Presenting the Gospel to People of the Muslim Faith, Part 7

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Got about one hour left together and still have a lot of material to cover and let me start off by apologizing for the brain seizure
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I had before we took our break. The reason I didn't give you the name of that very popular
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Islamic speaker is I couldn't remember what it was. It was just one of those, what's my wife's name again, um, um, um moments, you know.
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They are happening more and more as the calendar keeps flipping those pages and I get older and older it happens.
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But the man's name was Ahmed D .D .A .T. A -H -M -E -D -D -E -E -D -A -T.
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If you want to look up some of his material on YouTube. I do believe that he is the most viewed
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Islamic speaker in the world. In fact I'll tell you a quick story, it'll have to be quick because I've still got a lot to cover in the last hour.
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But I was, I did a debate, I've done a couple debates in New York with Muslims and I saw this group sort of sitting together.
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And they came up to me afterwards, very nice folks, and they're Ahmadi Muslims. And the Ahmadi Muslims, they believe in the
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Quran, they believe in the five pillars of Islam, they pray the prayers, the whole nine yards.
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But Muslims view them like we view Jehovah's Witnesses. Because they believe that there has been a prophet since Muhammad.
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They don't have other books of scripture, they only have the Quran. But they believe that there was a man sent from God back in the late 1800s.
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And because of that, Muslims say they are not Muslims. And as a result they're killed by both
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Sunni and Shia Muslims throughout the world. In Pakistan, Afghanistan, places like that. They're peaceful folks, actually.
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And so they came up to me afterwards and they were talking with me. And I had found the debate to be very interesting and things like that.
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And they said to me, they said, are you speaking anywhere else here in New York while you're here? I said, well yeah, actually
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Wednesday night I'm speaking at this Baptist church located. I'm going to be talking about the reliability of the text of the
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New Testament. And they said, that's the same night we have our meetings. We'll cancel our meeting and come to yours. And so they canceled their meeting.
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And so that Wednesday night, I'm at the church. And about half an hour early, all of a sudden, and they wear these fez type things.
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All these Muslims with fezes start coming in. It was about 60 -40, about 60 %
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Christian, 40 % Muslim that night. And of course, I had really beefed up my presentation for some strange reason that evening.
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And so there's a point to all this. Afterwards, we opened it up for questions.
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And they had a lot of the standard questions that Muslims have about the text of the New Testament. And when
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I was talking with some of them after the presentation, one of them mentioned that some of the information that he had been asking questions was based upon the fact that he had watched
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Ahmad Didat talking on these specific subjects. Here's someone who's not even in an orthodox
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Muslim group. And what have they watched? They've watched Ahmad Didat debating Jimmy Swagger. That is how widely distributed amongst
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Muslims throughout the world that kind of stuff really is. Now, what was interesting is in the conversations afterwards, the imam of the mosque, the
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Aqaba Mosque, said, you know, the next time you're in New York, please let us know. We'd like to have you speak. So I was like, okay,
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I haven't been to New York since then, but next time I'm there, we'll definitely try to arrange that.
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It would be quite interesting to do. Now, got to jump back into this because we still have a lot to cover, and you'll be able to tell that I'll be talking very, very fast to try to get it all done.
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We've been looking at the concept of sonship, all this leading up to what I think is the key text in this subject, in the subject of the
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Quran and its representation of what the Bible says. It's Surah Al -Ma 'idah is the name of the
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Surah. Surah 5, Ayah 116. And beware the day when
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Allah will say, O Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to the people, take me and my mother as deities besides Allah?
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He will say, exalted are you. It was not for me to say that to which I have no right. If I had said it, you would have known it.
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You know what is within myself, and I do not know what is within yourself. Indeed, it is you who is knower of the unseen.
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And so here is the Quran saying that on the day of judgment,
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Allah is going to say to Jesus, the son of Mary, did you say to the people, and here's the words of the
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Quran, this is an accurate translation, take me and my mother as deities besides or in derogation of Allah.
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Now, remember before when we had talked about the fig tree arguments and it said
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Jesus ate food, but it actually used the plural. It says he and his mother ate food.
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And it says, see how Allah makes his signs clear and yet how they are diluted. This is the only text in all of the
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Quran. Now, remember, Surah 5, we've already had the do not say three. It would be better for you.
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Three what? Who is the three? Some of you might say, well, is the
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Holy Spirit ever mentioned in the Quran? Well, there is a Holy Spirit in the Quran. You know who the
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Holy Spirit is in Islam? The angel Jibreel. The angel Jibreel. There is never any reference to father, son, and Holy Spirit anywhere in the
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Quran. Coming 600 years after the time of Christ, 300 years after the council of Nicaea.
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No mention of father, son, and Holy Spirit. Instead, you have the one place in all the
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Quran where you have three mentioned. It's in the same context of Surah 5. And here you have three mentioned.
