1 Is there a diabolical conspiracy to have you misunderstand the last days for Planet Earth? Find out the shocking truth, next on It s Supernatural. Can ancient secrets of the supernatural be rediscovered? Do angels exist? Is there life after death? Are healing miracles real? Can you get supernatural help from another dimension? Has the future been written in advance? Sid Roth has spent 30 years researching the strange world of the supernatural. Join Sid on this edition of It s Supernatural. SID: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it s naturally supernatural. My guest, Joel Richardson, has such amazing insight into the End Times. The prophet Daniel, in the 12th chapter, talks about the End Times. Explain what he says. JOEL: In the conclusion of this incredibly prophetically book, the prophet Daniel made clear, in fact, it was revealed to him by an angel, that all of the things revealed to Daniel, the primary message of this entire book, would literally be sealed up until the End Times. And he makes this very clear that when he s speaking about End Times, he s saying the time when the dead, those that sleep in the dust of the earth, are resurrected. This is talking about the end of the Age, that at that time, the understanding of this book would be opened up to the Church. SID: And I can see how you ve been hand-picked, literally by God, to give revelation of the End Times. In fact, you were sitting among 7,000 people. Get this, he s sitting around among 7,000 people and the man that is speaking has a word of knowledge, but he starts out by even saying Joel s name. What did he say? JOEL: Let me just back up a teeny bit and make mention of something else. Just before my wife and I met, there was a prophetess that prayed over my wife, and one of the things she said was she said, Your husband, you ll marry someone that will have significant insight into the End Times and he ll release new prophetic understanding concerning the End Times into the Church, and to the world. And so my wife and I are sitting in this meeting, 7,000 people, large civic center type of situation, in the very back. And before he spoke, he said, I want to share prophetic word, in order to show that what I m about to speak on is from the Lord. He called us out by name and then he spoke things to us that no man could know, things that we had been praying about, things that only we knew that only the Lord, only God could reveal to a man, and that gets your attention. And then one of the things that he said was he said that the Lord was going to bring me into a season of Divine revelation, which I knew intuitively was tied into this word about understanding the End Times. And of course, I had no interest in the End Times. I m an incredibly unlikely candidate. My heart has always been to I love sharing my Christian faith with Muslims and I love reaching out to the poor, and I thought if I ever had a ministry, that that s what it would be geared toward. But somehow the Lord has managed to bring together this love for Muslims, as well as this call to speak about the End Times and He s joined those two together. SID: But what if everything we ve been taught about in series like the Left Beyond or Late Great Planet Earth, the basic premises are wrong? What if? I believe God has raised up Joel. People that understand his teaching, say for the first time, the whole End Times scenario makes total sense to me. Joel, in preparation for this, you spent time in the Middle East. You have
2 studied the scriptures from an eastern, a Middle Eastern mindset. What difference does this make when you study the scriptures from that mindset versus the West? JOEL: One of the things that I try to emphasize, whenever I m teaching on these issues, particularly when I m addressing Americans, is I try to address this issue of American centricity, this idea that we have as Americans, whether we articulate or verbalize it or not, we believe the world revolves around us, and we even, again, we wouldn t quite come out and say it, we believe that the Bible is written primarily for Americans. What I m trying to do is bring people back to the context of this book so they can understand that this book is first and foremost, is and always has been Jerusalem, Israel and a Middle Eastern centric book, and that includes the subject of biblical prophecy, that the epicenter of all biblical prophecy is the Middle East. So when we try to, as westerns, try to read our world view into the prophetic scriptures, the prophecies of the Bible, we often make mistakes. We read things into this context that don t belong. So if you re sitting in Jerusalem today, the primary spirit that is coming against the Jewish people, coming against the people of God, is the spirit of Islam. Now here in the West we have other spirits that we re contending with, but we need to be careful not to read our world into the pages of this book. SID: Now the thing that s so amazing to me is as you began studying and reading about what the Bible calls the Antichrist, and then in the Middle East and talking with Muslims, and beginning to understand the one they consider to be their messiah, they seem to be the same person. JOEL: Exactly, exactly. What shocks a lot of people is that when we look at the basic template, the basic description of who the Antichrist is in the Bible, it is an exact description of the Islamic savior, the Islamic messiah figure. So in the Bible, the Antichrist is a charismatic leader, a military, political, religious leader that rises up at the end of the age. He initially comes with a spirit of peace, a spirit of tolerance and unity for all faiths, and he initiates a peace treaty with the Nation of Israel and the surrounding Islamic nations, and then three and half years into this peace treaty, he violates that. He invades the Land of Israel with the surrounding nations, the Islamic nations that are under his authority, and he literally comes against the Jewish people to kill them, to conquer them. He sets up his seat of authority in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount. And the Bible says that the time that he has to do this is seven years. In Islam, their messiah figure is said to come at the end of the Age. They call him the Mehedi. In English we can just say the Madhi. He comes at the end of the Age to revive the Islamic empire that s been dormant for the past 80-plus years. He then invades the Land of Israel to retake Israel for the Islamic world, and then he establishes the seat of his authority of world Islamic authority from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And according to sacred Islamic tradition, it says that the time period that he has to do this will be seven years. SID: I mean, I think that is so phenomenal, because I ve always been told it s going to be someone that will emerge from Europe, from the European Union, the ten nations coming together. But this is going to get interesting. Don t go away. It s going to be supernatural. Be right back after this word. We ll be right back to It s Supernatural.
