The Role of Eschatology in the Iran War: What You Are Not Hearing in the News

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The following essay is by Michael Peabody. His analysis of Iranian eschatology is spot on in my analysis. Michael’s site is outstanding on many of the issues of today. You can subscribe at the website below.


“What the West Gets Wrong About Iran”

An analysis of a theology-driven state, the martyrdom doctrine that shapes its war-making, and what to expect now that the bombs have started falling.
ReligiousLiberty.TV
Mar 14, 2026

I. The Framework the West Keeps Using
There is a template in Washington and in most Western capitals for how military pressure on a hostile state is supposed to work. You degrade capabilities. You kill commanders. You strangle the economy. You demonstrate that the cost of continued defiance exceeds any conceivable benefit. At some point, rational self-interest reasserts itself, the regime recalculates, and either a ceasefire is negotiated or the government falls. The template worked, more or less, in Libya. It worked in the Cold War arms race, where mutual assured destruction created a deterrence equilibrium built entirely on rational self-preservation. It worked in Iraq in 1991, where Saddam Hussein’s army disintegrated once it became clear that the territorial and political costs were catastrophic.


The template does not work against Iran. It has not worked for decades, through multiple rounds of sanctions, multiple rounds of proxy conflict, multiple rounds of targeted assassination, and now, as of February 28, 2026, a direct military campaign that killed the supreme leader himself. The West keeps applying the template and keeps being surprised when Iran does not behave according to it.


The reason is not that Iran is irrational. The reason is that Iran is operating from a different rationality, one built not on cost-benefit calculations but on eschatological expectation. To understand what Iran is doing and what it will do next, you have to understand what Twelver Shia Islam teaches about history and how it ends. Until you understand that, every intelligence assessment that starts from secular assumptions will be wrong in the same predictable direction: it will underestimate Iran’s willingness to absorb punishment, misread ceasefire acceptance as genuine defeat, and mistake tactical withdrawals for strategic collapse.

II. The Theology You Need to Know
Iran is a Twelver Shia state. Twelvers believe that legitimate leadership of the Muslim community belongs to the Prophet Muhammad’s bloodline through a chain of twelve infallible imams. The twelfth of these imams, born in 868 CE, went into what Shia theology calls occultation at the age of six. He did not die. He was concealed by God. He is, according to this doctrine, still alive, still present in the world, and waiting for the appointed moment to return and establish global justice. His return will be preceded by catastrophic conflict, widespread injustice, and the defeat of the forces of God’s enemies. Then he emerges, the world is set right, and history ends.


For over a millennium, this belief was largely quietist. The Hidden Imam would return when God willed it. Human beings could do little but wait. The transformation came in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini invented a doctrine called Velayat-e Faqih, rule of the jurist, which argued that qualified clerics must govern as deputies of the Hidden Imam until his return. This doctrine embedded eschatological expectation into the constitutional structure of the Iranian state. From that point, the regime did not merely believe in the Mahdi’s return. It organized itself as the instrument of that return. The Islamic Republic was designated, in Khomeini’s own framing, the Vanguard of the Mahdi, a state whose sacred mission was to pave the way for the end of history.


The IRGC has absorbed this framework entirely. A 2022 study by the Middle East Institute documented how the destruction of Israel is framed within the Guard not simply as a geopolitical objective but as a religious obligation tied directly to eschatological expectation. A leading IRGC-affiliated cleric called explicitly on Guard members to eliminate Israel as the greatest obstacle to the Mahdi’s return. This is not rhetoric for domestic consumption. It is operational doctrine, and it shapes how the IRGC makes decisions under pressure.
When the IRGC frames military conflict as preparation for the Mahdi’s return, it is not using religious language metaphorically. It is stating a terminal value. Terminal values cannot be negotiated away. They can only be accommodated or defeated. The West has spent forty years trying to negotiate away a terminal value while calling it a negotiating position.


III. The Persecution Complex as Strategic Asset
Western analysts are trained to treat persecution complexes as psychological vulnerabilities, signs of insecurity, weaknesses that can be exploited by demonstrating the futility of continued defiance. In secular political systems, they are often right. A regime that convinces itself the world is against it tends to make paranoid decisions that accelerate its own collapse.
In an eschatological framework, the persecution complex is not a weakness. It is a load-bearing theological structure. The foundational trauma of Shia Islam is the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE, where Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, was killed with a small band of followers by the vastly larger army of the Umayyad caliph. This event is not ancient history to observant Shia. It is re-enacted every year during Ashura. It is wept over. It is the emotional architecture of the faith. Karbala established, at the religion’s emotional core, a template in which the righteous are outnumbered, politically marginalized, and killed, and they are still right. Their defeat was God’s test. Their willingness to die was the proof of their faithfulness.


