Mike Parsons
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Can you know God? Can you know Allah?
We think of Islam and other religions, some of them being polytheistic, some monotheistic, but actually when you look back into the history of Islam, they chose a moon god out of other gods and then developed that into a monotheistic belief in Allah. But if you go back into the very roots of it, they were polytheistic when they started. They just chose the moon god. Hence we have the crescent moon associated with those kinds of beliefs. Most Muslims don’t know that, because they don’t know their own history and they don’t know where it came from. They tend to live from the Quran and from the teaching of the imams and all that sort of thing, but they don’t really know God, because their God does not allow for relationship. It is a blind trust of Allah who is sovereign, and therefore everything that happens must be the will of Allah. It leaves out the relational, the interactive, and the communicative dimension of that.
So I would not really try and argue with any Muslim about anything. I would talk to them about their experience. Can you know God? Can you know Allah? And they would probably say no, we can’t do that. Allah is holy. And so actually, I can say, well, I do know God. I have a personal relationship with him in which there is communication and sharing and life and joy and peace and love, using words which are evocative of good experiences rather than fear, which is what a lot of them associate with their god. They are afraid to get it wrong. Their knowing of God is by intellectual understanding of a concept rather than a relationship with a person who is loving and kind and good and gentle and all of the fruit of the Spirit. Where do you get angry, harsh and judgmental in the fruit of the Spirit? You don’t, because it isn’t there, and it isn’t in God.
Why Jesus came
God does make judgments based on verdicts and evidence, but those verdicts are always going to come out of his love. And that is the problem with intellectual knowledge, with theology, with the understanding or study of God through an external medium, the “word”, the Bible. That is how many know God: through what the Bible says about God. But the Bible says very different things about God in the Old Testament and the New Testament, because in the Old Testament they didn’t know God. They thought they knew God and had their own understanding, their own religious construction of him. But he wasn’t the God that Jesus came to reveal. Which is why Jesus came.
Jesus came to reveal the true nature of God as love, and to help them have a relationship with the Father, because they didn’t have God as Father. In one sense they had a wider concept of God as Creator, but the relationship of Father and Son, when Jesus said “Abba”, was scandalous to them. When he said I and the Father are one, it was deeply challenging, because they had a view of God which was coming entirely out of religious knowledge and not experience.
Transactional knowledge of God
Let’s face it, only one of them could go in and meet with God once a year, and that was very much on the basis of, we’re terrible sinners, we need to atone for our sin, will you forgive us? It wasn’t a relationship; it was a transaction from their perspective. So they had a transactional sort of knowledge of God which you could say was covenantal, but they didn’t understand the nature of covenant as God fulfilling himself within the covenant. He tried, but they wouldn’t have it.
He wanted them to come up on the mountain when they came out of Egypt. He invited them into his presence, into that spiritual dynamic of his presence. They were afraid. Why were they afraid? Because they had 430 years of fear living under Pharaoh, and they had very little sense of what they had started with, with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and their sons and all of that. And even then, their relationship with God was somewhat distant. Abraham, in a dream, was put to sleep to come into the presence of God. It never really started off in what Jesus came to reveal.
So they had their own version of God, carrying around idols all the way through the wilderness and into the Promised Land from Egypt, which is what Stephen said, and which is revealed in other places as well. They made a golden calf because they wanted something like other people’s gods, whereas God had invited them to come up into the fire of his presence, which is love, but they saw it as something to be feared. And therefore they sent a mediator, Moses, to go on their behalf. The seventy elders also went with him on their behalf, and then they set up a religious system so that they could have some connection with God at a distance, which was what they wanted. You don’t really get any sense of intimacy with God in much of it. Gideon meets an angel; there are various encounters.