3 *** We now return to It s Supernatural. SID: Hello. Sid Roth here with Joel Richardson. We just found out in the last segment that the one that the Muslims refer to as their messiah has a perfect description of what Christians refer to as the Antichrist. It s amazing how similar it is. Joel, in Matthew 24, it says, the Messiah says, The love of, and in the Greek it says, The love of most will grow cold in the last days. That s a pretty somber statement. The love of most will grow cold in the last days. Why do you believe that will happen? JOEL: This is one of the most, in my opinion, one of the most terrifying warnings in all of scripture, because not only does it say that the love of most will grow cold, it also says that many will betray the faith and betray each other. And of course, the End Times will be a catastrophic, cataclysmic time. But to put this in context, in the 1970s, there was a movement that swept through the United States called the Jesus Movement, and that s affected this country. Few people realize how much that affected. All these hippies were coming to following Yeshua and throughout the country. This was a revival, a biblical revival. One of the primary underlying factors of this religious revival was the fact that Israel had become a nation and fulfilled the prophecies of the Bible. People, when they look and they see that the prophecies of this book, unlike, you know, Nostradamus or some other vague prophecy, when they see that this book can predict things with accuracy precision thousands of years in advance, they come to recognize this book is true. Well likewise, if the majority today of the Church is believing that the Antichrist is going to come out of Europe and if they have all of these ideas about the End Times that are perhaps flawed, then likewise, even as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies affected people in a positive way during the 70s, I believe that if the opposite takes place, the potential that this has to shipwreck people s faith, to lead them into deep levels of disillusionment and confusion, and lose faith in this book, is tremendous. And so we need to, when we look at this warning in Matthew 24, we need to take an incredibly humble approach to the prophetic scriptures and keep our eyes open. SID: Okay. Islam talks about their messiah is the perfect description of the Christian Antichrist. What is Islam s description of Jesus? JOEL: This is essential. This is an essential point. A lot of Christians when they find out that Muslims also believe that Jesus will return at the end of the Age, they get all excited and say, well we have so much in common. What Christians don t realize is that what Islam teaches is that when Jesus returns he will essentially come back, not as the Jesus of the Bible, but as an Islamic prophet, and he will come back to tell the Christians of the world and those that follow him that you ve had it wrong all along, that your Bible is corrupted, that he never claimed to be the Son of God, that he never died on the cross, the whole Christian religion is false, that Islam is the true religion. He will command Christians to become Muslims otherwise they will have no other choice but to suffer the death penalty. Beyond that, Muslims teach that Jesus will come back as a Muslim prophet to kill the false Jewish Antichrist and to slaughter Jews in the Land of Israel. So in a nutshell, Muslims believe Jesus returns to abolish Christianity and to kill Jews.
