It’s estimated, there are currently 2.2 billion Muslims worldwide but do they worship the creator or creation? What is the mysterious Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and why did it become a source of such intensified worship? Islam is intensely monotheistic, worshiping a god it calls ‘Allah.’ Many claim that Allah is akin to the God of Christianity, but is this true? Carl investigates the emergence of Islam and particularly its founder ‘Ubu’l Kassim’ (aka Muhammad). Is the recent founding of ‘Chrislam’ in unison with orthodox Christianity or a deceptive ecumenical movement seeking to undermine the Body of Christ? Join him now…
Here is a complete transcript of the podcast…(below)
Islam today claims 2.2 billion followers which represents about one-third of the earth’s population but one thing is for certain my friend, the God of Islam is NOT the God of Christianity. Now, the word Islam means, “surrender” or “submission” to the will of Allah, whom they call God. The term Muslim is related to this word and means, “one who submits.” Islam is intensely monotheistic and the term they use for God likely came from al illah, which means “the God’. One of the greatest sayings in the Islamic culture is that, “All is as God wills it“, but nothing could be further from the truth. By saying this, Moslem’s couch that Allah is on the side of both good and evil and personal responsibility is largely ignored in their religion. In fact, this belief is a form of fatalism from our Christian worldview.
Now Islam is a hodgepodge of several elements of the OT and Christianity, and the Koran discusses Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus and others as merely prophets of Allah. It claims however that Mohammad is the last and greatest of the prophets and that only Islam is the true continuation of the OT faith. Mohammad was a fascinating character who had dark elements to his nature by all accounts. His real name was Ubu’l Kassim and he was born in Mecca, in 570 AD. Just to clarify, this is almost six centuries after the death of Christ, so Islam is a relatively new religion and fresh on the scene compared to many. Mohammad’s father died shortly before his birth and he was raised by his grandfather and then later by his uncle. He became a camel driver and went on long caravan journeys stretching from Egypt to Syria. During his travels he saw much of the region, tribal conflict and made many personal and business contacts. When he was 25 yrs old, he was employed by a wealthy Jewish widow. She decided to marry him despite her being 15 years his senior. Now because Mohammad had married into wealth instead of working for a living, he began to occupy his time with meditation and reflection, in his search for life’s true meaning; indeed, he was a lost soul in need of a savior like everyone else.
Now Initially Mohammad looked to the Arabian people for answers for life’s meaning but they were polytheistic idolaters, who had a pantheon of deities whom they worshiped, through shrines including one called Allah, as well as a number of angels and demons. Mecca was a religious center at the time and Mohammad witnessed over 360 shrines and encountered a small temple known as the Kaaba. The stone, housed within the Kaaba was thought to have been given to Abraham by the Archangel Gabriel, but there is no proof of this whatsoever. This Kaaba is of course still in existence today, when you see thousands of people chanting while they walk around this large black and white box in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Know this my friend, within its walls lies a black stone, which is essentially a meteorite. By worshiping this idol of stone they’ve exchanged the worship of the creator for the creation, as Romans chapter One warns us against.
Mohammad then decided to rid the Arabian vicinity of all other shrines and he destroyed them, leaving one shrine, which was called Allah whom he proclaimed to be the one true God and this stone still resides today within the Kaaba. He then went into a cave in Mount Hira, a few miles from Mecca and when he was 40 yrs old, in 610 A.D. he began to receive frightening revelations accompanied by violent seizures. Friend in Christian terms, we call this demonic possession and even by his own admission, Mohammad wasn’t even sure if these visions were of divine or demonic origin, but it was his wife who eventually convinced him to submit to these revelations, which were supposedly coming from the Angel Gabriel. He was told by this supposed angel from God that he was to recite the revelations he received and his followers would later record them after his death in the Koran (which means recitation).
Mohammad spent 22 years receiving these visions, until his death in 632 AD and here is where the red flag should go off for us as believers. Remember what the Apostle Paul said, 8″ But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that, which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed “(Gal 1:8). Evidently, Mohammad was unaware of this warning from Paul, although the final book of the NT was written by the close of the 1st century AD, five centuries earlier, and there was certainly no more to be added by any angel of any kind. If an angel should appear with ‘another gospel’, in any time period, it should be refuted immediately. Friend, we know that so many cults have angels involved in their inception. A true angel of God would not appear after the 1st century AD with more ‘revelation’ to add to the Canon of scripture. This was not the true Angel Gabriel that appeared to Mohammad but merely an imposter. If the Angel Gabriel appears to you, you need to ask him for his driver’s license! Truth is, if an angel really did appear to you, you would be in tremendous fear because whenever they appeared to people in the Bible, the first thing out of their mouth was, “Fear not“. The fact is false angels have been involved in the formulation of the Mormon cult, the Jehovah’s Witness cult and now the Islamic cult, as discussed in prior broadcasts. Beware, beware, beware my friend, of angels that bring revelations and make sure that these revelations line up with the word of God first.
