Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? EO and the Spirit

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Looked at two video clips today, one from Joe Heschmeyer on the question "do Christians and Muslims worship a different God?" (we come to different conclusions) and the other from an EO priest relating a discussion he had with Joel Webbon about cessationism.

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. A rather tired James White with you today.
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I have not felt 100 % for a number of weeks now, I'll be perfectly honest with you. But here we are anyways.
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And I may not go the full hour, we'll see. But I have two,
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I think, fairly important videos to review that I think should be of interest to a very wide number of people.
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It used to be in the news regularly. But other world events, wars in the
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Middle East, in Ukraine, all the other stuff going on, unrest in the
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U .S. has pretty well pushed right off the news pages. The murder of Nigerian Christians by Muslim militants.
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And we've talked about all this in the past many, many, many times. We've gone over the motivation of the militants, we've gone over the fact that the sources of religious doctrine and dogma in Islam are inconsistent with one another.
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And this is one of the main reasons I've always felt that it's pretty much next to impossible to hope for some kind of reformation within Islam.
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There's a lot of reasons for that, but the primary ones being that the hadith, which formed the matrix of Sharia law, interpretation of the
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Quran, an understanding of what Muhammad allegedly taught, how he acted, things like that.
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The hadith are incoherent, they're inconsistent. I've told the story a number of times, but years and years ago,
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I told the story where... I'm not trying to advertise for canes or anything,
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I'm just... You know how they do it on America's Got Talent, you've got those big old cups out there, and I don't know what they're paying for that, but they're paying a lot for that advertising.
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Anyway, I was riding back in the days, not too long ago, but 10 years ago, where I would go out for long morning bike rides, frequently in the dark, especially during the summer, and I would be listening to the hadith.
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I had found a way to convert them to mp3 and to just listen to these entire collections.
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And if you're not familiar with the hadith, the hadith are the sayings and actions of Muhammad and his companions that were collected 250 plus years after the days of Muhammad.
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And hadith studies are still a huge issue within Islam. What is sahih?
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What is the sound hadith? There's all sorts of disagreements. And of course, the
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Sunnis have their hadith, and the Shia have their hadith, and talking a lot about Tehran and Iran, they have a totally different body of hadith than the
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Sunnis have. And so I'd be listening to these things.
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And I remember so clearly, I was on a happy valley road, westbound, in the dark, sun was not even starting to rise yet, probably going to be doing a 100k ride that morning.
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And I was out around 72nd, 75th
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Avenue, funny how the mind works. And I'm listening to these hadith, and in the space of just a few hadiths, a hadith can be a single saying, it might be a sentence long, it could be a paragraph long or longer.
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Within just a few hadith, you had statements being made that were clearly inconsistent with one another.
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Now, you might say, well, where did you get these things? There are two primary collections of hadith for the
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Sunni Muslims, Sahih al -Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. There are others, Jamia Termini and stuff like that, but as far as the historical stuff that really impacts
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Sharia law, interpretation, things like that, um, you're going to find them in Bukhari and Muslim.
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And there are six, seven volumes each, so there's lots of them. And these are the ones that are considered
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Sahih, that is sound, there were a small percentage of the total hadith is considered sound, which means that there was massive volumes of stuff that was fake, that even
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Islamic scholars would say does not actually go back to Muhammad. And this section was about when you can take life.
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And so I had, I had seen videos of imams quoting one of these hadith about the permissibility of killing the infidel, but it was in between other hadith that said otherwise.
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And that's the problem. Um, the vast majority of Muslims don't read the hadith.
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And so when they go to the mosque and they, they hear the sermons and on Fridays and they're getting a very, uh, filtered amount of information, but that's pretty much all they've got.
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And so there have been, you know, there's, there's been jurisprudence within Islam, uh, that has chosen their sources and then the people disagree with them, choose their sources and on and on it goes.
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And so we've talked about all this stuff in the past and we've done entire programs, um, back when we were extremely unpopular because we did entire programs on Islam and looking at the
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Mutawatir hadith, the ones that are, um, universally accepted.
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And, you know, I remember, um, coming down cave Creek road, um, listening to a book by a, what would be considered a liberal
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Muslim scholar on how these hadith, if Islam is going to move, move forward, these hadith have to be removed from their position of controlling the theology of Islam.
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And he's exactly right. They, they, they have to be, but they can't be without Islam being fundamentally altered and changed.
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So anyway, you know, we've been talking about this stuff for a long, long time and we've covered, do
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Christians and Muslims worship the same God? There are videos. I have numerous videos online discussing these things.
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So it's, it's not a new thing, but a lot of the people who listen to the program today, weren't listening six, seven years ago when we were doing a lot of this stuff really is like 10 years ago when we were doing all this stuff.
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When I was flying down to South Africa and doing debates with Muslims and mosques and stuff like that.
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And so we do a lot more of that kind of thing, uh, debating and Muslims in, uh, in London, uh, and things like that.
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So, um, all of that to say that the current news cycle has caused us to not even notice the 200, uh,
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Christians that were murdered, uh, by Islamic militants.
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And you can, you can figure out what theological background these people have.
