Do We Worship the Same God?

Christians believe in one God who created everything.

Muslims also believe in one God, called Allah.

Some people say that they worship the same God. Is this true? Let’s take a look.

Christian God:

• God is above all
• God is eternal
• God’s only begotten son is Jesus/Yahushua
• God made salvation available by sacrificing His Son and promises salvation by grace to those who believe.
• God has a payment for sins – Jesus Christ/Yahushua Messiah
• God’s Christ paid for the sins of mankind.
• God’s salvation is through Christ’s work.
• God’s saving work is, “Come to Christ”.
• God says His Son is THE way, THE truth, and THE life.

Muslim god:

• Allah is above all
• He is eternal
• Allah has no begotten son
• He sacrificed nothing, and only saves if sufficient works are done.
• He has no payment for sins.
• He paid for nothing, and all men pay for their own sins.
• His salvation is through people’s work
• The major part of Moslem salvation is to believe Mohammed was the sum and seal of the prophets.
• Allah says that Christ is only a messenger and not the Son of God.

[Source: https://www.truthortradition.com/articles/what-are-the-differences-between-allah-and-the-god-of-the-christian-bible].

Here is an excerpt from an article discussing whether or not Allah and God are one and the same:

Does God care what we call Him? Do Muslims and Christians worship the same god? These are questions many Christians are asking these days, and for good reason.

For some time now, feminist theologians and a host of others have suggested that Christians should adopt new names for God. One denomination went so far as to affirm names like “Giver, Gift and Giving” in place of the “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” to be used in worship. Feminist theologians have demanded that masculine pronouns and names for God be replaced with female or gender-neutral terms. But to change the name of God is to redefine the God we reference. Changing the name of God is no small matter.

As a matter of fact, God takes His name very seriously, and the Ten Commandments include the command that we must not take the name of the Lord in vain. We are to use the names God has given for Himself, and we are to recognize that God takes His name seriously because He desires to be rightly known by His human creatures. We cannot truly know Him if we do not even know His name.

Moses understood this. When he encountered the call of God that came from the burning bush, Moses asked God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13). God answered Moses, “I Am who I Am” (Exodus 3:14). God told Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” (Exodus 3:15).

As these verses make clear, we are not to tamper with God’s name. We are to use the names whereby God has named Himself, and we are to recognize that any confusion about the name of God will lead to confusion about the nature of God, if not to idolatry.

Christians must keep this central principle from the Bible constantly in mind as we consider some of the most urgent questions we face in the world today. We must certainly have this principle in mind when we think about Islam.

Several years ago, a bishop in the Netherlands attracted controversy when he argued that Christians should call God “Allah” in order to lower theological tensions. He also argued that calling God “Allah” would be commonplace in Christian churches within a century and that this would lead to a synthesis of Islam and Christianity.

More recently, an Islamic court in Malaysia ruled that only Muslims can use the name “Allah” in print publications. “The usage of the word will cause confusion in the community,” the chief judge ruled. Oddly enough, Christians may well agree with this Islamic judge. To call God “Allah” is to invite confusion.

In the Bible, God reveals Himself to us in many names. These names are His personal property. We did not invent these names for God. To the contrary, God revealed these names as His own.

We have no right to modify or to revise these names—much less to reject them. Jesus Christ made this abundantly clear. In the simplest way imaginable, Jesus teaches us to know God as Father, and to use this name in prayer. The Lord’s Prayer begins with the words, “Our Father, who is in heaven.” By the grace that God has shown us in Christ, we can truly know Him as Father.

Muslims do not speak of God as their heavenly Father. In the Islamic faith, Allah is not only a different name for god; the deity it designates is far more impersonal than the God of the Bible. Father—the very name that Jesus gave us as the designated name for use in prayer—is a name that simply does not fit Allah as depicted in the Quran.

Furthermore, Muslims claim that Allah has no son. This represents a head-on collision between the God of the Bible and Allah. For, as the Bible makes clear, the one and only true God is most perfectly revealed as the Father of the Son, Jesus Christ. In the Gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly teaches that no one has truly known the Father, except by the Son. In one of the most clarifying verses in the New Testament, Jesus declared Himself to be “the way, and the truth, and the life,” adding, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

(That alone makes it impossible for Allah and God to be one and the same). Carrying on:

[…] From the very starting point, Islam denies what Christianity takes as its central truth claim: the fact that Jesus Christ is the only begotten of the Father. If Allah has no son, then Allah is not the God who reveals Himself through the Son. How then can calling God “Allah” not lead to anything but confusion—and worse?

[Source: https://billygraham.org/decision-magazine/december-2013/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god/].

The following is taken from an article that a FORMER MUSLIM wrote:

With this desire for love in mind, I turn now to the question: Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? Like all good questions, the answer is more complex than most want, but I am confident of my position: Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God, but given the complexity of the matter we all ought to stop demonizing those who disagree with us.