4 SID: How about Daniel 2:43? How does that fit in? JOEL: Daniel 2, this is the prophecy about this metallic statue, one of the most essential, prophetic passages in all of the scriptures. A lot of people believe that this is the foundation for this whole idea that the Antichrist will come out of the Roman Empire. SID: Right. JOEL: It s speaking of these legs of iron. It s all very complicated. But when we look at the biblical description, the criteria that the Bible lays out for us to identify this fourth empire, it says that it will crush Babylon, think Iraq, Persia, think Iran, and Greece, think Turkey and Greece. The problem is the Roman Empire did not crush those empires. It conquered a little bit of some of them. But in terms of Persia and Iraq, largely most of these regions were left untouched. The Roman Empire does not meet the biblical criteria. The Islamic empire does. And then when we look at Daniel 2:43, specifically of this fourth empire, it says, The kingdom will be mixed. And in the Aramaic, that word is Arab. The kingdom will be Arav, Meh arav. The same word for Arab is the word that we translate as mixed. In ancient times, the Arabs were known as the mixed peoples. SID: So why does everyone think the Antichrist is going to come out of Europe? JOEL: Well again, it s because of a misplaced interpretation of two key passages. And there s a huge wealth of passages throughout the Bible, consistently that speak of the surrounding nations. In the Hebrew it s the goy sabhib, the goyim sabhib, the nations that surround Israel that come against her in the last days. And you have dozens of passages that say this. But then based on two passages, Daniel 2 as well as Daniel 9, some point to Revelation 17, they form the foundation for their eschatology and believe the Antichrist will come from the Roman Empire, and they ignore all of these other passages which are clear, which are consistent and easy to understand. SID: Very briefly, what is the Islamic view of the one they call the Antichrist? JOEL: Muslims also believe that an Antichrist will come at the end of the Age. They call him adagela al massae, the imposter Messiah. He comes back as the Jewish Messiah who claims to be Jesus Christ, who claims to be God, the Son of God, who does miracles, and he s followed by Jews. So when you look at the Book of Revelation when it says that, The rider on the horse Jesus has come back, and the kings of the earth gathered together to make war against him, you think, what has gotten into them? The Muslims have been set up by their own religion to believe that when Jesus returns that he will be the Antichrist. SID: Well, you know, I can see why 99 percent of the people that hear Joel teach on this area say for the first time, I understand the End Times. Don t go away. You re going to find out some amazing statements of Orthodox rabbis about the End Times. Be right back after this. We ll be right back to It s Supernatural.
5 *** We now return to It s Supernatural. SID: Hello. Sid Roth here with Joel Richardson and the wealth of information. I see why God has hand-picked this man to give us a revelation of End Times. But there s going to be a false unity that will occur in the last days we read about. And you told me the most amazing statement about a Hasidic rabbi in Israel. Tell me about that. JOEL: Well I recently have been in dialogue, not only with some of the representative rabbis from the Sanhedrin, which is a body of 70 Hasidic rabbis in Israel, but also a very influential Turkish Islamic Muslim leader, named Adnan Oktar. I recently had the chance to visit with him in Istanbul, and amazingly, you have this Muslim that is actually calling for the Jewish temple to be rebuilt. He calls it Solomon s Mosque or Solomon s Palace. Shortly after I visited with Adnan in Istanbul, some of the representatives from the Sanhedrin met with him, and after meeting with him one of the things that they came out in a joint statement was a call for the Temple Mount to become a house of prayer for all nations. And, you know, when you listen to their dialogue, the rabbis regularly refer to God as Allah, and they speak about worshiping the same God all under one Abrahamic umbrella. So there s an emerging unity. You know, they have their clearly defined parameters, but they see each other as brothers who all worship the same God. SID: And obviously, by the description of Allah, that is not the description of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But I m talking about that Hasidic rabbi. What did he say to you? JOEL: Well not to me specifically, but Menachem Froman, very influential rabbi in Israel, the founder of the Tekoa settlement, he s written a letter to the government of Turkey, and he s asked for a meeting between the religious leaders of Israel and the government leaders, political leaders of Turkey to come together to form and forge a Middle Eastern peace treaty that they could then submit to the surrounding nations. And what he has said is that Turkey is the only hope for Middle Eastern peace, that Turkey is the premier bridge nation, the only nation that can mediate between the Islamic world and the State of Israel. SID: And that s probably why you talk about keep your eyes on Turkey. JOEL: For over 500 years it ruled the Middle East, right up until 1924. Now in 1924, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular reformer of Turkey, abolished the Office of Khalif, which is essentially the pope of the Islamic world. But he s actually more than that. And so the Khilafat, the government of the Khalif was abolished, and since that time, the Islamic empire has essentially been dormant. The Bible predicts this. It calls this the fatal head wound that the beast would suffer, the beast being the empire. And now that empire is reviving, and everything looks like Turkey will emerge once again as the leader of the Middle East. SID: You know, when you put End Time prophecy together with the Islamic world, as opposed to the European world. It just makes so much more sense.
