 Welcome to the Spirited Truth podcast with Lee M. Cummings. Today, Lee sits down with Joel Richardson to discuss the end times and his dedication to reaching the Islamic world. Thank you for joining us and enjoy this episode. Well, welcome to the Spirited Truth podcast. I am very excited today to have a friend of mine with us. Joel Richardson is a Bible teacher. He is also really uniquely involved in a lot of missions work in the Middle East primarily. And he's an author and a Bible teacher. And I've really come to love a lot of his writings. His newest book is from Zion, or from, let me get this right, from Sinai to Zion. And it is an incredible book. I think it's really part two of the first book or one of the books that you wrote about the real Mount Sinai, which was really, really interesting. And then you build on it. And like a lot of the books that Joel has been known for, it deals with biblical eschatology in his study of the end times. And he's been a teacher. He's become a friend. And we've had the privilege of having them here at Radiant for the last couple of days. Joel, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us. No, it's my pleasure. It's great to be here. I appreciate the introduction. I have to give you some props back. I have tremendous admiration for you and just getting to be here and see the whole Radiant Crew family. It's really pretty awesome. Well, we're glad to have you here. And sorry, I butchered your book title. Yeah, it's easy to do, Sinai to Zion. But we'll get to talking a little bit more about that here in a little bit because I read it last year. I think that's when I got it from you. And I can say I've read a lot of books on eschatology and the return of Christ. I've never read one quite like that particular book. And really in a few minutes, I wanna have you take some time and really kind of break that down. But I want you to just introduce yourself a little bit to our audience. Some people may not know you. Maybe share a little bit about what you're doing, your family, if you would like to. But then also how it is that you became a Bible teacher and an author on the subject of the last days and times eschatology. Yeah, it's just a huge accident. No, it's a great anomaly. I think the Lord loves anomalies. No, so I came to the Lord, came to faith August 20th, 1991. So I'm just here at 31 years, a little past 31 years in the Lord. And shortly after coming to faith, I was South Shore, Massachusetts, sort of a little pothead, 80s kid living in his divorce mother's basement, just kind of a loser to be honest. But came to faith, I was going to church and there was a missionary that came working with Wycliffe and he was working in Kazakhstan among the poorest of the poor. And he just told stories about what he was doing, showed slides, but he laid out the whole concept of the 1040 window, the unreached peoples of the earth. And at the time, again, this was 1991, maybe 92, he said, of those that are unreached in the world. And generally, misciologists refer to those that are unreached as those that have one or less missionaries or Christians to every 400,000. I mean, in that range. So your chances, if you're an unreached, if you're among the unreached peoples of here in the gospel of being born, living and dying without ever hearing an effective explanation of witness and invitation to follow Jesus is pretty significant. So among all the unreached peoples of the earth, roughly at the time half of them were Muslim. And at the time we were as the global protestant missionary, we were sending less than half of 1% of our missionary force to the Muslim world. And I was saying half of the unreached peoples of the world are Muslims. And we're not even sending 1%, we're sending less than half of 1%. And so the missionary did a real basic Pentecostal altar call. If you feel called to give your life to the Islamic world, I want you to come forward. And it was not overwhelming, but I felt the call. And I said to the Lord, I knelt at the altar and I said, Lord, you interjected and you saved me kind of out of the blue. I mean, I should be, at the very least, I should be in jail. I should definitely be dead because I'm such a moron. I should be in hell right now. And if this is where you need people, I'm no one, I'm expendable, I'm gonna give my life to the Islamic world. So that's really how it all started. And then of course, I started my five year plan to get educated, this and that, moved to Kansas City. I was going to at the time, it was called the Grace Training Center. Sam Storms was the president at the time. I go, Lord, I just, I wanna get the spirit, the podcast is called, it's the, what is it the word? Spirit and truth. Spirit and truth. I said, Lord, I want, I want a solid education in the word, but I also want the Holy Spirit. So that's why I went to Kansas City, Sam Storms, in a lot of ways. He's one of my heroes. Love him. So, you know, I had my five year plan, but then his life, you know, I say life happened. So I met a very beautiful woman named Amy. And, you know, we dated for three months, got engaged, got married. Next thing you know, you know, your single one minute you turn around and, you know, wham, wham, wham, what happened? And, you know, babies are happening and this and that. So I was supposed to be in Kansas City for two years. I've been there now almost 30. And- Extended stay. Yeah. Now we, I started looking at burial plots. Just kidding. But that's- For those of you who don't know, Joel has a really awesome East Coast dry sense of humor. So you'll pick up on that. Yeah. So in any case, I, this call to Muslims, it never left. Now I did spend, by the way, 1994, I spent better part of that year, went over to Israel, supposed to be there for a few weeks. I thought this would be a good scouting trip to kind of dip my toes in the Middle East. Ended up spending better part of the year. Just young guy backpacking around Israel, Egypt, Jordan. That was a good little taste of the Middle East. But then met my wife, got married and, you know, she has kind of a lot of medical issues that sort of, I'll say blossomed quite a bit after we got married and just became clear that moving to the Middle East was not realistic. You know, again, I was just kind of a young immature guy. So I just plugged into working. I was going to school, but actually started a painting company, you know, just trying to pay the bills, raise kids, babies and this sort of thing. But throughout this whole season, the late 90s, I was volunteering and just working with different ministries online, do an email correspondence, dialoguing with Muslims, trying to share the