New Zealand Christians have failed local Muslims by failing to engage with what has become their Standard Islamic Narrative (S.I.N.). The latest S.I.N. from the Islamic world states is that Islam is a religion of peace and that Sharia is compatible with western laws.
Muslims use their Quran, sayings and biography of their prophet as their source of history from which they gather what they claim are the eternal truths for the S.I.N. The sayings and biography of the prophet back up the Quran, which they claim was gathered together by one of their leaders in the late 7th century and represent the eternal words of their deity, which they claim is the same as the Christian and Jewish deity.
And here is where Christians have failed local Muslims because they have failed to engage with them on ANY of their claims of truth or history.
Here is just one example of a common conversation:
Christians will claim “the Gospels say that Jesus say’s he is the Way the Truth and the Life, and no one gets to the Father but by Him.”
In reply a Muslims will say “the Quran says the Bible has been corrupted, the truth is…”
And it’s at this point that Christians have failed local Muslims.
The Quran does not say, in the Arabic, that the Bible has been corrupted. The Quran says that previously some people have twisted the scriptures WITH THEIR TONGUES! This is different than saying that the written text has been corrupted.
The Quran says that the Gospels are inspired and preserved, the Word of God, and that Jesus came to confirm what the Hebrew Bible said.
And that is just one of MANY examples of how Christians have failed local Muslims.
Christians and others of the day kept a record of what was happening, as it happened. Even the Chinese have records of some of these events.
We know the names of all of the Abu Bakr’s – Abu (father) (of the) Bakr (tribe) in Tachkastan, and how the Nabatean Ishmaelites (a.k.a. Saracens /Sadducee) with the Karaites had been desperately trying to retake Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple so the Messiah would come. They were strict literalists who didn’t accept the Mishna’s spiritual side so were not considered to be Jews by others.
We know Ambrose (a.ka. Amr, Umar, Khaled = longevity) who conquered Jerusalem became a Christian and was killed by his own. He’d minted coins with himself holding a cross. To acknowledge the Christian doctrine that Holy Spirit dwelt in Christians who were themselves that “cherished” place that the Shi-ur Qomah called MHMT. Muhammad being a Christianised word. Christians didn’t need to build a temple, Christ dwells in us.
Their second leader suffered a similar fate after turned to Christ after a miracle was performed. Islam has never been peaceful, not even towards its own leaders. Eventually a new temple was constructed on the Temple Mount in the style of the day.
We know the S.I.N. was only constructed decades after the Messiah failed to appear at the new temple they had built for him. After the fourth Khalif eventually declared himself the Messiah the Jews again rebelled and the kingdom split and all the Jewish rituals of yearly circulating the temple were moved south.
All their literature now had to be re-written, so it was. Qiblas were moved. Thus the Arabic Quran which mixes the Aramaic Monophysite with the Hebrew Karaite was created, and messes everything up. The concept of our bodies being the temple of the Messiah, the cherished place, mhmt, which was so influential, needed to be erased. The later stories constructed to cover the truth contains hints of previous truths, but that’s all.
(Now that’s an ironic plot twist, the KFR, kuffar, “the coverers” which are riled against so harshly in Quran, were the leaders who edited it all together!)
NZ Christians have failed local Muslims, for we know our shared history can heal their wounds, yet we have not shared it. This generation of Muslim scholars are finding out for themselves that their own S.I.N. has holes in it.
Christians have also failed to engage on the subject of sharia, although we have their textbooks and have witnessed them following it here in New Zealand.
It was Jesus who said “I am the Way the Truth and the Life”, there’s no need to fight. Education defeats S.I.N.
Jesus has already won.
An example of the Gospel in Islam that Christians would be familiar with:
Quran 35:18 roughly mirrors Psalm 49:7, that no man can bear the sins of another. Yet, according to the most reliable hadiths, Sahih Muslim, Muhammad said: “When it will be the Day of Resurrection Allah would deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say: That is your rescue from Hell-Fire.” Christians know that person to be Jesus.