Bible. Oh, he had heard stories. He repeats many stories.
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There is a retelling of almost all the Old Testament stories. And there's stories told about Jesus.
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There's things said about Jesus in the Quran that most people in this audience never heard of before. You know why?
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Because the author of the Quran thought they were in the gospel, but they're actually in the Gnostic gospels.
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For example, the Gnostics told a story about Jesus and how he would make little clay birds.
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They'd breathe on them and they'd become alive and they'd fly away. That's found in the infancy gospel of Thomas, a
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Gnostic -tinged document. And the author of the Quran didn't know the difference between those later documents and what was in the
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New Testament. The author of the Quran never read a word that Paul ever said. Had no idea what was in the
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New Testament at all. All he knew about the Bible was what he heard from others. And so he knew a lot more about the
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Old Testament because he had much more exposure to Jews than he did to Christians. And knew very, very little about what was in the
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New Testament at all. And so the big question is, did the author of the
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Quran correctly understand what you and I believe about Jesus as the son of God so that what we do is shirk?
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And I am convinced that the author of Quran did not understand what we meant and thought that we were talking about something very different.
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That Jesus was the son of God in a sexual way. That God had taken a wife and had a child.
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And I can understand why a young man living in Mecca, born around 570, would come to that conclusion.
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If he goes on caravan up into Syria at the end of the sixth century and looks around at Christian churches, what's he gonna see?
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He's gonna see representations of God as creator. He's gonna see statues. He's gonna see crucifixes.
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The exaltation of Mary had already begun so he's gonna see a woman. He's gonna see a woman with a baby.
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He may see a dove, but that's not gonna mean anything to someone coming out of the deep desert, right?
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So what does he see? He sees God the Father. He sees a woman. He sees a baby.
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And so you go to Surah 5, verse 116 in the Quran. In Surah 5, verse 116,
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Allah says to Jesus, did you say to the people, worship me and my mother as deities in derogation of Allah?
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There is the only place in the Quran where the three are mentioned. And who are the three? Allah, Mary, Jesus.
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I understand where it came from, but the reality is that's not what Christians ever believed. Now there is a group that calls itself
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Christian today that does believe that. They're called the Mormons. But they came around in 1830, so I'm really not sure how that fits in with anything in there.
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Unless you wanna say the Quran is a prophetic refutation of Joseph Smith, which I've never heard any Muslim suggest before, that's really not gonna help you out too much.
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And so there's a major, major problem here. And so that first pillar of Islam, the
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Shahada, gives us really the central issue that gives rise to almost all of the other differences that we have and the things that we have to debate and discuss.
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And that is from the Islamic perspective, that profession that they make is in direct fundamental contradiction to the very profession that you and I make when we say,
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Yesus Kurios, Jesus is Lord. Because from their perspective, only
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Allah can be Lord. Jesus can't be Lord. But their book does not understand why we believe that Jesus is the
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Son of God, that it's an eternal relationship. That doesn't mean God has a wife. It's never a situation where Jesus was born in eternity past and became the
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Son of God or something like that. The author of the Quran simply did not understand what
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Christians had rather clearly already propounded by the time that he came on the scene. And that is a very, very important issue.
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So the first of the pillars, Tawheed, the Shahada. There is only one
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God worthy of worship. They are Unitarians, not Trinitarians. By the way, we're both monotheists.
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They will reject that. They will say we are not monotheists. They will say we are tritheists, we believe in three gods. We do not.
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But because the Quran basically says we do, then I was debating a
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Muslim apologist by the name of Yusuf Ismail in the Juma Masjid in Durban, South Africa, less than a year ago.
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And I was standing right in front of the Qibla, right where the Imam leads the prayers. This is the second largest mosque in the
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Southern Hemisphere of the globe. And the Muslims are on the floor, no farther away from me than you are from me right now.
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And Yusuf Ismail said, now I know, James, that you say you're a monotheist. I'm sorry, you're not.
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You're a tritheist. So it doesn't matter how often we explain it, how often we go back over it.
