Transcription
The truth does not need an endless series of lies to prop it up. If Islam were true, you wouldn't need all of those lies, and so that's kind of a sign that it's a false system. When I'm criticizing Muhammad, it's not because I hate you; it's because you've been misled about him. Muhammad is actually an obstacle to you having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
Should Christians learn about Islam? Let's say you're like me and you're a Bible guy. Why should we care about what's in the Quran? Well, David Wood has dedicated much of his adult life to answering those questions. David, my brother, welcome to "Can I Trust the Bible."
Hey, how you doing?
I'm doing good, buddy. So let's just get right after it. Why, and I know you're really passionate about this subject, should Christians even care about Islam?
There are multiple reasons. One, as you pointed out, you're dealing with nearly two billion Muslims in the world. You're talking about basically a quarter of the world's population are Muslim. This is one of the reasons that I stayed involved in this. I got involved in this just because my best friend in college was a Muslim. After he became a Christian a few years later, I actually thought to myself: "Oh cool, I'm done with Islam."
I didn't get away from it because I realized back then I was more interested in the objections of atheists, but so were almost all apologists. Almost all Christian apologists were going after atheism, and I was just sitting there thinking, "Gosh, there are so many Muslims in the world; why aren't we dedicating more of our apologetics to dealing with this?"
So I realized, hey, even though I'm more interested in this, there's a bigger need over here. So that's one. Another is, I get this a lot from—not as much as I used to—but you go back ten years ago when I was trying to tell people that they need to learn about Islam for their conversations with Muslims and so on. People were saying, "No, I don't need to learn about their stuff; what I have is superior to theirs."
But you have a lot of Muslim preachers and what are called dawa (these are people, like their version of evangelists, but people who invite others to Islam). They'll pick up on whatever is most important or valuable to people, and they'll make up a story about how Islam is the source of that thing.
In other words, if they—when the matter of fact, you can see this in real-time—if you go back to the 1960s when Islam was spreading in the African-American community with the help of people like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and so on, the message back then was, "Hey, how can you guys believe in Christianity? That's a religion that enslaves people. Islam liberates people and treats all people equally. Muhammad freed all the slaves."
People believed that message. It was completely false. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, bought, owned, sold, and traded black African slaves. The Muslim Community was the one that institutionalized the African slave trade centuries before the United States even existed.
Think about this: When the preacher comes and says, "Hey, here's what's important to you; let me tell you that's why you need Islam," if no one's in a position to raise his hand and say, "Hey, wait a minute, what you're saying about Islam is not true, what you're saying about Muhammad is not true," this happens over and over again. If it's an area where they love science, then the Quran is a fountain of scientific learning and contains scientific insights that couldn't possibly have been known by Muhammad; they must come from God.
If you believe in women's rights, Muhammad was probably the greatest feminist who ever lived. You have these dawa guys, and they'll preach Islam, and they are all too happy to say whatever they think will help that person convert to Islam. If no one knows any better, no one is in a position to correct any of this stuff.
So there you have one of the biggest advantages the Muslim dawa has: people's ignorance, because it allows him to say whatever he wants and to convince people that Islam is true. That doesn't change until people learn enough about Islam to raise their hand and say, "What you just said about Islam and women is not true."
Those are a couple of reasons. I could include more; one more important one is that Muslims make really cool Christians, as evidenced by Nabil Qureshi. As a matter of fact, that was where I saw it. I was watching and thinking, "Wow, he's taking a much firmer stand than a lot of people who convert." After a while, I figured out the reasons in discussions with Nabil.
The reason lots of Muslims make really, really awesome powerful Christians is it's connected to some of the features that keep people from ever leaving Islam. A Muslim is basically raised all his life to believe that the worst possible sin is the sin of shirk, associating a partner with Allah. So if you say Jesus is Lord, which is required by the gospel, according to Islam that's the unpardonable sin; that's a one-way ticket to hell.
They’re taught their entire lives that saying Jesus is Lord is the worst thing you can possibly do. They typically know that the penalty for leaving Islam officially is death. Most Muslims would say you don't apply it in a non-Muslim country, but they understand that if someone ever wants to carry out that penalty, they could run the risk of getting their heads chopped off.
At the very least, even if no one's going to chop their heads off, Muslims typically have to give up their family— either their family tries to win them back, and if it doesn't work, it’s just a strained relationship, or they say, "Leave; don't ever come back here until you’re a Muslim again." They understand they're giving up their entire social framework if they convert to Christianity.
