Myth: All roads lead to God and Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Let’s look at the evidence:

   A. Question #1: What is the evidence of this belief? If you believe that all roads lead to God and that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, what are you basing this on?

• A gut feeling? A friend told you? Heard it on TV? Saw it in a movie? A famous person believes that way? Just hoping you’re right?

John 8:32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

   B. The problem with belief is that you can believe what you want to, but that doesn’t make it true.

• Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, you can get something for nothing.
• Ideas can be very dangerous. What you believe can kill you.

>Marshall Applewhite, the head of the cult Heaven’s Gate told his followers that they if they drank poison-laced kool-aid, they could take a ride on a spaceship that they believed was hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp which Applewhite said was really carrying Jesus.

• The question we have to always ask is: Why should I believe what you’re saying is true? Where is the evidence?

If those 38 people had done a little research, they would have found:  That Marshall Applewhite had spent a lot of time in mental hospitals.  He met his wife, Bonnie Nettles, while undergoing treatment in a mental hospital.  They abandoned their human names, instead calling themselves Guinea and Pig, then Bo and Peep, before finally settling on Do and Ti.  Ti died of cancer in 1985 but Do, claiming he was Jesus returned to Earth, said he continued to communicate with her.

• There was no evidence that he was Jesus, no evidence that he was in his right mind, and no evidence that anything he said was true.

   C. When it comes to religion, people often say facts and evidence don’t matter. People think that religion can’t be proved or disproved by evidence because it is what people believe.

• That thought is dead wrong. Politically correct people are trying to tell us that all religions are equal and all religions should be respected. WRONG!
• Everything we believe should be scrutinized to see if there is proof that what we are believing is true.

   D. Let’s look at some religions and look at the evidence that what they were saying was true:
     1. Joseph Smith and the Mormons-Joseph Smith:

Fact #1: He spent much of his youth searching for treasure using peep stones. You put your magic stone into a hat, then put your face into the hat in such a way as to block off all light and supposedly the stone would shine and show you where treasure was. He also used divining rods to find water, and looked into crystal balls. All these practices were against the law because they were considered occultic (demonic in origin). He was found guilty in court of glass gazing and fined.

• According to him, his first vision was of God the Father, and God the Son appearing to him and saying that all churches and their beliefs were wrong.
• That an angel called Moroni appeared to him.

Fact #2: No one but himself saw the angel.

• He said that later the angel showed him where golden tablets were buried and a special seer stone found next to the tablets to allow him to translate the golden tablets.

Fact #3: No one saw either the golden tablets, nor the special seer stone.

• He wrote down what was supposedly on the golden tablets, now known as the book of Mormon, which chronicles the life and migration of a group of Jews who migrated from Jerusalem in 600 B.C. and went to Central America and founded dozens of cities and fought huge battles, the last battle culminating in upstate New York.

Evidence #1: None of the cities mentioned in the book of Mormon have ever been found by any archaeologist.

• Joseph Smith claims that these Jews, and millions of these early inhabitants of America spoke and wrote in reformed Egyptian, and that the book of Mormon was written in reformed Egyptian.

Evidence #2: No native American group ever found has any language with any similarities to Egyptian, plus no one has ever found any Egyptian hieroglyphics in the Americas. Fact #4: Jews in 600 B.C. spoke Hebrew and it is a distinct language from Egyptian, both in spoken form and its written form.

• Joseph Smith bought several Egyptian hieroglyphic scrolls and mummies from a circus. He said that he translated with it his special seer stone, and that they were none other than documents written by Abraham himself over 4000 years ago. This is now known as the Book of Abraham and appears in a book that Joseph Smith wrote called The Pearl of Great Price.

Fact #5: At the time Joseph Smith was alive, linguists still couldn’t decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone that they were able to understand what was written. Evidence #3: In 1967, the original papyrus that Joseph Smith said was the book of Abraham was found. When the head of Egyptology at Brigham Young examined it, he found that the scrolls were common Egyptian funerary prayers to the Egyptian god of the dead. The head Mormon Egyptologist resigned from Brigham Young and denounced Mormonism as false and fake.

• Egyptologist Dr. James H. Breasted, of the University of Chicago noted:

    "... these three facsimiles of Egyptian documents in the ‘Pearl of Great Price’ depict the most common objects in the Mortuary religion of Egypt. Joseph Smith’s interpretations of them as part of a unique revelation through Abraham, therefore, very clearly demonstrates that he was totally unacquainted with the significance of these documents and absolutely ignorant of the simplest facts of Egyptian writing and civilization."

• Dr. W.M. Flinders Petrie of London University wrote:

    "It may be safely said that there is not one single word that is true in these explanations"

Dr. A.H. Sayce, Oxford professor of Egyptology: “It is difficult to deal seriously with Joseph Smith’s impudent fraud.... Smith has turned the goddess [Isis in Facsimile No. 3] into a king and Osiris into Abraham.”

