Dialogue with a Muslim
Today, a couple of friends and I had the opportunity to witness to a Muslim family. Well, I guess you could call it 'witnessing', as it was pretty hard to get a word in. I’d like to share a little bit about our dialogue to see how you would respond in this situation:
When confronted with the gospel, the Muslim almost immediately began to dispute everything we said. Let me first share to you his immediate objections to our challenge of the gospel, and then I will share a little of our dialogue:
The man was adamant about his belief that:
-Jesus was a prophet sent from God, but that He of course not God Himself.
-Jesus came before Muhammad, who was God’s ultimate and final prophet.
-Jesus was not raised from the dead.
-The Koran was God’s word because there was only one true copy of it in the world that has been preserved, and that nobody has the original copy of the Bible, thus it now can’t be trusted. He kept saying that the Bible has been corrupted, that we no longer have the originals, and so what we have today is clearly not God’s preserved word.
Well, we argued for a few minutes on the Koran/Bible issue, but that didn’t go anywhere. I kept saying that Jesus claimed to be God, and so He was a lunatic if He was simply a prophet.
Next, we got into it briefly about the crucifixion. He looked at my friend and said, ‘Do you have children?’ My friend, Davide, who does not have kids, said ‘no, but he does’, and pointed to me. :) Looking back I laugh at that, but in the heat of the moment I did immediately step forward and say ‘yes I have a child’, so Davide really wasn't 'volunteering' me. :)
So, the gentlemen asked me if I’d ever let my child be tortured and killed, to which I responded ‘no, not if you ask me like that, but I am wicked and evil and I want my own desires’; maybe not the best thing to say in that moment, but its what first came to mind :)
But he continued to say that it was ludicrous that God gave up his only Son to be killed. At this point I pulled out my Bible and began to read Romans 3 to him, particularly verses 21 on, in an attempt to show that God put Him forth to show His own righteousness in passing over the former sins, but the gentlemen almost immediately cut me off and said that he didn’t believe that book and so I was wasting my time.
I then responded with ‘the Bible is my ultimate authority, and you want me to abandon that to explain to you why Christ was crucified?’, which only brought us back to the original question of the Bible versus the Koran. Thus, we were getting nowhere, and he said that it was best to go our separate ways.
But before we left, what I attempted to end with was this: our faith in Jesus is rooted in the historical fact that Jesus Christ was crucified, and that He rose from the dead. God confirmed His deity and His scripture by raising Christ from the dead.
So that was my last word, and I’m not sure exactly how it came out or if it was understood, but we then walked away.
What can I learn from this? What could/should I have said or done differently? Should we have engaged him further on the Koran issue? Should we have nailed down Jesus’ deity in clearer terms? Should we have pointed to the history of the Koran and of Muhammad? I value the advice of those who know more about these things and this religion than I do.
SDG
10 Exhortations:
Frankly you should have just zapped them with the actual Word of God. That is literally planting a seed. It grows in time if God makes it Grow.
And I mean literally proclaiming the Word of God (not your words or arguments or any other man's words, but the actual Words in the Bible).
Have a few Swordish verses handy for such occasions...
You can't convert anybody. The Word and the Spirit regenerate and convert. Give people the Word (God will take care of the Spirit).
I tend to agree with David and yet I know that in presenting the gospel to a Muslim there are questions in their mind because of their preconditioning. Traditions can be hard to overcome, even for believers. Certainly, if nothing else, may be one thing that could be asked concerning the Muslim is does he have the evidence that the Bible has been corrupted. Since he does not, isn't he merely taking that by "faith"? And since he doesn't, again we would be back to presuppositional apologetics, wouldn't he then want to hear what the Scriptures actually say, that is, if he truly believes Jesus was a prophet.
So, I agree with David, but I also realize that in the setting you guys were in that there needed to be a defense of the faith as well. Conversion was not the only point here: the Glory of God and integrity of His Word is at stake as well. Either the Bible is superior to the Koran because it is God's Word, or it should be burned or thrown on the shelf with the Left Behind series..........oh did I just type that???!!:)
Good words so far. I won't add on, but just say I have had a similar dialogue, and found a youtube contributor to be a big help after the fact. I heard him preach when I was studying in London in 2003. He is active at speakers corner almost every Sunday preaching and teaching and debating with muslims. Here is his first video if you are interested.
Amdocs is blackmailing America's "leaders." That's why they seem to be making such insane decisions: http://deanberryministries.blogspot.com
Good comments. Thanks for the youtube resource, Jon. I will definitely check that guy out. Also, James White has many good resources on the subject, as he debates Muslims fairly often.
