Mark Issa (Mohamad) 🇻🇦| مارك عيسى (محمد)

When I was Muslim, Surah 5:32 was my favorite verse to quote. “Whoever kills a soul, it is as if he killed all of mankind.” I put it in every debate. Every conversation about Islam and peace. It felt like the most beautiful verse in the Quran. Then I read it slowly. The verse doesn’t say Allah revealed this to Muhammad. It says: “We decreed upon the CHILDREN OF ISRAEL…” Wait. Decreed where? When? I went looking. Bro, then I found it. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5. A rabbinic commentary on Cain and Abel, written down around 200 AD like four centuries before the Quran. Rabbis discussed why Genesis says Abel’s “bloods” (plural) cry out and concluded: whoever destroys one soul, it is as if he destroyed an entire world. Insane that it was word for word, with the exact same context. Bro, the same Cain and Abel story it’s attached to in Surah 5. What I thought was the most beautiful verse in the Quran turned out to be a rabbi’s classroom commentary... Literally, that’s when the question changed for me. It went from “isn't this verse beautiful?” to: What the heck is a rabbinic homily doing inside a book that claims to be the eternal, uncreated speech of God?! Because there are only two options. Either Allah quoted the rabbis. Or a man in Arabia heard Jewish teachers and repeated what they said... The crazy part is, the Bible predicted men would do this. “I am against the prophets who steal my words from one another.” ( Jeremiah 23:30) That was the start of my journey toward Christ. I stopped defending the borrowed word of the Quran. I found the Living Word. PRAISE MY KING JESUS CHRIST, I’M FREE!

You know what shook me when I was Muslim? The story of Hosea: In it, God tells a prophet to marry a woman He KNOWS will betray him. She does. She runs to other men. She ends up enslaved, sold, and used up. Essentially, she is worthless to the world. Then, God tells Hosea to go BUY HER BACK, to pay money for his own wife who cheated on him, and love her again. (Hosea 3) I thought it was the most humiliating command in the Bible. Bro, why would any man do that!? Then I realized I was exactly like the wife. I gave my heart to everything but God. I chased other masters and I sold myself cheap. In a way, I made myself worthless. But, God looked at me, the betrayer, and didn’t say “you’re not worth it.” Instead, He said, “Name the price. I’m buying her back.” What's beautiful about this is, that’s the entire Gospel. God doesn’t wait for the unfaithful to come crawling back clean. He pays to redeem them while they’re still dirty. Islam told me to make myself WORTHY of God. Hosea showed me an amazing, present God who pays to redeem the unworthy. The cross was Him naming the price. Praise the Lord! Follow for more Christian apologetics that doesn't stop at winning arguments but equips you to actually reach people!

When I was Muslim, I never noticed what the Quran DOESN'T have. Namely, exact dates, exact places or exact titles or names you can check. Bro, when you read the Quran’s stories there is literally zero chronology, almost no geography, kings called only “Pharaoh,” events floating in no particular year. It is incredibly vague. You cannot get answers to questions like: Where did the story happen? When? Under whom? The text doesn’t say. You can’t check it, which conveniently means you can’t check it. Now, contrast that to the Bible, read the opening of Luke 3: “In the FIFTEENTH YEAR of the reign of TIBERIUS CAESAR — PONTIUS PILATE being governor of JUDEA, HEROD being tetrarch of GALILEE, his brother PHILIP tetrarch of ITUREA and TRACHONITIS, and LYSANIAS tetrarch of ABILENE, during the high priesthood of ANNAS and CAIAPHAS…” SEVEN historical anchors in one sentence. An emperor, a governor, three rulers with their exact territories, two high priests. And people HAVE checked — for centuries, often trying to break it. Skeptics mocked Luke’s “Lysanias of Abilene” as an error… UNTIL an inscription naming Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene turned up. Pilate was called legend by some… until the Pilate Stone was dug up at Caesarea in 1961 with his name and title carved in it. Luke 1:3-4 tells you why: “Having followed all things closely… that you may have CERTAINTY.” Certainty. That’s the offer of the Bible. The Quran floats above history where nothing can touch it. The Bible planted its flag in checkable ground and said: dig. I dug. It’s still standing. Praise the Lord and His mighty God-Breathed scripture.