Khomeini imported this structure directly into revolutionary politics. Every sanction became evidence that the arrogant powers feared God’s revolution. Every assassination became a martyrdom. Every military setback became confirmation that the regime was engaged in something real enough to make the forces of evil act against it. When your enemy attacks you, in this framework, you have not been damaged. You have been validated.
This is what makes conventional coercive logic dissolve against Iran specifically. Coercion works by making the costs of continuing exceed the benefits. But you cannot make the costs of dying exceed the benefits of paradise. You cannot make the costs of persecution exceed the theological premium that persecution pays. Every bomb confirms the prophecy. Every martyr joins the coming kingdom.

IV. The Iran-Iraq War: The Doctrine in Action
The best laboratory for understanding this doctrine is the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, specifically what Iran did when it ran out of conventional military options. Saddam Hussein invaded in September 1980 expecting to find a post-revolutionary military in chaos. He was partly right. Up to 14,000 Iranian commanders and officers had been purged, imprisoned, or executed after 1979. The professional military was working with American equipment it could no longer get parts for. Saddam Hussein looked at this wreckage and concluded he had a window.
What he had not accounted for was the Basij. The Basij paramilitary, founded in direct response to the invasion, was poorly armed and included members as young as twelve and as old as seventy. They had essentially no training and no logistics. What they had was the martyrdom doctrine. By 1982, Iran had driven Iraq back to the border. A rational state would have accepted a settlement at that point and rebuilt. Khomeini refused. Iran invaded Iraq instead, under the slogan that the road to Jerusalem passes through Karbala. It was not a military strategy. It was a prophecy with troop movements attached.


What followed was industrial martyrdom. The Basij launched human wave attacks on fortified Iraqi positions while actors playing Imam Hossein galloped along the lines on white horses to prepare the fighters spiritually for death. On March 20, 1982, Khomeini formally announced that schoolboys between twelve and eighteen could join the Basij without parental permission. Scores of children were given rudimentary training and sent directly to the front. Recruitment forms were nicknamed Passports to Paradise. Children were sent into minefields to clear them with their bodies, given keys reportedly symbolizing entry to heaven if they died as martyrs. Iranian official figures acknowledge approximately 36,000 school-aged children among the war’s martyrs.


The casualty ratio tells the story. In a conventional war between professional armies, the number of wounded typically exceeds the number killed. In the Iran-Iraq War, Iran’s ratio inverted. The dead outnumbered the wounded. This was not equipment failure or tactical incompetence. It was the doctrine performing as designed: minimally trained fighters sent forward in mass to clear obstacles, dying in numbers that would have broken any secular army. The Basij absorbed approximately 155,000 deaths in direct combat over the course of the war, per the organization’s own records.


And yet none of this produced a recalculation. Iraq had Soviet equipment, French aircraft, American intelligence, Saudi financing, and chemical weapons that the West largely declined to punish. Iran had ideology and replaceable human beings. From inside the martyrdom framework, the asymmetry was not demoralizing. The righteous are always outnumbered. Hussein at Karbala was outnumbered. If you are losing by every conventional metric, you are on schedule.


The Poison Chalice, 1988. When Khomeini finally accepted the UN ceasefire, he did not announce a strategic recalibration. He announced that accepting the ceasefire was itself a form of martyrdom: “Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Unhappy am I that I still survive. Taking this decision is more deadly than drinking from a poisoned chalice. I submitted myself to Allah’s will and took this drink for His satisfaction.” His son later recalled that after accepting the ceasefire, Khomeini could no longer walk and never again spoke in public. Loss was processed as sacrifice. The defeat became, in official retrospective framing by Khamenei, a “divine gift” and a “victory as clear as the sun.” The borders had not changed. Half a million were dead. Iran had won.


That reframing is not revisionism for domestic consumption. It is the framework working as designed. The revolution survived. The Mahdi’s vanguard endured. The enemy did not destroy it. By the internal logic of Shia eschatology, that is the definition of success.

V. What the Current War Confirms
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and numerous senior IRGC commanders. From a conventional strategic perspective, decapitating the top of the command structure of a theocratic state should produce one of two outcomes: collapse, as the legitimating authority of the system is removed, or rapid negotiated capitulation by a leadership structure newly aware of its own mortality. Neither occurred.


What occurred instead was immediate martyrological reframing. Khamenei’s death was processed within hours as a sacred sacrifice. IRGC commanders vowed revenge and launched what they called the heaviest offensive operations in the history of the armed forces of the Islamic Republic. Iran’s response was pre-planned, multi-domain, and clearly designed not for victory in a conventional sense but for sustained punishment combined with regime survivability: missile and drone strikes against U.S. forward bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait; cyber operations against critical infrastructure; and proxy activation across the region.


Within ten days of Khamenei’s killing, the IRGC pressured the Assembly of Experts, through what multiple sources describe as repeated contacts and psychological and political pressure, to select Mojtaba Khamenei, the late supreme leader’s son, as his successor. The selection was announced on March 9. Analysts noted that this represented what scholars Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh called the collapse of the last egalitarian pillar of the revolution, namely that the mullahs, unlike decadent Persian shahs, do not do dynastic succession. Iran had, in its moment of maximum external pressure, reverted to monarchy. The IRGC chose Mojtaba not despite his lack of clerical credentials but because of his ties to the security apparatus. He is not a theological successor. He is a security-state successor.


