Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, I want to challenge you to think seriously about Christianity and Islam. Yes, we have had in the news here recently, deep interactions, have we not? The United States of America has been deeply involved, like punching a tar baby.

We have gotten stuck in places like Iran and in Gaza and Israel, the Middle East. And once again, we are faced with, on one hand, an Islamic enemy, quote unquote, and as well as an ally in Israel and so forth. But Islam is a much broader scope, of a much broader scope than just in the Middle East, because Muslims do indeed comprise a growing number of Americans as well. Well, Muslims comprise about 15 to 20 percent of the world's population. 1.3 billion souls, concentrated as majorities in nations from North Africa to Indonesia.

However, there are huge populations of Muslims of diverse nationalities in Western cities across Europe and North America, too. I have some statistics I'd like to share with you. American Muslims in 2025. So these are really updated stats here. The 2020 United States Religion Census says that there are 4.5 billion Muslims, or I'm sorry, 4.5 million Muslims in the United States.

But that's contradicted by the American Jewish Committee. And they say Muslims are less than 3 million in America. So those are vying statistics. American Muslims are younger than all other communities. 26 percent of Muslims are between the ages of 18 to 24, compared with 2 percent to 12 percent of other groups surveyed.

So the American Muslim population is young. And they will be taking their place even more solidly here in the near future. Also, a significant part of the Muslim community in America is in prison, since 30 percent of all incarcerated African Americans are Muslims with accepted Islam in prison, a la Malcolm X. Now, this has been done very deliberately. And Christians have great missionaries and chaplains and so forth in prisons.

Well, so does Islam. And Islam has recruited and converted many a man in prison and converted them solidly and rehabilitated their lives and characters, for that matter, too. In America, most Muslims live in the major cosmopolitan areas of the United States. The largest number would be in New York, California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Now, 42 percent of the American Muslim population is born in the United States, and the rest are first-generation immigrants, although that's going to be changing as the birth rate for Muslims in America is increasing as well.

Now, there are many prayer centers and Islamic centers. The prayer centers are masjids and many Muslim schools, the madrasas, if you will, and also many Islamic centers all over the United States now that have been seeded, if you will, planted, established, and opened. There's about 2,771 prayer centers, or masjids, in the United States, and about 300 Islamic schools, madrasas, serving more than 50,000 students. 76 percent of American masjids offer weekend schools for children, too, and there are eight Muslim seminaries and madrasas for higher education in America, as well as three colleges and one university run by Muslims.

Masjids in the United States are often not just a place to pray, by the way. They are the center of Muslim lives in America, participating in coalitions and civic engagements and social services. Well, there are also a few Muslims that are appearing in public service, some of them notoriously and famously, right? There are currently four Muslims serving in Congress, for example. Also, we find that there is an increasing warning about sensitivity to what Muslims call Islamophobia, and many Muslims are very, very sensitive about what they perceive to be Islamophobia in America.

But the number of Muslims in the United States still does continue to grow. Muslims in the United States are not as numerous as the number of Americans who identify themselves as Jewish by religion, according to the Pew Research Center. At the same time, Pew projects that the United States Muslim population will grow a lot faster than the country's Jewish population. By 2040, Pew says that Muslims will replace Jews as the nation's second largest religious group, right after Christians. So, we are contending with these things, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters in the Christian faith.

The Muslim population has continued to grow at a rate of roughly 100,000 per year, according to Pew, driven both by higher fertility rates among Muslim Americans, as well as the continued migration of Muslims into the United States. Well, until recently, Islam rarely blipped the radar screens of most Americans, right until the near future came upon us with 9-11 and so forth. From its inception, Islam. What is Islam like then? What kind of religion is Islam?

I'd like to give you a brief introduction here for the next few weeks, just so we know what we're dealing with when we talk about Islam. From its inception, Islam has been an all-encompassing religion, demanding utter allegiance to its principles. The very name Islam means surrender or submission. That is, a complete giving over of the self to Allah and His will, which then brings the subject peace and rest for his soul.

It has the characteristic, as one commentator puts it, it has the characteristic of being able to generate a psychological certainty of possessing the truth, of following the right path, and of wielding the perfect key to the gate of the great beyond. And Islam has been at war, really, jihad, at war with the world from its beginning. Muhammad, Islam's founder, was born about A.D. 570, what's now Saudi Arabia. He lost both of his parents as a child, and he grew up with his uncle, who was an Arab merchant.

Now, young Muhammad grew up in a time of religious turmoil, where he encountered many different religions, Christianity and Judaism, and multiple pagan religions of his own peninsula of Arabia. And none of the religions of his youth seemed to take with young Muhammad, though he learned from them all, and he sought after the true religion. And finally, in A.D. 610, in the month of Ramadan, the angel Gabriel, ostensibly, appeared to Muhammad, called him to be a prophet of God, that is of Allah, and the true religion. And he met and conversed with Jesus and Moses and Abraham, according to the Quran.

