Is the Allah of Islam the God of the Bible? This is a beguiling and compelling question. The consensus is a modest percentage of people think that the Allah of Islam is the God of the Bible. In fairness it must be noted when Muslims refer to Allah and Christians refer to God they are referring to the same being. In fact, it is Islam that claims to worship the same God of the Holy Bible. To the contrary, Christians do not worship the same God as Islam. The belief can be contorted. For example, we are aware that the word Allah is used by Arab speaking Christians for the God of the Bible. As “Dieu” is the French word for God so “Allah” is the Arabic word for God. Therefore, the notion is that it can be used interchangeably, suggesting that they are the same. However, the Allah of Islam is distinct from the predominantly God of the Bible. The same God could not have authored the Qur’an and the Holy Bible in that they have contradictory perspectives of the nature of God, as well as conflicting historical accounts. It is at the point of the nature of God that the two faiths differ.

Muslims insist that Allah is not a title, but the personal name of the God of Islam. This becomes problematic since according to the Holy Bible the name of the God of Abraham is Yahweh/Jehovah, not Allah. God spoke further to Moses and said to him, “I am Yahweh (YHWH) and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as God Almighty; BUT BY MY NAME, YAHWEH, I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:2-3). Christians can use Allah as a title but not as the personal name for the God of the Bible.

Long before Muhammad was born, Arabic Christians were already referring to God as Allah – and millions continue to do so today. The Allah of Islam, however, is definitely not the God of the Bible. While Muslims passionately defend the unity of God, they patently deny His triunity. They recoil at the notion of God as Father, reject the unique deity of Jesus Christ the Son, and renounce the divine identity of the Holy Spirit. The nature of God among Muslims is He is monotheistic, one God. They reject the concept of the Trinity. Christians also believe in one God but as a tri-unity. The concept of God as one entity poses a question unanswered in the Muslim faith. The Holy Bible says “God is love.” Conceding He is eternal and existed before the dawning of creation. For there to be love there must be one loving and the object loved. Before creation there was nothing and no one to love. Without an object there is no love. Without an object to love there could be no love. Love being the very nature of God, there had to be an object to love before creation.

First while the Master taught his disciples to pray “Our Father in heaven,” devotees of Muhammad find the very notion offensive. To their way of thinking, calling God, “Father” and Jesus Christ, “Son” suggests sexual procreation. According to the Qur’an, “it is not befitting to (the majesty of) Allah that He should beget a son” (Sura 19:35), Allah “begetteth not, nor is he begotten” (Sura 112:3). The Bible, on the other hand, does not use the term “begotten” with respect to the Father and the Son in the sense of sexual reproduction but rather in the sense of special relationship. Though, when the apostle John speaks of Jesus as “the only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14 NKJV, emphasis added), he is underscoring the unique deity of Christ. The same, when the Apostle Paul refers to Jesus as “the firstborn over all creation” (Colossians 1:15, emphasis added) he is emphasizing Christ’s preeminence or prime position as the Creator of all things (Colossians 1:16-19). Christians are sons of God through adoption; Jesus is God the Son from all eternity.

Furthermore, Muslims dogmatically denounce the Christian declaration of Christ’s unique deity as the unforgivable sin of shirk. As the Qur’an puts it, “God forgiveth not the sin of joining other gods with Him; but He forgiveth whom He pleaseth other sins than this” (Sura 4:116). While Muslims readily affirm the sinlessness of Christ, they adamantly deny His sacrifice upon the cross and subsequent resurrection. In doing so, they deny the singular historic fact which demonstrates that Jesus does not stand in a long line of peers from Abraham to Muhammad, but is God in human flesh. The Qur’anic phrase, “Allah raised him up” (Sura 4:158) is taken to mean that Jesus was supernaturally raptured rather than resurrected from the dead. In Islamic lore, God made someone look like Jesus, and this look-a-like was crucified in his place. In recent years, the myth that Judas was crucified in place of Jesus has been popularized in Muslim circles by a late medieval invention titled The Gospel of Barnabas. Against the Christian belief, the Qur’an conveys, “they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them” (Sura 4:157).

Finally, in addition to rejecting the divinity of Jesus, Islam also renounces the divine identity of the Holy Spirit. Far from being the third person of the Triune God who inspired the text of the Bible, Islam teaches that the Holy Spirit is the archangel Gabriel who dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad over a period of twenty-three years. However, biblically the Holy Spirit is neither an angel nor a mere mortal; rather he is the very God who, given, redeems us from our sins and will one day resurrect us to life eternal (Acts 5:3-4; Romans 8:11).

Sourses:

- Hanegraaff, Hank. (2004). The Bible Answer Book. Nashville: J. Countryman division of the Thomas Nelson Book Group.

- New International Version Study Bible (NIV) (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995)

- Sarwar, Sheikh Muhammad, The Holy Qur'an: Arabic Text and English Translation (Elmhurst, 1981).