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Now I know, I know a lot of these folks, let's just say they don't have much in the way of theology.
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They just liked a murder, but then there are others that seriously believe that if you're going to believe what the
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Quran says, and you're gonna believe what Muhammad said, that this is what you're supposed to do.
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And there's no other way of looking at it like that. And so you can remove the history, remove the development of, of, uh,
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Sharia over time and stuff like that. And we've talked about this too, how in essence, the, uh, more radical perspectives that are, that are in play out there tend to be more of the, and I say this advisedly, sola scriptura
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Muslims. In other words, if you look at how theology developed tradition within Islam, the only way that Islam could survive is if the sort of bloodthirsty radical stuff about decapitating people was controlled and put into a particular context.
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And so, for example, you can make a very strong argument that what happened in Nigeria could not happen without the caliphate existing and the
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Caliphah declaring a state of jihad. And that's why, you know,
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ISIS and these people tried to declare a caliphate. Uh, without that, then you, you can't do these things ostensibly, at least you can make that kind of theological argument.
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And, uh, that's where a lot of the issues come from. So anyway, Islamic violence continues.
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Um, and Christians, especially in Africa are the victims of these things.
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And yet we don't hear a whole lot about it right now. It's being, there's just so much other stuff coming at us, you know, threats of literal nuclear war, um, that we don't, we don't think about it very much.
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So in the midst of all that, um, Joe Hashmire, uh, the fellow
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I debated, um, a number of months ago in, uh, Jonesboro, uh,
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Joe Hashmire put a video out discussing do
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Muslims and Christians did not, uh, worship a different God.
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Well, uh, I don't, I don't know if Joe has done debates with Muslims.
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Um, I don't think he's written anything on, on Islam. I addressed this of course, in my book on Islam, whatever
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Christian needs to know about the Quran. Um, but I have to take strong disagreement with what he said.
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And I think one of the main reasons that we're going to have this disagreement, um, is because of what happened in 1965.
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During Vatican II, um, in Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate, uh, three,
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Lumen Gentium 16, Nostra Aetate three, you have a fundamental reversal.
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I mean, it's just the only way to look at it. A fundamental reversal of the position the
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Roman Catholic church that had, that the church had taken for, well, um, centuries and centuries and centuries, certainly since Trent, but well before that,
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I mean, you, you cannot, you know, I love watching these guys that, you know, they get all excited about church history and, ah, like Newman said to go deep into church history is to cease to be
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Protestant. I'm just like, really? Come on guys. Um, how do you put together the papal claims and papal statements at the beginning of the crusades that only get worse and worse with time, which basically, though that wasn't the initial idea, very quickly developed into go on crusade, die, go to heaven.
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You know, I mean, that's basically what it ended up turning into. And obviously what was being said about Muslims and about, uh,
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Muslim theology and belief, even though there's a tremendous amount of ignorance on both sides at that time, still
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Rome's obviously official position, because look, but the Bishop of Rome cannot grant indulgences, use the keys to open the treasury of merit, uh, and do so as just some personal whim.
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He's exercising the power of the keys at this point. And so it's just another of many, many, many, many examples of how
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Rome has changed. If, if you, if you believe today what Rome believed Council Trent on capital punishment, on the nature of Islam, you're not, you're now out of the mainstream and out of the favor of papal curia and so on and so forth.
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So it's just another example of all these changes, but here's, here's the words, uh, if you, if you look up the catechism of the
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Catholic church, section 841, we've read this many, many times before. And I thought I had, huh?
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Oh, there it is. Duh. All right. Nevermind. It's a little one.
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And, uh, I mean, I have it up, so I don't need to be doing this, but I'm pretty sure that it's marked.
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Oh, it was right there. Um, but it's bigger on my screen than it is in the catechism of the
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Catholic church. There's a new edition and this wasn't changed in the new edition. Here is the, um, uh, statement, the church's relationship with the
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Muslims. The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the creator in the first place amongst whom are the
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Muslims. These profess to hold the faith of Abraham and together with us, they adore the one merciful
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God, mankind's judge on the last day. Now, I've never done,
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I, I, I, I'm hesitating there. I don't think I've ever done a debate on this subject.
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I think it's come up in a couple of debates, but specifically on this, especially since I wrote whatever a
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Christian needs to know about the Quran. These profess to hold the faith of Abraham and together with us, they adore the one merciful
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God, mankind's judge on the last day. Now Adoramus, the
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Latin, um, is very strong language. And so here the catechism of the
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Catholic church is specifically saying that Muslims adore the one with us, adore the one merciful
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God. And I've always found that to be the strangest language.
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But Joe Heschmeier being a faithful Roman Catholic, that's his ultimate authority.
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And I think you can make a good argument. He doesn't have the right to look back through history and go,
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I don't think anybody at the Council of Trent would have agreed with that.
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In fact, I think everyone at the Council of Trent would have rejected that very clearly.
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Um, so what happened? Well, that's outside of our, our realm of discussion today.