And he ascended by a ladder provided by Gabriel to the seventh heaven. And then, from there on, at various times over the rest of his life, the angel Gabriel, ostensibly, would dictate a series of visions and prophecies which he recorded in chapters called surahs, and collectively would become known as the Quran. Now, as Muhammad began to communicate his visions, however, he met opposition, even from his wife. Oh, his own pagan peoples rejected him because he proclaimed a one true God. Christians and Jews rejected him because he considered Islam to be the true and final successor to both Christianity and Judaism.

And while he and Muslims who followed him held the Bible to be true, he maintained it had been corrupted and that the Quran was the true, pure book. And he was increasingly persecuted in his hometown of Mecca. And so, therefore, he took all of his meager followers, they were a small band at this time, and made a famous pilgrimage to Medina in AD 622. Now, that year, AD 622 in the Christian calendar became seminally year one in the Muslim calendar. So significant was this pilgrimage to Medina.

And here, in Medina, Muhammad continued to grow slowly but surely, and he adopted such practices as plural marriage in his own unique theology of marriage and the sexes. Surah number four, for example, clearly establishes the inferiority of women to men, whose primary purpose, that is, women, is to bear children, especially sons. A rigorous, obsessive chastity is enforced upon the woman, reflected in practices from female circumcision to the wearing of the burqa. That's that environmental contamination suit that's just the hazmat suit that you see on TV. Well, one of the great appeals of Islam is its simplicity of practice.

It's simplicity of practice. Everyone can quickly observe and absorb and begin to practice the five things, if you will, that Muhammad insists every Muslim must do. Perhaps we can review that here briefly. Number one is the Shahada, that is the confession of faith. No big, thick book, but rather just a brief phrase, the Shahada, which every Muslim must confess, and that is, there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.

Say that, and you have, say that sincerely from the heart, and you have converted then to Islam. Very simple, right? The Shahada, number one. Number two is Salat, that is prayer. And each Muslim is expected to pray five times a day facing Mecca, and we see this famously reprised in the vast sea of Muslims, wherever they may be breaking for the day, perhaps, and praying toward Mecca five times a day.

The Salat, number two. Number three is the Zakat, which is the tithe. Each Muslim is expected to pay a tithe, especially to the poor and the needy, which is then distributed by the mosque. Number four is the Somm, the Somm, S-A-W-M, and pronounced Somm, which is fasting during the month of Ramadan, a whole month of fasting from sunrise to sunset, but you can eat then in the evenings, and so you have the great fast during the month of Ramadan. Number five, then, is the Hajj, as it's called.

Number five, the fifth thing that every Muslim is expected to do is to go on Hajj, which is a pilgrimage, and every Muslim is expected to make pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his life, and then worship at the Kaba stone. The Hajj, number five. The Shahada, the Salat, the Zakat, the Somm, and the Hajj. The five things that every Muslim is expected to do, very simple, very straightforward in terms of what's expected and what needs to be understood. You don't need to buy a great big thick book of theology.

You have five things that you are expected to do. Some also say, though, that there is an unwritten sixth pillar of Islam, and that is jihad, often translated as holy war, though others say, what it really means is struggle or exertion after the good of Islam on behalf of Allah. Jihad, there are characteristically four different senses to the idea of jihad, which the imams of Islam teach, and they have reached a pretty good consensus on this. And the four areas of jihad would be, number one, the jihad of the heart, where one fights against sin. The second jihad would be the jihad of the mouth and the pen.

That is a verbal defense of Islam. The art of cursing your enemies as well. Verbal pronouncement where it is reality to say and declare a thing. For example, Saddam Hussein said that indeed he was going to fight with America, the mother of all battles. And in his mind, the battle was won because he had so declared it, because he was fighting a jihad of the mouth and the pen.

The third sense of jihad is the jihad of the hand. That is good deeds. Every Muslim is expected to do good deeds to earn his way towards heaven. And that is the jihad of the hand. And then fourthly, which we hear quite often, is the jihad of the sword, where one fights on behalf of Allah and Islam.

That's the one we're most familiar with. Well, jihad goes to the heart of spreading the faith, which is an obligation of every Muslim and every Islamic society. First year to try peace. The Quran says, invite all to the way of the Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching. Argue with them in ways that are gracious and patient.

But if that doesn't work, as the Quran also says, in later surahs, fight in the cause of Allah, those who fight you, for Allah loveth not the infidel. Slay them wherever you catch them in surah number two. And then as well, in surah number nine, fight and slay the infidel wherever you find them. Seize them, weary them, and lie and wait for them in each and every ambush. From surah number nine.