The selection also carried immediate eschatological weight that Western analysis largely missed. Mojtaba’s father, mother, sister, wife, daughter, and young niece were reportedly killed in the February 28 strikes. The regime can frame him not merely as Khamenei’s heir but as a martyr’s son, a figure whose entire family was sacrificed to the cause. Within the Karbala template, this is not a political liability. It is a credential.

VI. Three Assessments: What to Expect
Based on the theological architecture described above, the historical precedent of the Iran-Iraq War, and current reporting on the post-Khamenei regime structure, the following assessments are offered in descending order of confidence.


Assessment One: Iran will not surrender in the conventional sense. The regime’s response to sustained military strikes will follow the pattern established in every previous round of pressure: martyrological reframing of losses combined with asymmetric retaliation designed to impose costs without triggering the decisive escalation that would threaten regime survival. Iran lacks symmetric conventional response options against the United States. It will continue to rely on layered retaliation: missile and drone strikes against U.S. bases, cyber operations against critical infrastructure, proxy activation in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and geopolitical alignment with China and Russia. The trilateral pact with China and Russia signed in January 2026 provides diplomatic cover, satellite intelligence, and a commitment from Russia to rebuild Iranian air defenses. This is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that Iran has correctly identified the binding constraint on U.S. operations, which analysts identify not as military capability but as domestic political will and the pressure of a depleted munitions stockpile.

Assessment Two: Regime change is unlikely in the near term, and the type that arrives may not serve Western interests. The IRGC is not a monolithic bloc, but in a moment of existential danger it becomes functionally unified around the minimum objective of regime preservation. Decapitation of senior leadership has happened before, after the June 2025 strikes on nuclear facilities, and the institution absorbed it through emergency appointments while continuing operations. The selection of Mojtaba Khamenei under IRGC pressure represents precisely the suppression-and-succession scenario that analysts at RAND identified as producing a more threatening regime, one that both stifles dissent and doubles down on resisting external pressure. As Brookings analysts noted, even if the United States and Israel continue targeting newly replaced leaders for weeks, the IRGC and its economic assets will not simply melt away, and even a future electoral process may not lead to a sustained democratic system, since such outcomes require nurturing over many years. The Iranian opposition is brave. It is not, as one New Yorker contributing writer observed, the kind of organized political infrastructure that can absorb a power vacuum and produce a functioning alternative government.

Assessment Three: The proxy network is degraded but the doctrine that generates it is not. Hezbollah has been significantly weakened. Hamas in Gaza has been operationally crippled. The Houthis have moderated their posture under the constraints of the 2025 U.S.-Houthi ceasefire. These are genuine tactical losses. But the proxy network was always less important than the doctrine that produces it. The martyrdom apparatus that the Iran-Iraq War institutionalized in the IRGC is not stored in a missile silo. It is stored in a theology and in the lived experience of men who walked away from eight years of that war still, in the words of one former CIA case manager, white hot. New proxies can be cultivated. New commanders can be appointed. The pipeline runs on ideology, and the ideology is intact. The IRGC commanders now running Iran’s war are not operating from a weakened eschatological framework. The killing of the supreme leader, framed correctly, strengthens it.

VII. The Question the West Has Not Asked
Every serious analysis of the current conflict focuses on what Iran can absorb militarily, how long U.S. munitions stocks can sustain the current strike tempo, whether the IRGC will fracture under sustained leadership decapitation, and whether economic collapse might finally produce the popular uprising that ends the Islamic Republic. These are real questions and they deserve serious answers.


The question the West has not asked seriously enough is this: what does Iran think it is doing? Not what it is doing tactically, but what it believes, at a cosmological level, is happening in history right now.

The answer, for the IRGC’s ideological core and for the new Supreme Leader it installed under pressure in wartime, is that Iran is the Mahdi’s vanguard in the final period before his return. The world is dividing, as they have always believed it would, between good and evil. The arrogant powers, America and Israel, are acting exactly as the prophecy said they would. The suffering of Iran is the suffering that precedes justice. The martyrs are accumulating in paradise. The worst of it may still be ahead, and that is not a cause for despair. It is a cause for endurance.

