39 - Islamic Impact Part 1

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, I guess we'll get a little early start here. We have come to the section in church history.

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I introduced it just briefly in the last lesson, where I will attempt to be fairly brief.

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I gave you a little bit of my own background in how things have changed since I first took church history in seminary, in looking at the subject of Islam and its interaction with the

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Christian faith and its importance in the history of the Christian faith. It's not that you could study

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Islam in the 80s, or study church history in the 80s and not recognize that there had been interaction with Islam.

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You'd look at the Crusades. You'd look at what was going on at the time of the

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Reformation, with the Turks invading from the east. Certainly, those things were there, and when you'd look at Eastern Orthodoxy and what's called the

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Echinoclastic Controversy, the division between the east and the west, where statues were eschewed in the east but accepted in the west, what was one of the primary issues there?

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Well, from mid -600s onward, the east is in constant contact, either under the auspices of, or around the borders of, or having interaction with Islam, and hence the idea of the charge of idolatry and statue worship and things like that.

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All of that was there, but it just was not emphasized very much.

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And then, after 9 -11, you'd have an increase, and of course, given the work that I've been doing and continue to do regularly, more and more study of the interaction and the impact that it's had down through the generations.

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And so, in introducing the subject, there's numbers of ways in which it can be done.

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What I'll probably do is, as I did in my book, if you've seen it,

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Whatever a Christian Needs to Know About the Quran, which is more than just the Quran, I pretty much covered the major theological issues using the

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Quran as sort of the outline for that. But give you the standard

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Islamic understandings of who Muhammad was, what his life was, what the Quran is, etc.,

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etc. But, along the way, recognizing that there are a lot of areas of dispute, that there are other possibilities that have been raised, especially over the past number of decades, as to the historicity of these things.

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Just as there are people who question the existence of Jesus historically, there are people who question the existence of Muhammad historically.

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And one could argue both sides of that particular question, if you wish to do so.

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But obviously, if you're going to end up speaking to a Muslim individual, they are going to have been taught the standard story concerning Muhammad and the

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Quran. And so, you're going to at least want to understand what that standard story is, even if we mention a few criticisms of it along the way.

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It's really not meant to be a refutation, just sort of an introduction to these particular issues.

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I've put the dates on the board that are traditionally given to Muhammad, born somewhere around 570, dies in 632.

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The standard story is that he is orphaned early on in life, that his life centers around the city of Mecca, which, of course, is the center of the

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Islamic world today. There are a lot of people who have raised some very serious questions about whether Mecca as any type of meaningfully large, even settlement, existed in the days of Muhammad.

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There are what are called Orientalists, who have raised serious questions, and I could actually destroy your hearing and blow your eardrums out, your eyeballs straight out.

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Yeah, see, you don't. That's why. Yeah, just held the eyeballs in, good, okay. When George sneezes, the world moves.

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The orbit of the earth just wobbled. Irma changed its course, everything, yeah. That was that 8 .1

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earthquake in Mexico, George sneezed. People listening to this 30 years from now are going to wonder, what in the world happened there?

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Moses was in the bulrushes. Where were we? Oh, yeah, Muhammad. And there are people who would point to certain issues, but we're just going to give you sort of the

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Muslim perspective here, is that Mecca, while not a huge place, was an important place religiously because of what is known today as the

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Grand Mosque and what it surrounds called the Kaaba. Now, if you, the

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Kaaba is K -A -A -B -A -H approximately. These are all transliterations, and you'll see different versions of it, obviously.

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If you've seen pictures of what's called Hajj, H -A -J -J, which

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I first heard of watching a cartoon as a kid called

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Johnny Quest, Hajji, that was my first introduction to Islamic theology.

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I had no idea what in the world it was, but in hindsight, I came to understand that someone is a

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Hajji if they have gone on Hajj. But anyway, if you have ever seen pictures of Hajj, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, we'll look at those five pillars a little bit later on, but the fifth pillar is

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Hajj. It's every Muslim who has the ability and the health to do so is obligated once in their life to go on Hajj, to go to Mecca and Medina and to do the various religious pilgrimage rites that one does there.

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You'll see video of huge numbers of Muslims circumambulating a black, not perfectly square building.

