How are Yahweh and Allah different?
By
John Piper Februaray 28, 2008
God has the right to kill anybody he wants. In fact, he is responsible
for all death. "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the
name of the Lord" (Job 1:21).
We don't own our lives. God owns our lives. He made them, and he
has the right to do with them as he please.
The question becomes: When he uses a human to kill another human,
what are we to think?
There is an overlap between the way Muslims think about God and
the way Christians think about God in the Old Testament. Clearly God appointed
that Joshua would go into the promised land and destroy
the inhabitants. And the reason he commanded it, as stated in Deuteronomy 9:4, is that they were greatly
wicked:
Do not say in your heart, after the Lord your God has thrust them
out before you, "It is because of my righteousness that the Lord has
brought me in to possess this land," whereas it is because of the wickedness
of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you.
Even back in Genesis, when God promised the land to Abraham, he
said that his offspring would first go down to
So God was giving more and more time, and the pagans in the land
were filling up more and more sin in resistance to God's common grace. Then
the time came for their judgment, and he used the people of
That is what I believe, and if the Muslims agree that Allah has
worked that way too, then I acknowledge the overlap.
The difference now is that, with the coming of Jesus Christ, God
does not relate to people like that anymore. Back then the people of God were
a theocratic, ethnic, and political entity. Today they are not. With the coming
of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom has been taken away from the people of
The Church is a people gathered from all tongues, tribes, peoples,
and nations. Jesus Christ himself has borne our sins, and he sends us out
to preach a gospel of grace and of the forgiveness of sins, based on his death.
What unites us now are not our political and ethnic
realities but, rather, our faith in Jesus Christ.
So we're not building an earthly kingdom. We're not protecting
an ethnic entity. In the name of a crucified Savior we are gathering people
from all nations, a people who are called to love their enemies and even die
for them.
Christians now spread the gospel by suffering and dying, not by
killing. So a change has happened. And there's the big difference.
Muslims don't have a savior. They don't have Christ. They don't
have a means of forgiveness. They simply have an authoritative God who says,
"Do this and don't do that." And they just have to wait until judgment
day to see whether they have been good enough to enter heaven. And they still
believe that their God can authorize his people to kill infidels.
So today there is a huge difference between Christianity—as Christ
has defined it for us—and Islam. Not only do they not have a savior, they
neither have a God who calls them to suffer and die and spend themselves in sacrifice for the lost.
Pilate asked Jesus, "So then you are a king?," and he responded, "My kingdom is not of this
world. If my kingdom were of this world, my disciples would have been fighting"
(John 18:36). That is huge
to me, because it says that we don't fight to establish God's kingdom. We
do not take up arms.
Bullets and bombs is not how Christianity spreads. And the reason
for that is that Christianity is a faith where people must put their belief
in Jesus without coercion. You can't put a gun to somebody's head or a sword
to their throat and make them a Christian. Islam, however, as I understand
it, believes that you can subdue people and make them do the Five Pillars.
If they are outwardly willing to do them, then they qualify.
Christianity is a radically different thing. We have to voluntarily
renounce sin and embrace Jesus as our substitute sacrifice and substitute
righteousness. And when we do that, we are justified and given an eternal
inheritance in heaven. And it is out of that hope that we lay our lives down
for other people and spread the gospel that way, not by killing.
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