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If you take the Quran as your final authority and then use it as the lenses through which you then read the
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Bible, it changes everything that the Bible actually teaches. And that's one of the big problems that we have to deal with and have to ask the
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Holy Spirit of God to help us with. So, first pillar, Shahada. The second pillar is called
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Salat. It's the prayers. If any of you have served in military overseas or traveled overseas in an
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Islamic country, you know five times a day the call to prayer goes out, or I guess if you live in Dearborn, Michigan, same thing happens.
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And the prayer goes out, and the call to prayer goes out, and you have the five daily prayers.
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And the time where it takes place changes depending upon the time of the year. And in some countries, you don't even ask someone if they're a
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Muslim. You ask, do you say the prayers? And that is just a discipline that is a part of the
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Islamic faith. The third pillar is Saum, which means fasting. Primarily in the month of Ramadan.
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Ramadan took place just recently, and you may have heard the news stories that in Pakistan, in certain cities in Pakistan, there was a tremendous heat wave, tremendous heat wave, and more than 1 ,200 people died because they were fasting when the temperature was functionally above 125 degrees.
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And the fasting that they do is not just from food. It's from drink as well, including water. From as soon as it's light in the morning till it becomes dark in the evening.
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And so during the summer, that's an incredibly difficult thing to do. And it's in January, not so tough.
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But in other contexts, it's extremely, extremely difficult.
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That's the month of Ramadan, month of fasting. The fourth pillar is Zakat, the giving of alms.
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Real quickly, that's basically just 2 .5 % of anything that you possess for more than a year. And the last is the
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Hajj, the pilgrimage, where you go to Mecca and Medina. There is a certain prescribed set of activities that you do there.
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What's interesting to note, just in passing, is that people have run the numbers. And given the number of Muslims in the world today, and the number of people that Saudi Arabia will allow into do
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Hajj, technically, if you're healthy enough and have sufficient funds to do it, you're supposed to do it at least once in your life.
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The fifth pillar can no longer be fulfilled. There's not enough openings. Even if you only went once, there's not enough openings for all the
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Muslims in the world to actually do Hajj. So it's interesting to speculate what it means that one of the five pillars cannot actually be fulfilled.
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But for many people, it would just be, well, as long as you desire to do it. It can be a
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Hajj of desire, I would imagine, is how you can deal with that particular issue. Now, there are also six articles of belief of Sunni Islam that I'll go through very, very quickly here.
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And that is, one, belief in Allah. Two, belief in all the prophets and messengers.
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God has never left any people without a prophet. And what ties all the prophets together is the message, la ilaha illallah.
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Not the part about Muhammad, but what ties them all together is there is only one God worthy of worship.
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Monotheism is what ties all of God's prophets together. Whatever group they've been sent to, that's the message they brought.
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So belief in all the prophets and messengers. Belief in the angels, and that includes the spiritual realm, which includes something called the jinn.
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Islam believes in jinn, and in fact, there's a fair amount of references to them in the
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Quran, certainly in the other writings that are very important to Islam called the Hadith, which are the sayings and actions of Muhammad and his companions that were collected 250, 300 years after the time of Muhammad which really become the lens through which the
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Quran is interpreted. There are six authoritative collections of Hadith amongst the
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Sunni. The two most important are Sahih al -Bukhari, Sahih al -Mu'min, Sahih al -Mu'min al -Mu'min al -Mu'min, Sahih Muslim, and that's where Sharia law is derived from and everything else.
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It's extremely important material that is found there. And remember, the Quran's not a big book, by the way.
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The Quran is only about 54%, 54 to 56 % the length of the
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New Testament. It's only 14 % as long as the Bible itself. So it's not a big book, it's a fairly small book.
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And so there has to be something more than that and that more comes from these collections of Hadith.
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Bukhari's about nine volumes, Muslim's about eight or nine volumes, Arabic, English. And so that's where a lot of this information comes from that ends up creating
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Islamic law is from what's called the Hadith. And there's a lot of references to the jinn in these materials.
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And what I didn't know until I started studying Islam is that they believe that there are Muslim jinn and Christian jinn and Jewish jinn.
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I'm not sure if they're atheist jinn. I've never asked anybody if there is. And the jinn are a little bit scary because they are faster than we are.