gospel. But it usually boils down to, and if you know a lot of Muslims, it boils down to arguing, arguing with Muslims. They love, if they can get a Christian, they feel very confident, they can win you to Islam. They're very evangelistic. And in so many ways, the latter part of the 90s after I got married, this was my seminary. You know, just years of this fighty Boston guy arguing with Muslims and studying and reading, because, you know, not only am I a fighty Boston guy, the Bible says study to show thyself a workman approved. And Muslims, you know, they're very, the guys that I was talking to were very educated, very intelligent. And so it required me to read a lot of, I'll say seminary level theology, this and that. Then 9-11 happened. And for a lot of people that changed everything. Suddenly people started recognizing the relevance of Islam on the world stage, spiritually and otherwise. So then in 2003, in the midst of all of my reading and so forth, just out of probably part of my own personal interest, I had a peace property couple acres. So I'd be out there mowing the lawn for a few hours every week. I used to listen to on my old Sony Discman. I would listen to CDs of- Throwback. Yeah. I'd listen to CDs of Mike Bickle teaching on the end times. But then I would spend all my evenings arguing with Muslims. So I started reading, just out of my own interest, books written by Muslims on the end times. What do they believe about the end times? That's interesting. Found it really fascinating. And I quite literally read every single book that exists in English on the subject by Muslim authors, by Christian authors, by academics, by popular authors. And I said, man, this is so fascinating because what Islam believes about the end times, it's so similar to what the Bible teaches, but it's kind of this strange mirror image. It's this kind of weird parallel to where all of the biblical good guys become the Islamic bad guys and vice versa. So I wrote my first book, and it was called Antichrist, Islam's weighted Messiah. It's been republished now, just called Islamic Antichrist. And it just turned out in the providence of God that here I was this first time author, writing about a very unique subject. I put the book online for free, threw it on Amazon. First year I sold like 15,000 copies. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, unheard of. Especially for a first time author, that's incredible. Yeah, it really, so I didn't expect that. But then the invitation started coming. I started getting invitation to churches to talk about this. And it turns out that a stupid street kid from Boston is good at telling stories and talking. And I'm a halfway decent teacher and speaker. So in the midst of painting and so forth, the invitations really started rolling in. And my wife said, I really think you're supposed to start doing this. And so I did start speaking in churches and it was resonating. And then over the next few years, I wrote a handful of, I've written, I guess, seven or eight books now, dealing with what the Bible says about the return of Jesus, the end times, these type of things. And it really has, it's not something that I do as a job. It's something that I'm legitimately really deeply passionate about. Yes, loving Muslims, reaching Muslims. And really I started out all of this, right? I was a missions guy, I was a gospel guy. The end times, I'm known more for the end time stuff than ever, I think I am. But really at the foundation, I'm a missions guy. And yeah, so then, I guess. And don't you think in regards to that, I think that's a natural progression. It should be anyways, a natural progression because we should never have theology that is separate or doesn't touch and motivate us in the direction of missions anyways. Whether it's our ecclesiology or even our eschatology. So I think you telling that story is a natural progression. I think it's a beautiful thing how God did that. He touched your heart first, which led you to a deeper study of scripture and engagement with Muslims. And now, he's using you to teach and really impact the body of Christ to really bring clarity to some of these things. That just to me, they're not distinct in separate things. They're just kind of a natural overflow of one another. It's powerful. Exactly, yeah. It's holistic. I, even as an end time teacher, I get a little frustrated with some guys that I would say are prophecy teachers and that's all they do is just sort of talk about just like weird enigmas and riddles and the end times and trivia, but there doesn't seem to be this application, this gospel application and it can just become weird, spooky, end time trivia. And I'm not picking on anyone in particular, but it is a danger when you get into that segment of theology. Well, it can actually appeal to the wrong side of us. I think one of the reasons, and I wanna get into this a little bit more in a few minutes, one of the reasons why you don't see such a unified belief or emphasis on the return of the Lord within the church, especially the Western church, to some degree has to do with abuse that I think some leaders and Christians in the church have seen and put it under the title of escapism or you guys just wanna kind of go over here and talk about your conspiracies and your mysteries and we're over here trying to get the mission of Jesus done. And so you have this dichotomy in the church of people who say, well, I'm a missions person and maybe they tend towards more amillennialism or even a triumphal, dominionist type of theology. And then you've got the Bible prophecy people over here are almost like, well, we're just waiting for Jesus to come. We've kind of given up hope. But in actuality, when you read the New Testament and you read Paul and really all of the epistles and the gospels and even the book of Acts, there was this apocalyptic sense of urgency about the return of Christ that actually stirred and motivated the church from the very beginning. And I think returning and restoring to a proper understanding of the return of the Lord and building it around the right missional motivation can actually be, it can be a beautiful thing to the church. And I think that's one of the things I've appreciated about you and about your books that you've written and the teachings that you've done, whether they're online or your YouTube channel is that that it really, it's not just, hey, this is really neat stuff. I've discovered something nobody's seen, the secret key, but you're actually, you're pointing the church back towards Jesus and to his mission. Seems like that's really important to you. Oh yeah, no, absolutely. And as you