The point is there are these massive psychological barriers in the way of Muslims accepting the gospel. This will get you sent to hell; this will get your head chopped off; and at the very least, you have to give up your family. But there's a positive side to that. The positive side is that when a Muslim says, "You know what? I may have to give up my family, and I may have to give up my life, and I've been told all my life that this is the worst thing I could possibly do and that this will get me sent to hell. But you know what? I want to know Jesus anyway."
Wow; that's someone who will lay down his life for Jesus. He's already been willing to give up everything else, and so that's why you're not going to be able to shake that person later on.
Wow, that is so insightful, my brother. Now, I want to get into more details of the Quran and what the Islamic faith actually teaches, but I want to ask you this question: even before we got started, you're like, "Hey, don't share where I live," because at the end of the day, you are touching on a very, very landmine subject, which is the idea of confronting what Islam teaches.
I've watched a ton of your videos over the years, and what you don’t find often—you do find people calling you all sorts of names and threats, all that stuff—but you don't necessarily find a lot of people dissecting what you said about Islam in the sense that you're just quoting, "This is what it says in the hadiths; this is what Muhammad's life looked like in the hadiths." You're quoting Islamic tradition and then expanding on it.
So my question is: why are you doing this? In the sense that you can't be just a normal dude who goes about their day and doesn’t think about the fact that you are, for lack of better words, poking the hornet's nest. You're doing it; a lot of people, most people, almost all people, even Bible believers, would be kind of terrified simply to restate what the hadith and the Quran say, but you do it openly, brazenly on YouTube. Why do you, David Wood, do what you do?
I believe in a divine purpose behind where we are in history right now. If you go back like 20 years, we were getting the statistics on just population growth rates in the Muslim world, and Muslims had the fastest growth rate—not from conversions, but from just high birth rates in Muslim countries. They were predicting that, you know, by the year 2050, this European nation is going to be Muslim majority; by 2060, this European nation is going to be Muslim majority, and so on. It was presented as this is all just straightforward math.
It was looking like, oh, this is really inevitable. At the same time, this is about to happen; at the same time, we're being told Islam is inevitably going to take over large sections of Europe. All of a sudden, at that exact same time—for the first time in history—we get open access to Muslim sources. When I talk about back in the 1960s, if a Muslim preacher was making things up about Muhammad liberating all the slaves and so on, how would a person in the 1960s be able to even respond to that? You’d have to have the hadith; they hadn't even been translated yet.
You didn't have access to them. No one was in a position to refute something that's being made up. All of a sudden, in the 1980s and 1990s, we start getting their sources translated, and now we all have open access to it. You can get open access to all their main sources online. We are the first generation that's in a position to respond to things that are being made up to make Islam sound really good.
We're also the first generation that gets open access to Muslims around the world. I mean, for 14 centuries, Muslim leaders have been able to keep their people pretty insulated. A Muslim would spend his entire life without ever hearing Islam criticized. He'd spend his entire life without hearing a serious presentation of the gospel. If you wanted to reach Muslims with the gospel, you had to go to a Muslim country, and you had a pretty good chance of getting your head chopped off if you were at all successful.
Whereas now, I mean, we're in a time where, if I wanted to, I could grab my phone and start talking to a Muslim in Saudi Arabia on Facebook or something right now. That's something that has changed massively—now Muslim leaders cannot keep their people completely insulated and isolated. We have open access to Muslims in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and so on.
I look at this and say we're the first generation that has open access to their sources, open access to Muslims around the world. We've got Muslims who have come here, and yet we're told, "Oh, in five or six decades Islam takes over." I'm thinking, wait, we just got everything we need to reach Muslims with the gospel around the world right now, right when we're told it's inevitable.
I look at this and say, "My goodness, the Lord has delivered that ideology into our hands." So I look at this as really good times. As far as criticizing Islam, that was something that I saw with Nabil because, I mean, we were having discussions for about four years, and for the first two and a half of those, we focused almost entirely on Christian topics: the death of Jesus, the resurrection, Jesus as the Son of God, the Trinity, the reliability of the New Testament. We focused on studying those issues.
Eventually, he was giving me arguments for Islam that forced me to actually go look up what's in the Muslim sources. He was talking about scientific miracles, Muhammad's claims in the hadiths, and so on. So I would go out and buy these collections; I would buy these collections so I could look up the passage, and I would look up the passage and go, "Whoa, that's not what it says!"
