Do All Religions Follow the One True God?

Tom: Thanks Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth, to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

We’re going through Dave Hunt’s book A Cup of Trembling: Jerusalem and Bible Prophecy. Last week we completed chapter 12 dealing with the subject matter of Islam and terrorism, especially jihad, or holy war. Today we’re going to discuss the God of the Bible and Allah of the Qur’an, and are they the same God?

Well, the Roman Catholic Church says they are, and some evangelicals at least teach that the name “Allah” is generic—it’s a generic title similar to the term “God.” Now, Dave, you start chapter 13 right off by stating that Muslims, Christians, and Jews all claim to be followers of the one true God. Now, let me just give two quotes here: the Qur’an says, “Your god is one God, there is no god save Him, the Beneficent, the Merciful.” And that’s Surah 2:163.

And the Bible says, “Look unto me and be ye saved, for I am God, and there is none else,” Isaiah:45:22Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.
See All.... And “I, even I, am the Lord, and beside me there is no savior,” Isaiah:43:11I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour.
See All....

And, of course, the Jews would use those verses to reject the Christian belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Dave, so how could all three be claiming to be followers of the one true God? Obviously, there….

Dave: Well, you can claim anything you want. But there are deep contradictions here between the Bible and the Qur’an and between Allah of the [Qur’an] and Yahweh. And there is no way that a Muslim can claim that they have the same God that we have. In fact, I don’t know that many Muslims would say that. It’s Catholics who would say—or even Christian Research Institute in their journal said that “There’s no other term for ‘God’ in Arabic except for ‘Allah,’” which is not true. Allah is a contraction al-ilah, and as you read the Qur’an, as I know you have, all the way through the Qur’an you have a generic term for God, ilah. And, in fact, in the confession of faith that you must make or have your head cut off, if you’re in a territory where the Muslims have that power, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” You don’t say, “There is no Allah but Allah.” You say, “There is no ilah but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” So there is a generic term, but Tom, tragically, every Arabic translation of the Bible that I know of uses “Allah” for God.

Now Allah is a specific god. This is the name of a god. It is a contraction of al-ilah, which means “the chief God,” and Allah was the chief god in the Kaaba—it was a pagan temple. It had 300-and-some gods in it. Allah is a definite god, the moon god—no son, but three daughters, and to say that…well, for example, Tom, there’s a very good group, and I won’t give their name, but they put out an excellent little tract, “Knowing God,” and they just did it in Arabic, and they’re distributing tens of thousands of copies in Iraq. I tried to reason with them: “Knowing Allah”—they use “Allah” for “God.” And I said, “Wait a minute! The Qur’an says Allah is unknowable. So you’re not reaching Muslims by saying, ‘How to know God, how to know Allah,’ because they would immediately say, ‘Wait a minute! You can’t know Allah! This is heresy!” What they need to say is “How to Know the True Ilah, the true God.”

Anyway there is a vast difference in many, many ways.

Tom: Yet, the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II—let me quote: It says “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims. These profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us, they adore the one merciful God, mankind’s Judge on the last day.”

Dave: Well, of course, they claim to “adore the one merciful God,” and the Qur’an does say Allah is merciful. In fact every Surah begins, “In the name the Beneficent, the Merciful….” But it simply is not true. Tom, we could talk for the next hour about distinctions. For example, the God of the Bible is a triune being: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and you must believe this to be a Christian. Second John says if you don’t have the Father, you don’t have the Son, okay?

But the Qur’an says, “Say not three. There is only one.”

The God of the Bible is called “the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

The Qur’an says, “Far be it from his transcendent majesty that he should have a son.” He’s not a father and he has no son. There are 99 characteristics of Allah in the Qur’an. Not one of them is love.

But the God of the Bible is love. Now, how can the God of the Bible be love? There are a number of concepts of God. On the one hand, you have polytheism. You’ve got diversity but no unity.

Tom: Could be Hinduism, for example.

Dave: Could be. Or the Greeks, the Romans.

Tom: Mormonism, maybe.

Dave: They had a god for everything. Well, you’ve got diversity, but you have no unity. The gods fight one another, they steal one another’s wives—there’s no peace in heaven, there can be no peace on earth.

On the other end, you have God as a single entity, like Allah. They claim Allah is a single being. Many Jews believe that Yahweh is a single being. Well, now you’ve got unity, but you have no diversity. In other words, Allah, before he created other beings, would be incomplete. He could not experience love, fellowship, companionship, communion, and so forth. He would have to create other beings in order to even experience love.

But the God of the Bible is love, because in Himself He is three persons, not three Gods—three persons, one God. The Father loves the Son. You have both unity and diversity. The God of the Bible loves Jews. He’s called the God of Israel 203 times.

Allah hates Jews. In the Qur’an, Allah says, “Make no friendship with a Christian or a Jew.” What? The God of the Bible is the God of the Christians. But the god of the Qur’an, Allah, says, “Don’t make friendship with Christians or with Jews.” We’ve got a lot of problems.