articulated, well, I'm convinced that the early church, they turned the ancient world upside down, like overnight, in a generation. And I think a huge part of that, a big part of the driver was that, as you said, that urgency, they believe that Jesus was returning soon, they believe they had this mandate to complete the Great Commission. They had this urgency for holiness, which a proper application of the end time message will give all of us. And that was one of the big drivers, I think it's one of the missing keys of the modern church today. Absolutely. In fact, in pointing out, as you said, a lot of the victorious eschatology guys in fairness, particularly in the charismatic world, it's also worth mentioning that a significant percentage, a significant segment of those in the church that have been talking about the return of Jesus for the past, I mean, to say 50 years, they're coming primarily from the pre-tribulational dispensationalist framework. Yeah, absolutely. It was as though that was the only crew that is talking about the end times and been part of that whole system of theology as the pre-tribulational rapture, which I think has been fairly at times criticized as the dominionists or the post-millennialists, they refer to it as abandonment eschatology. We're all out of here in a hand, the whole world's going to hell in a handbasket. We're out of here anyway. Why polish the brass on a sinking ship? Why engage culture? Jesus is, we can, almost from the 1980s, the stereotype was like, hey, we can pollute the rivers. Jesus is coming back to clean it up anyways. Any reasons why? Yeah, so I'm not a dispensationalist, though I am a pre-millennialist. I'm not a pre-tribul, I don't hold to the pre-tribulational rapture. I believe that we will stand and bear witness to the Jewish people and to the world during the tribulation, whether that's soon or a little ways off, I don't know, I don't pretend to know, but I think that is, well, it's not, I think it was the eschatology of the early church. And I think that's a much more balanced biblical approach that the church needs to recover. And as such, if we're really trying to get to a place where we're walking, a lot of people say, we need to get back to the book of Acts. Well, I would argue that we need to get to the book of Acts and beyond. Part of that recovery of what we've lost in the book of Acts is not just signs and wonders and prayer and missions, but it also is having a proper understanding about what the scripture has to say about the days preceding the return of the Lord, the end of the age, and also the age to come. And that is a subject that, for whatever reason, has either been neglected, skimmed over, either because of offense or because of ignorance. I mean, I can't tell you how many Christians, even pastors that I've talked to, who are like, yeah, I teach on every book of the Bible, except the book of Revelation, because maybe the first few chapters, but the rest of it's just too difficult and it's way over people's heads, but yet the book of Revelation is the only book that says, blessed is he who reads it. And obviously there's a blessing that's attached to all the Bible, but there is a blessing in understanding how things are going to proceed that ready us and actually propel us, or hopefully propel us to live our lives really intentionally and on purpose as you said this morning. You guys weren't in our staff meeting, but he talked about the Marinathakrai, and I love that. Can you just kind of describe what the Marinathakrai is and how that kind of fits into this and having a proper understanding of eschatology and or the study of what's gonna take place preceding the return of the Lord? Yeah, yeah, so essentially I just gave a message saying the church today, we really, we have the hallelujah down. Praise the Lord. We've got that, we're great at it. But the other primary cry or declaration of the early church was Marinathakrai, and it's an Aramaic word, mar means Lord, and atah is come. So it generally is understood to mean the Lord has come, the Lord is coming. So sort of a creedal statement, and that really encapsulates the gospel. Yes, he has come, he's come, he's made atonement. He came once with reference to sin, but he's coming back to judge the living and the dead and to renew all things, to restore Eden. As it says, multiple times in the New Testament, the restoration of all things, as was spoken of by the prophets. But it's also a cry. It's a prayer, come Lord Jesus. And so I'm convinced that the church today, really one of its greatest missing declarations and one of the defining cries of the early church was Marinathakrai, and I believe the modern church needs to recover that. We need to recover the Marinathakrai. And I think the book of Revelation says that that will be the case. Revelation 2. Spirit and the bride say come. That will define the church in that season before the return of Jesus. And it's grounding, I mean, it's not fringe weird. Like this is actually not just New Testament. This is Bible 101. And when you really lay it out, you go, oh, it's not all about the Antichrist, the tribulation, the mark of the beast and all of those things are relevant. The Lord wants us to understand those things, but those are just the signs that proceed our hope, which is his return. Yeah, it's the book of the revelation of Jesus Christ, not the revelation of the Antichrist or the end of the world. It really is zooming right in on the one who is right now enthroned and who is soon to return and established the throne of David on the earth and reign and rule. I mean, it's such a beautiful picture that we so easily skim over or ignore. And I believe in the days in which we're living it and the days preceding the return of the Lord, whether it's now or 100 years or 1,000 years, God's gonna restore that to his church, not just on a doctrinal statement, but actually in our hearts. And it's not just gonna be a marinata statement, but it's a marinata cry of our hearts. That's powerful. Well, listen, we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, I wanna talk to Joel about his newest book from Sinai to Zion. All right, we'll be right back. God is calling the church back to full hearted devotion to Jesus. Part of that is to learn how to be a praying people. God is looking for those who will build him a resting place just like in the days of David. What would it look like to invest your time and priority into prayer? Dive deeper in School of Prayer, a free online course from Lee M. Cummings. Learn more at leemcummings.com. Okay, welcome back. So Joel, you have written a book from Sinai to Zion. It's a great