Now, Mohammad exhibited nothing but contention and strife in his early years and there were several assassination attempts made against him, as he continued to vouch for his one true God ‘Allah’. Mohammad then ransacked Medina, declaring it to be the “City of the Prophet”. He then started a harem there with 12 wives. For a time, he tried to win over the Jewish population of Medina but when he was rejected by them, he prayed in the direction of Mecca, instead of Jerusalem. He also persecuted the Jews because of their rejection of him and the animosity and hatred for the Jew by Muslims, began right there and then.
Mohammad then built his treasury by robbing and plundering the caravans of pilgrims traveling to Mecca. This led to war with the Meccan’s and his life became embroiled in warfare from that point onward. Eventually he conquered Mecca and fulfilled his desire by tearing down all other idols and rebuilt the Kaaba with its Black Stone, as I mentioned earlier. He believed this remaining stone was a representation of the one true God, Allah. By doing so, Mohammad therefore instigated this ancient pilgrimage to the Kaaba, which continues to this day. As a result, Mecca became the most holy city of Islam and by the time of his death, Mohammad was the ruler of all Arabia having gained his power through war and plunder.
So just to recap, Mohammad was a thief, he built his wealth by robbing other people on the way to Mecca to worship or in the vicinity of Medina and he would receive his revelations by demonic seizures, often times foaming at the mouth when he did so. Let me ask you this, is that the kind of person you want to be the patriarch of your religion? I think not. My criticism here is not leveled at Moslem’s today, but the exploits of its founder. We need to look at the fruit of people’s lives in order to verify the source of their bold claims. Down through the years there were a series of successors to Mohammad and these were called caliphs, which I don’t have time to get in to. Hence the term Caliphate refers to nations that follow Islam and are better known as Islamic States. Islam continues to be a strong binding force today in the region of Arabia and enjoys its surge of power from the vast oil revenues that come from the region. In the times of Lawrence of Arabia, there was not one oil well drilled in the Middle East, but today, these countries have greatly benefited from the technology that the western nations brought to them in the aftermath of WWII and of course, the west benefited enormously also.
The Koran is the authoritative scripture of Islam. It has 114 chapters or surah’s. Parts of it were written by Mohammad, and the rest, based on oral teaching, was written by others after Mohammad’s death. Over the years a number of supposed additional sayings of Mohammad and his early disciples were compiled in a document called the Hadith, which means ‘tradition’. The Hadith is basically the sayings of Mohamed or the sayings that someone else heard him say, rather than his direct words. The Hadith supplements the Koran in much the same way as the Talmud supplements the Torah or Law in Judaism. Now, there are five main pillars or doctrines of Islam and none of them mention saving Grace but provide a rigorous series of works. The sad fact is no one in Islam, truly knows whether they’re saved or not but they wait judgment day when Allah will place their works on a scale and decide their fate, hoping their good works outweigh the bad. In fact, their God Allah is so transcendent that he’s practically unknowable and he has done nothing for man. Islam is marked by sectarian differences between Sunni, Shiite, Sufi and Wahhabi orders. In the majority of cases, the Sunni faction of Islam is the most militant and the Shiite faction is arguably more peaceful, looking toward the return of the Mahdi. Islam believes God has no son. They deny the son of God or the notion God ever had a son, but what does the Bible say about this,” Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 Jn 2:22).
Friend, did you know that right now our Lord Jesus Christ is appearing to thousands of Muslims in the Middle East. There have been various sightings of Jesus in Iran, especially. He is appearing to them in dreams and visions also. There are Pastors in Iran who risk their lives daily and have underground churches in the region that are rapidly growing. Iran has a lot of young people and Jesus wants to save them. Yet over here in the West and particularly in America, a very dangerous movement has arisen, calling itself Chris-lam, which is supposedly a union of Christianity and Islam. This friend is an apostate movement ushered in by an ecumenical church, with Pastor Rick Warren as its leader, who is the founder and pastor of Saddle-back Community Church, in Orange County California. By embracing this apostate union of false Christianity and Islam, Rick blasphemed our Lord claiming Him to be co-equal with the false God Allah. In 2009, Warren also addressed the convention of the Islamic Society of North America. He stated that Muslims and Christians must ‘work together’ to combat stereotypes, promote peace and freedom, and solve global problems but before he shook hands with the leaders present, he asked for forgiveness from the Moslem community for all that Christians had done. I’m all for friendly discussion and community but not the declaration that our Gods are one and the same. I would also like to remind you today that I’m talking about the history and beliefs of the Islamic religion, not radical Islam, which I will discuss in a separate broadcast.
Friend, Jesus loves the Moslem people so much so, that He desires them to come out of their religious bondage and to the saving grace of the Gospel. We don’t need to join their religion like Reverend Warren proposes, but we do need to tell them the truth about Jesus as Lord and Savior. Moslem’s have invited me into their homes, they are very friendly people. I have no qualms with Moslem’s, my concern is they’ve not researched their own religion. “Allah” is not a benevolent all seeing and all-knowing God but their religion in fact includes idolatry and the worship of one of the idols that was originally named Allah, found in the Arabian desert. Allah is not a God who watches over or even cares for them. Friend, I ask you to do your own research, don’t just accept what I have to say about it. I wish to thank Dr. Kenneth Boa for granting me permission to use some of his source material in this broadcast.
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