Islam: Not a Peaceful Religion; 1 John
2:18
1 John 2:18 NASB “Children,
it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now
many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour.”
This term “antichrist” is
derived from a Greek word with the preposition anti
[a)nti], which in
English as the idea of opposition or against, but in the Greek anti means substitution or instead of.
So this is a substitute Christ, a religious leader. We must understand that
there are many different figures in history that may be termed an antichrist.
That is because Jesus Christ’s coming is imminent. Because Satan does not know
when that will be he always has to be ready. So throughout the church age there
are certain trends: trends of false religion, religious leaders that arise and
create new religious systems that Satan can use for his benefit in order that
it maybe be used to bring in the final ecumenical
religion that will be during the Tribulation. One particular “antichrist” who
appeared in history, and his religious system, is Islam.
What is happening today in
light of the terrorist attacks on September 11 is that we are being bombarded
and brainwashed by an illiterate media—and an ignorant media—trying to convince
us that Islam is really a peaceful religion. Children are being indoctrinated
in this false claim in public schools. It is not a religion of peace and it
never has been a religion of peace. We will look at Islam as one expression of
a religious system that is an example of antichrists in the church age.
Islam was founded by a
prophet. He did not claim to be God or claim deity for himself, he claimed
simply to be a prophet but the greatest of all prophets and his name was
Muhammad. He was born in 570 AD in
When Muhammad was a young man
he married his boss. He was a camel driver and she had a “trucking” company and
he married her in order to get ahead in life. Because she was fairly wealthy it
left him with a lot of time on his hands, and being a somewhat introspective
ascetic, he liked to go up and meditate on “spiritual” things up in the
mountains. When he was 40 years of age he started having these strange
convulsions. He started foaming at the mouth and going into trances, and he was
convinced that he was demon possessed, that he had a djin, the Arabic from which we
get our English word genie—an evil spirit. But his wife said no, it was just
the angel Gabriel who was wanting to communicate with
him. So he goes up into a cave in the mountains and the angel Gabriel allegedly
appeared to this illiterate camel herder, outside of
He had various visions with
the angel Gabriel and over a 22-year period he was given 78,000 words of the
Koran’s 114 chapters. He never wrote anything down because he was as illiterate
as his followers. He began to force his new religion on people. He went to the
Jews and they rejected it, he went to the Christians and they rejected it, and
so he became made at both the Jews and the Christians so now he was going to
have a religious system that was antagonistic to both groups. He went to the
Arabs and tried to force it on them and they rejected it so he had to flee
Islam looks at Muhammad as a
prophet, the greatest of all the prophets; but Islam does not recognise Jesus
as a Son of God, they recognise Jesus only as a prophet. Christians are told by
Muslims that faith in Christ as God incarnate is blasphemy. According to Islam
all Jews by virtue of their birth are damned by God. Islam rejects the idea of
a virgin birth of Jesus as the Son of God. They reject the miracles He
performed and His death on the cross—Jesus didn’t die on the cross, He was
taken into heaven before the cross and somebody else was crucified. So the
Bible in their view is corrupted, as has been corrupted, especially by
The five pillars of Islam
are: a) They recite the Shahada
– “There is no god but Allah and Muhammud is his
messenger” – five times a day, whenever they pray towards
What are some of the beliefs
of Muslims? First of all, as we have seen already, Islam does not mean peace
but submission. A Muslim is one who submits. The goal of Islam is to get all
mankind to submit, even if by force, to Allah. There is no such thing as
salvation in Islam as there is in Christianity. In Christianity there is the
belief that all men are sinners. There is no comparable doctrine of total
depravity is Islam; there is no comparable doctrine of salvation. And there is
no certainty and no idea of how one ever gets to heaven, except to die on a Haj or in jihad.
Islam is completely intolerant of all other religious beliefs. If any Muslim
converts to Christianity his father is required to kill him. If the father will
not kill him then the village is required to kill both the father and the son. Islam
is also against progress and it represses women. According to Islam there are
only two people on the planet. There are those who are members of the house of
peace, the
According to Islamic prophecy,
when Jesus come back He will come back as a Muslim and then He and Muhammad will
gather all the Muslims to themselves and they will go out and kill every
Christian and every Jew; so much so that the rocks and the trees will cry out, “There
is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The god that they worship, Allah, is
not the God of the Bible, and the Jesus they talk about is not the Jesus of the
Bible. Their Jesus is an Islamic Jesus who is a destructive warrior who hates
all Jews.
