47 - Islam: Not a Peaceful Religion

Islam: Not a Peaceful Religion; 1 John 2:18

1 John 2:18 ^NASB "Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour."

This term "antichrist" is derived from a Greek word with the preposition anti [a)nti], which in English as the idea of opposition or against, but in the Greek anti means substitution or instead of. So this is a substitute Christ, a religious leader. We must understand that there are many different figures in history that may be termed an antichrist. That is because Jesus Christ's coming is imminent. Because Satan does not know when that will be he always has to be ready. So throughout the church age there are certain trends: trends of false religion, religious leaders that arise and create new religious systems that Satan can use for his benefit in order that it maybe be used to bring in the final ecumenical religion that will be during the Tribulation. One particular "antichrist" who appeared in history, and his religious system, is Islam.

What is happening today in light of the terrorist attacks on September 11 is that we are being bombarded and brainwashed by an illiterate media—and an ignorant media—trying to convince us that Islam is really a peaceful religion. Children are being indoctrinated in this false claim in public schools. It is not a religion of peace and it never has been a religion of peace. We will look at Islam as one expression of a religious system that is an example of antichrists in the church age.

Islam was founded by a prophet. He did not claim to be God or claim deity for himself, he claimed simply to be a prophet but the greatest of all prophets and his name was Muhammad. He was born in 570 AD in Mecca. His parents died when he was a child and he was raised by an uncle who was a merchant and took him on various caravan trips throughout the Middle east, and he had contacts with many different people. He had contacts with Jews and with Christians and was somewhat discouraged by the fact that on the Arabian peninsula the Arabs were nothing more than nomadic tribes who practiced polytheism. They had 360 gods, one for each day of the year, and the deities they worshipped included angels and demons, and the highest and most powerful of all the gods in the Arabian pantheon was a god by the name of Allah. He was a moon god and as the god of the moon he was also a god of war. So what Muhammad decided was to get rid of all of the polytheism, get rid of 359 gods and have one left, and that would be Allah. Allah was the moon god represented by a crescent moon which is why the Islamic nations have on their flag a crescent moon signifying the worship of Allah and his roots as the moon god.

When Muhammad was a young man he married his boss. He was a camel driver and she had a "trucking" company and he married her in order to get ahead in life. Because she was fairly wealthy it left him with a lot of time on his hands, and being a somewhat introspective ascetic, he liked to go up and meditate on "spiritual" things up in the mountains. When he was 40 years of age he started having these strange convulsions. He started foaming at the mouth and going into trances, and he was convinced that he was demon possessed, that he had a djin, the Arabic from which we get our English word genie—an evil spirit. But his wife said no, it was just the angel Gabriel who was wanting to communicate with him. So he goes up into a cave in the mountains and the angel Gabriel allegedly appeared to this illiterate camel herder, outside of Mecca, and they had a little fight. Gabriel strangled him and choked him into submission, demanding that he "proclaim in the name of the Lord, the creator, who created man from a clot of blood." So he was to proclaim this new revelation that came allegedly from God, and the fact that Gabriel allegedly choked him into submission is key for understanding Islam because the word Islam does not mean peace, it means submission. The role of Islam and their mission is to cause everybody on the planet to come into submission to Allah, and it doesn't matter if it is done by free will or whether by force through violence. That becomes clear from reading the Koran. Just as Muhammad was forced into submission through violence, that is the way that Islam has often spread in history.

He had various visions with the angel Gabriel and over a 22-year period he was given 78,000 words of the Koran's 114 chapters. He never wrote anything down because he was as illiterate as his followers. He began to force his new religion on people. He went to the Jews and they rejected it, he went to the Christians and they rejected it, and so he became made at both the Jews and the Christians so now he was going to have a religious system that was antagonistic to both groups. He went to the Arabs and tried to force it on them and they rejected it so he had to flee Mecca for his life. He went out into the desert and gathered various Bedouin riff-raff around him. He needed to raise funds in order to support this new army, so he did so by raiding various caravans, and he came up with the idea that this ought to be justified by some kind of religious argumentation. So he developed a doctrine called jihad, which means struggle or exertion. Jihad therefore authorised military ventures known as extortion and robbery in Allah's name. In 628 AD he returned to Mecca with a force of 10,000 men and gained control over the city in a bloodless coup, and the result was that all of Arabia was his.

