Inside Islam

Good morning, everyone! It's nice to see everybody here. Good to see our visitors here as well, as Mr. Wilkie mentions. Pleasure to have you with us here today. Mohammed Al-Bastimi was an Arab student at Al-Najah University in Nablus, which is an Arab city north of Jerusalem in what is called the West Bank. This is a special time for Mohammed because today was the day of his final exam to graduate from the university, and tomorrow was to be his wedding day, a wedding day that he had begun planning for three years earlier.

He arose early on the day of his final exam to go to the nearby mosque for morning prayers and the reading of the Qur'an. After that, he went to the university where he took his final exam and then went back to the mosque for another of the five daily prayers that are required of Muslims. Then he returned home where he and his family set up talking late into the night because, after all, this was their last night together before his wedding. The next morning, the day of his wedding, Mohammed again rose early because this was the big day that he'd waited for for so long.

He washed himself carefully, he sprinkled himself with cologne, put on his best clothes for the wedding. When he left the house that morning, he kissed his mother's hand as he usually did and again went to the mosque for morning prayers. Then, after the prayers, he finished the preparations for his wedding, which included putting on a large heavy belt, which would ensure that his wedding would go as planned.

Back out in the sunlight, Mohammed caught the morning bus along its regular route, then connected with another bus that carried mostly Jewish passengers back and forth among the various Jewish settlements and suburbs that ring the city of Jerusalem. After boarding the bus, Mohammed worked his way to the middle of the bus, thinking all the time of his upcoming wedding. When the moment was right, a smile came over Mohammed's face. He opened his mouth, shouted, Allahu Akbar, which is Arabic for Allah is great, and he pressed a switch on the heavy belt that he was wearing.

Mohammed exploded into a red and pink mist, and the Israeli passengers around him were shredded by the shrapnel by the force of the explosion. Screws, nails, and ball bearings shot out in all directions from the explosive belt that Mohammed was wearing. The bus was instantly engulfed in flames. The force of the explosion was so great that it peeled the top back from the bus. When the smoke had cleared away, more than a dozen Israeli passengers, men, women and children, lay dead and several dozen more were mangled, injured, some with horrible injuries.

And Mohammed had, in Islamic teaching, gone to his wedding. Because at the moment he pressed that switch, he was in paradise, with 72 beautiful, dark-eyed, perpetually young virgins who were now his new brides and companions for all eternity. Mohammed's story that I just related to you can be found on the Palestinian Students' Association website at Al-Najah University, where he was a student.

His story was posted there as a recruitment tool to encourage other Palestinian students to become suicide bombers in the following footsteps of Mohammed. Al-Najah University is called by the Palestinians the Greenhouse of the Martyrs, because a number of its students have blown themselves up as suicide bombers.

The institution is considered a greenhouse where the seeds of martyrdom are planted and nourished until they can sprout and bear their deadly fruit. When we hear a story like that of Mohammed Al-Bastimi that I just related to you, and they happen all too frequently in the Middle East, our reaction is typically to feel utterly sick inside because such events are so totally foreign to our thinking. We just wonder how in the world something like that could happen. What in the world is it that motivates people to do things like that? But unfortunately, that's not the typical reaction in the Muslim world at all, because typically there the family of a suicide bomber is showered with praise, with gifts.

They have essentially a neighborhood party or celebration for the person who has blown himself up, a neighborhood celebration for the family of the son or, in some cases, the daughter who blew themselves up, trying to take with them as many Israelis as they could. Also, in the case of Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq before he was deposed and ultimately hanged, he would typically reward families of suicide bombers with $25,000, which is a sizable fortune in that part of the world.

That's one of the reasons why the United States went in to take out Saddam Hussein, was to put an end to that incentive for mass murder in that part of the world. You may remember or have seen on TV the footage of Palestinian students dancing in the streets and cheering in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks against the World Trade Center in the Pentagon. These are some of the photographs of that here. You may have heard that immediately after that, that the most common name or popular name for newborn boys in the Islamic world was Osama, after Osama bin Laden.

In more recent years, not long after that, you may have heard that the most popular name for newborn boys was Saddam, after Saddam Hussein, because at that time he was viewed as standing up against the American and the British Crusaders there and defeating them, actually, before he, of course, was caught, overthrown, and hanged. But what is it that drives this kind of thinking? What beliefs would make a young college student, like Mohammad Al-Bastimi, plan for three years, which was when he first came in contact with a terrorist organization there in the West Bank, to go out and to blow himself up and to try to take as many Jewish settlers with him as he could?

What kind of thinking is behind events like the 9-11 attacks? How does it tie in with what we can expect to see in the world, in the Arab world, the Muslim world, in the days and in the years ahead?

Today, I would like to go through some other aspects of Islam that have a great deal of bearing on these things. In my last sermon here, I went through some of the history and origins of Mohammad, his teachings, his history, the history of the Muslim world, the Muslim empire, and overview. Today, I would like to go into more detail about the teachings of the Quran that drive this sort of behavior and beliefs, and how that helps us better understand so much of what is taking place in the world today. We'd like to start with a caveat that Muslims, like traditional Christianity, do not all believe and practice the same thing.

There's a wide variety of beliefs among Islam, just as there is within traditional Christianity. You have the extremes on either end. You have the extreme right wing, you might say, and the extreme left wing, or the extreme liberal view, and all sorts of views in between that as well.

And like Christianity and the Islamic world, you have, frankly, a lot of people who just do not know what Islam teaches, or do not really understand what the Quran teaches in there as well. So what I'm trying to do in giving you this series of sermons is to help you understand what is found in the Quran, what is found in the teachings of Muhammad, and the fact that there are plenty of Muslims who do believe those teachings that we'll be talking about today.

So I'm trying to help you to understand the major beliefs that motivate and drive a large number of Muslims in the world today, and that have created a lot of the huge problems that we see around us.

I'd like to start off here talking about some of the differences between Allah, the God of Islam, and the God of the Bible. And I'd like to start with an important truth here that we need to get firmly in mind, because so much of what follows flows from this particular truth. And that truth is that Allah, the God of Islam, and the God of the Bible are very different beings, very, very different.

They are not one and the same. As the earlier sermon this is not a politically correct sermon. I'm going to say a lot of things that are not politically correct. And one of the most politically incorrect statements somebody can make is to say that God, the God of the Bible and Allah of the Quran, are not the same. Very much not the same as we'll see here. Nearly everybody assumes that they are, and I myself believe that for a long time. I just thought Islam was another branch similar to Judaism or something like that. After 9-11, though, after the events and trying to understand what is going on, what is motivating these attacks against Western civilization, read literally dozens of books and hundreds of articles to try to understand this, to get a grasp on it.

