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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sideshow: [QB] For you to understand the incarnation, you first have to understand the Biblical concept of God. You need to see how Christians see God in order to understand how they can even possibly believe he could have done something like the incarnation. The Quranic and Biblical views of God are totally different. If a person presupposes that the Quranic view of God is the one that they will believe in, then the incarnation does not and will never make sense. There is no way to prove the incarnation if God is seen in this way. However, the incarnation will make perfect sense if someone presupposes that the Biblical view of God is the one they want to believe in. It is only a natural, logical outcome of who God says he is in the Bible. So, before trying to explain or "prove" the incarnation, I will spend a little bit of time explaining the differences between how Muslims see God and how Biblical Christians see God. In Islam, God is "transcendent," which is a big, long, theological word basically meaning that He is beyond us as human beings, and unrelated to anything that we can know or comprehend. He is unknowable, impersonal, a being that does not relate or interact with His creation in a personal way. There is nothing about His attributes or characteristics that is even remotely like something human beings can relate to. In Islam, Allah has 99 names. However, "love" is not one of them as far as I have been able to tell in the various lists I have seen of the 99 names. I have read the entire Quran and it appears to me that Allah seems to only love those who love Him. The only time it is mentioned that Allah is loving is in relationship to those who follow Him. Anyone else seems to be outside of that love until they have come under submission (islam/salam) to Him. The Islamic view of Paradise is a place where Allah is not obviously present. There are many pleasures to be experienced, but Allah is not a part of any of these pleasures. Allah is never mentioned as being a part of the experience of being in Paradise, and He is "absent" from being there. However, in the Bible, Allah is not unknowable or impersonal. He is a personal God, a God who interacts and relates to His people. He is a God who wants a relationship with each human being in the same way that we would relate to another person who is a friend or family member. Getting back to the description of Paradise, God and a relationship with Him is the center of the Biblical description of Heaven. The whole reason a Christian wants to go to Heaven is so that he or she can be with God and see Him face to face. When a Christian dies, we sometimes say that he or she has gone to be with the Lord. It would be too hard to quote, because it is mentioned too many times in the Bible (I'd have to quote most of it!), but over and over and over again, God is described as a loving Father. He is seen as a Father, not from a physical point of view, but in the same way that a loving father relates to his children is the way the Bible describes Allah as relating to His believers. In fact, we are taught to pray, "Our Father who is in Heaven . . ." and the Bible describes the true believer as a person who have been given the power to become a child of God. God is a God of love, a God who loves every single person in the world, not just those who love or obey Him. In fact, in one part of the Bible it says that "God is love," and the primary characteristic of God is that He loves in a perfect way. He loves human beings purely because He cannot do any other thing but to love them. He loves them without cause or reason. His love is not conditional on them obeying Him or loving Him back. He would love anyone just because they are human. God's love is something we do not deserve as human beings, but He gives it to us anyway. We do not have to do anything to earn it, we cannot be good enough to get it from Him, because we cannot be perfect like He is. It doesn't matter how bad we are or how good we are -- God will still love us in a perfect way that only He can do. The highest commandment in the Bible is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. The whole basis for relating to God is to be based on love. He loves us, so we should return that love and attempt to love Him as best we can. God is a personal God of relationship. Knowing God (not knowing ABOUT Him) is one of the primary goals of the Christian. We are to know Him in a personal way and relate to Him like we would a friend or a family member that we dearly love. The relationship with Allah is to be a heart relationship of intimacy and depth, not just a head knowledge of what He is supposed to be like. The Biblical concept of God is that God is a personal God who wants to have a personal relationship with all of His people. When a person understands this, the incarnation isn't something that is out of character for a God like this. The incarnation is actually God becoming a human being so that we could understand or know Him and how to relate to Him better. It was a part of God's revelation of who He is to us.[b] In Islam and all other religions, man is trying to reach up to God. However, in the Bible, God is trying to reach down to us as human beings and reveal Himself to us in a way that will enable us to relate to Him the way He wants us to relate to Him. Many people seem to think that when comparing Islam and Christianity that the Bible and the Quran are seen in the same way and that Jesus and Muhammad are seen in the same way. However, if you look at how these things are really looked at, this is not so. Jesus is seen in Christianity in the same way that the Quran is seen in Islam. Muhammad is seen in the same way that we see the Apostle Paul. The Bible, as a record of what the prophets said and did, is more like the Hadith and Sunnah. Jesus is the revelation of God, an expression that demonstrates who God is and what He is like. Even the Quran calls Him the "Word of Allah" (Kalamatullah), which is also what the Bible calls him. You see, God wanting to reveal Himself to us and be in a loving relationship with us, lowered Himself to become like us [b]so that it would easier for us to relate to Him and know who He is. Jesus was and is that physical human form of God. As someone I heard once described it, "God put on mankind like a garment." He put on a physical body, because many times we are limited as human beings to the physical world around us, and cannot fully understand the spirit world that God is a part of. He became like us so that we would be capable of understanding and relating to Him just like we would a friend. Because we know what Jesus is like, we have a better way of knowing who God really is and how to be able to relate to Him. If you have problems believing in the incarnation, it is because you are taking a different view of God than that described in the Bible. It is that different view of God that should be examined and argued about rather than the incarnation. The incarnation makes perfect sense to those who believe in the Biblical view of God. It is in direct contradiction to the Quranic view of Allah. Christians don't obey Him because it will determine whether they go to Paradise or not, but because they love Him as a result of His love for them. Their relationship with Him is what motivates them and gives them the desire to do what pleases Him. The whole basis of how Christians relate to God is a loving relationship with someone who is real and close, and not some God who they can never know in a personal way. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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