A gracEmail subscriber writes: “Recently in Sunday school, our teacher said that Allah is not the same God that we know. I’ve always been under the impression that Allah and God were the same, just worshipped differently by Muslims and Christians. What do you think?”
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In the Arabic language, Allah is the word for “God.” The goal of devout Muslims is absolute submission (Arabic: Islam) to him. Muslims believe that Allah revealed the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad during the years from 610-622 A.D., dictating it letter by letter through the archangel Gabriel. Some Christians argue that Allah is not the God of the Bible because the Qur’an does not reveal him to be a God of love and grace through his Son Jesus Christ. Indeed, the Qur’an denies that Allah has a Son (An-Nisa 171). It says that Jesus was only a human messenger and not God himself (Al-Maeda 72-75). But does this mean that Allah is anyone other than the God of the Bible? I think not.
We must remember that a person can talk about the one true God and not talk about that one God truthfully. The Qur’an perverts and distorts the truth about God’s nature and and character. It claims that the Bible is a corruption of God’s earlier revelation to humankind (Al-E-Imran 78). It says that Allah is all-merciful but it provides no atoning sacrifice that can actually take away sin. It provides no power that can enable us to please God or to keep his commands. As a result, Muslims have no actual confidence concerning their final salvation. They anticipate either heaven or hell based on a weighing of their good deeds and bad.
To know and to love Jesus Christ is also to know and to love the one true God who is his Father (John 8:19, 42). To reject the Son of God is to reject the Father who sent him to be the Savior of the world (1 John 2:23; 4:1-3; 5:19-20). Let us pray that the one true God will graciously open the eyes of world’s billion Muslims so that in Jesus Christ they may truly know the one true God to whom they seek so zealously to submit.