What are you Going to Believe?

Even if you can’t take the time to watch these videos, please scroll down and read my written observations.

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Is God drawing Muslims to Jesus through dreams?

What are you going to believe?

This? (A video of testimonies of Muslims receiving dreams or visions of Jesus, initiating a journey to faith in Him).

Or the claims of Todd Friel below?

Be a Berean and be sure to check the “proof” texts used by this celebrity cessationist to see whether his claims about scripture are valid. Do your own research and see whether his claims are true.

See below the video for my own observations of his claims

Todd Friels claim number 1:

Hebrews 1 tells us that dreams and visions are over.

Read Hebrews 1 and find where it says that. Read the whole of Hebrews and find where it says anything about dreams or visions. Those words never appear in that letter.

Friel’s only reference is this section of Hebrews: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word”

The implication he tries to make is that in these last days, God only speaks to us by His Son, no longer through prophets (despite obvious references to NT prophets in scripture) or through other “various ways” – only through His Son. Friel must stretch his assumption to include dreams and visions under that “various ways” category. But again, what about the post resurrection dreams and visions recorded in scripture, and what about Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost?

“In the last days, God says,
 I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
 your young men will see visions,
 your old men will dream dreams.

Was Peter preaching falsehood?

But then again, if in these last days God ONLY speak to us through His Son in a way that would exclude dreams and visions and anything else, wouldn’t also exclude scripture itself? NO! Because Friel’s claim is totally wrong, a desperate attempt to create scriptural justification for his preconceived rejection of the dreams and visions being reported.

Todd Friels claim number 2:

Faith for salvation comes by hearing the Word of God, not through dreams and visions.

Every testimony I’ve heard where a Muslim starts a journey to salvation with a dream or vision of Jesus, it’s NOT the dream that results in their salvation. They don’t go to bed as a Muslim, have a dream and then wake up Christian.

The dreams and visions set them on a path to meet up with a believer who can share the gospel with them. Or will lead them to a situation where they can obtain a Bible to read for themselves.

The situation is no different to the experience of Cornelius in Acts 10.

Todd Friels claim number 3:

Most of those testifying of the dreams reveal they had already heard the gospel.

I’ve never come across this situation in any of the testimonies I’ve read and heard about Muslims in Islamic nations. The only testimony fitting Friel’s claim that I’m aware of, would be one in the first video above. The example of American former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi, who had been in discussion with a Christian friend prior to a dream that confirmed the truth of the gospel to him.

Most Muslims have some awareness of Jesus, known to them as a Muslim prophet Isa. But the image of Jesus portrayed by Islam is flawed. The dreams and visions reveal Jesus as He really is, and not according to the Islamic misrepresentation of Him.

Todd Friels claim number 4:

If the reports of dreams and visions are true, it would be an insult to dead missionaries who lost their lives taking the gospel to dangerous lands.

I’m really not sure how to respond to such a presumptuous claim.

Except to point out that some of those who start their journey to Christ because of a dream or vision directing them to someone who can share the gospel with them, end their journey AS a dead missionary, martyred for proclaiming faith in the Son of God who they first came to know through a dream of Him.

Also, I’ve recently been reading biographies of some of those “insulted” dead missionaries, and I can only imagine them welcoming the newly arrived martyr missionaries into the presence of the LORD they all served unto death.

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For more on Todd Friel see here.

The full NIV text of Hebrews 1 (which according to Friel says that dreams and visions are no longer used by God).

Check for yourself to see if what Friel says is true (if you want to emulate the noble character of the Bereans)

Dreams and Visions

There have been increasing, exciting testimonies from former Muslims who were introduced to Jesus as saviour through dreams and visions. Often being directed to meetings with specific disciples of Jesus who were able to answer their questions about the man in white robes who had appeared to them.

Tom Doyle has written about some of these cases in the books illustrated below. The video (also below) has a half hour interview with Doyle.

Sadly there are some who are denying the validity of these examples of God leading people to Him through dreams and visions – but not surprisingly they are the usual cessationist suspects who consistently attack any claim of that God is still actively, miraculously, working today.

What are you willing to believe?

Do you accept testimonies consistent with scriptural records of dreams and visions, that reveal God is working today to reach the otherwise unreachable – or the word of people who basically make God into a dumb idol, who is unwilling or unable to be the same kind of God as He made Himself known through scripture.

Do you accept testimonies of people now willing to die for their new found saviour, who genuinely face that prospect because they’ve turned from Islam in communities where that is considered a capital crime? Or do you prefer the deniers who make their cessationist assertions from the safety of their comfortable, safe, western homes?

Iran

Christchurch

A few of my thoughts about the terror attack in Christchurch New Zealand.

