Yusuf Estes and the Trinity: Common Objections, Quick Reply

One of the most widely watched representatives of Islam in the United States, a man by the name of Yusuf Estes. He appears often on something called The Dean Show. And recently, he answered a question regarding the deity of Christ.

I'd like to provide some basic responses to Mr. Estes, demonstrating that his answers about Christianity, he claims to be a former Christian minister, fall far short of accuracy, the kind of accuracy we should strive for, especially when we are describing the religious beliefs of others.

So some quick responses to Yusuf Estes and his comments on the subject of the deity of Christ.

The Quran, Isa, and the Virgin Birth

The other thing is, we have the evidence anyway. What does the Quran tell us about Jesus? We believe in a man by the name of Isa. If you call him Jesus, that's up to you. But we know his name is Isa.

Actually, Jesus' name was Yeshua. And of course, how it appears in a language that was not spoken in Israel at the time of Jesus' life and is not used by any of his disciples seems to us to be rather odd.

I mean, if Muhammad's name is pronounced differently in some other language, should we insist that Muslims use that other language? That doesn't seem to make much sense. I'm not sure why Mr. Estes would want to focus upon the Arabic rendering of Jesus' name over against the language that he himself would have been speaking.

And he was a miracle birth. His mother was named Miriam. We have a chapter of the Quran named after her, chapter 19. And his miracle birth, there was no human intervention here. There was no man. There was nobody who fertilized any egg and implanted it in her like they do in modern days or anything like that.

She had a miracle birth. We don't worship Adam. We don't worship Eve. So why should we worship Jesus? Just because he didn't have a father.

Why Christians Worship Jesus as Divine

Makes sense? Of course, the reason that Christians worship Jesus is not because the virgin birth anyways. I don't think I've ever used as an argument with anyone who was denying the deity of Christ, well, you should worship Jesus because he was born of a virgin.

No, the reason we worship Jesus Christ because of the clear scriptural definition of Jesus as God and the fact that the apostles did this and that Jesus accepted the worship of those who bowed down before him and even identified him as God and the part of the apostle Thomas.

And so it's not because of the virgin birth that we worship Jesus. Jesus is virgin born because he pre-exists as a divine person. It is he who created all things in heaven and earth, according to Colossians chapter 1.

And so that is really the virgin birth flows from his deity. It's not the grounds upon which we assert his deity.

God Entering Creation and the Incarnation

There's another point, too, is let us look to Jesus and think, peace be upon him. Did he eat food? Yeah. Does God have to eat? Did Jesus sleep? Does God have to sleep? Allah doesn't sleep. But now, what about eating?

If you eat, don't you have to go to the bathroom? And you want to say that God went to the bathroom, ma wudu billah, astaghfirullah. This is too much for the Muslim mind to even contemplate that you would put God in the creation.

Well, of course, if we thought that we could put God in the creation, that would be rather silly. The real question is, does not God have the ability to enter into his own creation? All of these objections go back to the fundamental presupposition on the part of the Muslim that God would never enter into his own creation, that he evidently lacks the capacity, certainly lacks the desire, to do what the Christian scriptures said he had done 600 years before the rise of Islam.

And that is the word, the eternal word, the creator of all things, according to John 1 .14, entered into flesh. Or as Philippians chapter 2 describes it, Jesus did not consider that equality he had with the Father something to be held on to or grasped at all costs.

But instead, he laid aside those divine rights of worship that was his, and he humbled himself. Yes, the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son, gave us the example of humility. Having rights, but laying those rights aside in the service of others.

That's what Jesus did when he took on human form. He didn't cease being deity, but he took on a true human nature. And as such, anything that he did as a true human being, and for his sacrifice to be real, he had to be a true human being, anything he did was holy and just, just as Adam was holy and pure and righteous when he was created.

And so the Muslim objection that, well, Jesus ate, well, in Genesis 18 and 19, Yahweh appears in physical form, he eats with Abraham. This is part of the very earliest revelation that we have given to man.