To give a little background here, this was a man and his family. He was sitting on a park bench with his wife, infant child, father, and another women, presumably his sister. We walked up and asked them if they were Muslim (they were dressed as such), and upon them answering yes, we gave them the gospel.
There was certainly a lot of scripture coming from our end, but you can't always just stand there and quote. We spoke for a few minutes and then the guy said that he had some things to say, so we briefly listened and then attempted to answer his objections -that's how the dialogue got started. Then, once we got going, his family was clearly uncomfortable with debating in a public place, so we were trying to be as gracious as possible.
It's hard sometimes: you want to give them scripture, but you also don't want to be mindlessly reciting passages either. There certainly is a balance between zapping them with scripture, and being human in discussing different objections to the faith.
Nathan,
that last comment is something that is clearly missing in today's Christian circles. No longer can we welcome unbelievers into our home and actually engage them where we or they live. We no longer take seriously acts of love towards our neighbor in a desire to send forth the message of the gospel.
One thing I have heard among Muslims, of which my friend Trevor is a missionary in Indonesia among Muslims is that loving them alongside a presentation of the gospel goes a long long way. By loving them, I don't just mean giving the truth, or as you put it, mindelessly reciting verses, but helping them and treating them as friends rather than enemies or strangers. If you like I could provide you with his email address and you might be able to shoot him some questions in regards to your questions.
Nate,
I think what you said at the end, about focusing on the Gospel event, attested by Scripture, was good. I also think it may have been helpful to focus on the moral law. From what I've heard Muslims are supposed to have a higher regard for the law given through Moses than the rest of Christian Scripture. If you could have gotten him to discuss the Ten Commandments (which I assume he accepts) and shown him his guilt under the Law, then you could have demonstrated how the pllars of Islam are entirely insufficient to atone for his sins, thus making Christ's voluntary substitution on the Cross more reasonable to him.
Aside from these thoughts, however, I also want to thank you for sharing this post. I think it's beneficial to everyone involved when Christians think through these witnessing encounters together.
Your brother in Christ,
-Andrew
I agree with the last post. Take them to the Law of Moses. They repsect Moses and their conscience will smite them. Let them feel the heavy burden of their sin debt before God: then give them the Gospel. Law to the Proud, Grace to the humble.
And like Tim said, be loving and compassionate too!
God bless.
My brother once witnessed years ago to a Muslim at a gas station. He knew he wouldn't get very far debating "my Bible is better than your Bible"...so he just asked the man about sin. The Muslim asked him, "What is sin?"...to which Noy replied, "Sin is when....well, have you ever just tried to do things RIGHT and you just can't?"
Sometimes I believe we don't get simple enough in witnessing. It's the heart condition...the heart struggle that is common to man. And Jesus is the only One who has offered the "fix" for our hearts.
Good work, son! I admire your boldness...as well as your heart for the unsaved! Bless you~
The Islam, Jewish, and Christian religions all claim to follow the same God. Christ, before Pilot when death was starring him in the face, told Pilot that his mission here was to bear witness to the truth - nothing about getting killed and rising again. Biblical inerrancy is another serious issue you cannot account for because it simply does not exist. There are no original manuscripts and those we possess are full of discrepancies - look in most any bible at the end of Mark and you'll see the one most people are likely to be familiar with.
Perhaps the best approach is the one Jesus took. Focus on glorifying God and properly understanding God... and why,when you so love the world, you would let us kill the boy for the sake of telling the rest of us that your love for us all is unconditional - this country is full of conditional love, that's why the divorce rate is so high, but the church winks at that "sin" while adhering strictly to the law at others - didn't I read something somewhere about stone casting?.
In the end, it's all about faith because nobody can prove anything to anybody. And the truth is, none of us have exactly the same faith, we all have varieties of religious experience. So perhaps one should take some time to try to reflect on who God is and what a God of the entire universe might find fundamental to a planet of over 6 billion people, most of whom find Christianity as foreign to themselves as you might Buddhism.
Why do most people of the Christian faith so willingly accept Jews, but reject Muslims when they all purport to worship the same God? And do you really believe that a God who "so loved the world" would treat that world as exclusively as you want to maintain? Especially choosing the rich and privileged of American over the poor and oppressed of so much of the planet?
Sounds like a very bastardized version of the New Testament to me.
And if God is really who you want him/her to be, don't you think s/he is capable of surviving a serious inquisition as to his/her nature? Or are we all supposed to blindly follow a bunch of Catholic bishops from about 1600 years ago blindly over the cliff?
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