The question has been asked why NZ?

The fact that the alleged perpetrator was Australian and had far rightwing, racist allegiances is very relevant to that question.
Political rhetoric in Australia in recent years has developed an ugly racist element. The Guardian article linked below gives a lot of detail of that.
Also see the link to an earlier blog post of mine that refers to the foolish Christian involvement in support of that political direction.

Added to that atmosphere is the difference in gun laws between close neighbours Australia and New Zealand. Many years ago the Australian parliament passed laws that prohibited the kind of fire arm used in the Christchurch attack.

Those guns are legally available in New Zealand, making an attack like the one on Friday easier to carry out against Muslims in New Zealand than it would be in Australia, where the type of weapon used would not be easily obtained.
Combine the Australian political climate that has given traction to far right racist dogma together with the availability of semi-automatic weapons in nearby NZ and I can understand “why New Zealand”.

Yesterday I noticed that the Sunday Telegraph front page had a large photo of a small child, one of the victims of the shootings. The major headline read “Peace Be Upon You” – a common Muslim religious phrase that is used to greet or say farewell to others.

The Sunday Telegraph is one of the Murdoch papers referred to in the Guardian article. The Murdoch press has regularly given a platform for strong anti-Muslim rhetoric from commentators in their weekly columns and I believe that has been instrumental in fomenting a political climate that makes far right extremism more likely.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/17/australians-are-asking-how-did-we-get-here-well-islamophobia-is-practically-enshrined-as-public-policy

https://onesimusfiles.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/danny-nalliah-false-prophet-and-political-agitator/

Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus

Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus is the testimony of former Muslim, Nabeel Qureshi.

I’d come across Qureshi several times over the past year or two, mainly seeing that he had some YouTube videos. For some reason I didn’t pay any attention to him or his videos when I was looking for testimonies of Muslims turning the Jesus.

The book is excellent. It covers his early life growing up as a Muslim, his attempts to prove the truth of Islam to a Christian friend, and then how his own studies led him to consider the truth of Jesus.

He faced a difficult struggle before he could finally turn away from his life-long religion to embrace and accept the gospel, but God was patient and revealed Himself to Qureshi, over time.

I don’t think I’ve come across anyone else’s testimony in which they spent years of diligently searching and studying everything they could to try to find the truth.
While he started out trying to prove the Islamic  “truth” he’d been raised to believe, ultimately his desire for THE truth led him to recognise Jesus.

But there is so much more within the book than just one man’s experience.

While it may not have been intended, I found the book showed how many Christians aren’t very different to Muslims regarding the reason they believe.

It seems that Muslim belief tends to be passed on from authority figures instead of being gained from a personal interaction with their “scriptures”.
I’d suggest that most professing Christians do exactly the same thing – relying entirely on the teachings of others instead of seeking, finding and understanding the certainty of truth for themselves. If we follow that approach how can we be sure that our beliefs are any more valid than those of the Muslim, the Buddhist, the atheist or anyone else?

Qureshi’s early experiences of Christians tended to show that their knowledge of the basics of what they believed (and why) was mostly lacking, and thereby hindering their ability to communicate the gospel.

Sadly in September 2017 Qureshi died after a struggle with stomach cancer. The edition of his book that I’ve been reading has some additional chapters in which his wife and his friends remember his legacy.

One of those friends says this about Nabeel, something that addresses the issue of loving the truth enough to seek it (Him) out:

Proverbs 1:7 says “fools despise wisdom and instruction” but Nabeel loved both, even when they challenged his long-held beliefs. Like any of us, he didn’t enjoy finding out he was wrong, but he was not willing to blindly perpetuate hand-me-down ideas. He had to know that what he believed, what he built his life on, was based on reality, not speculation or tradition.

 

 

Fleeing ISIS, Finding Jesus

This book wasn’t exactly what I expected.
I thought it would be about Muslims who fled from ISIS controlled areas, and in the process of fleeing to safety, found faith in Jesus.

That in escaping extremist Islam, their experiences not only made them question their own Islamic faith, but through that experience they came to know the love of God through Christ.

At first I thought the title was misleading because it didn’t fulfil that expectation. However, about halfway through I recognised the title had a different kind of application. That recognition came when reading the story of a man, an Iraqi Christian from a Christian community. He tells of experiencing a change:

“…it was as if someone took away all my sadness and gave me another light shining on me. I started a new relationship with Jesus, and I felt like a new man, a new person. I found my hope in Christ. I began to see that in some ways I lost everything when ISIS came to Qaraqosh, but really I found Jesus.”

A related, significant reality I found expressed in this book, is the gaping disconnect between the lives Christians live in the west, and those lived by believers elsewhere.

