In America today it is almost as though the curtain has been brought down on the subject of religion. Whether a family is composed of a man and a woman, or two mommies or two daddies or some other combination is up for debate in the public square, but what you may not do under any circumstances is to apply religion or worse, the witness of the Bible, to questions like this one. Christianity may have a place at the table of public discourse only if it is entirely stripped of all its essentials, all of its core doctrines, only if it ceases to be the good news of God saving sinners through faith in Christ alone, and becomes instead a vague spirituality of warm fuzziness and goodwill. Only if it is brought down from being the revelation of God to sinners to the level on par with the "big hug" of Oprah or the Teletubbies is Christianity acceptable.

In order to be acceptable Christianity has to become a religion that ceases to make truth claims, and it certainly cannot maintain that Jesus Christ, the true source of Christianity is the incarnate Son of God and the only way that sinners may be reconciled to God.

But the Apostle John, in the passage that we have just read, is warning the church against precisely this kind of denial, this kind of apostasy. He tells us that people will arise, even within the church who deny that Jesus was really the Christ, the promised Messiah and the Son of God. Far from telling us that this great confession can be dispensed with, John tells us that the Confession that Jesus is the Christ is at the very heart of the Bible, and that this is the great test of whether a religion is true or false. In fact to say that Jesus is not the Christ, or that he is not the Son of God, is to be a liar and not to know God the Father at all, because if you don't know the Son, you cannot know the Father.

People today are prone to claim that every religion leads to God, that God is our Father regardless of whether we come to him through Christianity, Mormonism, Buddhism, Islam or the Psychic Friends Network. But John destroys that false reasoning. He says you can't have the Father without first having the Son. Jesus, and Jesus alone is the way to God!

Perhaps that strikes you as narrow. Who was this John fellow to say such outrageous things! To condemn all those well meaning Buddhists and Muslims. Shall I tell you who John was? He was a faithful ambassador and servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. His master, Jesus Christ said "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me" and John as a good ambassador does not give you cunningly contrived fables or things he has made up. He gives you the truth that he received from his Lord. He wants to make sure we know that he is just telling us the truth that he himself witnessed and received for he writes in the beginning of his epistle (1 John 1):

But the truth, has a tendency to make people angry. We live in a fallen world where the children of the light are warned that men will prefer darkness and comforting lies. Paul tells us that in his day the message of Christ crucified was to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness; and so, to the unregenerate in every age the Good News of salvation through Christ has ironically been an offensive message.

I think we all pretend that if we could just get back to the days of the Church of the Apostles all of our divisions and battles would be over. But if you believe that, you haven't been reading the letters of the Apostles very closely. Even in the Apostolic Church, men claiming to be Christians opposed Christ's apostles and fought against the core doctrines of the Christian faith proclaiming that Christ was not the Messiah. That is why John tells the church it is so critical to hold on with all your strength to the original teaching, the pure doctrine taught by Christ and his apostles and not to be lead astray by the lies of false teachers. And today Christians I don't need to tell you, we live in an age where there must be a hundred or more false teachers for every true ambassador of Christ.

Sadly I've come to expect that true statements about religious topics made in the public square will be harshly criticized.

Let me give you a recent example. Most of you are probably familiar with the name Franklin Graham. Franklin is the son of Billy Graham and is in the process of gradually taking over his father's ministry. In the wake of the 911 attacks Franklin made some statements that made people throughout the United States furious. He said, speaking of Islam:

"I don't believe this is a wonderful, peaceful religion. When you read the Koran and you read the verses from the Koran, it instructs the killing of the infidel, for those that are non-Muslim." He went on to say, "It wasn't Methodists flying into those buildings, it wasn't Lutherans, it was an attack on this country by people of the Islamic faith."

After he said this, politicians, the media, and even leaders of the evangelical church were quick to distance themselves from these comments. As much as I respect our President, he himself was quick to say that he disagrees and thinks that Islam is peaceful religion.

Rev. Graham received virtually no support for his statements, which to my mind was a terrible shame. He was one of the only figures of national stature willing to actually come out and call Islam itself evil, and not just the terrorists who acted in the name of Islam. He was also virtually a lone voice in the wilderness willing to say that the relationship between Islam and violence is not a coincidence.

But was he right? Is Islam evil? Is it also at heart a religion of violence? Do the men and women of Al Qaeda, and Hamas, and the Taliban perhaps understand Islam better than our leaders? Well, let us apply the tests of history and more importantly the Bible to Islam and then judge for ourselves.

It's been my experience that most Americans don't know much about Islam. Sure they usually know that Muslims mostly come from the Middle East, that they call God Allah, that they have a prophet called Muhammad, that Islamic women have to cover up, and that they follow the teachings of a book called the Koran. But beyond that, not much else is known. They usually don't know the origins or the history of Islam.

I myself was pretty much in the dark about Islam until in my pre

Christian pagan days, I began to study it as part of my coursework in University, and after doing so, when I hear people like our president say that Islam is a religion of peace, all I can do is scratch my head and wonder if he is talking about the same religion I studied. Because the religion called Islam that I know about, is no religion of peace.

