Jonathan Cahn Surrounded by Muslims

Jonathan Cahn shares from The Mars Hills Mystery

The surprising object, an amazing mystery, and one of the most important secrets of the gospel hidden in the pagan world: what to do when surrounded by opposition, conflict or hostility. Paul points to an unknown altar and reveals God’s “workmanship” or “poem”.

“And America has done much good. And there’s no shortage of nations far exceeding any of its faults or sins. But no nation in the modern world has ever been given so much. None has been so blessed. To whom much is given, much is required. If a nation so blessed by God should turn away from Him, what then? It’s blessing will be replaced with curses? Yes. And has America turned away from God? I asked. It has turned and is turning. How? In the same way Israel turned. It started with a spiritual complacency, then spiritual confusion, then the merging of God with idols and then, ultimately, the rejection of his ways. Just as with ancient Israel, America began ruling God out of its life, turning, step by step, against His ways, at first subtly and then more and more brazenly.”
― Jonathan Cahn

The emergence of earth worship, nature worship. We are to be stewards of nature.
That is, that is the Bible, but to be worshipers of nature. That’s pagan.
Now, Paul gets up on Mars Hill and on Mars Hill, he give this is his his chance to share with the pagan world, starting with Mars Hill.
So Paul stood at the miss verse 22 on Mars Hill and said men of Athens.
I see that you are a very religious people in all respects for while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship.
I also found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God.
Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, I now proclaim to you the God who made the world and all things in it since he is the Lord of heaven and earth does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all people, life and breath and all things.
And he made from one man, every nation of mankind to live in the face of the earth.
Having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitations that they would seek and perhaps find God.
They would, they would seek God and might grope for him.
Find Him though He’s not far from us because in Him, we live and move and exists as even some of your poets have said for we are his Children being then the Children of God.
We ought not to think of the divine nature like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the craft and thought of man.
Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance. God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent.
Alright. This is an amazing scene. This is amazing.
And Paul by the anointed in the spirit is amazing here. He speaks of them worshiping an unknown God.
He says, you worship. He says this is the unknown God altar sees this altar that says how strange to an unknown God.
And then he says what you worship in ignorance or without knowing.
Now interesting the word for the word for the unknown God, unknown and the word for ignorance or you worship without knowing in the Greek.
It’s the same, it’s linked together. It’s it, it’s we get the word agnostic from it.
Agnostic mean, you know, people say, hey, I’m agnostic. Agnostic means a means without agnostic means knowledge.
So it means if you say you’re agnostic, you’re saying I’m without knowledge.
It’s kind of all in the vows that has said, you know, it says you know, the, the agnostic says, I don’t know, the atheist says, I deny and the believer says, I don’t know how many people like poetry.
A OK, a few you are the minority.
But growing up in English class, you may have had to have poetry.
Well, there’s something really cool because it says when it says, it says in verse 24 it says that he made, when he talks about him creating and it’s, it says he made the world, he made all things.
You know, the word that it speaks about here is the word from which we get the word poem.
So to say so in other words, it says the universe is God’s poem.
It is meant to be beautiful, but we mess it up.
But when we come to God and you live in His will, the more you do the messed up this of life starts getting un messed up because God is a poet and poetry is to be beautiful.
Your life is to be beautiful. He has the power to take the mess of life.
Even the messes we make redeem them, make them something beautiful.
You look at your life with all the good and the bad and the hard times, the good times, the hard times and yet in God, it becomes beautiful, even the hard times and even the dark becomes blessed in God.
It says in Ephesians, we are his workmanship, right? You know what the word is or poem.
We are his poem. In other words, when you come in, the Lord, your life starts getting more beautiful.
You know, you know, how did you become his poem?
You let him write it, you let him, let you, let him lead you, you let him do it, move through you.
You let them lead your actions and your actions become beautiful.
