My wife and I have spent the last 13 years living
in the wonderfully hospitable land of Turkey. After learning
the Turkish language, we moved to a city of 400,000 people
without a single Christian church, and as far as we knew,
no followers of Jesus Christ. We wanted to share the good
news of salvation and eternal life through Christ.

Where would you begin in sharing the gospel
with a Muslim friend? John 3:16 is a great summary of the
gospel, but Muslims have been taught that associating a son
with God is as blasphemous as imagining that He has a wife.
I Corinthians 15:1-4 is also a good summary of the gospel,
but Muslims have been taught that God rescued Jesus from being
crucified and someone else was crucified instead. Besides,
your Muslim friend may reason, God can do anything He wants.
If He desires to forgive your sins, He will do it without
any need for someone to suffer the penalty of your sins in
your place (cf., Hebrews 9:22, Romans 3:25,26).

It makes a lot of sense to begin at the beginning.
The Bible begins by describing a good and powerful Creator
who not only created the whole universe, but also created
people to enjoy friendship with Him. The Bible is the wonderful
story of how God has worked in history, even after Adam's
rebellion broke that fellowship, to make it possible for people
to know Him. The Book of Genesis lays the foundation for us
to understand what God is like, why the human race has value
despite the problems we have caused in the world, why there
is so much evil in a world that a good God created, and how
God planned and carried out His solution to the human race's
deepest need.

My wife and I appreciated our new Turkish neighbors
and their hospitality, but longed for them to have a personal
relationship with their Creator as we do. After developing
friendships in the neighborhood, we were able to start a home
study of the Bible—a book in which the Turks nominally
believe, but know nothing of. We started where it made the
most sense to start—in Genesis, at the beginning. We
saw how almighty God created the world by His own power and
word. This implies God's eternal nature and preexistence to
all matter as well as His omnipotence, which are taught in
detail in other passages of Scripture (John 1:1-3; Isaiah
40:25-28; Revelation 22:13). We saw that creation was originally
very good. We saw that God created man in his own image with
intellect, volition, emotions, creativity, and with both a
capacity and a responsibility for making moral and spiritual
choices. This stands in contrast to the Muslim idea of fate
which minimizes individual responsibility. Then we saw how
evil entered the world, what its necessary consequence was,
and what God proposed to do about it by sending a Savior (Genesis
3:15). We saw why God instituted animal sacrifice, and later
the Passover, and how they pictured the coming Savior. We
looked at prophecies of this coming Messiah and how Jesus
fulfilled them. By the end of the study, four of our Muslim
friends had trusted in Christ as their Savior.

Down through the years, as we and our co-workers
have repeated and refined similar chronological Bible studies,
we have seen that beginning in the Old Testament rather than
in the New, actually helps people to understand the gospel.
In 14 lessons we explain that the whole Bible is an intact
story of God's involvement with people. It is not just a collection
of unrelated nice stories or, worse yet, myths, but true and
reliable history orchestrated by a purposeful, sovereign God
who wants us to realize where we have come from and where
we are going. Genesis shows us how God had regular communication
with Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:26-3:8). Revelation ends with
believers again enjoying God's daily presence (Revelation
21:1-4; 22:1-4). The middle of the story explains how the
human race lost close friendship with their Creator, earned
the wages of sin, and how God has provided a way for our forgiveness
and the restoration of our relationship with Him (II Corinthians
6:18-21).

Our Muslim neighbors understand from their Kurban
Bayram (Sacrifice Holy day during which those that are able
sacrifice an animal) that people are to demonstrate their
generosity by keeping only one third of the meat from the
sacrifice for themselves, and giving two-thirds away to their
neighbors and to the poor. We explained from the Scriptures
that from the very beginning God had warned Adam that the
penalty for disobedience against God was to be death (Genesis
2:16,17; cf., Romans 6:23). It is interesting that God warned
him that this death penalty would be immediate. Satan, in
the form of the serpent (Revelations 20:2), denied that they
would die at all. We saw that although they continued to live
physically for many years, God's word was true (Titus 1:2).
They did die immediately, because from God's perspective,
spiritual realities are much more significant and important
than merely physical. The root idea of death is separation.
In physical death the spirit is separated from the body (James
2:26). But in spiritual death, which is far worse, people
are separated from an intimate relationship with the Author
of life, and their lives are filled with ruin and shame (Genesis
3:7-11; Ephesians 2:1-5). God gave people hope by instituting
animal sacrifice in which the animal symbolically suffered
the death penalty that the sinner deserved. The death of the
sacrificial animal pictured salvation through the final sacrifice
of the coming Messiah.

The seriousness of man's rebellion against God
is seen again in the stories of the Flood and the Tower of
Babel. In our Turkish home Bible studies, my co-workers and
I followed the clues through the Old Testament that described
this coming Savior.

Then when we came to the New Testament we looked
at Jesus' unique life, death, and resurrection. Our friends
in our home Bible study gradually began to understand why
only Christ could ever save anyone from spiritual death through
His victory over the grave.They had been taught by their Muslim
teachers that each successive revelation or Scripture (the
Torah of Moses, the Psalms of David, the Gospel of Jesus,
and the Koran given to Muhammad) replaced the previous one
and was more up-to-date. But by beginning in the Old Testament
instead of in the New, they saw that the gospel truly is a
continuous theme throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation,
and that the Koran's message is totally different.

Although Turkey is officially 99% Muslim, many
Turks are nominal Muslims with a materialistic worldview,
some even embracing Marxism. A chronological Bible study,
as I described above, helps them to see God's purpose in creation,
to see the sinful nature of man and the relevance of the Scriptures.
Faith in Jesus Christ changes people from the inside out,
making possible true social justice and compassion with no
need for a revolution and a totalitarian state. One of our
Turkish Christian brothers who attended one of these home
Bible studies used to be a committed communist. He has realized
that changing people's economic or political situation does
not change their hearts. Marxists have failed to see that
their whole understanding of history (evolution) and of the
nature of man (basically good) is faulty and therefore cannot
produce an ideal, harmonious society.

The June 1998 issue of Acts & Facts
discussed the creation conference which was held in Istanbul,
Turkey, with ICR speakers. I attended the follow-up conference
in Ankara with a Turkish friend whose wife has become a Christian,
but who remains an atheist himself. He was impressed with
Dr. Gish's evidence from the fossils that evolution is not
scientific fact at all as he had thought. Some Turkish Christians
also attended, including a friend saved through the home Bible
studies I described, and were thrilled to get some teaching
on the subject of scientific creationism. Good scientific
teaching and translated materials on Biblical creationism
are lacking in the budding Turkish church. Although religious
Muslims believe in creation, there is a large segment of Turkish
society that has been affected with the teachings of evolution
and ideologies such as Marxism. It is my prayer that Christian
creationist literature will be made available in Turkish to
help dispel the notion that science has disproven the validity
of faith in the Bible. After all, the Creator of the universe
is the greatest and wisest scientist of all, and He has left
us some of His personal notes in Scripture which we would
do well to believe. May God pave the way for books to be published
and teaching to be made available inTurkish, the language
of Turkey, the land of Noah's Ark.

In Turkey, various beliefs and religious attitudes
may be encountered, but when it comes to explaining the gospel,
it is always best to "begin at the beginning."