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You have Allah, you have Jesus, and you have Mary. Hmm.
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Allah takes a wife and has a son.
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Allah is married to Mary. They have a kid named Jesus. Now, where could that have come from?
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Well, think with me for just a moment. What if you're a young Muhammad and you are going on a caravan up into Syria?
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And you visit a village that has a small Christian church in it. And you're a teenager.
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What do teenagers do? Well, we know the teenagers here run out of my presentation five or seven minutes.
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Five or seven minutes prior to when I'm done. That's what teenagers do.
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You're right in the middle of a sentence and there they go. And so I'm sure at some point in time,
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Muhammad gets done taking care of the camels. And it's time to go exploring.
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And so you go find the Christian church. And maybe nobody's around or something like that.
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And, you know, maybe you stick your head inside and you look around. And what are you going to see in a Christian church around 585
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A .D. in southern Syria? Well, by then you're going to see statues.
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You're going to have representations of God, maybe as the creator. You're going to see crucifixes.
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You're going to see Jesus on a cross. What aren't you going to see that's going to immediately strike you as being a representation of deity?
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How would the Holy Spirit be seen? How would the Holy Spirit probably be represented in art or sculpture?
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As a dove. Probably wouldn't even recommend to a young person this is a picture of deity. But what else are you going to see?
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You're going to see a woman. You're going to see a woman holding a baby. Because Mariolatry was already in full swing by that time.
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Not to the point that Rome has developed it today. But there is very exalted language of Mary by the third century.
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And so you're going to see God. You're going to see Jesus. And you're going to see Mary. I think that's where it came from.
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Did you say the people take me and my mother as deities besides Allah? And that's why some
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Muslims, I can sit there and explain to them. I can give them entire books. I've written an entire book on the trinity.
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It's used as a textbook in a lot of schools. The forgotten trinity. Here it is. Here's what we believe. One God. Here's the evidence.
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Monotheism. The existence of three persons. The equality and co -equality and co -eternality of the person. It's all right there. Here's why we believe what we believe.
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They'll read it. Smart people. And they still struggle to actually believe that that's what we really believe.
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Why? Because that's their ultimate authority. That's their ultimate authority. And that's why you really need the spirit of God to be able to reach those folks.
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Now, sometimes it seems like Islam is the religion of perpetual outrage. Because they're always outraged.
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Remember Jalal al -Burawud. I'm angry this evening. You've ascribed a son to Allah. And I'm angry. You've offended us.
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And there's all this constant, we're offended, we're offended. And to be honest with you, sometimes
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I'm offended. And no one really seems to care about that. You're a Christian. You're supposed to be offended. You know?
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Just take it. But I'm offended by this. I'm offended by putting into the words, the mouth of Jesus, you know what is within myself and I do not know what is within yourself.
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Clearly, the author of that text had never read these words. All things have been handed over to me by my father.
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And no one knows the son except the father. Nor does anyone know the father except the son. And anyone to whom the son wills to reveal him.
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People have said that there was Christian influence in Muhammad's life. That he had
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Christian relatives. But evidently, no matter how else you put it, Muhammad simply did not know the
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Gospel. He did not know what the New Testament contained. Even to any real surface level at all.
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He knew much more about what the Old Testament contained than the New. That's for certain. And he didn't know what was found here.
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So what's the first great barrier that you're going to have to get over in dealing with a
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Muslim and introducing them to Jesus Christ? Proclaiming to them the Lordship of Jesus Christ? It's the concept of shirk.
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Shirk is an unforgivable sin. So they actually believe, most of them anyways, that you're inviting them to commit the one sin that if they die, that's the one sin
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Allah cannot forgive them of. They can be a mass murderer. I told you the story, well I'll tell you the story tonight, about a mass murderer.
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He was forgiven by Allah. And all sorts of other sins can be forgiven by God. On what basis is an issue we'll get to here in a moment.
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But any other sin can be forgiven by God. But remember Abu Talib? Does anyone remember Abu Talib? What's Abu Talib wearing?
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Somebody? Thank you very much.
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There was someone listening, yes. If I had something to give to you, I'd give to you. But I don't have anything to give to you.
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Abu Talib, Muhammad's uncle. Remember he was the one person that Muhammad could intercede for, who was a mushrik.
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He had died having committed the sin of shirk. And Muhammad intercedes for him. So he's got the garden spot in hell.
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Which means he's wearing sandals that are so hot his brains boil. That's the one sin.
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And what the vast majority of Muslims think you are inviting them to do is to commit the one sin that Allah will never forgive.
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So that's the first barrier to the gospel. You wonder why missions work, real missions work amongst the
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Muslim people is so difficult. There's a good example of it. But the second barrier, the second barrier is found in these words.
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If you're going to write down two verses, if there's just two ayah of the Quran to understand, I would say they'd be surah 5, 116 and surah 4, 157.