I should start by saying this: for years after leaving Islam and accepting Jesus as Lord, I believed that Muslims worshiped the same God as Christians but that they were simply wrong about what He is like and what He has done. After all, I had been taught as a young Muslim to worship the God who created Adam and Eve, who rescued Noah from the flood, who promised Abraham a vast progeny, who helped Moses escape Egypt, who made the Virgin Mary great with child, who sent Jesus into the world, who helped the disciples overcome, and who is still sovereign today. Is that not the God of the Bible?

For that matter, the Quran asserts that the Torah and the Gospel are inspired scripture and that Jews and Christians are people of the Book. The Quran tells Muslims to say to them, “our God and your God is One, and unto Him we surrender” (29.46). If the Quran asserts that Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians, does that not settle the matter?

For years I thought it did, but I no longer do. Now I believe that the phrase “Muslims and Christians worship the same God” is only true in a fairly uncontroversial sense: There is one Creator whom Muslims and Christians both attempt to worship. Apart from this banal observation, Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God. I do not condemn those that think they do, but the deeper I delve into the Christian faith, the more I realize that this assertion is not only untrue but also subverts Christian orthodoxy in favor of Islamic assertions.

Let’s start with the obvious: Christians believe Jesus is God, but the Quran is so opposed to this belief that it condemns Jesus worshipers to Hell (5.72). For Christians, Jesus is certainly God, and for Muslims Jesus is certainly not God. How can it be said that Christians and Muslims worship the same God? This fact alone is enough to settle the matter, but at the very least, no one should argue as Volf has that “there isn’t any theological justification” for believing Christians and Muslims worship different Gods. There certainly is, and it is the obvious position when we consider the person of Jesus.

Another difference between the Islamic God and the Christian God that is quite personal to me is his Fatherhood. According to Jesus, God is our Father, yet the Quran very specifically denies that Allah is a father (112.1-4). In fact, in 5.18, the Quran tells Muslims to rebuke Jews and Christians for calling God their loving Father because humans are just things that God has created.

Also, from the same article, the mans points out this:

According to Islam, worshiping the Christian God is not just wrong; it sends you to Hell.

[Source: https://www.rzim.org/read/rzim-global/do-muslims-and-christians-worship-the-same-god].

That really puts it in perspective, doesn’t it? How can they possibly be the same?

Here is another article discussing the topic:

Jesus, the face and articulation of the Father, tells his followers that they are to turn the other cheek and love their enemies.

Mohammed tells his followers to respond to violence with violence:

“So whoever has assaulted you, then assault him in the same way that he has assaulted you” (Koran 2.194)

The way in which both ways deal with violence sets them at odds with each other.

The Quran prescribes

“Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it.  But it is possible that ye  dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”
(Quran 2:216)

Whereas the New Testament teaches

“Do not take revenge, my friends, but  leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written:
‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy
is hungry,  feed him… ‘”
(Romans 12:19-20)

[…]

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. (John 1.)

Mohammed on the other hand explicitly rejects and contradicts this:

“The likeness of Jesus in Allah’s eye is as the likeness of Adam. He created him of dust, then He said to him “Be!” and he is. (3.59)”

“O People of the Book! Commit no excesses in your religion or utter anything concerning Allah but the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of Allah.” (4.171).

So when CS Lewis in his famous dictum in Mere Christianity described the options that critics of Jesus have:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Mohammed replied – Jesus is a fraud, a fake – an imposter. And as Lewis says, no good man could be an imposter at such a level without being a bad man.

Mohammed in the Koran attacks Jesus as an evil imposter.

Christianity is just as stark. It repays the compliment.

In 1 John 4, the apostle writes;

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. ² By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, ³ and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist.”

So from a Christian point of view, the spirit that spoke through Mohammed was the antichrist.

If we examine the Muslim call to prayer, does the situation get any better?

In the daily prayer of the observant Muslim, come the words:

“Guide us in the straight path,

the path of those whom Thou hast blessed,

not of those against whom Thou art wrathful,

nor of those who are astray.”

So who might those who have gone astray be and against whom Allah is wrathful be?

“Ibn Kathir cites a hadith in which Muhammad clarified what he meant:

Imam Ahmad recorded that ‘Adi bin Hatim said, … he [Muhammad] said: ‘Those who have earned the anger are the Jews and those who are led astray are the Christians.’”

So the Muslim call to prayer involves a prayer to avoid the fate of the Jews and Christians against whom Allah’s wrath is kindled.

[Source: https://ashenden.org/2018/11/20/when-does-a-cathedral-stop-being-a-cathedral-art-inclusion-and-choosing-between-mohammed-and-jesus-in-blackburn/].

Do I even need to go on?

Here are links to a couple other articles talking about it:

https://ashenden.org/2018/11/22/3159/

https://www.summit.org/resources/articles/archives-muslims-christians-worship-god/

IN CONCLUSION:

Judging from all the above, I can safely say that God and Allah are NOT THE SAME GOD. They are two completely different beings.