A regime that processes history this way cannot be coerced into surrender by the tools that produce surrender in secular states. It can be destroyed. It can be replaced, although what replaces it may be worse, or may be ungovernable. It can, under truly catastrophic conditions, be brought to accept a tactical pause that it will call a poisoned chalice and then reframe, eventually, as a victory. What it cannot be brought to do is abandon the eschatological framework, because the framework is not a policy position. It is the reason the regime exists.
Discussions of Iran’s nuclear program have focused for twenty years on centrifuge counts, enrichment levels, and inspection protocols. These are real technical questions. But as the Middle East Institute noted as far back as 2022, Mahdism remains a blind spot in Western strategic thinking. That blind spot has not narrowed. It has been institutionalized. And the bombs currently falling on Tehran are being interpreted, by the people making decisions in what remains of the Iranian government, through an eschatological lens that most Western analysts still do not have the vocabulary to read.
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Sources
1. Hungarian Conservative: War and Eschatology — How Iran’s Mahdist Ideology Shapes the U.S.-Iran Conflict
2. Times of Israel / Tim Orr: Iran’s War Against Israel — The Shia Eschatological Vision
3. Middle East Forum: Mahdism — The Apocalyptic Ideology Behind Iran’s Nuclear Program
4. Theology in Five: Twelver Shiism, the Hidden Imam, and the Revolutionary Use of Eschatology in Iran
5. Middle East Institute: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the Rising Cult of Mahdism
6. Hudson Institute: Is the End Nigh for the Islamic Republic?
7. Wikipedia: Iran-Iraq War
8. Britannica: Iran-Iraq War
9. Wikipedia: Operation Ramadan
10. JNS: Iran’s Use of Child Soldiers
11. IranWire: The Lost Youth of Iran’s Child Soldiers
12. Grokipedia: Plastic Key to Paradise
13. Efraim Karsh, The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988
14. MEMRI: Khomeini’s 1988 Poisoned Chalice Speech
15. Wikipedia: UN Security Council Resolution 598
16. Radio Farda: Khamenei Hails Ceasefire With Iraq 40 Years Ago
17. Iran International: U.S. Superiority Over Iran Is Obvious, the Endgame Is Not
18. Atlantic Council: Twenty Questions About the Iran War
19. CSIS: How Will Cyber Warfare Shape the U.S.-Israel Conflict with Iran?
20. Tandfonline: Iran’s Proxy War Paradox
21. HSToday: Iran Responds to Operation Epic Fury
22. GlobalSecurity.org: Iran Regime Change 2026
23. Wikipedia: 2026 Iranian Supreme Leader Election
24. NCRI: Who Is Mojtaba Khamenei
25. The Soufan Center: The U.S. Struggles with Exit Strategy as Iran Selects New Supreme Leader
26. Foreign Policy: Mojtaba Khamenei Signals Regime Exhaustion
27. Brookings: After the Strike — The Danger of War in Iran
28. RAND: Who or What Will Replace Iran’s Supreme Leader?
29. CNN: Who’s Running Iran Now That the Supreme Leader Is Dead?
30. CSIS: How Would Iran Respond to a U.S. Attack?
31. Al Jazeera: What Is Iran’s Military Strategy?
32. Wikipedia: 2026 Iran War
33. Council on Foreign Relations: After Khamenei — Planning for Iran’s Leadership Transition
34. AOAV: The Martyr’s Logic — Why Provoking Iran Risks a Global Spiral of Violence

Some Spiritual Thoughts on the Iran War

The following blog is from Marcos Torres, who offers an apolitical analysis of the Iran war with a special focus on how followers of Jesus can and should look at these things. I thought it was worth sharing with my audience. Used with permission:


I’m an Ordained SDA Minister. Here’s What I Think About the War in Iran.
Let me say something that will probably frustrate everyone on both sides.
I’m not cheering.
Not for the bombs. Not for the regime. Not for the dispensationalist theology driving parts of this conflict. And not for the left-wing commentators who’ve tied themselves into knots defending the Ayatollah just to score points against Trump.
I’m not cheering. And I want to explain why.

The Predictable Culture War
The moment the bombs started falling, the internet did what the internet always does.
The right lit up with celebration. Finally. Long overdue. God bless America. America First. Some quarters went further—this is prophetic. This is God’s hand. This is what had to happen.
The left responded with the usual counter-programming. And here’s where it got weird. Some radical commentators—in their desperation to oppose everything the current administration does—ended up in a bizarre rhetorical corner. Softening their language on the Iranian regime. Framing the Ayatollah as a victim of American aggression. Performing moral gymnastics to avoid saying anything that might sound like agreement with Trump.
Both sides did what they always do: used a complex geopolitical catastrophe as raw material for their pre-existing culture war.
What got lost in all of it is the one thing that’s always lost in the noise.
Nuance.

You Don’t Have to Pick a Side to Feel the Weight of This
We’ve been here before.
When the war in Gaza erupted, a similar pressure emerged. You were either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. You either condemned Hamas or you condemned the IDF. If you mourned the children killed by airstrikes, some people assumed you were defending terrorism. If you named Hamas as evil, others assumed you didn’t care about Palestinian lives.
But that was never the choice.
You don’t have to defend Hamas to mourn the death of innocents. You can hold both. You can name wickedness and still weep over the bodies.
Iran is no different.
The Ayatollah’s regime is brutal. That’s not a political talking point—it’s a documented reality. This is a government that has imprisoned, tortured, and murdered its own people for over four decades.1 A regime that has persecuted Christians within its own borders,2 executed political dissidents,3 and sponsored terrorism across the region.4 Tyrants like this often end their stories in blood and chaos. So no one should be shocked that this day came.
And yet.
None of that means I have to cheer for the bombs. None of that means I can’t mourn the civilians—ordinary Persian men, women, and children—caught in the crossfire of something they didn’t choose and couldn’t stop.
The SDA apocalyptic framework has taught me something the political binary never could: how to mourn with complexity. How to hold conflicting grief at the same time. How to name evil without losing your capacity to weep over the suffering of the people caught under it.

