Equal Scales, Double Standards

The Problem of a Slapped-Together Response and the Need for Spiritual Dependence

I would like to very briefly comment on a response that was posted yesterday to the video that my ministry posted in cooperation with Ivey Connerly, where Brother Connerly and I together worked on a, I guess it's called, spoken word.

It's a lyrical, poetic way of expressing deep doctrinal truth, in this case, where we provided a response to Kamal Saleh's Islamic version, which was a response to another version of a video, and after a while you just start losing track of who's responding to who.

So this is a response to a response to our response to the response of the original, if you can follow any of that. Anyway, we posted that just yesterday, and within just a matter of hours, a response was published, put on YouTube.

It's very poorly done. I mean, I don't want to be mean, but you just look at it, and it was slapped together. It's just text or bad Akhmed Didat videos and other videos thrown together. There's a lot of mockery in it, so I'm not even going to play any of it because it's really not worthy of that.

What I did want to do in responding to at least the mindset of it is hopefully do two things. First of all, call the individuals who would produce material like this to a higher standard, to point out that there are Muslims who don't stoop to this level and commend them, and also to recognize and say to my fellow Christian brothers and sisters that no matter how clearly or even forcefully you speak the truth, unless the Spirit of God causes that to come alive in someone's heart, we are completely dependent upon the Spirit, and that is both our limitation as well as our great joy because the Spirit of God, when He moves in someone's heart, there is no power in heaven and earth that can stop Him.

But if He does not move, there is no power in heaven and earth that can accomplish the spiritual resurrection of a dead sinner. So, let's talk a little bit about this response. It was about 15 minutes of Ahmed Didat videos and some Bart Ehrman videos.

Misusing 1 John 5:7 and Ignoring the Trinity

I'm wondering if that was even legal, and then some, again, the inane, and my, please, Muslim friends, please hear me. We know about 1 John 5 -7, okay? We've known about it for hundreds of years. It is not the only verse in the Bible about the Trinity, okay?

If you think that, you just have to realize if you want to be serious in giving dawah and actually calling someone to Islam, then you have to get past using Ahmed Didat videos and really bad, ignorant argumentation.

You've got to. In fact, it's so bad, it makes me wonder, honestly, who are you producing this for? You're not producing it for me. You're not producing it for any Christian who is serious about their faith, knows something about the Bible, knows something about biblical translations, knows something about biblical manuscripts.

You're not producing it for anybody like that. So, who are you producing it for? And I sat around this morning a bit in the midst of other things thinking about that, and I finally came to the conclusion, the only people you are producing these videos for is you.

You're trying to convince yourselves. You're trying to just throw mud out at arguments that you don't understand, that you aren't interested in taking the time to understand, and you're basically trying to reconvince the already convinced.

Apologetics, Dawah, and the Question of Motivation

And as I thought about that, I could not help but compare and contrast the motivations of true Christians who engage in apologetics, because true apologetics always has an evangelistic element. Just as in Islam, dawah is sort of a mixture of the two.

I mean, it's a calling to submission, but it's also an answering of argumentation. In the same way, real Christian apologetics involves evangelism, the announcement of the gospel. If you're not at least paving the way for evangelism, then you're not really doing meaningful apologetics.

And I started thinking about the differences in motivation between us. I want to try to speak as clearly as I can without compromise so that you might understand. That doesn't seem to be the motivation of many, not all, many of those who address the subject of dawah from the Islamic perspective.

It concerns me. I am concerned when I see people who call themselves Christians using Islam as a pretense for self-promotion, and there have been people who have done that. We know that quite well. But you must understand that the vast majority of Christians who read the Quran and read the Hadith and listen to lectures, we do what we do because we really are concerned and care about the Muslim people.

And so we have this standard that we sometimes fail to meet. We're not perfect, but at least we have a standard that we're trying to meet of accurately representing what the other side's saying. And I'm constantly trying to get a better understanding of how Muslims think, and there's a lot of different Muslims, so it's not all that easy to do.

But I don't see but a small number, very small number of Muslims on the other side. Now, I do see Muslims on the other side that would have dialogue with me, but they're not doing a lot of dawah. They're not doing a lot of calling to Islam.

The ones who make the most noise seem to be the ones who are the least interested in the accuracy of their presentations, and least interested in, quite honestly, being logical in their arguments. For example, right at the beginning of the video, they interrupted Ivey right in between some of his words, and where he was talking about Jesus was not just a prophet.

And they quoted Matthew chapter 21, verses 10 through 11, where someone identified Jesus as the prophet from Nazareth, and then said, noticed they said prophet, not God. They could have early said God, but they didn't.

Now, obviously, whoever made this, their first language isn't English. We understand that. That's fine. But it's the mindset that I have to go, I don't care what your original language is. Are you seriously arguing that every time Jesus is mentioned in the Bible, it has to say God or he's not?

