The Christian Vanguard

 From the book "The Ambassador's Guide to Islam" by Alan Shlemon.  1. The Qur'an says the words of God cannot be changed or corrupted  2. The Qur'an says the Bible is the Word of God 3. Therefore, on the Qur'an's authority, the Bible could not have been changed or corrupted, as many Muslims claim  Three citations in support of 1 are given.  Surah 6:34, "Rejected were the messengers before thee: with patience and constancy they bore their rejection and their wrongs, until Our aid did reach them: there is none that can alter the words (and decrees) of Allah . Already hast thou received some account of those messengers." Surah 6:115, "The Word of your Lord has been perfected in truth and justice. None can change His Words . And He is the All-Hearing, All- Knowing." Surah 10:64, "For them are glad tidings, in the life of the present and in the Hereafter; no change can there be in the words of Allah. This is indeed the supreme felicit...

 In a discussion between a Christian and Muslim, I heard the following analogy. To understand how God can be three persons and one nature, think of three humans. You have three persons, but all one nature, the human nature.  Preliminary comment. All analogies for understanding God will come short in some respect since God is totally unique. God can't be compared to anything, so no analogy is appropriate. That said, they are helpful. We just need to understand that they will have limits.  The limit here is that one could easily respond with: yes, there are three persons, and they all are of the same nature, human. But there are also three humans, which would mean you would have to say there are also three gods. That's an unacceptable consequence for a Trinitarian, and it's often what Muslims will say Christians are forced to believe.  I read the following explanation from J.P. Moreland some years ago, I forgot the title of the book, but a similar analogy, which I thin...

 Being a dad has given me a new perspective on things. One of them is sin. Of course, I know sin is bad. I know sin is evil. I know the consequences of sin, even if I don't grasp the full effects of them. But being a dad, I've come to appreciate the ugliness of sin. I reflect on the joy of my son. He is constantly happy. His biggest emotional dips of the day are when he doesn't get his milk fast enough. Not a very tough life. I will sit him in my lap to read to him, and I get brief glimpses of how God views me. And then sin intrudes upon my joy, and this congruence sucks my joy away. I remember that at some time, perhaps in the not too distant future, my son will experience real sin. My glowing bundle of joy will have his lights turned out some day. Cloudy skies are on his horizon, and I can't do anything to stop it. It's just the fallen world we live in. And it's ugly. There's a kind of healthy hatred of sin one can have. A disappointment in one self, and ...

 A common question you might hear from Muslims is, "Does Jesus have a God?" The answer is Yes, of course He does. He says this repeatedly in scripture. Romans 15:6, 2 Cor 1:3, Ephesians 1:3;7. Now where this goes from here is usually with a follow up question: How is this possible? I've listened to many Christians stumble in trying to answer this question and get steamrolled by Muslims. And I've seen it happen enough to motivate me to write down an answer.  How is possible that God have a God? There are a couple ways to answer this. The first is to analyze what "to have a God" means. Because this could be interpreted in a few different ways, I suspect that Muslim apologists get a lot of mileage out of not defining this relation. What it means to "have" a God is commonly meant as something like creator. We commonly understand the Christian God to be our Creator and Sustainer. So, to say that Jesus has a God would mean that Jesus is also a created be...