But I would keep reading, and I would go, "Hey, look at this—this is completely wrong, and this is some really messed-up stuff." I would go back to him and say, "Hey, you pointed this out." Keep in mind, he wasn't being deceptive; he had read this in a Muslim apologetics book or heard it from a Muslim speaker or something like that.
But I would look it up, and then I was able to go back to him and say, "Hey, you know you said that Muhammad said this and that it’s miraculous. Let's go ahead and read this a little more carefully."
Let's read a couple passages later. "Look at this: this is really, really bad stuff here." He didn't tell me until after he became a Christian that he thought, when we were discussing Christian topics—the death of Jesus, the resurrection, and so on—Christians actually have really good reasons for believing what they believe.
He said, "Christians have a case for everything they believe; they have good reasons for all of these things." But he thought to himself, even if they showed me with 99% certainty that all these things are true, I'm still 100% sure that Islam is true because of the scientific miracles and the miraculous preservation of the Quran, and because he would go down the list.
He thought he had all these airtight arguments and that this gave him 100% confidence in Islam. He said it wasn't until we challenged Islam and we started going through Islamic beliefs about Muhammad and the Quran that he saw problems where he didn't know there were any.
He saw that the arguments weren't as good as he thought, and he realized that doubting Islam—and at least not having that 100% confidence—was what allowed him to take the gospel more seriously. This has been my experience: it's not always, but most of the time, the vast majority of the time, I would say, in my experience, 90 to 95% of the time when a Muslim leaves Islam and becomes a Christian, it’s only after someone showed him some serious problems with Islam.
I've had Christians say, "No, just preach the gospel; don't point out the problems with Islam." Well, you're preaching the gospel, and he thinks he's 100% confident in Islam because he’s been built upon this foundation of just making things up. Why would you not want to expose those so he can actually take what you're saying seriously?
That's why it was such an appeal for me. I realized how important it was back then to be criticizing this stuff, and so I understood: hey, it’s not just him; the rest of the Muslim world, they all need to hear this too.
That is so insightful. Now, for those who don't know, Nabil Qureshi was brought to the Lord basically by David, and he wrote a really famous book called "Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus." I think it's brilliant; I've read it. It's a very easy, understandable read, so if you want to—I could not recommend that book enough.
So let's get after it, brother. Let's talk about those things that you were able to see in Islam and, again, if you're watching this, you come from an Islamic background; you come from a Middle Eastern country, whatever it might be. We don't—this isn't a gotcha; this is just I think us trying to lovingly show you what your own books say, and we're doing this because we believe that Yeshua, Jesus of Nazareth is the salvation that you know in the depths of your heart that you need.
He's in the scripture; Jesus is called Emmanuel, God with us, and we truly want that for you. So, my friend David, can you start to unpack some of the things in Islam that you started to point out with Nabil that led him to question if this was the one true way?
Yeah, there are kind of two different categories of things. One is showing him that the arguments for Islam that he had been given were either much weaker than he realized or they’re just based on complete fiction. So that's one category. The other were more offensive problems with Islam—in other words, showing, "Hey, here's a reason this guy can't be a prophet; here's another reason this guy can't be a prophet," and so on.
As far as the arguments for Islam, fortunately, after a couple of decades of people working at this, we're starting to see some changing tides here. If you go back even 10 years, your average Muslim was convinced that you could pick up any two Qurans in the entire history of Islam. You could pick up a modern Quran, you could go to a 10th-century manuscript; it doesn't matter what you go to, and they will match up perfectly—dot for dot, letter for letter. That's what your average Muslim believes.
So you think, you know, how do you make an argument about that? I mean you could perfectly preserve some random book—a dictionary, something like that—that wouldn't mean that it's from God, even if it lasted for many centuries. But they actually believe that, like, "Hey, wait a minute; we know when people copy books by hand, they make mistakes and so on. If no one ever makes a mistake when copying the Quran, doesn't it seem like Allah is miraculously preserving this book by not allowing anyone to make a mistake?"
Anyway, this is what your average Muslim believed, and they think, "Wow, we have proof that our book is divinely preserved by the Almighty." The problem is, when you do any bit of research on this, it would literally take you five minutes of research to find out how silly and ridiculous this is. You go to the history according to their own sources—the history of the Quran. After Muhammad died, entire chapters of the Quran came up missing because Muslims weren't reciting them enough. Large passages were lost forever because the only people who had them memorized died in battle.