If This Were Just Politics, I Wouldn’t Be Writing This
Here’s the thing.
Empires go to war. That’s what they do. They always have. They always will. If every military conflict were cause for a blog post, I’d do nothing else. National security interests, oil, regime change, geopolitical chess—these are the normal mechanics of human civilization running its usual program.
If this were purely a political war, I would mourn the suffering. I would pray for the people of Iran. But I would probably not be writing this.
But this is not purely political.
And that changes everything.

The Part That Actually Alarms Me
Multiple credible reports have now surfaced—documented by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, covered by Military.com, Newsweek, The Intercept, and Baptist News Global—that service members across every branch of the military have submitted over 200 complaints about commanders framing the Iran war in explicitly apocalyptic terms.5
One non-commissioned officer reported that his commander opened a combat readiness briefing by telling the unit not to be afraid of what was happening in Iran, because it was “God’s divine plan.”6
Another complaint described a commander declaring that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”7
This isn’t fringe internet chatter. These are official complaints filed with a military watchdog that has been operating for two decades, with representatives on nearly every military installation in the country.8
And it’s not just happening at the unit level. Senior civilian officials have been framing this conflict in religious language from the beginning. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared from the Pentagon podium that Iran was “hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions.”9 Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson it would be “fine” if Israel took “essentially the entire Middle East” because the Bible promised it.10 The mixed messaging on why this war was launched—nuclear threat, regime change, retaliation for proxy violence—has been so incoherent that, as Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF observed, it opened the door to a new justification altogether: end times prophecy.11
The theological framework driving this is dispensationalism—a 19th century interpretive system popularized by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and later the Left Behind franchise. It maps ancient biblical prophecy onto modern nation-states, placing Iran (ancient Persia) as a central figure in a final cataclysm.12 Theologian and Baptist pastor Josh Olds summarized it plainly: the irony is profound. A faith centered on loving enemies and making peace has become a framework that welcomes and advocates violence. The result isn’t the advance of God’s kingdom. It’s the catastrophic damage of it in the eyes of a watching world.13
Twenty-seven members of Congress have now formally requested a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation into whether military commanders are violating constitutional protections by invoking apocalyptic theology to justify combat operations.14
This. This is what changes my calculus.

Putting on Jesus as a Costume
This is what I’m protesting.
Not empires empiring. Not military conflict. Not even the death of a brutal regime that had this coming.
What I’m protesting is this: one empire, in particular, dressing up its geopolitical ambitions in the costume of Jesus Christ.
That’s different.
Because when Jesus gets recruited for an empire’s war, the damage isn’t just political. It’s theological. It poisons the well. It makes the name of Jesus synonymous with bombs and bloodshed in the minds of millions of people who might otherwise be open to the actual gospel. It takes the Prince of Peace and turns him into a poster boy for Armageddon tourism.
This is exactly what Adventism warned about.
Not secular globalists imposing godlessness from the top. But religious populism—a movement of believers who weaponize sacred language to sanctify power. Ellen White described a time when Protestants, in their pursuit of control, would trample liberty in the name of morality. She described a church that, in its hunger for dominance, would unite with the state and in doing so “separate herself from God.” 15
We are watching that script play out in real time.
And some Adventists—who should know better—are cheering for it because at least the “secular globalists” are “getting theirs.”
That’s a partisan Adventism. And it has no prophetic authority.

So Here’s Where I Stand
Let me be unequivocal.
The Iranian regime is evil. It has oppressed the Persian people for over forty years. It has murdered, tortured, and jailed its own citizens—including women who refused to wear the hijab,16 Christians who dared to gather in Jesus’ name,17 and anyone who had the audacity to ask for freedom.18 The Bible is clear that those who live by the sword die by it. This regime’s day of reckoning was overdue.
I say this without qualification.
And.
I will not cheer for the chaos and bloodshed currently unfolding. I will not celebrate the dispensationalist theology that is fueling aspects of this conflict. I will not pretend that mourning civilian casualties is the same as endorsing the Ayatollah. In the same way I could mourn the children in Gaza killed by IDF airstrikes while naming the wickedness of Hamas—I can mourn the civilians in Iran killed by American bombs while naming the wickedness of a regime that has held its people in terror for decades.
Both things are true.
Both griefs are legitimate.
And anyone who tells you that nuance is weakness has never actually sat with the complexity of what it means to love people in a broken world.

