January 08 Q & A
Question:
I recently read "A Common Word Between Us and You," signed by 138 Muslim scholars, clerics, and intellectuals from all over the world. They claim common ground shared by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The statement was well received by scholars at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Moved by the "Muslim hand of conviviality and cooperation extended to Christians worldwide," they extended their "own Christian hand in return, so that we may live in peace and justice, loving God and neighbors."
Yale's scholars claim that Christians sinned against Muslims in the Crusades, and still do so by our "excesses in the war on terror." They say that if we could achieve religious peace with Muslims, world peace would likely follow.
The "common ground" between us is supposedly "love of God and neighbor." Muslims say their God is "The Infinitely Good and All-Merciful." Yale scholars agree that the Bible tells us "God is love" in 1 John 4:8. The "open letter" quotes Muhammad: "None of you has faith until you love for your neighbor what you love for yourself." The Yale Center compares this to 1 John 4:8 and 20.
The Yale scholars also state that when "freedom to worship God according to one's conscience is curtailed, God is dishonored...and neither God nor neighbor is loved." Haven't you been a bit rough on those trying to establish peaceful cooperation between Christians and Muslims? Romans 12:18 tells us, "If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men." Many Muslims want peace. Can't we accept the olive branch they offer? Many Christian leaders have signed this agreement.
Response:
Common ground...olive branch...religious peace? Islam says Allah is the only true God. Sixteen times the Qur'an says Allah is not a father and has no son. But the very foundation of Christianity is that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son...the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world..." (Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 4:14, etc., etc.) The Qur'an says Christ is not the Son of God, did not die for our sins on the cross-someone died in His place, so He did not rise from the dead, and anyone who believes in the Trinity goes to hell. What common ground is there with those who reject every Christian distinctive?
Muhammad teaches love for neighbor? His career included murders of hundreds of innocent people (all "neighbors" by Christ's definition) during scores of unprovoked attacks upon villages and caravans involving robbery and murder. This horror has been multiplied thousands of times by sincere Muslims following the Qur'an and Muhammad's example, slaughtering and torturing untold millions from France to China for 1,300 years.
This unequaled mayhem and murder is still justified by Muslim historians and clerics as true "Islam, Allah be praised!" When the twin towers came down, hundreds of thousands of Muslims around the world danced in the streets shouting, "Allahu Akbar!" [Allah is the greatest!]. The same cry rang in the streets during the Muslim riots in Paris, the Muslim riots over the Danish cartoons, and when two Israelis made a wrong turn into Ramallah and were literally torn apart by a frenzied mob, etc. Mobs, during binge after binge of destruction of property and innocent lives, always scream praise to Allah. And Allah is the "common ground" for peace?!
Christians mistreated Muslims in the Crusades? The crusaders were not Christians but Roman Catholics to whom (to match Islam's promise of paradise for Muslims dying in jihad) Pope Urban II promised escape from purgatory to heaven for dying in the fight to recover the "Holy Land" (not for Israel but for the Church!). They disobeyed Christ in fighting for an earthly kingdom and killed every Jew they encountered. Christ and Christianity cannot be blamed for what these deceived pawns of Rome did!
Muslims had attacked and captured North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, et al., 400 years earlier and had been torturing, enslaving, and slaughtering innocent and peaceful civilians for centuries before the crusaders finally struck back. Yale can't be ignorant of history! These "scholars" are suppressing the truth to promote a lie!
Excesses in the war on terror? At least the British and Americans follow the rules of warfare and punish their own troops if they misbehave. Compare that with vehicles loaded with explosives detonated in markets, suicide bombers in mosques, every devilishly clever deception possible to kill and maim, torturing and beheading prisoners-and we are guilty of excesses?! Anyone who thinks we are in Afghanistan and Iraq for anything other than "as much as possible" to find some means of living peacefully with these morally blind monsters is wrong.
Freedom to worship God according to the dictates of one's conscience?! Yale scholars and evangelical signatories suggest we are preventing this? We give Muslims full religious freedom in the West. We let them build mosques by the thousands, though in many they hide terrorists and plot our destruction. How do Muslims respond? Everywhere they gain control, all non-Islamic religions are suppressed and often prohibited, Christians are killed and churches destroyed by the thousands from Nigeria to Indonesia to Pakistan. In Saudi Arabia you can't carry a Bible on the street, cannot build a non-Muslim place of worship, or even worship the God of the Bible in the privacy of your home. You must be a Muslim to be a citizen! There is no freedom of the press, of speech, of religion, of worship. Any Muslim who converts to any other religion is beheaded in public.Where is the extended olive branch?!
Islam's Allah is "The Infinitely Good and All-Merciful"? Tell that to the many millions enslaved, tortured, and slaughtered in his name! Muslims killed more just in India than Hitler killed in all of East and West Europe and North Africa! Muhammad claimed, "Allah has commanded me to fight against all people until all people confess there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet." Terrorists today are not "extremists" but true Muslims, obedient to Allah and following Muhammad's example. "Peace" is for those who submit to Allah! Some olive branch!