Individual verses were eaten by a sheep because Aisha had the only copy, and a sheep came in and ate them, and those verses are no longer in the Quran. We have records of this stuff. In fact, the Quran wasn't actually compiled into a book until they realized they were losing so much of it that they needed to avoid losing more. The original goal was to preserve it primarily through memory.
If someone jotted down a copy, it was just an aid to memory. This is just something you take back to your tent, and you can recite from what you wrote down. They had no concept of this actually being put together into a physical book. The reason they put it together into a physical book was just because so much of it was lost. Then down through the centuries, you have tons of textual variants in Quran manuscripts, and you have different Qurans in different parts of the world today.
So that's just an example of how you can have the entire Muslim Community believing that some evidence is airtight, and it's just because no one ever bothers to go look it up. Well, if they’re not going to look it up, then we kind of have to tell them. That’s the kind of stuff we would go through. We’d go through the science.
Nabil really believed in the scientific miracles of Muhammad and the Quran, and so we had to go through a bunch of those. As a matter of fact, we did at Mike Lonon's house. Nabil gave a full presentation on scientific miracles of Muhammad, and then we all responded to it.
We were going through things like that, and then on the issue of Muhammad—whether he's a prophet—there are all sorts of interesting issues there. I'll just say for Nabil, the one that really, really bothered him was—it's another situation where he didn't admit this at the time he told me after he became a Christian—this was really bothering him.
I was pointing out things like Muhammad's one of Muhammad's wives was a six-year-old girl; he consummated the marriage when she was nine. I pointed that out to him. Nabil didn’t seem to have a problem with that. It was when we were talking about some of these battles where they would go in and take the captives, and they were told by Muhammad and by Allah that they can take these married women—their husbands are still there. They captur them both, and they can take them back. They weren't required to marry these women; they just become their sex slaves, and so on.
Nabil acted like this didn't bother him at all. He told me later it was really bothering him. He was thinking, like, what if this were my mother and sister, and Muslims came to town and just were able to take them back and do whatever they want to them and keep them as their sex slaves their entire lives? What? That's the greatest moral example for us? Muhammad was doing this.
He had a problem with that. That actually started bothering him because lots of Muslims are never told these things. Islam has been sanitized for them by their leaders, and so they believe this rosy picture of Muhammad, who's just this perfect guy who never did anything wrong, and he's so great. If you just look at his life, you'll just see this is the most wonderful guy who ever lived.
You start looking into it, and what do you tell about this? This is a guy who, again, had sex with a 9-year-old girl. He took the wife of his own adopted son after causing the divorce by lusting after her when he saw her practically naked. He started getting—he was attracted to her; the son divorced her just so that Muhammad could have her.
There’s such wild stuff. The opening verses of Surah 66 of the Quran—it's this passage about telling Muhammad that he can break his oath to his wives. You're like, "What's this about with a historical background?" He got caught having sex with his slave girl in one of his wives' beds.
He was— they knew he was allowed to have sex with his slave girl, but they didn’t like it in their beds. Right? So Hafsa goes out to the market to run some errands, and Muhammad goes into her bed with his slave girl. She comes back and catches them. She gets mad and tells the others, "You're doing this in our own beds? Do you have any idea how disrespectful that is?"
In response, Muhammad swears an oath. He says, "I will never have sex with that slave girl again." Then you get the opening verses of Surah 66, which has Allah responding to Muhammad, saying, "I didn't tell you to take that oath." He tells him, "It's okay to break his oath."
Muhammad went back to, after swearing an oath to Allah to his wives, "I will never be with that woman again." He then goes back and says, "Allah told him to do it."
There are all these issues where you look at it and go, "Something's not right; something's not right about this guy here." You're talking to Muslims; if you're talking to Muslims, most of this back then, no Muslim you would talk to had any clue about any of this. Now, you hear now lots of Muslims are familiar with, like, Muhammad and Aisha because lots of critics kept bringing it up over the past couple of decades, so now they're becoming aware of that.
But your average Muslim, there's still so much about his prophet and his book that he doesn't know, that if you learn some of that and you share it with him, you're going to be the first person he's hearing this from.
