To Be a Christian, You Must First Become a Jew
I clearly remember many times when, as a Muslim, I would enter the bathroom, take off my pants, and then realize that I was not sure whether I had entered using my left foot. In Islam, you are supposed to enter the bathroom with your left foot, or demons may remain there with you while you are defecating. So I would pull my pants back up if I knew there were other people in the house, or leave them down if there was no one there, go back outside, and then reenter using my left foot.
But there was another problem. Sometimes I would go out to reenter, only to realize that I had forgotten to pay attention to whether I had stepped out using my left or right foot.
I know this seems funny, but this is only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of things a Muslim must remember to observe throughout the day. Otherwise, there may be consequences. For example, Muhammad said that Satan urinates in the ears of the person who sleeps until morning without getting up for prayer. If you repeat “Glory be to Allah,” “Praise be to Allah,” and “Allah is the greatest” thirty-three times after every prayer, and then complete the hundred with the prescribed confession, your sins will be forgiven even if they are as abundant as the foam of the sea. If you recite Ayat al-Kursi before going to sleep, Allah will appoint a guardian to protect you, and Satan will not approach you until morning. If a man asks his wife to come to bed and she refuses, causing him to spend the night angry with her, the angels will curse her until morning.
Life can be difficult for someone who sincerely wants to observe everything Muhammad taught. But even after you do your best to fulfill all these requirements, which can completely overwhelm your life, you still cannot find peace in Islam because there is no guarantee that you will end up in Paradise or even that you will be protected in this life.
Islam teaches many arbitrary things and confuses Muslims who seek comfort in religion. For example, the Quran teaches that if a calamity strikes you, it may be from Allah as a consequence of your sins, but it also says that calamities may be tests from Allah. As a Muslim, you never know whether a calamity is Allah punishing you or testing you because you have strong faith (Quran 2:155; 42:30).
This arbitrariness extends to Paradise. On the Last Day, when you stand before Allah, there will be a scale. The two angels who lived on either side of you during your life will bring their records, and your good deeds and sins will be weighed against each other. There is no way to know which side will prevail on the scale.
Muhammad said that Allah might find the confession of faith among the pile of your good deeds and send you to Paradise. He also said that a person might say one word that displeases Allah and be cast into Hell because of it. Muhammad also said that on the Last Day, Allah will take the sins of Muslims and place them upon Jews and Christians, who will become their ransom from Hell.
There are literally thousands of hadiths like these that confuse Muslims to the point that they lose hope of ever having any assurance about their eternal destiny. That is why I wrote Sola Jihad, because dying in jihad is literally the only way a Muslim can guarantee Paradise.
But what if I told you that, six years after converting to Christianity, I realized I was still living as a Muslim? This was not mainly because Islam had programmed me. No, it was because much of the church had been severed from the Jewishness of the gospel.
In this article, I will try to help you understand why, to become a real Christian, you must first become a Jew. I pray that this truth will change your life and lead you into a deeper relationship with God, just as it changed my life fourteen years ago.