The Everlasting Hatred (17 page)

Basically, God teaches here that the true prophet will make detailed predictions about the future that can be proven or disproven. If the prophet's words
all
came true, then the people are to heed them as the Word of God. If any part of his prophecy did not come true, the people were to stone the person as a false prophet and destroy his message.

This is why of all the books that were written in Israel's history (and there were others),
only
the ones that are genuine were preserved in the canon of Scriptures. And this was in spite of the fact that these books frequently condemned the people's sinful behavior—from the king on the throne to the peasants in the fields. Each prophet proved himself to be true by fulfilled prophecy. The Israelites had every reason to destroy these unpopular
messages that even predicted the destruction of their nation for its sins. But they did not dare destroy that which was proven by fulfilled prophecies to be God's Word.

The Koran, on the other hand, has no such proofs to authenticate its divine origin. Instead, the believer is exhorted not to question its authenticity and to kill anyone who does. Blind, unquestioning belief is demanded. Today, many murders have been executed in western civilization for the crime of blaspheming the Koran.

The concept of how the divine message of the Koran was received is very different from how the approximately forty writers of the Bible received theirs. The Arabic word for “revelation” means
handed down
. Muslims believe that the Koran did not come “through” any man, not even Mohammad. They believe that the message came directly from Allah to the angel Gabriel, who passed it to Mohammad as a total package “intact” with no human involvement or interaction.

However, the Koran was not written down until years after Mohammad's death.

The Bible claims something very different about itself. It teaches that all Scriptures are “God-breathed” (transliteration of qeopneustoV)
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This means that all written words of the Bible's original manuscripts have God's direct inspiration upon them. The miracle of infallible transmission took place at the time of the original composition.

The Bible further claims that it is not the product of man's interpretation of the issues with which it deals, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
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The word translated “carried
along” is a nautical term that was often used to describe the wind driving along a sailboat.

The idea is that God so moved upon specially chosen men, that they communicated what He wanted them to say, but without setting aside their individuality or background.

The Apostle Paul adds that the Holy Spirit so moved upon the minds of the writers so that what they reduced to writing was in
the very words
God desired. He writes, “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.”
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The great miracle of the Bible is that some forty authors from different times and places produced a Holy Book that has one homogenous, cohesive, and consistent message. Its divine origin is stamped all over it. It does not contradict nature, history, or any proven fact of science, even though primitive men wrote it. It contains hundreds of prophecies that have all been fulfilled with 100 percent accuracy that are a matter of historical record. No other book can compare with that record.

Because the Holy Spirit combined “spiritual thoughts with spiritual words,” it does not make sense to someone who is “spiritually dead.” The Bible teaches that all mankind is born physically alive, but spiritually dead. This is why Jesus told a religious scholar of his day that unless a man is “born again spiritually,”
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he couldn't understand the kingdom of God.

The Apostle Paul explains it this way, “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised [understood].”
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The Koran does not speak on such matters as these. As a matter of fact, the Koran does not deal with such great issues as man's sin, God's absolutely righteous character, and the need for God to have a just basis upon which to forgive a hopelessly fallen man.

After the initial appearance of the angel, whom Mohammad later identified as Gabriel [
Jibril
in Arabic], Mohammad went through another period of self-doubt, depression, and thoughts of suicide.

He finally decided to commit suicide. He set out to end it all, but along the way he fell into another trance. While in this trance he had a vision in which he was told that he must not end his life because he was truly called to be God's special messenger.

It is at this point that Khadija played a pivotal role in his life. When he fully shared with her the anguish and doubt that he had about his call from God, she strongly encouraged him. She dismissed his fears of being demon-possessed as an absolute impossibility because he was such a good person. She vehemently believed that he was called of God as His prophet and apostle and kept assuring him of that.

Khadija then urged Mohammad to begin preaching the message he received from the revealing angel to his family and friends. All of his first converts were family members.

When the public heard about Mohammad's new teaching, opposition started almost at once. The people of Mecca rejected and ridiculed his new message. Even some family members turned against him.

Robert Morey explains the crisis that arose in Mohammad at this point:

In order to appease his pagan family members and the members of the Quraysh tribe, he decided that the best thing he could do was to agree with tradition—that it was perfectly proper to pray to and worship the three daughters of Allah: Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat.

This led to the famous “satanic verses” in which Mohammad in a moment of weakness and supposedly under the inspiration of Satan (according to early Muslim authorities) succumbed to the temptation to appease the pagan mobs in Mecca.

The literature on the “satanic verses” is so vast that an entire volume could be written just on this one issue. Every general and Islamic reference work, Muslim or Western, deals with it, as do all the biographies of Mohammad.

The story of Mohammad's temporary appeasement of the pagans by allowing them their polytheism cannot be ignored or denied. It is a fact of history that is supported by all Middle East scholars, whether Western and Muslim.
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Later, when Mohammad's disciples in Yathrib (Medina) heard of these compromises with polytheism, they came to Mecca and rebuked him. After consulting with them, Mohammad reverted back to the original message of monotheism and said Allah had now forbidden worship of the three goddesses. He explained this clear contradiction by saying that Allah could “abrogate” or cancel a previous revelation. Later on, Mohammad claimed that the angel Gabriel (Jibril) appeared to him and rebuked him for allowing Satan to deceive him into condoning the Meccan's worship of the three goddesses.