What I Don’t Expect From Politics
I’m not waiting for politics to be the place where love and righteousness prevail.
It never has been. It never will be.
Politics—empire—does not run on love. It runs on subterfuge, leverage, espionage, force, and self-interest. I’m not surprised when I see it doing what it was designed to do. Empires empire. That’s the whole thing.
What I do protest is when Jesus gets conscripted into that machinery.
Because the kingdom of God has no terrestrial ally. It has no geopolitical home. It is not an American kingdom, not an Israeli kingdom, not a Republican or a Democratic kingdom. It is wholly other. It is the stone cut without hands that will grind every human empire into powder. (Daniel 2.)19

What I Actually Hope For
Here’s where I land.
I don’t hope politics will fix this. It won’t.
But I do have a hope. A specific one.
I hope the war ends. I hope the dying stops. And I hope that somehow, on the other side of all of this, the people of Iran find freedom. Real freedom. The kind that lets a woman pastor her church without fear of imprisonment, rape, or death at the hands of the state.20 The kind that lets a Persian Christian lift the name of Jesus openly—not the Jesus with an American flag and a rifle, but the Jesus of the New Testament, whose kingdom is not of this world, whose power is love, whose throne is a cross.
That Jesus.
The upside-down one. The one who called his followers to lose their lives to find them. The one whose kingdom will outlast every empire that has ever tried to co-opt his name.
Ellen White wrote that “the last message of mercy to be given to the world is a revelation of His character of love.” (Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 415)21
If that’s true—and I believe it is—then Adventism’s job in this moment isn’t to pick a side in the culture war. It isn’t to cheer for bombs or cry for the Ayatollah.
It’s to flood the world with a picture of a God who looks nothing like what either side is projecting.
Because the people of Iran—and honestly, the people of everywhere—desperately need to see that Jesus.

Michael Peabody on the Sabbath and Anti-Semitism

The following blog is shared by permission. I share it because I find his commentaries on religio-political issues balanced and insightful. Shared with his permission from behind a paywall.

Before I share, let me just note that I have been overwhelmed the last six months for a number of reasons, hence the lack of any blogs. Hopefully, this will be a step toward regular sharing again.



WIDOW SAYS ‘SHABBAT SHALOM’ — CANDACE OWENS CALLS IT A CONSPIRACY
As antisemitism spikes nationwide, America’s most-watched podcaster turns a Hebrew greeting into a murder theory
ReligiousLiberty.TV