I'm trying to summarize a lot of that in this series of sermons here. But after doing a great deal of study into the Quran and what it teaches about Allah and what Muhammad himself taught in the Hadiths, which are the sayings of Muhammad that are not in the Quran, and trying to understand and coming to understand what Allah expects of his followers versus what the God of the Bible expects for his followers and the values that are taught in both of those books, it all makes sense now.

And basically the bottom line is that Allah is simply an ancient pagan deity whose origins are in moon worship in that part of the world. Moon worship was the dominant form of pagan religion in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, and Islam is simply the continued worship of that pagan deity to this day. The underlying assumption of nearly all people is that since Christianity and Islam and Judaism all believe in one supreme being, most people believe that that supreme being is one and the same among all three of those faiths.

This belief in one supreme being is called monotheism. Mono meaning one, and theism meaning belief in God there. But monotheism, just because you believe in one God, does not mean that all monotheists or all monotheistic religions believe in the same God. It's a very important concept when you need to understand there. Just believing in monotheism doesn't in and of itself tell you anything about the nature and the identity of the one supreme being who is being worshipped.

In other words, it isn't enough to say that there's only one God if what you're worshipping is the wrong God or a completely false God. So you need to be sure we understand that. Given an illustration of that, the ancient Egyptians could believe that that say Ra or Osiris was the run-true God, but this doesn't mean that the Hebrew God of the Bible is the same as Ra or Osiris.

In the same way, the Canaanites could have taught that Baal or Molech was the one true God, but that did not make that God the same as the God of the Hebrew Bible. Same way the Romans could have argued that Jupiter or Zeus or Saturn was the one true God.

But again, that doesn't make that God the same as the God of the Bible there. So when it comes to the one true God, the Bible has revealed Himself in such a way that His character and His nature cannot be confused with the other gods of the ancient pagan religions. The cult of the moon, the moon god that Muhammad worshipped there, that worshipped Allah, was transformed by Muhammad into a monotheistic faith that ultimately has somewhere today one and a half to two billion followers in the world. And because Muhammad started his religion with the worship practices of a pagan god, we shouldn't be surprised that Islam is still today composed largely of the practices and worship of the same pagan moon god.

So what are some of the differences between Allah, the God of Muhammad, and the Quran, and the God of the Bible? The book The Islamic Invasion, terrific little book, very informative and highly recommended to any of you. But chapter 5, I'd like to quote quite a bit from that, it has a good analysis of the differences between Allah and the God of the Bible. And I would like to go through those because they do thoroughly disprove this dangerous assumption that the God of the Bible and the God of the Quran are one and the same. When you go through and compare the nature and character of the two, that becomes evident.

So some of the points that the author Robert Morey brings out in this book I'll quote from it now from several pages. First is knowable versus unknowable.

And this is quoting from his book, according to the Bible, God is knowable. Jesus Christ came into this world that we might know God, citing John 17 and verse 3. But in Islam, Allah is unknowable.

He is so transcendent, so exalted, that no man can ever personally know Allah.

While according to the Bible, man can come into a personal relationship with God, which we have, and we celebrate that every year at the Passover, the Allah of the Quran is so distant, so far off, so abstract, that no one can know him.

Another point, personal versus non-personal. The God of the Bible is spoken of as a personal being, with intellect, emotion, and will. This is in contrast to Allah, who is not to be understood as a person. This would lower him to the level of man.

Another point, limited versus unlimited.

The biblical God is limited by his own immutable and unalterable nature.

Thus, God cannot do anything and everything. Now, that may sound a little odd to our hearing, but he goes on to explain. In Titus 1.2, we are told God cannot lie. We are also told this in Hebrews 6.18. God can never act in a way that would contradict his divine nature.

And it cites 2 Timothy 2 and verse 13. But when you turn to the Quran, you discover that Allah is not limited by anything. He is not even limited by his own nature. Allah can do anything, anytime, any place, anywhere, with no limitations. And I might just interject something here relative to this. If you travel to the Middle East and study into Islam, you find that Muslims are very fatalistic by nature. By that, I mean if you have a conversation with a Muslim or between two Muslims, say, and one of them says, well, we need to get together sometime. And the other says, okay, well, let's get together for lunch tomorrow in Shala. And if you watch TV news or something and you hear Muslims talking, you'll hear this word, inshallah, repeated constantly. And what it means is, is Allah willing. So, in other words, we will meet tomorrow for lunch if that is Allah's will. And the implications this has on a Muslim's life is that everything is Allah's will. So if things go bad and things, you know, you have a terrible tragedy. I remember seeing a TV clip from the Iraq War where a, let's see, yes, yes, they were interviewing a Muslim father about 10 or 15 minutes after his infant daughter had been killed in a car bomb explosion. And the man was showing no emotion. And the newscaster was interviewing him and saying, don't you feel sorry about the loss of your baby daughter?

And the man says, inshallah, it was God's will that the little girl die. So there's no sense in mourning about it. This also has massive implications for their part of the world. You might wonder why the Arab world is so backward in so many ways. It's interesting you go travel to places like Egypt. I have commented on this before. You go to Egypt and the parts of the country that are working, by that I mean the streets, the bridges, the electrical infrastructure, and so on, are basically what the British lived there in the last century. It's the part that the British built and worked and improved the lives of the people there. Because you travel around the Muslim world very much at all, and you see that they are literally living as people did hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago. You can see that in the news clips of Iraq and Afghanistan and so on. Because everything is God's will, there is no point in really putting a great deal of effort into improving your lot of light, into building a modern infrastructure in the country, building roads, bridges, dams for electric power, and things like that. It's just a very fatalistic approach, and everything depends on Allah's will. And if Allah is unpredictable, if he is not bound by his own character and principles and so on, anything can happen. It's just fate. Nothing that you do really has a bearing on how your lot in life is going to turn out to be, or the lot in life of your children. It's all Allah's will, and Allah is very fickle, and you never know what he's going to do. So why bother? Why go to the effort to improve yourself, to get a good education, to build up your country, and that sort of thing? So this is really the implications of what he is talking about here. Continuing on back to the book here, Trustworthy versus Capricious. And this ties in with what I was just explaining here. Because the God of the Bible is limited by his own righteous nature, and there are certain things he cannot do, like lie, as we quoted earlier. God is completely consistent and trustworthy. But when we turn to study the actions of Allah in the Quran, we discover that he is totally capricious and untrustworthy. He is not bound by his nature or his word.

