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