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And that black building is called the Kaaba. It is that which contains in one of its corners the black stone.

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And that is the direction toward which Muslims bow in prayer.

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And so you can go online right now and download to your phone, like someone in the

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Bible study class is doing something on their phone right now, I'm not sure what it is, but you could go to the App Store and download a

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Qibla program and it will use GPS to give you the

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Qibla. In any mosque you go to, if you want to go to the mosque over here on I -17, go to the mosque over at ASU, you will discover that inside the mosque the place of prayer is oriented in a particular direction and the architecture will be such that there is a sort of an arrow.

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And that's where the worshippers face when they do their five daily prayers.

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And that arrow points to the black stone and the

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Kaaba in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. And so you can get to nice little programs on your phones now that will make sure you're facing the right direction.

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That's obviously a fairly modern innovation, but you can do that. I'm not really sure why anyone in here would want to do that, but I do have one of those programs on my phone, not that I've ever had to use it, but it also is useful for other things like what time of the day the prayers are, because I cannot tell you how many of my debates have been interrupted by the prayers.

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The last one I did in Birmingham went way late in the evening because we got started late and therefore the prayers showed up right in the middle of everything, we just had to stop everything while the

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Muslims went to the corner of the room and prayed and then we got back to it. So it's good to know when those daily prayers are and when they're going to interrupt things.

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So anyway, Mecca is the center of all things and traditionally the

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Kaaba, and you can see inside the Kaaba by the way, if you go on YouTube and put inside the Kaaba, there are a couple videos of people who had connections amongst the

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Saudis. Because the Saudis of course control the Kaaba, and by the way, ISIS would love to blow up the Kaaba, a lot of people don't know that and wonder why.

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They consider it idolatrous, they consider that it has become a place of idolatry yet once again the

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Saudi royal family does not truly practice Sharia from their perspective and therefore it has become a place of idolatry and so one of the reasons for the high, high, high security, especially during periods of Hajj, is so that ISIS can't blow up the

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Kaaba. Which for some other reasons, there is a quote unquote Christian apologist who has made the suggestion,

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I first heard it while teaching at a Reformed Baptist church in Houston years ago, a guy asked,

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I was speaking on Islam and a guy asked during Sunday school, he said, what do you think about Christians who suggest the best way to deal with Islam is to nuke the

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Kaaba, drop a nuclear bomb on the Kaaba? And after I caught my breath,

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I gave a response I normally don't give, but I did, I said that's the stupidest thing

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I've ever heard in my life. I can't think of anything that would unify the world's

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Muslims any better, including the Sunnis and the Shia, than nuking the Kaaba. A Western power blowing up the

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Kaaba, talk about unifying 1 .5 billion people into one armed force, that's really intelligent.

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But there are people who actually think that should be on the table, that if ISIS, but again

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ISIS wants to do the same thing, so it's just the stupidest thing I've ever heard of and there are people who still defend this idea, even to this day.

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But anyway, the fact that there have been a lot of dumb Christian statements about Islam is not really a disputable issue, but we'll try to avoid most of those in our conversation.

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The Kaaba historically, that black building you see today is not the building that exists in Muhammad's day, it's been torn down and rebuilt many many times, the current one

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I think was done in the 60s or 70s, somewhere around there, so it's not all that old. But the site is the issue, and the black stone is the issue, and if you go online,

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I have all these pictures if I wanted to bring my computer in and hook it up and put the digital projector up and all that kind of stuff, we could have done that, but that doesn't help the folks in the church history, audio only stuff very much, so I didn't do that.

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But in my presentation on Islam, I normally show you pictures of the Kaaba, the inside of the

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Kaaba, the black stone, Muhammad Ali looking at the black stone when he made pilgrimage to Hajj and stuff like that years ago.

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The black stone is a meteorite, and allegedly when it fell down from heaven it was white, but it's turned black because of the sins of man, so there you go.

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It clearly to me had pagan origination as did the circumambulation around the

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Kaaba, even Islamic sources say that prior to the purification of the Kaaba by Muhammad, there were 360 or 365 idols in the

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Kaaba, and those were all purged by Muhammad, and the circumambulation of the

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Kaaba, which you have to do seven times as part of Hajj, used to be done naked, now it's done in what's called haram, this white clothing.

