August 3, 2016 Show with “James Wright” on “Martyrs of Malayta: Martyred for the Messiah in Turkey”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this third day of August 2016 and we have a very important guest today to discuss a very important subject.

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This is a first time guest here on Iron Sharpens Iron and his name is

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James Wright, not to be confused with my good friend who's been interviewed on this broadcast numerous times,

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Dr. James R. White. This is James Wright, w -r -i -g -h -t, which is actually a pseudonym or a pen name for reasons we will soon discover.

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We're going to be discussing his book Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the

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Messiah in Turkey, and it is my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, James Wright.

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Thank you, nice to be with you and I appreciate the invitation. Well let's get into as much basic background as we can about you, obviously remaining anonymous and right under a pen name for a reason, but how did you first come to Christ?

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We'd like to know something about your background, perhaps the country you're from, and how you got interested in the people of Turkey and spreading the gospel to Muslims and those living amidst

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Muslims in a heavily populated country where Muslims dominate.

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Right, I came from the south in the United States and went to a secular college, a state college.

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During my time I was part of campus ministry, now known as CRU, so that was very formative in my life.

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I actually was in a home where I heard the gospel and many of my family were

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Christians, so I was exposed to that from a young age. I would say at nine actually was when

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I first heard the call and received the call of God and put my faith in Jesus at that time, and then later was actually baptized.

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But in college I began to learn a lot more through the campus ministry, and then that was also my first introduction to Muslims, who were many students.

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There were many international students at our college. This book is about three men who gave their lives for Jesus Christ on April 18, 2007, which included two

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Turkish Christians and one German who were committed to taking the gospel to the country and people

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God had called them, and began their day simply wanting to spend time with local men they thought genuinely wanted to study the

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Bible. But instead, five hostile young men met their kindness and hospitality with betrayal and treachery, according to the publisher of this book,

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Martyrs of Malatya, martyred for the Messiah in Turkey. By the way, am I pronouncing

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Malatya correctly? That's correct, yes. That's very good, Malatya. It's famous in many ways.

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Historically it was still considered the world capital of apricots,

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Turkish apricots. Beautiful town, and they do produce a lovely, every year they have huge crops of apricots, and we've had good friends from that area.

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There was a Christian presence there in the past, I'd say before 100 years ago, the population in the country of Turkey has become, as you indicated, almost entirely

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Islamic in the last 80 years. And this may seem like a foolish question to ask somebody who writes on a subject such as this, but just so our listeners know specifically why, why did you write under a pseudonym or a pen name?

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I've written under a pseudonym several books, this was one of them, and because I travel pretty extensively, especially in the day and age of the internet where one just never knows who can look at your information, and sometimes we're in hostile places, sometimes where there's

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Christian persecution, just for the safety and security and advance of our ministry, it seemed like a wise thing to be able to keep doors open, in this case to write under a pseudonym.

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And if you could, I didn't want to even attempt to pronounce the names of the three men who were martyred in Turkey, whose lives and martyrdom you have written about, but if you could tell us about these three men and tell us what led up to their deaths.

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Yeah, let me just say their names. One was Nejati Aydin, another was

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Ur Yüksel, and the third is a German brother, Tilman Gesche.

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Nejati and Tilman both were married, and their widows are still in ministry.

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Tilman's widow, Suzanne, stayed with their three kids in Malatya, and they've really been amazingly faithful to stay in that city and continue to go to dozens and dozens of court cases, trying to seek some justice for the deaths.

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I might tell more about that later. It's a very complicated thing, and you know if anybody's been following, any of the listeners have been following the news,

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Turkey's been on the front page center because of many events in the last, well, 6 to 12 months, but now most recently there's been a failed military coup.

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And this book is interwoven with the events happening right now in Turkey, even though the book's been out a couple years.

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And the events of 2007, events prior to that, Turkey is a very complicated place.

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Yeah, I don't know if it's still as frightening as it was in the days when

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Billy Hayes was in prison there for being caught at the airport smuggling hashish, but I remember seeing the movie back in the 70s,

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I believe it was, Midnight Express, which left a pretty terrifying image in the minds of everybody who saw that movie, and I'm not 100 % sure how accurate it was, but obviously you've written a book about three men being martyred for their faith, so it still must be a fairly frightening place, and although it may be a very beautiful place in many ways too.

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Yeah, and a lot of what happens there is involving political intrigue.

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There's big powers, big groups of people that are vying for position, jockeying for position, and the

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Christians sometimes are just, they're used as pawns. In this case,

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I think these men were killed to foment unrest, and also the perpetrators that were behind it, this went deeper and deeper into the investigation and found more and more people involved in it, but basically there's big groups of people trying to jockey for power in the country, and the actual five men that you allude to that went in and pretended to be believers, and these were just five young guys, probably not even 21 yet, and they had been whipped into extreme hatred and distrust in Christianity, and also the

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Islamic side of things had been used to stir their animosity toward these men, and these

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Christians were viewed as many Christians are in Turkey, they were viewed as a threat to the security of the country, and then lies were told about them, that they were smuggling weapons and taking girls and putting them into prostitution, just all kinds of misinformation and slander, and all this had just been used to twist and deceive these five young men, but the powers behind the five young men would have been wanting to create unrest, social unrest, for their own purposes, so it was one group of people with one set of goals manipulating another group of guys who had a different set of goals, and it's all just powers of darkness, so it was a complicated thing.

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Trying to write about it was complicated, but I did try to distill it down in this book into a somewhat understandable way.

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And let me give our email address for those of our listeners who want to join us on the air with a question of their own.

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It's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. Obviously, if you feel more comfortable due to the sensitive nature of this program, or even our guest is using a pen name, a pseudonym, you may write in anonymously, and we will honor your request to remain anonymous, but if that is not absolutely necessary, we would encourage you to at least give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

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ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Let me backtrack a little bit before we get to know those brave Christians who were martyred there in Turkey.

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Let me get more of a sense of the theological and religious climate of Turkey.

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There are all different kinds of levels of Sharia law or Islamic rule in the eastern parts of the world.

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You have those that are strict fundamentalist Muslims running a very strictly ruled theonomic, or should

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I say theocracy, and would be under Sharia law.

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Then you had people who were not Muslim fundamentalists, but who were perhaps equally as brutal to their enemies, like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and others who were not really truly fundamentalist

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Muslims, but in some ways kept the more strict

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Muslims at bay from committing further violence. But if you could tell us something about Turkey.

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Yeah, that's a good question, and certainly in light of current events, people are very uncertain.

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Let me just give a kind of overview. 1453, the

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Byzantine Empire was at its last breath. The Ottomans came in, the

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Ottoman Turks, Osman, Fethi the Conqueror came in, and he and his armies finally toppled

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Constantinople, and they turned it into Istanbul, as we know it today by the name.

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It was a tremendous walled city, you know, beyond even the kinds of things you see in the movies like The Lord of the

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Rings. It was just a fabulous city of stone walls and turrets and towers and castles and everything, and they took it over the largest,

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I guess one of the largest domed church buildings, cathedrals in the world, in Istanbul, certainly one of the oldest.

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They immediately turned it into a mosque. They would be Sunnis, right? Sunni Muslims.

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Those were the Ottoman Turks, were Sunni Muslims. They were not Shiites. Shiites make up about 10 percent of the

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Islamic world, and Sunnis make up about 90. Well, at that time, the

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Turks quickly ascended within the first 100 years of that new Ottoman Empire, 1453, 1553.

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If you know, of course, the Christian history, this is right in the heyday of the

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Reformation. Luther and Calvin swing. All these guys are reforming. There's a great Reformation going on in Europe, and the

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Turks are ascending, and quickly the Turks take on the mantle of the

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Ghazi, the Jihadist, the holy warrior, and they begin to attack Eastern Europe.

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They advance into Greece and Hungary and go to the gates of Vienna and so forth. So since that time to the present,

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I should say really to about World War I, the Turks were ruled under the Sultans, and the

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Sunni Muslims were, kind of, they were the spearhead.

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The Turks considered themselves the army, the warrior arm of the whole

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Muslim world, and considered themselves the leaders of the Muslim world, the Sunni. And they also were the seat,

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Constantinople or Istanbul was the seat of the caliph, the caliphate, Islamic caliphate.

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The Sultan was the political leader, and he was the caliph, the religious leader. It was one person was both political and religious leader for the whole, technically, the whole

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Muslim world. Underneath all of that, in Asia Minor, in what's modern

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Turkey, underneath all that was some splinter groups. One was called the Alevis, and they were like, more like Shiites, but a splinter group, and they still comprised about 15 -20 % of the

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Turkish population. They would be the dissenters, they would be the political opposition, they would be the ones a little more politically, democratically minded in modern

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Turkey. But the current president of Turkey, Erdogan, Tayyip Erdogan, since the coup happened, he's been arresting people and tightening his control of the country.

