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0:20 Mount Carmel, midday, and the sun is absolutely hammering everybody. 0:26 And there are 450 men in robes and they are screaming at the sky. 0:30 They've been at it all day. 0:32 They've chanted, they've danced, now they're taking knives and they're cutting their arms and legs. 0:36 The blood is running down their bodies and onto the dirt because their God is silent. 0:41 And somebody told them that silence means you haven't bled enough. 0:45 But one man stands off to the side, his arms crossed, and he's watching. 0:49 When all these men finally exhaust themselves, he doesn't scream, he doesn't cut himself, he just makes some simple statements. 0:55 And these statements are actually worse than an insult. 0:58 He says things like, Maybe your God's asleep, maybe he's on the toilet, maybe you just need to uh, you know, shout a little louder. 1:06 That man is a prophet of the one true God, and he is about to end the show. 1:11 So, guys, welcome to a new week of the Daily Blade. 1:14 On my flagship show on Dawn and Life of Man's podcast, I did an episode back in August called Hell's Hydra. 1:19 So, Greek mythology, a hydra, obviously it's a serpent with these heads, and you know, you cut one head off and it just grows right back. 1:25 I remember seeing this image of a four-headed hydra, and it got me thinking about how Satan is operating in this world. 1:32 And I was thinking categorically about the things that Satan is using to really do his thing and to trick people and to deceive people in modernity. 1:40 And I came up initially with a list of four, and now it's uh expanded to a list of five different heads of Hell's Hydra that I think Satan is using today to his advantage. 1:50 And so each day of the Daily Blade this week, we're gonna be looking at a different head of the Hydra. 1:54 And today I'm gonna be going over the first head of Hell's Hydra, which is fundamentalist Islam. 1:59 Now, a lot of you have heard things like radical Islam, but what people are actually meaning and they don't realize it is fundamentalist Islam. 2:07 Because terrorist groups like Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood and all these different groups, they're not radical adherents to the teachings of Islam. 2:18 They're actually doing precisely what the Quran and the Hadith would want them to do, exactly what their false prophet Muhammad would want them to do. 2:27 So that's why I'm calling it fundamentalist Islam. 2:29 But now let's go back to the story from the beginning. 2:31 So you can find it in 1 Kings 18, some of my favorite parts of the Bible. 2:35 So Israel has been drifting towards Baal for a generation, and Elijah is calling the entire nation to Mount Carmel for a public investigation of one question. 2:44 Who worships the true God? 2:47 So there are two altars, there are two sacrifices, there's no fire lit by human hands. 2:53 Whoever answers by fire, that's the real one. 2:56 That's the real God. 2:57 So you should actually read the entire account for yourself today, but summarize the prophets of Baal go first, and what happens after is just it's hilarious, but also terribly humiliating for them. 3:07 They're leaping around the altar, they're crying out to a false God, and nothing happens. 3:12 So Elijah is just openly mocking them. 3:15 It's hilarious. 3:15 The prophets respond by cutting themselves as was their custom, which the text says, until their blood was gushing everywhere. 3:22 So that detail is actually not incidental. 3:24 So self-mutilation and you know ecstatic frenzy, hours of desperate noise. 3:29 That's honestly what it looks like to serve a God who has to be forced into paying attention. 3:35 A God whose favor is earned through pain and violence, turned inward and then eventually outward, right? 3:41 So Elijah then told everyone to come close to him. 3:44 He took twelve stones, which represents the tribes of the sons of Jacob, and he built an altar. 3:49 And then he demanded that the altar be soaked with water, not once, not twice, but three separate times. 3:55 And then we see this in first Kings 18, we're gonna start in verse 36. 4:00 And at the time of the offering of the ablation, Elijah the prophet came near and said, O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word. 4:13 Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back. 4:21 Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench. 4:29 And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, The Lord He is God, the Lord He is God. 4:35 And Elijah said to them, Seize the prophets of Baal, let not one of them escape, and they seized them, and Elijah brought them down to the brook Hishon and slaughtered them there. 4:45 So men, what we are watching in real time is a religious system that is built on the same logic as those four hundred and fifty prophets. 4:54 That there is a God who must be appeased through submission, through fear, through the willingness to shed blood, your own or eventually someone else's, because his favor was never secure to begin with. 5:08 So fundamentalist Islam is not a strange foreign anomaly in human religion. 5:13 It is the default setting. 5:14 It's what happens every time a man tries to reach up to God on his own terms. 5:19 He'll make a lot of noise, he'll harm himself, and then eventually he will turn his sword on others, others that he claims to be the infidels. 5:28 Because if God won't answer by fire, somebody has to make him look powerful by other means, right? 5:33 And that has been the Islamic playbook since the seventh century. 5:37 And this matters for you practically, not just theologically, because you are going to run into people that believe this religion with total sincerity. 5:43 They will tell you that it's a religion based on peace, even though it's not. 5:47 And here's the thing you don't need to hate them to clearly see what you're looking at. 5:52 You can certainly love the Muslim while hating Islam. 5:56 And look, the Apostle Paul doesn't leave any room for tolerance here. 5:59 Go read Galatians 1, verse 8. 6:01 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed. 6:08 So that's not Paul being harsh for no reason. 6:11 That's Paul telling you sincerely that ultimately that false gospel is not what's going to save you. 6:20 Someone's sincerity in their belief of that false gospel, their zeal, it doesn't allow for them to be correct at the same time. 6:30 Plenty of people have died for things that they thought was real, they thought actually happened, that had no basis in reality. 6:36 I mean, a man can be devout, he can be disciplined, and also utterly and completely wrong. 6:42 And if you don't have Galatians 1.8 in your bones, you'll be tempted to mistake devotion for truth. 6:48 And I'm here to tell you that you cannot let that happen.