Islam looks at Muhammad as a prophet, the greatest of all the prophets; but Islam does not recognise Jesus as a Son of God, they recognise Jesus only as a prophet. Christians are told by Muslims that faith in Christ as God incarnate is blasphemy. According to Islam all Jews by virtue of their birth are damned by God. Islam rejects the idea of a virgin birth of Jesus as the Son of God. They reject the miracles He performed and His death on the cross—Jesus didn't die on the cross, He was taken into heaven before the cross and somebody else was crucified. So the Bible in their view is corrupted, as has been corrupted, especially by Israel. They hate all Jews. There is this deep hatred and anti-Semitism among all Muslims that is palpable, incredible.

The five pillars of Islam are: a) They recite the Shahada – "There is no god but Allah and Muhammud is his messenger" – five times a day, whenever they pray towards Mecca; b) They pray five time a day towards Mecca – morning, noon, late afternoon, sunset, and before bed time. They must pray kneeling with their foreheads pressed firmly against the ground; c) They believe in alms-giving, are required to voluntarily give to aid the poor and to purify one's self from materialism. They are required to donate one fortieth of their income and possessions; d) Fasting during the month of Ramadan; e) the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The only sure way to get into heaven is to either die on your Haj or you will die in the midst of jihad. Other than that you don't know if you'll ever get into heaven or into Paradise. Many believe that the sixth pillar is jihad.

What are some of the beliefs of Muslims? First of all, as we have seen already, Islam does not mean peace but submission. A Muslim is one who submits. The goal of Islam is to get all mankind to submit, even if by force, to Allah. There is no such thing as salvation in Islam as there is in Christianity. In Christianity there is the belief that all men are sinners. There is no comparable doctrine of total depravity is Islam; there is no comparable doctrine of salvation. And there is no certainty and no idea of how one ever gets to heaven, except to die on a Haj or in jihad. Islam is completely intolerant of all other religious beliefs. If any Muslim converts to Christianity his father is required to kill him. If the father will not kill him then the village is required to kill both the father and the son. Islam is also against progress and it represses women. According to Islam there are only two people on the planet. There are those who are members of the house of peace, the dar es salaam, and those who are members of the house of war. Those who are members of the house of peace are to destroy those who are in the house of war. Finally, one of the sayings that they say frequently, "Allah is great," does not literally mean God is great, it means God or Allah is greater. Greater than what? We are reminded that it was Satan who said that he was greater than God. We are also reminded that in Deuteronomy 32 and 1 Corinthians 10 we are told that behind all idols and false gods there are demons. So if we put two and two together we come up with the conclusion that Allah is a creation of or a manifestation of Lucifer, especially when we couple that with the extreme anti-Semitism of Islam.

According to Islamic prophecy, when Jesus come back He will come back as a Muslim and then He and Muhammad will gather all the Muslims to themselves and they will go out and kill every Christian and every Jew; so much so that the rocks and the trees will cry out, "There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." The god that they worship, Allah, is not the God of the Bible, and the Jesus they talk about is not the Jesus of the Bible. Their Jesus is an Islamic Jesus who is a destructive warrior who hates all Jews.

Islam was built on the foundation of Arabian paganism, and apparently Muhammad had a trend in his sin nature towards asceticism and legalism and was embarrassed by the Arabs and their multiplicity of gods; especially when he had contact with Jews and Christians. He was more impressed with their piety and their morality and so he tried to force this on the Arabs. He did this by getting rid of all of their gods except for Allah. If we look at the attributes of Allah in the Koran they are not the attributes of the God of the Bible. For example, the word love is only used two times in the Koran. In the Bible the core commandment in the Old Testament is that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and love our neighbour as ourselves. In the New Testament we learn that God is love. There are no comparable statements to those in the Koran.