Seventh-day Adventists have kept the Saturday Sabbath for nearly two centuries, endured the “Judaizer” charge from their earliest critics, and built an entire theology of religious liberty around the conviction that the day you worship is nobody else’s business. They should be paying very close attention to what is happening right now in American public life, because someone is treating the word “Shabbat” as a confession of guilt, someone spray-painted a swastika on a Seventh-day Adventist church last Saturday morning, and the two developments are not unrelated.
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The Sarcastic Greeting
There is something almost poetically grotesque about what led Candace Owens to open a recent podcast episode with a sarcastic “OK everybody, Shabbat Shalom,” replacing her theme music with “Hava Nagila.” Three days earlier, Erika Kirk had appeared on CBS and mentioned that she and her late husband Charlie had visited and admired Israel. That was apparently enough. A widow, promoting Charlie’s posthumously published book about his personal embrace of Saturday Sabbath-keeping, offered a Hebrew greeting. Owens treated it as a tell.
The conspiracy Owens has been constructing since Charlie Kirk’s assassination involves, at various points, France, Egypt, and most pointedly Israel. She has implied Israeli government involvement in the murder, claimed Egyptian aircraft had tracked Erika Kirk’s movements for years, and called the evidence in the police affidavit “fake and gay.” When Erika Kirk sat with Owens for four and a half hours, bringing phone records and legal counsel to address the claims, Owens emerged unmoved.
After the “Shabbat Shalom” episode, Blake Neff, producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, pointed out that Owens had “aggressively ridiculed” Erika Kirk for using the phrase, and noted that Charlie’s book was specifically about his love of Shabbat observance. Owens replied: “They need the world to know that Charlie loved Shabbat. We are beyond parody.” She also suggested the book was a fabrication designed to make Charlie appear more pro-Jewish than he actually was.
So in Owens’ framework, a man who kept the Sabbath, wrote a book about it, whose widow uses a Sabbath greeting while grieving, is exhibiting suspicious Jewish entanglement. The ancient Hebrew practice of Shabbat has become a red flag. A greeting becomes a tell. Faith becomes proof of a plot. That is not anti-Zionism. That is not geopolitical criticism. That is antisemitism, and it is worth being precise about that before moving on.
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A Swastika on a Sabbath-Keeping Church
On February 28, 2026, a Saturday morning, San Francisco police responded to reports of antisemitic and homophobic graffiti on California Street in Pacific Heights. They found the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church painted with swastikas and slurs, damage estimated at more than $20,000. A suspect, 51-year-old Sadat Mousa, was arrested on the scene and booked on charges including felony vandalism with a hate crime enhancement.
The target was a Seventh-day Adventist church. Not a synagogue. A Saturday-morning Christian congregation whose primary distinguishing public feature is that its members worship on the biblical Sabbath.
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The Deep Architecture
To understand why this matters for Adventists specifically, it helps to revisit history the denomination tends to footnote rather than foreground. From the movement’s earliest days, the charge of “Judaizing” was leveled at Sabbatarians. Nineteenth-century critics taunted that Saturday worship was the Jewish practice and therefore suspect. The denomination spent decades distinguishing its Sabbath theology from Jewish law, arguing that the seventh-day Sabbath predates Abraham as a creation ordinance.
Adventist scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi spent a career documenting how anti-Judaism drove the early Christian shift from Sabbath to Sunday worship. The social pressure to not look Jewish in a Roman empire hostile to Judaism reshaped Christian liturgical practice for two millennia. Sabbath-keeping was suppressed not primarily through theology but through the ambient cultural force of antisemitism.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for the present moment. Could a sufficiently intense resurgence of antisemitism generate renewed pressure on Sabbath-keeping communities? Not necessarily through Sunday laws enacted by legislatures, but through the ambient social violence of a culture that has learned to treat Jewish practice, and practices adjacent to it, as suspect?
What the Numbers Say
The data is not reassuring. A recent American Jewish Committee poll found that 41% of American Jews are avoiding publicly displaying identifiers of their faith out of fear, and 66% feel less secure than a year ago. In January 2026 alone, New York City recorded antisemitic hate crimes at a rate 182% above the prior year’s baseline. In 2025, violent antisemitic incidents included an arson attack on a governor’s mansion during a Passover celebration and a shooting outside a Washington museum that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members.
Into this environment, a podcaster with one of the nation’s largest audiences treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker. The algorithm rewards her for it. The mockery is directional: Saturday worship is suspect, the language of the Hebrew Sabbath is suspect, and the people who use it are suspect. She is not carefully distinguishing between Jewish Shabbat observance and Adventist Sabbath theology. The hostility is not that precise.
The Pattern Adventists Should See
The Adventist prophetic framework has long anticipated conditions under which Sabbath observance would become socially or legally costly. Those discussions tend to focus on Sunday law legislation, on formal legal coercion. But formal coercion is rarely how persecution begins. It begins with ambient hostility, with culture, with the slow normalization of the idea that people who worship differently are not merely wrong but dangerous.
A man primed by that ambient hostility sprayed swastikas on a Seventh-day Adventist church on a Saturday morning. A podcaster with tens of millions of listeners turned a widow’s “Shabbat Shalom” into a punchline with a conspiratorial edge. The Adventist Record in Australia noted plainly that “a threat to the Jewish faith community is a threat to our faith community.” That observation no longer needs to travel across the Pacific to find its application.
The right response is not panic. It is clarity, solidarity, and preparation.
What Adventists Should Watch For
This is not a theoretical exercise. Here is what to monitor concretely in the months ahead.
Copycat vandalism. The San Francisco incident will not be the last. Adventist churches that display Sabbath-related signage, operate visible Friday-evening or Saturday-morning programming, or are located in urban areas with elevated antisemitic incident rates should be reviewing their physical security, documenting their facilities with photographs, installing security systems and cameras, and establishing a direct contact at their local police department before something happens rather than after.
Conflation in public discourse. Watch for commentary, particularly from the conspiratorial right and the anti-Zionist left, that treats Adventist Sabbath observance as a form of Jewish sympathy deserving the same hostility. The logic is already present in the Owens framework. It does not require a large additional step to apply it more broadly to Saturday-keeping Christians.
Legislative activity around Sunday. The Heritage Foundation published a study in January 2026 specifically promoting Sunday-closing laws, a development that followed directly on the heels of Charlie Kirk’s posthumous book about Sabbath-keeping gaining a wide readership. Watch state legislatures, not just Congress, for Sunday rest proposals framed as worker protection or Christian heritage measures. These will not arrive labeled as Sabbath restrictions. They will arrive labeled as something else.
Social media targeting of Adventist content. If the cultural logic that treats “Shabbat Shalom” as a conspiracy marker continues to spread, Adventist pastors, educators, and communicators who use Sabbath language publicly online may find themselves on the receiving end of coordinated harassment. Screenshot threats. Report them to law enforcement and local conferences. Keep records.
The thread connecting Owens’ podcast to a spray-painted swastika on California Street is not difficult to follow. Ambient hostility finds its targets through cultural permission, and right now that permission is being issued from some of the largest microphones in the country. Adventists, of all communities, should recognize that pattern. They have read about it in their history books. They are watching it form in real time.
What Candace Owens is doing has a name. A grieving widow using a Hebrew phrase for a peaceful Sabbath should not have to defend it.
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Michael Peabody is an attorney and publisher of ReligiousLiberty.TV, tracking First Amendment and religious freedom cases across the United States.

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Founders’ First Freedom, PO Box 571302
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A Literal Reading of Israel and Its Enemies Misunderstands Revelation

The principle of “spiritual and worldwide” in relation to Israel can be seen throughout the book of Revelation. In Zechariah 12:10 the “inhabitants of Jerusalem” mourn over the one they have pierced. But In Revelation 1:7 it is “every eye” in the entire world that mourns over the one they pierced. What the Jerusalemites do in Zechariah the whole world does in Revelation. In Revelation 1:7 the author clearly takes a literal and local matter from Zechariah and expands it to the whole world in relation to Jesus Christ.