title. It's hard to remember. I'm trying to get Zion ahead of there. But I read it last year, and I have to say I've read a lot of books on eschatology from Systematic Theology to John Woolford, to you name it. I have never read a book like that book that lays out the imagery of Jesus' return in the Old Testament, really throughout the whole Old Testament that gives such a descriptive picture of what that event, the return of Messiah to the earth is going to look like. It was captivating. I found myself many times kind of reading statements that you made in tying scriptures together and thinking to myself, I have never seen that before. And I'm not saying that to blow smokey. I just, I read it and it was like, it really thrilled my heart and it excited me. It filled me with great expectations for the return of the Lord. Give everybody just a quick description of why you wrote this book, what inspired it, and then maybe give them a 30,000 foot view of why you use that title and what kind of the content from beginning to end is. So the Lord's had me on this really kind of crazy, unexpected journey the past several years where, again, I work with the underground church in Iran, but then I speak at all these prophecy conferences and people over the years have come up to me and shown me pictures of this mountain that's in Saudi Arabia. There's a few guys that sort of snuck into the country back in the 80s and they were talking about it, doing the Christian circuit. And then there was another couple that worked in the country, took a bunch of pictures, early 90s, and it's a lot of people go, they go, have you seen these pictures? Do you think this could be the real Mount Sinai? And I'm like, I have no clue. This is not my purview. It's not my specialty. But this weird thing happened every time, and it happened about three times, just randomly some strange would come up. Hey, have you seen these pictures? Again, I would say, I don't have an opinion on this. This prayer would just rise up in me, almost just like it was not me. And I would say, Lord, and again, Saudi Arabia was closed to the world unless you were worked in Saudi Arabia or US military, you couldn't get in. There's no tourism pieces. And I would say, Lord, I ask that you would get me in. I wanna check this mountain out. And I asked you, it would open up the underground church in Saudi Arabia to me. And it was, again, it was like a prayer that wasn't mine. And I had to say yes to it, because I felt it rise up and I would say, Lord, I don't know where this is coming from, but I asked that you would connect me, give me the underground church in Saudi Arabia. And so about a little over four and a half years ago, another friend of mine that sits on another board that I work with, sent me the pictures. And it was the fourth time. He goes, what do you think about this? I just came from there. I was like, you were just there? Wow, wow. He works at one of the oil companies. And I said, can you get me in? This was my first opportunity. And he immediately texted me back. He said, I can get you, you know, you bring your cameras, do some promotional photography. I can get you a visa. And I immediately just felt, no, I'm not a real sensitive to the spirit guy. I just felt this heavy presence. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is, I felt the demonic resistance. I said, we're touching something big here. And so I got in, got to check out this mountain, which I am now absolutely convinced is the real Mount Sinai. Two and a half years ago, I actually ended up leading the first Christian tour group in history into the country. That's incredible. That was just one thing led to another. I've got now connections with the underground. Like we are, we have a vibrant connection with the underground church in Saudi Arabia. It's all coming together. But so during this whole season, as I was studying this thing, the archeology, the history, I found myself parked in the book of Exodus. First time in my Christian walk that I really was parked there, gripped by it. And what I started seeing is the way that the apostles, the way that the prophets themselves view the Exodus as the foundation for the story of redemption throughout the entire Bible. A lot of Christians would think the biggest boom at the beginning of the Bible is creation. And that's big. But really the way that the Bible's written from a literary and a literary redemptive perspective is it's the Exodus that is the foundation for everything. And the return of Jesus itself is actually the language that's used in the New Testament is clearly drawn from and patterned after the Exodus. And so the return of Jesus is framed as the greater ultimate or second Exodus. And so the more that I started looking at this, I started seeing it, not just here or there in the prophets, but it permeates the Old Testament narrative. It's amazing. And so you have the very first foundational text is Deuteronomy 33, the blessing of Moses, it's the last words of Moses, where he's using the language, it's very Exodus language. It says, God comes from Sinai, the Holy One from Mount Peron. He dawns on us from Sier. So it's this picture of Yahweh, but in anthropomorphic form, marching from the south to the south of Israel, from the deserts of the Exodus. And he's shining like the sun, radiating over these tall mountains to the south. That's Mount Peron, Sier, Sinai. He's marching. It says lightning or fire is shooting out of his hands. And you look at this and you go, either this is just over the top language. And this is what a lot of scholars will say. They go, this is just over the top poetic hyperbole. God didn't literally lead Israel during the Exodus on foot. And then you realize, when you start looking at a lot of the other statements in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, that Jesus, John, Peter, Paul, all the New Testament writers, when they talk about the return of Jesus, they're drawing from this foundational picture. And so you start seeing it everywhere. You see it in Habakkuk 3 and Psalm 68. You see it throughout Isaiah 63, where the majestic one is marching from the south, striding forward in the greatness of his strength, coming up through Edom and Boser, soaked in the blood of his enemies. And so you kind of put all these different passages together and you go, this was a very well understood narrative in the first century. Jesus and the apostles understood this and they applied it to the return of Jesus. So the story, the return of Jesus, it's not just he comes back from heaven, waves a magic wand, waves a sword or snaps his fingers. There is a procession. There is a royal