According to Islam, you cannot trust the Bible. Since there are over a billion Muslims, with a rapidly growing presence in the United States, understanding their claims and why they are false is increasingly important.
Islam teaches that all the true prophets throughout history have been Muslims. Although those outside the religion view Muhammad as the founder of Islam, Muslims themselves believe that Muhammad was the greatest in a long line of Islamic prophets, stretching back to the first man, Adam. Therefore, Judaism and Christianity represent groups that broke away from the true religion and teach false doctrines. Muhammad made known what the original, true religion was when he began to teach in 610 CE.
The authoritative teaching for Muslims is found in the Qur'an. According to Islam, the angel Gabriel taught Muhammad the words of God. Muhammad memorized them and taught them to others. They wrote them down after Muhammad's life. Muslims believe that the Qur'an is direct revelation from God. Other books are either completely false or represent corruptions of earlier teachings that came from God.
The Qur'an teaches that Christianity is wrong about several important issues:
1. The Bible contained God's Word at one time,but the version we now have was changed by false teachers.
2. Jesus was a great prophet, but was in no way divine. He was not even the greatest prophet. Islam views the Christian understanding that Jesus is God as illogical, impossible, polytheistic, and insulting to God.
3. Salvation is based on good works and God's mercy. God offers no payment for sin. Islam argues that God needing atonement for sin is insulting to God's mercy. Why can God not simply forgive? Why would he need to have Jesus die on the cross in order to offer mercy to sinners? Islam also rejects the idea that God offers mercy to everyone. One must sincerely work hard at following God's commands as found in the Qur'an in order to have the best chance at being welcomed into heaven.
4. Jesus did not die on the cross or rise from the dead. Instead, Islam offers several alternatives, the most popular of which is that someone else was crucified who was mistakenly identified as Jesus.
How can Christians respond?
The real issue is which book to trust, the Bible, or the Qur'an? If God really sent Gabriel to teach Muhammad the words that are accurately recorded in the Qur'an, then Islam must be right and the Bible a corrupted form of the truth. However, if we can trust the Bible, then the Qur'an represents a false religion that we must reject.
When we look at the evidence, it is easy to see how the Qur'an could be false, while it is much more difficult to explain away the evidence for the Bible. Consider the reasons for believing the Qur'an. The only witness to Gabriel teaching Muhammad is... Muhammad himself. Muhammad may have either deceived others about this or he may have been deceived himself (perhaps he saw a demonic being, not Gabriel). The only witness we have that Muhammad accurately related the teachings to others is once again Muhammad himself. After that, we do not even have much reason to confidently believe Muhammad's teachings were accurately written down.
The Bible is different. The truth of the Bible largely rests on whether or not Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. We do not need to simply believe one person's claim about this. Multiple sources (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, and more) give detailed records of these events, the times, places, and crowds of witnesses. (To see the full argument for this, I recommend the following article from "Trust the Bible":
Which is more likely to be true, that Jesus died on the cross as numerous sources report from within a few decades of the event by the people who lived in the area and knew the eyewitnesses? Or, that Jesus did not die on the cross, as recorded by Muslims living more than 600 years later, living hundreds of miles away with a different language and cultural background? Remember, the Muslim's only source for the claim is not historical evidence, but that their former political and military leader told them an angel appeared to him with this message.
The problem with the Qur'an is that it one must simultaneously believe it is true without any evidence other than the claims of one man, and believe that the Christian message verified by many witnesses was somehow corrupted by an unnamed group of people, at some unspecified time, without any supporting evidence. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the Bible we have today is unchanged from the time it is written. See,
http://trustthebible.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-telephone-game.html
The only other argument for the Qur'an is the strength of the arguments themselves, which don't really stand up to scrutiny. I wrote previously about the Trinity here:
The concept of the atonement does not question God's mercy, but rather demonstrates how he can be a just and holy judge of all the earth and simultaneously forgive sinners. Islam offers no solution to this problem.
Furthermore, the Qur'an seems to have a faulty understanding of Christianity, making it seem as though Christianity teaches worship of Mary and Jesus as separate deities (see Sura 5:115). Perhaps Muhammad misunderstood Christianity, or perhaps he only knew of a heretical Christian group. However, the misunderstanding is hard to explain if the Qur'an is of divine origin.
The Qur'an also seems to say that the Scriptures were yet unchanged during the time of Jesus. (Sura 3:50, 5:46-47) For Islam to be true, the corruption of the Bible must have occurred after Jesus' time and before Muhammad's. The problem is that since the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 20th Century, we now know that the Old Testament Scriptures in Jesus' time did not change by Muhammad's time. Muhammad's claim may have seemed reasonable in his time, but the records discovered since then completely dismantle it. Once again, it seems that a book claiming to have divine origin is in error.
Although there are many exceptions, most Muslims today do not support violence. They sincerely seek to honor God the way that they are taught. The problem is that they are trusting in a book that only has the claims of one man to support it. The key question to ask those of any faith is, "How do you know that is true?" No other book has supporting evidence like the Bible.
Trust the Bible is a weekday radio program that begins at about 8:10 each morning on WDOG 93.5 in Allendale, SC. You can listen to previous programs online here: http://www.fairfaxfbc.org/trust-the-bible.html
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