Understanding Islam w/Dr. James White

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Of all the debates I've done on Islam, my favorite so far, I had a good one in London back in May at Kensington Temple there, that went really well, that was a good debate.

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But as far as substance and the accuracy of the interaction and things like that, the debate that we had in Sydney in 2011 is still my favorite with the same gentleman that I'm going to be dialoguing with next week,

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Abdullah Kunda, he is a medical doctor, and we debated can

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God become man last time, and it was just the best debate that we've had with Muslims.

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And next week we are debating the issue, well, debating, discussing how does man have peace with God, a

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Christian -Muslim dialogue. And well, as you'll see this evening, there are fundamental differences as to how we understand how a man is to have peace with God between Christians and Muslims.

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But it also needs to be understood, and let me start with this, that I do not have for a second a belief that Abdullah Kunda wants to do me harm.

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And if you begin a conversation with the assumption that you're going to be fearful of the person to whom you're speaking, that they might want you to do harm, it's going to change the kind of conversation you're going to have with them.

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And we live in a day where there is obviously almost each and every day, in fact, if you go digging around, you can find each and every day, incidents of violence taking place in this world associated with Islam.

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You have ISIS, you have the wars taking place there, you have the horrific things happening in Syria.

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That nation has in essence been reduced to rubble in many places, a tremendous humanitarian disaster there.

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And it's very easy for us to slip into a mindset that unfortunately

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I have seen amongst many evangelical Christians. We don't like it, I certainly do not like it when

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I am thrown into one big pile with everything that calls itself

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Christianity. Many Muslims, for example, will try to hold me accountable for what the

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Pope says. And I'm like, no, no. In fact, there are many Roman Catholics today, they're like, no, no.

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Pope Frankie's a little bit on the odd side. And so I go, no, the

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Pope does not speak for me, he does not represent me. I have serious theological issues with his claims to be the

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Vicar of Christ and the Holy Father and using names of the Trinity for himself and things like that. And so no, you can't hold me accountable to that.

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And unfortunately, on YouTube, you'll find many Muslims who will post clips from videos that are easy to find from the

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New Apostolic Reformation or people like Benny Hinn swinging his Armanis around and knocking entire portions of the audience over and so on and so forth.

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And basically warning people, don't let these Christians talk to you about the Holy Spirit because this is what happens when they do that.

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And so I want to be able to differentiate myself from aberrations and falsehoods.

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And yet, if I'm gonna ask that favor or that freedom for myself, then we have to recognize that we have to extend that same grace and that same freedom to the

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Muslim individual who says, no, no, wait a minute, ISIS does not represent me. I'm not hiding an

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AK -47 behind my back. I have no interest in hurting you. And unfortunately, there are many

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Christians who would say, well, that's not true Islam then. Well, we can have that argument, but you need to recognize that if we approach this subject of Islam with fear, then we are going to hesitate to take the opportunities that are presented to us.

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And if you're scared of someone, you're not going to extend your heart. You're not going to really engage the person in such a way as to show them true

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Christian love. And so I would begin by seeking to exhort all of us as believers to pray that God would, well, we've not been given a spirit of timidity or fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind.

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And so the early Christians, they went out into a very hostile world, and they could not necessarily know if the people to whom they were speaking were going to turn upon them or to seek their harm or anything else, but they still boldly did so.

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And so in this situation, dealing with Muslims, I hope you're not here this evening to pick up some weapons, informational weapons, things like that.

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I hope your goal is not to be able to go on Facebook and take on all the

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Muslims or something like that, where so many of the battles take place these days, but in reality, that when you have the opportunity, when you find yourself waiting at the, well, maybe not at the airport.

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This may not be the right place to have a conversation about Islam. But seriously, you've heard the stories.

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I mean, there have been people who have been removed from aircraft. I realized,

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I pulled a real, I was doing something really stupid on a flight just a couple months ago.

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I had a book with me that I was reading, and I realized once I got on the plane, I cannot let anybody see what the title of this book is, because it was a study of shirk, which we're gonna be finding out here a little bit later on, is an

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Arabic term which means idolatry. And it was very clearly, all

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I had to do is look at the book, and you knew it was an Islamic book, and it was about a serious subject.

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And I literally had to, it's almost a brown paper wrapper cover type thing.

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You can't see what I'm reading here, you know, that type of thing. And had to make sure people couldn't see it, because there have been many people who have been removed.

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There have been people who've been removed from flights for reading just foreign languages, and someone was freaked out about that, because they were so scared about some type of act of terrorism taking place.

