I have recently been faced with the question of the burning of the Qur'an by one particular church group. I too have a hatred of the Qur'an as any believer should. However, I wonder if the burners of this book have acted arrogantly and self righteously without consideration to what the Bible teaches. Christ never burned anyone's idols. He spoke against them and preached repentance toward God and clearly stated the Good News of salvation to those who would place their trust in Him.

Could it be that those who would buy Qur'an's just to burn, are arrogantly and figuratively flailing their finger in the face of another pagan religion just to enrage them. I am not interested in enraging people with meaningless ritualistic activity that are designed to deliberately start wars.

My desire is to preach the gospel as Christ and the Apostles did, for the purpose of seeing souls saved. I will speak against the Qur'an and forbid it from our home, but when it belongs to someone else I leave it alone and I would not spend God's money wastefully on books that I intended to burn simply to aggravate others.

If we were to think that it was a good deed to burn the Qur'an, then why have we not been burning all wicked books, magazines and videos. We would have to burn down stores and libraries, to rid ourselves of all the evil that persists in our culture. This was not our calling from the Lord.

He would have wanted us to stand outside the establishments and preach His Word, speaking repentance, love and forgiveness. When Paul got off the ship in Athens Greece, he was grieved at the 100,000 statues that were representations of the false gods of that region. He did not seek to destroy their gods, rather he sought to preach, teach and pray for the souls that he would be encountering. He used one of their own monuments to one of their gods. He introduced them to "the unknown God" the true God.

I am in complete support of pagans who get saved building fires and burning their own idols. But I do not believe that we do God any service in burning the idols of others, merely as an attempt to "force" them into the kingdom. Their idols are nothing, we need not be intimidated by them, but we should care enough about the soul of the pagan to preach against their idols.

Let them make the choice and then it will be real. Force creates false converts and even hardens hearts that might otherwise be open to the Word of the Lord.

Let's put more energy into the saving of souls than the destruction of dead worthless idols. We do not want to bring more attention to the idols and false books, but minimize them by overwhelming the pagan with the truth of God's Holy Word and His Holy Book.