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People are speculating about who he is and what his goals are and so forth. But ultimately,

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Turkey has all, ever since the Turks first arrived, and I think it was 1071 when the

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Turks first arrived. Interestingly enough, the split between the East and the West Church, the Constantine, Constantinople, and Rome, the split,

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I don't remember the exact date, but it was just within, I think, a decade or two of the Turks actually arriving.

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And I've never read anything about it, but I just wonder, can't help but wonder if there was some connection between the

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Turks arriving in 1071, winning the Battle of Manzikert, which was out in the eastern part of Turkey, and that was the beginning of the end of the

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Byzantine Empire. I've always wondered if that had something to do politically with that split. But since that time to now,

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Turkish, a thousand, nearly a thousand years of Islamic, Sunni Islamic rule in Turkey.

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Times change, faces change, leaders change, but you essentially still have a very strong Islamic presence in Turkey.

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Now, the funny thing about the Turks are, if I could just add this, is that the

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Turkish people, for all the bluster and fame of Islam, most

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Turks don't know Arabic. And I have an acquaintance who's quite an effective evangelist in Turkey.

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He's from South America, and he once told me that the Turks actually are more mystical in their

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Islam, even the Turks, because they don't read, they don't know the Koran, they don't know what's in the

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Koran, they don't know what's in Sharia, they don't have Arabic language, they speak Turkish. And not only that, but when they were using

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Arabic script, the Arabic alphabet, they used it for what was called

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Osman, Turkish. That was pre -1922, when Ataturk, the founder of the modern country of Turkey, he abolished

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Arabic, he went to the Latin script, he tried to westernize the country. But even when they had that, people still couldn't really read

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Arabic. So you have what's a very strong heart, emotional, emotive allegiance there, deep, deep in the heart.

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But you don't have the same kind of understanding of Islam that you would find in the Arabic countries, where they can actually read the text.

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Most of them just can't read the text. So you're going on hearsay, you're going on tradition, you're going on manipulation, if you will, you could even say, by leaders who just pull in different directions.

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And a lot of Americans would be surprised, were surprised, and may still be surprised, that the

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United States' involvement in Iraq actually made

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Iraq a far less safe place for Christians than it was when

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Saddam Hussein was in power. Now, what would your opinion be as to whether or not the coup, or should

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I say, if the coup, attempted coup, was successful in Turkey, would this have been a more problematic situation for Christians, or would it have made life better for them?

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This is the question. We were in Turkey when the U .S. invaded Iraq. We've been living in Turkey, my family, since early 2000s.

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We were in Central Asia before that, and another Turkic country. We were in Kazakhstan, I can say, until we've been traveling to many of those countries.

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But these are the two big questions we always, we as Christians, we as the Church, have, particularly the

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Church that's reformed and says, well, we want to see this gospel preached to all the nations.

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And we understand that is a biblical mandate. We have these two big questions.

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What about the Church that's there, or the Christians that are there? Even the ancient

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Church, we would say, in some cases, theologically, has become very confused or off track.

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But that's the first question. What about the Christians already there? And the second question is, what about those that might yet become

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Christians, who are not Christians yet, but are Muslim, probably? Although there's other minorities, like the

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Yazidis, who've experienced significant persecution, very strange religious group.

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I don't know much about them, but you have the Maronites, all these other groups. What about what's going to happen with those who are yet to become

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Christian? Those are always the two big questions, aren't they? And we all, at this point, when it comes to your question about Turkey, is we're asking, well, what's going to happen?

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No one knows. A friend of mine just wrote on his Facebook account, he said he was in the coffee shop the other day.

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This is a very strong, bold evangelist, a friend of mine. And he was offering his consolations, his condolences to his

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Turkish friends, saying, I'm very sorry about this coup, and we're just sorry to see your country experience this trouble.

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And another man walked in, a Turkish man, and said, well, you don't need to be sorry, because you Christians are going to probably see masses of Turks become

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Christians now, because of what just happened. That's interesting.

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We don't know, but we know that something's probably going to change. The status quo seems to be changing.

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We do have a listener in Kinross, Scotland, Murray, who asks, to those of us in the

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UK, and I assume the USA, the length of time the trial of those accused of the murder of the three brothers is ridiculous.

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Just what likelihood is there that the next proposed hearing scheduled for the 28th of September will actually result in a verdict being arrived at?

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Is the current instability in Turkey likely to have any effect on the trial? And I give thanks that despite all this and continued vandalism to the church building in Malatya, the church there continues to grow.

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But are there any up -to -date needs that you can share with us for prayer? Okay, yeah, that's a well -informed listener.

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Thank you for that question and comment. Let me just say this, that one of my reactions earlier today, thinking about the current events, you know, they're calling for, the president of Turkey has even suggested maybe reintroducing the death penalty, and he's very angry about this current coup attempt, and they're angry at the people who attempted it, and I say it is a terrible thing.

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I was sorry to see the loss of life and so forth, and he's calling for vengeance.

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It struck me as rather odd because these guys who were caught in, they were caught in the

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Zirve Bible offices within minutes of having killed, I mean, one of the guys was still alive, or was still alive when the police arrived.

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They were caught literally red -handed. They were caught with the knives, caught with all the weapons, caught with the ropes. They have not been convicted, and now they're on house parole.

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They have a bracelet or something, and they can even go out and around town, and the widow was telling how traumatic it would be to be at the shopping center and then see one of these guys out and around the city, and I thought, you know, there's been so much desire for vengeance because of this current event, and yet here the

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Christians suffered a terrible thing, and they won't even convict these guys. You know, the chances of this, I'll just be frank.

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I don't see how, I don't see any indication that they'll ever be convicted. I don't see any change, and maybe

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God will do something and intervene and bring justice. We know justice will eventually be served, but I don't see that.

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If I could just take a moment, Chris, just to give a little more background into what's happening currently.

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You know, the current coup is the political power in charge, the current government of Taip Erdogan, and in the coup attempt, he is blaming on this guy that's living in Pennsylvania named

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Fethullah Gulen, and it would seem possible to me that this guy,

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Fethullah Gulen, who I don't see him as a positive figure at all in any way whatsoever.

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I see him as a very subtle Islamist who has his own agenda, but it's very possible that his people, and he must have had millions of people that were under his influence at least, it's very possible that there were people in the judiciary, people in the military, people in the academy that were part of this murder of these three

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Christians. It's possible, and I don't know for a fact, but just looking at the evidence as it plays out, it's certainly a real possibility that some of his followers were part of covering up or obstructing the actual justice brought to these five guys.

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And I probably should have waited till later to read Murray's question because it involved things that we didn't even discuss yet, but it's difficult for me to read the questions to myself before reading them out loud because obviously

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I'm conducting an interview at the same time. Yeah, that's okay. But we do have another listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, Tyler, who says, what is the greatest threat facing

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Christians in Turkey? Is there a particular need to pray for in that country?

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Yeah, and tying in with the previous question as well, what can we be praying for? And as the previous questioner alluded, the church in Malatya is still there, and he mentioned, you know, there was actually a news article,

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I just read it in one of the UK papers, that during the coup attempt there was some vandalism on the church, rented church building, it's a rented shop or something, and there was some vandalism in Malatya this past three weeks ago.

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I would say, you know, praying how to pray for the church in Turkey, if people are serious, if they have a heart to pray, if the church has a heart to pray, pastors that get up on a

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Sunday in front of their congregation and lead the congregation in congregational prayer is so important to lift up the pastors in Turkey, to lift up the workers, people who are, you know,

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Christian workers from other countries. We call them missionaries in English, that word has very negative connotations in Turkish to a lot of Muslim countries.

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They don't understand that, it's simply, it just simply means someone who's sharing the good news of Christ, but pray for those people as well, and as I said earlier, this could be a, the status quo is changing, and let's pray that God's people will increase in number, increase in faith, increase in holiness, increase in boldness.

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Contrary to a place like Iran, Chris, I don't know how much you've looked into Iran, but there's tremendous growth in Iran these days, of the church.

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Tremendous growth. The church in Iran has grown by tens of thousands since the 70s and 80s.

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Wow. Now, when you speak of the church in Turkey, a lot of people, they will basically use whatever would fall under the umbrella of Christendom as the church.

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They would include Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and so on. When you speak of the church in Turkey, what is the percentage of that group in Turkey who are

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Bible -believing Christians? I think they say the total number of all affiliations,

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Greek Orthodox, Assyrian church, Catholic, and Protestants of all various stripes, they say the total is about 100 ,000.

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That's in a country of about 80 million. Wow. Yeah. But the actual number of believers who are from a

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Muslim background who are Indigenous, local, and Protestant believers,

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Evangelical Protestant believers, the number would be around 5 ,000. It's about one of the smallest in proportion to the overall population.

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It's your publisher happens to share my theologically Reformed background.

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Is that your background as well? I've worked my way that direction as I've studied the

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Scripture. My particular church background isn't Reformed specifically, though we are part of the larger family of Reformed in the sense of salvation by grace through faith alone.

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I have that background, but I've become more Reformed in my thinking in several years.