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But Rome is committed to the idea that Muslims adore the one merciful
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God, mankind's judge on the last day. They're committed to that. There's nothing they can do about it. And so I think that's what's behind what
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Joe says in, uh, in this video. It's, uh, three minutes long and here's the, before I play it, and I suppose
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I should stop and start so I don't, we don't end up getting dinged with copyright violation or non -fair use and all that kind of stuff.
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The main thing he's going to be saying is people can have imperfect ideas about who
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God is and still be Christians, or they can still be worshiping the same
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God. Now, on a very basic level, it's sort of like, well, yeah.
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Um, we can certainly understand, I've lamented it many times, that most evangelicals are actually modalists when it comes to the doctrine of the
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Trinity. You could get them to confess a form of modalism really fast, um, if you know how to use the proper misleading terminology.
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And so perfection of profession is not the standard.
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Um, yes, I will need video, audio and video. Um, I have it queued up.
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I'm not sure if you can see that or not, uh, Rich, uh, but I'm going to be playing the audio and the video.
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And I just realized that's going to be really hard for you to start and stop. Well, no, I'll start and stop it. It doesn't matter.
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We'll just sort of let you, Rich is working remotely. He's under the weather, um, much more than I am.
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And so there's going to be some delay on stuff, but it hopefully will not impact the, uh, actual material anyway.
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Um, so we're not talking about perfection of There are, you know, if you stay the
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Trinity long enough, you can always come up with some obscure discussion about the
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Trinity that someone hasn't heard of, or read it using different language or whatever it might be and trip somebody up and go, oh,
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I'm, you know, I'm not sure if you're really orthodox about that and this kind of thing. That's not what we're talking about.
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Um, there is a vast, and in fact, what he does is he, he says, well, look, the, uh, the
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Jews worshipped the one true God without knowing the Trinity. Well, I have some friends that argue that point and actually try to argue the
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Jews were Trinitarians. I, I'm not as smart as they are. And so I could never defend that.
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And I don't think the majority of modern day scholarship in any way does make that assertion.
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And I've explained why I think the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed in the incarnation ministry, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit. And that takes place between the old and new testaments. The old Testament has prophetic, uh, anticipatory language regarding the doctrines of Trinity.
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Um, but the actual revelation of the doctrine of Trinity, in my opinion, uh, is found between Malachi and Matthew in the historical reality of what took place in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit. So, uh, but there's, there's such an obvious difference, in my opinion, between the
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Jews under the old covenant and Muslims today or Jews today.
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And that is we're living post -cross, we're living post -resurrection, we're living post -New
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Testament. The, and the Quran in particular is coming six centuries after the
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New Testament and tries to interact with the New Testament, claims a chain of authority from the
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Torah and Moses to Jesus and the Injil to Muhammad and the Quran. So, if it's revealed, if it's
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Natsal is the Hebrew term, uh, sent down in the
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New Testament, um, and then rejected by Muhammad out of ignorance, but still rejected, um, that's a different thing than living prior to the revelation of the
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Trinity, where you only have prophetic foreshadowings, but you don't have the actual revelation.
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So, there's a difference between living before a revelation takes place and rejecting a revelation after it takes place.
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So, there's a difference between being a Simeon, uh, an
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Anna, uh, prior to the cross and the resurrection, ascension, so on and so forth.
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Um, and all Jewish people sense that. So, you have to look at those things in, in a different fashion because of the fact that revelation has been made and whether someone is suppressing that revelation, denying that revelation, twisting that revelation, replacing with something else, whatever it might be.
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So, this is really important because Christians tend to go, well, no, if you deny the deity of Christ, then you can't possibly be saved.
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And certainly there is a massive swath of truth to that, but it has to be put into a context.
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Who are we talking about? At what point in history? What knowledge do they have?
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Was this before Christ came? Is this after Christ came? Do they have any idea what the
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New Testament revelation is about these things? These are all very, very important, uh, issues to coming to a sober conclusion on this topic.
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So, now that I think about it, um, and now that I, so for anybody who's going to get upset that we're going to play this whole thing, um,
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I'd like to stop and start, but since we're doing it remotely, I'm just going to play it through and then we'll respond, um, more fully on the other side, though I've actually done most of the response.
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So, here we go. Um, here is, uh, what, uh, Joe Heschmeier had to say on this subject.
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Joe Heschmeier 1 In making the case that Muslims and Christians worship separate gods, you end up seeming to have to make the heretical case that the
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God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are separate gods, and that just won't do. A denial of the trinity is, at least in a certain way, a denial of God.
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But here's the problem. Jews also don't believe in the trinity. It's not just Jews today who don't believe in the trinity.
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The Israelites in the Old Testament had never heard of the trinity. Now, there might be individual exceptions to that. People like Abraham may have had some glimmer of the triune nature of God, but certainly the ordinary
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Israelite believer was not a trinitarian. Okay, Rich says I can go ahead and stop and start because he's just putting it down there anyways, so that's fine.
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Um, okay, so I would agree at this point. Like I said, I have friends who would say no, but I would agree, but that's missing the temporal context.
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There has not been a revelation of the incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit. Um, even, well, there was when the movie The Ten Commandments was made, which is where the video clips are coming from here.
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Uh, that Charlton Heston, they don't make actors like that anymore.
