The Question No Muslim Can Answer!

Nominal Muslims (those who are "Muslim" in name only and not by practice), continue to try and deny that Jesus is God and that He said He was God. In the New Testament, Jesus stated that He was God in a number of different ways, by words and in actions. Only God can forgive sins, and yet Jesus was forgiving sins. Only God can receive worship, yet Jesus received worship. Only God can restore sight to the blind, yet Jesus restored sight to the blind. Even the Qur'an affirms that Jesus is God.

In surah 57:3, the Qur'an states that Allah is the First and the Last.

In Revelation 1:17-18, Jesus says that He is the First and the Last.

In surah 22:56-57, the Qur'an states that Allah is the Judge of all the world.

In Matthew 25:31-32, Jesus says that He is the Judge of all the world.

In surah 22:7, the Qur'an states that Allah will resurrect the dead.

In John 5:25-29, Jesus says that He will resurrect the dead.

According to the Qur'an, only God can do these things. But Jesus said that He would do them. Clearly Muslims and the Qur'an are wrong for giving honour to Jesus. If Jesus was nothing more than a prophet, a good man, then what does Islam have to say about prophets lying and claiming to be and do the things that only God Himself can do?

Jesus had said to the people of His day, "For unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins." (John 8:24) "He" who? Who are they to believe that He is? The Jews obviously had the same thoughts, and so they asked Him, "Who are you?" (v. 25). This entire discussion lead to Jesus arguing with the Jews as to who their true father was, and stating that Abraham looked forward to seeing His day, which prompted the Jews to challenge Him, "You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?" (John 8:57). Jesus replied, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I Am." (John 8:58). Immediately after Jesus said this, the Jews "picked up stones to throw at Him" (v. 59). Why did they pick up stones to stone Him, Muslims?

Before we continue, it is important to note that in John 8:24, the word "He" does not actually appear in the Greek. How it actually reads is like this: "For unless you believe that I Am, you will die in your sins."

At the Feast of Dedication, Jesus said, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). Immediately after Jesus said this, "The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him" (v. 31). Why would they want to stone Him, Muslims? Jesus even asked them that same question: "I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?" (v. 32). The Jews explained to Him precisely why they wanted to stone Him: "For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, claim Yourself to be God" (v. 33). Did you catch that? Obviously the Jews were intelligent enough to realize and understand what Jesus had said: "You claim Yourself to be God."

In both John 8:58 and John 10:30, Jesus was equating Himself with God the Father. In other words, Jesus said He was God. When He said "I Am," He was using the name that God revealed Himself as to Moses. The Jews understood what Jesus said. Why do Muslims have such difficulty in understanding this? Muslims demand a specific verse where Jesus unequivocally says, "I am God." They clearly do not understand a single thing we have looked at thus far. So let's play their game.

Muslims...

Where does Allah unequivocally state in the Qur'an that the text of the Gospel has been corrupted?

I will give you a hint: nowhere! What the Qur'an does state unequivocally in surahs 3:3, 5:66, 5:68, and 18:27, is the affirmation of the inspiration, preservation, purity, authenticity, and continuing authority of the Gospel. The third article of Islamic faith is that Muslims "Believe in the existence of the books of which God is the author: the Quran (revealed to Muhammad), the Gospel (revealed to Jesus), the Torah (revealed to Moses), and Psalms (revealed to David)." If nominal Muslims are not believing in the Gospel, then they are Apostate "Muslims"!

Premise #1: If the Gospel is the inspired, preserved, authoritative Word of God, then Islam is false because Islam contradicts the Gospel.

Premise #2: If the Gospel is not the inspired, preserved, authoritative Word of God, then Islam is false because the Qur'an claims that the Gospel is the inspired, preserved, authoritative Word of God.

Conclusion: Islam is false.

ATTENTION: King James Only People

It is a known fact that the English language evolved from the German language. If you examine Wycliffe's English translation of the Bible from the 1300s, you can see a bit of this in some of the words. However, if you go back earlier than Wycliffe, to the Anglo-Saxon Proto-English, you can really see it. So, let me ask you a question . . .

If the English language did not exist, would the Word of God be preserved anywhere?!? Think hard before you answer.