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They are stronger than we are, but they're not as smart as we are, which to me sounds like a teenager in a
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Camaro. But that's what the jinn are. And there are entire sections of the
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Quran about how to protect yourself from them and almost like magical incantations to protect you from the jinn.
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So there's a belief in the spiritual realm. The number four, belief in the books, plural, sent by God. The books, plural, which would include the
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Torah, the Injil, but God sent other books of scripture down. It's just that the last book is a muhaiman.
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It's a guardian, a corrector over all the previous ones, and that last one is the Quran. So it becomes the fundamental authority.
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Belief in the Day of Judgment. There is a very strong, number five is belief in the Day of Judgment, a very strong doctrine that there will be a judgment.
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There are very graphic, graphic pictures in the Hadith of what that Day of Judgment's gonna be like.
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One of them, very interestingly, seems to be borrowed from Persian religion, and it's about the
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Sirat, this narrow bridge that's like a razor that you have to cross to get into paradise, and its functions to judge people.
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And the Muslims tell stories about how those who have great faith have great light coming out of themselves, and they can just cross right over the bridge.
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But then there are other Muslims that have just a little bit, and they're crawling across the bridge in the very small amount of light that they have to get across this chasm, this bridge that goes over hell itself to not fall in.
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Very, very graphic descriptions of what hell is like in Islamic teaching.
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And then finally, belief in destiny, or qadr. Now, this might sound like the idea of God's sovereign decree or something like that in Christian theology, but it's not really the same, because in Christian theology,
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God's activity in this world, His choice to enter into this world, in the incarnation, is something that, from Islamic perspective, could never, ever happen.
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And in fact, so far, the best debate I've had with a Muslim was with a Muslim apologist in Australia, and we debated, can
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God become man? I mean, we got down to the real issue, because fundamentally, Islam says
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Allah would never do that. Allah is transcendent. Allah is above having anything to do with His creation in this way.
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He uses angels to be intermediary, and so on and so forth. He would never, ever, ever enter into His own creation, and that is the real issue.
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And I'm glad we've had the opportunity of debating that. But this idea of destiny, then, is really a form of fatalism.
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Many people would point out, that in a lot of Islamic countries, you'll hear the phrase over and over again, inshallah, inshallah, if God wills, if God wills.
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Well, could we do that tomorrow? Inshallah, inshallah. And in a lot of Muslim theology, the belief is, again, drawing from the
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Hadith, that 40 days after conception, and this causes problems today with what we know about the development of the unborn child, but 40 days after conception, an angel comes and writes for you, male or female, a little late genetically speaking, but male or female, successful, unsuccessful, paradise or hell, happy or unhappy, and the very date of your death is stenciled on your forehead, 40 days after conception.
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And there is nothing you can do, and in fact, there is a Hadith that is considered by some to be what's called
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Mutawattir. Mutawattir means universally held. It's repeated in so many different sources that it really cannot be questioned as to its validity, where Muhammad taught that there are certain people who will do the works of the people of paradise.
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In other words, they'll be righteous. They'll do the works of righteous people their entire lives until they're a hand's breadth from entering into paradise, and then what was written for them shall overcome them, and they shall go into the fire, because what was written for them was hell.
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So they live an entirely righteous life. And they're just about to enter in into hell.
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And there'll be those who do the acts of the people of the fire their entire lives until they're a hand's breadth from entering in, and then what was written for them will overcome them, and they will go into paradise.
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So you'll notice, and I could give you some more, I could narrate some more Hadith for you that verify this, but there really isn't any connection between what one does in life and where one is going to end up.
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And it's not because there is a mediator who can give his life and give us righteousness or anything like that at all.
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It's just all this idea of belief in destiny, which is very much a part, at least, of the original perspectives of Islam.
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Now, there's a little bit of background. Trust me, there's a whole lot more. But there's a little bit of background that, and even just having that amount of information, you might be able to hear what the
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Muslim is saying with a little more clarity, because our tendency is to interpret what they're saying to us within our worldview, within our religious perspective and not their own.