Wow, you're looking for this kind of light switch moment. I've seen it over and over and over again: when the light switch flips, it's like this moment when they realize, "Wait a minute! I've been a Muslim all my life! In the mosque all my life, I’ve never heard any of this! Why am I hearing all this stuff from a Christian? Why am I not hearing it from them? Why am I hearing the truth about Muhammad from Christians, and I'm not hearing it from my leaders?"
There's this light switch moment where the light goes on, and they think, "Maybe I can't trust what they've been telling me all my life; maybe I need to investigate this for myself." As soon as they say, "I need to investigate this for myself," that’s someone who's on his way out of his life.
Wow, wow, wow! That is—wow, wow! First off, wow. I think the fact that you know so much—and again; what you're doing is you're just quoting. I think that's a huge thing; you're not pulling out arguments from some professor. You're simply quoting the Quran and the hadith, and like you're saying, most people didn't know this—that it was in there.
I think that's what's startling for a lot of us. Here’s a question I have for you: In Scripture, in the New Testament, God calls us, you know, the children of God. Jesus says, "I no longer call you servants; I call you friends." What is the ultimate relationship a human being can have with Allah?
The only relationship you—I mean, the Quran says that no one comes to Allah as anything other than a slave. The greatest prophet, the lowliest anything; it doesn't matter. We all come before Allah as slaves, and you're either a good slave or you're a bad slave.
That's actually connected to so much more; that's connected to, like, ethics in Islam versus ethics in Christianity. You know this: if you have a child, you sort of automatically love the child. The baby does not have to earn your love. You don’t sit there and say, "Hey, my son was just born. Let me wait till he grows up, and then I'll figure out if I love him or not based on how good he's being."
Right? No, you automatically love your son. In Christianity, if we are loved by God and we’re children of God, and God is our heavenly Father, that’s describing a different kind of relationship, where we’re even told that God first loved us.
We didn't start this; God first loved us. In Islam, it's flipped because we are nothing but slaves to Allah. Keep in mind if you were to buy a slave, you wouldn't automatically love that slave. You might come to love a slave; you might say, "Oh wow! This slave's been with me 20 years. He’s been so good; I really love this slave."
You could. But that slave would have to earn your love, and so you have this completely different mindset in Islam where you have to earn Allah's love and respect to show that you're a good slave. If you show that you're a good slave, then Allah will love you, and that's straight out of the Quran. Over and over again, it talks about all these different people that Allah doesn’t love.
He doesn’t love the proud; he doesn’t love the boastful; he doesn’t love the mischief-makers; he doesn’t love the unbelievers. Think about that. We're told to love our enemies. Why? So that we can be like our Father.
So wait a minute! Our Father in Heaven loves these people that we don't like. Okay, we have to love them too. In Islam, Allah does not love the unbelievers. He has no love for the unbelievers, and so why should you, as a Muslim, love unbelievers when Allah Himself doesn't love them?
You have these things, and they're listed as doctrines: like we all come to Allah as nothing but a slave. But once you start connecting the dots, you find out how many other things this is all connected to.
What do you see as the viewpoint the Quran has of Jesus and of Christians?
I think it’s Surah 5:82, correct me if I'm wrong, that basically says that Christians are like super close homies with Muslims or something like that. That’s the modern version that I just made up. But it sounds like in the Quran that, you know, Jesus—first off, Jesus is in the Quran. He's the Messiah; he was born of a Virgin Mary; he did miracles. What would you say is the ultimate opinion of Christianity from an Islamic standpoint?
You have a couple of things there. So you pointed out that there are times when Christians are spoken of favorably, and this is all part of this trajectory of Islam. At first, when Muhammad starts preaching in Mecca, the basic message is, "Hey, it's going to be Muslims, Christians, and Jews all united against the polytheists."
So it's us, the monotheists, versus the polytheists. Back then, he was saying positive things about Jews and Christians. Later on, he moved to Medina, where there were three Jewish tribes. He'd been saying the entire time he was in Mecca that he’d been saying, "Hey, you guys are all pagans; you don't know any better. But the Jews, they'll know me because I'm in their scriptures. The Jews will recognize me."
For over a decade in Mecca, he's telling his followers that the Jews are this source of authority on matters of who is and who isn't a prophet. Once he gets to the Jews, the Jewish community eventually went to Medina, and those three Jewish tribes made fun of him quite a bit. According to them, he's basically like the most obvious false prophet in history, and so this changed Muhammad's view of Jews.
All of a sudden, it became Muslims and Christians against Jews and polytheists. In fact, the verse you're bringing up, Surah 5:82, also says that Jews are the most vehement in hostility towards the believers.