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Uh, some of you saw, I finally saw Ben -Hur. I had seen Ten Commandments a million times, but for some reason, don't ask me why, the only thing
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I'd ever seen in Ben -Hur were just sections of the chariot race, because that's the most famous part.
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Um, I don't know why I'd never seen it before, but I finally got it and watched it on a couple rides in Zwift.
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And, uh, man, they still make movies like that. And, you know, if they ever, if they ever start making movies that are completely
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AI, and that's just around the corner, I'm not going to watch them, no matter how interesting they are.
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Um, I want to see what human beings, that's, that's even worse, you know, CGI has been getting there where it's sort of like,
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I can tell, uh, you look at what they did with stuff like Ten Commandments and Ben -Hur and stuff.
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That was, that was movie -making, uh, that, that was worth rejoicing in the creativity of the human mind rather than the
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AI. But anyways, so back to, um, uh, the
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Ten Commandments here. Uh, so I, I just think that just as Joe, as Joe had a sort of a fundamental problem with the idea that if untaught and unstable men distort the scriptures, then obviously taught and stable men do not have to distort the scriptures.
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They can handle the scriptures rightly. I mean, vast majority of human beings go, yeah. And he's like, no.
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And so there is a, uh, overarching authority thing that sometimes gets in the way of clear thinking here.
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But, uh, we continue. That reasoning, you would seemingly have to say that Christians don't believe in the same
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God believed in by the faithful of Israel in the Old Testament. Okay. Um, he says that's a huge problem.
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Well, no. Um, we, we believe that Yahweh is the
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Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Um, that Yahweh is tripersonal. Um, that Yahweh is the one name, uh, of the being of God.
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And then you have fathers identify as Yahweh, the sons identify as Yahweh, the spirits, the spirit of Yahweh.
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Um, that's, that's a given, but, but again, we're, we're talking about worshiping in accordance with the revelation that God has made of himself to that point in time.
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So there would be greater revelation of who Yahweh is in Isaiah than Moses had.
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Right? I mean, it's not a different God, but there now has been further covenantal interaction with his people between the days of Moses and those of Isaiah.
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And so we've learned more about the character of Yahweh, right? Does that mean that Yahweh changed? No, it does not.
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Um, but that's not the issue that we're talking about when we talk about the triune nature of God and whether someone is accepting or rejecting, not embracing with perfection, but accepting or rejecting that revelation.
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That's, um, huge difference. A huge problem because the New Testament is quite explicit that the
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God of the old and the God of the New Testament are one and the same God. So I think - Yeah, there's, there's no question about that.
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But the question becomes, all right, so if you are a Jewish believer who has been worshiping
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Yahweh, then Yahweh reveals himself as father, son, and Holy Spirit and the person of Jesus Christ, and you reject that, are you still worshiping
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God aright? Because you're rejecting his self -revelation.
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Well, what did Apostle John say? If you don't have the father, you don't have the son. If you don't have the son, you don't have the father.
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He doesn't leave open this middle category. Now, look, there would have been a period of time, yes, where the gospel message and the
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New Testament scriptures are still being written and still being distributed, and so there's a transitionary period there.
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But we're not in a transitionary period any longer. You might argue for a transitionary period of 100, 150 years, just simply because we know early church writers who still had a minimal
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New Testament canon, missing entire sections. So, okay, we can be at least somewhat generous in that situation.
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That's not where we are right now. That's not what we're talking about today when we talk about, we talk about Islam today, or we talk about Islam when it arose 600 years after the incarnation.
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I mean, the Trinitarian controversies are pretty much over. The New Testament canon is complete, well known.
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There just isn't much in the way of excuses at this point. And so, if you're going to reject, and we'll look at where the
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Quran does so, that's a completely different thing than ignorance or in a transitionary period where, you know, you can't just fax a copy of the entire
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New Testament around the world or send it to everybody's cell phone type of situation.
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This is a theologically dangerous error. So, how do we avoid it? Well, by recognizing that people can be wrong about theology.
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You can say false things about the true God. You can even say false things about the nature of God. The philosopher
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Saul Kripke, in his book Naming and Necessity, gives us a helpful example. So, imagine you meet somebody celebrating
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Columbus Day, and you ask them, oh, who's Christopher Columbus? And they tell you, oh, he's the first man to realize that the earth was round, and he was the first European to land in the
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Western Hemisphere. These are the only two facts that this person can remember about Christopher Columbus. Now, you might know that both of those facts are actually false.
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The ancient Greeks realized that the world was round, and the Norse seemed to have been the first to arrive from Europe into the
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Western Hemisphere. But does that mean that when this person you're talking to, he's talking about Columbus, that they really are talking about somebody else, an ancient
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Greek or a Norseman? It doesn't. They're talking about the same guy that you and I know as Christopher Columbus. They're just very wrong about all the details that they know or think they know about.
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Now, here's one of the problems, though. The purpose of God's revelation is that we might know him, worship him aright, and grow in the grace and knowledge of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Someone who has a knowledge of Jesus as bad as whoever that example was of Christopher Columbus, there's good reason to question whether they know who
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Jesus is. And wouldn't this apply to Mormons? Well, they're just wrong about who
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Jesus is. No, they're polytheists. Not only do they literally demonize the
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Trinity, but they believe God is once a man living on the planet. The circle is a star named
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Kolob. And that's not the same God.