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Great. We're going to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today for the full two hours is

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James Wright. And that is not to be confused with my longtime dear friend,

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Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, who also has written on the subject of Islam.

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He wrote a phenomenal book called What Every Christian Needs to Know About the

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Quran. And that is available through Bethany House Publishers, a phenomenal book.

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And he is one of the premier Christians debating Muslim clerics and imams and scholars and apologists all over the world.

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In fact, even on occasion inside their own mosques. He debated in a mosque in South Africa.

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He debated in the largest mosque, or at least I think it may have been the second largest mosque in Europe.

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I'd have to find out about that. I got to brush up on my details. But he is a real force to be reckoned with in the apologetic realm with Muslims and even has made a number of very close

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Muslim friends, although they remain obviously very sharply divided on their theology. But I didn't want our folks to confuse the two names since they're so similar.

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James Wright, my guest today, is actually writing under a pseudonym or pen name. And the book is

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Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the Messiah in Turkey. Our email address if you'd like to join us on the air is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

35:22

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you live outside of the

35:29

USA. And you may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable. Before I return to our discussion,

35:35

I just want to let you know that the Fellowship Conference New England in Portland, Maine starts tomorrow and runs until Saturday, August 6th.

35:48

And my very dear friend, Pastor Mack Tomlinson of Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas is one of the speakers there.

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He will be joined by Charles Leiter and Jesse Barrington and Michael Durham.

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And this is sure to be a time of powerful preaching, gospel -centered, biblically sound preaching and wonderful fellowship.

36:17

And I hope that anybody listening in Maine or those near to Maine who are able to get there, take advantage of this conference.

36:25

And the website for more details is fellowshipconferencenewengland .com.

36:34

fellowshipconferencenewengland .com. And if you could, I would really appreciate it if you would mention that you heard about the conference on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, since they are a sponsor of ours there.

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And we also have a phone number for them. 207 -423 -7652.

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That's 207 -423 -7652. And that's fellowshipconferencenewengland .com.

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fellowshipconferencenewengland .com from tomorrow through this Saturday, August 6th in Portland, Maine.

37:16

And we do have a listener in New York City, Davey, who wants to know, can you explain briefly what

37:26

Sharia law means and is that taking place in Turkey? Okay.

37:35

Islam, of course, a lot of people are aware of that term, that it has a law.

37:41

You know, in the Old Testament, there's the ceremonial law, there's the civil law, and religious aspects to it, social aspects to it.

37:51

Sharia is a bit like that. There are different dimensions. There's how to worship, how to do your religious code, and so forth.

38:00

Then there's law for the whole social sphere of life. And Islam, in an ideal situation, as I understand

38:08

Muslims and the way they look at their religion, is that God has a will,

38:15

Allah has a will, and His will is expressed through Sharia. And when people obey

38:21

Sharia, they are conforming to His will. It touches matters of marriage, matters of divorce, matters of family, and matters of finance, all these different matters.

38:30

And so there's many different interpretations. There's different schools of Sharia law. I understand that there's at least four major ones,

38:38

Hanafi, Shafi, Wahhabi, and Hanbala.

38:44

And these are four different schools. For example, in some Sharia law schools, a man should never touch a woman, like can't even shake her hand, but in others it's okay, and some can't touch a dog, and others it's okay to have a dog, and so forth.

39:01

So it's all these different levels. And the question, you know, this is always going on in a

39:06

Muslim society. It doesn't matter if the government is behind it or not. People are at some level trying to follow this code of law.

39:16

But then there's the question at a deeper level, how much will it be implemented through the court system?

39:23

Turkey currently has, I think their civil law is a Swiss based law.

39:30

Judicial law is French. I forget exactly, but there's the French. They borrowed from the French constitution and the

39:35

Swiss constitution. But will they go and try to back and interpret according? And I think most

39:40

Turks are Hanafi in their school of law jurisprudence. So will they go in and try to implement that?

39:47

What does that mean? Will they outlaw liquor? Will they outlaw adultery? There was an attempt made a couple years ago to outlaw adultery and to sort of punish it, you know, legally, punish adulterers and so forth.

39:58

So it's always going on when there's a Muslim society. The question is just which school of law will prevail?

40:05

For example, in Saudi Arabia, that's Wahhabi, and it's probably not going to be Wahhabi in Turkey.

40:11

I don't see that at all because there's no intermingling between those two schools of law.

40:17

Just, you know, we want to, I understand the questioner's intent, but it's better to think of it that it's always going on when there's a

40:26

Muslim society and then what's going to prevail in the court systems. Well, guess what,

40:32

Davey, since you are a first time ever questioner, I don't know if you're a first time ever listener, but since you're a first time ever questioner, you're getting a free copy of Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the

40:45

Messiah in Turkey by James Wright. So thank you so much. By the way, we need your full mailing address now,

40:53

Davey, so if you'd like to get the book, get that to us as soon as possible. We have another first time listener, or should

41:01

I say first time questioner, Peter in Old Town, Maine. He says, what is the dramatic impact on small churches since the coup?

41:13

Press reports, Kristallnacht -like reaction with burned churches and storefront churches targeted specifically, for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with that term,

41:25

Kristallnacht. That's when the Nazis in Germany in the earlier part of the 20th century began to smash the store windows of Jewish owned businesses and began their acts of brutality before the death camps arose and so on.

41:47

But if you could answer Peter's question there. The only report that I can really verify of a building, a property being marred or attacked was in Malatya.

42:01

That was written about in Tim Stone, is one of the Christian workers there, serves as a leader in the church.

42:09

He was quoted in an article in the UK and maybe a couple other newspapers picked it up,

42:14

I saw, but I don't know of any properties. Doesn't mean there aren't any, but I don't know of any right now.

42:20

Now, there have been even before this coup, there were threats from ISIS against churches.

42:26

And I know of at least one international church in Istanbul that just canceled its

42:32

Sunday worship, one Sunday, they skipped one Sunday, then they went back to meeting.

42:37

But the Turkish authorities, as I understand it, to their credit, they took the threat seriously and offered protection.

42:45

Well, guess what, Peter? You also are going to receive a free copy of Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the

42:53

Messiah in Turkey by our guest James Wright. If you would give us your full mailing address, we'll have that shipped out to you as soon as possible.

43:01

And by the way, our winners of these books are having them shipped courtesy of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, which is one of the sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron.

43:15

And we thank Todd and Patty Jennings for their graciousness to always ship out our winner's books at no charge to Iron Sharpens Iron.

43:25

So we thank them and we ask of you to keep your eye out for these books.

43:32

And of course, Peter will need your full mailing address to get that book out to you. Now, how did you begin to really develop the depth of knowledge that you had in regard to Islam, that you have in regard to Islam?

43:51

And did you have it before going to Turkey, or was this something that you had already pretty much become very familiar with before leaving the

44:00

United States? When I was in, as I was saying earlier, when I was in college, that was my first encounter here and actually in the deep south of the

44:10

U .S., where I'm at present before we're traveling, met some

44:17

Muslims from different countries, Iran, where else, I don't know, Kuwait maybe, and some various countries like that.

44:24

So I began to meet these guys. And you know, in the south, the southern part of the

44:30

U .S., it's a Bible belt and you don't meet so many people that are different.

44:37

And that sort of intrigued me. And I guess I just, to be perfectly honest,

44:42

I just felt sorry for them. It just seemed like such a step back from God's free offer of grace in Jesus, and to be stepping backwards, even though they claim it's a step forward.

44:57

They say, of course, the Quran is a step forward, and it's correcting the errors of this and that, but it's just going back under the law.

45:05

And living with them over the years, of course, I've had to learn a lot. I did get a PhD in intercultural studies from a school in Indiana, and I did more specializing in Islam and that, but I've learned a lot through writing.

45:21

I've got two other books. At some point in the interview, if it seems appropriate, I could mention those books.

45:26

You can mention them right now, if you like. Okay, yeah. One is called Fields of Gold, Planting a

45:31

Church Among Central Asian Muslims. It's been quite a successful book,

45:38

I think, among mission -minded people. That one is also on Amazon.

45:43

And then I have another one called Child of Ishmael. It's a novel, and I did something a little different here.

45:49

I have never seen anything quite like this. I think there's a guy that just did something recently like this, but it's a novel, and I wanted to, through story form, through narrative, introduce

45:58

Christians in America to Muslims. In fact, the content of the story is a small town church in Iowa, and a mosque moves in across the street.

46:09

So the pastor, it's a small reformed sort of Bible church, and the pastor meets the leaders of this mosque in a small town in Iowa, and so that sort of introduces that.

46:19

So I've had to learn a lot about it, but I've also tried to equip and educate others about Islam. Well, that sounds great, and perhaps we could have you back to discuss those books.

46:31

Yeah, it'd be my pleasure. So let's now get to know more about those brave young men who were martyred there, that your book is really about,

46:44

Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the Messiah in Turkey. Right. As I said,

46:50

I can't pronounce their names, so you're going to have to, I'm going to have to rely upon you to do that. So you've got two

46:57

Turkish guys, Nejati Aydin is his name, Nejati Aydin, and the second guy is a guy named

47:03

Ur Yüksel. Both have amazing testimonies, as do so many of the faithful believers there.