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If we can at least try to understand where they're coming from, then maybe when they respond to what you're saying, you'll be able to more quickly identify where they may have misunderstood you or maybe we've used some
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Christianese that they have not understood. It's always a very disappointing thing to spend time trying to talk to someone and then you get down the road and realize that they took a left when you took a right way back there somewhere, and now you're half a state away and there's really no time for you to go back and try to get everything back together again.
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So it can help, at least, in our interpretation of one another in that way. What then are the biggest barriers to our presentation of the gospel to these folks?
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What's in the way? Well, the biggest barrier I've already told you about fairly clearly, and that is the concept of shirk.
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The 112th surah, the Quran has 114, what we would call chapters, they're called surahs.
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And by the way, if you ever choose to read the Quran, do not read it cover to cover.
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It won't make any sense if you start at the beginning and go to the end. The reason is the way it's organized.
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It opens up with a seven verse opening prayer and surah al -Fatiha, and then surah number two is called the
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Qal, and it's the longest surah, hundreds of verses. And then surah three is a little bit shorter, and surah four is a little bit shorter, and surah five is a little bit shorter.
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So again, on the surah 114, it only has a couple of verses in it. It's organized by length, which means if you read it straight through, you're bouncing back and forth between the major periods in Muhammad's life, even if you just take the
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Islamic understanding of what his life was like as your context. And most people just cannot figure out what in the world it's talking about because it does not provide much in the way of context at all.
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In fact, there's all sorts of sections of the Quran that even the Muslims in their more honest moments will have to admit, we have no earthly idea what the context of this was.
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There may be stories in the Hadith that say, well, it was this or it was that, but they just don't know.
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And so when we try to read it, we get completely lost. And so you can find online, in my book on the
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Quran, you can find tables that will put the surahs in chronological order, which will help you to understand at least a little bit, a little bit more about what's going on in it.
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But of all the surahs, Muhammad said that to quote surah 112, which is one of the last surahs, is to quote a third of the
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Quran. In other words, it is extremely important. It's about the closest you can get in the
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Quran to a statement of faith or to a creed. And what does it say? Well, it says, say, he is
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Allah, the one and only, Allah, the eternal absolute. He begetteth not, nor is he begotten, and there is none like unto him.
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That's the whole surah. Now, as you can see, most of that is just a statement of monotheism that would sound very much like what we have in Isaiah or Jeremiah or some of the minor prophets, except for the third verse.
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He begetteth not, nor is he begotten. Lem yeled while lem yuled in Arabic. And why do
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I tell you that? Because there is lem yeled while lem yuled. You hear yelad in there.
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He does not give birth, nor is he himself born. Why is that important?
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Because the very same root, yelad in Hebrew, is what we have in Isaiah chapter nine.
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A child, a yeled, will be born to us, yelad. And so,
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I've taken some of my classes, for example, in teaching in seminary to mosques, and we've talked with the imam.
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And I remember, we were in one mosque, and I asked the imam, would you agree that the third ayah of surah al -Ikhlas, surah 112, lem yeled while lem yuled, is specifically in regards to Christianity?
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And he would say, well, there's no question that this is a specific response to Christianity. So here in one of the most important chapters of the
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Quran, which defines Islam, one quarter of the verses are a specific denial of what we believe.
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Now, our world can say, we shall just lay our differences aside, but the reality is, the only way we can do that is for Islam to cease being
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Islam and Christianity to cease being Christianity. You don't lay your differences aside, you debate them, you discuss them openly.
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You don't just shoot people or something else, you discuss them. That's what needs to be taking place.
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And so the big, the mountain, there are three barriers to presenting the gospel to Muslims.
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The first one, the big mountain, is that the Muslim believes that you are inviting them to commit shirk.
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And they believe that that is an unforgivable sin. You wanna know how unforgivable it is?
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Muhammad had an uncle named Abu Talib, and Abu Talib kept him alive in those first years in Mecca.
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And when Abu Talib was on his deathbed, Muhammad came to him and he said, you know
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I'm a prophet, say la ilaha illallah, abandon the ancestral gods, worship the one true
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God, and you will enter into paradise. But the rest of the family is saying, don't you dare, this would be a great dishonor to the family, this guy's crazy, so on and so forth.