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But when opportunities do present themselves to us, if we have not prayed that God would prepare our hearts and fill our hearts with love and concern, then there's gonna be that hesitation that very often is the one hesitation that keeps us from being able to continue on.

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But the other reason there might be hesitation in the part of most of us, is most of us are not overly comfortable with how well we know

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Islam. And so we are concerned that we're going to say something that is unnecessarily offensive out of ignorance.

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Now, there's nothing you can do to avoid saying things that are necessarily offensive.

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For example, very often Muslims will say, well, why can't you even be open to the possibility that Muhammad was a prophet?

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It is offensive to me that you're not even open to that possibility. But when you think about it,

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Muhammad comes after Jesus. Muhammad is born over half a millennium after the time of Christ.

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And so immediately you have this issue of, well, if Christ, according to Hebrews chapter one,

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God in times past spoke to us by the prophets, now he's spoken to us by his son.

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If you have someone coming after that, who in essence in the theological system takes preeminence over Christ, there is a fundamental denial of the

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Christian faith that is a part of accepting the idea of Muhammad's claims. And so when someone says, why can't you even be open to that?

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Well, what you're saying is I need to be open to beginning with a denial of my faith so that I can then dialogue with you.

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That's not really a possibility for me. And there are other reasons in regards to what

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Muhammad taught about Christ. It's contradictory to what the Bible says and things like that. There are certain things that are gonna have to be said that are going to be quote unquote offensive.

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But there's a difference between necessary offense, and the gospel always contains necessary offense.

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Any individual who has yet to bow the knee to Jesus Christ is in rebellion against his

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Lord, because Jesus Christ is Lord of all. And if you're in rebellion against him, if you are engaged in self -righteousness, if you think you can be right before God without his imputed righteousness, well, the gospel is gonna be offensive to you because it's gonna tell you you have no righteousness and you have no capacity in and of yourself to do what is pleasing before God.

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That's the teaching of scripture. And so there's necessary offensiveness, and then there's the unnecessary offensiveness that seems to be so rampant today.

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It's the zealous Christian who has his theological sword out and just enjoys swinging it and getting it bloody and doing the

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Facebook groups and the chats and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And unfortunately, the net has not really helped us in how we handle things.

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It certainly hasn't helped young men to talk to young women, I've noticed that. Have you ever noticed, you know, you watch a bunch of young people standing on the street corner, and they're all like this, and they're actually chatting with each other.

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It's like, do you know that if you move your mouth, she can hear you? You don't have to do it that way.

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I know it's challenging, a little scary to look her in the eye, you know, things like that. Ooh, but, and we wonder why guys are getting married at 30 now.

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There's a reason for this. I got married at 19, she was 18.

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We're still married. Isn't that neat? That means I might get to know my great -grandchildren.

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Ooh, what a thought. Anyway, that's another sermon we will skip for now.

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The unnecessary offense comes either from having wrong attitudes as to how we approach others, or from the fact that, let's face it.

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I mean, I would ask, I would normally ask an audience, how many here have read the

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Quran? The fact of the matter is, right now, because of the lighting in here, you could leave quietly, and I would not know that you were gone, okay?

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I am absolutely, totally stage -blind right now. I mean, literally, you could all start going, me and I would have absolutely no earthly idea it was taking place.

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Don't try it, because I can sort of do this, and I'll catch you right at that time, but I'm completely stage -blind.

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But normally, I would ask how many in the room have actually read, have read the

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Quran? And then, I always have the three or four people who go,

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I always have the three or four people who go, parts? Parts? I heard someone say parts, didn't

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I? Yeah. Of course, you might have been speaking Australian, and I don't understand it. It's, I really don't.

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We were riding, we did a 72 -kilometer ride out to, is it

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Wellington Point? Is that what it is? Out, and yesterday morning, and we'd keep going around these corners, and the guys would go,

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Clea, Clea. I started going, Patra, Patra. What happened to the letter

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R? Is it illegal, or just what? I don't get it. Anyway, so you may have said parts.

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Parts, there's an R in there. Parts, I was like, pots. Pots is something different than parts, but anyway, you don't have to turn the lights.

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It's okay, I'm not worried that people are gonna be making faces at me. It's all right. It's okay, you don't have to do that.

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It's just the lights are just really super, super bright here and so I'm gonna be squinting the whole time because I had

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LASIK years ago, and so I'm very light -sensitive, so it's gonna make me look mean and old and stuff like that, but don't worry about it.