47:09

These two guys represent the two main different groups

47:14

I mentioned earlier, the splinter groups. First you have Sunni Islam, that's Nejati. He came out of a very devout

47:22

Sunni Muslim family. He actually was preparing to be an imam, a religious leader, and he was what they called a hafiz, which meant he had memorized the entire

47:35

Quran. Wow. Very devout, and his family, to the best of my knowledge, actually had some affiliation with this current group that's being blamed for the coup, the

47:51

Fethullah Gulen. Nejati apparently came out of that sort of affiliation.

47:58

He came out of that. His story really is inspiring. He was taking a bus into the city to work.

48:05

I think he was doing some computer, he had a job doing some computer accounting, and he had to commute every day.

48:11

And so when he was on the bus, he had to ride Turkish public transport. It was very crowded, and one day he got on the bus, and there happened to be an empty seat, but it was unusual.

48:22

It was next to a woman, and he was a little hesitant to sit down, but I guess he was tired, and he just went ahead and sat down by this lady.

48:29

He had a beard. He was quite pious in his appearance. Well, this lady was a

48:34

Christian, and she was reading a New Testament in Turkish, and he got curious, and he asked her, well, this was highly unusual.

48:41

I've already told you how statistics are. It's very few Christians in Turkey. Well, she was one of them, and he started looking at what she was reading, and said, well, what is that?

48:49

And she said, well, it's the New Testament. It's the Injil, the gospel, and he said, well, that's been changed.

48:56

You can't trust that. It's been corrupted, and you need to read the Koran, and she said, well, no, it's not. It's not corrupted.

49:02

It's reliable, and they began to have a conversation. She was quite a bold evangelist, and they were both single, and they were courteous to one another, but they did meet on several occasions on that regular bus commute, and then he began to learn more and more about Christianity through her.

49:24

They would meet for tea sometimes after they got off the bus before they went to work. They worked in separate places, but eventually he became a believer, and he also became her fiancé.

49:37

They married. Just before they married, I think his family abducted him, put a gun to his head to give up all this

49:46

Christian stuff. Oh, yeah. Before he was martyred, he had been tested over and over and over again.

49:54

His family had threatened his life on multiple occasions. When he became a

49:59

Christian, he got involved in a ministry in Turkey where they distributed the

50:05

New Testament. They would go into towns and distribute the New Testament. Very low -key, very polite, courteous, offer people a

50:11

New Testament in Turkish. Well, the police followed him one day and took him and his partner and arrested them, put them in prison for about 30 days.

50:19

That was on a different occasion. The whole world knew about that through some of the

50:25

Christian persecution news centers, and they began to pray for them. They were released. They had no grounds to hold them legally, so they let them go.

50:34

Anyway, he became a strong leader in the church, in the national ministry.

50:41

Eventually, he and his wife, her name is Shemsa, they decided they wanted to move out to the east, and they chose

50:47

Malatya. Along that same period of time, should I go ahead and tell you a little bit about that?

50:52

Oh, yeah, definitely. Okay, so Ur, his journey is very different, very different.

50:59

I think that's what makes it such an interesting story to read, is how their journeys come from such different backgrounds. Even though he was a

51:05

Turk, he came from a different city named Alaza, that's out eastern Turkey. His family was of this splinter group called the

51:14

Alevis. Alevis tend to be very secular. You might have an Alevi who's completely secular, completely.

51:20

They just call themselves Alevi Muslim, but they have no religious convictions. They have no spiritual convictions.

51:25

Their worldview is entirely materialistic. They have no view of anything spiritual or supernatural. They're very materialistic, and you know what

51:33

I mean. Materialism as a worldview, that's their worldview. A lot of Alevis are like that, a lot of them.

51:39

Ur was raised in that kind of environment, but though he kind of had a sense there was something out there.

51:45

At one point, when he was still quite a young man, he, and I'll tell you,

51:51

I'll be perfectly honest with you, Chris, this happens for at least 50 % of Muslims. He had,

51:56

I don't know how you can work this into your theology. I'll leave that up to you and your listeners, but he had some kind of an impression.

52:03

Sometimes it's a dream that Muslims will report where they see a vision of Jesus or a dream of Jesus, but Ur had an impression.

52:11

I don't know what else to call it based on his own testimony, and I have the whole thing in the book. And in his impression, he had this thought come to his mind, and it was, you are my son, and someday you will find your true father, something to this effect.

52:25

And it just always stuck with him. He would tell his Alevi friends, they laughed at him, they teased him, they thought it was silly, because they didn't even believe in God, much less anything like a heavenly father.

52:36

And that's not a concept in Islam, too. If you know Islam, they utterly reject the concept of God as father.

52:42

So it was alien to his secular friends, alien thought to his Islamic background, but he had this impression.

52:49

Well, he had no gospel, he had no exposure to Christianity, zero. This was before he had any exposure, other than maybe something through maybe, you know, that he heard through the media, saw a movie or something, just very little exposure.

53:03

So later he goes to college and he has a professor that is talking to him about different ideas, and this professor is a little bit liberal for a

53:12

Muslim and said, you know, you ought to read the New Testament. So he gets a New Testament, orders it from the

53:17

Bible Correspondence Course, that's one of the most effective ministries in Turkey, orders a copy of it, gets it, reads it,

53:24

I think it's three or four times in one week, the whole New Testament, three or four times in one week. So he just devoured it.

53:32

And then he quickly put his trust in Christ. He later was introduced to Nejati, they became good friends, brothers in Christ.

53:40

Nejati baptizes him and invites him to join his ministry team.

53:46

So I have a photograph in the book, it's quite a touching photograph of Nejati baptizing

53:52

Ur. Praise God. Yeah, so they become ministry partners.

53:59

Ur joins the team in Malatya. Nejati is the team leader, sort of the pastor, church planner, very effective.

54:06

He was on the radar because of his effectiveness, he was very effective.

54:13

Many people were coming to Christ. Ur was his partner, quiet, Ur was very quiet, kind of a thoughtful, philosophical, gentle soul.

54:23

Hilvan the same way, very quiet, very thoughtful. Nejati was more the outgoing evangelist when they were finally there together at the end.

54:34

Wow, praise God. It's interesting, you brought up something that a lot of people, perhaps even a lot of Muslims are unaware of.

54:45

My friend David Wood, I don't know if you're familiar with David, but he is a

54:50

Christian apologist who writes a lot in internet blogs about Islam and also debates

54:59

Muslims, hosts a television program called Jesus or Muhammad on the

55:05

Trinity Channel. And the Trinity Channel is, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's primarily

55:11

Arabic Americans who are

55:17

Christians who have left different countries within the

55:22

Middle East and have come here to the United States. And the Trinity Channel seems to be focused primarily on evangelizing

55:30

Muslims with the gospel. And David had taught me during one of his conferences that I invited him to speak at that a lot has changed in Islamic history in regard to their concept of the

55:52

Bible. This idea that the Bible is corrupted is a comparatively new concept that in its origins,

56:05

Muhammad and the earliest Muslims believed that the

56:11

Bible was from God and nothing from Allah could be corrupted. But then when Muslims started to actually read the

56:18

Bible and people became more sophisticated in apologetics and theology, they realized, wait a minute, we can't say this is from God.

56:27

So they had to come up with the idea that it's been corrupted, even though an actual tenant of Islam, and I couldn't quote you the

56:34

Surah or anything like that, I know David would instantly if he was here. But he said that Islam did teach for quite a large portion of its history that the

56:46

Bible could not be corrupted. Uh -huh. Yeah, I think I could see that.

56:52

And I think also, certainly now it seems widespread that the explanation for the rationale for the supposedly revelation of the

57:04

Quran, the rationale for it was, well, the Bible got corrupted, therefore God had to send,

57:10

Allah had to send this corrective. So in other words, if the

57:15

Bible had never been corrupted, why do we need yet another book? It became the rationale, oh, this book had to come in order to correct the corruption of the earlier book.

57:29

And it's interesting you brought up the vision that seems to be quite a common experience when

57:37

Muslims come to faith in Christ. I actually called in to the

57:42

Trinity Channel during a live broadcast and the host of the particular show

57:48

I called in was, just as I am, a Reformed Baptist. He is not a

57:53

Charismatic or Pentecostal. He does not believe that the sign gifts continue today, but he did say that he thought that there was something unique about these visions or dreams that Muslims have, because he said that they are typically one -time events.

58:13

They do not follow the Muslim after his conversion throughout his

58:20

Christian walk. It's just like an initial experience that gets them to read the scriptures or something.

58:27

So he viewed it in a different way than a Charismatic or Pentecostal might view visions and extra -biblical revelation and so on.

58:36

Right, right. I think that's a fair assessment, yeah. I would agree with that.

58:42

We have to go to another break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

58:52

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And by the way, Peter in Old Town, Maine, we're still waiting for your mailing address so we can mail you a copy of the book.