And I might add here that, from all the reading that I've done in the Quran, that you find an incredible number of inconsistencies in Allah's supposed revelations to Muhammad there.

For example, in virtually adjacent verses, you'll find things like Allah saying that he is all merciful and all compassionate. And you find that repeated throughout the Quran. And then just two or three verses later, Allah commands Muhammad and his armies to go out and utterly slaughter the inhabitants of this village because they reject Islam. So if Allah is so merciful and compassionate, as it says here, and two verses later, he's telling them to go out and slaughter the inhabitants of these verses. Just a lot of internal inconsistencies in there. And that's a reflection of how Muslims view their God, Allah of the Bible, that he is very capricious. They're not consistent. And you find that kind of inconsistency throughout the Quran on virtually every page. But in the Bible, however, what do we see? We see Jesus Christ, as is written in Hebrews, who is the same yesterday and today and forever. We see God saying that he changes not, but Allah is not like that. He is capricious.

Another major factor, again, quoting from the book, is love of God versus no love of God.

Quoting, the love of God is the chief attribute of the biblical God. Now, I should mention love of God is not our love of God, but rather God's characteristic of love here. So the love of God is the chief attribute of the biblical God as revealed in such places as John 3 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, and so on. God has feelings for his creatures, especially man. But when we turn to the Quran, we do not find love presented as the chief attribute of Allah. Instead, the transcendence of Allah is his chief attribute. Neither does Allah have feelings toward man. That concept is foreign to Islamic teaching. Think about that for a minute. The concept that Allah has feelings toward mankind is foreign to Islamic teaching, and that has huge implications, as we'll discuss here in a few minutes. Continuing, that would reduce Allah to being a mere man, which again is blasphemous to a Muslim. Another factor he mentions, active in history versus passive. Allah does not personally enter into human history and act as a historical agent. He always deals with the world through his word, prophets, and angels. He does not personally come down to deal with man. How different is the biblical idea of the incarnation in which God himself enters history and acts to bring about man's salvation? It's referring, of course, to Jesus Christ coming to earth to live as a physical human being, to interact with humans so that he can be a righteous judge, having experienced everything that we go through in this life.

Continuing on, conclusion. Many westerners assume that Allah is just another name for God.

This is due to their ignorance of the differences between the Allah of the Quran and the God of the Bible, and also due to the propaganda of Muslim evangelists who use the idea that Allah is just another name for God as an opportunity to convert westerners to Islam. That sentence is very, very important because it's the mantra that's repeated constantly on the news and in the mainstream media. Again, he says this is due to the propaganda of Muslim evangelists who use the idea that Allah is just another name for God as an opportunity to convert westerners to Islam. In other words, what you read in the media, what you see in the educational institutions, is there's no difference between Allah and God. They're just names for the same thing. And it's simply an evangelistic tool to deceive westerners into accepting Islam as really not that much different from Judaism or Christianity. Continuing on to quote one more paragraph here, the Bible and the Quran are two competing documents that differ in their concept of deity or God, in other words. This fact cannot be overlooked just because it is not in conformity with the present popularity of religious relativism. So end of quote, and I think that sums it up very well. One source that I read summed up the differences between the God of the Bible and the Allah of the Quran very bluntly.

It said that in Christianity, God sent his son to die for you. In Islam, you send your son to die for Allah. I can't think of anything that sums it up, sums up the differences as well as that quote. The book Inside Islam, from which I've taken a fair amount of material from this, it gives a short section, an illustration that perfectly illustrates this particular concept here.

In this book, I might mention Riza Safa is the name of it, it's a foreign name. The author is a former Muslim, so he's talking about Islam from having been a Muslim for much of his life.

He says on page 41, to a Muslim dying and killing for the cause of Islam is not only an honor, but also a way of pleasing Allah. And notice this very important sentence, the only way Muslims can have assurance of salvation and eternal life is by becoming a martyr in the cause of Islam. Now think about that in relation to what I said earlier about Allah being very capricious, very fickle, you might say, because to a Muslim he doesn't know if his salvation is assured. We on the other end know that, as Paul wrote in Philippians, that he has begun a good work in us. We'll continue that up until the time of Christ's return in the resurrection. We know that so long as we are faithful to God and serving him and obeying him, that our salvation is a sure thing. So long as we do not fall away and turn our back on that. A Muslim does not have that assurance. He only has one sure way to salvation, and that is to die in the cause of spreading Islam. So I'd like to, the author of this book then goes on to give an example of this. He says, and I quote, this is why so many young boys in Iran volunteered to become a Basiji. It's an Arabic word that means the mobilized or the army. And this is referring to the Iran-Iraq war back in the 1980s when Saddam Hussein tried to invade Iran. Continuing on, Ayatollah Khomeini went on television asking for 10,000 volunteers to fight in the war. The next day, all the boys on the street who had volunteered had a piece of red tape on their foreheads.

Their task would be to die for the cause. A Basiji was committed to death, not just the possibility of death. The Basijis volunteered to clear the minefields with their bodies, and they did it.

Military leaders would send out as many as 5,000 boys at once to run through the fields and trip the mines. Sometimes they asked the boys to clear high-voltage border fences by throwing their bodies against electric fences. Thousands of young bodies were shattered and electrocuted in this manner.

Many of the boys were only 12 or 13 years old. To them, Khomeini gave the promise of beheshed, or paradise. To symbolize this false promise, he gave them a key which they hung around their neck, a key with which they could open the gate of heaven. This is a very sobering and tragic concept here, but again this was to them the only sure way to enter paradise by becoming a martyr in the cause of Islam. I'd like to talk now about a very major difference between Allah of the Quran and the God of the Bible, and that is cruelty. One area in which the differences come out is the absolute cruelty and the lack of mercy that we see in the Quran. I'd like to give a few verses, quote directly from it so you can see what I'm talking about.