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It's just the way it is. Okay, here's the point. Very few people have actually read the Quran, and very, very, well, by the way, from the

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Islamic perspective, unless you read it in Arabic, you didn't read it because the Quran only exists in Arabic.

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I'm not sure why that's funny, but it only, it's an interesting fact, but I don't find it overly humorous, you know, but it only exists in Arabic.

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Everything else is not truly the Quran, and so if you have not actually read it in Arabic, you really haven't read it. Now, the funny thing about that is only about 16 % of the world's

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Muslims are actually Arabic themselves, and so the vast majority of them are dependent upon translations as well, so that's an interesting thing to keep in mind, but anyways, the proportion of Muslims who have read the

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Bible would be about the same. In fact, the majority of the Muslims may be even lower, and so we don't know each other's scriptures very well at all, and so most of the time, we just talk right past each other.

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What they know about Christianity, they've been taught from their imams, and it's very, very frequently extremely inaccurate, or sadly, they get their knowledge from watching

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YouTube. Ooh, okay, so they really have some tremendous misapprehensions as to what

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Christians actually believe, and of course, for example, when I go to South Africa, the vast majority of people who call themselves

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Christians in South Africa are not even Trinitarians, so they probably have had people who have explained the

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Trinity to them in an extremely inaccurate fashion, and the same thing is true of us. Let's face it, for the majority of us, most of our knowledge of Islam came to us from something like Fox News or CNN or something like that, which is even worse than Fox News, if there's something that could be worse, and that's not where we should be getting our theological information, and so there's a lot of inaccuracy, there's a lot of stuff to try to get over, so if you want to be able to proclaim the gospel in a meaningful fashion, it's always helpful, and don't get me wrong here, the

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Lord can use anything, and I don't want to try to hinder anyone from proclaiming the gospel, but you need to understand that especially when you're dealing with another faith system, the greatest danger is they are going to filter what you say through their set of definitions, and this creates a language barrier between us, and the result is, very frequently, you might feel like you're communicating something, you might even feel like this witnessing situation is going very well, and then all of a sudden you get to a point where they say something that makes you realize that the entire past 40 minutes that you just spent was not getting you anywhere at all, because they had hung a left at the beginning, you hung a right, and you've been talking, and all of a sudden you turn around, and you're all alone, and that's because they're three miles the other direction, you haven't been communicating, and so it is really helpful in those situations to know something about the people to whom you're speaking, to have, we're the ones that have to build the bridges to reach out to them, to be able to communicate with them, and so what

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I want to do in the brief amount of time we have this evening is to give you a foundational understanding of where your average believing

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Sunni Muslims coming from. Now there are nominal Muslims, just like there are nominal Christians, in name only, and so there are some who are just culturally

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Muslim, that don't have any real deep -seated affection for the

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Quran, it doesn't necessarily have an impact upon them each and every day, and so just as there are people who call themselves

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Christians, exact same type of thing, cultural Christianity and cultural

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Islam, very much issues, and you may be talking to a cultural Muslim that just simply has some theological knowledge, but doesn't really know a lot from that perspective.

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You've got to keep that in mind, you've got to have some conversation to find out where the person's coming from. But we're talking about here a believing

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Sunni Muslim, now Shiites, Shiites only make up nine to 10 % of the world's

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Islamic population, and they will agree with most of this presentation, but not necessarily all.

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There are some interesting variations in regards to Shiism that we can't, we certainly do not have time to get into this evening, but 90 % of the world's

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Muslims are Sunni, the world's largest Muslim country is

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Indonesia, and so this would be very much the viewpoint that would be expressed there.

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So having a basic understanding can at least give you some level of confidence that as you make your presentation, you're gonna be able to do so in such a way as to communicate clearly.

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And maybe at least if there's an objection or someone says, well, you don't understand this, at least you'll have some basis for understanding what it is the person's saying back to you.

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Now, I didn't have a whole lot of time, we got here a little bit late to, I'm gonna have to skip a few slides and things like that,

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I'm sorry about that, it's not quite professional on my part, but that's just simply what we're gonna have to do. The five pillars of Islam, the first and the one that very frequently ends up in the center of our conversation is called the

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Shahada. The Shahada is the central statement of what makes Islam, Islam.

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The central affirmation of Islam is something called Tawhid. Tawhid, from the term

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Wahad, to make one, Tawhid is the oneness of Allah. Islamic theology was born out of Muhammad's interaction with the polytheism of his day.

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And so there is an absolute emphasis not merely upon monotheism, but upon what we would identify, and you and I need to be thinking clearly, as Unitarian monotheism.

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It's one thing to say there's only one being of God. We believe there is only one being of God as Christians.