You see, King James Only individuals like to try and argue that the King James Bible is the preserved Word of God. Some King James Only individuals will even argue that the King James Bible is the preserved Word of God in the English language, which is a far cry better than those King James Only individuals who basically argue that the King James Bible is the preserved Word of God in the entire world. The former individuals not only disqualify any English translation to come after the King James Bible, but they also disqualify any English translation to come before the King James Bible, which means that God left the world languished and without His preserved Word until the King James translators came along. Absurd, right? The latter individuals disqualify every translation in every language unless it has been translated from the the King James Bible. That is a whole other barrel of monkeys. So before the King James Bible even existed, all these other translations of the biblical manuscripts were not even preserved by God. Utterly ridiculous! If the King James Bible is the preserved Word of God, then answer me this . . .

Why does your King James Bible not contain the Apocrypha? You see, the Apocrypha was a part of the original 1611 King James Bible, which means that if the King James Bible was inspired and is the preserved Word of God, then so too are the Apocrypha. If you reject the Apocrypha, then the King James Bible could only be partially inspired, which means it is partially preserved. If the King James translators were inspired, as some King James Only individuals like to attempt to argue, then why did they include the Apocrypha? So if the translators made a mistake by including the Apocrypha, then how do you know they did not make any other mistakes anywhere else?

Since you King James Only individuals do not seem to have the discernment to figure this out, here are the facts for you to digest. God's Word promised that God would preserve His Word. Tell me, how many copies of the New Testament manuscripts do we have? I say copies because the original autographs no longer exist. There are over 25,000 copies. In other words, God has preserved His Word. Guess what? It has nothing to do with the King James Bible! God's Word is preserved even if the King James Bible did not exist!

If you want to use the King James Bible, that is perfectly fine. It is a good translation. But it is not the only good translation. It has its errors just like every other translation. If you knew anything about language and translation, you would know that it is impossible to translate from one language to another with 100% accuracy. You use the best words available and leave the rest in God's hands.

False Approaches to the Bible!

In the year 1227, a professor at the University of Paris named Stephen Langton added chapters to all the books of the Bible. Then in 1551, a printer named Robert Stephanus (sometimes called Robert Estienne) numbered the sentences in all the books of the New Testament.

According to Stephanus’s son, the verse divisions that his father created do not do service to the sense of the text. Stephanus did not use any consistent method. While riding on horseback from Paris to Lyons, he versified the entire New Testament within Langton’s chapter divisions.’

So verses were born in the pages of holy writ in the year 1551. And since that time God’s people have approached the New Testament with scissors and glue, cutting and pasting isolated, disjointed sentences from different letters, lifting them out of their real-life setting, lashing them together to build floatable doctrines, and then calling it “the Word of God.”

Seminarians and Bible college students alike are rarely if ever given a panoramic view of the free-flowing story of the early church with the New Testament books arranged in chronological order.’ As a result, most Christians are completely out of touch with the social and historical events that lay behind each of the New Testament letters. Instead, they have turned the New Testament into a manual that can be wielded to prove any point. Chopping the Bible up into fragments makes this relatively easy to pull off.

We Christians have been taught to approach the Bible in one of eight ways:

→ You look for verses that inspire you. Upon finding such verses, you either highlight, memorize, meditate upon, or put them on your refrigerator door.
→ You look for verses that tell you what God has promised so that you can confess it in faith and thereby obligate the Lord to do what you want.
→ You look for verses that tell you what God commands you to do.
→ You look for verses that you can quote to scare the devil out of his wits or resist him in the hour of temptation.
→ You look for verses that will prove your particular doctrine so that you can slice-and-dice your theological sparring partner into biblical ribbons. (Because of the proof-texting method, a vast wasteland of Christianity behaves as if the mere citation of some random, decontextualized verse of Scripture ends all discussion on virtually any subject.)
→ You look for verses in the Bible to control and/or correct others.
→ You look for verses that "preach" well and make good sermon material. (This is an ongoing addiction for many who preach and teach.)
→ You sometimes close your eyes, flip open the Bible randomly, stick your finger on a page, read what the text says, and then take what you have read as a personal "word" from the Lord.

Now look at this list again. Which of these approaches have you used? Look again: Notice how each is highly individualistic. All of them put you, the individual Christian, at the center. Each approach ignores the fact that most of the New Testament was written to corporate bodies of people (churches), not to individuals.