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Well, Abu Talib died without becoming a Muslim, so he died as a mushrik. And in the only exception, only exception,
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Allah allowed Muhammad to intercede for Abu Talib. He actually allowed
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Muhammad to intercede for a mushrik. Not for his parents, but for Abu Talib. And what was the result of that?
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Well, according to the Hadith, Abu Talib has the best spot in hell.
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And whenever I say that, I look around the room and the unspoken thought in every person's eye is, exactly what is the best spot in hell like?
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Well, let me tell you, Abu Talib is wearing sandals that are so hot his brains boil.
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That's the garden spot. That's the best spot of hell. And that's why shirk is so bad.
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If Muhammad can pray for you, and you get the best spot so that your brains just boil, then what's the rest of hell like?
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It's a bad place. And so it is a huge, huge barrier in the mind of the
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Muslim that what you're saying is, hey, commit shirk with me. And so what do we have to be able to explain?
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We have to be able to explain that we are not talking about associating things that are not worthy of worship with God.
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That means you and I need to know what our Bible teaches about who Jesus Christ was.
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We need to know John 1, 1, the beginning was the word was with God and the word was God. That's as far back as you wanna push the beginning.
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The word has always been as to his nature deity. We need to be able to explain Colossians 2, 9, for in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.
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We need to know about Philippians 2, 5 through 11 and the Carmen Christi that's found there, the hymn to Christ is to God.
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We need to be able to explain to the Muslim, the author of the Quran did not understand what we believe about Jesus.
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Jesus is the one who made you, he is the creator of all things. We can quote them Colossians 1, for by him were all things made are in heaven and earth, visible, invisible, principalities, powers, dominions, authorities, all things created by him and for him, he is for all things and in him all things hold together.
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And say directly to them, trusting the Holy Spirit of God to make these words come alive in their hearts, that every breath you take, every beat of your heart comes from Jesus Christ.
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You cannot reduce him to a mere prophet and to worship him is to only worship the one true
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God, not to commit shirk. The sad thing is, most of the time,
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Christians take a very timid approach. I have found that Muslims respect someone who will say, you need to deal with Jesus because Jesus is not just the guy holding a little lamb, knocking on a noblest door.
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He is king of kings and Lord of lords, he's your maker and you will not find salvation by believing he's a mere prophet.
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They respect that. You don't have to do it with arrogance, but you can do it confident of what the word of God actually says.
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And so you need to be prepared to deal with the issue of shirk and you always need to have it in the back of your mind. This may be why this
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Muslim is hesitant to accept what I have to say because I'm gonna have to explain this to a number of different ways to help them over this particular barrier.
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What's the next barrier? I mentioned it to you before. I'll give you a specific verse in the
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Quran. It's Surah 4, 157, Surah 4, 157. And in Surah 4, 157, we have the one verse in all the
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Quran. This is the only verse, 40 Arabic words that deny the crucifixion.
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Here's what they say. That they said, speaking of the Jews, in boast, we killed
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Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, the apostle of Allah. But they killed him not, nor crucified him, but shubihalahum, it was made to appear to them.
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And those who differed therein are full of doubts with no certain knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not.
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40 Arabic words. Interestingly enough, not a word of commentary on those 40
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Arabic words in all the Hadith. For nearly three centuries, no Muslim could ever remember anything
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Muhammad ever said about these words. And if they weren't in the Quran, Surah 3 and Surah 19 would both have natural references to the death of Jesus.
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And so there's a lot of question as to where these words came from. But they're there, and so the
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Muslims believe that they are the authoritative word of God. And so they do not believe that Jesus died on the cross.
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Now, if you talk to a Muslim from outside the United States, the majority of them are going to believe something called the substitution theory.
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And that is that someone else was put on the cross in the place of Jesus. That phrase, shubihalahum, so it was made to appear to them.
