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 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.