This is an article from the January-February 1991 issue: The State of the World

Khomeini, Saddam, & Jihad Leading Muslims to Christ

Communism Falls

These are momentous days. I wish to open by trying to place two things in perspective: communism and Islam.

International communism became a formidable anti-God force in the world when it seized power in the Soviet Union in l9l7. After being strongly entrenched for about 70 years and capturing as much as one third of the world, communism suddenly seemed to collapse from the inside and crumble as a formidable anti-God political power. It is amazing that something that had 70 years to entrench itself could lose so much of its momentum and its political power so rapidly.

When something like that happens that no intelligence-gathering agency in the world predicted, what do you suspect was the operating agent? I strongly believe that these events took place in response to prayer.

There were people led by the Lord to go into cities like Moscow, rent a hotel room with a view of the city and then pray hour after hour, day after day for the power of God to fall upon every communist nation.

I believe that prevailing prayer has been answered tumultuously in the rapid decline of communism as a strong anti-God force in the world. Of course, there will be some setbacks in the steady movement toward democratization in the communist countries such as we see right now in the Soviet Union.

Islam On The March
But as we behold communism's awesome loss of momentum in our day, my mind turns to another formidable force in the world, one that has been entrenched not for a mere 70 years, but for approximately l400 years. It has set itself to oppose the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ even more determinedly than the international communist movement has done. That force is the world religion called Islam.

In its first hundred years of existence Islam swept away approximately one-third of the Christian world. All of North Africa was solidly Christian, as were Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Asia Minor prior to the advent of Islam.

The Muslims were quite intent upon conquering the entire Christian world, largely by force of arms. They were well on their way to doing so when Charles Martel stopped them at the Battle of Tours. The Muslim armies were within 300 miles of the south coast of England. But God rallied His forces and stopped their advance. After controlling Spain for 700 years they were eventually forced back south to North Africa and held the line there.

Compared to this all-out Islamic assault upon the Christian world in those early centuries of Islam's existence, the Crusades were minor skirmishes by comparison. The Crusaders did not have the objective of sweeping Islam from the face of the earth but simply of securing the Holy Land and a few other special places to make them safe for Christian pilgrims.

The Crusades, of course, were an awful mistake and I suppose that around the world, Christians apologize for the Crusades at least a thousand times a day. But do we hear Muslims apologizing for having captured one third of the Christian world in the early centuries of Islam. Unlike Islam Christianity does not incorporate jihad into its credo; we must instead exercise the use of spiritual weapons to retake that lost ground.

Now, if God in answer to prayer could bring about the dissolution of communism's anti-Christian strength in a mere one year after it had entrenched itself for about 70 years, that leads me to posit that God is also able to weaken the anti-Gospel element of Islam just as remarkably.

The Fall of Islam?

Are there any evidences in the world of our time that Almighty God is now beginning to move through His people, through the Church and through the events in world history to weaken Islam? I believe there are.

In l965 the communists tried to take control of Indonesia in a bloody coup. They knew there were eight generals in Indonesia who were strongly anti-communist. The communists reasoned that if they could kill all eight of these generals in one night, they could effectively decapitate the Indonesian armed forces. Then the Communist Party by the sheer force of its twenty million members could take Indonesia by bluff. That is to say they did not have the actual weapons to carry out a coup.

Why did they not wait until they had sufficient weaponry provided by Communist China, in order to take over Indonesia? The answer is that Chairman Mao became obsessed with embarassing the great paper tiger, the United States of America, in South Vietnam. So the weaponry that was being secretly shipped into Indonesia to arm the Indonesian Communist Party was redirected, beginning in l964, to the Vietcong in South Vietnam. The Indonesian Communist Party was denied the weapons it needed because Chairman Mao decided that the Vietcong held priority and diverted to them enormous quantities of weaponry that otherwise would have gone to Indonesia

The United States eventually "lost the war " in South Vietnam, but in the process saved the fifth largest nation of the world from a communist takeover. So who really won the war in South Vietnam? If you trade the l80th nation in the world, South Vietnam, for the fifth nation in the world, wouldn't that have to be a pretty good deal politically?