procession from the south, in many ways, like the greater Moses, as he sets the prisoners of war free from the armies of the antichrist, as he's setting the captives free, as he says plagues go before him, pestilence is after him, he's destroying the armies of the antichrist, his enemies, as he proceeds with this glorious parade, if you will, like something out of Lord of the Rings, just magnificent up to Mount Zion, making processions, singing the Psalms of Ascent. And when you look at this picture, it's amazing the degree to which suddenly all of these texts that never quite made sense, they just fall into place and it opens up the Old Testament. And just like you, I was thrilled when I was writing it, of course, because it's opening up as I'm writing it. And I don't think, to be honest, I don't think I'll ever write anything as important as Sinai Desai and I'd like to think that I will, but it's, I think it will be really the masterpiece of my life. Well, because I think regardless of whether you are a premillennialist, a millennialist, almost everybody that I've ever talked to agreed that when Jesus returns regardless of the timing of that, kind of the generally accepted kind of protocol of how that's gonna go is he's gonna return to the Mount of Olives, his feet are gonna touch it, it's gonna split in half and walk down through the Kidron Valley, through the Eastern Gate. That's kind of the return. That's how I've always seen it. And there's Old Testament scriptures, other prophets that they'll touch. Where does that come from in light of what you're talking about of going from Mount Sinai and that procession all the way up to Zion? Where does that imagery fit? Yeah. So I mean, with any subject, we can't build doctrine off of one passage or one verse. We need to consider the full council of scripture on any matter. So the scripture speaks abundantly of this march, of this procession, but you do have this one verse, which is thrown a lot of people off in Zechariah 12, which just says, in that day, his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives. It says, and the Mount of Olives will split from the East to West. And so half the mountain goes North, half goes South. And then many that are there flee. And it says, you will flee as in the days of Azal by the, you know, so, but here's the point. First of all, Zechariah is one of the last of the prophets. He's a post-exilic prophet. Zechariah was familiar with all of these previous statements concerning the march. In fact, when you look at Zechariah nine, it says, then the Lord will appear over them and he will march in the storm winds of the South. It's beautiful. But so when you get to Zechariah 12, well, what's it saying? So people, I think, wrongly look at this one passage and they read that in that day, his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives. And what they read is in that day, his feet will land on the Mount of Olives. It doesn't actually say that. That's all I've seen it in my mind's eye for sure. But so I think what happens is he returns arguably, maybe to Egypt, you know, he actually retraces the entirety of the Exodus. I think a good case can be made. I'm not dogmatic about this, that he does split the Red Sea again, just like Moses, that he marches up through the region of Sinai, through the deserts of the Exodus. But when he returns, now this is a little speculative. But if you think about it, when Jesus, when the power of God was released to raise his body from the dead unto immortality, there was a mighty earthquake, right? Like the ground shook. There was some type of physical power released. The rocks that shook, they weren't overwhelmed with emotion, right? There was something that shook the earth. And so you think about this, when that same power is released, when he returns and millions of people are raised from the dead, the whole earth is gonna shake. I think that's when the Mount of Olives splits. But if you think about it, they don't flee until after the mountain splits. If their savior has just returned, landed on the Mount of Olives, why are they fleeing? That's a great question. If you keep moving forward, it says, and then, so it's after they flee, it says, and then the Lord my God will come and all of his holy ones with him. So I don't think, I think the dangerous readings, Zechariah 12, and all of these statements in this rigidly chronological ordered way, as opposed to it just making a series of statements in light of the abundance of all of these other passages, I think when he returns, the mountain splits, many of those that are in Israel at the time under the oppression, occupation of the Antichrist flee, and then he comes back with them as part of this triumphal procession. I think that makes the most sense. Yeah, let me recommend, if you have not picked up that book from Sinai to Zion, and you're at all interested in this, you need to, because he's just given a micro version of it, but it lays it all out so well, and it's compelling reading. If you enjoy theology, you enjoy eschatology, you enjoy Old Testament biblical theology, you are gonna love that book. Let me play off of that real quick and ask you kind of pulling it into modern times, Joel. And I know you're probably asked this question, I'm asked this question a lot, knowing what Jesus said in the Olivet Discourse, knowing the Old Testament indicators pointing towards the end of the age. What has the last couple of years been like for you, having been a student of eschatology and now kind of seeing the global birth pangs beginning to, in my opinion, begin to accelerate? What's that been like and where do you see us if you have any opinion about that, kind of in the grand scheme of things? A lot of people are trying to figure out, okay, where are we? What does this all mean? Is this the best of times or the worst of times? Or is it kind of a combination of both? Well, I think the end times will be both. You know, the scriptures are clear, there's gonna be a great falling away, and I think we're seeing that. It's painful, but the scriptures are all so clear in Joel chapter two that in the last days I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, and it's in the context of just before the great and terrible day of the Lord. The sun goes dark, the moon's turns to blood. So it's going to be a mighty global revival. At the same time, there is a great falling away. So I'm looking forward to the revival part of it. We're seeing this in the Middle East and different places, Iran, Afghanistan. We're seeing massive growth right now in Saudi Arabia of all places, but I'm looking for something far greater than