Relationship Trumps Hearsay Every Time!

This week I watched a video featuring a self-confessed Salafi (i.e., fundamentalist) Sunni scholar named Sheikh Muhammad Abu Zaid, who lives in Sidon, Lebanon. In response to some softball questions from Gabe Lyons, the sheikh began by mouthing the typical bromides that Islam is a religion of peace and that the standard Muslim greeting “as-Salaamu ‘alaykum” is a greeting meaning “Peace be upon you.” He neglected to mention that among conservative Muslims that greeting is to be shared only with Muslims, not unbelievers, and that “Islam” is rightly defined as “submission,” where peace is achieved by subjection rather than by agreement among equals. But why quibble over such things?

What really interested me were Sheikh Muhammad’s remarks about what makes for good relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims. He noted that much of the reason for barriers is that we tend to carry negative stereotypes of each other, and that these can be broken down best by actually getting to know one another personally. I agree wholeheartedly.

He quoted a famous Arab saying, “Knowing someone is better than just hearing about him,” and proceeded to share how his travels to the United States helped him to love and appreciate Americans as people even though he has a very hard time with U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East. Simply to hear about a person without the chance to actually meet, speak with, share meals with and get to know that person, leaves one with only hearsay, which then the human mind naturally augments with its own usually faulty imagination as it builds a fuller picture. In other words, in such cases we base our opinions on caricatures rather than reality, and are often completely wrong. It is in meeting others and building relationships that we have the opportunity to truly know them and be known.

But, that got me thinking further. One of the colossal differences between Christianity and Islam has to do with the “knowability” of God. Islam asserts that Allah is so transcendent and lofty that human beings cannot know him personally — indeed, that Allah is not interested in being personally known. The idea of God becoming incarnate on our little planet is incomprehensible to Islam, even blasphemous. Allah did not communicate personally even with his favorite prophet, Muhammad, but used the angel Gabriel as an intermediary. Even heaven in the standard Muslim description is not a place where Allah and his rewarded saints rub shoulders, but rather the location where the chosen enjoy endless romps with virgins, broken only by feasting on delicacies and drinking fresh wine and other libations. Allah is not present there — such would be unseemly; instead, his abode is in heaven above Paradise, where he does not have to mix with his sensually-minded creatures. Lastly, the Qur’an itself is never seen as Allah’s self-revelation to human beings, but rather the revelation of his will for his creatures — what he expects them as slaves to do or refrain from doing in obedience to him.

What we have in Islam is a god about whom you can discover hearsay reports, but one you can never meet and get to know.

The biblical God,  on the other hand, is one who from start to finish desires personal relationship with His human creatures. From the time of Eden, He is pictured as walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the garden. Even after the rupture of relationship through the Fall, God is at work planning the restoration of harmony between heaven and earth. He reveals Himself to Abraham and promises to work for the blessing of all the earth through Abraham’s descendants. He reveals to Moses and the Jews His personal name, Yahweh, by which He is to be forever known. (An interesting side fact is that the name Yahweh appears some 7,000 times in the Bible, while never finding one mention in the Qur’an; isn’t that strange for a book which claims the same God as its source of revelation?) His presence (the Shekinah) goes before the Jews as they wander in the wilderness for forty years, and He orders the settled Jews in the promised land to construct the Temple in Jerusalem where the presence of God would always be found in the Holy of Holies. With the Incarnation, the person of God the Son takes up residence as a human being, Jesus, in order to meet us on our own level and become the bridge between heaven and earth. As the Gospel writer John put it, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Not only did Jesus reveal the nature of God most fully through his words and actions, but by his loving self-sacrifice he repaired the breach between God and humanity which sin had caused. As a result, human beings can not only know God personally, but can experience union with Him through the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, whom the Father and Son have poured into the hearts of all who trust in Jesus.

The Bible is the record of God’s self-revelation, His giving of Himself, not merely His decrees, to the human race. His message is one of love, of restored relationship, of grace and mercy promising eternal fellowship which begins and grows from the moment we open our lives to receive His salvation. The picture of heaven is not one of a distant deity rewarding his faithful slaves with a brothel of never-ending sensuality, but of a God who lives among His redeemed, whom He names not as slaves but as sons and daughters. According to the Book of Revelation, this God will take His children to Himself and wipe every tear from their eyes — there is no greater symbol of intimacy and warmth than this.

As Jeremiah prophesies concerning the New Covenant:

No longer shall each man teach his neighbor, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sins no more” (31:34).

Sheikh Muhammad is absolutely right that to know someone is better than to hear about him. This is so vital to the creation of harmony and blessing among human beings. “To hear about” always pales in comparison with meeting “the real thing.”

Sadly, Islam delivers only hearsay about God, and thereby fills its teachings with all sorts of unhelpful, even destructive, imaginings concerning the true God and His nature. Since Islam denies the possibility of ever personally knowing God, these false images cannot be corrected within the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah (the practices and sayings of Muhammad).

If human beings are to truly know God, it can only happen in a context where God openly reveals Himself, and welcomes human beings as His adopted sons and daughters, in and through the life, death and resurrection of His eternal Son, the Beloved, made incarnate for us in Jesus Christ.

To know God is better than to hear about Him. And it is the joyful responsibility of those who know Him to introduce Him to those who as of yet have only heard about Him. This is the heart of Christian missions. And what greater mission field today than the vast world of Islam, where the god who is known about is only a woeful caricature of the God of inexhaustible love. May this true God continue to raise up workers to send into the harvest fields with the good news of redemption, joy and life eternal, and may He give Muslims ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to receive His Spirit for themselves — that they may know God personally, and not only by hearsay