The man mentioned above didn’t have anything like the prosperity that the west takes for granted, but when he lost what he had, he found something much more valuable; something he thought he already had – and then with the loss of everything else he recognised a sufficiency and wealth only available through closeness to Christ that he’d not experienced before.

There is a vital lesson to be learned by Christians in the west. A lesson that will challenge the seeming obsession with maintaining and protecting a perceived quality of life that is often attributed to God’s blessing. The price of protecting those “blessings” is often a denial of help to people in need, a failure to share those “blessings”.

The author writes of the generosity of the nation of Jordan, who welcomed so many refugees from neighbouring Syria and Iraq, that refugees now made up one in four of the population.

“If that were the United States, it would be like half of Mexico and all of Canada moving in”

Is it necessary to say anything else to address the difference in attitude displayed by western nations with an alleged strong Christian foundation?

The author continues, describing the hardships that have been created,

“…the influx of people looking for cheap accommodations had caused both rents and the prices of staple goods to rise sharply, making life even harder for Jordan’s population. And yet still they open their doors and invite refugees in.”

On questioning a local about the inconvenience of this, he received the reply “What else can we do? Wouldn’t you do the same?”

Sadly most in the west clearly wouldn’t. And neither would many western “Christians”.

I wonder what it will take for THEM to find Jesus.

 

Stranger No More by Annahita Parsan

It wasn’t what I expected.
The flood of Moslem refugees across Europe was constantly in the news two or three years ago, and most books I’ve recently seen about refugees have been about those escaping from Syria.

I thought this would be the same, but instead the story dates back to the late 1970s, early 80s and the Iranian Revolution.

Annahita Parsan’s abusive husband Asghar found himself on the wrong side of the new Islamic government in Iran after the Ayatollah Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran. Together they escaped Iran via Turkey, where they were imprisoned and brutally treated. Eventually they were freed and allowed to move on to Denmark as refugees.

Despite the potential for a new life, Asghar’s violence against his wife increased in frequency and intensity and there seemed to be no escape for her.

But a seed was sown when visitors to her door gave Annahita a bible in Farsi.

Ever since I had been given the Farsi Bible, I had picked it up and prayed from time to time. The worse Asghar’s attacks had gotten, the more I had prayed. I found that it helped, much like drinking a glass of cool water took away the dryness in my mouth on a hot night.

She started to become aware of ideas about God that were different to what she had “learned in a mosque”.

There it was all about fear and rules and the difficulty of earning a route to paradise. I had never thought of God being interested in helping me, let alone being with me all the time. I liked the idea. It gave me courage.

In time that courage helped her to take steps towards freedom for herself and her children. Freedom from the violence of her husband and towards the freedom of a new life of faith.

Annahita Parsan now works within churches in Sweden, ministering to former Muslim refugees.

God Reaching Those Cut Off From the Gospel

Hawa* had travelled hours to meet us. She had grown up in a Muslim family. Her father was a Muslim leader who travelled to different Arab countries to teach about Islam. She felt loved by her family and was engaged to a Muslim man who lived in the US. Hawa’s future looked bright.

Everything changed when she contracted a serious lung disease. The doctors feared for her life and all her dreams and plans seemed to disappear. But Hawa was exactly where the Lord wanted her. “One night in hospital I had a dream.” Hawa said to me, “I saw a man who was smiling and crying at the same time. I somehow knew he was weeping for me. I bowed down before him and asked, ‘Please help me. Show me the way. How can I be free from this disease?’”

When Hawa woke up she told her family about the dream, but no one understood it. When she had recovered and returned home, she told the mosque leader about her vision. “What you saw was Jesus, the Messiah.” He said, “I can’t talk now. It is not safe. Come back another time.”

Weeks went by before Hawa had another opportunity to speak to the mosque leader. “The one who is weeping for sinners is the one and only Jesus.” He told her, then he handed her a Bible.

full article here:

https://www.opendoors.org.au/persecuted-christians/blog/vision-of-christ/

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Several believers involved in Christian witness paint Oman as a deeply religious country. There is a lot of spiritual conflict and oppression in this country. Believers experience many barriers when sharing the Gospel; “People are very friendly and seem to be open to the Gospel, willing to listen and exchange ideas. But to actually take the step to commit to Christ is very difficult for many of them,” one worker said.

However, in the midst of that darkness, God is doing amazing miracles, “Eighty percent of the Omani believers come to Christ in a supernatural way, through dreams and visions,” shared a Christian living in Oman.

full article here:

https://www.opendoors.org.au/persecuted-christians/blog/christ-in-the-heart-of-islam/

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“There is hunger to come closer to God! There is hunger for the prayer meetings for example. Now the whole congregation comes to these meetings. The church is full of people praying.”