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I'd also throw surah 112, surah Dalai Klas in there for good measure, but that's another issue. Surah 4, 157.
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Have any of you seen, I wish I, you don't have internet, right?
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Wireless or anything in here? Yes, no, I've got yeses and nos. We have a division in the church.
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We do not, okay. Maybe you're picking up on somebody else's. Maybe you're sponging off somebody else's.
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But if we did, actually, I have it. Oh, I wish we had plugged in the,
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I actually could hold my microphone down to do this if I really needed to. Have any of you seen the music video that we produced with a fellow by the name of Ivy Connerly called 40
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Arabic Words? Have you seen that, Drew? You have seen it, okay. Maybe I'll have time to play it for you or something.
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But here are the 40 Arabic words. Only 40
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Arabic words. This is the only ayah, the only verse in all of the Quran that denies the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
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And it says, and for their saying, that is the Jews, indeed we have killed the
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Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah. And they did not kill him, nor they crucify him, but it was made to appear to them.
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And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption, and they did not kill him for certain.
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So, you have 40 Arabic words written 600 years after the events, 765 miles away, by someone who has no knowledge of the events themselves.
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And yet, for this reason, Muslims all across the world do not believe that Jesus Christ died upon the cross of Calvary.
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Now, if the Muslim comes from a Muslim country, there is a very great chance they believe in what's called the substitution theory.
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Not substitutionary atonement, the substitution theory. Because they look at this phrase right here, but it was made to appear to them.
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Shubihallaham. Shubihallaham in Arabic is really not a very clear, understandable phrase.
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It could mean a lot of different things. Most Muslims in the world believe that someone else was made to look like Jesus, and he was the one crucified on the cross.
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And guess who the primary suspect is? Judas. So, most
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Muslims in the world think Judas was supernaturally made to look like Jesus, and he was the one nailed to the cross, while Jesus, the next verse says,
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Surah 4, verse 158, rather Allah raised him up, Rafahu, to himself, and ever is
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Allah mighty, exalted in might, and wise. So, Jesus is taken up to heaven, and Judas is made to look like Jesus, and Judas is the one that's killed on the cross of Calvary.
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Now, I had one Muslim send me a long paper once, proving absolutely that it was Simon of Cyrene who was the one that was nailed to the cross.
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But that's the substitution concept, and the vast majority of Muslims in the world believe that. In the
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West, not so much. Why? Because Western Muslims realize, because they get challenged more often than non -Western
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Muslims, that this sort of leads to a little bit of a problem, because if you believe the substitution theory, then
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Allah sort of started Christianity by mistake. Because he did such a good job in fooling people that even
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Jesus' disciples were fooled, and they went out and started proclaiming the crucifixion and resurrection, and now you've got
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Christianity. And so, Allah started Christianity by mistake by doing such a good job with the substitution concept.
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And so, a lot of Western Muslims, when you ask them specifically if they believe that, they'll say, well, we don't believe
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Jesus was crucified, but what really happened? Whenever a Muslim doesn't have an answer, they'll say,
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Allahu alim, God knows, God knows, and they sort of move on from there.
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You'll see this in some of the presentations here. So, the
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Orthodox, this is a quotation from Yusuf Ali. His particular version of the Quran has sort of study notes.
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It's sort of, you know, the wry study Bible version of the Quran. It's got the footnotes down at the bottom. Nothing against...
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I still have a great Schofield, new Schofield from Oxford. Man, the leather on that thing is so awesome.
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Even after all these years, it still moves quietly at night. It's just a... It's great.
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It's a great Bible. The Orthodox Christian churches make it a cardinal point of their doctrine that his life was taken on the cross, that he died and was buried, and that on the third day he rose in the body with his wounds intact and walked about and conversed and ate with his disciples and was afterward taken up bodily to heaven.
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This is necessary for the theological doctrine of blood sacrifice and vicarious atonement for sins, which is rejected by Islam.
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The Quranic teaching is that Christ was not crucified nor killed by the Jews, notwithstanding certain apparent circumstances which produced that illusion in the minds of some of his enemies.
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Well, not just the minds of some of his enemies, the minds of his friends too. In fact, for a hundred years, anybody who commented on this at all, outside of the
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New Testament, historical sources, everything, Jesus died under Pontius Pilate on a Roman cross. It wasn't until the
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Gnostics came along that anyone denied that Jesus died on a cross and they denied Jesus died on a cross because they denied
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Jesus had a physical body. Ever tried to crucify a spirit? Not very easy to do.
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You can do all the nailing you want. It doesn't do anything to a spirit, so that's why they denied the reality of the cross.
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And so, you'll have other Muslims like Muhammad Asad. He has a huge commentary on the
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Quran published by CAIR. You all have heard of CAIR, I imagine, the Council on American Islamic Relations. They're in the news all the time.
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Compare Surah 355 where God says to Jesus, Verily I shall cause thee to die and shalt exalt thee unto me.