This produced no end of problems for Mohammad, since
these goddesses were believed to be the “daughters of Allah.” This contradicted what became the very heart of the Islamic faith: that “There is no God but Allah.” The point is also problematic in view of the many Koranic verses that say Jesus cannot be the Son of God because Allah is the only God and he has no offspring. So the “revelations” Mohammad received during this time were never included in the written version of the Koran. They came to be called “the satanic verses.” In our era, the ayatollahs of Iran have issued a death sentence against a Muslim named Salman Rushdie for daring to write a book about these verses. This is considered “blasphemy of God's prophet and the Koran.”

The people of Mecca used this situation to the fullest against Mohammad. They mocked and ridiculed him for attacking the gods of Arabia. This was especially important because of its impact on their economy. Worship of these three goddesses brought many of the lucrative pilgrim tours to Mecca. So the Meccans used Mohammad's vacillating messages attributed to Allah to mock his whole religion.

The hostility of the Meccans became so great that they drove Mohammad out of Mecca. So he fled to Ta-if. He also did not receive a good response there, so he tried to return to Mecca.

In the Koran, Mohammad claims that on the way back to Mecca, he preached to the “jinns” and converted them. The Koran says:

Say: It has been revealed to me that a party of the jinn listened, and they said: Surely we have heard a wonderful Quran [proclamation], Guiding to the right way, so we believe in it, and we will not set up any one with our Lord: And that
He
—exalted be the majesty of our Lord—
has not taken a consort, nor a son
. (Surah 73.1–3)

This important claim is also in Surah 46.29–35 and in 73.1–28. By this revelation, Mohammad claims that even the spirits (jinns) that indwell the sacred rocks, trees, and water sources now believe his message. Note how Mohammad corrects all his previous “satanic verses” about Allah. He now proclaims that Allah never has had a “consort” such as the three moon goddesses. Reasoning from this, Mohammad then proclaimed that Allah never had a son—such as the Christian teaching about Jesus being the Son of God.
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When Mohammad arrived again in Mecca, he found that there was now organized hostility against him and his message. The merchants had gotten involved and were out to protect their economic interests. They rightly feared that Mohammad's renewed monotheistic attacks against the idols housed in the Ka'abah would threaten their leadership as well as the pilgrimages to Mecca and therefore their livelihood.

The animosity grew so intense against Mohammad and his followers that some Meccans sought to kill him. So he fled with some two hundred followers to Yathrib. This famous escape in A.D. 622 became known as the “Hegira.”

It took Mohammad, and his converts, about ten days to reach Yathrib. When he arrived, the oasis city extended him a lavish welcome. They greatly honored him and even changed the city's name to
Madinat-al-Nabi
, which means “The City of the Prophet.” The shortened form of this name is simply “Medina.”

In Medina, Mohammad established his first Islamic theocracy. This became the model for all future Islamic rules of law and government. For this reason, it is of ultimate importance that we
learn these keys to Islamic society and government. This is the reason all forms of Western democracy are considered to be against the Koran and will never be accepted.

During this period, Mohammad developed his most important Islamic doctrines. Indeed, Medina became the model for his “ideal Islamic culture” that would soon be spread to the world.

“And those of the People of the Book [Jews] who aided them [Meccan invaders]—Allah did take them down from their strongholds and cast terror into their hearts. So that some you slew and others you took captive. And He [Allah] made you masters of their land, their houses and their goods, and of a land which you have not yet trodden. Truly Allah has power over all things.”

— T
HE
K
ORAN
, S
URAH
33.26–27
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By around 1400 B.C., more than two thousand years before the first Muslim invasion of Palestina,
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Israel was already established as a nation.

A civil war split Israel into two nations during the time of Rehoboam, Solomon's son. The ten tribes of the northern land known as Samaria called themselves Israel. The southern tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi became known as the kingdom of Judah, from which the name
Jew
came.
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Israel entered a continuous spiral of apostasy away from following Jehovah until He finally sent the Assyrians to destroy the
northern kingdom in 721 B.C. The survivors of the ten tribes were taken away captive into Assyria.

Now why am I going into all of this? Because some of the survivors of this dispersion fled to Arabia and settled there! Arabist scholar Alfred Guillaume observes that the Israelites probably first settled in Arabia in connection with the fall of Samaria in 721 B.C. He writes, “It is not impossible that some Jewish settlements in Arabia were due to fugitives fleeing from the old northern capital of the Hebrews.”
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The southern kingdom of Judah had intermittent revivals, but finally fell into the same apostasy of the Samarian kingdom. Though the people of Judah were repeatedly warned, they did not listen. As it is written:

The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place. But they mocked God's messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the LORD was aroused against his people and there was no remedy. He brought up against them the king of the Babylonians, who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and spared neither young man nor young woman, old man or aged. God handed all of them over to Nebuchadnezzar. He carried to Babylon all the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the LORD's temple and the treasures of the king and his officials. They set fire to God's temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem; they burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there. He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power. The
land enjoyed its Sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah.
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