This first one is Surah 9 and verse 5. Surah, again, is a chapter. It's what we would call a chapter. The Quran is organized into various surahs, anywhere from several pages to just several sentences long. So this is Surah 9 and verse 5. It says, quote, when the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Now keep in mind, as we covered in the earlier sermon, who an idolater is. An idolater is anyone who does not worship Allah. So in Islamic thinking, an idolater, we as Christians would be considered idolaters because we are worshiping, as a Muslim would view it, anyone who worships Jesus Christ and God the Father, because those are two different beings, they refer to Christians as idolaters or polytheists. And you'll see this in their writing constantly. So do not think that that Muslims believe that we are worshiping the same God as they do. They do not believe that. So we, Christians, are idolaters in their minds. So again, slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie and ambush everywhere for them. So the point I'd like to, the part I'd like to point out here is that Muhammad's followers are specifically told to fight dirty, to lie and ambush for your enemies, to ambush them, to not fight them out in the open. This reminds me of the passage in the Bible how the Amalekites attacked the Israelites when they were coming up out of Egypt and passing through the desert. If you remember the story, the Amalekites would not fight the Israelite men at the front of the column. They would attack the rear of the column. Now, who was at the rear of the column? Well, that would be where the elderly were, the old men and women who can't quite keep up with everybody else. It would be where the young, where the women would be, where the young children would be, again, because they can't quite keep up with everyone else. It would be where the sick would be, where the injured. So the Amalekites, instead of attacking and fighting fair out in the open, would come around and attack the Israelites from the rear. And they would slaughter the elderly, the injured, the women, the children, that sort of people. It's probably the earliest recorded incident of terrorism in all of history, and certainly in the Bible, and that is exactly what it is. Terrorism. Terrorism killing the innocent. And it's basically today the same people doing the same type of thing in that same part of the world there. It's the same mentality at work over the centuries from the time of the Exodus on up to our time today. And, of course, God's judgment on the Amalekites, if you remember, his command was to utterly wipe them out, to slaughter every man, woman, child, animal, just utterly eliminate all remembrance of them from the earth because of their mentality, because of their terrorist activities against the Israelites at that time. God commanded them to be utterly, completely wiped out. It shows us something about how God views this type of behavior.

Another surah or chapter that illustrates Allah's cruelty is Surah 5 verses 34 and 35.

Those who make war against Allah and his Apostle, his Apostle is referring to Muhammad, and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land. They shall be held up to shame in this world and sternly punished in the hereafter. So notice here that Allah in the Quran commands the torture the crippling and the maiming of prisoners of war.

Crippling and maiming them. Crucifixion, of course, was a horrible way to die.

Involved days of torture to be executed in that way. And cutting off a prisoner's hand on one side, it would say cut off the right hand and the left foot or opposite, and that would just leave the person maimed and crippled for the rest of his life then. It would be very difficult for him to even support himself or to be able to do anything productive from that point forward. It was just absolutely barbaric to cripple and maim a person like that for the rest of his life. And if you don't believe me, I actually went out on the internet and searched for some photos of this, and thinking of putting that in here, and decided not to because it's just too grisly. But you can find that. You can find photos of people where that has been done in places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq, that sort of thing. In Islamic lands that are ruled by Islamic law, which is called Sharia law, you've probably heard of that term Sharia law, thieves typically have a hand cut off for stealing. Anybody know which hand is cut off? Right hand. Cut off the right hand. Anyone know why they cut off the right hand? Yes, you eat with in Islamic culture, you eat with the right hand, and to be blunt, when you go to the bathroom, you wipe with your left hand. So by cutting off the right hand, you are forced to eat with the same hand that you wipe with for the rest of your life.

You won't find that. You won't find that in our media, or most books, or articles, or so on, but that is the reality. That is why they do that. Again, it is to utterly humiliate the person and to mark them for the rest of their life. Again, this is not politically correct, but it's facts.

In contrast, you might think, how did God's word, how did the Bible, God's revelation to Moses, say to deal with a thief? What happened to a thief there? He had to restore several times over what he had stolen, depending on various circumstances there. So under the law that God revealed to Israel, if the debt was paid, the thief restored what he had stolen several times over, the thief would learn a lesson from that. He would know he would have to work harder to go off and repay back what he had stolen here. So hopefully the incentive there was for the thief to repent, to learn that crime does not pay. And would give him the opportunity to repent and to go on with his life, and no one is the worse off for it at that point. But under Islamic law, a thief is permanently maimed and crippled and marked as a thief for the rest of his life. So in other words, there's no room for mercy. There's no room for repentance. There's no room for forgiveness and absolution of one's crimes there in Islam. Instead, there is just vengeance. There's just utter humiliation and crippling a person for the rest of his life. There's no room for mercy, but only carrying out vengeance by maiming a person in a very cruel and humiliating way. And this is a totally different concept, again, between the God of the Bible and the Allah of Islam. You might recall reading some of the stories after the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. And you may remember some of the horrible stories of people who had been victimized by Saddam Hussein's secret police and military and people like that, how he dealt with people who disagreed with him. I remember stories of things like one of Saddam Hussein had two sons, Uday and Kusei, I believe were their names, and one of them had a habit of taking his political enemies and feeding them live into wood chippers.

In Iraq, one of the favorite methods of torture was to use electric drills to drill holes in people. That is, again, the nature of the culture that has been immersed in Islam for all these centuries there. Those things did not happen in a vacuum. They happened because the cultures of that world, having been immersed in Islam for so many centuries, are very cruel.

Totally lacking in mercy, compassion, and common human decency, as we would view it.

It is very ironic that the people in that part of the world can be very hospitable. On the one hand, if you ever travel there, you'll see that hospitality. People, total strangers, will invite you into their house for a meal or for tea or something like that there. But on the other hand, they can be very cruel and very vengeful. And again, that is just part of their culture. Islam was a religion of the desert, which is a very harsh and cruel environment, very difficult to survive there. And the people who lived in that harsh and cruel environment worshipped very harsh and cruel gods there. And so we shouldn't be surprised that from that environment came a religion and a god that are very harsh and cruel because they go hand in hand there. Continuing on with this theme, let's talk a little bit about the hell of the Quran, because another way in which this harshness and cruelty are spelled out is in the Muslim view of hell. Now, we all recognize that the modern Christian, the traditional Christian view of hell is not found in the Bibles. Confusion based on misunderstanding of the Greek words and concepts for Gehenna and that sort of thing. And they took a lot of concepts out of Greek and pagan religions to come up with this idea of an ever-burning hell.

So we know that that is not found in the Bible. It's a distortion of those things. And we know that those ideas came from sources outside the Bible. However, Islam very definitely teaches about an ever-burning hell where people are tortured forever. Non-Muslims, rather, will be tortured forever to be specific. Apparently, Muhammad took some false ideas about hell from false Christianity and incorporated them into the Quran as part of Allah's supposed revelation to him about hell. And the Quran describes many of the tortures of hell for those who refuse to submit to Allah and become a Muslim. So I'll quote just a few of those verses from the Quran.