59:03

And don't go away, we're going to be right back with James Wright and our discussion of martyrs of Malatya martyred for the

59:11

Messiah in Turkey. Don't go away, we'll be right back after these messages. Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is sponsored by Harvey Cedars, a year -round

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01:03:28

Welcome back.

01:03:33

This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today, writing under a pseudonym or a pen name, is

01:03:40

James Wright, W -R -I -G -H -T, not to be confused with Dr.

01:03:45

James R. White. The book is titled Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the

01:03:51

Messiah and Turkey. And if you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:03:58

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And also don't forget about the fellowship conference,

01:04:04

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And the website for that conference is fellowshipconferencenewengland .com.

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That's fellowshipconferencenewengland .com. And the phone number is 207 -423 -7652.

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01:04:41

We are discussing the lives and martyrdom of the three very brave Christians in Turkey who lost their lives for the cause of the gospel.

01:04:52

And tell our listeners something about how the family of these martyrs have reacted and have been able to cope with this horrific nightmare.

01:05:05

Well, it was within hours and then certainly within days, immediately after April 18th, 2007, the news media landed in Malatya in force.

01:05:22

Amazing numbers of people came in to try to get their perspective.

01:05:29

At that time, Suzanne and her children were there. And Shemsa, there was a funeral.

01:05:37

Tillman was buried in Malatya. Nejati, his body was taken and transported by air from Malatya to the city of Izmir.

01:05:50

You'll know that as Smyrna in the Bible. It's one of the seven cities. Smyrna is on the far western coast of Turkey.

01:05:59

That's where Nejati is buried. He's buried in the graveyard of a small, I think it's a small, old

01:06:05

English Baptist church that was built there many, many years ago. One of the few Christian graveyards in the country.

01:06:12

Tillman actually got, his family got permission to bury him in a small Armenian graveyard in Malatya.

01:06:19

I visited his grave site. And so within hours or a day or two,

01:06:27

Suzanne went on national news, international news, and made a public statement that they forgave the murderers in the name of Jesus.

01:06:37

This was rather radical for Turks. Rather radical for Muslims because you don't really forgive your enemies.

01:06:46

But they were following Jesus' teachings and the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, to forgive, to bless.

01:06:56

And it made headline news, made huge headlines on newspapers, national newspapers.

01:07:03

And so a very powerful witness. I heard a story of a family, a

01:07:09

Christian family way out on the Black Sea, and their daughter was studying at a Turkish public school. And when this happened, the teacher came in and held up the newspaper and said to the class, the

01:07:18

Turkish class, Turkish teacher, Turkish teacher said to the class, look at this. Can you believe this? This woman, her husband's brutally murdered in Malatya, this

01:07:27

Christian woman, this Christian German woman, and she forgives. And we don't do that. Isn't this amazing?

01:07:35

Of course, there was the flip side where persecution continued. People, I had another friend that said he was sitting in a hotel when this was on the news.

01:07:46

And some Turks sitting at a table nearby said, oh, listen to this lady saying she forgives and all that. I wonder how much they're paying her to say that.

01:07:54

So a lot of cynicism, tremendous levels of cynical attitude, unbelief among people just thinking that it's all a show.

01:08:03

Turkey has very low level of trust and that sort of thing. But their witness has been faithful. The church has continued to grow.

01:08:10

They didn't give up. They didn't leave. They didn't flee. Amazing courage, really, of Suzan.

01:08:17

Nejati's wife and two children, they left. There were some concerns there about security and safety and so forth.

01:08:24

And so they actually relocated. And they live in a different place now.

01:08:30

But there's the attitude of forgiveness and trying to honor these guys and remember and live up to their faithfulness has continued.

01:08:44

And has there been any sympathetic response from Muslims that you're aware of who would not agree with these murders in spite of perhaps their strong Islamic faith?

01:08:59

There were some expressions of solidarity with these people.

01:09:04

I think a Muslim from Germany came down and offered his condolence, actually traveled.

01:09:10

And I don't know if he was from the Alevi side or the Sunni side. And we always have to remember there's these two different sides.

01:09:16

And one is a much softer kind of mystical Islamic group. And then the Sunni side tends to be generally, you know, and don't want to overcharacterize, but tends to be a little more stern.

01:09:28

But there were expressions. And I would say in Turkey, a good, even among the

01:09:34

Sunni background, there's probably a good 30, 40 % of the country in Turkey would be more just just more secular, like a secular

01:09:40

European. And you see a common humanity kind of come out in that sense, where people are expressing their sympathy.

01:09:52

And do you know of any converts to Christ that have come about as a result of hearing about the lives of these young men and the forgiveness offered by the families?

01:10:07

Yeah, I don't remember the specific details. But I think a man even came, maybe to a funeral or had came to someone later and said that because of these guys,

01:10:16

I've decided to, this is where I want to land, I want to put my faith in Jesus.

01:10:22

So that was one story I heard. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the church is very small. And it's even now only 5 ,000.

01:10:30

But considering that in 1990, the church was probably numbering around 100, the church has had pretty statistically pretty significant growth.

01:10:42

And I have no doubt that the lives of these men has produced fruit. And this is one thing that there seems to be a lot of disagreement on amongst not only the population here in America, and I'm sure other parts of the world, but even in the body of Christ.

01:11:11

And even among those who have studied Islam and are involved in the apologetics realm.

01:11:17

There are some who say that consistent, genuine,

01:11:25

Quranic Islam, Muslims who are not only faithful to the

01:11:30

Quran, but to the Hadith, they would have to be if they are logically consistent, those who live out these acts of violence that we see these acts of terror, these acts of horrific brutality, and murder, and so on.

01:11:50

And there are others who would say, no, this is only the interpretation of Islam by some of the more extreme individuals in the fundamentalist sects that, and some would even say that especially the acts of terrorism, which are done vigilante style, are not in keeping with Quranic Islam, historically, based on the

01:12:21

Hadith and so on, and the life of Muhammad and the early Muslims. What do you have to say about that issue?

01:12:30

Well, I would answer it this way, to break it apart this way. I don't know of any

01:12:36

Muslim, of any persuasion or any opinion, that doesn't have some hope that Islam will someday expand and bring sort of dominion globally.

01:12:52

I don't know of anyone that doesn't see that. The question is how to get there.

01:12:58

Do we take up arms? Do we just try to live quietly and persuasively?

01:13:05

Do we just wait and kind of see what happens? Maybe the Masih, the

01:13:11

Christ, will return, and then he'll convert all the infidels, and then that's when everyone will become Muslim. The question is how are they going to get there?

01:13:18

That's the question. That's where the dispute is. So I would say probably there's almost total consensus that Islam is an expansionistic, imperialistic view that someday this is going to win out globally.

01:13:38

That's one view that seems to be shared universally. The second thing

01:13:43

I would say to that is, what I've been breaking down a lot and trying to explain as I've shared with people recently, is a new view

01:13:51

I have, kind of new for me, and that is to look at Islam in two ways. This is simple. People can remember it pretty easily.

01:13:59

The first way is what I call moralistic monotheism, moralistic monotheism, and that was characterized by Muhammad in the early days when he was in Mecca.

01:14:10

He was preaching against polytheism, thus you have the strong emphasis on monotheism, and he was preaching a moralism.

01:14:20

I think he was against the Arabs were burying their female infants, the girl infants.

01:14:28

They were committing infanticide and so forth, so he was presenting a kind of moralism.

01:14:35

And a lot of Muslims in the world would just fall under that category. They were moralistic monotheists.

01:14:41

But then in the second half of his – I don't want to call it a ministry, but that's the only thing

01:14:50

I can think of – the second half of his ministry of his religious endeavors, the second half is in Medina, and that's what then

01:14:59

I characterize as militaristic monotheism. And so you have in the world today these two general categories.

01:15:07

You have moralistic monotheism, and you have militaristic monotheism.

01:15:12

And they're going to fall on one side of that fence. Every Muslim is going to fall on one side of that fence. Whatever reasons they have to fall on the first side, the moralistic monotheism, whatever reasons they have, they could have any number of reasons, and they may have very different reasons from one another.

01:15:28

But that's where they wind up at. The second side is militaristic monotheism, and they may get there with a different style or different school of thought or a different Islamic leader, but that's where they end up at.

01:15:40

So you have – but they all seem to have some view under that, even though there's two sides of that fence, right?

01:15:46

They all seem to fall under this overarching view that somehow Islam will be the dominant religion.

01:15:55

And have you developed friendships with those who are and continue to be

01:16:01

Muslim? Yeah, of course, living in a country with so many people that are

01:16:10

Muslims, you develop friendships. Of course, you run into that problem that the

01:16:17

Quran tells Muslims they should not take Christians or take friends from among Christians and Jews.

01:16:23

That's what the Quran says. So any Muslim that knows this, and they all should know it, there's going to be that hesitation there in the relationship.