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The idea being that everyone has to wear the same thing, and so it doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor, powerful or not powerful, everybody's put down the same level, etc.

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etc. The community of what's called the ummah, when you hear Muslims talk about the ummah, that is the community, worldwide

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Islamic community, and that's really what jihad is, jihad is simply defense of the ummah, wherever it might be, and that's the excuse used today.

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Israel is attacking part of the ummah in Palestine, and therefore all Muslims have the responsibility to defend the

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Palestinian ummah. Of course, there are all sorts of very rich Middle Eastern Muslim nations that could take care of all the

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Palestinians quite easily, but they won't do that because it's all politics. But anyway, so the story is that Muhammad is born in this context of idolatry, from a

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Muslim perspective by the way. The Kaaba was originally built by Abraham and Ishmael.

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Ishmael is the one who's offered on the altar in the Islamic concept.

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Ishmael is the important person, not Isaac, because the traditional idea is that Ishmael is the father of the

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Arabs, and therefore the promises are to Ishmael, therefore the promises are to the

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Arabs, not to the Jews. And there's no evidence that Abraham ever went there or did anything there at all.

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It's pure speculation without any type of historical foundation to it, but that's the

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Islamic idea, is that it was originally founded as a place of monotheistic worship of Allah by Abraham and his son,

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Ishmael. And so that's where the line of promise actually is supposed to come from.

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But over time, the Kaaba became corrupted initially by the idea that there could be intermediaries and then eventually those intermediaries become the actual objects of worship until it was a place of polytheistic idolatry in the days of Muhammad.

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And so Muhammad, the story goes, as a young person was orphaned.

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His parents died as Mushrikun, and I suppose that is a term that would be good to know.

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If I can get the top off of this thing, there we go. Mushrikun.

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Mushrik comes from the term shirk. In Semitic languages, almost always when you have a muh in front of any other root, that's a participial form, same as in Hebrew.

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And so a mushrik is a person committing shirk. The term shirk in classical and even modern

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Arabic would refer to association. So like a corporation, the root form of that would be shirk.

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But religiously, shirk is the association of anyone or anything with Allah in worship.

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And hence it's the closest identification to idolatry that we would have in our vocabulary is shirk.

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And according to the Quran, shirk is the unforgivable sin.

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Now that needs to be understood in the Islamic sense. Unforgivable in the sense that if you die as a mushrik, as one of the mushrikun, that's a plural form, if you die as a mushrik, there can be no forgiveness, which means in Islam there is post -mortem forgiveness.

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So Allah is free to forgive you of any sin even upon your death, except for shirk.

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Shirk is the worst sin. Because shirk is the violation of the most positive command in Islam, and that is

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Tawhid. Tawhid is the oneness of Allah.

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There is only one God, Allah. In the modern formulation, this includes

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Unitarianism over against Trinitarianism. It's not just monotheism, but it's Unitarian monotheism.

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One person, one God. Tawhid, this is the central affirmation of Islamic theology.

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And therefore to violate the most important revelation of God, of Tawhid, is the one unforgivable sin.

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So Muhammad's parents died as mushrikun, and Muhammad actually, according to Islamic sources, asked for the right to intercede for his parents after their death, once he became a prophet.

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But Allah did not allow him to do so. This is part of the evidence of the seriousness of shirk, is that even

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Muhammad was not allowed to intercede for his own parents, who died as mushrikun.

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Now there is one slight exception to this particular part of the story, and that is, and again the sources aren't completely 100 % consistent on this, but there is someone else who died as a mushrik that Muhammad was allowed to pray for.

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And it was his uncle, Abu Talib. I guess I might as well put it up there if we're next to the board.

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Abu Talib was Muhammad's uncle, and once Muhammad begins preaching monotheism, in the year 610, he is meditating in a cave.

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He is dissatisfied with the polytheism of his day.

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It is said that as a youth he had gone on caravan up into Syria. A Christian prophet had seen his back, and there was a mole on his back, and the

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Christian prophet saw it as the sign of prophethood. Didn't know that was the sign of prophethood.

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Do we have any prophets? I don't know. And so the later stories clearly embellished, very obviously embellished, about Muhammad's mother and things like that, and this happens fairly early on.