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But they called the same God. They called the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They refer to Jesus and the
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Holy Spirit. And oh, no, no, no, come on. I hope you can see where the vast difference is there.
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Jehovah's Witnesses are a little less wild an example, but they're still a good example.
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They even use the name Jehovah. At least they know what the Tetragrammaton is and the divine name and things like that.
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Doesn't that make them just an error? They're saying false things about God. Well, there has to be a dividing line.
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And there's a difference between saying false things about God and purposefully and specifically denying truths about God that are part of his revelation.
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So when one of his Pentecostals say that Jesus is both the
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Father and the Son, the Son is his human nature, the Father is his divine nature, that there aren't three divine persons, but they're
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Unitarians. Or when Jehovah's Witnesses say that Jesus is
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Michael the Archangel, is this just being wrong about facts?
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No, because both these religions came long after the truth has been revealed about who
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Jesus Christ is. And so they're replacing that truth with something else. It's not that they're just confused.
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The fundamental doctrinal positions of Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, one is
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Pentecostalism, are formulated with the doctrine of the
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Trinity, as held by Christians for many centuries, as the background.
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They're specifically saying that's wrong, this is what the truth is. That's not a matter of just...
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And when you talk about the Muslims, Islam comes 600 years after Christ, it comes 170 years after the
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Council of Chalcedon, and the problem with Islam is that its founder, or founders, were deeply ignorant of the
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Christian faith. And they were confused about all sorts of things, because they were going on without access to the
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Christian scriptures themselves. They were going on hearsay. What they had heard said here, heard said there.
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Man, that would be a really confusing thing to do, wouldn't it? But that's where they are. But they're coming 600 years down the road.
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We'll look at more of the Quran here in just a second. So, it's not just that you two might disagree about whether Columbus was a hero or a villain on a kind of qualitative value level.
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The other person might literally be getting every fact wrong, and still, they're talking about the same guy.
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Okay, but what about the fact that the Trinity is the essence of who God is? Well, and so it's interesting that, okay, he gets this now, but it's not just that it's the essence of who
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God is, and maybe this is part of the problem with Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholics are loathe to admit the
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New Testament is clear in its revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity. And that's always been one of my deepest visceral responses to Roman Catholicism, is when they say, well, you wouldn't know the doctrine of the
38:10
Trinity except for the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And especially one of my
38:16
Roman Catholic apologists who have never taken these people on. They've never gone into the streets and spoken to Muslims like I have, and like many other people like me have.
38:28
Not just me, but yeah. So, it's a different context here.
38:37
It's a completely different situation. Yes, the Trinity is central to what we believe about God, but it's also central to the denial of the doctrine of the
38:47
Trinity as found in the text of the Qur 'an itself. We'll get to that. I keep saying that. We will. Bear in mind, we only know
38:54
God's essence through his revelation. So, think about it like this. I've never seen an H2O molecule. I've never seen a water molecule.
39:00
I just trust that the textbooks and the scientists and teachers that I've learned from are accurately describing that molecule with two hydrogen and one oxygen.
39:08
So, if you're sitting with your friend at the beach, and you apparently have been run out of things to talk about, say, wow, that water is H2O. And your friend says, yeah,
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I actually don't believe in all that H2O stuff. What follows from that? Well, you probably need to find better beach conversation.
39:21
And your friend has some weird views about science, but it doesn't follow that the two of you are talking about different waters, or that one of you is talking about water and the other one is talking about something else.
39:29
No. Okay, again, the problem here is this is talking about specificity of facts, not denial of facts.
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And the New Testament makes it clear. If you deny that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, if you deny that he came in the flesh, you're anti -Christ.
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You're not a Christian. It's not that you're confused by the nature of water. These are issues that the
40:01
Bible itself defines as definitional. And interestingly enough, so do the
40:06
Muslims. One of you is just wrong about the nature of water, for the same reason that Muslims and Jews are wrong about the nature of God.
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The essence, whether it's the H2O or the triune nature of God, isn't something immediately obvious, something visible to the eye.
40:20
And so, it requires taking it on some level of faith. And making the case that Muslims and Christians worship separate gods, you end up seeming to have to make the heretical case that the
40:29
God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are separate gods. And that just won't do. No, stop, stop, stop.
40:38
Okay, you can take that down, Rich. So, we are not making that argument at all.
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And I think that's really where Joe's thinking is confused here, and hopefully will help us in clarifying our own.
40:56
We are not saying that the Jews, the Old Testament, believe in a different God. We are recognizing that revelation has taken place over time, that the revelation of the
41:06
Doctrine of Trinity is found in history, and that, let's just stick with the
41:13
Muslims, that the Muslims are specifically and purposefully denying what the
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New Testament teaches. Now, again, I've done entire programs on this, you can go back, use the transcripts tab, and dive into it.
41:30
But Surah Taliqas, Surah 112, Surah Taliqas.