01:16:36

Yeah, and of course the existence of taqiyya, where they are told that they can legitimately lie and they're not violating any kind of teaching of a law in doing so, that further complicates the issue, further increases paranoia amongst non -Muslims.

01:17:00

Right. You're maybe inclined in that way. I would say that I have great faith in the

01:17:10

God and His electing power, and that He's choosing and electing, and that includes among Muslims.

01:17:19

And I don't know who those people are. They don't have a sign on their, they don't have a tattoo on their forehead that says, here

01:17:27

I am, here I am, I'm one of the elect, but I'm out there trying to present the word as much as possible.

01:17:35

And it is difficult at times because they love to debate and debate and debate, and so we try to stay wary of that, because that can become a pit, that can become a deep pit, like a hamster running on a spin wheel, you just never get off of it.

01:17:51

Yeah, even we who are Calvinists, or those who believe in the doctrines of Sovereign Grace, or Reformed Theology, if we are interpreting those precious truths the way that they have historically been held by the great heroes of the

01:18:10

Reformed faith, we will diligently and passionately and tirelessly evangelize all those we come into contact with, because we do not know who the elect are.

01:18:22

The elect come from the most pious of preachers, and also the most perverse of prostitutes, and everywhere in between, and I believe

01:18:34

Spurgeon said that even if the elect had a yellow stripe running up their back, he would still preach to everyone that he met, regardless of whether or not they had a stripe or not.

01:18:48

I may have mixed up the analogy there, but that was the basic idea of Spurgeon's comment.

01:18:56

And well, that is a very tiny percentage there of those who profess to be

01:19:02

Christ, but the Lord has historically brought about great revivals in place where the percentage of believers was equally as small, if not even a smaller remnant.

01:19:16

Yeah, and it's always helpful to remind myself that, well,

01:19:22

I heard the president of Taylor University many years ago, Jay Kessler, I heard him at a conference, and he said, well, he said

01:19:30

Islam is, you could describe it as a Jewish heresy. I would go a step farther and say it's a,

01:19:38

I would describe it as a Jewish Christian heresy. And we're looking at a whole system of thought that is heavily indebted to the

01:19:52

Old and New Testaments. How would they say anything if they didn't have that? So in a sense, we're defending the faith, we're presenting the truth, but we're not starting outside of a totally bizarre foreign worldview like one would experience, say, up in the mountains of Tibet, where you're looking at religious thought and religious systems that are just completely detached, except this common revelation, that general revelation we have,

01:20:25

Romans talks about, that is common to all people. But in this case, you specifically have this thing was born, nurtured, incubated right in, right within a couple of hundred miles, three or four hundred miles of the birthplace of Jesus.

01:20:43

And we're, it's a unique conversation, if you will, it's a unique evangelistic encounter when we are speaking with Muslims.

01:20:55

We're presenting Jesus, but we're really having to undo a lot of misinformation about him, bring people up to speed, bring the correct view of who he is.

01:21:08

Right, some of our listeners might be confused by your describing Islam as a

01:21:14

Christian heresy. I guess we should explain that the

01:21:19

Muslims have a very high view of someone named Jesus Christ, it is not the biblical

01:21:26

Christ, it is not God, it is not the second person of the Trinity, which they would view to be shirk, the most wicked of all sins, and a sin that cannot be forgiven.

01:21:39

But they believe that Jesus was a prophet. And the thing that is very baffling about their religion is that they believe

01:21:47

Muhammad to be the greater prophet, and yet Jesus has more phenomenal attributes than Muhammad.

01:21:56

They even believe he was born of a virgin, they believe Jesus was sinless, they believe

01:22:02

Jesus performed miracles, and they believe that Jesus is returning, and none of those things are attributed to Muhammad, who they believe is a greater prophet.

01:22:13

So that's kind of interesting. Yeah, and when I say it's like a heresy, and I think it was

01:22:21

John of Damascus who wrote about the Saracens, he called them in Damascus, Syria, back in the 7th century,

01:22:30

John of Damascus, and I think he actually called it a Christian heresy when he first started hearing about Muhammad and the teachings of Muhammad in the

01:22:37

Qur 'an and so forth. But Martin Luther became quite interested in Islam, what

01:22:44

Muslims believe, he obtained a copy of the Qur 'an, he managed to, I'm trying to remember if he translated it into German, but he was studying the

01:22:54

Qur 'an, he interacted with it, he had a lot to say about it, Martin Luther did, he was concerned about it because he thought that the

01:23:01

Turks were about to overrun Germany and they would take huge numbers of German Christians as slaves back into the

01:23:10

Ottoman Empire, and so he was trying to, he had started to devise tracts and materials to equip what he thought would be

01:23:17

Christian slaves in the Ottoman Empire not to lose their faith. He said when you get into the

01:23:23

Ottoman Empire and you see the wealth, you see the opulence, you see the sensuality, you see all these temptations, you're going to be tempted to become a

01:23:30

Muslim. But you need to hold on to your faith. It didn't happen, they didn't overrun

01:23:36

Germany, and there weren't vast numbers of German Christians. There were Eastern European Christian people that were taken into slavery in the

01:23:44

Ottoman Empire, but not the numbers he thought. But he actually had some interesting things to say, and you know, he actually said that he thought the

01:23:53

Holy Spirit left little clues or little hints of the truth in the Qur 'an, so that if someone were to really read the

01:24:00

Qur 'an and the Holy Spirit were to work on that person, that that would be used to lead that person to find out more in the

01:24:07

New Testament and Old Testament and ultimately come to faith in Jesus. That's what he saw.

01:24:13

That was many years ago before some people have suggested that. I don't spend a lot of time going into the

01:24:21

Qur 'an. I'm willing to look at some things. I'm certainly willing to point out what you just said, and that is, well, let's look at what this says about Jesus.

01:24:29

And since the Qur 'an, like I said, borrows heavily, heavily indebted to the

01:24:35

Old and New Testaments, you have, and I always tell this to Muslims, you have certain things in the

01:24:41

Qur 'an that are true. It is true, as it says in the Qur 'an, that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary.

01:24:46

That's true. That's in the Qur 'an. But it's all the stuff around it that gets distorted.

01:24:52

We have to figure out how to take what's true, so you've got this true thing here, use that as a talking point, use that as a launching pad to take them to the next place, which is get them into the

01:25:04

New Testament. Like I said about Ur, for example, he read the New Testament four or five, three or four times in one week, and that was the deal breaker for him.

01:25:15

We have Sam in Chicago, Illinois, who wants to know, are you intending to remain in Turkey as your permanent home, or are you just visiting there as a journalist or missionary?

01:25:32

That's been our home for many years, and no one knows what the future holds. It's become even more uncertain with recent events, but our plan is to be there for some time.

01:25:43

How many years has it been again? We've been there since 2002. Wow, that's something.

01:25:50

Well, I know that I happen to have fallen in love with Turkish cuisine.

01:25:56

There's a restaurant right up the block that I live on, the same block, the north side of the block that I live on here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, called

01:26:05

Andalusia, and it is both Moroccan and Turkish cuisine that they have there, and it's really delicious stuff there.

01:26:15

There's lots to love, lots to love in the people, in the culture, in the land.

01:26:20

Beautiful. Everywhere, every stone you bump into probably has some Bible story behind it. Now, can you live very openly about your

01:26:29

Christian faith, or is this something that has to be in some measure underground, or how is that working out? Turkey's kind of a, it's been sort of a semi, we're open, we're open with people that were believers, and they're very quick in the

01:26:47

Middle East. Most countries have been very quick to try to talk about religion, spiritual matters.

01:26:52

Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the second coming? Do you believe in angels? These are all important questions for these folks, way more so than the typical secular sort of American.

01:27:04

It's very easy to have a conversation, in that sense, very easy. We call ourselves,

01:27:11

I don't use the word Christian, it's the same word in Turkish, and it tends to have, again, negative connotations. They think of prostitutes, drug use, licentiousness with that word, so I don't use that word.

01:27:26

I prefer to just tell them what I believe, rather than use a label. I tell people

01:27:31

I go to meet with other believers, and sometimes they're surprised. Really? There's believers here in Istanbul?

01:27:37

Jesus believers? So there's openness in that sense, and we'll find out in the coming months.

01:27:46

There's a lot of uncertainty yet. Well, we're going to our final break right now, and this will be your last opportunity to write in with a question, if you'd like to ask a question of our guest,

01:27:57

James Wright, which, as I've been repeating, is a pen name. It's not his actual name, and he is the author of Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the

01:28:08

Messiah in Turkey, and our email address, again, is chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

01:28:18

Please include your first name, city and state, and country of residence, but if you prefer to remain anonymous, we will honor your request.

01:28:25

Don't go away. We'll be right back with James Wright and our discussion on martyrs. Hi, I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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01:32:02

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01:33:06

Chris Arnzen and this is the last half hour of our two -hour interview today with James Wright, which is a pseudonym or a pen name for our guest today who wrote the book

01:33:19

Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the Messiah in Turkey, and if you'd like to join us on the air with any questions, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

01:33:31

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. And I want to remind you once more about the

01:33:39

Fellowship Conference New England in Portland, Maine. It's actually being held at the

01:33:44

Deering Center Community Church in Portland, Maine from tomorrow through Saturday, that's

01:33:51

August 4th through the 6th, and the speakers include my friend

01:33:57

Pastor Mac Tomlinson, who is a pastor at Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas.