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The earliest biography is by someone named Ibn Ishaq, and we don't even have it.

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We only have it mediated through somebody else. But even by that point in time, these stories have become very much embellished.

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And so allegedly Muhammad has never been a mushrik. He's very disturbed by the polytheism in Mecca, and so he's outside of Mecca, and he's meditating in this cave when he is commissioned as a prophet by the angel

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Jibril, who we would identify as Gabriel. And the initial description of this is very interesting, that the angel is sort of everywhere that Muhammad looks along the horizon.

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This is a huge angel. He cannot get away from him, and he tells him to recite

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Qara' from which we get Quran. You can find these first few words that I recall off the top of my head,

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Surah 95. But anyway, Muhammad's response to this, to us, should be quite striking.

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And once again, these are all from Islamic sources. His response to this is to try to kill himself.

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He believes he has been possessed by a jinn, by a spirit, and he does not want this to be his life, and so he tells his wife, who is older than he is, a rich woman who married him and sort of put him in control of her possessions, named

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Khadijah, tells

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Khadijah, and she wraps him in a cloak, which some people have interpreted as a sign of prophethood, but tells him that he shouldn't do this, and sort of talks him down off the ledge.

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But it is really interesting that the first response from the Muslim sources of Muhammad to this encounter with this being is that he wants to kill himself.

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That is not exactly what you have in the Christian and Jewish sources.

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You may have conviction of sin, such as with Isaiah, but you don't want to jump off a cliff as a result.

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Though Jonah, but that wasn't because of the encounter with God. That was because he didn't like what

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God was doing in being merciful to the Ninevites, so that was a very different situation. Anyway, once he accepts his call to prophethood, he is a part of the clan that has control of the

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Kaaba, and Mecca cannot support itself apart from caravan trip.

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There is really no arable land in that area, so they can't grow their own food. And so their primary economic income comes from pilgrims coming to worship the

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Kaaba. Well, how wonderful is it to have one of the members of the clan that is in control of the

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Kaaba start preaching against the Kaaba? This is not a good thing. They are called the

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Quraish. So he is of the tribe of Quraish.

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And so from 610 to 622, so for 12 years,

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Muhammad is a minority prophet there in Mecca, and he is a persecuted minority.

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There is the story told, I'm coming back to Abu Talib, I didn't forget about him.

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I'll get to him in a second. We're sort of wandering around here. I don't even have my iPad on. I'm just off the top of the head type thing today.

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The story is told, it's a fascinating story, and it's a touching story to be honest with you, of Muhammad's daughter coming across him.

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He has bowed in prayer, and some of his enemies there in Mecca have come along, and while he is prostrate in prayer, they have thrown camel entrails, camel guts, from a slaughtered camel all over him.

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And his little daughter comes along and is picking the camel entrails off of Muhammad.

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And this is where you get sections from the Quran about religious freedom, because when you're a persecuted minority, you talk about having the freedom to worship

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Allah as you should, things like that. Though it's interesting, even here, sources wise,

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I'll use a different color here. Sources wise, I've been mentioning the...

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Go long. We have more of them back there.

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We'll keep trying until we find one. Okay. One more, and we're going back just one color.

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We have the Quran, and then you have what are called the

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Hadith. And the

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Quran, 114 chapters called surah, surat, plural, divide into ayat, ayah, verses.

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It's 55 % the length of the New Testament, 14 % the length of the Bible. So it's not long, it's not big.

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And that is considered to be the very word of God in a very mechanical fashion.

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In the sense that it exists on a heavenly tablet and has for eternity. It is not created.

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The eventual Sunni, not Shiite. Shiites don't have this.

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The Sunni orthodoxy that developed within 200 years after Muhammad, is that the

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Quran is uncreated. It has the same attribute of God of being uncreated.

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Now that raises all sorts of questions and controversies, and you can look historically at some of the caliphs, the caliphate, the caliph is the leader of the

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Muslims. There are certain caliphs that did not clearly believe this early on.

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And so on and so forth. But Sunni orthodoxy today is that the

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Quran is uncreated. It exists on a heavenly tablet. And then, man

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I am bouncing all over the place. Is this so much? I said to you all last week, I'll never describe myself as an expert in Islam because you're a student.