Lets look briefly at the origins of Islam. Islam was born in Arabia in 611AD when an Arab by the name of Muhammad claimed that the Archangel Gabriel had come to him and told him that he was a prophet appointed by the one true God Allah to deliver his messages to the people. It was these messages from Gabriel declared by the Prophet that make up the Chapters or Suras of the Koran.

In some ways the religion that Muhammad was preaching was an improvement on the religion of his fellow Arabs at the time. They worshipped at least 360 different gods which all had different shrines at their holy site in Mecca, the Kaaba. Muhammad reduced this number to one god, Allah which was the name of one of the idols, and tried to end some of their more abhorrent practices like the commonplace killing of female infants at birth. But how did Muhammad ensure that his message of Islam, which means "peace" or more properly "surrender" in Arabic spread? By any means possible.

When he was criticized by a poetess named Asma Muhammad sent a follower to murder her, his disciple dutifully snuck into her dwelling at night and drove a knife through her, pinning her to her couch as she held her sleeping infant son in her hands. When the disciple asked the overjoyed Muhammad if there was any cause for apprehension, Muhammad replied "None! A couple of Goats will hardly knock their heads together." This event as bloody as it is, rather than being an oddity was the norm in the life of the Prophet. He promised his henchmen that to kill in his name and therefore in the name of God was to obtain a sure reward in paradise and made sure that the Koran reflected that.

To this day, to criticize or insult the Prophet is capital crime under Islamic Sharia Law, and in the countries that observe Sharia like Pakistan and Sudan it has been the means by which many a Christian has been sentenced to death. Many of you may have heard of the author Salman Rushdie….

You've probably guessed by now that Muhammad unlike Christ was not a Prince of Peace who would not break the bruised reed or snuff out the smoking flax. He was an earthy, violent, and brutal man who as several of his biographers pointed out, knew nothing of pity and little of moderation. When the Jewish Beni Qoriega tribe of Medina rebelled against his rule, he ordered 600 of the 800 men of the tribe to be beheaded in the marketplace, the rest of the tribe including the women and children were sold into slavery. The executions took all day and most of the night to complete, but Muhammad did not linger long. He left early in the evening to spend the night with the beautiful 17 year old widow of one of the victims. This slaughter which the Koran praises in Sura 33, verse 25, made the prophet a rich man, for the Koran not surprisingly dictated that the prophet was to receive a 1/5th of all the booty taken in battle.

But then the Koran strangely always seemed to ensure that Prophet got whatever he needed. For instance in the matter of wives, Joe Smith, the founder of Mormonism had nothing on Muhammad. While the normal rule for the number of wives is four the Koran declared that Muhammad was not to be constrained by this and consequently Muhammad took 11 plus several concubines. He married his favorite wife Aisha, when she was 6 and he was just shy of 50, but being the man of moderation that he was, did not consummate the marriage for 3 years. He took a hankering to his adopted son Zeid's wife, and accordingly his son divorced her and Muhammad married her. When people in Medina were somewhat scandalized by this action, overnight, verses appeared in the Koran which told them that Prophet was right to do this and that they whispered against him at their eternal peril.

I could go on and on with examples like this but that should be enough to show you why, when Muhammad is publicly compared to our Lord Jesus Christ I don't know whether to laugh or be ill.

Muhammad instructed his followers to spread Islam by the sword. This is called the Jihad, or Holy war. While Christians are essentially commanded to be willing to lay down their lives for their faith, Muslims are told to be willing to kill to ensure that theirs spreads. The duty of Jihad, is one of the 5 central tenets or Pillars of Islam. In the Koran, there are two distinct portions of the earth, the Dar-Al-Islam "Or the Land of Islam or Peace" and the Dar-Al-Harb or the "Land of War." You and I live in the Dar-Al-Harb, and I believe that the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 should have woken us up to that fact. The hijackers knew that the Koran promises that those who die fighting for Islam will obtain paradise.. I quote:

"[4.74] Therefore let those fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world's life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, then be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward.
[4.75] And what reason have you that you should not fight in the way of Allah and of the weak among the men and the women and the children, (of) those who say: Our Lord! cause us to go forth from this town, whose people are oppressors, and give us from Thee a guardian and give us from Thee a helper.
[4.76] Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Shaitan. Fight therefore against the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak."

The defenders of Islam will always point to the Crusades and say look! You Christians have killed in an attempt to spread your religion. Ah yes, but when a Christian murders in the name of Christianity he is going against the true teaching of Christianity, so the Crusades are a perversion of Christianity and not representative of the life or teachings of Jesus Christ. But the Jihad, on the other hand, is a core doctrine of Islam. And the first Jihad campaigns started during the lifetime of Muhammad and under his direction. Also, let's be frank, the Crusades started as a reaction to the spread of Islam via the Jihad. Their objective was to retake Jerusalem, which had been a Christian kingdom until it was conquered by the Muslims in the 7th century. The Crusades lasted for about 200 years and Christians aren't too proud of them today.