01:34:04

He is being joined by Charles Leiter and Jesse Barrington and Mark Durham, who will be preaching the

01:34:13

Gospel of Grace in a powerful fashion, and that I'm sure will bless those who are in attendance, and I hope that if you live in Maine or nearby

01:34:23

Maine that you can attend this conference. Once again, it's from tomorrow through Saturday, August 4th through the 6th in Portland, Maine, and the website again is fellowshipconferencenewengland .com,

01:34:40

fellowshipconferencenewengland .com, and the phone number is area code 207 -423 -7652, 207 -423 -7652, and I also wanted to give a prayer request by a listener in Green Valley, I'm sorry,

01:35:05

Grass Valley, California, Dennis in Grass Valley, California, who is involved in outreach to an orphanage in Nepal, which is a

01:35:22

Hindu kingdom. He said, the police came to the orphanage in Nepal yesterday and threatened to close the orphanage for teaching the

01:35:34

Bible to the children. They came back a second time and searched the building. I had advised them to hide all

01:35:41

Bibles and Christian literature they had, and so there was nothing found.

01:35:46

The police have now called them to appear at the police station in about 12 hours, so please pray.

01:35:57

So we ask of you listening to pray about that situation in Nepal. Our listener,

01:36:03

Dennis, has requested those prayers for this orphanage that his church has been involved in, and he is in Grass Valley, California, and we will definitely pray for that orphanage there in Nepal, and it goes to prove that there's a myth that Hindus are very peaceful and tolerant folks.

01:36:32

Now, obviously, there are many millions of Hindus who are peaceful and tolerant folks, but the religion is not innately that way, and there are many

01:36:41

Christians in Hindu -dominated countries like India and Nepal who are in quite a bit of danger if they evangelize aggressively and get converts and so on.

01:36:57

So we thank you, Dennis, and we do have a listener in Monroe, Louisiana, who just wants to offer you encouragement.

01:37:08

He says, I'm listening right now and thankful for your ministry. We'll continue in prayer for you, and that's

01:37:16

Pastor John at Covenant Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Monroe, Louisiana. Hmm, good.

01:37:23

And, well, I want to make sure that before the time slips away from us that you leave our guests, or listeners,

01:37:32

I should say, with what you most want etched in their hearts and minds about the story of these three

01:37:37

Christian martyrs in Turkey, and then if we have time, we'll move on to some other listener questions.

01:37:46

Sure. Well, when I was first writing this book, and I think I just wanted to read maybe here from the introduction,

01:37:54

I was at the gravesite of Tillman, and I'm standing there at the gravesite.

01:37:59

His family had planted some rose bushes next to the grave,

01:38:05

Suzanne and the kids, and someone had actually come and vandalized the roses, and I wrote, standing at Tillman's gravesite,

01:38:15

I thought, this is where Christianity got him. It got him a grave. Not a better job, not a bigger house, not inner peace, not success in life.

01:38:26

A grave. One that continues to be vandalized. He doesn't even get respect in death.

01:38:34

This is the kind of story we would rather forget, not retell. Then why not just forget it and move on, especially since few people care anyway?

01:38:43

That's what I wanted to do, just get on the bus, just let it go. Then I remembered Stephen, the first martyr, and how his friends wept, says the

01:38:53

Book of Acts, how they mourned with weeping and crying over Stephen's death. They grieved the hopelessness of Saul of Tarsus and his kinsmen.

01:39:00

Motivated and agitated by the murder, Saul made plans to arrest and murder more Christians.

01:39:06

Facing such deadly persecutors, these guys, Stephen's friends, they obeyed the words of Jesus and they prayed for their enemies.

01:39:16

I think this is a story that should challenge us in the West to live not for prosperity.

01:39:27

We're just so consumed with self. I see these guys as examples.

01:39:35

I'm not seeking martyrdom myself. I don't wish it on anyone, but we all are dying daily.

01:39:41

That's what it says in Scripture, isn't it? We die daily and we take up our cross and follow

01:39:46

Christ. I think that's a message that's hard for us to hear, but we need to hear it.

01:39:54

We have an anonymous listener from Suffolk County, New York, who says, this question may sound political, but in its root, it really is not.

01:40:07

You may be well aware of the fact that the Republican Party candidate for President of the

01:40:13

United States, Donald Trump, says that he will bring about a halt upon Islamic immigration to the

01:40:23

United States, at least for a period of time. And I was wondering, as a

01:40:28

Christian and as one who deals with Muslims in a

01:40:33

Muslim -dominated country, what your opinion is on this kind of tactic?

01:40:39

Do you think that even a Christian who believes in evangelizing Muslims and loves the

01:40:45

Muslims and wants them to become saved, is it still, even in a day and age of violence, very appropriate and understandable for Christians to support this kind of action?

01:41:00

Yeah, that's a good question for that listener, and it's something on the front burner for a lot of folks.

01:41:07

I would just say that my understanding of the job of the President and the government, first and foremost, in the founding of this country, the government was rather limited, but it was the defense, it was national defense, it was defense of the citizens from danger to try to provide security and safety for its citizens.

01:41:27

That's how I see the government, we have military, we have police, and regardless of what a person's background, the

01:41:36

U .S., the job of the President, the job of the government is to try to protect the borders and protect from threats and dangers.

01:41:47

We've seen the shooting at Orlando, Florida, we've seen the shooting at San Bernardino, there's been the attack at Nice, France, there's been the attack in Belgium, and so forth and so on, and many of these, all the ones

01:42:00

I just named were some kind of, or another of an Islamic terrorist or jihadist, whatever you call them, they had some connection with that.

01:42:09

So yeah, I think there has to, I think Donald Trump in principle is trying to say, and I think any conscientious public servant would be saying, how do we protect our citizens?

01:42:23

The question is, back to what I said earlier, how do you identify moralistic monotheists and militant monotheists?

01:42:33

And that's where they talk about the vetting process and so forth. It is rather troubling to me, I have heard statistics, and I'm not an expert on this, but it does seem that the number of Christians that have been persecuted, the number of Christian minorities from Syria fleeing war, from Iraq fleeing war, the numbers of those people being allowed in the country as refugees seems to be disproportionately small to the number of Muslim background, and I don't quite understand why that would be.

01:43:03

Yeah, that was the complaint against Barack Obama, one of the many complaints.

01:43:10

Yeah, that puzzled me, and I don't know of anybody saying, hey, we need to be careful and vet these

01:43:17

Christians, these Arab Christians. They're not a threat. We don't know of any reason for them to be a threat.

01:43:23

So this is a complicated thing. In a way, I'm glad I'm not a politician. I just have to say there are a lot of Muslims living here now, and the responsibility of the church is to present the gospel to them in a way they can understand.

01:43:38

And by the way, our anonymous listener in Suffolk County, New York, you are also going to get a free copy of the book

01:43:46

Martyrs of Malatya, Martyrs for the Messiah in Turkey by James Wright. If you give us your full name and mailing address, and obviously since you remain anonymous, we promise we will not disclose your name and address on the air, so we just look forward to getting your email so we can mail this book out to you.

01:44:09

That actually will be mailed out to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, cvbbs .com.

01:44:19

That's cv for Cumberland Valley, bbs for BibleBookService .com,

01:44:26

who are a sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and we thank them for their help in this regard.

01:44:36

We have James in Westchester, New York, who wants to know if you feel truly safe in Turkey, or are you always looking behind your back?

01:44:55

Yeah, and I get that question a good bit, and you know, there have been an increase in the number of bombings and attacks in the last nine months.

01:45:04

I haven't been in Turkey in several months now, so maybe

01:45:09

I have a little bit of nervousness under the current circumstances, but hey, that's life.

01:45:16

You know, you drive down the street, there could be danger, so a healthy person who's healthy psychologically and of course spiritually recognizes that you live in a world where there's always risk.

01:45:29

Am I always looking over my shoulder? No, but I would try to be wise and discerning in where I am and how

01:45:37

I'm addressing folks and who's nearby. But you know, we appreciate prayer, and we appreciate, as one of the listeners asked earlier, how can we pray?

01:45:47

We just, we have to pray for protection. I think praying for protection is biblical. There are times like these brothers that lost their lives, they had been in prison, they had been threatened, and finally they were martyred.

01:46:02

Not all are called to go that way, and we don't understand all the mysterious will and purposes of God, but praying for protection, praying for God's people, as just was asked for Nepal, I think that's perfectly right to do.

01:46:17

And we have Tony in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who wants to know,

01:46:24

I'm sorry if you've already said this, but I'm tuning in late, why did you choose

01:46:29

Turkey as a place to move and live and evangelize? That's a good question, which would give me an opportunity to just mention my favorite subject, which is that the church needs to have as a priority, reaching people groups that haven't yet received the gospel.