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There's just so much that I started in my 40s. It's too late in life to ever become really an expert, no matter how much time you spend studying it.

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Or even interacting with Muslim scholarship. But the Quran is sent down to the angel

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Jibril in the month of Ramadan.

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And what is the month of Ramadan? The month of Ramadan is the ninth month of the

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Islamic calendar. And the Muslims to this day do not use a solar calendar like all the rest of us.

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They use a lunar calendar. And so their year is about 10 to 11 days shorter than our year is.

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So if you've ever noticed, Ramadan, that month of fasting, where the

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Muslim will not eat or drink from sunrise to sunset basically, it's actually a little bit before sunrise and a little bit after sunset, but anyway, eat or drink, including water.

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That month, you may have noticed, moves forward in our year each year by 10 to 11 days.

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It's currently in June, I think, and will soon be in May. So in the month of Ramadan, on what is called

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Laylatul Qadr, believe me, when we get done with this, you'll have been given significantly more information than 99 % of seminary students that graduate with Masters of Divinity.

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I hate to tell you that, but it's true. Laylatul Qadr is called the

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Night of Power. Qadr literally means power.

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It also means predestination. So I just did a dialogue, discussion, debate, whatever you want to call it, with Yusuf Ismail in Durban, South Africa, about three weeks ago.

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We were contrasting, or attempting to contrast, the biblical doctrine of predestination, election, and God's sovereignty with the

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Islamic concept of Qadr. First time I've ever heard anybody have a discussion about that, but we try to do new things anyways.

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Laylatul Qadr means the Night of Power, and it is the night in which the Quran was sent down via Jibreel, was given to Jibreel, sent down to Earth, and then over the next 22 years, from 610 to 632, it is revealed piecemeal to Muhammad.

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So Jibreel would come to Muhammad, Muhammad would go into this state of almost a trans -like state, he would sweat profusely, and then when he would come out of this state, he would have portions of the

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Quran that he would then dictate, and his followers would seek to memorize. Not write down, necessarily, but would seek to memorize.

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There's a lot of discussion as to exactly how the Quran came about. So, in Islamic theology today,

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Laylatul Qadr is a very important night, because prayers said on that night have 10 ,000 times the effect and worth of prayers said on any other night.

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The problem is they're not sure exactly which night it is. The theory is, and it's different between Shia and Sunni, but the theory is it's either 21st, 23rd, 25th, 27th, or if there is a 29th, because it depends on the month, night of Ramadan.

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Probably the 23rd or 25th. And so, knowing as many

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Muslims as I do, I know that during Ramadan, there's no reason to try to contact those folks during the days of the last week of Ramadan, because they're all staying up all night on those odd -numbered nights.

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And if you drive by the mosque over here, drive by the one over in ASU, whatever, those nights you will see the parking lots full, because they are having all -night vigils, prayer services, during Ramadan, so that if you go every one of those nights, you nail

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Laylatul Qadr. But that revelation is then piecemealed out to Muhammad, and that becomes what is known as the

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Quran. The Hadith are the sayings and actions of Muhammad and his companions, so that first generation of Muslim followers, that have been compiled into various collections.

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The Sunni and the Shia have different collections. The Shia collections are really weird, I'll be perfectly honest with you.

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Shiism is interesting, very, very interesting. It's a lot easier for us

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Westerners to understand Sunni theology than it is Shiite theology in practice.

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The Hadith, the Sunni have six authoritative collections of Hadith, and the two most authoritative, most complete ones are called

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Sahih al -Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Sahih means sound, so there is this incredibly complex system whereby you analyze

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Hadith on the basis of what's called their Isnad chains, I -S -N -A -D, who narrated to whom, who narrated to whom, who narrated to whom, who said this is what happened.

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And it's an incredibly complex chain of stuff, and there are some

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Hadith that are considered unsound, there's various levels of unsoundness, but then

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Sahih is considered to be sound. And when you hear people talking about Sharia, Sharia law is based upon the interpretation of the

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Hadith and then the codification of laws that come from that over time, Islamic jurisprudence.

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There isn't just one form of Sharia. It was so sad, I don't know if anybody saw it yesterday, but I saw, Sean did you see, it happened to pop up on your

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Facebook feed, this woman, there's a Canadian politician, and this woman gets in his face at this community meeting, did you see it?

