ColorsFade,
I don't hate Muslims. I don't hate anyone. You haven't read all the thread. I know I type alot, but please, read it all, before assigning motives to me I have disavowed already previously.
To recap:
God promised Abraham that he would have children who would grow into an inumerable number, as the sands on the beaches or the stars in heaven, even though he and his wife were of old age. Time goes by, and Abraham's wife is not pregnant. Finally she tires of waiting, and suggests that Abraham go and lay with her handmaid Hagar to get her pregnant and bear children for them. This was the practice back then, that a servant could bear children for her mistress. Abraham, rather than TRUSTING in God, follows his wife's advice and sleeps with Hagar. A son, Ishmael is born, Abraham's first born. He is a son. Normally he would have been the heir, given a blessing by his father before he died, and received his father's inheritance.
But lo and behold, God fulfills His promise to Abraham after all, and Sarah bears her own child to Abraham, named Isaac (Oh, I think I said Jacob before, my bad) in any event, being a woman and mother now, Sarah of course wants Isaac to be the only son and NOT Ishmael, because Isaac is from her womb, and also, though the Bible doesn't say this, of course, she wanted HER SON to be the one to inherit everything. She convinces Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael.
In these times, a woman alone with a son was a virtual death sentence.
This was a horrible thing for Abraham to do, and as an aside, God has told me that Abraham loved Ishmael, and it grieved him to do this, that he did not want to send Ishmael away, but in deference to his wife, he agreed to this.
After Ishmael and his mother are cast out, God tells her not to worry, that her son would become a great people, blessed by God.
Ishmael's descendents are semitic peoples who became Muslims, they honestly and rightly, trace their lineage back to Abraham.
Rather than hate Muslims, I love them, as God does, and understand where their anger comes from. They are descended from a slave woman who was then rejected and cast out. In the terminology of the past, they are "bastard" offspring, without a legitimate (legal) father. Disowned.
That anger has existed and festered now, for THOUSANDS of years. This is not hard to understand if you know of a famous situation called "The Hatfields and the McCoys" which is a family against family feud that lasted for generations. When the Soviet Union disbanded, the first thing many of the people did in the satellite countries, was go back to ancient in-fighting, culture clashes that existed for hundreds of years, and though they were prevented from doing this for many decades under Soviet rule, they didn;t forget their anger, and went right back to it. Some anger, is passed from generation to generation and is not easily muted, even over decades, even over hundreds of years, even over thousand of years.
In any event...
God has shown me alot of things, especially recently about this whole situation. He has told me that the Muslims are partially right. IT WAS Ishmael who was offered for sacrifice. He was the eldest son, and so this makes sense. But the Muslim argument is that he was the ONLY son still, when this happened, because there was no mention of another child being around. God has told me that this is because Isaac was still a baby. And that Abraham did receive a revealtion from God that Ishmael was to be a sacrifice. But God did not mean a PHYSICAL sacrifice, but a spiritual one. This is because God's plan was to bless Sarah and Abraham with a child, of THEIR LINEAGE, a child phsyically related to them both. God had to fulfill his promise comepletely, not merely to bless Sarah with a child, but that THIS CHILD was the child of promise, he would receive the blessing, and begin the lineage God wanted. This would NEVER set well with Hagar and Ishmael, and in God's wisdom, he intended for them to be separated from this family.
You see, Abraham should NEVER had laid with Hagar in the first place. He was following his wife's instructions and not God's. So it was not Hagar's fault that she was impregnated and it wasn't Ishmael's fault he would be condemned to being a bastard son, cast out and disowned, but God, in his great love, also promises Hagar that her son Ishmael would ALSO become a great people. God rewarded Hagar and Ishmael, NOT cursed them.
God told me that Abraham, took this to mean a PHYSICAL sacrifice and though he was grieved to sacrifice Ishmael, he was willing to do it because he WRONGLY assumed this was God's answer to Abraham's mistake of having a child with Hagar.
However, the angel appears to Abraham before he does the deed, and stops him, claiming that it is unecessary because now God sees he has faith, and so Abraham looks up and sees the ram in the thicket, and understands that God has provided an alternative, an animal sacrifice.
God did provide the ram through the angel, but not for the reason the Bible gives. God did not want Ishmael to be executed for Abraham's sins. Jewish scribes reworked this story, for reasons I am not going to get into right now.
But the fact remains that I love Muslims, and have had quite a few Muslim friends in my lifetime. Some of them so close, that they call me a brother and would open their homes to me at any time if I ever needed.
God has also told me, that in some respects Muslims are closer to God's heart than Jews are, because they have understood what it is like to be considered bastard children and to be rejected without cause. Jesus also grew up being believed to be a bastard, because he had no earhtly father, and Joseph was quite clear that he was NOT the father of Jesus. What else could the town's people assume? That Mary had sex with another man, but that out of compassion, her husband did not have her stoned to death. Jesus grew up more lonely than anyone here could ever imagine, with questions and rumors circulating about him his whole life. Who is his father? Why did Joseph accept this?
And of course, when Jesus was eventually rejected by his own people, by his own family and even by his friends, the disciples, who all ran away when Jesus was taken prisoner, well, no one knows lonliness and rejection more than he does.
So God has shared with me that Muslims are very close to his heart. But just as Abraham wrongly assumed that maybe God was fulfilling his promise through Hagar, so to, do Muslims wrongly assume, that they are the instruments of justice against a people who they believe misrepresent God and change history, and STOLE the blessing from Ishmael.
I don't hate Muslims.
I don't fear Muslims.
I am concerned however, about the nuclear weapons, that even this moment, they are furiously seeking to acquire and set off in this country.