01:46:46

The Bible talks about discipling all the nations, Matthew 28, Matthew 24, 14,

01:46:52

I think it is, also says this gospel will be preached to all the nations as a witness, and then the end shall come.

01:46:57

And there's been a strong emphasis for many years now that the church has neglected unreached people groups.

01:47:04

It takes more than just reaching a political nation like, say, England or Russia. There's all kinds of groups of people, languages and cultures embedded in geographical areas, and Turkey has many of these kinds of peoples.

01:47:20

And until someone goes in from the outside, how are they going to hear the gospel? So we wanted to find a place where we could go once we were challenged by that, that understanding from scripture, and Turkey was one of those places we had had experience in Central Asia, and I suppose we had just some natural affinity and interest, and God used all that to put us there.

01:47:44

And did you already speak the language fluently before going there, or is it something that you've been learning as we speak living there?

01:47:54

Actually, we had learned the Kazakh language, and that is a part of the Turkic language family, so it was a related language that gave us some familiarity when we began to study

01:48:03

Turkish, but we learned Turkish in Turkey. We also did some study outside of the country as well, using some language learning material in that fashion.

01:48:14

It's a mysterious thing to me. I've puzzled over this, thought over it many times, how do different people get called, like this guy in Nepal, or someone goes to India, or Mexico, or wherever.

01:48:24

It's really quite interesting what God may use to put someone somewhere, and that seems to be our field for now.

01:48:34

Now in regard to media, is there any Christian media that is open and clearly visible, not something that's obviously something like on the internet that anybody can have access to?

01:48:50

There is, and I said Turkey's kind of semi -open, it's semi -underground, it's not completely oppressed.

01:48:57

They've tried to join the European Union, and so the

01:49:03

European Union has called them to increase their levels of religious freedom, and so that's given freedoms for, there's two or three radio stations in Turkey, one's in Ankara, the capital, one's in Istanbul, and these are

01:49:15

Christian radio stations that are broadcasting in Turkish. They broadcast different programs, some

01:49:21

I might be theologically less in tune with than others, but that's just the way it is.

01:49:27

There's a Christian radio, there's a Christian television program on satellite, there's quite a bit of activity online, and that's open doors, many, many doors, so the media is very effective right now.

01:49:42

Yeah, sometimes when I listen to Christian radio and watch Christian TV here in the

01:49:48

United States, I sometimes battle with the feeling that I wish it were banned here, but I know that in addition to that which is theologically vile, there is still some

01:50:03

Bible -believing, God -honoring, wonderful, powerful evangelists that are proclaiming

01:50:09

God's word on TV and radio like John MacArthur and R .C. Sproul and Alistair Begg and a number of other really faithful, wonderful brothers in Christ who are not to be counted among the charlatans and the heretics that seem to dominate the airwaves.

01:50:30

They seem to, unfortunately, have the most money to spend on things like television and radio time.

01:50:37

Yeah, so there's a wide, should we say, buffet, but there is a presence of the biblical message, and I think it's been very effective means using media because it can get into villages and places that no one necessarily can get to easily, so that's good.

01:50:58

We're thankful for that. I mean, is it safe enough for there to be, for instance, the

01:51:07

First Baptist Church of Istanbul where they have a sign out front and they're actually really open in the face of the public where everybody knows that's a

01:51:15

Christian church, they worship every Sunday, everybody's invited, there are calls to repentance and so on?

01:51:23

Right, that's a good question. Right now, under the law, I only know of two or three government -recognized

01:51:33

Protestant churches in the whole country, only two or three, okay? Everyone else is operating as a civic organization or a civic association, so they get a different status.

01:51:46

It's not a full church status. Number two, there's these, number one, just getting the status as a church, there's only two or three, but then the ability to get property that goes along with that.

01:51:58

There may, of those two or three, I don't even know if all three have property. So you rent a building, you lease a place, you have some kind of a status as a civic organization, and then you write into your constitution that this is a religious organization and it promotes the

01:52:20

Bible and so forth. So they find a way to have a semi -official identity as a church.

01:52:28

Now these Protestant denominations that are tolerated openly, do they possess the gospel?

01:52:38

Are they faithful to the Word of God or what kind of denominations are they?

01:52:45

Right now, of that 5 ,000 people I mentioned, there's about 140 churches in the country that would be a church in the sense of a congregation.

01:52:57

They may not even have a facility or a building. 140 congregations. And these would all, at some level, would have an agreement with the,

01:53:09

I don't know the official names necessarily, the World Evangelical Statement of Faith or Luzon Statement of Faith or the

01:53:17

Nicene Creed has been translated, the Apostles Creed has been translated. So I would say in a fundamental sense, faithful preaching the

01:53:27

Word of God, faithful preaching salvation by grace alone, through faith through Christ alone.

01:53:33

And these would be not necessarily, I can't think of any of them that have a denominational status with an international organization.

01:53:45

And there might be, but I'm not familiar if there are. But they tend to be affiliated with each other at some level under what's called the

01:53:53

Turkish Evangelical Church Alliance. So it's like a national alliance.

01:53:59

It's not necessarily connected to any denomination in the West. Not necessarily officially, though there'll be relationships, but not necessarily officially.

01:54:09

So these would not be like puppet churches like existed in the Soviet Union at one time when...

01:54:16

No, no. Okay. No, no, not at all. Now there was a puppet church in Turkey.

01:54:22

It was called the Turkish Orthodox Church and it was a government puppet church.

01:54:31

And if someone wants to support what you're doing there, since I know you're remaining anonymous, is there any way for listeners to contact a certain group or organization in order to somehow support what you're doing?

01:54:53

Sure. I can say their organization they could contact would be

01:54:58

Crossover Communications. And if they mentioned James Wright, they would know who

01:55:04

I am and that would be the organization. Crossover Communications in Columbia, South Carolina.

01:55:13

They have a website under that name, Crossover Communications. Yes. In fact, it's crossoverusa .org.

01:55:24

Yep. Crossoverusa .org. And my good friend,

01:55:31

Pastor Ed Moore of North Shore Baptist Church in Bayside, Queens graduated a

01:55:38

Christian college or seminary in Columbia. And he used to be a youth pastor there at Three Rivers Baptist Church.

01:55:48

I don't know if that church still exists now, but that's certainly a familiar sounding name.

01:55:58

And I'm so glad that you have been able to join us on the air today.

01:56:04

I want to thank all of our listeners who took the time to write in.

01:56:12

And I'm looking forward to having you back with updates, especially as current events unfold in Turkey.

01:56:21

Absolutely. And perhaps if you could give our listeners one more time a list of prayer requests and anything that you want them to remember before the program comes to a conclusion here.

01:56:39

Yeah. Again, just as I read from thinking there by Tillman's grave that we're called to live for something higher than this world.

01:56:49

And we need to be looking for ways always to invest in God's kingdom and invest in the global work that takes the gospel to all the nations, the hard ones, the difficult ones, the ones least reached, the ones unreached.

01:57:05

So I want to encourage us all in that way. And then I do appreciate, you know, just folks praying for me and my family.

01:57:13

My wife, I'm married. We have several kids and we're at a stage of life with kids approaching adulthood and aging parents.

01:57:25

And we're committed to this work that takes us all over the world. So you can imagine how that is sometimes challenging.

01:57:33

And then just pray for fruit. We want to see fruit for the kingdom that lasts.

01:57:41

Well, I thank you so much for being on the program, as I said, brother, and please keep in contact with me.

01:57:50

And I definitely want to have you back. That's for certain. And I'm sure we're going to have a lot to discuss.

01:58:01

And want our listeners to know that this Friday, August 5th, we have a

01:58:08

Mormon convert to Christianity, Lynn K. Wilder. She is going to be our guest from 4 to 6 p .m.,

01:58:16

God willing, this Friday to discuss her book, Unveiling Grace, the story of how we found our way out of the

01:58:23

Mormon church, seven reasons we left Mormonism. And she is a former

01:58:29

Brigham Young University professor. And she became well known for discussing how she left the

01:58:36

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints in the 2011 video documentary, Unveiling Grace.

01:58:43

So we hope that you tune in on Friday. And next week, we've got a number of interesting guests, including

01:58:51

George Grant, who is a world -renowned Christian author and Presbyterian pastor.

01:59:00

And I always enjoy having discussions with George, and he's coming back to Iron, Sharp, and Zion on Wednesday, August 10th.

01:59:11

And Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio will be on August 15th.

01:59:18

He will be our guest on August 15th to discuss his brand new book, Hot Off The Press, Stressed Out, a practical biblical approach to anxiety.

01:59:28

So we're looking forward to that as well. That's just some of the many guests that we have in the days and weeks ahead on Iron, Sharp, and Zion.

01:59:35

And don't forget that website for our guest, James Wright, to help the work that he's doing in Turkey is crossoverusa .org,

01:59:45

crossoverusa .org. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater