Study Islam this is the final word of Muslims when they were cornered with questions. It compelled me to think a lot. What to study in Islam? Is it a text book or a three-year course to study? This is one of the main advantages and peculiarity of Islam apart from other religions. If it is the Pillars of Islam to study, then almost all persons know it. I came to know about world religions and their tenets from our Sunday School Catechism. So a person who has completed 9th level in Sunday School would know the Pillars of Islam, Ahimsa of Hinduism, Nirvana of Buddhism, animal sacrifice of Judaism, etc. So far as I am concerned, I read Quran more than 10 times. I have read it two times by concealing the controversial verses such as in Sura 9 at least to find out something motivating me. But I felt Quran as useless and cheap. If you add something to Sura 23, it forms the entire Quran! Lack of proper arrangement, unnecessary repetition, etc. made it uninteresting. Even if I could argue with an Islamic scholar and prove Islam and Quran as a masterminded effort of Satan, they would still ask me to Study Islam!!
If religion is about God who exists in Spirit, what to study about Him? He must be experienced. You must feel His existence in your heart. All religions except Islam urged its followers to experience God; but Islam asked to study it. Christianity is in the forefront on compulsorily asking its followers to experience Lord Jesus Christ. As regarding converts, a Christian scholar remarked that it is better to be a Muslim than a poor Christian. There is no tragedy in this world than becoming a nominal Christian whose religious life is restricted to visit the Church on Sundays or having a Christian name. The person who is writing this message was also a nominal Christian for 15 years a Christian who visited Church on Sundays to avoid the angry of mother, to meet friends, etc. But after attending a spiritual retreat conducted by Jesus Youth, I became a practicing Christian. My life has totally changed thereafter. I made new destinations followed by decisive footsteps to reach it. I became disciplined; my addiction to music and films had gone completely; great success has been attained in academic studies; my parents got a caring, loving and obeying son; my friends got a sincere friend; my friends found Jesus through me; etc. I have been experiencing God in my life. I feel Jesus keeping my hands and helping me to search new skies. The presence of Jesus compelled me to search for high standards. It urges me to possess some apex dreams and work for it.
To experience God, we should have personal relationship with God. It is absent in Islam. For Islam, Allah is too great to reach. While the Quran says that God is closer to man "than his jugular vein" (50:16) such nearness is a technical nearness. For Muslims, God is great, but unknowable. Muslims have religion, but they do not have a personal relationship with God. If you want a religion, Islam has a lot to offer. But if you want a relationship with the one true God and the peace and assurance that comes from knowing Him personally, then you MUST GO BACK into the Scriptures of the prophets and to the Gospel of Lord Jesus Christ.
The reply from Muslims would be very fast - "We believe all the prophets!" and "We believe in Jesus! He was a great prophet and messenger of Allah!" Then the next question is, "What does it mean to believe a prophet? It means to understand and believe their prophecies and messages, isnt it? Where do we find the message of the prophets? It is in the Scriptures of the prophets!"
The Quran acclaimed that the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel are Word of God (5:44-46; 4:163; 40:71; 10:94; etc.), and that "the Word of God shall never change. That is the supreme triumph" (10:64). If the Quran is trustworthy to a Muslim, and if he is honest, he is BOUND to accept "the previous scriptures" wholeheartedly (Quran 20:133). He has no option nor alternative in that case. Yet all Muslims reject the message of these Holy Books, simply saying that they have been altered, corrupted, changed, ad nauseam. After searching for more than a decade, I still wait to hear who changed, when and for what. As is the case to this very day, many of the Jews and Christians were guilty of twisting their Scriptures with their tongue (Quran 3:71,78), but the fact is that the Scripture was considered intact during the time of Muhammad (3:93; 10:94; 21:7; etc.). [See how Protestants oppose Catholics by twisting the Biblical verses; and Ariel Sharon and other hard line Jews always quote Biblical verses to justify their aggression over Palestinians saying that the whole territory was gifted to them by Yahweh].
In the first four centuries after Mohamed (AD 600-1000), no Muslim theologian contended that the Gospel texts were not authentic. It was only with Ibn-Khazem, who died at Cordoba in 1064, that the charge of falsification was born. When he found out contradictions between Quran and Gospel, he argued, it must be the conflicting Gospel texts that are false. But Mohamed told us to respect the Gospel. Therefore, the present text must have been falsified by the Christians.
Many great Muslim thinkers have accepted the authenticity of the New Testament text. The important figures among them are: great historians like Al-Masudi (died in 956) and Ibn-Khaldun (died in 1406); Ali at Tabari (died in 869); Al-Ghazzali (died in 1111); Abu Ali Husain Ibn Sina, who is known in the West as Avicenna (died in 1037); and Bukhari (died in 870) who acquired a great name by his collection of early traditions, quoted the Quran itself (Sura 3, 72, 78) to prove that the text of the Bible was not falsified.
Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, founder of Aligarh Muslim University in India, which is a major Muslim university in a non-Muslim country in the world, has written: "In the opinion of us Mohammedans, it is not proved that corruption (tahrif-i-lafzi)..... was practised". Sir Sayyid quotes Imam Bukhari and Fakhruddin Razi as agreeing with him. Fakhruddin Razi states on the authority of Ibn Abbas, a granson of Muhammed, that "The Jews and early Christians were suspected of altering the text of the Taurat and Injil (Old & New Testament) but in the opinion of eminent doctors and theologians it was not practicable thus to corrupt the text, because those Scriptures were generally known and widely circulated, having been handed down from generation to generation". It is now the duty of Muslims to decide whether to follow the words of mediocre Imams / hypocrite Mullahs or great Muslim personalities!!
Im fed up with other justifications of Muslims we believe in all prophets and acclaimed their messages? But really, Islam denies the central message of all prophets. What is the central message of the prophets? That God, in His infinite plan and unmeasurable love, would "become flesh" in order to fulfill the symbolic meaning of millions of animal sacrifices and hundreds of detailed prophecies by willingly shedding His blood as the perfect substitutionary sacrifice to pay the sin-penalty for helpless sinners, and then conquer death by rising from the grave thus establishing an everlasting peace between the one true God and all who believe in HIM and HIS way of salvation.
Isaiah makes it clear: The sins of man is acting as a stumbling block between God and man; and I am not satisfied with your animal sacrifices. So it is clear that animal sacrifice is not enough for the sins of human beings; but the sacrifice of a man is MANDATORY for the sins of human beings. The man who has to pay the penalty for the sins of mankind must be SINLESS. If he is also suffering from sin, then who will shed blood to remove his sins? So the man who has to make sacrifice must be sinless. Could you show me a man without sin in the past, present or future? We could call anyone ranging from beggar to Pope a sinner. Only God is sinless. As per Quran, only Jesus is sinless at birth and led a sinless life. Then God started giving messages to prophets about the seriousness of sins and the coming of Messiah to remove the sins of mankind. On due time, the sinless God was born in flesh from Mother Mary. The rest is history.
See what the prophet Isaiah wrote concerning the coming Messiah 700 years before Jesus was born (please note that the book of Isaiah is confirmed by discovery of original manuscripts from Qumran caves. So dont come with your third-rate talk shop about the corruption of Bible): "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel [meaning, "God with us"]. For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given ... and His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. ... He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed." (Isa. 7:14; 9:6; 53:5)
After 700 years, the promised Prince of Peace was born into our sinful world. In His Last Supper, He told His disciples, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. ... Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down ones life for his friends. If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. ... If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. ..." (John 14:27; 15:13,20,21)
The greatest tragedy in the history of mankind is that Lord Jesus Christ has been reduced or restricted from the Messiah to the founder of Christianity. To believe in the Salvation offered by Jesus Christ should not mean to embrace the religion of Christianity. I have a friend called Bhoopathi Sankara Narayanan, a Tamil Brahmin, now practicing as a Chartered Accountant in Bangalore. His wife, Mrs. Usha Parvathi, is also a Chartered Accountant. I met them in a conference conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. I became perplexed on knowing that both of them along with their 4 children embraced Lord Jesus Christ as their God and Savior. But he would not allow others to call him as Ex-Brahmin. He told me: Now I felt that I completed my status of being a Hindu by embracing Lord Jesus who really practiced the basic principle of Hinduism (Ahimsa) in his life. Even if Jesus might not have uttered the word of Ahimsa, his life and message proved it. Im not satisfied with the explanations of Mr. Bhoopathi making Jesus adaptable to Hinduism, but I had to appreciate the courage of that traditional Brahmin who found truth in Lord Jesus in his own way.
Religion is only a channel to God through its own means such as prayers, good works, etc. There is no truth in itself. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is God coming to mankind in the Person of Jesus and offering them a RELATIONSHIP with Himself. And what makes it so wonderful and sure is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that "which God promised BEFOREHAND through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures..." (Romans 1:2).
Lord Jesus Christ said, you could know the fake prophets from their fruits. If you want to judge Mohamed and his Islam, then look to their fruits. Please show me an Islamic society in the past or present that existed in peace? Even after existing for 1300 years in this world, no Islamic country or society had lived or is living in peace. You could start from rich Saudi Arabia to poor Sudan. How can it promote true peace when it denies the very means God has provided to establish a lasting peace between God and man, and between man and man? All the prophets bear witness to the fact that Jesus "made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight... For [Christ Jesus] Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of division between us ..." (Colossians 1:20-22; Ephesians 2:14). Or as the prophet Micah wrote of the Messiah 700 years before He was born, "This One shall be peace."
The reason is simple you demeaned the Prince of Peace to the cheapest rank of a prophet. That also, in par with a cheap war monger from pagan Arabia who showed unlimited lust for the meat of women.
Lets pray to God to give His blessings of Wisdom to all.
Sijo.
If religion is about God who exists in Spirit, what to study about Him? He must be experienced. You must feel His existence in your heart. All religions except Islam urged its followers to experience God; but Islam asked to study it. Christianity is in the forefront on compulsorily asking its followers to experience Lord Jesus Christ. As regarding converts, a Christian scholar remarked that it is better to be a Muslim than a poor Christian. There is no tragedy in this world than becoming a nominal Christian whose religious life is restricted to visit the Church on Sundays or having a Christian name. The person who is writing this message was also a nominal Christian for 15 years a Christian who visited Church on Sundays to avoid the angry of mother, to meet friends, etc. But after attending a spiritual retreat conducted by Jesus Youth, I became a practicing Christian. My life has totally changed thereafter. I made new destinations followed by decisive footsteps to reach it. I became disciplined; my addiction to music and films had gone completely; great success has been attained in academic studies; my parents got a caring, loving and obeying son; my friends got a sincere friend; my friends found Jesus through me; etc. I have been experiencing God in my life. I feel Jesus keeping my hands and helping me to search new skies. The presence of Jesus compelled me to search for high standards. It urges me to possess some apex dreams and work for it.
To experience God, we should have personal relationship with God. It is absent in Islam. For Islam, Allah is too great to reach. While the Quran says that God is closer to man "than his jugular vein" (50:16) such nearness is a technical nearness. For Muslims, God is great, but unknowable. Muslims have religion, but they do not have a personal relationship with God. If you want a religion, Islam has a lot to offer. But if you want a relationship with the one true God and the peace and assurance that comes from knowing Him personally, then you MUST GO BACK into the Scriptures of the prophets and to the Gospel of Lord Jesus Christ.
The reply from Muslims would be very fast - "We believe all the prophets!" and "We believe in Jesus! He was a great prophet and messenger of Allah!" Then the next question is, "What does it mean to believe a prophet? It means to understand and believe their prophecies and messages, isnt it? Where do we find the message of the prophets? It is in the Scriptures of the prophets!"
The Quran acclaimed that the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel are Word of God (5:44-46; 4:163; 40:71; 10:94; etc.), and that "the Word of God shall never change. That is the supreme triumph" (10:64). If the Quran is trustworthy to a Muslim, and if he is honest, he is BOUND to accept "the previous scriptures" wholeheartedly (Quran 20:133). He has no option nor alternative in that case. Yet all Muslims reject the message of these Holy Books, simply saying that they have been altered, corrupted, changed, ad nauseam. After searching for more than a decade, I still wait to hear who changed, when and for what. As is the case to this very day, many of the Jews and Christians were guilty of twisting their Scriptures with their tongue (Quran 3:71,78), but the fact is that the Scripture was considered intact during the time of Muhammad (3:93; 10:94; 21:7; etc.). [See how Protestants oppose Catholics by twisting the Biblical verses; and Ariel Sharon and other hard line Jews always quote Biblical verses to justify their aggression over Palestinians saying that the whole territory was gifted to them by Yahweh].
In the first four centuries after Mohamed (AD 600-1000), no Muslim theologian contended that the Gospel texts were not authentic. It was only with Ibn-Khazem, who died at Cordoba in 1064, that the charge of falsification was born. When he found out contradictions between Quran and Gospel, he argued, it must be the conflicting Gospel texts that are false. But Mohamed told us to respect the Gospel. Therefore, the present text must have been falsified by the Christians.
Many great Muslim thinkers have accepted the authenticity of the New Testament text. The important figures among them are: great historians like Al-Masudi (died in 956) and Ibn-Khaldun (died in 1406); Ali at Tabari (died in 869); Al-Ghazzali (died in 1111); Abu Ali Husain Ibn Sina, who is known in the West as Avicenna (died in 1037); and Bukhari (died in 870) who acquired a great name by his collection of early traditions, quoted the Quran itself (Sura 3, 72, 78) to prove that the text of the Bible was not falsified.
Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, founder of Aligarh Muslim University in India, which is a major Muslim university in a non-Muslim country in the world, has written: "In the opinion of us Mohammedans, it is not proved that corruption (tahrif-i-lafzi)..... was practised". Sir Sayyid quotes Imam Bukhari and Fakhruddin Razi as agreeing with him. Fakhruddin Razi states on the authority of Ibn Abbas, a granson of Muhammed, that "The Jews and early Christians were suspected of altering the text of the Taurat and Injil (Old & New Testament) but in the opinion of eminent doctors and theologians it was not practicable thus to corrupt the text, because those Scriptures were generally known and widely circulated, having been handed down from generation to generation". It is now the duty of Muslims to decide whether to follow the words of mediocre Imams / hypocrite Mullahs or great Muslim personalities!!
Im fed up with other justifications of Muslims we believe in all prophets and acclaimed their messages? But really, Islam denies the central message of all prophets. What is the central message of the prophets? That God, in His infinite plan and unmeasurable love, would "become flesh" in order to fulfill the symbolic meaning of millions of animal sacrifices and hundreds of detailed prophecies by willingly shedding His blood as the perfect substitutionary sacrifice to pay the sin-penalty for helpless sinners, and then conquer death by rising from the grave thus establishing an everlasting peace between the one true God and all who believe in HIM and HIS way of salvation.
Isaiah makes it clear: The sins of man is acting as a stumbling block between God and man; and I am not satisfied with your animal sacrifices. So it is clear that animal sacrifice is not enough for the sins of human beings; but the sacrifice of a man is MANDATORY for the sins of human beings. The man who has to pay the penalty for the sins of mankind must be SINLESS. If he is also suffering from sin, then who will shed blood to remove his sins? So the man who has to make sacrifice must be sinless. Could you show me a man without sin in the past, present or future? We could call anyone ranging from beggar to Pope a sinner. Only God is sinless. As per Quran, only Jesus is sinless at birth and led a sinless life. Then God started giving messages to prophets about the seriousness of sins and the coming of Messiah to remove the sins of mankind. On due time, the sinless God was born in flesh from Mother Mary. The rest is history.
See what the prophet Isaiah wrote concerning the coming Messiah 700 years before Jesus was born (please note that the book of Isaiah is confirmed by discovery of original manuscripts from Qumran caves. So dont come with your third-rate talk shop about the corruption of Bible): "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel [meaning, "God with us"]. For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given ... and His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. ... He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed." (Isa. 7:14; 9:6; 53:5)
After 700 years, the promised Prince of Peace was born into our sinful world. In His Last Supper, He told His disciples, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. ... Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down ones life for his friends. If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. ... If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. ..." (John 14:27; 15:13,20,21)
The greatest tragedy in the history of mankind is that Lord Jesus Christ has been reduced or restricted from the Messiah to the founder of Christianity. To believe in the Salvation offered by Jesus Christ should not mean to embrace the religion of Christianity. I have a friend called Bhoopathi Sankara Narayanan, a Tamil Brahmin, now practicing as a Chartered Accountant in Bangalore. His wife, Mrs. Usha Parvathi, is also a Chartered Accountant. I met them in a conference conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. I became perplexed on knowing that both of them along with their 4 children embraced Lord Jesus Christ as their God and Savior. But he would not allow others to call him as Ex-Brahmin. He told me: Now I felt that I completed my status of being a Hindu by embracing Lord Jesus who really practiced the basic principle of Hinduism (Ahimsa) in his life. Even if Jesus might not have uttered the word of Ahimsa, his life and message proved it. Im not satisfied with the explanations of Mr. Bhoopathi making Jesus adaptable to Hinduism, but I had to appreciate the courage of that traditional Brahmin who found truth in Lord Jesus in his own way.
Religion is only a channel to God through its own means such as prayers, good works, etc. There is no truth in itself. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is God coming to mankind in the Person of Jesus and offering them a RELATIONSHIP with Himself. And what makes it so wonderful and sure is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that "which God promised BEFOREHAND through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures..." (Romans 1:2).
Lord Jesus Christ said, you could know the fake prophets from their fruits. If you want to judge Mohamed and his Islam, then look to their fruits. Please show me an Islamic society in the past or present that existed in peace? Even after existing for 1300 years in this world, no Islamic country or society had lived or is living in peace. You could start from rich Saudi Arabia to poor Sudan. How can it promote true peace when it denies the very means God has provided to establish a lasting peace between God and man, and between man and man? All the prophets bear witness to the fact that Jesus "made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight... For [Christ Jesus] Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of division between us ..." (Colossians 1:20-22; Ephesians 2:14). Or as the prophet Micah wrote of the Messiah 700 years before He was born, "This One shall be peace."
The reason is simple you demeaned the Prince of Peace to the cheapest rank of a prophet. That also, in par with a cheap war monger from pagan Arabia who showed unlimited lust for the meat of women.
Lets pray to God to give His blessings of Wisdom to all.
Sijo.
truth! YAY!!! I just began studying Islam in hopes of reaching many with true salvation and the gospel of Christ. God Bless you for posting! 
