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.
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.