Islam was originally planted by the sword and spread by the sword during the time of Muhammad. In fact he killed and murdered tens of thousands of Arabs and Syrians in order to spread Islam during the 8^th and 9^th centuries. He tortured his captives with fire. He would kill them, take their wives and his bondmaids and forced others to marry his companions. Anyone who criticised him was instantly murdered and following his death all of the caliphs were to be blood relatives of Muhammad. So his followers fought a bloody war of succession and his own relatives and closest friends sacrificed and slaughtered one another. So it is not a religion of peace.

The differences between Jesus and Muhammad

a)  Jesus' birth as the Messiah was prophesied in Scripture. Muhammad's birth was not. For example, we are told in the Scriptures that Jesus would be a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He would be born into the tribe of Judah and the house of David, 2 Samuel 7:12-16; born of a virgin, Isaiah 7:14, and to be born in Bethlehem, Micah 5:2. There is no Scripture to appeal to about the birth of Muhammad.

b)  Jesus was foretold to be the Son of God and He claimed to be the Son of God, and the apostles also proclaimed Him as the Son of God. However, Muhammad and Islam reject this: God cannot have a son. He thought it was blasphemy to say that God has a son, so all Christians by definition are blasphemers and in the Koran they are to kill all blasphemers. That is why one of their sayings is to kill the Jews on Saturday and to kill the Christians on Sunday.

c)  Muhammad did not authenticate his claims with any works or miracles. He claimed that the Koran was the only sign needed to authenticate himself as a prophet.

d)  Jesus and the Old Testament prophets emphasise love. Over and over again in the Bible there is an emphasis on love—love for God, love for mankind, God's love for mankind. But this is not true in the Koran. In fact, the Koran emphasises vengeance and vindictiveness and violence as opposed to love and forgiveness. In his book A Cup of Trembling, Dave Hunt writes: "Islam is fighting a holy war for control of the world. That war was begun by Muhammad himself in the 7^th century and is still carried on today by his faithful followers through terrorism. The terrorists are not radicals or extremists as the media continually labels them. Instead, they are Islamic fundamentalists…" What is a fundamentalist? A fundamentalist is someone who believes in the fundamentals of whatever his system is. There is nothing extremist about it. Yet what has happened is that our modern liberal media is using the term fundamentalist as an insulting, negative term that is synonymous with extremism. That is a falsehood. The term Christian fundamentalist came into use because of a series of books published in the early 20^th century called The Five Fundamentals of the Faith. The term Christian fundamentalist came into use to describe the people who believed in the five fundamentals of the faith; not extremists or crusaders. "… Instead, these are Islamic fundamentalists who are true to their religion and the teachings of the Koran, and who follow foully in the footsteps of their great prophet Muhammad. As one former Muslim and Islamic scholar has said: 'We must never imagine that such Muslims are being unnecessarily wicked, they are simply being faithful to their religion. The fact is never hidden as to the attitude a good Muslim  should have towards Christians and Jews. In fact much of the incitement to violence and war in the whole of the Koran is directed against the Jews and Christians who rejected what they felt to be the strange God Muhammad was trying to preach.… Muhammad and his successors initiated offensive wars against peaceful countries in order to impose and implant by force as well as to seize the abundance of these lands. Their objective was to capture women and children and to put an end to the poverty and hunger from which Arab Muslims suffered. So Islam was forcibly imposed upon Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran, all of North Africa, some parts of India and China, and later Spain." In fact western Europe fought the Muslims from the eight century up to the fifteenth century and it was only when Columbus and others came to the Americas and took back all of the gold from Mexico, South and North America that western Europe had the financial resources to finally defeat the Muslims. But what happened by the late 19^th century and the use of oil is that the petro-dollars come along and now the Arabs are filthy rich and have the financial resources to go back on the warpath and to try to take over the world. Violence is clearly mentioned in numerous places in the Koran.