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Anees Zaka, founder of the “Church Without Walls,” has poured his life into evangelism among Muslims in the United States. He began his work with Ahmadiyyah Muslims in southern New Jersey, where truck farms have provided employment for the Muslim community. Years ago, he invited some of these Muslims to attend services at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Willow Grove, Pa. They were guests of the church for dinner after the service. Conversations flowed around small tables in the church hall. After the meal, two talks were scheduled. The imam from their community presented the Islamic view of revelation as recited by Mohammed in the Koran. I then gave the Christian doctrine of revelation in Scripture and Jesus Christ.
A man from the Muslim community contacted Anees several weeks later. He said he could not get out of his mind something I had said. I spoke not only about the inspired Scriptures, but also about God’s revelation in Christ, the promised Savior. This Muslim could not forget my statement that God had come down. Anees presented the Gospel to the man, and he became a Christian.
Americans have had to recognize the hatred against them in the streets of Arab countries. The terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center were Arabs, schooled in hatred. In the unclaimed luggage of one hijacker was a copy of the Koran.
Amir Taheri, himself an Iranian Muslim, laments the way the Muslim press has promoted hatred of America. He longs for “the golden age when Islam was a builder of civilization, not a force for repression, terror, and destruction.”
Prospects for presenting the Gospel of the God who came down to the Arab world may seem hopeless. For the apostle Paul, speaking in the Jewish synagogues must have seemed hopeless, too, and for the same reason. The Pharisaic Judaism that Paul represented was a religion that added good works to grace. Far more, Islam is a religion of good works. Yet Paul’s Gospel continually cuts the cord of pride. “Where is boasting then? It is excluded” (Rom. 3:27). Islam boasts in the heroic goodness of its saints. The Koran does away with the fall into sin found in the Bible. Paul’s Gospel, on the contrary, shuts up all humanity under sin. There is none righteous, not even one.
Over against all self-righteousness, Paul sets the righteousness of God. The consuming fire of God’s holiness must burn in wrath against all sin. It is God’s own righteousness that must be satisfied. How can sinners with no righteousness of their own stand before the perfection of His righteousness?
Paul’s amazing answer is: “God’s righteousness”! God does not deny Himself and settle for a sinner’s concept of righteousness. The glory of His perfect righteousness is the point of the Gospel Paul preaches. The mystery of the Gospel is that God Himself met the demand of His justice, His righteousness, by receiving Himself the curse due for sin. God came down, not first to be with us, but to be for us. The Good News is Christ and Him crucified. On the cross, Jesus bore the curse of our sins. He was forsaken by the Father, the judgment we deserved. The Father, silent in the darkness of Calvary, paid the price as He gave His Son to damnation for us.
God came down, not only to the earth but also to the cross. God’s saving righteousness displays free, unmerited grace. This is the message Mohammed rejected. The Allah of Islam is called the merciful, but he is not the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. To the Jews of Paul’s day, the Gospel was an offense. It remains an offense to the Arab world today. They see the cross on the shields and banners of the crusaders who laid waste their lands. Yet the Gospel that the crusaders betrayed holds forth Christ crucified, the power of God to salvation.
Islam speaks of the 99 names of God, but rejects the triune name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet only because Jesus is the Son of God incarnate can it be true that God came down to save us. The righteousness of God that came down to the cross is sealed by the resurrection of the Lord. The Lord who came down went up when He ascended from the Mount of Olives. Jesus had said to Nicodemus, “ ‘No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven’ ” (John 3:13).
Again, the coming down and the going up of Jesus is related to the cross, for Jesus adds, “ ‘And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life’ ” (vv. 14–15). In the wilderness, a second generation of Israelites rebelled against the leading of the Lord. The Lord judged them by sending venomous serpents among them. At God’s direction, Moses made a bronze serpent and lifted it on his rod. Those bitten by the serpents had only to look to the figure of the serpent to be delivered. The figure of the serpent was the symbol of the judgment. As a speared snake might be lifted to show the removal of the danger, so the bronze serpent lifted was a sign of the curse removed.
Later, Jesus said, “ ‘And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself’ ” (John 12:32). John explains that Jesus said this about the kind of death He would die. John saw in the lifting up of Jesus a few feet from the ground on the cross the beginning of His lifting up to glory. So did the God who came down bring to us His saving righteousness.