Islam was built on the
foundation of Arabian paganism, and apparently Muhammad had a trend in his sin
nature towards asceticism and legalism and was embarrassed by the Arabs and
their multiplicity of gods; especially when he had contact with Jews and
Christians. He was more impressed with their piety and their morality and so he
tried to force this on the Arabs. He did this by getting rid of all of their
gods except for Allah. If we look at the attributes of Allah in the Koran they
are not the attributes of the God of the Bible. For example, the word love is
only used two times in the Koran. In the Bible the core commandment in the Old
Testament is that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul,
mind and strength and love our neighbour as ourselves. In the New Testament we
learn that God is love. There are no comparable statements to those in the
Koran.
Islam was originally planted
by the sword and spread by the sword during the time of Muhammad. In fact he
killed and murdered tens of thousands of Arabs and Syrians in order to spread
Islam during the 8th and 9th centuries. He tortured his
captives with fire. He would kill them, take their wives and his bondmaids and
forced others to marry his companions. Anyone who criticised him was instantly
murdered and following his death all of the caliphs were to be blood relatives
of Muhammad. So his followers fought a bloody war of succession and his own
relatives and closest friends sacrificed and slaughtered one another. So it is
not a religion of peace.
The differences between Jesus
and Muhammad
a)
Jesus’ birth as
the Messiah was prophesied in Scripture. Muhammad’s birth was not. For example,
we are told in the Scriptures that Jesus would be a descendant of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. He would be born into the tribe of
b)
Jesus was
foretold to be the Son of God and He claimed to be the Son of God, and the
apostles also proclaimed Him as the Son of God. However, Muhammad and Islam
reject this: God cannot have a son. He thought it was blasphemy to say that God
has a son, so all Christians by definition are blasphemers and in the Koran
they are to kill all blasphemers. That is why one of their sayings is to kill
the Jews on Saturday and to kill the Christians on Sunday.
c)
Muhammad did not
authenticate his claims with any works or miracles. He claimed that the Koran
was the only sign needed to authenticate himself as a prophet.
d)
Jesus and the Old
Testament prophets emphasise love. Over and over again in the Bible there is an
emphasis on love—love for God, love for mankind, God’s love for mankind. But
this is not true in the Koran. In fact, the Koran emphasises vengeance and
vindictiveness and violence as opposed to love and forgiveness. In his book A Cup
of Trembling, Dave Hunt writes: “Islam is fighting a holy war for control
of the world. That war was begun by Muhammad himself in the 7th century
and is still carried on today by his faithful followers through terrorism. The
terrorists are not radicals or extremists as the media continually labels them.
Instead, they are Islamic fundamentalists…” What is a fundamentalist? A
fundamentalist is someone who believes in the fundamentals of whatever his
system is. There is nothing extremist about it. Yet what has happened is that
our modern liberal media is using the term fundamentalist as an insulting,
negative term that is synonymous with extremism. That is a falsehood. The term
Christian fundamentalist came into use because of a series of books published
in the early 20th century called The
Five Fundamentals of the Faith. The term Christian fundamentalist came into
use to describe the people who believed in the five fundamentals of the faith;
not extremists or crusaders. “… Instead, these are Islamic fundamentalists who
are true to their religion and the teachings of the Koran, and who follow foully
in the footsteps of their great prophet Muhammad. As one former
Muslim and Islamic scholar has said: ‘We must never imagine that such Muslims
are being unnecessarily wicked, they are simply being faithful to their
religion. The fact is never hidden as to the attitude a good Muslim should have
towards Christians and Jews. In fact much of the incitement to violence and war
in the whole of the Koran is directed against the Jews and Christians who
rejected what they felt to be the strange God Muhammad was trying to preach.… Muhammad
and his successors initiated offensive wars against peaceful countries in order
to impose and implant by force as well as to seize the abundance of these
lands. Their objective was to capture women and children and to put an end to the
poverty and hunger from which Arab Muslims suffered. So Islam
was forcibly imposed upon