A Brief Summary of Islam, Part 3

A Brief Summary of Islam, Part 3
Monday, March 11, 2024 by Dr. James W. Walraven

Categories: Apologetics / Contemporary issues / The church / Thought for Today / Truth telling

As mentioned at the end of the previous post, the Quran frequently describes God as “Oft forgiving, Most Merciful.” When we sin and then repent, we can at least have the hope that God will be merciful to us and forgive us, since God is “Oft forgiving, Most Merciful.” The Quran holds out that hope for us. But it is God’s choice and decision. While He may forgive us, He also might not. Once you’ve rejected a warner’s warning, the outlook, as many people-groups found out, can be quite grim.

To me, that is a huge problem. “Oft forgiving” doesn’t equate with “will forgive.” To me there is an underlying doubt or uncertainty. There does seem to be some degree of mercy for those who committed sin in ignorance and then repent once the light of Islam has dawned upon them, but in most cases it appears to be more of a hope for forgiveness, as opposed to a certainty of forgiveness. One can never truly know if one has been forgiven or not.

Within Islam, it helps if one is focused on eternity rather than the pleasures of this life. To focus on this life is a trap, a trap that almost certainly will result in eternal destruction (to some extent, one can find partial Biblical parallels). Rather, it is best to spend one’s financial resources, personal goods, and one’s own life—through martyrdom if necessary—in service furthering Islam, looking for any reward in the hereafter.

One can argue, I think, that as Christians, we are also to focus more on the hereafter, as that makes us more useful in the present age, but not precisely in the same way as in Islam. The key difference is that in Islam salvation is works-based. If one is to have any hope for eternity at all, one must do these things. It is also worth noting that the Quran specifically criticizes the Jews for their supposed this-life focus.

As already mentioned, according to the Quran, Jesus is not God. Islamic scholars offer a number of proofs outside Jesus’s own words as given in the Quran, in support of that claim. They look especially to Western “Christian” source critics and their allies for additional proof that what the New Testament repeatedly says about Jesus being God are falsifications. I think, for example, of groups like the Jesus Seminar, and their insistence that not a single word attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John was ever spoken by Jesus, and that Jesus was just an illiterate peasant who uttered pithy sayings while never claiming to be God.

We’ve seen that according to the Quran, both the Jewish and Christian “books” as we now have them are corruptions of their previous genuine writings.

That being the case, how did those “Books” become corrupt? What happened to turn both Judaism and Christianity into apostate religions? But before we can address those questions, we need to ask: How does Islam know that the “Books” of Jews and Christians, are corrupt? We will turn to that question in the next post.

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