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There are 114 Surahs in the Quran. This is number 112. If you're familiar with the Quran, they get shorter and shorter and shorter as they go along, so it's only four ayah, four verses.
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Say, He, Allah, is one. Allah is He on whom all depend. He begets not, nor is
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He begotten. And none is like Him. Surah 112,
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Ayah 3, He begets not, nor is He begotten. He does not beget, nor is
42:12
He Himself begotten. The Arabic word for birth, child.
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Remember, Hebrew is a Semitic language as well, so there's a lot of crossover. Yalaad, same term used in Isaiah 9, a child be born to us.
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That's where the connection is. Anyway, can you find
42:36
Western Muslims who would say this isn't necessarily talking about the
42:43
Trinity? I suppose. But I think it's pretty obvious that the vast majority of Muslims down through the ages would all say the same thing.
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This is a specific, Ayah 3 is a specific denial of Christian theology.
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And I would say the majority of Muslims in the world, if you were to press them on that, would say, well yeah, sure, that's where the
43:07
Quran says, He begets not, so there is no father, nor is He begotten, there is no son.
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Now, did the author of the Quran understand that relationship? No, not by a long shot.
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But there's the problem. I can say that because I don't believe the Quran is divine. The Muslim can't say that because as historic
43:31
Islam has said, there's not even a fingerprint of man in the
43:36
Quran. It's all divine. It's all the golden tablet in heaven. It's eternal and unchangeable.
43:44
And so you can't even muse on the idea that the author of the
43:50
Quran was ignorant of anything. Because the author of the Quran, the Quran itself is eternal.
43:55
It's as eternal as Allah is. So you can't go there.
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And so the Quran is specifically denying
44:10
Christian theology. So the majority of Muslims that I know and that I have had extensive conversation with would agree, no, we do not worship a triune
44:23
God. And if triunity is definitional of who you believe
44:28
Yahweh is, they rarely use the divine name. But if you believe
44:33
God is, then no, we do not worship the same God. And again,
44:39
Islamic sources, they're not completely consistent, but you can find all sorts of examples where that has been said down through the years.
44:48
No, we don't. We're not worshiping the same God. What they will claim is what they're forced to claim because of like Surah 5.
44:58
And that is the Torah was given to Moses. The Injil was given to Jesus. The Quran is given to Muhammad.
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And there is a intimate connection of content and authority.
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And so they will say, yeah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, they're all Muslims because they bowed in submission to Allah.
45:21
And so, yeah, we all have the same God on that sense. They'll literally say that their religion precedes
45:33
Christianity, especially, and that Christianity is marked by excess.
45:43
Do not go into excess. Do not say anything of Jesus that is not true. And they believe that what we assert about Christ is having gone into excess.
45:53
And so you might want to see the debate I did in Wandsworth, London a number of years ago on that very issue.
46:05
We went deeply into what the Quran says. And interestingly enough, my Muslim interlocutor basically said we can't really know what
46:15
Surah 5 is actually saying. I think we can, but there you go.
46:22
Okay. So do Christians and Muslims worship the same
46:27
God? The answer is no, we do not. And that is not a denial that Jews were worshiping one true
46:36
God. It is a recognition of the fact that Islam comes after the New Testament Revelation, is at least aware of the essence of that revelation, specifically denies that revelation.
46:48
And therefore, on a logical basis, you have to go, no, the object of our worship is fundamentally different.
46:56
It's fundamentally different. So Rich, can you change cameras? Can you, I'm not sure if you can do that out there in remote
47:04
Bill Land, but it would be a little bit easier to be over on camera two than camera one.
47:10
Otherwise, I'll just keep staring at camera one and all will be well. All right. Now, let me see here.
47:21
This next little clip, I do not want to see anyone moving into a religious system that is going to, thank you, trap them in endless ceremonies and things like that.
47:43
But I saw someone post this, and I don't know all the details.
47:53
I had heard from someone a while back that as many as six families from Joel Webben's church in Georgetown had converted to Eastern Orthodoxy.
48:10
And I think Pastor Webben did a program on Eastern Orthodoxy or something like that shortly thereafter.
48:22
I didn't see it, but that's what I was told. And so this clip that I have, it's all of 47 seconds long, from what
48:36
I read is from the guy at the Eastern Orthodox church there in Texas that these families moved under his authority into Eastern Orthodoxy.
48:48
That's what was said. I'm just repeating what I was told. Now, what's interesting is the substance of the argumentation here.
49:01
Let's listen to it, and I'll give Rich enough time to make sure the audio's up and we're ready to rock and roll here.
49:12
Let's listen to it because it is a different topic, but I do find it interesting, the fundamental attitude that this fellow has.
49:24
So let's listen to what he has to say. I met a local pastor. His name is
49:30
Joel Webon, and he's part of a reform group. Now, that said, Joel Webon, I think he's trying to say
49:37
Joel Webben, Webon. I don't know. I'm not sure what his ethnic background is, to be honest with you, but I think it's just a misunderstanding.
49:47
And I think the annotation here on the screen just may have been automatically generated or something like that.
49:58
I think he was trying to say Webben, Webon, whatever. And I was talking with him, and I said, oh, you guys are cessationists.