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But the Islamic understanding of monotheism is it needs to be Unitarian monotheism, that is the being of God must be shared by only one person.

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While we are monotheists, we are not Unitarians. You can be a Unitarian monotheist or a

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Trinitarian monotheist. From the Islamic perspective, they do not understand how that could be, and the sad part of the reality is a vast majority of Christians cannot effectively communicate to someone what the difference between being a

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Unitarian monotheist and a Trinitarian monotheist is. Though, given that we call this the very definition of our faith, it should be something that we are very capable of doing, comfortable of doing, and in fact,

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I would argue that it's central to what we were just doing. We were just singing hymns of praise, songs of praise to God.

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There was prayer that was offered. Well, that requires us to understand who we're addressing.

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That requires us to be accurate in our own thinking as to whether we are addressing the

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Father, or whether we're addressing the Son, the Spirit, the different roles that each of those divine persons have taken in our redemption, and they've not taken the same roles.

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Sadly, many Christians are functional modalists, and in fact, the last time

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I was here in Brisbane, we had a debate on that particular subject, and hopefully that was helpful to those of you who were here for that particular encounter, but the reality is that the

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Muslim really struggles with understanding how we can make a distinction between Unitarian monotheism, because in their mind, it's all the same thing, and in the mind of the

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Jehovah's Witness, in the mind of the Muslim, Unitarian monotheism, it's all just the same thing.

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We are being repetitive, even using that phraseology, because they assume that if someone is

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God, then there cannot be anyone else that can likewise be described as God, and yet in the scriptures, we have the one name

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Yahweh used of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit, and yet they're distinguished from one another, and how you demonstrate that is going to really depend upon how well you understand the scriptural witness to the fact that there is one being of God shared eternally by three co -equal and co -eternal persons, the

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Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Person and being are not the same thing. I don't have time to be going through my whole

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Trinity presentation. I wrote a book on it, if you'd like to really try to get into the biblical evidence of it, but that is something that needs to be understood.

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From the Islamic perspective, remember, Islam comes after Christianity historically, but from the

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Muslim perspective, it's before us, because from their perspective, the prophets of the

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Old Testament were Muslims, Jesus was a Muslim, we were all born Muslims, because we were all born professing that there is only one true

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God. We were born upon what's called fitra, and this is the result of a covenant that was taken from all of us in Adam, where we professed that Allah was our

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Lord, and so from the Islamic perspective, that Islamic monotheism is the original, and everything else is a departure therefrom, but historically, obviously,

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Islam comes 600 years after the time of Christ, and hence, in the Quran, there is interaction, and as we will see, not accurate interaction with Christianity.

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So back to the shahadah. How do you become a Muslim? You become a

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Muslim, and I just realized in my haste and my hurry, and I apologize for this,

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I'm not gonna be able to show you the videos because I didn't get audio. I mean, I suppose I could take my microphone off.

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I've done that in the past. Maybe we'll try it on the first one, see if it works, but how do you become a

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Muslim? This is one of the major issues. If you're gonna be witnessing the Muslim people, we have a certain idea of what it requires to be a true

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Christian. Biblical Christianity has no concept of being born as a

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Christian. Unfortunately, Christianity has certainly developed that idea in many countries in the past, but the reality is, the biblical teaching is that a person must be born again, and that that person must exercise faith and repentance, and so the idea of genealogical

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Christianity has always been a disaster for the church, even though that's been a very common thing in the past.

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From the Islamic perspective, how do you become a Muslim? Now, how many of you have ever seen someone become a

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Muslim? Anybody seen one, just a couple people? That's why I'm gonna try, and like I say,

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I'm not done this, I'm going to, I'm not sure why it's not allowing me to turn the volume up.

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We'll find out here in a moment if this is gonna work at all. Let's see if we can show you what it looks like for someone to become a

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Muslim, because I think this is extremely important, and so I'm going to take a risk here, and this is high -tech stuff.

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Let's see if this is gonna work for me, okay? And that didn't work at all, did it?

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And can we play? And no, look at that.

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It's playing, but there is no sound coming out, maybe because we're using HDMI and stuff like that.

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That's a shame. This is the first time I've used this setup and this connector and all that kind of stuff, and I keep hitting the volume button, and the volume, it just says, nope, not gonna allow you to do that, so I apologize for that.

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That's going to change everything here, but it's a shame because of the fact that what the video showed was people coming forward and saying the shahada, and this was actually in Sydney a number of years ago, that this specifically took place.

