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My God and My Neighbor is a “Bible talk show” that looks at religious issues, Christian living and world events in light of the Word of God to give hope. This podcast is a ministry of Tennessee Bible College. TBC offers a bachelor's in Bible studies, a master of theology, and a doctorate of theology in apologetics and Christian evidences. TBC also provides Christian books, audio recordings on the Bible, and free Bible courses in English and Spanish. Tune in to My God and My Neighbor to experience the educational content that TBC has been delivering for nearly five decades!
Kerry Duke: Hi, I'm Kerry Duke, host of My God and My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible is not just another book, but the book. Join us in a study of the inspired word to strengthen your faith and to share what you've learned with others. The scriptures teach that history does indeed repeat itself.
The book of Ecclesiastes says it this way in Ecclesiastes chapter one, beginning in verse four. “One generation passes away, and another generation comes. But the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes toward the south and turns around to the north. The wind whirls about continually, and comes again on its circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the rivers come, there they return again. All things are full of labor. Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing which has been is what will be. That which is done is what will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun.”
This is a look at the decade of 2000 to 2010 in light of the Bible. This is not just a study of history. It's not a study of all the political and all of the worldwide and international movements and trends and events that occurred in this decade.
We're not looking at history just to be studying history. We're looking at the moral and the spiritual aspects of history, and especially those trends and those events which contributed to the situation that we find ourselves in today at the present time. So let's look at the decade of 2000 to 2010, which is no different because we see the same things happening.
For instance, Ecclesiastes chapter three, verse six says that there is a time to gain and a time to lose. The last half of the 1990s was an amazing time of financial gain, but the rate of growth in the stock market that produced the tech bubble was bound to stop and it did. In the year 2000, the tech bubble burst. The Nasdaq plummeted. So the decade began with stocks soaring and by the end of the first year of that decade investors had lost billions of dollars. The time to lose had arrived. But that wasn't all. The years 2007 to 2009 are sometimes called the Great Recession. Among other things, a housing bubble burst, pulling the market down tremendously. Some of the most prestigious financial firms in American history went under. This was a time of the most massive government bailouts in all the years of the famous U. S. economy. The numbers and the names are staggering. Companies and institutions once thought to be beyond financial threat suddenly became bankrupt. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Bear Stearns was bought out. The government handed over an incredible amount of money to keep companies afloat. Fannie Mae received 119 billion. Freddie Mac, 71 billion. AIG, 67 billion. GM, 50 billion. Bank of America, 45 billion. Citigroup, 45 billion. JPMorgan Chase, 25 billion. Wells Fargo, 25 billion. Chrysler, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, 10 billion each.
But all this reminds us of what the Bible says thousands of years ago. In 1 Timothy chapter 6 verse 17, Paul warned wealthy Christians not to be high minded or to trust in uncertain riches. They are truly uncertain. They can be here today and gone tomorrow. The Bible also says, “Let not the rich man glory in his riches.”
But the Bible also warns about how all of us look at money, rich or poor, not just the wealthy. Jesus said that money can be very deceptive. You may think that you're in control of it, but it may end up controlling you. In Matthew chapter 13, verse 22, in the parable of the sower, Jesus talked about those who become Christians. who, He says, received the seed among the thorns. They hear the word and then “the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word and he becomes unfruitful.” Notice the expression, the deceitfulness of riches. So while we look at sins in these decades, like sexual sins of adultery and fornication and pornography or things like murder and abortion or alcohol and drug use, let's not forget the sinfulness of greed and the arrogance that goes with it. Let's remember also that beneath some of the most widespread and destructive trends in America that we've looked at, like divorce, the lack of parental discipline, problems in the home, problems in society were often due to a love of money that brought selfishness into the home and into society, which in many cases contributed to these problems.
And that's why the Bible warns us in many places to check our heart, because our attitude toward money may not be what it should be. We may tell ourselves that it doesn't mean that much. But you never know about yourself until you are really tested. When you lose, or when you think you are about to lose all that you have, would you be like Job? Or would you turn against God like the devil accused him? Would you still follow Jesus, or would you walk away like the rich young ruler in Matthew chapter 19? The wise thing to do is to examine your heart now to see if your attitude is what it should be.
