FAQ
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There is something that troubles me. I have read in the Quran that our prophet Muhammad commands every Muslim to believe the books in the Bible, that is, Tawrat, Zabur and Injil. And in my heart I want to believe the Good News of the Messiah proclaimed in the Bible, but my friends tell me that we can no longer believe the Bible because it has been changed. They claim that the Bible that exists today is different from the original Bible. What do you think?
Thank you very much for asking this question. It is a common question we hear. Many people around the world think they cannot trust the Bible because they have heard that it has been changed. So the question we have is: Is this accusation true? Has the Bible been tampered with?
Before answering this question, we too would like to ask a few questions of those who claim that the scriptures were corrupted. You say the Bible has been changed. But tell us, where did you get this idea from? On what do they base their accusation? When was the Bible changed? Who changed it? Where was it changed? What changes have been made? How do you know? Where is the proof?
In short, what we can tell you is that if you sincerely seek the truth, you will understand that the idea that the Bible has been tampered with is meritless. Those who say this are founded on baseless rumors. They have no evidence that the original Bible was altered. On the contrary, there is a lot of evidence that shows that the Bible has not been changed. If you are honest and research the Bible, you will find that Almighty God protected the Holy Word which He inspired the prophets to write in the Bible.
Today, in the great museums and universities of the world, scholars have preserved about 24,000 ancient books, manuscripts and scrolls of the Injil, that is, the New Testament. These books existed hundreds of years before the time of Muhammad. With regard to the Old Testament, that is to say the Tawrat of Moses, the Zabur and the Writings of the Prophets, know that the books which have been preserved existed more than four hundred years before Muhammad. And if you compare these ancient books with the ones we have in our hands today, you will see that they are the same. God has preserved his Word!
The prophets wrote the words of God on scrolls made from the skin of animals or the fibers of plants. The Jewish scribes then copied the Word of God onto new scrolls. These scribes were well trained and extremely careful to ensure that the copies were identical to the originals. They counted the number of letters in each book and wrote down which letter was in the middle, to make sure the copy was identical to the original. If there was an error, the entire scroll was destroyed! These Jewish scribes believed that to falsify the Word of God was to attack God himself!
Perhaps you have heard of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947. Did you know that these Old Testament scrolls were copied a hundred years before Jesus was born? And yet these ancient manuscripts are consistent with others copied a thousand years later! The Word of God has not been tampered with!
No one can edit the Bible because from the beginning there are hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts of the Bible that professional scribes have written with great care. If anyone wanted to change the Bible, they would have had to change all copies of the Bible, which is impossible! Also know that after the time of Christ, scholars began to translate the Bible into many different languages. No one could have changed all the Bibles around the world. It would have been impossible. And today the Bible exists in whole or in part in over 2,000 different languages. The Lord God has preserved his Word, and his servants translate it into the languages of the different peoples of the world, because God wants all to hear it with their ears, understand it in their minds, receive it in their hearts, and be saved.
Dear friends, really anyone who says that the Word of God has been changed is insulting God. He speaks against God saying that he is unable to protect his Word! Yes, we are aware that there is someone who wants to change and falsify the Word of God: it is the devil. In the Tawrat we read that God said to Adam: “On the day that you eat you will die”. But Satan, what did he say to Adam and Eve? He said the opposite of what God said. He said, “You won’t die.” Satan thus tried to modify the Word of God. And, as you know, Adam and Eve chose to listen to Satan. But in the end, everything turned out exactly as God said it would. That very day Adam and Eve died in their souls, and their bodies began to wither and die. Satan is a liar. The Word of God is true. Satan knows how to deceive people, telling them, “The Bible has been changed.” But that doesn’t mean it has been changed! For the Lord Jesus Himself said, “Scripture cannot be broken.” “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away”. Amen.
Why is the Bible divided into two parts: the "Old Testament" and the "New Testament"?
In short, what you need to know is that everything that the prophets wrote in the Old Testament, that is, in the First Covenant, they wrote it before the birth of the Messiah. But whatever is in the New Testament, or the New Covenant, they wrote after the birth of Messiah. The message of the Old Covenant prophets was ‘God will send the Messiah!’ And the message of the New Covenant is ‘God sent the Messiah, just as he had promised through his prophets!’ Therefore, let us not be confused by the fact that the Bible has two parts. Rather, let us thank God with all our heart that the Holy Scriptures include an Old Testament and a New Testament. In these two parts, we see that what God promised so long ago, he has fulfilled! God sent us a Savior, as he promised our ancestors in the Tawrat, Zabur, and the Writings of the Prophets. As the seed of monkey bread grows into a baobab tree, so too the Old Covenant matures in the New Covenant.