The god of the Qur’an, he doesn’t say, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel.” He says, “Kill the infidels wherever you find them. Pursue them and kill them.” The God of the Qur’an says Jesus didn’t die for our sins. The Bible says the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. There is no way that you can possibly say that Allah is the God of the Bible.

Tom: Dave, again, this…to me, this ought to be a crushing—not just a crushing blow, but it should just dismiss right away ecumenism.

For example, earlier in the chapter you talk about…well, you just mentioned Hinduism. How can you reconcile that with Islam? How can you reconcile it with biblical Christianity? You can’t. Well, what about Buddhism? Buddhism, depending on what form it is, it could be atheism. There’s no personal God. There’s nobody on a personal nature that you can relate to in Buddhism, with the exception maybe of Buddha himself, but it cannot be reconciled. It doesn’t make any sense.

Dave: The God of the Bible condemns idolatry. Allah was the chief idol in the Kaaba. He was there with several hundred other idols. Now Muhammad did destroy them. But at the very beginning, 629 AD, Muhammad brought his—well he didn’t have that many followers, but he brought I don’t know how many—twenty, thirty, forty, fifty followers—these are new Muslims. He brought them to the Kaaba. It was filled with idols. They went around it seven times, they kissed the dark stone and so forth, exactly as pagans had done for centuries. He kept all of these things. He finally—he allowed the pagans in 630 AD when he took over, he allowed the pagans to mingle on the hajj with the Muslims. They were all going to the same idol temple. They were all going through the same rituals. And finally, when Muhammad destroyed the idols, but he kept the name “Allah,” he gave the pagans four months to convert or they couldn’t come to Mecca anymore. But he retained in Islam the very same rituals that the pagan Arabs had practiced for centuries.

The same is true of Ramadan. That was not an invention of Muhammad. This is not a new revelation of Allah to Muhammad for his new religion Islam. It is carried on today exactly as the pagan Arabs carried it on for centuries.

Now Allah cannot be known. That’s one of the things about Allah that they’re very firm about.

But the God of the Bible wants us to know Him. Jeremiah:9:24But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the LORD.
See All...: “Let him that glorieth, glory in this: that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord.” Jeremiah:29:13And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.
See All... says, “You will search for me and find me when you seek for me with all your heart.” The God of the Bible wants us to know Him. The Psalms are all about knowing God. Jesus, in John:17:3And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
See All..., said, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou has sent.”

But you cannot know Allah, so there’s no way that Allah can be the God of the Bible. And yet the pope kisses the Qur’an and honors it. And you’ve quoted from Vatican II that they worship the same creator, the one true God, that the Catholics do.

Tom: Dave, Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, and actually his grandfather—they were worshipers of Allah.

Dave: Exactly.

Tom: Now, how can that be, when Muhammad claims, or at least you say in the book, Muhammad invented Allah, or it began with him?

Dave: Well, you couldn’t possibly say that, but, Tom, now you raise a problem. Allah—same name, this chief god in the Kaaba—is he someone other than that? How can you separate? How can you cut off Allah from the Kaaba? How can you say this is a new Allah? This is not the same Allah that we had before. This is a different Allah. There’s no way you could possibly say that. It certainly was not understood by the pagans as they joined with the Muslims in the hajj that they were worshiping any different God. And when Muhammad finally destroyed all the idols but he kept the name Allah, he didn’t say, “Allah is a different god from the one we had in the Kaaba.” There’s nothing in the Qur’an to distinguish between the Allah of Islam and the Allah of paganism.

Tom: Well, you point out that Abdullah means Abd-u-Allah, that is, “the servant of Allah.” So if the only Allah that was around then was the one of…the chief idol in the Kaaba, obviously that’s who Muhammad’s father served, worshiped, along with his grandfather.

Dave: Right, but what I’m saying is, can we say that that Allah is different from Allah today? And there’s no discontinuity. There’s no way you can say that. You would have to have an apologetic in Islam. Islam would have to have arguments. They would have to distinguish. You have the same name, but this is a different god. Now tell us what the difference is. Tom, it simply can’t be done.

Now the God of the Bible is love. There’s a little bit about love in the Qur’an. But we’re not told to love Allah. You couldn’t love him, he’s totally other. But the very first commandment is “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might…” and so forth.

Now how could this be the Allah of the Qur’an and of Islam? That is absolutely impossible. Now for Jewish people who still insist that Yahweh is a single entity, we would take them to Deuteronomy:6:4Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
See All..., and as you know this is the Shema—it says, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord….” So they say, “You see, He’s one. Yahweh, our Eloheim, is one Yahweh.” Now, of course, you’ve got a lot of problems. “Eloheim is the plural form, and the word “one” in the Hebrew is echad. It means not a single, but it means a unity. For example, in Genesis, where it says Genesis 2, the man and woman, Adam and Eve, became one flesh. That’s echad. It’s a unity.