Surah 9 and verse 35 describes the punishment of those who hoard up material possessions, specifically gold and silver, rather than using it to further the cause of Islam.

Quote, To those who hoard up gold and silver and do not spend it in Allah's cause, proclaim a woeful punishment. The day will surely come when their treasures shall be heated in the fire of hell and their foreheads, sides, and backs branded with them. They will be told, These are the riches which you hoarded. Taste, then, what you were hoarding. So according to the Quran, the gold and silver objects, the jewelry, the bracelets, the necklaces, rings, and so on, will be heated in the fires of hell and then used to brand those who are caught there in that punishment. To have red-hot gold and silver pressed against their flesh, to permanently brand them on their foreheads, on their sides, on their backs, and so on. Surah 8 and verse 50, If you could see the angels when they carry off the souls of the unbelievers, unbelievers again, as non-Muslims, they shall strike them on their faces and their backs, saying, Taste the torment of the conflagration. This is the punishment for what your hands committed. So what you have here being described is Allah's angels beating and maiming the souls of non-Muslims and taunting them, mocking them, as they are carried away to hell to suffer for all eternity. Another one, Surah 44 and verse 43, states, The fruit of the zakam tree, and I'm not sure what that is, shall be the sinner's food. Like dregs of oil, like scalding water, it shall simmer in his belly. A voiceful cry sees him and drag him into the depths of hell. Then pour out scalding water over his head, saying, Taste this, illustrious and honorable man. This is the punishment which you have doubted. So again, what we have here is people being punished, tortured without mercy, being force-fed stuff that will have the effect of scalding water poured down a person's throat, and boiling water being poured all over them. And if you don't think Muslims take this seriously, go back and read some Good History books, because what you will find, for instance, it came across this in studying the relations between Hindus and Muslims in India, in the Indian subcontinent there. And when the Muslims would try to expand their empire against the Hindus, they would actually use the Quran as a guide for how to torture their prisoners.

And this part about scalding water, I read accounts where they would literally get cauldrons of boiling water and lower Hindus into the boiling water or oil there. Where do they get that? They get it straight out of the Quran there, taking the tortures of hell as they view it and applying it to those who will not convert to Islam in this day. Another one, Surah 9, in verse 73, says, Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them.

Hell shall be their home, an evil fate. So here Muhammad is justifying the brutality of his religion by saying that Allah himself revealed to him personally that people of other religions are evil and belong in hell. So therefore, according to Muhammad, basically any barbaric act that you want to perpetrate against non-Muslims is justified because they deserve it and because they're going to hell anyway if they do not convert and become Muslim. So anything is fair game and how you want to treat your prisoners are people who do not convert to Islam. Another one, Surah 98, in verse 6, lest you believe that Christians and Jews are exempted from this.

It says, The unbelievers among the people of the Book. Now again, unbelievers, they're not talking about unbelievers in the Bible. They're talking about unbelievers in the Quran and Muhammad, those who don't believe in them. The unbelievers among the people of the Book, and that's a term that's used for Christians and Jews. And the pagans shall burn forever in the fire of hell.

They are the vilest of all creatures. So again, this is talking about Christians and Jews who do not see the wisdom of converting to Islam and accepting Allah. I might mention here too that Muslims view the Bible as corrupted. I'm not sure whether I got into this in the first sermon or not.

And the Quran as the successor to the Bible and the true revelation of Allah. So according to Muhammad, Christians and Jews who do not accept Islam are like the pagans. And just like the pagans, they deserve to be punished forever in hell because they are the vilest of all creatures, as it says here. Another one, Surah 22, verses 19 through 21. Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Scalding water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins, and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed with rods of iron. Whenever in their anguish they try to escape from hell back, they shall be dragged and will be told taste the torment of the conflagration. One more I'd like to read Surah 18 verses 28 and 29.

For the wrongdoers we have prepared a fire which will encompass them like the walls of a pavilion.

It's referring to a plaza or room surrounded by curtains, except the curtains in this case are flames. When they cry out for help, they shall be showered with water as hot as molten brass, which will scald their faces. Evil shall be their drink and dismal their resting place.

So these are some of the descriptions of hell from the Quran directly quoting from it. There are plenty more passages that describe it, but these describe some of what is in view, what lies in the future for those who do not accept Islam. And again, the reason I'm going through this is to show the very graphic differences between the loving and merciful and compassionate God that we honor and worship, compared to the God revealed in the Quran.

Basically, Muhammad's Allah is revealed to be nothing more than a cruel sadist.

And since that is clearly described in the Quran as part of Allah's nature and his character, we shouldn't be surprised to see that same type of cruelty exercised by Allah's followers in the world today. After all, they are simply following Allah's nature, his character, his example is spelled out in the Quran. Now, since Muhammad had such a warped view of hell, we shouldn't also be surprised that he had a very warped view of heaven or paradise, as it's typically called in the Quran. Muhammad had a very good marketing plan for his religion. In war against the infidels, Muslims have nothing to lose because well Islam conquered much of the known world in the seventh century because Muslims had a powerful motivation for that. The Quran spelled out that four-fifths, eighty percent of the booty, went to the Muslim fighters to be divided up among them, and the other fifth, rather conveniently, went to Muhammad himself, or to Muslim charities there.

You find that in Surah 8 in verse 41. Won't go through there for lack of time. So this was, the Islamic wars were a self-financing effort. Muhammad didn't have to pay the soldiers to fight to spread Islam. They got their pay from the looting and the plunder there so they could share in the spoil. So if a Muslim man won in the battle and he lived, he survived, then he got his share of the loot and the plunder from that. He got children for slaves, he got women for sexual slaves or wives, and on the other hand, if he died in battle, well, he got to go to paradise, where he would get essentially the same thing there as well. So what could a Muslim and what does a Muslim look forward to in paradise today? For lack of time, I won't go through and quote the passages as we did here, but I'll just summarize what is revealed in the Quran and the Hadiths, the sayings of Muhammad, about paradise. For one thing, in paradise you would enjoy great wealth. Those who went there would be, quote, decked with pearls and bracelets of gold and a raid and garments of silk, end of quote. They would eat off gold dishes with gold and silver eating utensils. They would, quote, recline on green cushions and fine carpets, end of quote. They would also recline on jeweled couches, it says. So in brief, they would enjoy wealth unlike anything they would be likely to ever experience in the human life as a nomad living in his tent out in the desert there. In the desert of the Middle East, they didn't have much water, obviously.