You let them lead your thoughts, your thoughts become you, let them lead your emotions, your emotions have a flow like a poem has a beauty to it.
He made, it says the, the the world, the co the cosmos in Greek, which means the ordered word.
He made the world and he ordered it God of order. He’s not a God of chaos.
He made the heavens and he made the earth. The word for heaven. Here is the word.
We get the word. The word also means eternity.
Interesting because in Hebrew, the word for heaven is Shami.
Try it, which is plural, but the word for earth is singular. So earth is limited. Singular, finite.
Heaven is beyond heaven is without end. Heaven is alternate. That’s why heaven has eternity.
That’s why if you live your life based on the things of earth, you’re always gonna be limited because you’re never gonna have enough.
Even if you get, oh, I got more and more possessions. Well, you’re getting more and more of limitations.
But the things of heaven have no limitation. No end.
So if you live your life based on the things of heaven, then your life is going to start becoming unlimited.
You’re gonna have more than enough, a spirit of abundance of overflow. How do you do that?
You do it through faith, you do it.
You said we live by faith, not by sight, we live by the spirit, not by the flesh.
That’s how you unlimited your life.
Now, the word for earth here is the word gay or we get the word from it.
When people start, if you ever heard anybody speak about earth as well, that’s mother earth.
But it is like it’s another sign you talk about. It’s basically another sign of pagan organization.
The emergence of earth worship, nature worship. We are to be stewards of nature.
That is, that is the Bible, but to be worshipers of nature. That’s pagan.
It is pagan to view God and nature or the world as one thing.
It’s still part of Eastern religion. You know, all the Eastern religion, they’re saying basically the world is God.
God is the world, the world is God.
But if God is the world and the world is messed up, that would mean God is messed up.
If God is the world, then we have no hope because there’s nothing else to answer the world, to save the world, to redeem.
The world. God is not the world. God is beyond the world.
God is above the world so he can answer the world, he can save the world.
So the name Jesus or Yeshua means Yahweh. The eternal God is our salvation.
Only God who is not the world can give you something better than the world and can save the world.
Only God who is not us, can save us. That’s why it’s really good that we’re not God.
It says he doesn’t dwell in temples made by hands yet he dwelt in Solomon.
But even Solomon’s temple, Solomon said, even this cannot contain you.
You dwell the highest heavens and in the heart of the humble Paul is speaking diplomatically, but his message is radical.
He’s speaking to the pagan world and he’s, he compliments them. You are a religious people.
Greek civilization with all its wisdom.
The greatest thing it ever produced was the altar of the unknown God.
And now the apostle stands on Mars Hill taken place and says, I’m proclaiming this.
Now, the truth of every, every faith.
Well, every faith seeks to reach up to God or reach up to the answer. Hinduism tries to reach up.
If you do enough good works, you’ll get reincarnated in the right good way. Instead of the bad way Buddhism.
If you can extinguish your soul, you can achieve Nirvana or the Orthodox Jews seeks to achieve it by good works.
The Muslim seeks also to do do Muslim law and if he does enough, he’ll get to heaven with 70 virgins that’s the Muslim heaven, new age tries to achieve godhood, divine nature.
Paganism tried to appease the gods and enter into their favor.
Even the atheist who tries to be good is trying, seeking for something.
It’s all a hand reaching to heaven. But the gospel is so radically different.
It is not the hand of man reaching to heaven.
It’s the hand of God of heaven reaching a man that’s totally different.
And even as believers, we sometimes don’t get it and we convert our faith into a hand reaching to heaven.
But it’s not, it’s a hand reaching to us. A great thing to ask.
A hardened unbeliever is, which is greater that which you know, and that or that, which you don’t know if they’re honest, they’ll say that which I don’t know is greater.
Well, if what you knew was greater than what you didn’t know, then you could be closed off.
You have more. You got the main thing.
But if what you don’t know is greater, then you have to open your heart.
You have to open your mind.