This decade also had its share of disasters and diseases. 2005 was the year of Hurricane Katrina followed by Hurricane Rita. These storms took over 1,200 lives and caused $125 billion in damages. And there's a moral aspect to these kinds of catastrophes. Hardships like these, as we've seen, bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. So, when these disasters struck, some opened their hearts and their pockets and gave very generously to help.
Others, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to pillage and loot buildings that lay defenseless. There was also the question of whether these storms were some kind of divine punishment, whether there was a divine purpose to these disasters. Did God punish the city of New Orleans for it sins? Some immediately said no while others said yes.
Now we saw this same question with the AIDS epidemic, and again, the answer is, we don't know because God hasn't told us. But as with other cases of suffering, it is possible that God's just hand was at work. Elihu in the Old Testament was right when he said that God sends rain for different reasons. In Job chapter 37, verse 13, he said he “causes it to come, whether for correction or for his land or for mercy.”
The Bible also says that God withholds rain because of man's sins. Solomon said in 1 Kings chapter 8 verse 35, “When heaven is shut up, and there is no rain, because they have sinned against you.” So, while as a general rule, God gives us rain from heaven, Acts 14 verse 17, and He even sends rain on the just and the unjust, Matthew 5 verse 45, sometimes He intervenes and changes how people think and feel by literally changing their environment.
There were also diseases in this decade that we'd never heard of before. One of them was SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. This involved 8, 000 cases in 29 countries. It involved 744 deaths in the year 2003.
Then there was an even more widespread disease called the H1N1 or Swine Flu Pandemic, which peaked from 2009 to 2010. The CDC estimates that in the United States alone, 60.8 million people were infected. Almost 275,000 were hospitalized, with over 12, 000 deaths in the United States. Yet there was no thought of closing schools, shutting down churches, or banning businesses from opening, even though some in the media tried to cause a panic over what they called a pandemic.
But Christians have an anchor. The Bible is a light in a world of suffering and fear. Jesus lived in a world of diseases. He said, if you're sick, you need a doctor [Matthew 9, verse 12]. Of course, he also healed people. Luke was a doctor [Colossians 4, verse 14]. Paul knew about medical problems firsthand because he had a permanent illness [2 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 7 through 10]. Timothy had frequent sicknesses, one of which was an intestinal problem [1 Timothy 5, verse 23].
But even though Jesus and Paul were compassionate toward the sick and taught us to do the same, they always had as their main focus and taught that our main focus should be the sou, not the body. Jesus said, “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” [Matthew 10, verse 28]. Paul said, “For which cause we faint not, but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. While we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal [2 Corinthians 4, verses 16-18].
Paul also said this in 1 Timothy 4, verse 8: “Bodily exercise profits little.” Paul did not deny the benefit involved with exercise. He simply said keep it in proportion. “Bodily exercise profits little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having the promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.
These were some of the main problems and changes in the decade of 2000 to 2010. Of course, the defining event, the pivotal marker that is now history, the event that permanently changed the country and the world, occurred on a Tuesday morning in 2001. A team of Islamic terrorists hijacked four jets with a deadly mission in mind—a suicide attack.
The only real exposure that Americans had ever had to this kind of radicalism was the Japanese kamikaze attacks on U. S. battleships in World War II. But most of us had only seen that portrayed in movies. Muslim terrorism was still something foreign to us, even though what had happened in Munich in 1972 and in Beirut in 1983 was filed away in our memory.
And then there had been really an unsuccessful attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 when some Islamic terrorists exploded a bomb in the parking garage of the towers. But what happened on that clear day of September the 11th, 2001, was beyond anything that we could have imagined. It brought the country to a standstill and caused the whole world to sit up and listen.
America had not experienced a day like that since Pearl Harbor. There was an eerie hush that came over the land. People were glued to the radio and to the television to find out what happened. When you went outside, there was a noticeable absence of any kind of plane or jet in the sky. Some of us watched TV as the second jet struck the Twin Towers.