• Fact #6: Joseph Smith thought he was living in the last days before Christ return, and prophesied Jesus Second coming in 1890.
• Fact #7: Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, believed that men seven feet tall, dressed in Quaker clothes and wearing very high hats, lived on the Moon, and he prophesied that a certain young man named Oliver B. Huntington would be a missionary to the Moon – this was around 1837.
• Fact #8: There is no evidence for anything Joseph Smith claimed, and much against it.
• But all religions are equally valid ways to God. RIDICULOUS!!!
• The difference between the God of the Bible and every other faith is that our faith is based on facts and evidence. Don’t we want our faith to be based on evidence and truth?

     2. Islam. Islam says that their prophet, Mohammed spoke to God.

Let’s ask the question: what evidence is there that Mohammed spoke to God or for God? Let’s look at the evidence: Fact # 1: He was born of two parents and died of poison. Fact #2: He confesses three times in the Koran that he sinned and had to ask forgiveness from Allah. Fact # 3: He himself admits that he never talked to God, but would fall into a trance, fall to the ground and foam at the mouth and utter supposed words of Allah. Fact #4: Falling to the ground and foaming at the mouth are biblical signs of demon possession: Mark 9:17-18 A man in the crowd answered, “Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit that has robbed him of speech. Whenever it seizes him, it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not.” Fact #5: He was asked by his tribe 25 times to perform a miracle. He answered them, “Am I aught but a man-a messenger? Fact #6: There are no predictive prophecies in the Koran, not one. Fact #7: Muslims claim that the present day Koran is an exact representation of Muhammad’s revelations without so much as a dot or stroke ever having been lost, changed or substituted in any way. No other book in the world can match the Qur'an ... The astonishing fact about this book of ALLAH is that it has remained unchanged, even to a dot, over the last fourteen hundred years. ... No variation of text can be found in it. You can check this for yourself by listening to the recitation of Muslims from different parts of the world. (Basic Principles of Islam, p. 4) Evidence #1: Muslim scholars use seven different texts for the Koran and they are all different. In a comparison between just two texts: Muslim scholars themselves pinpointed 1,354 differences. Evidence #2: Scholars tell us that there are over a hundred grammatical errors in the Koran. Evidence #3: Archaeologists have found early mosques and all the early mosques didn’t point to Mecca but Jerusalem. Fact #8: Allah contradicts himself multiple times in the Koran and when the people pointed it out to Mohammed, he told them this: When we substitute one revelation for another- and Allah knowest best what He reveals (in stages)- They say, "Thou art but a forger"; But most of them understand not. Surah 16:101

• In laymen’s terms he said-Allah knows what He’s doing and you’re just a bunch of ignorant people.

Fact #9: He forced his adopted son, Zaid, to divorce his beautiful wife, Zainab, at the behest of Allah so that Mohammed could marry her. Fact #10: Mohammed married a nine year old girl, Ayeshe, approaching her family when she was seven. Fact #11: He sent his followers into raids and holy wars more than thirty times. He himself participated in such attacks and expeditions twenty-nine times. Fact #12: He exterminated half of the Arabian peninsula to convert it to Islam.

• Where is the evidence that he heard anything from God?
• As we see with Islam, one of the hallmarks of false religions and false ideas is that they are intolerant of anything and anyone that disagrees with them.
• Many intellectuals think that all religions are based on superstition, myth and lies.

Many people would define religion as blindly believing what cannot be proved.

   E. Belief must be based on evidence and truth. 

This is great difference between other religions and the God of the Bible. John 18:37-38 Therefore Pilate said to Him, "So You are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice." Pilate said to Him, "What is truth?"

• The true God, the God of the Bible has done everything to prove to us that He is God and that we have a destiny with Him.

   F. Consider the evidence that the God of the Bible has given us:

Evidence #1: Prophecy-One of the evidences that God has chosen to let us know that the Bible is from Him is prophecy-telling us the future before it happens. In fact, God does it so that we will know that He alone is God. Isaiah 46:10 I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’

• Prophecy is undeniable evidence, because no human agency could do so with such accuracy. The Bible accurately foretells specific events-in detail-many years, sometimes centuries, before they occur.

1. The Bible has 8,352 verses out of its total 31,124 that are predictive (27%). 2. Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter—no errors. (The remaining 500 or so reach into the future and may be seen unfolding as days go by.)

• The probability for any one of these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance averages less than one in ten (figured very conservatively) and since the prophecies are for the most part independent of one another, the odds for all these prophecies having been fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in 102000 (that is 1 with 2000 zeros written after it)!
• We could spend days showing how very specific prophecies have been fulfilled in detail centuries later.