Water was very precious and rare. So in paradise, the Islamic view is that you have plenty of water to drink from. There are many springs of water, each one tasting different. The most prominent were springs that taste like nectar, one that tastes like ginger, and another one that tastes like wine. There are also rivers in paradise, and these also are unique. One is a river of water, one is a river of milk, and another of honey, and another one of wine. Muhammad was promised his own personal river, which had banks that were lined with pearls there. Paradise is also loaded with fruit trees covered with apples, dates, grapes, flowers, all with trunks and branches made out of solid gold. On Earth, the Acacia tree, and if you've been to the Middle East, you may have seen some Acacia trees in the desert. They're very scrawny, brushy tree, not much to look at. It doesn't bear fruit here on Earth, but in paradise, it bears 70 different kinds of fruit, 70 different tastes and colors of fruit. And because shade is very rare in the desert, there will be plenty of shade in paradise. In the form of a tree that is so large that, according to Muslim tradition, it would take a man riding a horse a hundred years to go past this giant shade tree that provides shade for everything. In paradise, there would be plenty to eat with these rivers of water and milk and honey and wine. And you may be thinking to yourself, didn't I read or hear somewhere that Muslims aren't allowed to drink wine? Well, that's true, except in paradise, the wine is non-intoxicating wine. It's non-intoxicating, so you don't get drunk. You can drink all you want in paradise and not have a hangover, throw up on yourself, or whatever there. So again, these are the teachings of Islam.

Also, after you drink this non-intoxicating wine there, your body smells like perfume.

In fact, any time you eat in paradise, you smell like perfume, because according to Muhammad, in paradise, you never have to go to the bathroom.

The food that you eat or drink there in paradise is transformed into perfume that oozes out of your skin. I'm serious. This is what they believe. So it makes you smell nice all the time. Now, to understand where some of these concepts come from, imagine that you have lived all your 30, 40, 50 years in the desert, sleeping in a tent made out of goat hair and living around goats and camels and things like that. You would understand why perfume is such a big deal in paradise, that everything you eat oozes out of your skin as perfume there. Also, whenever you belch or hiccup, that also smells like perfume as it comes out, as do other bodily functions, which we will not get into. They smell like perfume in contrast to life today. So I must say that Islam actually has probably the best recycling program that's ever been thought of here.

So I don't know about you, but it sounds to me like maybe Muhammad was having a little bit of the intoxicating type of wine when he came up with some of these visions of what paradise was to be like there. So again, that is what you find. Also in paradise, everyone is healthy. They are complete. They are as tall as palm trees and in their prime of life at age 33. So if you ever wanted to know what your prime is, it's 33. So you either have something to look forward to or someone something to look fondly back on, depending on which side of that milestone you fall on there.

In paradise, some have it better than others. If you're a good Muslim man or woman, you might make it into paradise, as we talked about earlier. And there you'll be married to the spouse you had in this life if you were both good enough. If not, you just simply look around for somebody else there. Because again, according to the Muslim author of Inside Islam, you can never quite be sure whether you're good enough to make it into paradise or not, because Allah can be very harsh in His judgments. There's also one particular surah where Muhammad says that He is not even sure that He Himself is good enough to get into paradise. That is so how unsure salvation is to a Muslim there. That is why there is only one sure way again for a Muslim to make it into paradise. And it's also the way you can get the best that paradise has to offer. And that's the story that I started this sermon with about Muhammad al-Bastimi, the suicide bomber who went to paradise at his death. You might have wondered why I kept mentioning that this was his wedding day that he was preparing for. And that's because in Muslim teaching, that is exactly what it is. It is the wedding day because the only sure way to enter paradise is to become a martyr fighting for Islam.

And in Islamic teaching, as soon as a martyr sheds his first drop of blood in death, that he is guaranteed his place in paradise. And when he arrives, he is waiting for him there, 72, perpetually young, perpetually beautiful dark-eyed virgins whose skin glows like sunlight.

It's even described as being semi-transparent there. And these are to be his brides for his wedding day and for all eternity. These virgins in Islamic teachings are called hooris, H-O-U-R-I-S. And I'd like to read a few verses from this.

Yes, here we go. Surah 37 verses 40 through 48. But the true servants of Allah shall be well provided for feasting on fruit and honored in the gardens of delight. Reclining face to face upon soft couches, they shall be served with a goblet filled at a gushing fountain, white and delicious to those who drink it.

It will neither dull their senses nor befuddled them. So this is referring to this non-intoxicating wine that I mentioned earlier. They will sit with bashful dark-eyed virgins. And the word here is hooris. It's an Arabic word. Another Surah 52 in verse 17. They shall recline on couches ranged in rows. To dark-eyed hooris or virgins we shall wed them. Another one, Surah 55, excerpting from verses 54 through 77. Therein, referring to Paradise, are bashful virgins who neither man nor jinni. And, whoops, excuse me, I, okay, I'm sorry, I didn't include this slide in here. I'll just finish reading it, though. Therein are bashful virgins who neither man nor jinni. And this is referring to desert spirits. It's where we get the English word genie, spirits who live out in the desert. Will have touched before. Virgins as fair as corals and rubies. Virgins chased and fair. Dark-eyed virgins sheltered in their tents. So, again, these are just a few of these that promise these virgins, supernatural virgins in paradise, to service the needs of those who go there. In the Hadiths, which, again, are the sayings of Muhammad that did not make it into the Quran, Muhammad goes one step further and he expands the promise of virgins to include, again, this is not politically correct, but a free sex market in paradise where there is no limit to the number of sexual partners that one may have. This particular Hadith says, Ali, who was one of Muhammad's earlier followers, reported that the Apostle of Allah, and this is referring to Muhammad, said, there is in paradise a market wherein there will be no buying or selling but will consist of men and women. When a man desires a beauty, he will have intercourse with them. And this gives the reference from a compilation of the Hadiths there. I don't know whether you noticed it, but in this market are both men and women. So, in other words, in the Muslim view of paradise, if you're a man, you get to take your pick of men or women.