It is said that a man cannot know whether he will go to heaven or hell. Only god knows. But you say you know if you died today you would go to heaven. What are you basing this on?
Let us answer this question with another question. Can God go back on his word? Or does he faithfully keep his word? The important thing to remember is that it was God himself who said, “To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” The Injil also says, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.” Since God himself said that you can know that you have eternal life, who are we to say that no one can know where he will spend eternity, that no one can know where he will go after his death? Dear friends, you can know where you will go after death! The question is, do you trust the Lord Jesus and his perfect sacrifice? Or do you trust your own good works? Only those who trust Christ can sincerely say, “I know I have eternal life.”
Did Jesus say Muhammad was coming after him?
We read in the Injil that before returning to heaven, the Lord Jesus made a promise to his disciples, saying: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” Again it is written, “And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, ‘you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’”
It is important to understand what Jesus promised his disciples about the coming of this Comforter, because today some people want you to believe that Jesus was announcing the coming of another prophet. But the Comforter he promised cannot be a human, for Jesus made it clear that he will be a spirit, that no one will be able to see him, and that he will live in Christ’s followers forever. So who is this Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God. He is the Spirit who inspired the prophets to write and speak the word of God in ancient times. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Most High who descended on a virgin named Mary so that she could conceive and give birth to the holy child. It was the Spirit that was in the Messiah, Jesus. It is also the Spirit that God puts in the hearts of all who believe in the Messiah, to give them a new birth, to purify them, to strengthen them, to put on them a sign that they belong to God, and so that they are forever in his holy presence. This is what the Scriptures say: “In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guaranteed of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.”
For us who believe, the Holy Spirit is our help, our guide, our strength, our teacher, and much more. He does so many things for us that we can’t begin to mention them all. One way he helps us is through our prayers. There is a big difference between ‘saying a prayer’ and ‘really praying to God’! The Holy Spirit helps us pray true prayers to God. As it is written, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” All who truly believe the gospel of Christ have this heavenly guest living in them. The Scriptures say that, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.“
Did Jesus come only for the Jews?
From time to time, people say that Jesus only came as a prophet to the Jews. They will quote Jesus in Matthew 15:24 where Jesus says “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Doesn’t this mean that we being non-Jews are not meant to look to Christ for God’s revelation to us?
This is a good question, and it is one that Jesus’ own disciples wrestled with. Let us look at the context of this citation both in the Gospel of Matthew and in the scriptures as a whole. First, let us remember how the blessing of God comes into the world. We see in the Torah, in Genesis 12:2-3 God tells Abraham, “I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Here we see that God has chosen to have his blessing pass through the descendants of Abraham, that is the people of Israel, to all the families of the earth.
We pick up this line at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew which begins with, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The gospel shows us from the beginning that Jesus is the descendant of Abraham through whom the blessing of God will flow to all the families of the earth, and this blessing will come through the people of Israel.
Continuing on in Matthew, we see that Jesus begins by preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God, and repentance throughout the region of Galilee in Israel. As he goes, he calls disciples to follow him. In Matthew Chapter 10, Jesus selects 12 of these disciples, whom he appoints as apostles. These 12 men are all Jewish and immediately, Jesus sends them out to continue his teaching among the Jews saying, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
When they return to Jesus after their mission, they continue traveling and learning from Jesus. In Matthew 12:18-21, Jesus is teaching these 12 apostles as well as other disciples and he says to them, “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles… and in his name the Gentiles will hope.” This is a quote from Isaiah 61 about the Messiah coming not only to the Jews but also bringing justice and hope to those who are not Jews.
Soon after this, in chapter 15, Jesus leaves Israel and intentionally goes to the Greek dominated regions of Tyre and Sidon. This is where a gentile woman comes to Jesus and pleads with him to free her daughter from an evil spirit. Jesus’ disciples “begged Jesus to send her away,” to which Jesus responds that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The woman shows her faith, and Jesus frees her daughter from the demon. Jesus then continues to heal, care for, and preach to the non-Jews and warns his disciples about the teaching of the Jewish religious leaders.
If we continue forward to the end of Matthew after Jesus has been resurrected, he appears to his Jewish disciples, and he sends them out a second time. His message is the same, but their target is different. In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus says to his disciples, “ All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and all nations, baptizing them the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” He is fulfilling the pattern God started with Abraham, to send his blessing through the Jews out to all the families of the earth. Jesus likewise goes first to the Jews, and sends the blessing of God through them to all nations of the earth!
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