So here’s what the Shema says—this is the heart of the Jewish faith: “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh our Eloheim is one (echad) Yahweh.” He’s a unity, and all through the Old Testament, you have unity and diversity. For example, the very first verse in the Bible starts out, “In the beginning Eloheim….” That’s a plural form. It means “gods.” Why doesn’t it say then “in the beginning Gods created the heaven and the earth…”? Because the verb is singular. It’s bad grammar. All through there you have a plural noun and a singular verb; a plural pronoun, a singular verb. For example, in Genesis 1, what is it 27 or 28—somewhere around there? “Let US make man in OUR image.” Well who’s this “us”? Who’s this “our”? You cannot escape it. Eloheim is a plural form. It means at least three. And all through the Old Testament—I think Eloheim occurs 2,500 times—you have Gods.

But at the burning bush, for example, Eloheim appears to Moses. Moses says, “What is your name?”

Eloheim doesn’t say, “We are that we are,” but He says, “I AM that I AM.” You have a plurality and a singularity in a unity all through the Old Testament; there’s no way you can escape it.

Now furthermore, this is essential, as we’ve said. You have to have unity and diversity, but we couldn’t be redeemed. God couldn’t become a man. He couldn’t pay the penalty for our sins, die on the cross, and so forth, unless there’s a trinity. It wasn’t the Father and the Holy Spirit who died on the cross. It was the Son. The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. And maybe we have illustrated it on this program years ago, Tom, but people say, “Well, how can that possibly be?” Well, I think I mentioned years ago a book that I remember reading as a boy in the 30s. You don’t even know that I’m that—you couldn’t believe that I’m that old, could you, Tom?

Tom: No, Dave just sitting across the table from you….

Dave: Yeah, I carry a birth certificate with me so they’ll let me have my senior discount.

Tom: Right.

Dave: But anyway, it was written by a man, Dr. Wood, I forget his first name. And it was called The Secret of the Universe. And his hypothesis was this: If God is a triune being how then we would see His fingerprints in this universe that He made. Well, what do you know? It’s made out of three things: space, matter, time. Well, what do you know? Each of those is divided up into three: Space is length, breadth, and height. And what do you know? Each one of them is the whole. If you draw enough lines lengthwise you’ve got all the space. Time—past, present, future. Now it gets more interesting. One of them is visible, the other two are invisible. I can go on and on, but we’re running out of time, Tom.

But there’s no way that you can possibly deny the necessity of the Trinity, nor that the Bible teaches it. And no way that you can reconcile the triune God of the Bible with Allah.

Tom: Dave, has anyone ever explained or do you know—when the Qur’an uses a plural pronoun for Allah, what does that mean? Especially if Allah is supposed to be singular?

Dave: Well, Tom, I have asked Muslims, and I haven’t gotten a satisfactory response.

Tom: Is this an editorial “we”?

Dave: Well, they could say that, I guess. But you see, we can’t say, “Well, this was inspired,” because it wasn’t inspired. If it was inspired, it was inspired by Satan, not by God, because of what it says in there and the errors and contradictions and so forth in the Qur’an. But the Qur’an, much of it, came—Muhammad, he was friendly with Christians and Jews. He learned what he learned about the Bible…this is why it is so messed up. This is why Noah has another son. We talked about that last week, I think…

Tom: Last week.

Dave: …and you’ve got the golden calf being built by Samaritans 700 years before Samaritans existed. And one of Noah’s sons died in the flood, and Jesus is born under a palm tree. So he got his stories mixed up.

Tom: Because he was illiterate. He couldn’t read this for himself.

Dave: That’s what they say. He got it from people who themselves were mixed up. Maybe they didn’t have Bibles. Maybe they’d heard it, and they were getting part of it from myths and so forth. So I guess they quoted, “Let us make man in our image.” And I guess he adopted that language from what they had said about the Bible. I don’t know of any other explanation, Tom.

Tom: Well, Dave, we started off with, again, this seems to be the death knell for ecumenism. Certainly you cannot reconcile, as the Catholic Church attempted, you can’t reconcile Islam with biblical Christianity. It just can’t happen.

Dave: Well, it denies that Christ died for our sins, denies that He’s God, denies that He’s the Son of God. It contradicts the Bible. It has no hope for salvation. Your good deeds will outweigh the bad, maybe, but even then you can’t be sure because Allah changes his mind. “Allah says at such a time as we abrogate a revelation we put another better one in its place.” I’m just quoting from the Qur’an.

The God of the Bible says, “I the Lord change not…. Forever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven.” So we have a changeable Allah. You can’t trust him, then, because he may change his mind. Abu Bakr, remember—we’ve quoted it before—Abu Bakr, father-in-law of Muhammad, the first of ten to whom he promised paradise without jihad, Abu Bakr said, “Even if I had one foot in paradise, I couldn’t trust Allah. He might push me out.” This is not the God of the Bible and this is not a god you want to trust.