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As they believe that someone was supernaturally made to look like Jesus and crucified in his place. And for most Muslims, it was
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Judas. Since Judas betrayed him, then God made him look like Jesus and they crucified
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Jesus while Jesus was taken to heaven. I had one Muslim send me a long article years ago proving beyond a shadow of a doubt it was
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Simon the Cyrene. Simon the Cyrene was the one who was crucified, not Jesus. But the point being that Muslims outside the
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United States tend to take that as a given. Muslims inside Western countries tend to be a little hesitant about that.
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They'll say, Allahualam, God knows. The reason being, if you think about it, if you take the substitution theory,
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Allah started Christianity by mistake. He did such a good job fooling everybody.
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He not only fooled the Jews and the Romans, but the followers of Jesus who then went out and began preaching the resurrection.
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And so he started Christianity by mistake. And so a lot of Westernized Muslims are like, we don't know.
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All we know is Jesus didn't die on the cross. Now this places the
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Quran directly against the witness of history. I mean, even the most wild critics of Christianity will admit that the strongest historical element of all of Jesus' life is the crucifixion.
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Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, wild critics of the Christian faith say this is the most established historical fact of Jesus' life, his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.
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So the Quran finds itself very much alone in denying this reality.
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But there it is. And so first two problems, shirk. Surah 157, the denial of the crucifixion.
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What's the third? Well, it's an issue you have to deal with with a lot of groups. But it is the now almost universal belief of all
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Muslims that the Bible has been fundamentally corrupted, that the wording and text of the
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Bible has been changed over time. Now I say it's pretty much universal belief now because that wasn't the universal belief of the
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Muslim people throughout the history of Islam. In fact, historically, there's always been two streams of thought here.
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On the one side, you had those who said that, no, the Bible is Allah's words and men cannot, there's an actual verse in the
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Quran that says there is no changer of God's words. And it's hard for the Muslim to explain how the
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Bible could be totally corrupted when it was sent down by God, but the Quran couldn't be. There's sort of a double standard there, which is one of the biggest problems that Muslims have,
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I think. But there have always been those who've taught, no, the corruption was just in the understanding of the words, not in the writing of the words themselves.
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But then there is another stream that has now become absolutely predominant. And that is the idea, the words themselves have been altered over time.
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Now what caused that to happen? It happened in 1864. A Indian Muslim scholar wrote a book,
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Itzaar ul Haqq, The Demonstration of the Truth. It was a counter -Christian book where he borrowed pretty much all the bad arguments of German liberalism and things like that.
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It's a horrible book. I mean, it really is, from a scholarly perspective, it is just horrible.
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But the book has had an incredible impact across the
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Islamic world. The most famous Muslim speaker of our day, died a number of years ago, still the most listened to Muslim speaker of our day is a man by the name of Ahmed Didat.
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And Didat honestly admitted that it was Itzaar ul Haqq, it was that book from 1864 that turned him into a
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Muslim apologist. And all Muslim apologists today are well aware of that book and continue to utilize it even to this day.
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And that has totally, almost totally wiped out the moderate stream that would affirm that the
01:00:03
Bible has not been changed in text, but only in interpretation. So that now almost every single
01:00:08
Muslim you talk to, it doesn't matter whether he's read the Bible, knows anything about the Bible, he believes it has been corrupted and cannot be trusted.
01:00:15
Now, of course, you go to any university, anywhere in the
01:00:21
United States these days, and that's exactly what you're going to hear in those places too. And so here's another place where you and I as believers, we need to know about where the
01:00:33
Bible came from. We need to know why we can trust it. We need to know how to respond to accusations that are made against it, because it doesn't do us much good to quote from a text that the
01:00:46
Muslim automatically believes is corrupted. There can even be very good arguments made from the
01:00:52
Quran itself against that position. I use Surah 547 a lot to point out that if the
01:00:59
Bible has been corrupted, you and I as the people of the gospel are told to judge by what is contained in the gospel.
01:01:05
How can you do that if you don't have the gospel anymore? If the gospel's gone, if it's been corrupted so we can't know what it is, how can we judge by what it says?
01:01:14
So the Quran becomes self -contradictory if you don't recognize that the author of the
01:01:21
Quran was not functioning on the idea that the Bible was a corrupted mess and the gospel was gone, so on and so forth.