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The verb rafahu, literally he raised him or elevated him as always whenever the act of raf, elevating of a human being is attributed to God, the meaning of honoring or exalting.
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Nowhere in the Quran is there any warrant for the popular belief that God has taken up Jesus bodily in his lifetime into heaven.
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So, Asad represents the more Western view that is not the most popular view at all amongst most
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Muslims and you can sort of tell by the person you're talking to. You know, when I mentioned that I had an opportunity of talking to a
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Muslim who was my cab driver. He was taking me to the airport and we started talking and I could just tell he was from Morocco.
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He was born and raised in Morocco and so it was almost a given. He accepted the substitution theory.
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He understood Surah 4, 1 -7 as meaning somebody else was made was put in Jesus' place and so on and so forth.
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But if it's someone who may be second generation a little bit more educated or something like that, possibility is they're going to be not quite as quick to affirm this idea.
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Now, obviously if Jesus is not crucified on the cross, then there is no resurrection. There is no concept of atonement and most
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Muslims will, of course, say to you, I just don't understand why you don't believe that God can just forgive sins.
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I mean, if someone sins against you, you can forgive them. You don't have to have a sacrifice or you don't have to go, you know, kill a puppy dog or something just simply to forgive someone who asks you for forgiveness.
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Why do you need to have sacrifice? Allah can simply, he's merciful, he can just simply forgive sins.
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That is the Muslim concept and they do not understand, do not accept, even though there's sacrifice in Islam, it is not seen as being pointing forward to some kind of fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ.
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And so, you have very, very clearly here then, this second major hurdle.
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I had a friend, in fact, somebody here mentioned to me, I think, yesterday or the day before, it all blends together after a while.
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It was pre -Yamama, I know that. That's sort of the dividing line. Was it pre -Yamama or post -Yamama?
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That sort of helps me to understand where I was in the course of the conference. I never really had that happen quite to that level before, but I think it's the conjunction of that and the football shirts that just sort of, it comes together and it just makes it a special experience for me, one that would be very, very memorable.
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Anyway, what was I saying? We were at the Battle of Yamama and someone came up to me and said, who here has done some of the work in Uganda?
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Did anyone mention it? Okay, alright. Was it you? Really? Oh, he's going,
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I don't know if it was me, but I've been there. Somebody had been talking about some missions work in Uganda and I had had a friend that was in Uganda and, you know, in a small village, rural village,
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I mean, just very, very primitive, no electricity or running water or anything like that, and just walking down the streets and talking to people through a translator and the
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Muslims there would come up and you start talking and we're talking people that are on subsistence living here and the first objections they would raise was, we just don't understand why you
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Christians believe that Allah would allow one of his most blessed messengers to die in such a horrible way.
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And it's an honest objection from their perspective, they just understand from their perspective to die upon a cross,
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Allah would never allow that because Jesus was a good man, that's not, prophets don't die that way.
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And so what does that mean to us? That means that whenever you present this, whenever you present the crucifixion to a
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Muslim, you have to emphasize the self sacrificial nature of what
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Jesus does. No one takes my life from me, I give it of my own accord.
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It is necessary that I go to Jerusalem, it is necessary that the son of man be betrayed in the hands of men, that he be scourged and beaten and crucified.
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You've got to, he humbled himself, he became obedient to the point of death, even to death on the cross.
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You have to emphasize the fact that this is something Jesus does and he does so willingly, the father, son, and spirit together chose to do this.
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Because from their perspective, that's just not possible. It's not possible that Allah would ever allow something like this to happen to such a wonderful, wonderful servant of God.
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And so, did you all see the some of the, okay, he could have seen it on the iPad too, but did you all see the video why
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I love Jesus but hate religion? One person?
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Two people? Okay, alright. A couple of you did. It had millions and millions of hits. It went viral on YouTube.
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And it was a Christian guy. Well, every other group on the planet started to do a response to it.
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And a young Muslim guy down in Australia did a response to it. Why we love
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Jesus, why I love Jesus and therefore love Islam. And millions of people saw that too.
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So we did a response to that. For some reason, I do not know why. Look at me and you'll find this to be as funny as I do, but I happen to be very popular amongst black
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Christian rappers. But seriously, a couple of years ago,
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I looked on Twitter and here's Lecrae. Anybody ever heard of Lecrae? Probably one of the biggest names in that.
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And Lecrae was saying, we've got a day off on our tour, we're chilling on the bus watching
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James White videos. And there's a click and it's a picture and there's the band and up on the TV in the bus is me doing a debate with somebody.
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I'm like, really? Seriously? So Shailene, Lecrae, all these guys, they like watching debates and stuff.
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And so I've gotten to know some of these guys and one of the guys I've gotten to know is a guy named Ivy Connerly. And I contacted
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Ivy and I said, you know, I think it would be really, really good to respond to this young Muslim guy because his thing is filled with misunderstandings of Christianity.