And then watching the towers crumble later and learning how many people were in them sent chills down our spine. And then we learned of the heroic efforts of firefighters, policemen, and other first responders in the city of New York and we watched for weeks.
Then we learned of the heroic efforts that day of passengers on Flight 93, and then later we learned that even the Pentagon, the center of defense for the nation, was under attack.
For all of our wealth and power, America was suddenly extremely vulnerable. Almost 3, 000 people died that day. For the first time in years, politicians and the media united to denounce this evil. A month later, we were at war in Afghanistan in what has proven to be a long, drawn out battle.
There was also a change in those days in people's attitude. People began to pray more. They started going to church more, at least for a while. But then sadly most of them went right back to their same old disinterest in spiritual things. The slogan that began in those days, “We will never forget,” became popular, but sadly, many of them did. And, in fact, there were some that did not understand the true nature of this attack from the outset.
The men responsible for these horrific attacks were Muslims. That much was clear. But the question that arose, which is still debated, was is the religion of Islam to blame or were these men extremists who did not represent the religion itself? Is Islam a religion of peace or a religion of the sword?
Now, President George W. Bush said not long after 9 11 that Islam is a peaceable religion. He said the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. That's a quite odd claim, because the word Islam itself means submission. But it's interesting that his assessment of this religion was quite the opposite of one of his predecessors in the Oval Office several generations before.
I'm reading now from John Quincy Adams. He said, “In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius with the preternatural energy of a fanatic and the fraudulent spirit of an imposter, proclaimed himself as a messenger from heaven and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth, adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law the doctrine of one omnipotent God. He connected indissolubly with it the audacious falsehood that he himself was his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new revelation of Jesus the faith and hope of immortal life and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain by degrading the condition of the female sex and the allowance of polygamy, and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as a part of his religion against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust, to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of 1200 years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant, nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man. While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace on earth and goodwill towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man and every man's hand against him. The precept of the Quran is Perpetual war against all who deny that Muhammad is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives by the payment of tribute. The victorious may be appeased by a false and elusive promise of peace, and the faithful follower of the prophet may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat. But the command to propagate the Muslim creed by the sword is always obligatory when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike by fraud or by force” [John Quincy Adams]. But as pointed as his words are and as sharp as the contrast is between what he said about Islam and what George W.
Bush said about it, the truth is that we don't have to take his words for it. We can read from authoritative sources of Islam itself. So let's look first of all at the Quran.
Here are some verses straight from the most authoritative source of the Islamic religion. One of them says, “Fighting is prescribed upon you and you dislike it, but it is possible that you dislike a thing that is good for you.”
Another one says, “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah and those who reject fight in the cause of evil. So fight ye against the friends of Satan.” Now, some people say that these verses are only about defensive wars, that they really are not about religious warfare. But look at this statement again: “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah.”
The cause of Allah is a religious cause. It is the cause of Islam. Now remember that Islam means submission and the goal of Islam is to conquer and subjugate the whole world and to impose its government, which is also its religion, upon all mankind. That is the goal.
Another statement is, “Fight those who believe not in Allah, nor the last day.” Then, in 47: 4: “Therefore, when you meet the unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks. At length, when you have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly on them.”
To see how literally and seriously Muslims today take these words, let's go back and look at the year 2004, just three years after 9/11. In Maryland, a police officer saw a woman in a car, and she had on this traditional Muslim headpiece, who was videotaping the support structures of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
So he pulled the car over, and come to find out, the driver was wanted on a material witness warrant in Chicago. So the FBI investigated, and when they went to this home, they discovered underneath the floor of the basement some documents of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's called the Explanatory Memorandum, which comes from the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.
And here's one of the statements from this work: “The process of settlement is a civilization jihadist process with all that the word means. The Ikhwan,” that is, these fighters in the Islamic religion, “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers,” that is Muslims, “so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform jihad and work where he is and wherever he lands until the final hour omes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack” [The Explanatory Memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood, 2004].