There are a number of surahs that also describe that in paradise, a Muslim man will have not only the 72 dark-eyed virgins to choose from, but they will also have around them, quote, fresh-faced young boys as pretty as pearls, end quote, who are there to serve them if the men are so inclined. I won't go into more details in that. I think you can understand what is implied. And again, this is something that is definitely not politically correct for mention, to mention, and you won't hear about it anywhere else, but this is a documented fact of Islamic teaching. I'll just comment that this practice, if you read anything about the Arab or Muslim world, you'll find it's quite widespread, and apparently was widespread back in Muhammad's day at that time, to the point that he would promise young boys to his followers if they were so inclined. So, in the Muslim view of paradise, just to sum up, it's basically a place of eternal youth, of endless rounds of eating and drinking and sexual relations with as many partners if you want, at least if you're a man. If you're a woman, sorry, you're out of luck, you just get stuck with the husband that you had in this life. So again, it's not politically correct to say it, but the paradise of Islam is nothing more than the rantings and the ravings of a sick and degenerate and perverted mind, to be blunt about it, and not a spiritual mind at all.

I'd like to talk about one more concept here before we close, and that is a very important concept to understand, and that is Islam and Jihad. Islam and Jihad. We didn't cover that last time, but Jihad is an Arabic word that means struggle. That would be the closest equivalent in the English language. Jihad is a secret duty for Muslims, and you've probably heard some of the debate about what what Jihad means or what it doesn't mean. Some say that Jihad, most Muslims will say that Jihad simply refers to the personal struggle to become a better person, to become a better Muslim. Some say that Jihad means holy war, spreading Islam by force. In fact, both of them are right because Jihad, meaning struggle, basically, well, what is the struggle for? The struggle is for advancing the cause of Islam. So one who strives in Jihad to become a better Muslim is struggling to advance the cause of Islam. The one who mounts his horse with his saber behind him, or the one who wraps his belt around him to blow up the heated Jews, is also engaging in the struggle to spread Islam because he is killing the enemies of Islam. So Jihad can refer to both of those, to all of those, anything to spread Islam there. Again, Islam, as we covered in the earlier sermon, means submission or surrender. So one who struggles with himself to submit to Allah is carrying out the duty of Jihad because he is submitting or surrendering to Islam. And also, one who spreads Islam by force is also becoming a Muslim, or practicing Islam, becoming a Muslim because he is spreading the will of Allah throughout the world. He's carrying out the Muslim duty of Jihad, or struggle to spread Islam. Muslims who believe in Jihad, as holy war, have no problem finding verses in the Quran to support that view. As a matter of fact, if you read the communiques from people like Ben Laden, if you go on the internet and search them out, translate the communiques from different terrorist groups, you'll find them just filled with quotes from the Quran.

That's how they understand the verses. That's how they apply them. That's why they do the things they do, because they read it right there in the Quran. I'll quote just a few of them. There are many, many that advocate and justify violence to spread Islam. So just reading a few, Surah 8 and verse 60. Let not be unbelievers, non-Muslims. You need to understand that when Muslims use words, their meanings are quite different from the way we would view them in English. An unbeliever is not somebody who doesn't believe in God. An unbeliever is a non-Muslim. It's somebody who doesn't believe in Allah, the God of the Quran, which includes, again, Christians, Jews, pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, anyone who is not a Muslim. So let not the unbelievers think that they will ever get away. They have not the power to do so. Muster against them all the men and cavalry at your command, so that you may strike terror into the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others besides them who are unknown to you but known to Allah. Surah 9, verse 14.

Make war on them. Allah will chastise them at your hands and humble them. Humble them, meaning to defeat them. He will grant you victory over them and heal the spirit of the faithful. Surah 8, verse 12. Allah revealed His will to the angel, saying, I shall be with you.

Give courage to the believers, the Muslims. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels, the non-Muslims, the non-believers. Strike off their heads. Strike off the very tips of their fingers. Perhaps you've seen clips on the news of some of the beheading videos from terrorist groups, and the videos were mostly cut off just before they continue the deed there. Perhaps you've listened to one. Sometimes you'll hear them. You'll see a clip, and the screen goes black, and then you hear this chanting and shouting and so on in Arabic. And maybe you've wondered what they are chanting and shouting there. Well, one thing, if you listen to it, one phrase you'll hear continually is, Allahu Akbar. Allah is great, or more specifically, Allah is greater than all else. Allah is greater than the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians, the God of any other God. Allah is greatest is actually a more appropriate translation for that. So you'll hear in these videos the shouting, Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! In there continually. The second thing that they are chanting in these videos is they are quoting verses from the Quran, behead the infidels. And that's exactly what they're chanting. They are citing verses from the Quran as they are beheading the non-believers. Again, not politically correct. You don't see this.

You'll typically find this only in sources like Memri. It's a source I've mentioned before, memri.org. Wonderful source. Go there. It's an Israeli source. And what they do is they translate video clips and articles that appear in the Arab media, newspapers, magazines, communiques from the terrorists, this kind of thing. And you can read there what they're really saying in Arabic.

And you'll see it translated into English. And that's where a lot of the material I'm giving you comes from as well. So again, when they do this, they are simply quoting Scripture from the Quran to behead the infidels. And then they do it and recording it on video to share with the world.

In Islamic theology, the world is divided into two major spheres or worlds, you might say.

There's the sphere that is called, as they would call it, Dar al-Islam.

Dar is an Arabic word that means land, house, abode, dwelling place, has all of those meanings. Dar al-Islam, or the land or world or sphere of Islam that is under Islamic rule. And there's also, in contrast to that, the other sphere is called Dar al-Harb, which means the land, the abode, the area of war. In Islamic theology and philosophy, the world is divided into those two, and those two alone, the land of Islam and the land of war. Why is it called the land of war? It's called the land of war because Muslims are obligated to fight against it until the whole world is Dar al-Islam, the land, the world, the abode of Islam. It's part of Islamic teaching, and you find it continually throughout the writings of bin Laden, the speeches of him, the Qur'an, other sources. There, you need to understand that. That is a fundamental aspect of Islamic teaching is that all non-Muslim lands must eventually become conquered and become a part of Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam. It can be done preferably by peaceful conversion, but by force, if necessary. This theology and this approach perfectly explains what we see all around us in the world today. Muslim countries are generally at peace between themselves, although there are civil wars taking place in some Muslim countries. You might think of Algeria, for instance, on the Mediterranean coast, where over about the last 15 years, I think, more than 100,000 Muslims have been killed by other Muslims in a civil war. What is the civil war about? It's because the hard-line Muslims who believe in Sharia law, who take every word of the Qur'an very literally, are trying to overthrow the more moderate Islamic government there and replace everything with Sharia law. You might think of the Taliban there. It's another version of the same type of theology and belief system there. You might think of what happened in the Iranian Revolution back in 79, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and Ayatollah Khomeini came in.