what we're seeing right now. So I'll say that now with regard to prophecy, I think we need to be careful about getting too specific, but the language that I would use is to say, when you carefully study the geopolitical landscape that the prophets describe at the end of the age, the contours of the geopolitical landscape at the end of the age, and then you look out at the world today, they're both coming into almost perfect agreement and not in a very vague in general way, but in a pretty specific way. The notion that these prophets thousands of years ago were able to describe the geopolitical landscape that we see today, that's significant. That's not a coincidence. And so I don't pretend to know all the specifics and ins and outs. If there's one thing I am confident of is that I'm going to get a lot of stuff wrong. I'll bet my right arm on that, but the general picture is clearly coming into focus. And there's a lot more that we could say about that, just in terms of like geopolitical analysis, there's also gospel signs. When we see the trends in where the gospel is going globally, I think that that's pointing to the signs are being fulfilled. This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached to all ethnos or ethnic groups before the end. So we see that. Global persecution of Christians is rising in a dramatic way, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism. And there's a lot of other things that we could talk about. There's also subjective prophecies that have been given by different prophetic individuals in the body of Christ that are pretty profound. You know, I don't pretend to know the timing, but just based on the totality of everything, I would be very, very surprised if I live out to my full life expectancy, I'm 50 right now. I would be very surprised if I didn't live to see the return of Jesus. I could be wrong, but I really feel, I feel pretty strongly about it. That's kind of a say-law moment, because sometimes you can talk theoretically about theology and doctrine, especially when it comes to the return of the Lord. And I know you and I know that as teachers, we have to be very careful about what we say. So you wouldn't just bandy that about and say that type of thing, but to hear you say that. And there's a few others that I greatly respect that I've asked similar question. And across the board, I've heard very similar things. It's like, I can't be adamant, but I feel in my bones and I suspect by what I see that I very well might see the return of the Lord in my day. That should just cause us to just really stop and ponder that reality, that we may be the generation that is going to see the transition from this age into the age to come. And what a privilege that would be, but if that's the case, everything that the Bible talks about of the approach of the end of the age and the birth pangs and the time of trouble and the geopolitical landscape tectonic place really shifting and very dramatic and very accelerated ways, it's upon us. What are the things that right now you as a Bible teacher, especially with this emphasis, knowing what you know, what are you paying attention to on a global scale? Not so much just the biblical theology of it, but on the geopolitical arena, what are the things that you're paying attention to that are kind of catching your attention? I could probably go down a list of 10 different things, but let me say one of the things when I wrote my first book, again, and I wrote it in 2003, 2004, we're coming up 18, 19 years ago, in the book by carefully just working through Ezekiel 38, 39, the Oracle of Gog, Magog. A lot of people believe this is Russia. They believe it's some preliminary different end time bad guy other than the Antichrist. No, Ezekiel's just telling the same story that all the other prophets are telling. And it's not talking about Russia, it's talking about Turkey. I don't have time to hash that all out, but I worked through it and I said, I said at the time, I said, if you just look out all political commentary at the time, said Turkey is turning to the West, they're becoming much more European, they're becoming much more moderate. American foreign policy said Turkey is the model, we want to replicate this moderate, Western friendly form of Islamic government throughout the Islamic world, this is wonderful. And I said, there's nothing in the natural right now to see Turkey becoming more radical, to become more nationalist, to become more aggressive imperialist. So, but prophecy says that. So just based on the word of God alone, not based on any hunch that I have, I said, I expect to see Turkey turn in that direction. Well, over the past 18 years, we've watched it unfold. Turkey's still a member of NATO, but they are, they've basically gone the way of Iran. I mean, they are turning to both Islamism and Turkish nationalism. I mean, we've seen them invade Iraq. They openly say, the president openly says that the present borders of Turkey are not the legitimate borders of Turkey. I mean, so this very aggressive move in Turkey, certainly watching Iran, there's pretty clear, again, prophetic evidence that some of these nations would become more aggressive and ultimately join together in a sort of coalition, a last days union. Again, watching the rise of irrational, unexplainable, anti-Semitism, hatred of the Jewish people, irrational anti-Zionism, this demonic lust to possess the promised land. But one interesting sign that I would highlight that a lot of people wouldn't think of is Isaiah 60. So Isaiah 60 is one of the most beautiful, glorious descriptions of the millennial age, arise and shine, fear light has come. It's, you know, to put yourself in the shoes of a Jew who's been waiting. Lord, you said that you're gonna come and restore the kingdom of Israel, but instead we've just had persecution for millennia. How long? And Isaiah says, it's come. The glory of the Lord will rise upon you. So it's describing this and then it describes the Gentiles bringing their wealth up to Zion to rebuild the house of God. And it's a beautiful picture, very poetic. And then all of a sudden it says, multitudes of camels will cover your land. And dramataries, yeah. You go, where are these camels coming from? They're coming from the land of modern day Saudi Arabia. And it says Qidar, Nabiath, it's naming the children of Ishmael, the children of Abraham from the region of Saudi Arabian. You go, wait a minute, Isaiah, you're trying to tell me that the day is coming, not 10, 20, 500, a multitude of worshipers. And it says, and their offerings will be acceptable on my holy altar. And so in a weird way to say, but is there a revival