Double Standards in Arguments Against Christianity

Here's one of the big problems that I have with so much of what I see from Muslims arguing against my faith. You don't use the same standards in arguing against me that you use in defending your own faith.

And that, if you don't understand that that demonstrates that you are lacking truth, that I don't know even know how to speak to you. The use of double standards demonstrates that you simply are incapable of mounting a meaningful, truthful argument.

For example, it's so easy to refute the use of Matthew chapter 21. First of all, logically, we believe that Jesus was the incarnate son of God, but we also believe he was a prophet. And we also believe that he was, he's our high priest, and that he is king, and that he's the son of man, and son of God, and king of kings, and lord of lords, and all sorts of things.

So, by your reasoning, every single time Jesus is mentioned, you say, and he's God, and he's God, and he's God. It's absurd. It's ridiculous. And you don't hold yourself to that standard. Is every single time Muhammad is mentioned in the Quran, is it said, Muhammad, the last and final, the greatest prophet, and the one after which none other will come, and the greatest example of all mankind.

Does it say all that after every time it says Muhammad? Would it be a meaningful argument for you to say, see, see, Muhammad isn't all those things, because every time the Quran mentions him, it doesn't say this.

Who thinks like this? I mean, honestly, in any kind of real life situation, who thinks like this? And yet, this is put forward by a Muslim as an argument against my faith. And I just go, why is it that I try not to use arguments against your faith that would refute mine?

Because that's untruthful. That's dishonest. It's illogical. It's irrational. But you don't mind using arguments that, totally inconsistent with your own worldview, totally inconsistent with your own position, but you'll put them out there.

Why is that? That seems to be a very common element of Islamic argumentation. Then I showed up in this particular video from a debate I did with Osama Abdullah, which was not much of a debate. I mean, I don't know how anyone could rationally view that debate and not go, wow, that was really lopsided.

That was really bad. But the citation was about the book of Hebrews. Now, Hebrews is an anonymous book. There is no name attached to it. We don't know who wrote it. And there's a bunch of books in the Old Testament.

We don't know who wrote them. And I said, so what? Why is that relevant? I mean, you may make a standard and then try to apply it to previous books, but that has nothing to do with me. I mean, would you want me to lie about Hebrews and say, oh yes, Paul wrote that.

There are people who think Paul wrote that. I don't think Paul wrote that. I think it was someone who was close to Paul. I think it was either Apollos or the language and syntax is very Lucan. So maybe it was a sermon of Paul where Luke translated into Greek.

I don't know. I don't need to know. It's irrelevant. God does not have to provide me with a social security number of every person who wrote a book of the scriptures for them to be inspired. And so I'm just, I'm left confused as to why any of this is relevant.

Because it's not, I mean, are you seriously going to attempt to demand an Isnod chain? Where did the prophets or Jesus or the apostles ever use that standard? It just doesn't make any sense, once again.

Bart Ehrman, the Gospel of John, and the Misuse of Sources

Then you had all the long quotes of Ahmed Didat, which again, when are you fans of Ahmed Didat going to realize that this man was not a good apologist? We have demonstrated errors on his part over and over and over again, and no one's bothered to try to rehabilitate him at all in any way, shape, or form.

You can't because he was wrong. So you got a bunch of Ahmed Didat videos and then you have Bart Ehrman. I just, you all love Bart Ehrman. You don't seem to realize every time you quote Bart Ehrman, you're refuting yourself because the consistent application of his position to the Quran would be the refutation of the Quran.

But you don't care about that. You don't care that you're quoting an apostate as long as he supports your position, and you don't care that the worldview from which he's drawing that would refute your own position.

You just, how can that be? That again demonstrates a lack of concern for the use of sources. Now, in this particular instance, there is this, and again, I've done entire seminars available on YouTube where I have refuted Ehrman on these things, and you all don't even seem to know that they exist or even care to even try to rehabilitate his argumentation.

I mean, you don't care if you're using refuted arguments as long as it supports your position. That says something about your view of truth. But specifically, you quote Bart Ehrman ignoring the fact that in the Gospel of John, the word for Friday is Preparation Day, where Bart Ehrman is talking about, well, clearly, you know, John has a different day of the crucifixion and the synoptics.

That was refuted long before Bart Ehrman was born by scholars far greater than Bart Ehrman, though Bart Ehrman probably wouldn't think so. And I just have to ask the question, why are you not concerned about that?

Why do you just repeat it? Because, well, it sounds like our side. That uncritical, throw everything but the kitchen sink at somebody and see what sticks, doesn't matter if I use sources that refute my own position type methodology.

Again, says to me, you don't care about truth itself. And that just doesn't make any sense. And nowhere does this really come across even more clearly than in reference to the Kamiohanium, the addition to 1 John chapter 5 verse 7.