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It was an American speaker, and he explained what the shahada meant. It means, in English, there is only one true

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God, Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger, but you cannot say it in English to become a

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Muslim. You cannot say it in English to become a Muslim. To become a Muslim, you have to say, la ilaha illallah wa muhammadun rasulullah.

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You have to say it in Arabic. Even if someone just leads you through it syllable by syllable, you have to, in the presence of witnesses, and there are also certain things you have to believe.

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There's like seven requirements for a genuine shahada, but you have to say your shahada in the presence of others in Arabic.

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Arabic is absolutely central to the Sunni Islamic understanding. Not only is it central to the way you make your profession of faith, but even their understanding of the

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Quran. Like I said, unless you've read it in Arabic, you really haven't read the Quran, and the

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Quran is eternal in orthodox Sunni Islam, not in Shi 'ism. In orthodox

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Sunni Islam, it's eternal. It is uncreated. It's as eternal as Allah is, and it has existed in Arabic, so Arabic really is, in essence, a divine language along those lines, and so you have to say it in that fashion, and that's how you become a

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Muslim. Now, when we watch that video, you see people coming forward.

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They're given gifts. They're given a Quran. They're given books about Muhammad, things like that. It looks a lot like an evangelical service, where people are being invited to come forward.

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They'll frequently be given a Bible, discipleship materials, things like that. There was a lot of parallel to that, but where the difference breaks down is,

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I imagine there's no one in this room that made your profession of faith either in Biblical Hebrew or in Koine Greek.

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Anyone do that? Anyone make your profession of faith? No? There's normally some creepy person in the back that goes,

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I did, and they always want me to sign 14 books and take 27 selfies, and it's like, no, no, that's scary.

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What that illustrates is that Islam, Islam is a religio -political or politico -religious system, depending on how many

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Muslims are in a culture. When Muslims are a small minority, the emphasis is upon the religious aspect.

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The more and more Muslims you get in a culture, the emphasis starts moving more and more toward the political and the legal, what you've heard as Sharia law.

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And so you can't separate the two out and still have Islam. There are people trying today, but it requires a fundamental reorientation concerning the nature of Islam to try to separate out

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Sharia from it. And so Islam never had its

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Acts 15 moment. Remember Acts chapter 15? That's the Jerusalem Council. And it was decided at the

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Jerusalem Council that people did not have to become a Jew before they became a Christian. You didn't have to go into the

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Old Covenant before you went into the New Covenant. You didn't have to be circumcised. You didn't have to engage in that Jewishness before you could then become a true

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Christian. And so that allowed the Gospel to transcend any cultural boundaries, any linguistic boundaries, anything like that.

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Islam didn't have that. And so much of what's going on that causes such conflict in the world today is that when

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Islam enters into a particular society, it brings all these cultural trappings along with it.

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And that causes great conflict. And that's one of the things happening in the world today that we need to consider.

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So you become a Muslim by saying in Arabic the shahada.

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It is your profession of faith. It is the statement that there is only one true God. And by the way, from the

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Islamic perspective, that's how anyone has ever become a true follower of God. And so they believe that God has sent a prophet to every people group.

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And they were all held together by the fact that they delivered the message, as Jesus allegedly delivered the message, of the first part of the shahada.

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That is, there is only one true God, Allah. So all prophets have always taught monotheism.

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But then when you are sent to a particular people group, when Moses is sent to the Jews, then for them it would be there is only one true

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God, and Moses is his messenger. Or for the Christians, and Jesus is his messenger.

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But since Muhammad is the final prophet, now the message is for all of mankind, not just for the

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Arabs in the seventh century in Mecca and Medina, but now for the whole world.

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And so they're all held together by la ilaha illallah. They're all held together by that one message of monotheism.

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But now the final messenger has come, and so the shahada is the way you have a right relationship with God for everyone in the world now, not just these individual people groups, okay?

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So that's the first of the five pillars of Islam, is the shahada. That's really what holds everybody together.

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And from the Islamic perspective, this is the main area of division between you and I.

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Because from their perspective, we deny monotheism. The Quran's pretty clear in teaching that we are polytheists, that we believe in multiple gods.

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Now there are Muslims who obviously have studied enough Christian history to know that we are not polytheists.

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But the author of the Quran thought that we were. That is very, very clear, as we will see in the text that we'll look at here in a little while.

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So from their perspective, if the central affirmation of Islam is tawhid, then the worst thing you can do is to deny the central affirmation of a faith.