Islamic fundamentalists took over, and that has been, well, frankly, the root of much of the modern terrorism that we see around us today. Hezbollah, the famous terrorist group in Lebanon, traces its root back to funding and support from Ayatollah Khomeini right after the overthrow of Iran.

Hamas, the terror group in Gaza, there, same thing. A lot of these different terror groups that we read about in the news there can all be traced back to that. Another aspect of this that bears bringing out is that the Arab world is so totally united against Israel because it is in Islamic theology and worldview, it is an abomination for country or land or territory that was once a part of Dar al-Islam to revert back to Dar al-Harb. Because in their mind, since the world is to be ultimately united all under Islamic rulership, a caliphat, which would be ruled by a caliph, in other words, an Islamic ruler, since that is to be the destiny of the entire world as described in the Quran, it is an abomination for any territory that was once ruled by Muslims to go back under Christian or Jewish control, as Israel is today. And that is why Muslims are so determined to utterly wipe out Israel. And in their teaching, their preaching, you see it constantly, we're going to drive the Jews into the sea, to eliminate the Jews between the sea and the sea, referring to the Dead Sea, or from your perspective, the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, to totally eliminate all Jews out of that area and drive them back into the sea so the land can become part of the land of Islam. Again there. And I'm just continually amazed at how many of our Western leaders fail to understand that. All they have to do is read it in the Quran. All they've got to do is read some of bin Laden's speeches, and they lay it out very plainly in there. That is their goal, total world domination. So when our government tries to force the Israelis to continue making concession after concession after concession, to get out of southern Lebanon, to give the Sinai Desert back to the Egyptians, which they took in the 67 war, to get out of Gaza Strip and turn that back over, now they're pressuring them to give up the West Bank and give that to the Palestinians. They fail to understand that that is not going to satisfy the Muslims. It is not going to satisfy them until the land of Israel is free, is totally Jew-free, until there's not another Jew living in the Middle East. Again, this is not politically correct, but that is exactly what they say in their writings and their teachings. Again, you can look it up yourself there. No peaceful solution is possible with those who believe in their heart and soul that their land, that your land belongs to them, and that you should be dead. How do you negotiate a peaceful solution with people who believe that with all their heart and soul? That's the reality of the situation in the Middle East. That is also why Osama bin Laden and others are so motivated to drive Americans and the British out of the Middle East in its entirety.

If you read any of his letters, again, he's very clear of that, that Muslims should drive the Western Crusaders, and that's the term he uses continually in his writings, Crusaders, because in bin Laden's mind, in the minds of a lot of these Muslims, the Crusades never ended.

They never ended. So when America and Britain and others invaded Kuwait and Iraq and now Afghanistan, in their mind, that is simply another crusade against Islam. And you have to drive out the Crusaders. See it in bin Laden's writings all the time.

There. And he refers to it as a sacred duty, a jihad, against America and Britain to drive the Crusaders out. I don't know how many of you noticed it, but if you remember back in the Kuwait War, the Iraq invasion back in 91, the U.S. established huge military bases throughout Saudi Arabia to support the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq. Go to Saudi Arabia today, you will not find a single American military personnel anywhere in the country. Why is that? They were all withdrawn several years ago to cater to the Muslims, because the Saudi government demanded that we take all of our soldiers out of there, because again, it is an abomination for these Western Crusaders to be on the Holy Land, the land of Islam, the land of Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam.

So they forced all of our military forces to withdraw from there and to move to other countries in that region there. Again, you probably did not see that reported in any of the media, but that's exactly what happened. That's why we've gone and built other bases in other areas around there now.

Many of the Saudis agree with Osama bin Laden, and that's why they demanded that we move our soldiers out of there after we had saved them from Saddam Hussein. This also explains why, in recent decades, there have been incessant wars on the fringes of the Islamic world, because in those areas, you may have heard the phrase, bloody borders of Islam. We'll talk about that more next time. But it's areas where Muslims have gained enough power to see victory within their grasp. They're continually pushing, spreading out the borders of Islam. This is a graphic that I showed last time that shows the green countries are where the Muslim population is 50 percent or greater. In a lot of these areas, particularly the Middle East, Northern Africa, it's more like 95, 98, 99 percent Islamic. And the gold-colored areas are those where the Muslim population is 10 to 50 percent. And do yourself a favor when you start reading about wars, terrorist attacks, going on in the world. Get yourself a world map. Look it up and see where these areas are. And what you'll see is they're all around the fringes of Islam because Islam is pressing and pushing out to expand Dar al-Islam, the world, the land, the sphere of Islam.

That's why you see the current civil wars and unrest in places like Algeria on the Mediterranean coast, down in Ethiopia, down in here, Ivory Coast over in here, Kosovo up in here in southern Europe, Kenya down in here, Nigeria over in here, Russia or Chechnya as it's popularly called up in the Caucasus region up in here, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan right in here, and the western provinces of China along in here, Thailand down in here, and the Philippines as well as India, the Kashmir region right up in here, and of course Israel right here. What is happening in all of these areas is that Islam is pushing and pressing to take over new territory, new lands. So do yourself a favor again. Look up these places on a map and see what is taking place and just overlay this map in your mind with that. The clear teaching of Islam is that it is the one and only supreme and true religion and that it will win out ultimately over all other religions and eventually the entire world will come under Islamic rule. I'd like to close with this quote from Surah 61 in verse 9. It states, it is he, Allah, who is sent for his Apostle Muhammad with guidance and the true faith, Islam, so that he may exalt it above all religions, exalt it above all religions, much as the idolaters, and again this is referring to Christians and Jews as well as any other non-Muslim, may dislike it. So in other words, you accept Islam or tough luck. So in conclusion, these are some of the beliefs that drive Islam that are totally contradictory to the true God and the Bible. Islam is not going away. There are between one and a half and two billion Muslims in the world and Islam is a major threat to the West because it sees the West and the United States and Israel in particular as the major obstacle to obtaining Islam's true goal. Its true destiny that it had in earlier centuries when the Islamic Empire was at the height of its power and ultimately its true destiny to rule the entire world. And yes, as a reminder, there are some Muslims who truly are peaceful and renounce violence, but it's the ones who believe these passages we've quoted from the Quran today that are read today that the rest of the world needs to worry about. We'll learn more about that in the next sermon in this series.