Proverbs 16:11, Justice, and the Scales of Truth

Look, folks, like I said, we've known about this for a long time, and there isn't any question about it. Think about it this way. What if we left it in there? In fact, why didn't we? If the way you think that we want to, we just play around with the text of scripture, like, you know, we just, we fiddle with God's Word, why don't we leave it in there?

Why is it that, for example, you know, up until the 13th century, no Greek manuscript contained it. Why is that? I mean, people believe in the Trinity all along. Why is it that the Greek speaking and Greek writing Christians who were under so much pressure from Islam for all those centuries, they didn't have it in their text.

Why not? I mean, if we just play with our scriptures, just write things in for the fun of it, why not? The reason that it came to be in what's called the Textus Receptus, and hence the King James Version of the Bible, we've explained it a thousand times.

Why won't you listen? I take the time to listen to your side. I take the time to listen to the Hadith stories, and right now I'm working through the Shiite Hadith, which is a world different from the Sunni Hadith, but still, I take the time to do that.

Why don't you take the time to even find out about the background of the issues you raise as objections to the Christian faith? Don't you see that it, quite honestly, shows a real level of disrespect for the people you're talking about when you just, you'll just throw stuff out, just without any concern about its accuracy or its consistency, or especially with, even with its own consistency with your own worldview?

Don't you see how that causes a problem, and that to people on our side who know what the issues are, you're really destroying your credibility? The whole reason to raise these issues is simple. The Bible, in Proverbs chapter 16 verse 11, Proverbs chapter 16 verse 11, that, for those who aren't familiar with the Bible, is a collection of wisdom sayings from the Old Testament.

It says, a just balance and scales belong to the Lord. All the weights of the bag are his concern. What that's talking about was, back in those days, at the same time frame as far as the mechanisms of commerce, you would sell a certain amount of grain based upon its weight, and so scales were very important, and you have to make sure that when someone said, here is my reference weight of one shekel or whatever, one kilogram, one pound in our language, that it was really a pound, because if it was lighter, then they could sell you less grain, make more profit, and that would be true of precious metals and grains and all sorts of things, and so the Bible talks about the need for justice and the fact that God's people should be just and your scales should be even.

They should be balanced. No cheating. Ironically, the Quran makes the same reference in Surah 55, 9, and establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance. Pretty much the same thing it said in Proverbs 16, 11, right?

So, here's my question for specifically the Muslim that posted this response, but for so many others that think and behave in the same way. Why don't you have just balances? You don't have just balances.

You see, when I weigh the arguments of Islam, I use a just balance. That is, I use arguments against your position that are consistent with mine. I don't use double standards. I don't have one set of balances for Islam, one set of weights, and a different set of weights for Christianity, because if you do that, well, you're dishonest, untruthful.

It's wrong. It's morally and intellectually wrong, but that's exactly what you do. You clearly have no concern whatsoever that you have one set of arguments that you use about the New Testament and a completely different set of arguments that you use in defense of the Quran, and this has been one of my primary arguments against Islamic dawah, is when you go running off and, oh, look at what Bart Ehrman said, or oh, look what this atheist said.

Are you really being consistent? And when you use, you know, the argument of the fig tree or hear Matthew 21, and Jesus has to be called God every time he's referred to, or he couldn't be called God at all, and this type of stuff, you don't apply any of that when you're reading the Quran.

You don't apply any of that when you're reading the Hadith, do you? Why not? Why not? Two sets of balances, two sets of weights, two sets of standards. It's called double standard, and when you use a double standard, well, in a court of law, your point's thrown out.

In a debate, you lose. In this situation, it demonstrates on the simple level of truth, you don't have a heart of truth, and that should tell you something. And so, once again, the vast majority of Muslims engaged in dawah, you just don't seem to realize that when you behave in this way, your dawah isn't a calling to Islam, it is a repelling from Islam.

You need to understand that. There are a few Muslim apologists that don't behave in this way, but let's face it, even they will have to admit that. Who is the most famous Islamic Daoist? I've seen Daoagondist used as well, but the first, the one that you travel anywhere in the world, his name would be known, Ahmed Didat.

And Ahmed Didat was a practitioner of double standards, a practitioner of double standards. And so, once again, to our Christian viewers, you know, when we produce videos like the one that Ivy and I posted yesterday, you expect this kind of response.

You expect that there will be people who will not have ears to hear, but you cannot allow that to dissuade you from continuing to pray that there are others who will hear, because God has proven for the past 2 ,000 years that he's building his church, and he does it, by many means, he does it against all odds.

There is no power on heaven and earth that can stop him when he chooses to draw his people into himself. And so, keep praying that that video will get out. The very fact that really bad responses have already been posted, that's enough to demonstrate that the message is strong, the message is clear.

We need to continue to pray that the Lord will use it. Thanks for listening.