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113 - OMISSION EXAMPLE 3: Application of these findings in ministry
a) When answering Muslim missionaries, you can ask them questions like this one: “Why did the Koran omit most genealogies from the Bible, while Ibn Hisham's Sira of the prophet Muhammad (his biography) has included biblical genealogies at the beginning of its text? Did Ibn Hisham correct the Koran, when he included this true biblical genealogy? Does this mean that the Bible was not corrupted, as many Muslims say, because Ibn Hisham incorporated one of its genealogies in his Sira?”
b) In sharing the Bible with Muslim seekers you can highlight the implications of this and other genealogies, which are part of the genealogy of Christ in the Gospels, by pointing out that Christ was not only a son of Mary, his mother, but that he was also the Son of Adam, i.e. a true Son of Man, because Mary, his mother was a true descendant of Adam.
c) In follow-up among new believers from a Muslim background, it may be helpful to show how the Bible is consistent in calling Christ both the Son of Man and the Son of God. He is a Son of Man, because as a descendent of Adam his human mother Mary truly gave birth to him. And he is the Son of God, because God is truly Christ's Father, and Christ the Son of God, through the Holy Spirit, became flesh in his mother Mary (see Luke 1:35). This can deepen their new faith in Christ as the Son of God and the Son of Man.
d) In discipling committed Christians from a Muslim background you can encourage them to take seriously the genealogies and chronologies in the Bible and help them set up a sketch of the main events in God's dealings with our world in a coherent biblical chronology. This may help them not to be tempted by the vague historical expressions of the Koran, but to stick with the Bible with its historical clarity.
e) When you preach and teach the Bible in a church of disciples of Christ, who were once Muslims, you can take up the teaching, which we outlined above on how the Koran changed the biblical teaching of human beings to make it impossible for God to be Father and Christ to be Son of God. Equally show how the deepest roots of the fatherhood of God and the sonship of Christ go all the way back to God's first commandment to Adam and his wife to be fruitful and to multiply.
f) And finally, in warning Christians, who have no contact with Muslims, from opening up to the Koran or from seeking a harmony between the Bible and the Koran, you can ask them what the reasons may be that the Koran has omitted virtually all biblical genealogies in its text. In your discussions with them you can help them appreciate the deep disparity and incompatibility of the teachings of the Bible and the Koran in view of what happens, when a human being is born. The Koran views my birth as an act of creation of Allah, making my father only appear to be a father, while the Bible views my birth as the result of an act of my bodily father, who truly is my father according to the flesh. On this background you can then show how the Koran does not only deny God the Father and Christ the Son, which the Bible clearly and consistently proclaims, but that it systematically obliterated the possibility of anybody being a father or a son, in direct and irreconcilable opposition to the teaching of the Bible.