But there are other moral issues in Islamic teaching, and one of the most disturbing is Muslim attitudes toward women, sex, and religion and marriage. For instance, in Islam, a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man's. In Surah two verse 2 82, the Quran says, “And get two witnesses out of your own men. And if there are not two men, then, a man and two women, such as you choose for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her.” So clearly, a woman's testimony is worth only half that of a man, in court or otherwise in society. So the word of one woman in Islam means nothing. If a woman is raped, for instance, this makes it almost impossible to convict her rapist in a court of law, and if she can't convince witnesses to come forward, or if they do and she's still not believed in court, then she may be found guilty of adultery, for which the penalty is death in many Islamic countries. And this is why rape in many of those very countries oftentimes goes unreported.
The Quran also gives some disturbing instructions about how a man is to treat his wife. In Surah 4, verse 34, the Qur'an says, “As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill conduct, admonish them first. Next, refuse to share their beds, and last, spank them lightly.” That's Surah 4, verse 34. This is from Abdullah Yusuf Ali's 1999 translation.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that the ground of this treatment is suspicion. Notice, “as to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty.” Then, the next step is to refuse to share the bed with her. This is ungodly advice. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 3, “Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her.”
But the Quran says, in this situation, that a husband is not to do that. But the last part is very interesting also. Western English translations have changed over the years. Notice that the last step is to spank them, and in the parentheses, you have the words “lightly” as well as “last” and “first.” So this means these words have been added, the word lightly has been added, especially here by the translator.
Now that's the 1999 edition by that translator. But in the 1995 translation by the same author, we have the words “beat them,” that is, beat your wives and the word “lightly” in parentheses. In other translations, however, such as Muhammad Asad's 2003 translation of the Qur'an, he simply has “beat them.” So while you may find some variation of these Muslim translations of the Qur'an into English, and while they may send some mixed messages, the overall idea is undeniable. And that is that the Qur'an tells husbands to use physical punishment, corporal punishment, against wives who are even suspected of disloyalty.
This is wicked and vile and totally opposed to the Bible. Listen to what the Apostle Paul said in Ephesians 5, verse 28: “Husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as the Lord does the church.”
Now also in Islam, we find that a man can have four wives. Surah 4, verse 3 says, “Marry women of your choice: Two, or three, or four.” Now compare this to first Corinthians chapter seven, verse two: “Let every man have his own wife and let every woman have her own husband.” And of course, Muhammad had far more than four wives.
Another shocking fact that you'll find when you read the Quran is that there are many references to companions in heaven, sensual references to companions in heaven who await Muslim men.
For instance, Surah 44, 54 says “companions with beautiful, big, lustrous eyes await them.” Surah 52, verse 24 says “youths, handsome as pearls.” Surah 56, verse 35 says that they will be of “special creation, virgin pure.” And Surah 76, verse 19 says that they will be “youths of perpetual youthfulness.” Freshness. Now, the Quran doesn't mention 70 virgins awaiting Muslim martyrs. That's an Islamic tradition and many Muslims believe that. But this is clear that there are companions who are awaiting these Muslim men in heaven. And notice that these verses do not specify whether these companions are male or female.
Now, one of the most despicable subjects about the founder of Islam is that Muhammad contracted a marriage with a six-year-old girl named Aisha, and he consummated the marriage when she was nine and he was 52 years old.
And yet, this is the religion hailed by the Western media as beautiful and peaceful. And these are only a few of the many immoral teachings and practices of the religion of Islam. What happened on 9/11 was tragic, but the circulation of Islamic propaganda and the indoctrination of the American public has been the real jihad in America.
This, as the document said, “civilization jihad.” “The ultimate goal of this system of government is the overthrow of every rival religion and government and the establishment of Sharia in every country.” And as long as this movement is in the world, there will always be this kind of conflict.
Thank you for listening to My God and My Neighbor. Stay connected with our podcast on our website and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Tennessee Bible College, providing Christian education since 1975 in Cookeville, Tennessee, offers undergraduate and graduate programs.
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