Joshua Evans on the Deen Show: Ten Reasons, Part 1

The Deen Show and the Claim That Islam Defines Itself by Denying Christianity

Greetings. I would like to make some comments today on some materials that I saw on a new edition of the Dean Show. Well, I'm not sure how new it is, but it was new to me anyway. And once again the topic, interestingly enough, was denying Christian faith.

Ten reasons why Jesus isn't God. And it does strike me just a little bit how often my own assertion that Islam cannot define itself outside of a negation of Christian faith, how often that is proven by what you see on the Internet.

What you see, and this is not just some private Internet individual putting YouTube videos up. This is the Dean Show. There's some support, some money behind this. There's a large number of people who appear on the Dean Show.

And so it is, I think, important for Christians to understand that it is part of Islamic faith to deny what we believe, to find, honestly, many of them offensive what we believe, especially about who Jesus Christ is and what he did and what he accomplished.

Now the individuals, Joshua Evans is the primary speaker on this particular topic. He is identified as a former youth minister and that makes most of us chuckle a little bit. That would be a little bit like me putting someone on here who used to coordinate youth sports activities for a masjid.

That doesn't exactly speak to someone who actually has had a serious study of the religion that they once embraced. But once again we see the convert syndrome. Someone who was once called themselves a Christian that somehow makes them an expert.

Remember we documented very thoroughly the errors of Yusuf Estes in his appearance on the Dean Show in regards to the Trinity, demonstrated that he was an error on factual matters, not only in misrepresenting the doctrine of the Trinity, not understanding the doctrine of the Trinity, but historical issues, issues about Bible transmission, the King James Version of the Bible, all sorts of things like that.

And if you haven't seen that, we would highly encourage you to take a look at that and see for yourself if we did not do so rather thoroughly. But beyond that, we have here a presentation with the two gentlemen.

The Muslim Claim to Love Jesus and the Rejection of His Self-Revelation

We want to start off by saying we love Jesus. We want everyone to understand we love Jesus. It's very important to understand what they mean by that. The Muslim Jesus is not the Christian Jesus. The terms may be the same, but at every important element, at every important point, it is the very things that Jesus himself said were definitional of who he is that Islam denies.

I don't have time in this video to go back through John chapter 8, but if you will look at John chapter 8, the Muslim believes everything that the Jews believed in John chapter 8, and yet Jesus said that they would die in their sins.

That is, the Muslim believes that Jesus was a messenger from God, that he worked miracles. The Jews saw that right in front of them, but they refused to accept him for who he really was. And Jesus says, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.

And so, who is the Jesus that these Muslims profess to love, to believe in? There are very few words of Jesus in the Quran, relatively speaking, and very few that reveal anything important about him at all.

They're almost all words about monotheism, about Allah, about demonstrating that Muhammad's a prophet. I suggest to you, you cannot love the Muslim Jesus because he's not a person, he's an argument, as has been well said.

The Muslim Jesus is a very shallow, unidimensional presentation in the Quran, and to say that you love him doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me whatsoever. And it's important that the person viewing this understand that what the Muslim is saying is, well, while I reject everything that the followers of Jesus presented about him, I still love him.

I don't believe that that's a possibility. That would make about as much sense as my saying, I love Muhammad. I don't love Muhammad. How could I? He claimed to be something I don't believe that he was.

And the Muslim is saying that the Jesus of history, the Jesus of all the scriptures, the real scriptures, not the Gnostics, it's so sad to watch Muslims depend upon Gnostics, as we will see, Gnostics who deny that there is a creator God, who deny everything that Muslims believe, and yet to see Muslims buying into the Gnostics as their source of argumentation against Christianity, for me, is one of the greatest proofs that Islam is bankrupt apologetically.

It's bankrupt as far as having a serious argument to make, because if you know anything about Gnosticism, you know that depending upon them is, well, it says a lot about Islam. But, yet as it may, they reject everything that the followers of Jesus wrote concerning what he did and who he was.

How can you say you love him when you deny what he did, and you deny what he himself said about who he was? It simply makes no sense, but it is the common thing that you see. So we're going to take a look at these alleged ten reasons, and once again demonstrate that Islam really needs to step up.

I have yet to encounter an Islamic apologist who accurately represents the Christian faith in his denial of the Christian faith. That says something about the truth level, the dedication to truth of the Islamic faith as a whole.

So let's take a look at what Josh Evans says.

Reason One: God Cannot Be Born or Created

On The Dean Show. Number 10. Number 10, the first reason, and we're going to try to go in a descending order, top 10 reasons, working our way to the number one most important reason. The first reason, beginning at the beginning, that Jesus cannot be God.

And the reason why we're going over this topic is because it's an issue of salvation. We want everyone to be saved. And this issue is a very important issue for Christians, Muslims, Jews, why Jesus cannot be God.

And the first number one reason is that God cannot be born. God did not come into existence. He's always existed. He did not come into existence from nonexistence. He was not born. He was not created.

He has always been before there was even a thing called time.

Now I appreciate the fact that Joshua Evans points out that this is a matter of salvation. As I had just pointed out, that's exactly what Jesus said in John chapter 8. It is a matter of salvation. Unless you believe that he is the I am, unless you accept his self-revelation, you will die in your sins.

So we both agree, this is a matter of salvation. I wish they'd bring it a little bit out more clearly that what they're saying is that if you die believing that Jesus is God, that you cannot have salvation.

And we're saying the exact opposite things of one another. But who can accurately handle the biblical text and the history in this matter? This first objection is, of course, a non-objection. Christians have never intimated, suggested, taught that God came into existence with Jesus.

In fact, a person who has even the slightest understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity knows that we believe that the person's Father, Son, and Spirit are eternal. That they have eternally existed in the relationship that they bear to one another.

So that the Son, who became flesh in Jesus Christ, has eternally existed as a divine person. He did not come into existence at his birth in Bethlehem in any way, shape, or form. He has eternally existed.

He's the eternal creator. He has eternally been in fellowship with the Father and with the Spirit. And so, this is a non-objection. It is an objection demonstrating that Joshua Evans does not understand the doctrine that he is actually objecting to.

And once again, I ask my Muslim friends, if I produced videos objecting to things that Muslims have never believed, never suggested that they believed, and that demonstrate I haven't even the first inkling of an understanding of Islamic theology, would you accept what I have to say?

Why then is it so easy for me to demonstrate over and over again well known individuals, from Ahmed Didat on down, that Muslims continue to look to today who clearly do not understand what they're talking about.

They are factually in error on a basic level. And what this means is, Joshua Evans was never truly a Christian. He never had any meaningful understanding of what it is he professed to believe. He didn't even know what he was professing to believe.

And so, because of that, I would strongly encourage Joshua Evans to take some time and to find out. Because if what he's denying is a straw man, it's a gross misrepresentation, then maybe he needs to look at Christianity again.

Probably help a good bit.

Reason Two: No Explicit Verse Says Jesus Is God

Okay, number nine. Let's get to it. Number nine would be that there are no explicit verses in any scriptural text, especially the Bible, that say so.