Now think about this: he was just saying nice stuff, and now it switched. Why? They rejected him. So you had this period where it became Jews and pagans versus Christians and Muslims and so on. Later on, of course, the Christians rejected him as well when he encountered some Christians.
By the time you get to Surah 9, the last major chapter revealed, it's "Fight those who do not believe in Allah," and it specifically refers to Jews and Christians as unbelievers.
So yeah, it's just interesting to me how Allah's opinion of Jews and Christians always changes. It always has to do with however Muhammad is feeling about them at some given point.
So that's the issue with Christians. As far as Jesus, yeah, there are lots of things about Jesus in the Quran that Christians would agree with. This is ultimately because Muhammad is copying lots of things from other religions. I mean, according to the Quran, Alexander the Great was a devout Muslim, and that's just so insane to anyone who knows about Alexander the Great.
You can't possibly be more pagan than Alexander the Great, and yet in the Quran, he's a devout Muslim. It looks like Muhammad just took everyone who was important who came before him and said, "Oh, yeah, these were devout Muslims."
The group he’s talking to, they don’t really know any better, but what's interesting from a Christian perspective is, one, this is a key area where, you know the Muslim’s going to bring this up. If you go to a dawa booth, the dawa will very frequently have "Jesus was a Muslim" written across it because they're trying to draw Christians in for a discussion.
So you know they're going to be bringing up Jesus and saying, "Hey, we don’t hate Jesus; we believe in Jesus too; we love Jesus." So it's going to come up as a topic, and so if you know how to navigate that discussion, it can be very interesting.
But one of the important points about Jesus in the Quran is it just makes no sense. It just makes no sense. Muhammad was adopting things, adopting ideas about Jesus, and they don’t make any sense from an Islamic perspective.
So according to the Quran, Jesus is the word of Allah—no one else is called the word of Allah, just Jesus. He's called the word of Allah. We know where that comes from, right? He heard Christians saying, "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God."
Right? He doesn't know what it means, but he hears Christians saying that, describing Jesus as the Word. Anyway, Jesus is the word of Allah; he’s a spirit from Allah, according to the Quran. He’s born of a virgin—no one else is born of a virgin. He lives the most miraculous life in history. Muhammad is told that he has no miracles except for the Quran.
He’s the Messiah; he’s all these things. He even—in the Quran—creates as Allah creates. Allah creates a man, Adam, out of clay and breathes into him, and then Adam becomes man. But Jesus does the same thing in the Quran; he creates clay birds and breathes into them and gives them life.
It’s like, why is Jesus creating in the same way Allah creates? The Quran will say, "Oh, he does it by Allah's permission." It's like, wait, why is Allah having this guy do these things that are making people around him think that he's God?
You look at this and say you can ask your Muslim friend, "Hey, explain to me why Jesus is so unique, even in Islam—not just in Christianity—even in Islam. Why is he the one who's the word of Allah? Why is he the one who has the most miraculous life? Why is he the one who's born of a virgin? Why is he the only one who is sinless? Why? Why is he so unique?"
There's no Muslim answer; it's just "Allah knows best." What you actually want to do is go through that, get the Muslim to realize there’s no real reason to make Jesus so radically special in Islam. There's a reason for him to be radically special in Christianity.
Why is he so radically special in Islam? And you move this into a discussion of, "Well, can you blame us? Can you blame us for thinking that Jesus is this special figure when even according to your religion, he’s that special?"
You eventually want to get into comparing Jesus and Muhammad—pointing out the areas that the Quran denies. Because here's the ultimate takeaway: Jesus comes and he's preaching, and then you get to the book of Acts, and you see he's just spent three years with his disciples teaching them all kinds of things.
But when they go out and preach in the book of Acts, you see over and over again what they regard as the gospel. It's a message about Jesus' death for sins, his resurrection, and his divine nature. He died on the cross for sins; he rose from the dead; he’s Lord. They emphasize that wherever they want.
So we're also told in the Bible that false prophets and false teachers are going to come. What are they going to do? They're going to lead people away from the truth of that message. Then all of a sudden, you get to Muhammad centuries later, and Muhammad comes along.
