(Transcript of the video, edited for readability)
It may be that as a Christian, you're talking to your Muslim neighbor and friend and you get to the issue of the cross, the crucifixion and the resurrection. It's one of the things that Muslims will deny and they'll deny it on the basis on a couple basics.
One, you sometimes hear Muslims say that such treatment is beneath a prophet of God, that no way would allow one of his prophets to suffer in that way. I think that just betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge about the prophets as you read them in the scripture. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, imprisoned and mistreated. Isaiah and others struggling. And boy, Moses had his battles too. The Lord gives him victory, but it's the Lord who doesn't allow him into the Promised Land. And so I think that's about the role of prophets in a way that just historically isn't accurate. That's important to establish because Jesus is not only a prophet, but he's also our sacrifice. It's God who sends Jesus into the world as a sacrificial lamb to die in our place, and it's by that very act, Romans 3, tells us that God is not only the justifier of sinners, but is just as well.
Far from the cross being somehow a tragic misunderstanding of how prophets are treated or something that many Muslims just deny happened altogether, or claim that Judas was actually crucified and made to look like Jesus and Jesus went on to live. There's no evidence for those positions. Far from that. The Bible is actually telling us that this is how the righteousness of God is vindicated. God upholds his own righteousness by giving his son as a sacrifice and by judging our sins in him, so that sins that before then had gone unpunished are finally satisfied in Christ. So that his mercy at the same time is being demonstrated on the cross as sinners are freed from his sin, forgiven and cleansed before God.
So it is the cross and the sacrifice of Jesus that both is the justification, becomes the grounds of justification and righteousness for the sinner, and for a holy God who cannot leave sins unpunished. Islam cannot answer that. How it is that God can both forgive sins and forgive the sinner and at the same time punish sin. Only the cross answers that.