So I maintain that the United States of America actually won the war in South Vietnam, but not in South Vietnam. If President Johnson had wanted a face saving way of pulling American forces out of South Vietnam around the end of l965 he could have said to the world, the USA's real objective in sending troops to South Vietnam was to distract Mao from sending arms to the Indonesian Communist Party so they could not be used to take over Indonesia.

At the same time, the Indonesian communists were spooked into making a premature move, without having the weaponry to back up that move. President Suharto, who was the umbrella for protecting the communists in Indonesia, began to fail in health. The communist leaders in Indonesia knew that if Suharto suddenly died then they would be killed by the eight generals no longer restrained by Suharto. The communists thought,"We'll make our move now even though we don't have the weaponry."

President Johnson never understood what he accomplished by persisting in Vietnam. The State Department and the CIA are still unaware of the real victory that was won, or who arranged it.

I believe it was God who was sovereignly overruling in these decisions in order to save the fifth largest nation of the world from a communist takeover.

Who Really Knows Allah?

The Indonesian Muslims reacted to the killing of the eight generals and to the attempted communist takeover by engaging in mass slaughter of somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 communists, including many who were not communists. In the name of jihad, the Muslims overextended themselves in Indonesia. By the wanton slaughter of so many, they traumatized the vast majority of the Muslims who were peaceable, gentle people. When they compared this cruelty to the behavior of Christians, who were 10% of the population at that time, they asked, who were the people who acted like they really knew Allah? Was it the Muslims who falsely accused each other of being communists and killed each other, or the Christians who even took communists and Muslims, falsely accused of being communists, into their homes and hid them from the mobs until the killing stopped?

Thus began a tidal wave of conversions from Islam to Christianity in Indonesia in l965. No one knows the exact numbers, but probably somewhere in the order of 10 million Muslims in Indonesia have become Christians since that fateful year. I perceive that as the beginning of the unraveling of Islamic opposition to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Khomeini and Saddam--Leading Muslims to Christ
Then God raised up Khomeini. We really should have paid that man a salary because he was such an embarrassment to millions of the more liberal Muslims around the world. There may have been millions of people who were considering converting to Islam until Khomeini arose and took the hostages. Then they saw the restraint of the world's most powerful nation and decided not to convert.

When Khomeini died, who next did God raise up to emphasize jihad and further discredit Islam? None other than Saddam Hussein. So while most of the people in the world are looking only for victory over Saddam Hussein and his radical militaristic movement, we as God's people should be looking not only for that victory but for a very much wider victory as well: a furthering of God's plan to weaken Islam as a barrier against the advance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our day.

I believe that Islam is being weakened. jihad is Islam's Achilles heel. That is what has weakened Islam tremendously in Indonesia. jihad is what discredits Islam in Iran to the extent that many Muslims in Tehran have been walking around wearing crosses and praying to Isa, because they associated Isa with mercy and under Khomeini's government they felt a need for mercy. Teenage boys were being rounded up and sent to the front lines to run through the mine fields, blow up the mines and get their legs blown off. Later the seasoned troops could go through the mine fields safely. That caused trauma. That caused people to be revulsed, as were millions of people in Indonesia, by the violent behavior of the radical Muslims there.

Will We Be Ready?

Now, when millions of Muslims begin to feel disenchanted with Islam as the result of these events, we have to have our people on the scene. We must be ready to give them the Gospel of Jesus Christ when they ask, if Islam is not the true religion, then what is? If they come to that point of receptivity and we are not on the scene, or we are not able to provide them with the literature or the radio programs, then that period of receptivity may pass.

I predict that from now on, political controversy in world history will become less and less important and religious conflicts are going to become more and more the issue. World history is shaping up as an all out final struggle between Christianity and Islam. Muslims are mobilizing with four-color printed propaganda, building mosques in every city of the western world, intent on propagating their faith in our territory. Christians are just belatedly awakening to their obligation to reach out to the Muslims. We are not going to persuade them with jihad. They may try to employ jihad to convert us, and if they do, it will only weaken their cause. The spiritual weapons, such as prayer, must be the focus of this next great wave of the Church's advance . We must pray not only for a victory over Saddam Hussein-- he is simply serving God's purpose. Our victory is over what he represents to 800 million people in the world.

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