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And so I wrote it and then Ivy put it into, it's called Spoken Word. It's not specifically necessarily rhyming rap, but it's spoken word type stuff.
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And look, I'm a Bach Beethoven type guy and if I'm doing something a little more modern,
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I'm a Keith Green type. Any Keith Green folks? Oh, yeah. I mentioned that to Drew and he's going, who's that?
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And I'm like, oh, gee. Gee. Yeah, I remember
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Keith Green. How can they live without Jesus?
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My parents thought that I was a liberal modernist nutcase for listening to Keith Green and it's now like, who's
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Keith Green? Anyway. It's not like this stuff is native to me.
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But it really went well. They shot it real well. They did it in a church and the graphics are real good and stuff.
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We started doing some work together. And I wrote a something on surah 4, 157.
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And he converted it. And I just realized that I can't play it for you because it's on a separate drive.
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I feel terrible. Anyways, what you want to do is you want to go to either
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YouTube or to my blog and put in 40 arabic words and tonight get a chance to listen to that.
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I moved all my stuff. My iTunes library is so huge. It takes up over half of my 750 gig drive.
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I moved it to an external drive and left it sitting in my hotel room, which I hope is still there. If it disappeared,
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I would be in real big trouble. It might be hiding somewhere in the recesses of this someplace.
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It's possible it is. I'd have to stop and look for it. Maybe when we're done, I'll take a quick look for it.
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We'll see. Okay. So you have a massive problem here.
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We have a massive hurdle in the way. And this leads us to the issue of salvation.
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If you think that there are differences of viewpoints amongst christians on the nature of the gospel and the arguments between calvinists and arminians and pelagians and augustinians and mulanists and all the rest of the stuff that you can come up with, there is exactly the same as just as wide a variety of viewpoints amongst muslims as there are amongst christians at this point.
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There really are. What you do have though is a fundamental rejection of the idea of a need for substitutionary atonement.
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That god can simply forgive. His law can simply be from our perspective trampled underfoot.
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And one of the illustrations is the one I've mentioned a couple times. It just sort of starts here, but I'm going to tell you the story myself because there's a number of different versions of it in the hadith.
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But here's just one example of it. Muhammad told a story, and by the way,
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I had used this as an illustration for a couple of years before I did a debate with Imam Shamsi Ali in New York.
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We did a radio program before we did the debate together and to illustrate the forgiving nature of Allah, Shamsi Ali told the same story that I had used as an illustration for years.
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This is not something that I've just stumbled upon this story and no muslim has ever told it or anything like that.
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It's a very well -known story and it's used by, well Shamsi Ali is the imam of the largest mosque in New York City.
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Fairly well -known individual. And so here's the story. You have a man who is, well, he's a mass murderer.
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He has killed 99 people and he goes to a monk and he asks the monk, will
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God accept my repentance? And the monk, rather unwisely says no.
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And so he kills the monk. And so now he's killed 100 people. Was that one up there?
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Yeah, the part where he gets killed isn't on that particular screen, I'll just leave it there. So he kills the monk and now he goes to a scholar and evidently this scholar is smarter than the monk.
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Maybe he heard about the monk, I don't know. But he goes to a scholar and he says, can my repentance be accepted by Allah?
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And the scholar says, go to such and such a city that is filled with righteous people.
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I guess he figured he can't kill all them. And they will tell you how your repentance can be accepted by Allah.
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And so the man starts going and as I've mentioned to you, in Islamic theology, 40 days into the gestation period, an angel comes and writes upon a tablet what every person's life is going to be like.
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What you're going to look like, where you're going to live, how successful you're going to be, how smart you're going to be, everything.
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And the exact day of your death. And there is nothing you can do about that. Zip, zero, nada.
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That's why a lot of Muslims and a lot of Muslim lands are really fatalists. You know, it's Inshallah. Many of those nations really struggle to motivate people to do work and things like that because Inshallah, if Allah wills.
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And so the time of his death comes as he is going toward this city.
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And I guess it's a little bit like if any of you saw the movie In Time. I saw it on a flight once.
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I found it rather fascinating actually. It had a lot of interesting spiritual overtones to it. But you had this clock embedded in your arm and once the time's out, you're gone.
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And that's sort of what happens to this guy. His time comes, he's gone. And so there he is probably face down in the dirt, in the road.
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And when you die, an angel from paradise comes, an angel from hell comes to claim your soul.
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And they argue. And the angel from, you would think the angel from hell has got the fairly easy argument here.
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This man's a mass murderer. He's killed a hundred people. He's never done anything good. He goes to hell.
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But the angel from paradise says, ah, but he was going to find out about repentance.
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So Allah decrees that if the man is one cubit closer to the city he was going to than the city he was coming from, he'll go to paradise.
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And then he causes the earth to shrink between the man and the city.
