Commentary:
His name is Jesus
by Parker T. Williamson , The Layman, February 7, 2011
Silence enshrouded the room, partly due to the “No recording devices or cameras allowed!” signs on the door. Partly, also, because just beyond that portal, cloisters of Christians from the Middle East and the USA were huddled in prayer.
These were partners in an underground enterprise, sharing the Gospel with persons shackled by the chains of Islam.
“Don’t tell your family what has happened to you,” a Christian minister advises his Muslim friend who had just accepted Jesus as her Lord, “at least, don’t tell it yet.”
Mum’s the word
There is good reason for his counsel, for had his young convert told her family, she could have been killed on the spot. The Koran calls for such retribution, and in many Middle Eastern countries the government allows it, if not explicitly, then by looking the other way when the murder occurs.
Millions of Middle Eastern Christians keep the faith under wraps. Where churches exist, ministers may preach the Gospel. But if they share that Gospel outside church property, Christians can be prosecuted and their churches shut down.
Show but don’t tell
So how do Christian converts convey their faith to family and friends? They display what they cannot say. “The Holy Spirit now lives within you. His presence will cause you to live and act differently,” an Iraqi minister tells Muslims who convert to the faith.
“People will see your integrity, kindness and love. They will be drawn closer to you, and some who knew you before you met the Lord will wonder what has happened to you. Sooner or later, someone who has been touched by your love may ask you why you are different. Wait for that question, for in asking the question, they are acknowledging that they are being drawn to the Lord who lives in you. Then you may answer, giving a name to the Jesus whom they have already met in you.”
As I reflected on my interviews with these Middle Eastern Christians, my mind raced to the counsel Jesus gave to some whom He had revealed himself. “Don’t tell,” He said.
Could it be, I wondered, that in similar circumstances, Jesus wanted the evidence of His presence in a person’s life to precede explicit attribution? Might this security measure employed in the context of virulent Islam also be a primer for evangelism?
Jesus does it all
The underlying assumption is that we do not do evangelism, Jesus does.
Jesus goes before us, entering the minds and hearts of Muslims whom He chooses to touch. His Holy Spirit destabilizes them and engenders a hunger for something more than they can find in the Islamic life.
He appears to them in visions that invade their spiritual boredom and in crisis situations for which Islam offers no answers. He appears in their awareness that the Christian who has befriended them has an inner peace that the Muslim has never known.
This Muslim has met Jesus without knowing Jesus’ name, and he yearns for a definition, some word that can assign meaning to his experience.
My Middle Eastern friends say millions of their countrymen and women are experiencing the heretofore nameless Jesus. Like the Ethiopian eunuch who asked the Apostle Paul to help him understand the Scripture that he was reading, these Muslims have already encountered God’s Word. What they seek is an interpreter.
So our Christian friends lovingly serve their Muslim neighbors. They know they do not need to present the Lord to Muslims, since the Lord has already made His presence known. Their task is simply to build the kind of relationship that permits them to name the One whose presence the Muslim has experienced.
A critical distinction
I asked a Middle Easterner who shares the Gospel in Yemen, how do you evangelize a Muslim?
“You love him,” he said.
“Make no mistake about it,” added a friend who shares the Gospel among Syrians, “we love Muslims; but we do not love Islam.” That distinction, he said, is often lost on American Christians who think that loving Muslims means tolerating their faith.
“Islam is not Christian,” he said. “Islam’s god is not the Christian God. Allah has none of the attributes of the God whom Christians worship. And Islam does not recognize Jesus as the Son of God.”
He continued, “Do not let your denomination’s ‘peacemakers’ deceive you into thinking that there are commonalities between the two faiths. They are radically different. In the Koran, there is only one assurance that one can go to heaven. It goes to those who lose their lives while killing Christians and Jews.”
“And this ‘heaven’ that they describe is nothing like the heaven you find in Scripture. For Islam, heaven is a reward composed primarily of food and sex. Muslims do not believe they meet Allah in heaven, for Allah is above anything that humans can inhabit. You fear Allah; but you do not love Allah. There is no relationship with Allah.”
Radical vs moderate Islam
But you’re talking about radical Islam, I responded. What about the kind of Islam that we Americans experience? Can we not find common ground with moderate Islam?
“You need to understand the distinction between what you call ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ Islam,” replied a Christian who shares the Gospel with Jordanian Muslims. These notions come from two different sections of the Koran.”
“One section is composed of Muhammad’s early writings, when he lived in Mecca. Here he was outnumbered by persons of different faiths. Here he encouraged accommodation, including loving Christians and Jews. These portions of the Koran are marked with a symbol indicating that they were written during the Mecca period of Muhammad’s life.”
“But that is not the end of the story,” continued my Jordanian friend. “Muhammad then moved from Mecca to Medina. Here he gained military and political power, and he soon controlled the region. The Medina writings, approximately two-thirds of the Koran, are very different from what he wrote in Mecca. Here, he calls on his followers to kill all who reject Islam, specifically Christians and Jews.”
Where Muslims are in the minority, he explained, they tend to follow the Mecca Koran. But where they become a majority, they move very quickly toward the Medina Koran.
“This is why you see Islamic persecution of Christians and Jews in the Middle East, Indonesia and in the Sudan” said an Iraqi Christian.
A Christian who shares the Gospel in Morocco joined our discussion: “Are you Americans not aware of what is happening in France and England?” he asked. Look at sections of these countries that are now dominated by Muslims. Do Americans not understand the meaning of last year’s riots in France, the Muslim takeover of Anglican Church property in England and demands by Muslims that Sharia law be instituted in their neighborhoods?
“They have a word for this transition from peaceful to violent Islam,” he said. “It is called ‘abrogation.’ They say that the Medina sections of the Koran abrogate the Mecca sections. This is the way they handle the difference between the Koran’s counsel to love Christians and its later command to kill them.”
On dialogues with Muslims
“There’s another factor that ‘peacemakers’ often overlook when they tell you there are commonalities between Christian faith and Islam,” said a friend who shares the Gospel in Iran. You need to know about al-Taqiyya. It means that Muslims who are in the minority may lie about the true nature of their faith until they are strong enough to
tell the truth.
Al-Taqiyya means deception. In a section called Sura 3, the Koran applauds it. That section puts a unique spin on the crucifixion. It says Allah protected Jesus by putting Jesus’ face on another person, so that the authorities were deceived and crucified the imposter instead of Jesus. Allah’s deceit is applauded and lifted up as a model for the way followers of Islam should operate when infidels control the situation.
“This is how followers of Medina Islam excuse moderation by Muslims who practice Mecca Islam,” he continued. “They are permitted to lie about their faith in order to win a toehold for Islam in a non-Islamic country. But when they gain majority status, they are required to abrogate their moderate position and follow the dictates of violent [Medina] Islam. Christians have to understand when they ‘dialogue’ with Islam that you cannot have a helpful discussion with those who lie to you.”
“We don’t try to debate with Muslims,” said a friend from Upper Egypt. “There is nothing to be gained from these dialogues because we don’t have the same God and we see Jesus in very different ways. There is no common ground.”
“Instead,” he continued, “we love them. We don’t accept their beliefs. We don’t accept their ways. But we love them, even when they persecute us, deny us medical care, tear down our churches and will not permit us to rebuild them, aim loudspeakers at our sanctuaries to drown out our preaching … We just keep on loving them with such a powerful love – Jesus’ love – that they must feel His presence.”
“When they feel that love, some ask, ‘who can love me like that?’”
“And we say, ‘His name is Jesus.’”