6 JOEL: Absolutely. And you know, sometimes it s as if they re reading right from the script of the Bible. And Adnan Oktar, this Muslim leader that I met with, after I had been teaching for some time that the Bible predicted that Turkey would emerge as a regional leader, suddenly he comes out and he s calling for what he calls a Turkish-lead Islamic union. And there is these massive movements throughout the Middle East calling for a neo-ottoman empire in the Middle East. We ve been concerned that Al Qaeda would revive a Khilafat, but Turkey may very accomplish what Al Qaeda could not do. SID: And you have another interesting revelation from the prophet Micah about the Assyrian. JOEL: This is one of the most basic prophecies about the Messiah. In the Bible, in Micah 5, you have the prophecy of the Bethlehem-born Messiah. We all know this one. But if you read a little further it says that one of the primary things that this messiah does, it says, When the Assyrian, that s the Antichrist, When the Assyrian invades our land and tramples into our borders that the Bethlehem-born Messiah would deliver us from the Assyrian. Now you have to ask yourself, if you re a believer who takes the Bible at a face value approach, you take it for what it says, if the Antichrist is called the Assyrian then is it more reasonable to conclude that the Antichrist will come from the former region of the Assyrian empire, or is it more reasonable to conclude that the Antichrist will be Nicolae Carpathia from Romania, or that he ll be from Germany, or London? SID: Now of course, we re hearing all of this stuff, which is kind of heavy. But there is so much exciting things going on by the supernatural power of the living God. Jewish people and Muslims are having supernatural experiences with the Messiah of Israel. Tell me about some Muslims. JOEL: Amen. First let me say this. Yeshua, a Jewish man, will soon come back and he will take over the earth. This is the yearning of mankind. Righteousness will cover the earth. Before he does this, this is all we re talking about. We re talking about the End Times, we re not talking about the end of the world. We re talking about the beginning of the good stuff. We re talking about the day when all the things that we groan about, the child slavery, the sex slave trade, the unrighteousness of the earth, the unrighteous leadership will be eliminated. Before he does that, the Lord right now is reaching out and He s drawing Muslims to Himself all over the Islamic world. Reports are coming in from missionaries, and one of the primary ways that Muslims are coming to become followers of Yeshua is through supernatural dreams and revelations. Yeshua himself is personally evangelizing Muslims. He hears their cry and he s calling them to himself. SID: Briefly tell me one Muslim story. JOEL: You know, I just heard one recently. I believe it was Joel Rosenberg, not to be confused with Joel Richardson, was telling a story of a woman who was praying. She read the scripture that says, Behold, I stand on the door and knock. If you open the door I will come in a sup. She was praying about that scripture. She heard a knock on the door. She opened the door and there was a man in a white robe with holes in his hands, and she said, Come on in. And Jesus himself came in, sat down, ate with her and taught her the truth about himself and the scriptures, and she became a follower of Jesus.
7 SID: But based on your research, this is not just an exception. This is happening to many Muslims. JOEL: Reports are coming in, again, from across the Islamic world. Missionaries are reporting this. I have a friend in Berlin right now who just, about two weeks ago, he was able to lead nine Turkish Muslims to the Lord in one meeting. He prayed for them. They had various sicknesses. They were healed. Jesus healed them. They could not deny the power that he had in Yeshua, for Yeshua. They came to faith. He preached the crucified Christ of the Bible, not the false Jesus of the Koran. SID: And the amazing thing is when these Muslims come to know God they have such a love for the Jew and Israel. This is where Romans 11:11 says that, The gentile will provoke the Jew to jealousy. What greater gentile than an Arab coming to faith. JOEL: Exactly. What a testimony when these Muslims who were raised on anti-semitism, the anti-semitism that is in their holy book, the Koran, and they have this hatred for the Jews. Suddenly, they fall in love with Yeshua. They read the scriptures and they realize the Jews are God s people, that Isaac is my brother, and they come to love Israel. They come to love Jews. This I believe is one of the primary ways that the Lord is going to use the gentile world to provoke His people, the Jewish people, to jealousy, that they will turn to Him. SID: That kind of a transformation could only come through knowing the Messiah of Israel. Do you need that kind of transformation? I believe you do. It s time to tell God you re sorry for mistakes you ve made in your life and you believe the King of the Jews, Jesus the Messiah, washes away your sins. Ask him to be your Lord and ask him to live inside of you right now.