A Birthday Reminder
How many of us have already started preparing for Christmas? For the first time ever my daughters’ families and ours (including all the great-grandparents) will be in the same city for the whole month of December! We are concocting a plan for joint-Advent activities this season, mostly hoping to help our kids—my five, world’s best grandkids—anticipate Christmas more memorably this time around. Our count-down to Jesus’ 2020 birthday party will really stand out!
D-i-i-i-i-i-ng! As I’m typing on the computer, a calendar notification interrupts my Christmas musings. It reminds me of another big day, which is happening now!
To my Muslim friends, it’s a pretty big deal—their prophet Muhammad’s birthday!
It’s not a real party topic, but God would have me mention it. I went from thinking about my own dear grandkids to the 1.8 billion Muslim grandchildren (everyone is someone’s grandchild, right?) in our world who have no advent to celebrate. Their erroneous concept of Jesus demotes Him to the role of mere prophet and isolates them from the Truth of the gospel. They bear His image but are fettered to a counterfeit faith.
Jesus came so that we might have life. The message Muslims believe Allah gave Muhammad negates humankind’s need of the Savior and makes every Muslim’s eternal destiny reliant on the measure of their good and bad deeds. Furthermore, in it all Allah’s love is conditional; “he misleads whom he wills, and guides whom he wills.” (Qur’an 14:4) But “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.... to save it through him.” (John 3:16-17)
Muslims meticulously follow Muhammad’s example in life and faith. They believe that Muhammad was the last in a long line of Old Testament (Muslim) prophets, including Jesus— who came to lead humanity in true worship of Allah, so that Islam might be established on the earth. Muslims obey him because the Qur’an tells them to (Qur’an 33:21). They follow his example (Qur’an 68:4) as portrayed in the Qur’an and hadith, Islam’s sacred collections of the prophet’s words and ways of life. They would never worship Muhammad, but Muslims all over the world work very hard to look like, behave like, and practice Islam like they believe he modeled and taught. They do so in hopes of earning a place in paradise.
Although the Qur’an extols the prophet, his own end-of-life reflections affirm that even he, the best Muslim ever, could not be sure that his deeds were entirely paradise-worthy. He, like everyone else, would have to rely on Allah’s judgment day mercy for eternal reward. (Qur’an 52:17)
Today is this prophet’s birthday. Many Muslims will celebrate it, although not all of them. Since there isn’t any record in their holy books of such celebrating in the prophet’s day, very conservative Islamic states actually forbid it now.
But Jesus’ advent was first foretold when God confronted Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:15), then repeatedly through the Old Testament prophets. Generation upon generation anticipated it right up until His very birth! It has always been and will be central to every human’s hope for Heaven—God’s salvation gift to every human who will accept it!
If only Muslims could grasp the breadth, depth, width, and height of God’s love for them (Eph. 3:18)—that He would send them not a prophet, but a Savior, who came to seek and to save us all!
Alas, I’m grateful for my computer’s notification. The interruption reminded me, and thus I, you—that Muslims must know the truth about Jesus. And we have it to share.
Jesus came for the lost. He wants them to be part of our Christmas planning, all year long.
But how can they believe if they’ve never heard about it? And how can they hear if we don’t tell them? (Rom. 10:14)