01:01:27
That's not the presupposition that it is written from in any way. And so there are your three barriers to the gospel.
01:01:38
Shirk, the denial of the crucifixion, and the accusation of the corruption of the
01:01:43
Bible. Now, are there other barriers? Well, certainly in the sense that Muslims do not have our doctrine of sin.
01:01:51
They don't understand the concept of atonement, but that pretty much flows out of Surah 4 and the denial of the crucifixion, of course.
01:02:01
And you can go into depth in each one of those areas and identify more elements of it, but really, if you look at the debates that have taken place down through the centuries and are taking place even now between Christians and Muslims, they're all gonna devolve down eventually to one of those three areas or a combination of those three areas.
01:02:23
And if you're aware of that going in, now, the Muslim's not aware of that. The Muslim may knows all those things, but they've never sat around going, well, what are the barriers between ourselves and the
01:02:36
Christians? And they're not really thinking about so much how to reach you. They wanna call you to believe in Muhammad.
01:02:42
They wanna call you to say the Shahada. But they think just refuting a few things about the
01:02:50
Trinity or something like that will be enough to get you just simply to go, well, I wanna become a
01:02:55
Muslim. They're not really thinking about how to provide a meaningful critique of the very center of our faith because their book does not provide them the basis for doing that because their founder did not understand these things.
01:03:07
You and I are the ones that are gonna have to do the work of building the bridges, listening to the language, and making it possible for us to communicate with the greatest level of clarity to that individual.
01:03:21
Because when you think about it, think about the position that the believing
01:03:26
Muslim is in today. They have a holy God who will judge sinners.
01:03:36
He is transcendent. He would never lower himself to enter into his own creation.
01:03:43
So because of the ignorance of the founder, there is no mediator in Islam.
01:03:51
There is no one to come between you. Now think about what Job said. Think about what
01:03:57
Paul said about a mediator, the need for that mediator. They have no mediator. You've still got a holy
01:04:03
God, you've still got a broken law, and you've got the reality of hell described in even more vivid colors than anything we find in the
01:04:10
Bible. You put all that together, and the believing
01:04:16
Muslim has to ask himself, how can I have peace with God? How can I know that when
01:04:22
I die, I'm gonna enter into paradise? Even some of the companions of Muhammad wept considering the coming of their death because they did not know whether they were going to enter into paradise.
01:04:34
And the Quran only provides one way of knowing that you will enter into paradise, and that is to die in an act of jihad.
01:04:45
And so I think with great clarity, back to what happened in,
01:04:50
I believe it was June of 2007, when two men drove a
01:04:56
Jeep Cherokee filled with flammable liquids into the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, and hit a button and ignited it.
01:05:07
It was their intention that that thing was going to fire a huge volume of liquid flame into all the people that were staying there checking in for their flights to the airport.
01:05:19
Didn't work that way, thankfully. The only two people who died were the people in the vehicle, and they did so weeks later of their burns.
01:05:26
Bad way to go. But I remember seeing the news coverage, and it strikes me especially because only a few years before that,
01:05:35
I had begun going to the Reformed Baptist Church of Annie's Land and ministering there.
01:05:42
And I've walked through that very door many times before and since. The two men in that car, they weren't down and outers.
01:05:54
They were national healthcare physicians. They were both medical doctors.
01:06:00
Why did they do it? Because they had no mediator. They were convinced this was the only way they could have peace with God.
01:06:08
My friends, you and I have the very message that could stop someone from doing that, because there is a mediator.
01:06:17
There is a way of peace, but we have to be the ones. We are the ones called to communicate that message to these people.
01:06:24
And my question is, will we love them enough to put aside fears, prejudice, to open our hearts, to open our minds, and to take the risk and proclaim to these folks the
01:06:40
Jesus of history, not the Jesus of the Quran? That really is what I hope these few moments together will help you to do, will encourage you to do.
01:06:50
And I hope that you will pray that God will give you the opportunity to proclaim this message with the sincerity of your heart, brought alive by the
01:07:00
Holy Spirit of God to any Muslim that God brings across your path. I hope that's what you'll do.