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So for us, well, this used to be the case, but for the vast majority of Christian history anyways,

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Christians would not have fellowship with someone who purposefully denied the central affirmations of the

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Christian faith. And so you have the Council of Nicaea in 325, people denying the deity of Christ, a

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Council of Constantinople, Council of Chalcedon, et cetera, et cetera. And the idea of accepting the central affirmations of the incarnation and the virgin birth and the deity of Christ, the doctrine of the

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Trinity, these things, this becomes central to the very identity of the Christian faith.

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And so we identify groups, the Mormonism, we know that they denied the doctrine of the Trinity, and Jehovah's Witnesses, we know the same thing.

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And so at least until recently, you didn't generally have get -togethers with those folks outside of debate or evangelism.

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You didn't have get -togethers as if we can sort of put all that on the table and not worry, you know, let's have a discussion about it again, something like that.

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Well, from the Islamic perspective, if the central affirmation of the faith is tawhid, the oneness of Allah, then to deny that is the greatest sin.

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And the greatest sin in Islam is called shirk. Shirk. Now, shirk in Arabic has a secular use, it's like a corporation, association.

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But in its religious use, shirk is the one unforgivable sin.

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Now, when I say that, you automatically interpret that, oh, well, we talk about the unforgivable sin,

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Matthew chapter 12, and so if you commit that sin, you can never be forgiven. When the

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Muslim says that shirk is unforgivable, what they mean by that is if you die as a mushrik, as a person on shirk who has committed that sin, if you die in that state, there is no forgiveness for you in the afterlife.

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So it's not, you can be an idolater, that's what a mushrik is, is an idolater, and still be saved in this life by becoming a

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Muslim. There's forgiveness for that sin in this life, but if you die as a mushrik, plural mushrikun, the mushrikun cannot be forgiven.

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No matter who they are, and they take this extremely seriously, the believing

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Sunni Muslim. Outside of the Quran, you have collections of books called the

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Hadith, and the two most authoritative collections of Hadith for the Muslims are

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Sahih al -Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, they're eight and nine volumes respectively in English and Arabic.

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And these are the stories, actions, sayings of Muhammad and his immediate followers, that first generation.

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And this really becomes, there's an interesting parallel between how the Hadith function, and how

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Roman Catholicism has developed traditions based upon the early church fathers and things like that.

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But the Hadith are considered extremely important in the construction of Sharia law,

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Islamic jurisprudence, and really functionally become the lens through which the

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Quran ends up being interpreted, because the Quran is not like the

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New Testament. When we teach, Sunday morning, or was it

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Sunday evening? And when you're traveling, it doesn't really matter. Especially when you're traveling to the United States, because morning and evening, whatever it is.

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Sometime on Sunday, I taught out of the Book of Colossians. And when I taught out of Colossians, I began in looking at chapter one by giving some of the background of what was taking place.

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The rise of the early forms of Gnosticism, and the backgrounds of that. And I was giving a context and a background to interpret this.

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You just don't really do that with the vast majority of the Quran. It doesn't have, for many sections, no one knows what the background is to begin with.

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The idea of looking at how Colossi was founded by people who went up the Lycus River Valley from Ephesus, where Paul established a church.

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For the vast majority of the Quran, you can't do that. And in fact, about the only places where you can is when the

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Quran's talking about one of the battles that Muhammad had. And so we can identify what that's specifically about. But you just don't do the same kind of exegetical work with the

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Quran. And so the result of that is the Hadith become the lens through which the

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Quran is interpreted. And the differences between the various Sunni groups, you've got the

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Salafis and the Wahhabis and all these different groups within Sunni Islam, it basically comes about because some people choose these scholars and their understanding of the

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Hadith, and they prioritize the Hadith in this way, and then these people do it differently over here. And that's why you have these different schools, the

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Maliki and Hanafi, and different schools of interpretation and jurisprudence amongst the

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Muslims, which are really difficult for us to understand, just like it's really difficult for them.

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I actually know one particular Muslim scholar who's actually contacted me and said, you know,

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I've been invited to talk at a sort of an interfaith thing. What exactly is the difference between a

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Methodist and a Lutheran again? And can you imagine from their perspective how confusing it is, you know?

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So is your group like pro -Benny Hinn or not pro -Benny Hinn, you know?

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And so if you feel confused looking at them, imagine what it's like for them looking over at us.

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It's pretty confusing in both directions. And so anyway, the Hadith, I've read all of Bukhari and Muslim, and I did it on a bike.

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And frequently I did it in the dark at like three o 'clock in the morning. And what's really weird is there'll be times when

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I'll be in like in a debate and somebody will mention a Hadith, and I'll remember exactly where I was on the bike when

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I read that, heard that Hadith. That's really strange for most people. And that's why it's so wonderful that my wife has remained married to me for 34 years.