Well, over the centuries, jihad, as an instrument of conversion and imposition of Islamic law and society, has been perfected into high arts, as in no other major world religion. After the death of Muhammad, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, led Muslim armies out of Mecca and Medina to conquer the entire Arabian Peninsula and eventually into North Africa and Spain and India and Asia on conquest, not through peaceful conversion, but rather through the sword. Now, many critics of Christianity make a superficial comparison here. They say things like, well, Christians are just as guilty of war and bloodshed and spreading their religion.

But that's not true. The Bible gives no warrant for spreading Christianity as a faith by means of the sword. That's a crucial distinction. Christianity does not countenance force as an instrument of conversion and imposition of Christian law and society. No.

Well, some might say, well, how about those parts of the Bible where God commands the Israelites to kill men, women, and children? The Amalekites, for example. Well, they were so corrupt in their bloodlines that they were a danger and a plague to Israel. Monsters, they were not just regular human beings. No.

Nephilim, many of the Amalekites were, and they were dwelling among them. So corrupt were they that they were a danger and a plague to Israel and her neighbors, an incorrigible stench in the nostrils of God. Or, wherever Israel engaged in military conquest, for example, which was brutal, thorough, and unrelenting, it was to establish a pure temporal earthly kingdom as a picture and emblem of the purest eternal heavenly kingdom God had established in Christ.

John says, for example, our Lord says in the Gospel of John, a time is coming and has come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth. Well, and secondly, we must also observe, since the advent of that heavenly kingdom in Christ, the means of entry and conversion into that kingdom have been essentially spiritual.

The preaching of the word, the administration of the sacraments, all authority, our Lord said in Matthew 28, just before he ascended into heaven, he said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. And then thirdly, we must observe about Christian conversion when it comes to propagating the faith. Our model is Christ.

As Peter says in his letter, he says, in your hearts, set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that lies within you. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. It is better if it is God's will to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring you to God.

Well, that's just a sample of the abundant evidence in the Bible that when it comes to propagating the faith, our means are spiritual and heavenly. They're not fleshly and earthly. Another major misconception when we think of Christianity and Islam needs to be corrected. And that is, doesn't this mean that Christians should kill or shouldn't kill or serve in the military or be in favor of the death penalty? No, that's not what this says.

Propagating the faith in peace? No. These are all functions of the state. The things like a killing or serving in the military or the death penalty, right? These are all functions of the state as an earthly institution, which is a legitimate power given by God.

Romans chapter 13, Paul says, everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there's no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. The magistrate is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

So, not only is it permissible to serve with sword in hand, it is a Christian's duty to serve as a soldier, a policeman, a prosecutor seeking the death penalty, maybe, and as a judge presiding over capital cases. We have seen this throughout the history of Christianity in the West. For example, Charles Martel and his troops understood this when they beat the Muslims back at Tours, France in AD 732, defeating the Moors, which were North African Muslims who had conquered Spain, or Stephen Sobieski. He's one of the great ones we'll be covering in the near future. Stephen Sobieski and his Polish troops understood this.

They defeated the Turks at the gates of Vienna in AD 1683. On and on, we could go and we will go with many other examples. But we must understand this in our day. Make no mistake. Let no Muslim talking head deceive you.

Let no tolerance talking pluralist persuade you that if we just understood them more and talked to them more and looked within and corrected what's wrong with us, they'd stop being mean and we could just get along. Oh, that's not going to happen, dear listener. The jihad of the sword is the instrument of choice for the militant radicals and increasingly for the average Muslim who reads his Quran and takes it seriously. While we recoil in horror to terror, enrollment in radical Islamic groups has swollen. The typical Western response is perceived for what it is, and that is weakness, and it will only encourage more terror.

What we need to understand, and what they understand, is strength. What kind of strength is that? Oh, understand this, dear listener. The battle we fight is a spiritual battle. First and foremost, this is a concept that's been utterly lost in our secular age, which is utterly cast aside its Christian heritage.

No, our battle first and foremost is a spiritual battle. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 10, for though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. They are spiritual weapons.

We do not fight with earthly weapons, but rather with spiritual weapons first and foremost, as indeed we represent Christianity and we struggle then to convert. We struggle indeed to establish Christianity and Christ's kingdom all over the world. The key missing components in almost every discussion of what it will take to defeat militant Islam. It's not budget. It's not guns.

It's not a strong economy or determination, pure and simple. No, it is spiritual strength, spiritual resolve that comes from the Christian God of the Bible. This indeed is what will give us ultimate victory in the long run and establish Christ's kingdom over the entire globe, yea, throughout the universe. Well, this has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and New Geneva meets for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard, and we invite you to come and visit us this summer.

We have a delightful group of people, and we would more than welcome you into our midst, and we are very much aware, both politically and socially aware, and we have, as you can hear from our, this recent broadcast, and we would be glad to welcome you into our fellowship here on Sunday mornings. We meet at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard, and you can call us for more information or give me some feedback, perhaps, on what you've heard, at area code 208-523-0196. That's area code 208-523-0196.