More Bad Islamic Arguments

Why Repeating Old Objections Fails

Last evening I posted a video starting a response to Shadid Lewis and very quickly after I posted it, another video was posted in response to mine. And this same person has posted previously. And it really is indicative of why I refer to the common Islamic forms of argumentation as bad Jehovah's Witness arguments.

Many of them seem to be borrowed directly from the Jehovah's Witnesses just without the same level of detail that the Witnesses are known for using. And they're very short. And the thing that still amazes me, and I don't understand this mindset, is that these individuals will continually post this material, and it's like they never ever hear what someone says in response.

I mean, if you were to do any research at all, you would see how Christians have responded to this information for literally longer than Islam has existed. But the modern Islamic apologists show no interest in knowing what Christians have said in response to their objections.

It's almost as if what we say is irrelevant. So I'm not sure who they're trying to convert. I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish. Because if you don't take the time to actually find out what the other side believes and respond to that, then what really are you doing?

Why are you engaging in any of this? And so I want to look at these arguments and demonstrate we've responded to these things many, many times before. And I'd like to ask this person, how do you respond to the response?

Go to the next step. Show that your objections have some kind of substance to them. Now, likewise, I have no idea why this person chose to use the music of Queen, We Are the Champions, as his background music.

John 17:3 and the Father as the Only True God

So I think since there's no words, I'll take that out and put something worthwhile in the background so maybe it'll be a little better. Another often made error regarding the testimony of the Lord Jesus and his deity has to do with Jesus' words in John 17 .3.

Here the Lord Jesus prays the Father and He calls the Father the only true God and says that to have life eternal, men must know the Father and they must know the one sent by the Father, Jesus Christ.

Some quickly pass over the fact that here Jesus says that life eternal involves knowing both the Father and the Son. And they likewise ignore the testimony to the deity of Christ plainly found in verse 5 as well.

Instead, they focus on Jesus' description of the Father as the only true God and mistakenly assume that this must mean that only the Father is deity. This is a simple logical error that again confuses the categories of being in person since Jesus, like all Christians today, was a monotheist.

He believed that there is only one true being of God. He worshipped that one true God, his Father, who is in heaven. But saying that there is only one true God is not the same as saying and the Father alone is true deity.

Indeed, how else again would we expect the incarnate Son to address the Father? If for a moment we just theorize that John 1 .14 is true and the eternal Word who is God became flesh, how would the God-man speak?

Would he say, you Father are just one of many gods? Of course not. In the same way, Jesus was not denying his own participation in the divine being when he properly addressed his Father here any more than he did in John 20 .17.

This is exactly how the incarnate one, Emmanuel, God with us, would speak. Those who make this error must be reminded that their own view must be tested by the exact same standard. That is, if they wish to say that Jesus is a mere creature, then please explain how it is that life eternal is gained by knowing the Almighty God and a mere creature joined on equal footing with the Creator.

And how is it that in just a matter of 14 words later, the Lord Jesus asks the Father to glorify him together with the Father, with the glory they shared together before the world was? What creature, may I ask, shares the glory of the Almighty before creation itself?

No creature, but the incarnate Son of God was the Word at that time and was indeed glorious in the presence. Now in these sections we have the common error found in so much of the information provided by Muslims and others who oppose the Doctrine of the Trinity of simply thinking that if you can demonstrate that the Father and the Son are different persons, which of course is exactly what the Doctrine of the Trinity teaches, that you somehow have proven something.

This again demonstrates they are assuming Unitarianism to prove Unitarianism, thereby showing the circularity of the system. Now in this particular instance, Jesus is talking about the fact that he and the Father are perfectly united, just as we had seen in John 5, and that his teaching is not coming from any other source but from God himself.

There is a perfect unity between the Father and the Son. He says he is sent by the Father, this is common terminology all through the Gospel of John, of the Son who is sent by the Father. So the objection that the person who put this particular video together raises, it doesn't say God, it doesn't say Father.

It says God is without merit as far as reading in context anyways, because we know who Jesus is talking about. And so Jesus says that he is sent by the Father. In this very same section in John 7, he speaks about those who would believe in him out of their innermost being would flow rivers of living water.

And in verse 39 it says,. But this he spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive. The Spirit was not yet given because Jesus was not yet what? Glorified. Glorified. That's the same term we see in John 17, 5, where Jesus is glorified in the presence of the Father before creation itself began, something that clearly could not have been said about a mere razul, about a mere creation of God.

And so again we see John 7 being taken out of context, the entire surrounding context being ignored, and all we have is a demonstration that once again, our Muslim debaters don't even take the time to find out what the doctrines are that they're seeking to deny.

And this again just simply says to the Christian, we have to be ready to explain these things and to help people to understand what the truth really is.