Then the prophets begin to have more of a sense of hearing God speak to them, and I’m sure they were quite shocked by some of the things they said, because that’s when it started to turn around. Sacrifices and offerings you never required, they began to declare, and all of a sudden they were saying things that were leading up to the new covenant, beginning to reveal what God was truly like, and fulfilling all of those promises that they had viewed through their own understanding, revealing them in the truth of Jesus being the Way, the Truth and the Life, the express image of God; being one with the Father and having a relationship of I AM.
John 14
My favourite chapter in the Bible has always been John 14, in which Jesus describes the relationship, describes going to the cross, coming back in resurrection, enabling them to have relationship in which they would know, “Where I am, you may be also.” And of course that’s been totally trashed in the meaning, to mean heaven in the future, where it actually means is where I am in relationship. Jesus says, I am in the Father and the Father is in me, and that is the relationship he was describing that they would have.
And then later on it says, “on that day (resurrection day), you will know this relationship: you will know that I am in you and you are in me and we are in this relationship with the Father together,” which is what he came to unveil. There was no veil. Hence the veil of the temple was torn, showing that there had never been any separation. And then they gradually began to work out that the Gentiles could come into this, that it was for everyone. Even after three and a half years with Jesus, they still didn’t grasp the fact that this was for everybody. He came to take away the sin of the world, not the sin of the Jews.
Tabernacle of David
So the concern was, we can’t associate with Gentile people because they’re unclean. And then the revelation comes from heaven in the vision: don’t call anything unclean that I call clean; take, taste and eat, as a symbol of, you’re all one now, there is no separation or division. And of course they then described this as the tabernacle of David, which was God in their midst, no temple or holy of holies or structure, which is what they had celebrated for quite a while, dancing and celebrating in the presence of the Ark, not hidden away in a box somewhere.
And I guess the sad question I’ve asked a lot is: why did David then want to go and build a temple for the God they had just experienced and enjoyed in their midst? Maybe because the timing of Jesus’ coming was not yet. Things had not yet reached the point where Jesus was going to come, and therefore another system was set up through David and Solomon building the temple, and eventually the next temple with Herod and everything else.
You can know God for yourself
But when I look at what Jesus came to help us come into, he was the door so we could come into a relationship with the Father. Jesus made us to be a dwelling place, a habitation of God, which was what it was all about and what John 14 was describing: you will be like me in this relationship with the Father. They never had that before. None of them. Even John the Baptist, who was the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, the least in the kingdom is greater than he. We look at all the miracles and the amazing things that happened, but they did not know him. He was not in them the way he is in us. There is a huge difference.
And that’s what we come back to: you can know God for yourself. God already dwells in you. He lives in you and he wants you to know him in that inner relationship. That’s what I would encourage people to experience, and if anything, that’s what I would share with others who have not had that experience, to help them think, “I would like that.” So I wouldn’t argue theology with a Muslim over the Quran or the Bible or Abraham or all the other things people try and use to find some sort of common ground. I would simply ask: do you know God by experience? Do you have a relationship with him through experience? And then share the testimony of your experience with God, which would hopefully open their eyes to something they had not considered.
God is awakening the Muslim world
Let’s face it, God is awakening the Muslim world. There is huge revival going on in Muslim countries. People are having visitations of Jesus in dreams. There is great transformation. The gospel is spreading in places like Iran under persecution far more greatly than in our sort of western, “Christmas and Easter” sort of culture where not much else happens, and where we have got inoculated from it all because it has become another religion rather than the relationship God wants all his children to experience and know.
So definitely, stick with the relationship. Present God as a good God, a loving God, a kind God, rather than the angry, judgmental God who is so distant that we can’t really know him. Muslims have very little certainty, because their relationship is based on performance. If they don’t perform to a particular standard, they won’t make it. It’s the works-based mindset: you have to be good enough, keep a standard, perform, live according to the manual, rather than follow Jesus. Jesus made it very simple: come and follow me. He didn’t make it hard. He didn’t say do this and this and this and this and this. He just said, come and follow me, because he invited them into relationship, and then he opened the door for them to have a relationship with the Father and the Spirit through following him.
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Sons of Issachar 