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And she's just yelling and screaming about Sharia and everything else, the guy is Sikh, it's just because he has a turban on, and the woman is so stupid that she's yelling at this guy as if he's a

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Muslim, and he's a Sikh, he doesn't believe in Sharia, but she's yelling and screaming about Sharia, and he was very patient with her, gotta admit, give the guy kudos,

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I would have sat there and gone, hey, bozo, I ain't a

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Muslim, you know, that would have been the easiest thing to do, but he didn't do that, it is

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Canada, there's something in the maple syrup that just sort of does something, I don't know, but anyway, it was so sad, it was just like, really, seriously lady?

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Wow, but how did I get onto the Sikhs from that,

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Ramadan, Sharia, Sharia, there's many different forms of Sharia, there's all sorts of different understandings of Sharia, and so for people running around going, well, we need to oppose

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Sharia, it's like asking, so you need to oppose the

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Christian view of God's law, right? Oops, which one is that? We have our own disputes on that particular subject, and the

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Muslims have theirs as well, as to exactly what is in Sharia, I was just sent a 320 or 330,

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I've got to look at it again, because we've got to convert to MP3, page Fatwa, Fatwa is a legal decision based upon Sharia, against suicide bombings and murder of non -believers, and it gets extremely, extremely complex, it really, really does, but Sharia is primarily based upon the

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Hadith, and the interpretation of the Hadith over time. These are large collections,

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Bukhari is 8 volumes English -Arabic, Muslim is 9 volumes English -Arabic, so there's thousands of Hadith, and I have not read all the

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Hadith, I've read all of Bukhari, all of Muslim, a large portion of Jamiat Termini, Sunan Abu Dawud, and others of these that have been relevant to my studies.

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So the Hadith is a very large body of material, and by the way, it's a really neat way to open doors,

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I was in London just a few weeks ago, as you know, and for a while,

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I actually put out on Facebook at one point, or maybe Twitter, I said, is it a law that if you're going to drive for Uber in London, you have to be

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Muslim? Because the church would keep getting an Uber car for me, especially in the evening, because I could get to the church

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I was ministering at on the tube and the train fairly easily during the day, but they didn't want me doing that necessarily alone at night, even though it would probably be fairly safe.

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So I had, I don't know how many hours of conversation.

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The guy picked me up at Heathrow, took me to the hotel, they're all

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Muslims, and if you want to open the door to a discussion with a Muslim Uber driver or cab driver in London, just narrate some

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Hadith to them. They're like, you're a Christian and you're narrating

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Hadith? Wow, okay, tell me about this. I had a grand old time witnessing to all my

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Uber drivers. My last Uber driver had a Catholic background from Uganda, I think.

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So you run into everything. I mean, you just run into everything in London. We Americans are so insulated and so focused upon just here that you get to London and it's like, wow, there's a big world out there, and they don't always have the same priorities that we do.

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It's fascinating. So anyway, we're trying to get back to Abu Talib here. So this is a

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Quran, this is a Hadith. The information I'm giving you, especially when we get back here to talking about Abu Talib, is primarily drawn from the

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Quran, the Hadith, and then there are other things that make up what's called the

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Sunnah, the life of the prophet. I mentioned to you already Ibn Ishaq's early biography of Muhammad and things like that.

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These are all sources that are utilized. But they all come from the Hadith are not gathered until at least 250 years after Muhammad.

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So that's a long time. I mean, you're talking not quite as far down, right around, it's fairly close actually to the time of the

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Council of Nicaea from the birth of Christ. So there's a time period there that you're dealing with, and it's not nearly as literate a society as Rome was as far as the epistolary literature and having, you know, we've got all sorts of early church fathers writing way, way before any of the collections we have of the

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Hadith. So these are the sources that we're drawing on here to give you these stories.

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So we come back here. Muhammad is preaching against polytheism in Mecca.