taking place in Saudi Arabia? Well, again, over the past now five years or so, we're connected, we've got workers in Saudi Arabia in the underground church. One of them just did a real comprehensive, now the numbers are still small. It's actually less than a thousand national Saudis have come to faith. You've got less than a thousand, but the numbers over the past couple of years are 60% growth per year. My goodness. If that's the case, then Saudi Arabia is presently the fastest growing church in the world by about three times. Wow. So little things like that. In the natural, I don't have faith for it. I don't have faith that Saudis are gonna be pouring into the kingdom, but it's happening. How did Isaiah know that 20, what is it? Almost, you know, 28, 100 years ago. Yeah. And so little things like that, they get me excited. Yeah, that'll fire you up right there. I know you've had a lot of interaction and engagement with the underground church both in Iran and even most currently Afghanistan. Our pullout in Afghanistan, our military pullout and even our diplomatic pullout that took place over a year ago now, obviously left a void. I heard at least that Afghanistan at about the time of the pullout was like the fastest growing church in the world. Iran was, Afghanistan began to surpass it. Sounds like Saudi is on the move as well. What's happening behind the scenes in Afghanistan? Can you give us a little kind of glimpse behind that? Because many people have been praying for Afghanistan. We're here little bits and pieces of it, but you probably have had much more detailed information about that. Yeah, it's been a very busy year. So for example, we have gotten out roughly 3,000 people the past year. And probably I'm gonna say at least 80% of them were Christians. So in a country where you, I don't know the exact numbers, probably there were less than 50,000 believers in the whole country. So when you're getting out thousands and that's just our operation, other people have got many other Christians out. Our count right now is there's probably about 4,000 that we have our sort of hands on in the country. And so many have left, many have fled and I don't blame them. Those with small children, et cetera. To surrounding nations, some have come as refugees to Canada, the United States, et cetera. But our folks working on the ground report that people are coming to faith and still in a pretty dramatic way. Now the Taliban are ethnically the vast majority of the Taliban are Pashtun, ethnic Pashtuns. And so very few of them over the past, a couple of decades have come to faith, very, very few. The majority of the people in Afghanistan that are believers are among them, a minority group, the Hazara. So they would look more like Genghis Khan, you're kind of Asian. But they're a persecuted minority. And so it's not surprising. Well, there's a couple of reasons. One, they're persecuted. So the gospel is for the poor, for those that are poor in spirit, for those that are desperate, those that are hurting, they tend to respond to the gospel, but also because they speak Dari, which is a dialect of Farsi. And so what's interesting about that is that many of them that are coming to faith are coming to faith because they're being evangelized by the Iranian church. The Iranian church has actually become an evangelistic. Isn't that amazing? Missionary sending church. And so, but here's what's neat is over the past year, we've actually started seeing a number of the Pashtuns coming in. Wow. And so this is- That's unheard of. Yeah, unheard of. I mean, among like Taliban members getting saved or those that were not Taliban members. But so there's something changing the church is growing. Again, because of the chaos, we don't have real careful numbers, but just based on anecdotally, our people on the ground are saying people are coming to faith. And the reason, quite frankly, is because where despair is the greatest, where people are the most desperate, the most hurting, that's where the Lord shows up in the most powerful way. I think you had a part to play in that two-part docuseries called Sheep Among Wolves that highlighted a lot of what God has been doing in the Middle East, especially in Iran. You have a curious position in that you're an American and a Bible teacher who also has deep ties and communication into what God is doing amongst the persecuted underground church in primarily persecuted environments. And now we're beginning here in America to begin to see persecution on the rise. Culture is not necessarily, well, it's adamantly now becoming separated and divergent from a Judeo-Christian worldview. So the church now in the West is beginning to experience a little bit in small detail, but a little bit of what our brothers and sisters in the Middle East have been experiencing in very intense ways. I'm curious of what you see as maybe the two or three primary lessons or things that the American church now, as we're beginning to experience it, can draw or should be paying attention to and drawing from our brothers and sisters in the Islamic world. Paying attention to because we're gonna have to make some adjustments and some shifts as culture becomes more and more hostile towards the gospel. Yeah, there's a lot of lessons. One of the things that a little story that I always tell is when I first went to go meet a bunch of the leaders of the Iranian underground church, beforehand I had all these ideas in my head. I thought I was about to go meet the John the Baptist, the hardcore, the apostles of our time, super soldiers, people that I could never live up to be like, and then I met them and they were hilarious, they were goofy, they were silly, they were fun, they were scared, they're regular people. And I go, these are the folks the Lord is using to strike terror into the heart of one of the most terrifying regimes in the world, the Iranian regime. And they're just people, they're mothers and fathers and children, they have kids. And I said, wait a minute, they're just like me. And what that means is if they can do it, then a screwball like me can do it. A regular person like me can do it because sometimes I think when we envision them as whatever it be, the Chinese underground Christians of the Iranian, we think they're something like I could never be as an excuse to, well, I'm just, and no, these challenges come upon regular people, just like you and me. And so the thing of it is when faced with tremendous challenges, we can do it too, we can do it too. Another thing that I find is that when persecution comes, some of the biggest critics are actually Christians. They're like, oh, quit whining, this