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And so she's a very patient woman. You should pray for her. Her name's Kelly, Saint Kelly.

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And so you'd have to be a saint to stick around with me for that long.

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But one of the ways that I have honestly had some really cool witnessing opportunities, especially like if I've got a

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Muslim taxi driver, is to start narrating Hadith. Because they've never run into a

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Christian minister that narrates Hadith. That is really unusual, especially to do so accurately. And so some of these

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Hadith illustrate for us how serious shirk is. Now, why am

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I spending so much time here? When you're, my understanding is this is operation, well, it's funny.

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When I heard Josh say even the name, the R disappeared from operation.

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It's an operation. Operation 513.

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Because there's an R in 13 too. It's that they're gone. It's just they've been banished completely from the language.

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In fact, I was looking on my Mac. Is there an Australian keyboard thing where the R just goes, poof, it's just gone.

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I need an interpreter. There's something biblical about that when people start speaking in tongues. But since this is operation 513, my emphasis here is if you want to be witnessing to someone, these are things to be keeping in mind.

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One, there are three great barriers to the gospel for Muslims.

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Three great barriers. The first one's right here. The Muslim, the believing

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Muslim believes that you are inviting them to commit the one unpardonable sin called shirk.

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Because they look at us, they look at what we were just singing, and that's shirk.

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Because we are worshiping Jesus, and Jesus is just a prophet. And so we are associating a mere man with the one true

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God, and that's shirk. And if you commit that sin, you will not be forgiven.

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Now, you can be forgiven in the sense of becoming a Muslim, but shirk is unforgivable.

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And so the story is told, Muhammad's parents died as Mushrikun. And Muhammad asked permission of Allah to pray for them.

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And he was denied permission to pray for them. He could not even pray for his parents. There was one exception.

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One exception. Muhammad's uncle, Abu Talib, protected him when he was a minority prophet in the first, well, he was called in 610, and Abu Talib dies around, what, 620?

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So it was the first decade or so. People in his own tribe, the Quraysh tribe, wanted to have him killed.

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He was preaching against the Khaba, which they were very much involved in. And so Abu Talib protected him.

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And so when Abu Talib was dying, Muhammad came to him and he said, you know that I'm a prophet, say the shahada.

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The rest of the family's saying, don't deny the ancient God, so on and so forth. Well, the point is, Abu Talib died as a

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Mushrik. And Muhammad was allowed to intercede for Abu Talib.

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

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Now, I always stop there because I wonder. Because everyone looks at me and they go, so what exactly is the best place in hell like?

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Because there's far more description of the sufferings of hell in the

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Hadith. The Christians didn't get around to descriptions like this until Dante, but it's extremely graphic in the

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Hadith, the sufferings of hell. According to the

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Hadith, Abu Talib, there's two different forms of it. I like the first one that I heard, is wearing sandals that are so hot his brains boil.

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That's the garden spot of hell from the Islamic perspective. That's how bad shirk is, all right?

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So shirk is a horrible thing. Let me illustrate with another thing that's also very important to the Doctrine of Salvation. Keep this in mind when we wrap up a little bit later on.

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I'm gonna be skipping the vast majority of my presentation because we just don't have time to, and a lot of it was based on videos that I can't play for anyways.

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And one of the Hadith that is considered, what's called mutawatir, it's universally accepted.

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Is a story of a man, in some of the versions, a Jewish man who killed 99 people.

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So we're talking about a mass murderer here. He killed 99 people, he goes to a priest and he asks if his repentance will be accepted by God.

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The priest says no, so he kills the priest. So now he's killed 100. So he goes to a scholar, and none of the versions of this tell us whether the scholar knew about the priest or not.

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But he goes to a scholar and says, will my repentance be accepted by God? And he says, go to such and such a city, which is filled with very righteous people, and they will instruct you as to how your repentance can be accepted by God.

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So as he's going, the time for his death comes. Now in Islamic theology, there's something called qadr.

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And many people, sadly, even some evangelicals, have presented the idea that qadr is the same thing as what

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Reformed people believe about predestination. There is a strong predestinarian element in Islamic theology.

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The problem is that qadr and the biblical concept are very, very different. God's sovereign decree is intensely personal on his part.

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God is so transcendent in Islam that he would never enter into his own creation.

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But the fact that in God's sovereign decree in the Christian faith, it includes the entrance of the

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Son of God into human history itself, splits those two concepts completely apart.