But that is not all. Each of these approaches is built on isolated proof texting. Each treats the New Testament like a manual and blinds us to its real message. It is no wonder that we can approvingly nod our heads at paid pastors, the Sunday morning order of worship, sermons, church buildings, religious dress, choirs, worship teams, seminaries, and a passive priesthood—all without wincing.

We have been taught to approach the Bible like a jigsaw puzzle. Most of us have never been told the entire story that lies behind the letters that Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude wrote. We have been taught chapters and verses, not the historical context.

For instance, have you ever been given the story behind Paul's letter to the Galatians? Before nodding, see if you can answer these questions off the top of your head: Who were the Galatians? What were their issues? When and why did Paul write to them? What happened just before Paul penned his Galatian treatise? Where was he when he wrote it? What provoked him to write the letter? And where in Acts do you find the historical context for this letter? All of these background matters are indispensable for understanding what our New Testament is about. Without them, we simply cannot understand the Bible clearly or properly.

One scholar put it this way, "The arrangement of the letters of Paul in the New Testament is in general that of their length. When we rearrange them into their chronological order, fitting them as far as possible into their life-setting within the record of the Acts of the Apostles, they begin to yield up more of their treasure; they become self-explanatory, to a greater extent than when this background is ignored."

Another writes, "If future editions [of the New Testament] want to aid rather than hinder a reader's understanding of the New Testament, it should be realized that the time is ripe to cause both the verse and chapter divisions to disappear from the text and to be put on the margin in an inconspicuous a place as possible. Every effort must be made to print the text in a way which makes it possible for the units which the author himself had in mind to become apparent."

You could call our method of studying the New Testament the "clipboard approach." If you are familiar with computers, you are aware of the clipboard component. If you happen to be in a word processor, you may cut and paste a piece of text via the clipboard. The clipboard allows you to cut a sentence from one document and paste it into another.

Pastors, seminarians, and laymen alike have been conditioned by the clipboard approach when studying the Bible. This is how we justify our man-made, encased traditions and pass them off as biblical. It is why we routinely miss what the early church was like whenever we open our New Testaments. We see verses. We do not see the whole picture.

This approach is still alive and well today, not only in institutional churches but in house churches as well.

—Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity?: Exploring

the Roots of Our Church Practices, (BarnaBooks, 2012), 228-232.

Ezekiel 40-48

These chapters describe a rebuilding of a temple. Many theologians and scholars seem to agree in stating that this vision was not fulfilled in the return from the Babylonian captivity. If this is the case, then what are these chapters describing?

You see, there are two main theories, both of which fail in their interpretation of these chapters.

AGE TO COME / NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH

These nine chapters cannot be describing a temple and sacrifices come the new Heaven and new Earth. Why? Because sin will be done away with, therefore there is no need to make a "sin offering" (Ez. 40:39; 42:13; 43:19, 21-22, 25; 44:27, 29; 45:17, 19, 22-23, 25; 46:20) or "to make atonement" (Ez. 45:15, 17). Also, because Christ fulfilled the sacrifices "once for all" and they have been done away with (Heb. 10-10-18).

RESTORED ISRAEL / MILLENNIAL KINGDOM

These nine chapters cannot be describing a temple and sacrifices of a restored Israel. Why? Because, primarily, Christ fulfilled the sacrifices "once for all" and they have been done away with (Heb. 10-10-18). The sacrifices cannot be for a "memorial" because the passages clearly mention "sin offering" (Ez. 40:39; 42:13; 43:19, 21-22, 25; 44:27, 29; 45:17, 19, 22-23, 25; 46:20) and "to make atonement for" (Ez. 45:15, 17). Believers are being built up into a holy temple (Eph. 2:19-22). What would be the point in ethnic Israel returning to a system that never worked in the first place and was nothing more than a foreshadow of the sacrifice of Christ? That would not be a returning to God with their whole heart; it would be returning to idols.

These chapters have nothing to do with a rebuilt temple in a millennial kingdom nor in the age to come. So if this vision has nothing to do with the temple to be rebuilt after the return from captivity, what does it have to do with? Three literal interpretations are inadequate to explain these chapters: (1) a re-built temple after the Babylonian captivity, (2) a re-built temple in a millennial kingdom, and (3) a re-built temple in the new Heavens and new Earth. There is no mention of Jerusalem anywhere in these nine chapters. Unlike with Moses and the tabernacle and Solomon and the temple, there is no mention of construction supervisors or builders.

