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Thoughts of...Martyrs
There was another bombing in London today. But, praise the Lord, this one was a failed attempt to kill many innocent people.
The Islamic suicide bombers who successfully carry out there mission are hailed as martyrs by those who send them. According to news reports, there are many thousands of young men and women willing to be martyrs for the cause of Islam.
The word “martyr” is quite revealing.
“Martyr” appears twice in the Bible (, ) and “martyrs” appears once (). The Greek word means “witness” and is used to describe those who knew the fellowship of the suffering of Jesus Christ, being made conformable unto His death (). Stephen, Antipas, and the multitude of saints at the hands of Mystery Babylon suffered physical death for their faithful witness of the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is a history of the lives, sufferings, and triumphant deaths of born-again believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, from the original Apostles of the First Century to the saints of the mid-16th Century Reformation. John Foxe’s history has been called “The most important Christian work ever printed outside of the Bible itself.”
Those men and women, and many millions of others throughout the years of Biblical Christianity (whose histories are most assuredly known by the Lord!), were witnesses of
• the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
• the God of Israel
• the God of the Bible
Who is
• knowable () and desires a personal relationship with all men.
• unable to lie () or act contrary to His nature () and, therefore, is completely faithful and trustworthy.
• love, light, and life (, , , ).
• gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness (, , , , )
• truth (, , , )
• hated by the world (, )
The martyrs of Jesus Christ were known for their love (, , )…and the world hated them (, , ). The desire of God’s witnesses was to bring lost, unbelieving, dying souls into the Light and Life so that they too would receive by faith the gift of eternal life. Ambassadors of Life, they did not kill, they were killed.
And they are still being killed to this day. Why do we not hear from the major news agencies about the massacre of born-again Christians in the Sudan? Or China? Or Iran? Or Saudi Arabia? Or the Philippines? Or in many other countries?
Yet, we hear about every single suicide bomber in the world. Contrary to the martyrs of Jesus Christ who are killed, the martyrs of Islam kill. They kill themselves, and in such a way so as to kill as many “unbelievers”/infidels as possible.
These men and women are witnesses of “Allah”, according to the Encyclopedia of Religion,
• a pre-Islamic god corresponding to the Babylonian Bel
• a pagan Arabian moon god whose symbol was the crescent moon
• the god of a violent tribal society
who
• is unknowable and aloof; no man can ever know him personally and to suggest otherwise is considered blasphemous by Islam.
• can lie and is not limited by his nature, and therefore, is capricious and untrustworthy
• is not loving and has no feelings toward man
• has no grace and no Savior for men; every man must do good works in order to attain his acceptance
• advocated death to unbelievers
The Koran says:
Fight and slay the pagans (infidels) wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war. (Sura 9:5)
Their punishment is…execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from the opposite sides, or exile from the land. (Sura 5:33)
The Islamic suicide bomber’s witness of his god is one of hate, death, and evil. So must his god be. According to the Bible, Satan, the god of this world (, ) is a
• murderer ()
• liar ()
• destroyer ()
• deceiver ()
Contrast the Islamic martyrs and their god to the Christian martyrs and their God. Examine the fruit.
To their god, the bombers are martyrs. To the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they are deceived murderers.
Pastor Doug
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