By contrast; the Jihad started in the seventh century AD and technically continues to this day. Islam expanded by Conquest throughout first the Middle East then North Africa, and then continued as they attempted to Islamize all of Europe. Amongst the Christian countries invaded and conquered either in whole or in part by Islamic armies waging Jihad are Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Sicily, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumania, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, and the Ukraine. The occupations of these lands was long and bitter Spain, for instance was occupied for 800 years and Greece for 500 years. Many of these lands were devastated in the process, and the growth of others permanently stunted.

As a matter of fact we can ultimately thank Islam for the ongoing wars in the Balkans, for there we see the ongoing fruit of their invasion of those lands and the Islamization of entire sections. In the Balkans, memories last a long time so the Serbs, for instance, are still bitter about battles and massacres that happened hundreds of years ago, and this has lead to the long standing feuds with the descendants of the Islamic invaders and converts who live in places like Bosnia and Kosovo.

This does not, of course, justify their killing them however, now that they have the upper hand. Christians, unlike Muslims, are called upon to love their enemies.

But all of that is just putting Islam to the test of History. The most important test is the biblical test that John mentioned in the verses we read, what does Islam say about Christ? Few people are aware of this but the Koran does mention Christ, whom it calls Isa. Unfortunately it says many blasphemous things about Christ. Here are some of its major teachings:

1) Jesus was a created man just like Adam, whom Allah took back into heaven [Sura 3:55-59]

2) There is no difference between Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, etc. [Sura 3:84]

3) The Jews did not really kill Jesus, they only thought they did, Allah took him into heaven [Sura 4:157-158]

4) The Good News that Jesus was proclaiming was the coming of the Prophet Muhammad [Sura 61:6]

5) Jesus was not God, nor did he claim to be [5:116-117]

The Jesus of Muhammad's Koran is not the Christ, he is not the promised Immanuel, God with us, he is not the savior of mankind. The Jesus of Islam didn't even die on the cross for our sins, neither was he resurrected for our Justification!

In Islam, salvation comes not through Christ, but by becoming a Muslim, obeying the commands of the Prophet Muhammad, and doing works of righteousness, including of course, dying in the Jihad. In fact being killed in the war against the infidels is the surest way of entering directly into heaven. And this is not the heaven that we see pictured in revelation, a place of perfect communion with God and unending worship of the glorious lamb. It shouldn't surprise us that the paradise that Muslims hope to inherit is the carnal fulfillment of all Muhammad's fantasies. It is a place of unending sexual activity where fallen warriors are immediately provided with 72 maidens for their unending pleasure. In essence it is the eternal fulfillment of every male carnal desire. In fact it is unclear what female Muslims have to hope for in the Muslim version of paradise. And we wonder why it is easy to find Islamic men eager to carry out suicide missions?

Islam offers a false paradise, a false hope of salvation, and worst of all, a blasphemous false Jesus, who is not the Christ of Scripture. Remember the words of John?

"Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.

Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses the Son has the Father also."

So Islam is a religion of Lies and Muhammad was yet another false prophet motivated by a Spirit of Antichrist.

But should your reaction should be to hate individual Muslims? Not at all! While we hate the Christ denying lies of Islam, we should remember the words of the Apostle Paul in Titus 3:3-7:

We too were once just as blind and lost as the Muslims. While they may hate us, we must not return evil for evil but rather, instead we should pray for them and whenever possible we should seek to give them the real Good News of Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Muslim governments have made it almost impossible for Christian missionaries to work in their countries, but every year, thousands of Muslims are coming to the United States. You need to be ready, willing and eager, to share the gospel with them now that God is mercifully bringing them to a place where they can be exposed to it and I would urge you to consider supporting ministries whose focus is not only to Muslims abroad but the growing Muslim community here in America.

Most importantly you need to wake up to the dangers and opportunities presented by the growth of Islam here in the USA. Islam is, according to the New York Times, the fastest growing religion in America. I would strongly urge all of you to become informed about Islam so that you will be able to expose the lies and share the truth, and that you will also be equipped to respond when some Christians claim that Islam is a peaceful religion or that we basically believe the same things, which is a disturbingly common message. [Book Recommendation: Refuting the "Islam is Peaceful" and not a threat claim: Jihad by Paul Fergosi. Learning to witness to Muslims: Muslims and Christians at the Table by Bruce McDowell and Anees Zaka]

Above all though your first priority needs to be to know and believe what your own faith teaches, and to let the faith that you heard from the beginning that strong biblical faith abide in you as grow in grace and the knowledge of the Lord.

And remember dear people, if you don't believe the Gospel yourself, then you have nothing to share with Muslims, and in fact you are just as lost as they are. Remember, the words of the Apostle Peter concerning Christ: "And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved." If today you don't have a saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, then I would beg you to repent and turn to him now, today, for this is the day of salvation.

Just as in Heaven, there will no longer be denominational divisions between believers, only the wonderful congregation of the saved, in Hell there will no longer be Muslims, or Buddhists, or Atheists, or false Christians, there will only be the damned. There it won't matter any longer whose lies you believed, only that you did not embrace the truth of the Gospel.

Christians, stand firm in that faith once for all delivered to the Saints, and Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have, regardless of what religion they profess. But do this with gentleness and respect.

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