The religion of al-Islám is well-known to be an iconoclastic religion: They hate images. Why? In their scripture, al-Qur'án, the prohibition of images is not explicit. Only the story of Abraham from the Hebrew Torah is retold in Arabic. Yet they absolutely forbid images, ikons, at least in the kingdom of Sa’udi Arabia. That's why it surprised me to see today the image of the Sa’udi flag appear as the latest new visitor to my Ikonostasis blog. Visitors from the Sa’udi kingdom (ranked 44 out of 111 countries) have visited Cost of Discipleship before, and still do, so it's probably not an accidental encounter, but I was surprised to see a visitor from that country on my ikon blog. I wonder if it's one of my regular visitors to this blog?Taking the current Sa’udi flag, I redesigned it slightly, removing the scimitar and the calligraphic image of the الشهادة ash-shaháda, the Muslim confession of faith, and replacing it with the text of Daniel 2:20. The result, shown below, would make a nice replacement flag for a country that desperately needs Christ. May all the secret Christians of Sa’udi Arabia persevere through this dark time, for it is soon at an end, for them, for us all, “for the Time is close” (Revelation 1:3).
2 comments:
Shouldn't a Cross replace the sword?
No, the Cross is too real to be merely emblematic, and Christ is not in a contest with the islamic satan to see who can conquer more nations. Jesus says, "My Kingdom is not of this world."
We are not like the Crusaders who fought with flesh and blood and planted emblematic crosses all over the Middle East. We follow Jesus, the King of Glory enthroned on His life-giving Cross, and we follow Him wherever He goes, bearing the Cross.
The bible verse from Daniel is just an example of Christian Arabic calligraphy which I borrowed from the Christian Bible website (link in my sidebar), and it resembled the Sa’udi flag, which gave me the idea for this post.
I think that when Islam is finally defeated, it will be too late to redesign flags… the Kingdom will have arrived.
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