I do not know how to interpret these passages. But what I do know is simple, and it is this: if these passages do not describe the rebuilding of the temple after the Babylonian captivity, based on everything the New Testament has to say, they for sure have nothing to do with a rebuilding of a temple in a millennial kingdom or the age to come. Any interpretation that attempts either of these is false and they are ignoring and denying a vast portion of what the New Testament teaches in order to force these interpretations.

Perhaps it should be interpreted symbolically, emphasizing the return and permanent dwelling of the divine presence among His people?

Why Is Christianity So Narrow?

"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it." Matthew 7:13-14

Why is Christianity so narrow? Because truth, by very definition, is narrow. The equation 2 + 2 = 4 is narrow. The answer cannot be anything other than 4. There is no such thing as "your truth" and "my truth"; there is only the truth. Christianity is narrow because Jesus, the very Person many of you self-professing so-called "Christians" claim to love and follow, said that the way to God is narrow. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me!"

Jesus declared that He was the only way to salvation, to right standing with God. You self-professing so-called "Christians" who question this, who deny this, who say there are many ways to God that even a devout Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, etc., may get to Heaven; you call the very Person you claim to follow and obey a liar! Jesus said "the way is narrow," and you say that it is not. Jesus said "I am the way" and "no one comes to the Father but through Me," and you say that He is not, and that people can come by any way. You make Jesus to be a liar! Why? Because you are not a Christian! You do not belong to Him! You are not the Father's child!

You claim Jesus for your own, yet reject everything He said and stood for. You claim He was wrong about creation. You claim He was wrong about Adam and Eve being the first humans. You claim He was wrong about the flood. You claim He was wrong about upholding heterosexual relationships and condemning everything that did not conform to this. You claim Jesus for your Saviour and God, yet spew the denials of your true father, the Devil. Unless you repent and start believing what the Saviour said, when you die you will spend an eternity in Hell. You profess to be a Christian, but you are anything but. A Christian obeys his/her Master. A Christian does not deny what his/her Master has said and make Him out to be a liar. You call yourself a Christian, but you were sold on a false Gospel and you have never been regenerated, born again, and saved.

If you believe that any religious person can get to Heaven by observance of their religion, then you are not a Christian. If you believe the way to salvation is not narrow, then you are not a Christian. If you believe that Jesus is not the only way to the Father, then you are most definitely not a Christian.

You engage in the Devil's most successful motto: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." The Devil's greatest victory is in having false converts and non-Christians claim to be and pretend to be Christians so that it gives the rest of the world a bad taste of what it means to be Christian. Many cults and sects claim to be Christian, yet deny the very words of Scripture and teach doctrines of men and doctrines of demons. Oh, the condemnation that rests upon your head for the day of judgment!

Christianity is narrow because truth is narrow. Truth cannot be untruth. Truth is narrow because God is narrow. God is absolutely holy and cannot be anything but. If God provides a way, then that is the only way and everyone who comes to Him must come the same way: by faith in Christ Jesus as Messiah the Saviour.

Why You Need A Bible Without Chapters and Verses

by Alex Goodwin

When it comes to reading and studying the Bible, chapters and verses feel about as essential as the steering wheel of a car. We wouldn’t quite know what to do without them. They give our Bibles a structure we can grasp. They make things easy to find and they break down long passages into manageable, relatively uniform chunks. It’s hard to imagine a Bible without chapters and verses inside.

But where did they come from? Surely the Apostle Paul didn’t write his letters with chapters and verses. Why were they added? And what unnoticed impact are they having on how we read the Bible?

A Recent Innovation

Many people are unaware that chapter and verse numbers are only about 500 years old. Archbishop Stephen Langton created the chapter system we’re familiar with in the 13th century, simply because he was writing a Bible commentary and needed a way to reference more specific portions of Scripture. Similarly, French printer and scholar Robert Estienne added verse numbers in the 16th century. His reason? He was creating a Bible concordance, so he needed a way to reference even smaller portions of passages – a sentence or two at a time.

Shortly after these numbering systems were conceived, somebody made the decision that they should be a standard feature in all Bibles. Thus, a book made for reading was turned into a book made for referencing. One of the first Bibles produced on the printing press, the Geneva Bible, turned each verse into a separate paragraph, obliterating any sense of continuity within the literature and setting the table for the volleys of verses hurled back and forth during the theological debates of the Reformation.

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