Jesus Wasn't a Muslim

By Martijn van Tilborgh

Yes, it's true.

Jesus wasn't a Muslim.

He wasn't a Buddhist, a Hindu, or one of those Hare Krishna folks either.

But here is the part that tends to make people nervous:

Jesus wasn't a Christian either!

That might sound offensive to some, but Jesus did not come to save Christians.

His mission was far bigger than that.

It was not aimed at any religious group.

Not even the right one.

The gospel says His objective was to save the world.

Or, using the original Greek word, the kosmos.

Not a tribe.

Not a doctrine.

Not a belief system.

Everything.

If anything, Jesus' message was not the beginning of a new religion.

It was the end of religion itself, including what would later be called Christianity.

Historically speaking, Christianity did not exist while Jesus was alive. It only became a religion long after He was gone. And once it did, it quickly became a useful system for sorting people.

Who is in.

Who is out.

That was nothing new. The religious leaders in Jesus' day did the same thing. They argued endlessly over who was clean and who was unclean.

Who qualified as a saint and who deserved the label of sinner. They made it clear that God favored the Jew. The Gentile, they said, was rejected.

Sound familiar?

Jesus refused to play that game.

He did not spend His time categorizing people.

As far as He was concerned, everyone was already in.

The only people Jesus consistently confronted were the religious professionals.

The Sanhedrin.

In modern terms, the gatekeepers of God.

Meanwhile, He ate with those religion had disqualified.

The unclean.

The sinners.

The ones labeled as rejected by God.

That is what religion does.

It labels.

It assigns categories.

It tells us who we are allowed to be.

And once labels take hold, they do not just divide humanity. They fracture the church itself, with every group convinced it alone is right.

Revelation 12 speaks of Satan as the one who leads the whole world astray. It calls him the accuser of the brethren. The Greek word used for accuser is kategoros.

Yes, that should sound familiar. The accuser categorizes and assigns labels.

That is how deception works. Not by denying God, but by dividing people. And far too often, we participate in it.

Even Peter did.

In Acts 10, Peter falls into a trance on the rooftop of Simon the tanner. The vision comes to him three times. Only then does it finally land.

“Do not call anyone impure or unclean.”

Peter had walked with Jesus for years. Yet it took a disruptive spiritual experience to break the grip of religious thinking.

Suddenly Cornelius, a Gentile, an Italian, and a man who did not believe in Christ, was no longer an outsider.

He was chosen by God.

So let us stop the labeling.

Stop sorting people into categories God never created.

Jesus was not a Muslim. He was not a Christian. He was not a Buddhist.

He was the Son of God, sent to save the world.

All of it.

Including the people who do not yet know His name.