SID: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. My guest, some 40 years ago, was on a fast track in his career and all of a sudden God invaded his living room, flattened him to the floor and instantly downloaded in picture form the stories of the Bible as if he was there. And he said that very few of the End Time views of what’s going to happen in the last days are correct because they don’t understand the Jew and Israel, and once you do it’s simple. I protest. Why do I protest? Because Dr. Richard Booker had such a supernatural experience with God. Richard walked down the aisle as a Southern Baptist, but then got enmeshed in his career, Occidental Petroleum. You were a top executive. You were on a fast track and all of a sudden almost out of the blue he gets an insatiable hunger. Now remember, all he knows is he walked down the aisle and he believes the Gospel, but that’s on the side burner. And all of a sudden he’s hungry for God. So tell me about the day that God answered that hunger.
RICHARD: You know Sid, God is so wonderful and I didn’t have a Bible, but I was supposed to, I was invited to go to a Bible study by my business friends, so I had to go to something called a Christian bookstore and get a Bible. And I came home, and I started reading Leviticus. Doesn’t everybody?
SID: That’s enough to stop you right in the tracks.
RICHARD: But you know, the devil keeps people out of Leviticus because that’s the motherlode of the Gospel in the First Testament. But anyway, I started reading Leviticus. Then I started studying it. I’m educated. I know how to study. But then I got one of those big concordances, you know. And the Bible says if you seek God with your whole heart you’ll find him. You’re gonna run into him sooner or later. So one day in 1974, as I was studying Leviticus I had this encounter with God where it was like I was on the Emmaus road where Jesus appeared to two of his disciples.
Man 1: What’s up? What are you discussing?
Man 2: You must be the only person in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard about the things that happened there the last few days.
Man 3: What things?
Man 1 The things that happened to Jesus of Nazareth. He was a prophet. He did powerful miracles.
RICHARD: It’s like the Holy Spirit let me be a third disciple to hear what Jesus said.
Man: As it is written by Moses and all of the prophets, Moses was once told that there would be a greater prophet than him, and I am the prophet.
RICHARD: And God instantly and dramatically downloaded in a heaven second, whatever that is, the entire Bible into my core being. And we have 66 books in our Bible, so Sid, it was like 66 bombs going off inside me. I literally thought I would die. I literally hid under my desk. You know how humans do silly things.
SID: Right.
RICHARD: God can’t find me there, you know. I hid under my…
SID: Now your wife had the same background as you.
RICHARD: Absolutely.
SID: And what did she think when she saw you flat on the floor? I understand you couldn’t even walk without, except you could walk on all fours, crawling.
RICHARD: I did hide under my desk and I begged God not to show me anymore. I literally thought I would explode. The human being can’t take a whole lot of the Creator, you know. Well, but I couldn’t walk for a while. I pulled myself along on the carpet trying to get to the couch with every ounce of energy I could get and pulled myself up on the couch, rolled up there and just would lay there for hours until the weight of the Glory of God would lift. And John the Baptist said that Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Sid, my hands were on fire and they were burning. They were hot. Well I was a Baptist. I didn’t know what to do. I put, this is not supposed to happen, you know, but it happened to me. So I put my hands under the faucet thinking the water would cool my hands. It didn’t help a bit. The fire was on the inside. This changed my life dramatically, Sid, when the whole Bible, people don’t know that the Bible is a picture book and all of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, is just a picture of a person. When you get a puzzle the first thing you look at is the picture and that tells you what it’s supposed to look like.
SID: Even seeing the picture I have a hard time putting a thousand pieces together.
RICHARD: Exactly. So often as Christians we read these stories maybe in the Bible or we maybe went to Sunday school and heard little stories, but it doesn’t really connect. They don’t grasp. I didn’t grasp that the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament, Christians, it’s a picture of a person, and every part of the Hebrew Bible is a little puzzle that when you put it all together it’s a picture of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.
SID: You have spent the last 40 years after this download studying keys that most Christians don’t study. You have studied the Jewish culture, the nation Israel, their geography, their geology, their archeology. Why was this so important to study the Jew in Israel?
RICHARD: Because Sid, what we have is a Bible that’s a Middle Eastern book. We live in the western world here and we’re trying to understand the Bible as if it was a western theological seminary book. Well Jesus was and is, and always will be a Jew. He taught in his culture using Jewish idioms and figures of speech.
SID: These were idioms that you can’t take literally because they meant something different in the eastern culture than they do in the western. But what he found was there was a total understanding of the scenario and sequence of events of the End Times that was really different than what most people teach. And he also found something about the biblical feasts, and he found the time to get the most miracles. We’ll be right back.
Tags: It's Supernatural, Sid Roth