Think about this: Muhammad comes along and says, "Hey, you Christians, you believe in God? So do I. You believe in the prophets? So do I. About Jesus, you believe that he's the word of God? So do I. You believe that he's born of a virgin? So do I. You believe that he performed all these miracles? So do I. You believe that he's sinless? So do I. You believe that he's the Messiah? So do I. We agree on all these things; we agree on pretty much everything, except these three little things: one, he didn’t die on the cross for sins; two, he didn’t rise from the dead; and three, he’s not Lord.
Now if we could just get past that—all out assault on those core doctrines of the gospel. We’ve been waiting for you!"
So anyway, that's the importance of understanding Jesus in the Quran. You can actually respond to Muslim objections about that, but you can actually show them some of the problems with their own system. David, that is so unbelievably helpful. You are, man, just incredible. The way you're able to just dissect such heady things and make it so easy to process.
We're going to have to have you back because I love the way you're able to just inform us, but I do have one last question before we let you go, which is this: let's say we have someone like Nabil—who used to be someone watching this—and they're a Muslim, or they live in the Middle East, or they're studying Islam, whatever it might be. Honestly, they're a little scared to be watching this. One, because, as we've talked about on many episodes of "Can the Bible in Islam," it is so interwoven with their identity, with respecting their family, with not bringing dishonor.
To even think about leaving Islam would be catastrophic, and is catastrophic in a lot of ways. But they're here. They're watching this channel; they're watching this show; they're watching you, and something's tugging at them. I would call that the Holy Spirit is making them think. And you have this platform; you have this microphone for a couple more minutes.
David, what would you say to someone watching this exact episode who has clicked on and they see you?
The first thing would be: lots of Muslims think that if you criticize their beliefs or something you’re attacking them because you hate them. I mean there may be people who just hate Muslims and so on. When we criticize your beliefs and we share the gospel with you, it's not out of hatred. If I didn't love you, I would not just let you go on serving the most obvious false prophet in history for the rest of your life. I mean, what worse thing can I possibly do?
So when we are criticizing Muhammad and the Quran, it's not because I look at you and I go, "Oh, I hate this person." It's because I look at you and I go, "Oh, this person has been led astray his entire life." I mean, he's been told by his sheikhs and imams that all these things about Muhammad are true and that he needs to dedicate his entire life to this one 7th-century Arabian caravan robber.
It's like, "No, no, you're made for something better than that. You’re made in the image of God." When I'm criticizing Muhammad, it's not because I hate you; it's because you've been misled about him, and Muhammad is actually an obstacle to you having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
So even if you think we’re wrong, at least understand our motives. We have your best interest in mind. With that said, as far as the arguments that are used for Islam, the same arguments that you Muslims are told by your leaders about the scientific miracles and the perfect preservation—all these things about Muhammad, his character being so great—my goodness, how do you listen to that?
It never crosses your mind to do any bit of research about it. I mean, any argument that I'm listening to from anyone, my first instinct is to say, "Okay, let me go look this up. Let me go look this up and see if I can flesh this out and see if the evidence actually supports this."
Somehow, in Islam, it’s, "Here's all the evidence, but don’t ever question it." No! If you just research these things—like, seriously—you find out the people who are telling you all these reasons Islam is true have no problem deceiving you.
I’ve tried to figure this out about the dawa guys. The best I can understand them is they believe that it's actually good. In other words, if I lie to you for your entire life, but it keeps you believing in Islam and you go to heaven, have I harmed you by lying to you all your life? That’s their mentality.
Whereas our mentality is, "The truth does not need an endless series of lies to prop it up. If Islam were true, you wouldn't need all of those lies."
So that's kind of a sign that it's a false system. I would encourage every Muslim watching, when your leaders are telling you something, you can ask them, "Hey, I want to see this evidence for myself." Look it up! Try to look at it from the perspective of someone who’s actually seriously investigating this.
Then start asking yourself: why is Jesus always so different, even in Islam? Start trying to figure out and understand why the Quran affirms the inspiration, preservation, and authority of the Bible—which you believe is corrupted. Your God and your Prophet affirm it, and you believe it’s corrupted. Why? Because your leaders told you that’s what the Quran says? Look that up!
Look up what the Quran actually says about the Bible, then ask yourself: why are they making this up? Why is the Quran pointing me to the scriptures of the Jews and Christians? Why is the Quran pointing me to Jesus? Why does the Quran have all these problems?
Then just look into that and see where it goes, and if you're sincere, I know where you're going.
David Wood, my brother, thank you so, so very much. We're going to have to have you back on; that was incredible! Thanks again, my friend.