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And trying to parallel them, I think, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both Christianity and Islam, though there are many people who do that.

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I could name names, but we won't do that this evening because that could start fistfights. So the time of this man's death comes because they believe that when you are born, well,

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I'm sorry, 45 days after your conception, an angel comes and writes down for you whether you're gonna be male or female.

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We know that's not the case, genetically speaking. But whether you be male or female, successful, happy,

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Muslim, non -Muslim, heaven or hell, the day of your death, everything is lined out for you.

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And so, in essence, it's written on your forehead. You're gonna die at such and such time. There's nothing you can do about it.

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So as he's traveling to this other city, the time of his death comes, and when you die, an angel from paradise, an angel from the fire, come and dispute over your soul.

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Now, you would think, in this situation, that this would be a pretty clear -cut decision.

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The man's a mass murderer. He's killed 100 people. He's not said the shahada.

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And you would think that it would be done. But instead, what's pointed out by the angel from paradise is, but he was going to inquire about repentance.

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And so, Allah decrees that if he's one cubit closer to the city he was going to than the city he was coming from, that he would go to paradise.

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And then, in some versions of the story, he then causes the earth to shrink between the man and that city, so he's one cubit closer, and so the man, the mass murderer, goes to paradise.

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Now, many a Muslim leader has presented this as an example of God's graciousness and his mercy to individuals.

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I hope when you hear that story, it makes you go, but nothing was done about his sin.

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There was no atonement. God's 100 people were murdered, and he goes to paradise simply on a whim from God.

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And that is the real issue. Because God, Allah's forgiveness is whimsical, it's arbitrary.

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There's no foundation to it. He can simply allow his law to be broken, and it's okay.

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I did a debate, and we're gonna take a break, and I'll just mention this, and then we'll go ahead and take our break.

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But I did a debate, it's available online, in a mosque in Erasmus, South Africa, which is a suburb of Pretoria, the capital city.

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And the issue was this very thing. Not so much how we can have peace with God, but how is it that God can interact with sinful people?

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And the point that I tried to communicate, and it was fascinating, because you're sitting in nice, comfortable pews, and they sit on the floor.

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Muslims are much tougher than we are. Because can you imagine what it would be like after two and a half hours of just sitting on the floor?

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And they're closer than you are to me. And there we are in the mosque, and what

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I tried to communicate to them was this. God's law flows from His nature.

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It reflects who He is. So to leave it unfulfilled, to leave it broken, and trampled underfoot by man, is unthinkable, if you really understand the holiness of God, and the intimate connection that exists between His law and His person.

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And you can see in Christianity how important this is, because how does God demonstrate

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His justice and His mercy, but in His own self -giving? It's the giving of the

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Son that fulfills that law. But there's no such concept within Islam at all.

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God's forgiveness is absolutely arbitrary. And to me, it reflects the fact that as I read the

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Quran, the God represented there is just as arbitrary as Muhammad himself was, because Muhammad was known, after a battle, for example, they would bring his enemies before him, and there might be one who comes before him, and Muhammad forgives him, and gives him back his lands and his property, and just shows tremendous mercy to him.

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And the next guy who comes before him is in the exact same situation as the one before, and he lops his head off.

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There is an arbitrariness in his behavior that is, I think, the source of the arbitrariness that you end up seeing, and the contradictory nature, by the way.

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The Hadith are not consistent. There is one Hadith, for example, that says there are certain people who will do the deeds of the people of the fire their entire lives until they're a hand's breadth away from entering in, and then what is written of them will overcome them, and they will go into paradise.

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And there are people who do the deeds of the people of paradise their entire life until they're a hand's breadth away from entering in, and then what is written of them will overcome them, and they will enter into hellfire.

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So in other words, there are people who live their entire life in a godly, proper fashion that are going to go to hell because it was written for them, and then there are people who live a horrible life that go to heaven just because it was written of them.

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You see the difference? From the Christian perspective, God has a purpose in conforming people to the image of Christ and all the rest of this stuff.

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You have the personal intimate relationship, all that kind of stuff that's just simply not possible when you have

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Allah, who is this transcendent being, and would never even contemplate the idea of entering into human existence, just not a possibility from that perspective.

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So this concept of tawhid, shirk, the seriousness of shirk, the first big barrier is that the

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Muslim believes you are inviting them to commit the one sin, that if they die upon that sin, never any forgiveness, never any forgiveness.

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The mass murderer could be forgiven because he hadn't committed shirk, but Abu Talib committed shirk, so even when he gets the best place in heaven, his brains are still boiling.