>>Let’s look at a couple OT prophecy that shows the unbelievable accuracy of Bible prophecy: The Phoenician port city of Tyre. The Phoenicians were the greatest sailors and traders of the ancient world. Tyre was a large port city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Ezekiel 26:7-11 “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: From the north I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, with horsemen and a great army. He will ravage your settlements on the mainland with the sword; he will set up siege works against you, build a ramp up to your walls and raise his shields against you.

• This happened in 586 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar came in and destroyed all the suburbs or settlements outside the city and laid a seige to the city for 13 years.

Notice v. 13-14: I will make you a bare rock, and you will become a place to spread fishnets. You will never be rebuilt, for I the LORD have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD. Notice: In the late 1800’s, archaeologists were trying to find Tyre because they had read about it in the Bible and also in history from the annals of Alexander the Great. One archaeologist couldn’t find the city, but as he was in a boat noticed that about twenty feet down there was what looked like a stone road going into the sea! He followed it out to where the island city of Tyre was and found fishermen throwing their nets out into the sea above the island (just as God said and you will become a place to spread fishnets. You will never be rebuilt) >The prophet Moses foretold (with some additions by Jeremiah and Jesus) that the ancient Jewish nation would be conquered twice and that the people would be carried off as slaves each time, first by the Babylonians (for a period of 70 years), and then by a fourth world kingdom (which we know as Rome). The second conqueror, Moses said, would take the Jews captive to Egypt in ships, selling them or giving them away as slaves to all parts of the world. Both of these predictions were fulfilled to the letter, the first in 607 B.C. and the second in 70 A.D. God's spokesmen said, further, that the Jews would remain scattered throughout the entire world for many generations, but without becoming assimilated by the peoples or of other nations, and that the Jews would one day return to the land of Palestine to re-establish for a second time their nation. This prophetic statement sweeps across 3500 years of history to its complete fulfillment—in our lifetime. >The life & works of Cyrus. The prophet Isaiah foretold that a conqueror named Cyrus would destroy seemingly impregnable Babylon and subdue Egypt along with most of the rest of the known world. This same man, said Isaiah, would decide to let the Jewish exiles in his territory go free without any payment of ransom. Isaiah made this prophecy 150 years before Cyrus was born, 180 years before Cyrus performed any of these feats (and he did, eventually, perform them all), Isaiah 45:13 I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness: I will make all his ways straight. He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the LORD Almighty.” Isaiah 45:1, 14 “This is what the LORD says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armor… “The products of Egypt and the merchandise of Cush, and those tall Sabeans— they will come over to you and will be yours; they will trudge behind you, coming over to you in chains. They will bow down before you… >One prophet of God said that a future king of Judah, named Josiah, would take the bones of all the occultic priests of Israel's King Jeroboam and burn them on Jeroboam's altar and II Kings 23:15-18). This event occurred approximately 300 years after it was foretold. I Kings 13:1-2 By the word of the LORD a man of God came from Judah to Bethel, as Jeroboam was standing by the altar to make an offering. By the word of the LORD he cried out against the altar: “Altar, altar! This is what the LORD says: ‘A son named Josiah will be born to the house of David. On you he will sacrifice the priests of the high places who make offerings here, and human bones will be burned on you.’ Evidence #2: Miracles-throughout the Bible God supernaturally intervenes doing impossible things so that we might know that He is God.

• Throughout the Bible, God proved His existence through miracles.

Exodus 9:14 "For this time I will send all My plagues on you and your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is no one like Me in all the earth. I Kings 18:36-39 At the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, Elijah the prophet came near and said, "O LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, today let it be known that You are God in Israel and that I am Your servant and I have done all these things at Your word. "Answer me, O LORD, answer me, that this people may know that You, O LORD, are God, and that You have turned their heart back again." Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces; and they said, "The LORD, He is God; the LORD, He is God."

• Jesus came on the scene performing many miracles so much that everybody talked about them:

Matthew 11:2-5 Now when John, while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to Him, "Are You the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?" Jesus answered and said to them, "Go and report to John what you hear and see: the BLIND RECEIVE SIGHT and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the POOR HAVE THE GOSPEL PREACHED TO THEM. Luke 23:8 Now Herod was very glad when he saw Jesus; for he had wanted to see Him for a long time, because he had been hearing about Him and was hoping to see some sign performed by Him. John 11:46-48 But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them the things which Jesus had done. Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, "What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. "If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation."

• Jesus commanded us, His disciples to go out and prove that God is alive:

Mark 16:17-18 These signs will accompany those who have believed: in My name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover." Mark 10:7-8 "And as you go, preach, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.' "Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give. >T.L. Osborne’s testimony of 100 deaf people. Evidence #3: The down payment of the Holy Spirit inside us. 2 Corinthians 1:21-22 He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Ephesians 1:13,14 And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of his glory.