This hunger is not just from Christians.

“It happens more with the Muslims and the Druze. God is speaking the language of each group. Muslims meet Jesus in dreams. A woman saw a man in a dream, he was dressed in white and his face was shining. She woke up and went to church, she was very afraid of being rejected. She was accepted with love.”

full article here:
https://www.opendoors.org.au/persecuted-christians/blog/syria-pastor-alim-on-the-frontline/

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Rainbow Connection 2: Don’t dare speak out!

At a time when homosexual campaigners are decrying anti-homosexual hate-speech…

 

Petition calls for doctor in ‘no’ campaign same-sex marriage ad to be deregistered

A woman that appeared in [an] advertisement for the ‘no’ camp in the same-sex marriage debate is now at the centre of an online campaign to have her medical licence stripped.

The online petition has just over 6,000 signatures and calls for a “review of the registration of Dr Pansy Lai”.

Dr Lai, a GP in northern Sydney, appeared as one of three mothers in the Marriage Coalition advertisement that first aired at the end of last month.

She told The Australian she has been inundated with phone and social media threats since the ad was released and said she had reported one threat to police that she would be shot “this week”.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/36946222/online-petition-wants-dr-pansy-lai-from-sydney-deregistered/

 

And another article:

Same-sex marriage debate: conservative Muslims steer clear for fear of backlash

Muslim Australians who oppose same-sex marriage are afraid to speak out for fear of being labelled extremists, including by Christian conservatives who themselves oppose it, a Muslim community leader has said.

Ali Kadri, a spokesman for the Islamic Council of Queensland, told Guardian Australia that imams and community leaders “who represent the vast majority of the Muslim community” were staying out of the postal survey debate for fear of backlash.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/04/same-sex-marriage-debate-conservative-muslims-steer-clear-for-fear-of-backlash

 

There are questions I’d like to raise regarding the second article:

Why would the Muslim spokesman think and suggest that conservative Christians would label Muslims as extremists for sharing their views on same sex marriage, when the conservative Christian and Muslim views would be the same?

Is that suggestion an attempt by the Muslim to politically distance himself and his community from conservative Christians – who have so far been the main target of hate-speech from supporters of SSM?

Is it a suspicion that conservative Christians will be antagonistic towards the Muslim community even in cases when their views are the same?

Maybe it’s a Muslim attempt to maintain division and distrust between two religious communities – mirroring the anti-Muslim rhetoric of some Christians who have regularly resorted to fear-mongering with regard to the presence of Muslims in the community?

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And a related article (don’t dare reflect a “traditional” view of fatherhood on father’s day):

Dads4Kids ad is ‘dodgy campaign tactic’ in marriage debate, says LGBTI activist

A fathers group that claimed its political ad was blocked from television is engaged in a “dodgy campaign tactic” to claim victimhood in the same-sex marriage debate, according to a senior LGBTI advocate.

Just Equal spokesman, Ivan Hinton-Teoh, has hit back at Dads4Kids, labelling them an anti-LGBTI, anti-marriage equality activist group who had attempted to politicise father’s day.

Ben Pratt, the spokesman for Dads4Kids, said it was “extraordinary” that Australians could “no longer celebrate fathers’ day without being forced to look at it through the lens of the same-sex marriage debate”.

“It’s a tragedy that a political motive is now implied in any mention of fatherhood. Not everything is about same-sex marriage,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/03/dads4kids-ad-is-dodgy-campaign-tactic-in-marriage-debate-says-lgbti-activist

ISIS – Pushing Muslims Toward Christ

This is from the Voice of the Martyrs site, describing something that I’ve now heard about from many sources.

While many in the west, including Christians, grow fearful and suspicious of Muslims in their communities and want to resist the flow of Muslim refugees from war zones like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan;  God is doing among Muslims  despite those Christian attitudes..

Islamic State (ISIS) is now believed to have fully operational branches in 18 countries across the world, not only persecuting Christians, but also pushing Muslims toward Christ.

Its efforts to create a ‘pure’ Islamic nation are causing a growing number of Muslims to examine their faith more closely and more critically. “There are a lot of people turning from Islam”, said Ibrahim Al-Jamil, a pastor in northern Iraq. “Jesus has a big net and ISIS is pushing people toward this net. What we are seeing now is like the tip of the iceberg”.

complete article here: ISIS – Pushing Muslims Toward Christ

 

While Christian fear is a disappointing response, even worse is outright Christian hostility towards Muslims, particularly those who are refugees after being driven from their homelands. I’ve written about this before. (Will hating Muslims lead them to Jesus?)

 

Such fear and hostility is working against what God is doing. Do we want to be on the wrong side of His purposes?