The Shema, the Trinity, and Jesus' Prayer to the Father

All of this just goes back to the starting point, and you can even see it in the expressions of Eusebius. Allah will have nothing to do with his creation in this sense. And that, of course, just requires us to reject everything the Bible said and take the Quran as the overarching authority, and that's what Muslims do.

But the problem is, the writer of the Quran tried to argue that we should accept his prophethood based upon the consistency of his argumentation with what had come before, and he was wrong in that.

And when he came, he brought a mighty message, and the message was, worship God without partners. To know, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord, and you have to love him and worship him with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength.

That's in the book of Mark, chapter 12, verse 29. Very clear.

And that's the message of Jesus. That is part of the message of Jesus. That is not all of the message of Jesus. What you have right there is the Muslim looking back upon the New Testament through the lens of the Quran, can only accept what the Quran allows him to accept, has to reject everything else.

So everything that Jesus said about faith in him, and his role as the forgiver of sin, and his role as the source of eternal life, and indeed in the accepting of worship and prayer to him, and all those other things, those have to be rejected.

Because the writer of the Quran rejected the revelations that came before him, I would argue, out of ignorance. He simply didn't know those things were there. And so you have a choice to make. Either you accept what those who followed Jesus initially taught about him, or you accept what one individual said from a different land in a different language over half a millennium later.

And that is Muhammad in the Quran.

Not worshipping him, but worshipping the one he worshipped. Who did Jesus worship when he prayed? And he said, and you pray who? To the one above. And how do you pray? God, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And when he was in the trials and the fitna that was coming about in Gethsemane, and he prayed and he was asking God, let this cup pass from me, but even so, your will be done.

Who's he talking to, himself? Here Dr. Estes demonstrates that even though he claims to be a former Christian, he does not understand the doctrine of the Trinity. It was the Son speaking to the Father.

He is confused and thinks Christians believe that the Son is the Father, and hence Jesus was like a ventriloquist or something. This is probably the most basic elementary level error that people of many religions make who are simply ignorant of the doctrine of the Trinity, don't take the time to read even basic introductory theologies on the subject of Christianity, and therefore make this kind of a mistake in his presentation.

The Cross, Psalm 22, and the Suffering Messiah

And on the cross, according to the people that have him on the cross, the one on the cross is saying, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And we wouldn't accept this. We won't accept that because no prophet would say God was forsaken them.

It's the devil who is forsaken, not any of the prophets of God. They were always in the best care of Almighty God.

Here we have a two-fold misunderstanding on the part of Dr. Estes. First of all is the Islamic idea that just because a person is a prophet, somehow they're next to sinless, and that they are always in the perfect relationship with God.

The biblical picture of the prophets is of true human beings who at times felt very abandoned by God. The Psalter, for example, gives us examples of this. And look at Jeremiah and the struggles that were his.

And isn't it good that we know that God uses people like us and that isn't limited to supermen who basically never experience any feelings of abandonment or loneliness or anything like that at all. That's the first error.

And secondly, Jesus voluntarily took the role that he took. He humbled himself. He became sin for us. This was something he did. And so when he is on the cross, and there's no evidence that anyone else has ever been on the cross but Jesus, when he is on the cross and he says, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, he's quoting from the 22nd Psalm.

Read all the 22nd Psalms. It's a messianic psalm. It ends in the victory of the one, the Messiah, who sees the vindication of God. And that's what Jesus is doing in quoting that very first line of that psalm.

Psalm 22 is a psalm. That's what he's doing there upon the cross. And so once again we see another example of a person who claims to be a former Christian, has embraced Islam, but the reasons for his embracing Islam can be nothing more than the fact that he was ignorant of the Christian faith that he once claims to have professed.

We hope you will look into the Christian faith, but look into the truth about the Christian faith, not what it says about it, but what is found in meaningful, serious, biblical presentations of the message of Jesus Christ.

Thank you.