I am shocked by the leaders who joined Muslims in signing this document, which betrays Christ and the gospel for a phony promise of "peace" from the enemies of God and Israel! Sadly, here are some of them: Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, George Verwer, Robert Schuller, John Stott, Brian D. McClaren, David Neff, Richard Mouw, Richard Cizik, David Yonggi Cho, et al.
Question
[Excerpt of letter from leader of large Messianic congregation]: Are you forbidding Gentile believers to celebrate Jesus, our Passover Lamb, in a Passover setting [Q&A 6/07;10/07]? It is one of the most beautiful things, and most prophetic, that the end-time church is rediscovering its heritage in Israel....In the Millennium all nations, both Jew and Gentile, will have to celebrate the Hebrew Feast of Sukkot (Tabernacles-Zechariah 14:16-21). Are we not free to keep or not keep one day above the rest?
Response:
You are saying that for Gentiles to keep the Jewish Passover is a truth lost to the church and now being restored in this "end-time." Yet the "Last Supper" was not the annual Jewish Passover in remembrance of Israel's deliverance but a new "Passover" feast for the church to keep "on the first day of the week" (Acts 20:7), in remembrance of the death, burial, and resurrection of "Christ our passover" (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 5:7).
Exodus 12:14 commands ethnic Jews to keep the Passover "a feast by an ordinance forever." The fact that Jews alone keep the Passover is the great proof that they are the chosen people to whom the Promised Land was given for an everlasting possession: "When your children shall say...what mean ye by this service?...[Y]e shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's passover...when he smote the Egyptians and delivered our houses" (vv. 26,27). No Gentile could say that to his children-reason enough for Gentiles not to keep this Jewish feast with its special meaning! This is specifically for the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and for no one else. So says the Bible.
Moreover, for Gentiles to keep this feast weakens its intended proof. Christians (whether Jews or Gentiles) celebrate "Christ our Passover" in the breaking of bread "on the first day of the week" (Acts 20:7), as did the early church. The Jewish believers also kept the Passover once a year as commanded.
The fact that all nations will be forced to keep Sukkot during the Millennium does not justify Gentiles keeping the Passover. Nor does it illustrate freedom to keep or not to keep one day above the rest. Nor does Romans 14 refer to the Passover.
Question:
I love your newsletter and radio program but I have to take exception to your statement [Dec '07 article] that for Christ to taste "death for every man would have to include the experience of the 'lake of fire' [which is] the second death." Jesus suffered physical death on the cross and went immediately to the Abraham's bosom/Paradise side of Sheol/Hades. As He said to the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise," not hell/gehenna/lake of fire. Yes, God did turn his back on Jesus-hence his words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" but Jesus did not actually experience the "lake of fire," which was not opened for business yet. The first persons to go there will be the Antichrist and the False Prophet (Revelation 19:20). Your statement came too close to the false teaching of Kenneth Copeland.
Response:
No, I was as far from Copeland's heresy as the East is from the West. Copeland actually says, "Satan and every demon tortured Christ in the depths of hell"-not "lake of fire." But Satan is not the proprietor of either place and will be tormenting no one; he himself will be tormented continuosly forever in the Lake of Fire (Rv 20:10). Copeland's worst heresy, and that of others like him, is that our salvation comes from Satan torturing Christ in hell during the three days His body was in the tomb. That is not the gospel that saves!
Nor did I say that Jesus went to the Lake of Fire to suffer for our sins. On the Cross He paid the full penalty for sin, shouting in triumph, "Tetelestai" [paid in full!]. The KJV translates it as "It is finished!" Furthermore, redemption is through "the blood of his cross" (Col 1:20).
Scripture declares, that "he by the grace of God should taste death for every man" (Heb 2:9). Being "cast into the lake of fire...is the second death" (Rv 20:14).
How could Christ "taste death for every man" without suffering "the second death" that every sinner will endure eternally in the Lake of Fire? He couldn't. I believe what the Bible plainly says. But how could He suffer the torment of the Lake of Fire while on the Cross? Consider carefully:
- Physical death is not sin's full penalty: "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment..."(Heb 9:27). How can eternal punishment of the soul and spirit be physical? Death separates man from his body and opens the door to judgment and eternal punishment.
- Punishment in hell and the Lake of Fire cannot be physical but moral and spiritual. I've been accused of not believing in real flames in hell and the Lake of Fire by those who think that only physical flames could be real. Then neither God, who is "a spirit," nor Satan, angels, demons, or man's soul and spirit are real!
- Is the "water" of eternal life that Jesus offered to the woman at the well and that He offers to each repentant sinner not real because it isn't physical? Then why must the flames of eternal punishment in the Lake of Fire be physical to be real? The rich man was tormented in the flames of hell, but only his soul and spirit were present-his physical body was rotting in the grave.
- Surely, the fire of God's holiness, justice, and judgment, by which "every man's work shall be made manifest...of what sort it is" (1 Cor 3:13), cannot be physical but moral and spiritual. Real? Yes, far more real, terrifying, and tormenting than physical fire could ever be, as the conscience can find no more excuses but is confronted with the stark reality of what sin really is and the horror of its rebellion against God and rejection of Christ and the sacrifice He made on the Cross. I believe that is the horror Christ endured on the Cross for every person who would ever be born as He cried in agony, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"!