Witnessing to Muslims, Part 2 - Their Authority

Welcome to lesson 2, or part 2, of Witnessing to Muslims. This is where we're going to get into some more detailed information, so that you know where I'm getting the information from.

It is from the Introduction to Cults and World Religions from Striving for Eternity Ministries.

This is work that I have done, original resource material from reading the

Quran itself, systematizing the Quran, and putting a systematic theology to it.

It's the only one that I know of in existence, even in the Muslim world, that I know of. I've spoken to some

Muslims that have told me the same. Now, what we want to deal with in this lesson is the issue of authority.

This is a key issue, because when you speak to a Muslim, they believe that they have an authority over you as a

Christian, because they have a Quran. They're going to believe that that is their authority.

They're going to have one thing that they're going to have, even if you have a Quran like this, they're going to tell you that this is not really authoritative, because it must be in Arabic.

So, if you have an English translation, they're going to make excuse for it, so anything that you may point out to them in an

English Quran, they always have a way of escaping that. But there are some things that you can get them to agree with, and before they know it, they've been trapped in their own authority.

So when we start with, the first thing that we must look at is how they view the scriptures, the

Christian scriptures, scriptures in general. They have many passages in the

Quran that state that Allah has given a hundred and four sacred texts.

Now, out of these texts that they say that we have, they say a hundred of them are lost, a hundred of them we cannot find anymore.

We only have four in existence today. That is important.

We'll get to that in a moment. But what you see here is that out of the four that are left, they see the first as being the writings of what we call the

Pentateuch, the books of Moses. They would see the Zebra, which is the books of David, meaning the

Psalms. The Angeal, which is the books of Jesus, which any

Christian would quickly realize Jesus didn't write any scripture, but that's what their theory is.

And then the Quran, which is the book of the writings of Muhammad. Now the interesting thing here that I usually like to do with them is to go through these things and what they'll do is they'll say that we've lost 100 of those sacred texts, but we have four of them.

Three of the four, the books of Moses, the books of David, and the books of Jesus have been corrupted or changed.

And that the only one that's trustworthy is going to be that of the books of the

Quran. So what we see here is that out of 104 times, according to their scriptures,

Allah could only keep his word accurate one time, that's less than 1%.

If Allah could not keep his word 103 times, why would

I trust the 104th time? Doesn't make much sense. Another aspect that you can do with this is to ask them questions.

By asking them these questions, you can lead them down a path of logic to hopefully reason with them.

The thinking would go something like this. Ask them, when about did the

Bible get corrupted? Now we know it would have had to have been after Muhammad lived, which would have been 700

AD, because in Sarah 5 .48 it says this, it says to you we sent the scripture in truth speaking of the

Quran, confirming the scripture that came before it and guarding it in safety.

So judge between them by what Allah has revealed and do not follow vain desires diverging from the truth that has come to you.

So both the Quran and the Old and New Testament scriptures by the time of writing of Sarah 5 were considered trustworthy in truth and that one confirmed the other.

So we know that at least by 700 AD the Bible was considered trustworthy.

And the reason I would ask them how it goes about that because they would say that it's been changed and corrupted and that all the copies were burned.

Well the issue there is that after 700 years the scripture had spread throughout the whole known world, into Asia, into Africa, into Europe, it had spread.

How do you gather all of them up and destroy them all? That would be very very difficult.

Where we do know this third caliph after Muhammad did actually say to burn all the abhorrent texts of the

Quran. That was only within 25 years of the writing.

That's more conceivable that they can gather them all because it hadn't spread as widespread as the

Bible. So you can ask them how do you go about gathering up all of the

Bible from all the separate parts of the world, Old and New Testament and not find any deviation.

The Dead Sea Scrolls if you study them out are a good thing to study in that because it will give you a great amount of understanding.

Let's move on though. One aspect is this that I point out all the time with Muslims is the fact that how can you trust something that Allah could not keep straight 103 out of 104 times.

Where in the scripture, the Bible it says God will not let one jot nor tittle pass away.

It will all come to pass. So a great view to deal with them on the authority issue is that, is the fact that the

Bible says it will never pass away and the Quran says yeah God couldn't keep his word 103 times.

Why trust the 104th? If the others think that the 103 are accurate or the 3 that we have known, wouldn't it make sense that a

Muslim would believe the 104th is accurate even if it was corrupted? And we know from history that a

Caliph Ammar had actually said to burn the abhorrent texts so there were some other translations, other copies that they disagreed with.

Let's go to what I call the ultimate proof that the Quran is not written by Allah or God.

It is the ultimate proof because it is a clear contradiction, a very clear contradiction.

In speaking of the issue of the triunity or trinity, the Christian view of a trinity is the

Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. What I encourage people to do is, and I do this all the time as I ask a

Muslim, is the Quran accurate when it teaches or does the

Quran teach that the Christian view of trinity is the Father, the

Mother and the Son? And if you have a Muslim who understands the Quran, they will agree with that.

If they're familiar with Christianity, they may deny that because they know where you're going to go because clearly you can see already.

If the Quran teaches that the Christian view of trinity is Father, Mother, Son, that is a contradiction to the

Christian view of trinity which is Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So let me give you that quotation.

It's in the Surah 5, verse 116. It says, And behold,

Allah will say, O son of Mary, didst thou say unto men,

Worship me and my mother as gods? You see right there that they've set that up.

We see later, if you need another verse, you can look at Surah, and this one is going to be in 5, 73 to 75, and it's going to speak specifically of the trinity.

By the way, the trinity is the only thing that you can never be saved from if you believe in it.

It's the one unpardonable sin in Islam, is to believe in a trinity, and it's speaking of the trinity in there, it very specifically says,

Allah is one of three, is a trinity, for there is no god but Allah, if they detest not from your word a blasphemy.

So in other words, if you were to say that there's a trinity, that's the blasphemy. So let's recap real quick, two areas of authority to address with a

Muslim, first, the fact that they believe that there were 104 sacred texts of which we have 4 in existence today, of which 3 are corrupted, why trust the last one?

How would they know Muhammad is accurate if God was wrong 103 other times, versus a

Bible that says he's always going to be accurate? The second and ultimate proof that the Quran is not from God is the fact that it's a clear contradiction when it talks about the definition of the trinity.

That is very clear, if God wrote the Quran, he wouldn't get that wrong.

Now Muhammad got it wrong because Muhammad was not associating with true

Christians, he was associating with people who were kicked out of the Roman Empire because of heresy, and that's what influenced him, a heresy.

So if you speak to a Muslim, ask them those questions, why trust the 104th time?

If God couldn't keep it right, why trust the last one? But if God wrote the

Quran, he can clearly not have gotten something so blatantly wrong as the definition of the trinity.

Think about that the next time you go out and speak to a Muslim, that is some authority that you can go with, and next time we're going to talk about the fact of Allah's justice versus mercy, it's a very interesting topic, and until then, go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the