If what you don’t know is greater, you got to have an open mind to God because the realm of the unknown is greater than the realm of the known because God is greater than anything, you know, and you can see this through Paul’s message.
He could have easily condemned them, but he doesn’t, they don’t need that. They’re already judged.
But Paul came to save them.
So everything he said was trying to find a connection with them and to them listen, he, they are far into him.
I mean, he knows their culture but it’s so this is Paul is like an orthodox, more orthodox than an orthodox Jew today and he sees all this, but he’s trying to connect with them.
He said, he said as a Jew to the Jew, a Greek to the Greek as a pagan, to a pagan in everything he said, he was trying to connect with them to find a place.
He could build a bridge to reach them in their paganist and through that bridge, bring them to the knowledge of God and salvation.
So he speaks to them as in turn in the language of pagans to win them.
He looked for the connection, the point of agreement. And then he built from that.
He found it the altar of the unknown God. He met them where they were.
He found the connection even if they had no idea who God was.
He found the connection to bring them across. We need to do the same thing.
The amazing thing is there are many accounts of missionaries going to peoples that have never heard the gospel.
And yet they found when they got there, the people had in their own way, their altars of the unknown God, not like the people of Athens, but in their own way.
Some said to the missionaries we knew God, we just didn’t know his name or some said, we knew we were separated from God.
We were under a curse, we were bound.
But God told us, we were told that one day he would send us messengers and they would tell us of him or they would give us his book or they would tell us of his son all over the world.
What do you need to do?
Find the altar when you want to win somebody to the Lord and you have to win people to the Lord.
Find the altar. There’s an altar there. It doesn’t matter who they are.
They could be, they could be into witchcraft. Satanism.
They could be, they could be communists hard and atheist, there’s an altar there, there’s a way, look for the door, look for the altar, look for the connection.
They’re human. They have a, they have a God shape back no matter what they say, Paul looked for it and he kept looking until he found it.
You know, Muslims. You know, I, I didn’t plan on sharing this either, but I was once in Nigeria and my God, my, I, I was going to a big event.
We had to go somewhere and the guy that left me in a car and he left, he had to do something.
I’m in a car and also the car gets surrounded by these Nigerian Muslims and they’re looking at me and I don’t know maybe I look Jewish.
I don’t know. But because they said, are you a Hebrew? I said, yes, I am.
They said, what do you think of Mohammed or what do you think of Islam?
I said, well, I said, Islam says that Jesus is the messiah.
So if Jesus is the messiah and he says, he’s coming again, then you better listen to what Jesus said.
And Jesus said, he’s the way, the truth and the life and you cannot have salvation without him.
Now, I, I did that knowing that could be my last sermon.
I didn’t know what was gonna happen.
But, and then, then the guy comes back just like I said, oh thank God, he came back, you know, he comes back and, and we start pulling away and they say, wait, stop.
And I’m like, OK, here it goes.
You know, he says, don’t leave without giving us a blessing, give us a Hebrew blessing and they all bowed their heads.
And I, I prayed a blessing and I pray they would find the Lord.
But Islam, you might have not known. They actually say Jesus is the Messiah.
They don’t understand what that means and then he’s coming again. That’s a, that’s a altar there.
That’s a connection there. The orthodox Jew believes in Messiah believes in the scriptures. That’s a connection.
They, they learn from Messiah, that’s a connection. They just have to know who he is. The Hindu.
The Buddhists want to be one with God, we show them how to become one with God.
Even the atheist has it. You know, the atheism is close to agnosticism.
And remember that gnosticism is close to the word for the unknown God and the altar of the unknown God, they all have it because he said eternity in their hearts.
Even Satan worshipers have an altar that is meant for God.
They just got some of you were in the occult.
God used it because you were searching for God and think about Messiah, what did he do?
He didn’t condemn us. He became like us. He connected with us. He met us where we were.
Hi, I’m Jonathan and I hope you are blessed with the video.
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