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So he's one cubit closer to where he's going, so the man goes to paradise. Now, Imam Shamsi Ali told this story on the radio.
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And you sort of think, well, alright, if that's the case, then any
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Muslim who says their prayers and goes on Hajj and fasts during Ramadan, I mean, if you can earn heaven,
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I would say living in Saudi Arabia, not drinking all day during the day in July is enough to get you into heaven.
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I mean, that should be enough to do it, I really think. Any faithful Muslim should have it easy.
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There shouldn't be any problem in them getting into heaven, right? And yet we know that that's not how
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Muslims understand it. There's another hadith where a man is brought before God, before a law, a judgment, and 99 scrolls, seemed to be a number for Muhammad, 99 scrolls of his evil deeds are brought forth.
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And the angel reads all of them, and the man just stands there. And Allah asks him, have we been unrighteous to you?
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Are these your deeds? Yes, I did all those things. Do you have any good deeds?
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The man says, I have nothing. He's resigned to his fate. And Allah says, but you're wrong.
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What? One, remember, 99 scrolls of bad deeds stacked up.
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One scrap of paper is brought forth by an angel. And the 99 scrolls are put into the scales.
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The Quran specifically uses the language of scales. It says those whose scales are light on the day of judgment will be the losers.
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Those whose scales are heavy on the day of, in other words, good works versus bad works will be the successors.
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They'll be successful. And the 99 scrolls are put in one side of the scale, and this one little piece of paper is put in the other side and it outweighs the 99 scrolls.
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What was written on the one piece of paper? You probably could guess. La ilaha illallah.
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He had made the confession of faith. He was going to paradise. Now, other hadith would indicate he'd be spending some time in hell in the process.
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Not to purge him of sin. The time spent there is not a purification thing.
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It more has to do with the intercession of Mohammed and stuff, but still he's going to end up in paradise.
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There's another hadith that very clearly states that it's written for you on that 40th day whether you're going to paradise or to fire.
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And so there are going to be people who will do the deeds of the fire all their life until they're one hand's breath away from entering the fire and then what is written about them will overcome them and they will go to paradise.
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Because that was what was written for them. And there are other people who will do the deeds of paradise.
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They will be righteous. They will do good deeds their entire life until they're one hand's breath away from entering the paradise and then what is written of them will overcome them and they will go into the fire.
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So in other words you can't tell by looking at somebody. It's part of the hadith. And then you have this.
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Click. There it is. I was shown the hellfire and that the majority of its dwellers are women.
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That always wakes the ladies up. At this point maybe they're getting a little tired, you know, and the coffee's wearing off and then you you throw that one up there.
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Now would any of you like to know maybe why this is? Because actually some of the ladies, some of the
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Muslim ladies asked Muhammad O Prophet of God Razul Allah why is this?
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And his response was well, it's obvious. First of all your testimony in court of law is worth less than that of a man.
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And secondly at least once a month you're not able to do the prayers. Now think about both of those rules.
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If I were a Muslim woman I would have gone, excuse me but you made those rules. But they didn't say that because they were wiser than that and wanted to continue living.
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So but that's why. The majority of the dwellers in hellfire are women because they can't be as religiously observant as a man.
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Which strikes us as very odd. And as I said there are hadith about some of the companions of Muhammad.
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The companions are considered to be the greatest generation that's ever lived. No generation can come close to companions.
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The people who actually walked and talked with Muhammad. They are the greatest religious authorities in the world.
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They're the greatest generation that's ever lived. And yet there were companions who cried when they thought of their death because they had not been told by Muhammad that they would come out of the hellfire.
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They had been told they'd go in but not that they would come out. And so you have a lot of conflicting stuff.
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I mean in Muslim theology the day of judgment the thing called the Sirat is set up.
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It's a bridge that goes over hell. And some people will run across it quickly even though it's a razor edge.
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And if you have a lot of Iman faith then you have much light to see. But then he told stories about some
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Muslims who will have only a small amount of Iman. Sort of the faith of a mustard seed.
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A small amount of Iman. And it's sort of like their toe will glow for a second then it stops. And they will be crawling across this bridge on their hands and knees and they have to stop waiting for the light to come back on.
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There's just so many different pictures and trying to come up with a coherent way of understanding them.
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It's why there's so many different perspectives found amongst the Muslims. What all this leads us to is a recognition of why all of what we've been doing this weekend is important.
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You see I have this saying that I probably didn't make it up but I didn't consciously borrow it from anybody else.
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But I say theology matters. In other words, what you believe will have a tremendous impact upon how you live.
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How the church worships. How the church views itself. What it's mission is. All these things.
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Theology matters. And here is a great illustration of it. You have a religion that talks about a holy
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God. You have a religion that talks about Sharia. The law of God.
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And so you have sin. You don't have the same real concept that I see in Isaiah 6 and where even
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Isaiah who is a holy man sees his own sinfulness before God. I don't really see that kind of an understanding.