50:08
He goes, yeah, we believe that basically the gifts of the Holy Spirit have ceased. Okay. Now, most of what's going to follow this is,
50:18
I would assume, I could be wrong. I could be wrong.
50:25
But I would assume that Joel Webben is not a hyper cessationist.
50:34
A hyper cessationist basically says that, uh, yeah, the
50:46
Spirit's not doing anything these days at all. The Spirit is not active any longer, and my camera's died.
50:57
And let me see if I can, do you want the video up?
51:04
Yeah, I do want the video up. Sorry. Huh.
51:17
All the cameras just crashed and everything else. Okay. Well, no one's gonna steal my old car out there.
51:23
It's right there. Anyway, a hyper cessationist is a person that basically does believe that there are no spiritual gifts that are practiced or that are given to the church today.
51:35
A cessationist believes that the apostolic sign gifts that were specifically designed to establish apostolic authority during that important transitional period have ceased, but that there are clear and obvious gifts of the
52:01
Spirit in the sense of discernment, preaching, teaching, all these types of things that are listed for us in the
52:07
New Testament that they continue on. It's only the specific miraculous apostolic sign gifts that have ceased.
52:20
So there's a difference, hey, just came back up, yay, there is a difference between hyper cessationism, and I have met a few people that go that far, and what
52:32
I would call rational cessationism that recognizes that there were certain things that had a specific purpose during the apostolic time that would not have that purpose any longer.
52:46
So I don't know what Joel's view on that is. My gut feeling would probably be that he would agree with what
52:57
I just said and that he would be a cessationist, not a hyper cessationist. I don't know if this guy would really understand what those distinctions are.
53:06
That's not an area of discussion for them, but anyway. I said, oh, we agree with you 100%.
53:13
And he was kind of shocked and taken aback. I said, no, no, we do not believe the Holy Spirit is active in your ministry at all.
53:20
I go, we're in 100 % agreement on that. And he didn't have anything to say. What are you going to say?
53:26
You just told me the Holy Spirit is not active. I agree with you 100%. I said, but in the Orthodox Church, the
53:31
Holy Spirit is still active. Miracles still happen. There are still wonder workers. There are still saints.
53:37
There are still people alive today that have this grace of the Holy Spirit that is activated within them.
53:44
I mean, I look... Okay. So pretty cheesy shot, to be honest with you.
53:52
I mean, that's the best you've got. But it does re -raise the issue of the fact that you can make a very strong argument.
54:08
And again, orthodoxy is not completely uniform.
54:14
They do have their divisions. There are less than fundamentalistic
54:22
Orthodox people today, and especially in Greece, who would recognize true
54:31
Christians outside the bounds of orthodoxy, but that's not the historical position. It's just not. There have been those who have, but that's not the majority position.
54:43
And if you've seen the ceremonies where they're anathematizing
54:48
Calvin and Luther and Zwingli and all the
54:53
Protestants, anathema, anathema, anathema. I'll have to admit, I've never...
54:59
The group that uses the term anathema more than any other group
55:05
I've ever encountered are the Orthodox. I think it's because it's
55:12
Greek. So more so than the Roman Catholics. They don't mind saying anathema to all sorts of things.
55:22
And so you will encounter Orthodox who don't take that perspective, but I don't think they're by any means near the majority.
55:34
I think the majority would accept that, and they have to. I mean, we've sat here and we've read the anathemas of the
55:41
Second Nicene Council, not only anathematizing all the iconoclasts from the preceding generation, but it's just...
55:53
If you don't kiss the icon, anathema to you.
55:59
And if you don't do this, anathema to you. I mean, it gets so repetitive that at least you get the idea.
56:07
Yeah, they take this anathema thing pretty seriously. And they did not think of anathemas the way that Jimmy Akin thinks of anathemas today, where he says, oh, well, that's not that.
56:19
It's disruption of fellowship. No, no, no. We know what anathema meant to them and still means today in any rational sense.
56:30
And so I don't like seeing anybody pulled into this kind of thing.
56:39
And I'll have to admit, the garb is difficult for me.
56:49
I try to listen to the words and not necessarily the outward appearance, but sometimes it's just like, okay, it's hard to get past the very purposeful outward appearance that you've got.
57:07
But that was a pretty weak argument. That he put forward there.
57:13
Yeah, you're saying the Spirit's not in your church, but it is in ours. We've got wonder workers and miracle workers and so on and so forth.
57:23
And it's like, wow, you know, there's a lot you... I could present a whole lot better argumentation from the
57:33
Orthodox side than something like that. That, ah, it's just a sermon illustration.
57:40
He's just, you know, well, I don't know what kind of a chitchat he had with Joel Webben. And I don't know if Joel has recorded his side of the conversation.
57:51
Maybe somebody will point it out to me if somebody has. You can go ahead and take that down.
57:57
But yeah, I just wanted to take a look at what that guy had to say.
58:04
I was underwhelmed, shall we say, by the cogency of the argumentation as it was presented.
58:14
So anyways. All right. Well, real quickly. I'm actually shortening my upcoming trip a little bit.
58:32
There's been some substantial financial requirements.