isn't persecution. Like unless you're getting your head chopped off, it doesn't count. And I go, yeah, tell that to the guy who just had to move out of his house, sell his business, lose everything because of persecution, because some progressive politicians are this or that or because you didn't bake a cake because you stood to your convictions and their kids are severely depressed and maybe even suicidal because they're being bullied relentlessly at school. Tell me that's not persecution. The pain is still real. And so what's interesting is that oftentimes when persecution comes, it doesn't come, it doesn't come and say, I hate you and I wanna kill you because of your Christian. It'll say, how dare you stand for, like I'm angry at you because I found out who you voted for. Like they blame these peripheral things so that when you cry persecution and say I'm being persecuted for righteousness, they go, no, you're not. You're being persecuted because you voted for a jerk. And then you'll get Christians that will say, quit your whining. And so they, persecuting cultures, they make excuses. They don't want to admit they're doing it simply because you believe in Jesus. They find all manner of other. Yeah, that's a good perspective. Excuses and persecution is persecution. Pain is pain. It's kind of like an adult that goes, oh, you're 18, you just got your heart broken. Well, that's just puppy love. It doesn't count. Now that pain is real. It's real. When we experience the type of persecution, the preliminary early stages of persecution we are here in the West, it's still real. And we shouldn't diminish it and mock it and belittle it because it is sort of the frog in the kettle. Like it's here, it's coming. It's kind of like we're going right back to the beginning, isn't it? I mean, who did Jesus pick? He didn't pick scholars, he picked fishermen and average blue collar everyday people who had jobs. They weren't the religious scribes. In fact, when a rich young ruler approaches them, he made the standard so high that he wasn't willing to do it. But he invites a fisherman who doesn't have a whole lot to lose whose lifespan thrown off because he's encountered this rabbi, Jesus. So he takes this ragtag group of a militia guy, a zealot who wants to overthrow the government. He takes a corrupt tax agent and a couple of fishermen and he says, let's change the world. He takes some insurrection. He has got at least two insurrectionists, right? Yeah, so there you go, they're anti-government. He's got a mess on his hands. Well, here we are at the end of the age and Jesus is in the Middle East taking Iranian everyday people in Afghanistan and he'll do that here and he puts a spirit on them, gives us the ability to endure persecution and to keep our eyes focused on Jesus and the hope that Marinath a cry in our hearts and uses us to change the world if we make ourselves available. Maybe that's where the intersection of missions, eschatology and what Jesus is doing in the earth today, all kind of intersect because that's how that's how this Jesus movement began and it's how it's going to culminate at the return of the Lord and I love that. I love the idea that, because we can idealize and say, like when you told me I met these Iranian pastors in my mind, I'm thinking these are, these are John the Baptist, these are Apostle Paul's and they probably are, but they're also just real people with sense of humor and families and fears. They don't know everything and that gives me hope because here we are and you don't have to qualify in the ways that maybe you think you need to be qualified for Jesus to use you. You just have to be available and to have your heart positioned with that cry. This is Lord, you came once. I know you're coming again. Use me to prepare and to reach people before you come. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a good place for us to be, don't you think? Yeah, yeah. I was sitting in the back of the room and I was admiring this room full of just beautiful shining faced believers. They're worshiping because in Iran they can't worship and I leaned over to this other American that had been, had met them all previously and I just commented on how beautiful it is and he goes, you know what's extra beautiful about this? He said, five years ago, pretty much everyone in this room was either a complete drug addict, prostitute, suicidal or a radical Muslim. And he goes, look at them now. And that's not to say that the Lord only uses former prostitutes and drug addicts and criminals and this type of thing. The Lord will use anyone that says yes, that has a humble heart. But it is, as you said, he chooses the foolish and the weak things of this world. Me, just this former stupid pot dealer from South Boston. But he'll use anyone that says yes to him. And the goal at the end of the age is to proclaim the good news, the restoration of all things is coming, the end of this tired, wicked, broken, corrupt system. And listen, this whole system, it's groaning and it's tiresome, not just to Christians, to that 22 year old kid that's wrestling with gender confusion, that's a progressive green-haired kid from Portland or whatever, he's groaning too. He's in touch with it. Everyone's aware of the fact that, I think that, I shouldn't reference this, but it's a Moby song. Are you lost in the world like me? And it keeps saying the systems are broken. The system is broken. So when we proclaim the coming restoration, the new system that's coming, it's a message that resonates with everyone. And all's the Lord needs is weak, broken people that say yes to proclaim that good message, to snatch as many out of the fire as possible. And I think very shortly, we're about to see that last great end time revival. It's gonna be messy. It's gonna be really messy. It always is. It's gonna be glorious. I think that's a good place to just say, Maranatha. Amen. Come on, Jesus. Joel, thank you so much for being with us. Really appreciate it. I appreciate it. It's great to be on with you. God bless you and all that you're putting your hand to. Tell everybody where they can follow you at. Social media, YouTube, where do they find you? Yeah, so I've got a YouTube channel, I guess just type on YouTube, type in Joel Richardson. My website is jolestrumpet.com and I'm usually informing and playing around and mouthing off a little bit on Twitter. I think it's Joel7Richardson. There you go. Follow him everywhere, guys. All right, thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time, guys. Thank you again for joining us. Stick with us, subscribe to the podcast and we'll see you again right here on Spirit and Truth.