Can Allah Forgive a Person Who Believes Jesus Christ is God?
Is it Shirk (making partners with Allah) to call another person Allah or something Allah, or to call a false god? How can the Christians be forgiven if they call Jesus Christ God? Is this unforgivable?
Let us first look to the evidences. This is always imperative for a person who is seeking truth, to look at what is clear evidence. That’s why we go to scripture and we look at what scripture has told us. Scripture is only a scripture in the original language. So when you don’t have scripture in original language, you are guessing, you are not going to get the same answers if you had the original scripture. Therefore, it’s not appropriate for us to use English. No prophet of Allah ever spoke English. It didn’t exist until just 900 and some years ago after the Normans invaded the Saxons. English is a language that we are using, contemporary language, however if you really want to understand and especially confirm what was said, what was taught, you must go to the ancient languages, which are: Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic.
These are the Semitic languages. They were translated into Koine Greek and Latin; however, those are not the original languages of those prophets. Now, do any of the originals still exist? The answer is “yes,” there is no doubt. The entire Quran is still existing. Portions of the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament also exist because they’re in the Quran, confirmed by the Quran.
When you find these and then you find the ancient manuscripts in the Hebrew and the Aramaic saying the same thing, you can compare it to the Quran and then you know for a fact that that’s true. That we can do, and more, they agree. Wherever you can take from and look at them and see they say the same thing. Then you have no doubt this is the teaching of the prophets. Let us look to what is called, commonly known as to the Christians and Jews as the Ten Commandments. Look to the book of Exodus, which is the second book of the five books of Moses, chapter 20, it says real clear: “I am the Lord your God, that brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You know no other God beside me.” Then the first commandment comes up, “Thou shall have no other gods beside me.” It goes on, “Thou shall not make unto me any graven image.” Not of anything that creeps upon the earth, swims in the sea beneath nor flies in the heaven above.
This is paraphrasing the verse. I’m not using Elizabethan English, I’m not speaking to you in the way they did it at the time of Shakespeare. Next, let us look in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 5. The same thing again, first commandment “Thou shall not have any other gods beside me.” Second commandment: no idols, no images of anything, walking on the earth, swimming in the sea beneath, flying in the heaven above. So it’s clear from these verses, if there were no other verses in the Bible, that’s enough to say that you can’t worship anybody other than God. However there are many other verses saying the same thing. The book of Hosea, this is also in the Old Testament, in the book of Prophets after the book of Jeremiah, you will find the book of Amos and Jonah. Look in Hosea I think it’s in chapter 13, verse 4. The meaning of it is that it says something similar: I’m the Lord, your God, brought you out of the land of Egypt the house of bondage. You know no other God beside me. Beside me there is no savior. So, for sure this goes with our subject tonight, talking about the Wasilah (the drawing closer to Allah).
To get salvation, you draw close to Allah and it's Allah by His Rahmah (His grace) that you are saved. You are not saved except by the grace, nobody is saved except by grace. It's by Allah’s grace, His mercy that we are saved by, and He extends that to those who worship Him alone without partners. They do not break those two commandments that I just quoted to you, because those are the same commandments in the New Testament. I read to you already from Surah an-Nisa, chapter 4, verse 48. Allah says He does not forgive (La Yaghfiru), He does not forgive the setting up of partners with Him in worship, but anything less than this, He can forgive it. And who ever has committed this Shirk or association with Him, his “partners,” then they have invented a monstrous thing and they will not be forgiven for that.
Sheikh Yusuf Estes