58:43
My big beautiful truck is in the shop right now.
58:49
I don't know if I'll get it today or tomorrow. But, and they even said that this is unusual.
58:57
But we had to replace the catalytic converter. And on a big old honking diesel like that, there's all sorts of sensors and filters, all this kind of stuff.
59:07
Well, I think Rich said about thirty six hundred dollars, something like that, just for that.
59:14
And we told you about the big work on Big Red on the
59:20
RV itself. Some substantial expenditures. And so if you want to help us,
59:28
I am going back to Conway, Arkansas to teach apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.
59:37
And then you all know about, as Keith Foskey named it, Harbor Freight G3.
59:45
The same weekend G3 was supposed to be taking place in Tullahoma, Tennessee. I'm trying to get a debate set up there that I think would be very, very useful to folks.
59:58
I hope it works out. We will see. But I'm also going to be doing, and we need to get a graphic put together of this as soon as possible.
01:00:11
I just realized this. But last year I went up to Dolores, Colorado, which is in the southwestern corner of Colorado.
01:00:23
Beautiful area. And there's a couple up there, support of the ministry, a long time support of the ministry, and just a great couple.
01:00:35
And they have an RV park up there. They had invited me back when we first started
01:00:41
RVing, and I had no idea what the world was doing. Finally got a chance to stay with them. We're going to go up there.
01:00:46
I went with them to their church and met with the pastor. And it's the exact, it's the reason
01:00:54
I love doing this kind of traveling, is you get to get into these churches and not only hear about what the but to reinvest in those churches.
01:01:13
And we're going to do a conference there in Dolores. And like I said, we need to put a graphic together.
01:01:24
But I can tell you, as long as I can pull my trip planner up here. By the way, for those of you who have any interest in RVing, RV Life Trip Wizard, best planner out there.
01:01:39
No, I wouldn't know what on earth I was doing if I did not have this wonderful little thing of a
01:01:52
Bobby here. It's how I make all my reservations and all that stuff.
01:01:58
But let's see. We will be there by the hour. There it is.
01:02:08
Yeah, that'll be the weekend. Now, I don't know how many folks we have listening in southeastern
01:02:19
Colorado or in that general area. It is a beautiful area to go visit if you want to go up there.
01:02:30
But we will be up there once this, I don't need to know what is new in my calendar program.
01:02:36
There we go. This will be the conference will be, come on, 7 -16.
01:02:51
So yeah, the 18th, 19th, 20th of July.
01:02:59
And there aren't too many churches in Dolores. So once we put all this stuff out there with the location, things like that.
01:03:07
But yeah, we're gonna be doing a little conference up there. Whole idea from our perspective is bless the church, get people to know that it's there, to know that they get sound teaching and theology and fellowship there, especially in areas where there may not be a whole lot out there to know where the good sound places are.
01:03:36
And that's what we're gonna be doing. And we'll try to get a graphic put together as soon as possible and, and get that up for everybody.
01:03:43
But looking forward to that. I'm cutting off the about 10 days of the trip up to up to Denver.
01:03:56
I'm really gonna miss that. I miss seeing some of my friends up there, Bruce and Marty, especially.
01:04:03
It's not July unless I'm having Mexican food or Italian food up in Evergreen with, with those dear parts of my family.
01:04:13
But my September trip back east all the way to Pennsylvania, the
01:04:20
Harbor Freight G3, the conference with Eli Ayala and Jason Lyle.
01:04:28
That's gonna be a big one, not only distance wise, but time wise. And there'd only be like two and a half, three weeks between these two.
01:04:34
It's just gone too much. I got a wife, you know, and a family.
01:04:40
And so I'm going to cut that second part off. I'm going to have to eat some RV park reservations in the process, but just need to get back and have a little time at home before heading out on that big, long one, going, going, going back east.
01:04:58
So if you haven't gotten your reservations for the worldview conference, that's going to be,
01:05:05
I think, Franklin, Tennessee, and then Tullahoma, and then
01:05:11
Chris Arntzen's Iron Sharpens Iron Pastors Conference the weekend after that, and preaching in Carlisle, and then the long trip back.
01:05:21
So those are the upcoming, upcoming trips. I won't go into the possibility of a debate in Tullahoma right now.
01:05:29
We're going to throw it out there and see if it's a possibility. But let's hope it comes, comes out, because it would be, it would be an important subject and a very challenging opponent as well.
01:05:40
Someone I have debated before. So we'll see if that ends up working out.
01:05:46
So, but if you can help us with the, with the costs, travelfund .aomen
01:05:54
.org. We don't beat this fundraising drum very hard and very long.
01:06:03
Lots of bad experiences down through the years, people who did. But we do need to let you know that, you know, we're not sitting on a mountain of cash and stuff like that.
01:06:17
We don't have big, big, big, big, huge donors normally. And so it's, it's regular folks that keep us doing the things that we're doing.
01:06:29
Oh, so, so Rich is concerned that I, I need to cue him so we get out of here because I guess there's about a five or six second delay or something like that.
01:06:41
So I'm just going to type go in there when we're ready to, ready to go. And so that way we'll say, thanks for watching the program.