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But there is a great fear of hell. There is a great fear of not being right with Allah because as I've said, it seems to me that Allah looks a lot like Muhammad.
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And if you know anything about the history of Muhammad you know that sometimes a defeated foe would be brought before him and Muhammad would be gracious to him and restore him to his lands and his property and his wives and so on and so forth.
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And the next guy comes up he's just like the last guy and he beheads him. There is an arbitrariness to Allah just as there was an arbitrariness to Muhammad.
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And the result is a Muslim who becomes truly concerned about his relationship to Allah has to look to the
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Quran and the only thing the Quran can give him by way of assurance is there is one way to know when you die that you're going into the presence of Allah and you'll have peace with him and you'll go to paradise.
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And that is if you die in jihad. If you die fighting for the
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Muslim people. Muhammad himself wished that he could die a thousand times in jihad.
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Die and be resurrected then die again in battle and be resurrected and die again in battle and be resurrected over and over and over again.
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He didn't get to do that. But he said that was his desire. It should be all Muslims' desires.
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Because that's the one if you die as a mujahid there is no question of the judgment.
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There is no question of the arbitrariness of Allah. Straight into the presence of Allah.
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Straight into paradise itself. And that explains this.
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Look familiar? June 30th, 2007. Glasgow Airport, Scotland. There is a dark green jeep that has been driven into the airport doorway.
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Two men inside have pressed a button and gas bombs have gone off.
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Thankfully, just like Christmas Day over Detroit a couple years ago, making bombs is not as easy as the internet may look make it look to be.
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And the only two people who died were the two people in the vehicle and they died slowly over time with their burns, which is a really not a good way to go.
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But there you see the fires. You saw the gates there just a few moments ago. One of the reasons that this one really struck me was because I have a lot of friends in Glasgow and starting in 2005
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I started preaching pretty much every other year there at the Reformed Baptist Church of Annie's Land with Jim Handyside and his wife
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Chrissy. And I've walked through that very door before this happened and since.
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I was there last year, I think. No, late 2010. Anyways, no, early 2011.
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That's right. I know this airport. I know where the
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Starbucks is. I've bought my daughter some things there. I've stood at those gates and checked in my luggage and they clearly wanted that bomb to go off and just blast burning gas in all over those people.
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That's what they wanted. And they purposely drove it there and they ran in that door and they reached down and I'm sure they screamed
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Allahu Akbar and pressed the button. Now, what kind of men were these?
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Most of the media sort of tries to tell us that these are down and outers. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia some of the governments will actually send money to people's families who blow themselves up in Israel and as long as you kill an
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Israeli or two, you get money for being a martyr or you die as a mujahid and things like that.
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And they're presented as down and outers. They got nothing else to do. It's a good way to get money for your family and so on and so forth, but that's not what these guys were.
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They were both National Health Service doctors. Not nurses.
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They were full fledged physicians. And they were the ones who died in this attack.
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They were the ones who planned it. They were the ones who built the bomb. And you go, what causes somebody to do that?
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What causes somebody, what's it like? What was the drive there like?
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You know, we think about that about 9 -11. What was it like in the cockpit as that building got bigger and bigger? I was in the
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Twin Towers a year before they went down. I was in this airport a year before that. And they're following me around.
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It's just a strange and odd thing. Hope that doesn't continue. Thanks, Drew.
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What was it like at that time? What was it like as those buildings came closer and closer?
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These men knew what they were doing. Why? They don't know the people in those buildings.
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They don't know the people in those planes. They didn't know the people in the airport. How can they have such animosity toward these people?
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And such a lack of concern for their own life. Every one of them was absolutely convinced that by dying in this way, they were assuring to themselves paradise itself.
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Yeah, 70 virgins, all the carnal pleasures that go along with that.
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But fundamentally, since Islam has no mediator, there can never be any assurance of peace with Allah except this.
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Because there's no mediator. And why is there no mediator? Because Muhammad didn't understand the concept. And because he denied the crucifixion, because he denied that the son of God had taken on human flesh, that there was a son of God.
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You could say he was ignorant if all you want. He was. There's no question that he was ignorant. But the results have been absolutely, positively, amazingly tragic.
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Down through the centuries and even to this day. And so as you think about well, the young people, lettuce and singing, it's a beautiful song.
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Before the throne of God above, I have a strong and perfect plea. It talks about my name is written on his hands.
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And those are beautiful songs to sing, but do we really think about what that means? Do we really believe it? You know,
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I watch those kids and I think back to wow, over 30 years ago, 1981, the
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Christian music festival in Estes Park, Colorado. It's a big,
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I mean, Amy Grant was there, the Imperials were there, I know you don't know any of these people, it's okay. You know, all the big names were there and they had a small group competition like this, about the same number of people.