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The Quraysh want him dead. He is one of the Quraysh, and his uncle, Abu Talib, is one of the most powerful of the

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Quraysh. And Abu Talib protects Muhammad. He will not allow the

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Quraysh to either banish him or to kill him. And so this goes on until what's called the

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Hijra. The Hijra is year zero of the

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Islamic calendar. The Hijra is when Muhammad's followers and eventually Muhammad himself leave

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Mecca. It's when they go from Mecca to what is eventually called

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Medina. Medina at the time was called Yathrib, but eventually becomes the city of the prophet

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Medina. So all the Hajj stuff that takes place there takes place between Mecca and Medina. And we are not allowed in these cities.

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These are holy cities. You can't go in them, even to this day. I can show you signs on the freeways in Saudi Arabia.

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Non -Muslims exit here. You're not allowed. I misspelled Mecca. That's good.

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There's two C's there. I'm not sure. We will get to finish the story of Abu Talib before we wrap things up here.

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On Abu Talib's deathbed, Muhammad comes to him and he says,

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Look, you know that I am the prophet of Allah. You need to make that confession.

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The confession that makes you a Muslim in Islam is a simple confession.

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It only takes a few words. It's called the Shahada. I guess

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I'll put this over here. The Shahada.

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And it can only be done in Arabic. You cannot become a

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Muslim by simply saying these words in English. It has to be done in Arabic.

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And so the first part of the confession is that there is only one God worthy of worship, Allah. The second part is, and Muhammad is his prophet.

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Don't worry. There's also seven necessary elements to a true

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Shahada, which means you also actually have to believe it. So I can say it in Arabic until the cows come home. It won't make any difference.

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But he attempts to get Abu Talib to say this, but the rest of the family is on the other side of the bed saying,

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Do not deny the ancestral gods, etc., etc., etc., etc. And the fact is that Abu Talib dies as a mushrik.

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And so the one exception is that Muhammad is allowed to pray for Abu Talib.

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And as a result, Abu Talib has the best spot in hell.

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Now whenever I say that, I look around the room, and everybody's looking at me going,

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So what does the best spot in hell look like? Do we have, no?

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It's the Scottsdale address in hell. Yeah, it's an 852 something. Definitely, yeah.

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What does the best spot in hell look like? Well, there are differing versions of this in the

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Hadith as to the specifics, but they all pretty much agree on the same thing.

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And that is that Abu Talib, and I like this version of it best, I'll give you the second one, but Abu Talib is wearing sandals that are so hot that his brains boil.

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That's the garden spot of hell. The other version is he's standing in fire up to his ankles that is so hot that his brains boil.

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I like the sandal idea personally. I think it gives a little sort of kick to the story.

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So Queen Creek. Yeah, Queen Creek, yeah. So, no one's going to understand that, but that's okay.

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No, this is a little bit more like Yuma. Yuma's the best we got, so it just goes downhill from there.

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The point being, obviously, that the commission of shirk is exceptionally dangerous.

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It is a bad, bad thing to commit shirk. And as we will see, one of the major barriers that we face when we seek to witness to Muslims is the fact that they believe that we are inviting them to commit shirk because they believe that our view of Jesus is the association of a mere human prophet with God and his worship, and therefore we are mushrikun.

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There are some Muslims that do not believe that, but they are in the small minority. The vast majority of Muslims, especially from overseas, believe that we are mushrikun.

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Not only kafir, kafir means unbeliever, but we are mushrikun. And therefore, to invite them to believe what we believe is to invite them to commit shirk.

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And that's unforgivable. So if they die as a mushrik, there can be no forgiveness for that sin.

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So that's a huge barrier to the gospel. There are three that we will discuss over time, but that is probably the most serious of the three.

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Maybe not the most difficult to get over. There's one other that's probably a little tougher, but that's what a mushrik is.

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So we covered a lot of ground there just to get back around to that particular point, but maybe that's a little bit...

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I'm finding that narrative presentation of difficult material ends up being more memorable to people than just plain old outline type stuff and things like that.

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So covering things as you're going along sort of gives a framework to remember it in. Okay, we are out of time.

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Let's close the Word of Prayer. Father, we do thank you once again for this opportunity and this opportunity here of preparation, understanding.

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We do ask for opportunities to present your truth to those who have been given a different way, a way that will not lead to eternal life and to peace with you.

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So help us to remember. Go with us now as we go into worship. May you be pleased with all that is done. It is in Christ's name that we pray.