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Small group competition and we were from a very large Baptist Church, North Phoenix Baptist Church in Phoenix. I sang bass and we won.
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We won the national competition that year. And I just remember how our signature song was called
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Cornerstone. I've still got it on my, well, again, on the external drive I don't have with me right now, but I have it and I'll still sing along.
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Can't do it as well as I used to. The range isn't quite as good as it used to be when I was 18, but it just meant a lot to me.
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It meant a lot to me to sing that song, but I sometimes think back at some of the songs I sang as a young person.
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I go, you know, I didn't really give quite enough thought to what I was saying back then.
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The older I get, the more I think about lyrics and what it means. And maybe it's because I do a lot more preaching now.
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I've been preaching through Hebrews for almost three, four years now. Not every
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Sunday, but I don't go that slow. Though Reformed Baptists do tend to go that slow. My fellow elder preached through Matthew I think in seven years.
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yeah. What's that? What's that?
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We got one of those? Okay. There he is.
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That's good. That's good. I got no problem with that whatsoever, but I've been preaching through Hebrews and it has really made that song mean so much more to me to think about the sacrifice of Christ, the nature of the one.
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I've defended the deity of Christ against Jehovah's Witnesses and people like that for years, but honestly the more
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I do it, and especially recently because of my work in Islam, it has really struck me more and more how vitally important that is.
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I mean the cross is the very centerpiece of human history. It is the very centerpiece of what
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God has done, and if Jesus wasn't the God -man, then he would not be fit to be the one where all of the attributes of God are illustrated in one event.
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His holiness, his justice, his wrath, and his love, his mercy, his grace meet in one place at one time in one unique individual in the cross of Christ.
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And when we think about my name is written on his hands, why is it that you as a believer woke up this morning, if you're a believer, why is it that you woke up this morning and the first thought across your mind was not the wrath of God against your sin?
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Because you know your sin. You know even as a believer how many times your mind wandered. How many times you left things undone.
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How many times you indulged your sinful flesh. So why did you wake up not fearing the wrath of God?
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Partly because we don't think much about the wrath of God. But if you're a believer, the reason you wake up with confidence is because Romans 5 once says, therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
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Lord Jesus Christ. Why? Why can I have peace with God? It's not because of anything
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I've done, it's because of what Christ has done in my place and that's the very thing that has been denied to the
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Muslim people. They've got the holiness of God, they've got heaven, they've got hell, but they don't have a mediator that can provide them with that peace.
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And if there's anything that should motivate you, it should be...
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Remember the story from the Old Testament? You know, the armies have besieged Jerusalem and then they're gone.
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And who discovers it first? Some beggars. Some people that have nothing. And we are like beggars, starving and we have found eternal life.
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Are we just going to keep it to ourselves? Oh, this is great. No, you want to go and tell everybody else that you know is likewise like you, starving.
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And when we really understand what God has done for us, then we should be the first ones to be proclaiming that message to those who've, in this case, been given a false hope and in fact have specifically been put in a position that results in doctors sitting in jeeps burning because they think this is the way they can have peace with God.
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It's an amazing thing. And so I've thrown a lot of material out at you. We've talked about Abdullah ibn
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Masud and Ubay ibn Ka 'b and Ahmed Didat and even got Jimmy Swaggart in there for the fun of it.
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And we've talked about a lot of stuff. But all of it really comes together to try to say these people need knowledgeable, bold, loving, compassionate
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Christians who will get over the fear that we have and tell them not about a
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Jesus. You know, the only Jesus it seems Christians want to tell Muslims about is the, you know,
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I hate that picture of the long haired Jesus where he's got the little lamb in his arms. You go, well, you don't want to tell
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Jesus is loving? Yes, he's loving. But that's not all he is.
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And the picture of Jesus in the book of Revelation, how does Jesus appear to John?
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Yeah, he does appear as a lamb later on in the book of Revelation. Lamb standing as a slain before the, and he's the object of the worship of every created thing.
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But when he appears to John in the Isle of Patmos, what does he look like? He's powerful.
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He has a sword. A sword comes forth, he rules the nations with a rod of iron.
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And what really strikes the Muslims, I've found, is when you give the full orbed view of Jesus, he is king of kings and lord of lords.
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Every breath of your mouth comes from his hand. Every beat of your heart comes from his hand. You cannot treat him as a mere prophet.
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You can't be neutral about him. And then when you present him in his glory as the one who's created all things, then what's really amazing is he's shown his love and proven his love in the cross of Christ and the resurrection.
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And they respect that. And that's what they need to hear from us. So if I have been able to encourage you toward that end, encourage you toward being bold as a witness, and maybe getting over that initial fear.
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We haven't covered everything there is to know, but I can guarantee you one thing. If you took in any major portion of what
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I've said, sadly, amongst evangelicals in the United States, you're some of the best educated on Islam now.
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Use that information. May God be honored and glorified in it. Thank you,