In Isaiah 34:9-10 the land of Edom (a small nation in the Old Testament) is said to burn forever, with smoke constantly going up. This passage refers to the local situation of one of Israel’s national enemies in the Old Testament. In Revelation 14:10-11, on the other hand, the experience of Edom is applied to everyone in the world who receives the mark of the beast, an end-time spiritual concept. Here again, the author of Revelation takes a literal and local matter related to one of the enemies of Israel and applies it in a spiritual and worldwide sense.

In Joel 3:12-13 the tiny “Valley of Jehoshaphat” outside Jerusalem is the scene of the final battle between Judah and its geographical enemies. The geographical location of the enemies in Joel is in what we call the Middle East today. In Revelation 14:14-20, on the other hand, “outside the city” clearly has to do with the enemies of God’s end-time people located all over the world (notice the six-fold repetition of “earth” in Revelation 14:14-20), rather than just a small valley outside of literal Jerusalem.

So in the book of Revelation, Israel, the neighbors of Israel and even Babylon and its river are all applied in a spiritual, world-wide sense. The key to the language is relationship with Jesus Christ. Those who are on the side of the Lamb are ranked with Israel. Those who find themselves in opposition to God are Babylon, Egypt, Edom and the Euphrates River. Just as Israel is to be understood as spiritual and world-wide, so Babylon in Revelation is also spiritual and world-wide.

The principle of spiritual and worldwide Israel (and its OT enemies) is crucial for understanding Revelation. If you read into the book of Revelation the literal and local things of the Old Testament, you will misunderstand the whole purpose and intent of the book. You will have a great deal of difficulty finding Jesus Christ in Revelation and Jesus Christ is what the whole book is supposed to be about (Rev 1:1). If a method of interpretation does not bring Jesus into clearer focus, the book of Revelation has not been rightly understood. In the book of Revelation all the other books of the Bible meet and end. In the book of Revelation, you find the Old Testament and the New Testament. You find a revelation of the gospel. Revelation makes the Old Testament come alive, because the things of the Old Testament are baptized into Jesus Christ and applied to people who are living in the last days. So, the book of Revelation can make the Old Testament come alive for God’s people today.

A Spiritual, Worldwide Israel

While I respect all godly Christians who differ with me on Revelation, I think the spiritual, worldwide nature of Israel in Revelation is easy enough to demonstrate, beginning with Rev 5:9-10. This text builds on Exodus 19:5-6, where ethnic, geographical Israel is a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Israel in Exodus was an ethnic group heading for a geographical place. But the New Israel of Revelation is the purchase of the cross, and is applied to people from every tribe, language, and nation. Rev 5:9-10 adopts the language of Old Testament Israel. But there is no ethnic or geographical limitation to the New Israel of Revelation 5.

Another example of the New Israel in Revelation is the 144,000. In Rev 7:4-8 there is a description of 144,000 individuals made up of 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. It sounds like a very ethnic group. But in the vision John never sees this group. Instead, when he looks he sees a great multitude that cannot be numbered, made up of people from every tribe, language and nation (7:9-10). This “heard” and “saw” pattern is common in Revelation (Rev 1:10-12; 5:5-6; 17:1-3; 21:9-10). What John hears described and what he sees seem very different, and yet at another level they are the same. So although he hears about 144,000 Israelites, the meaning of the image is not focused on ethnic Israel. Israel has spiritual, worldwide characteristics in Revelation. This has huge implications for the interpretation of much of the symbolism in the book.

In Revelation, not only Israel is seen in spiritual and worldwide terms, but the same is true of Israel’s enemies, such as Babylon and the beasts. Let’s look at a specific geographical term in Revelation 16:12: “The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the east.” If you take the language of Revelation literally, the Euphrates River must mean the Euphrates River, a literal, geographical spot in the Middle East (in modern day Iraq). But John himself explains what the Euphrates River is all about. Revelation 16:12 is part of the sixth plague. In Rev 17:1 he elaborates on the sixth plague when he describes a prostitute called Babylon sitting on “many waters” (the Euphrates River as described in Jer 51:13). The Euphrates River passed right through ancient Babylon. So the angel who comes to John in Revelation 17 is the sixth bowl angel. He has come to explain something about the Euphrates River. That something is found in Revelation 17:15.

“Then the angel said to me, ‘The waters you saw, where the prostitute sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations and languages.’” The waters John saw (in Rev 17:1) represented the Euphrates River. And what does the Euphrates River represent in Revelation? In verse 15 the angel tells us exactly. They are “peoples, multitudes, nations and languages.” The Euphrates River is a symbol of many nations– the political, secular, and economic powers of this world. In the Old Testament, the Euphrates River was a literal and local river but in the book of Revelation it is a symbol of world-wide powers in support of end-time Babylon. So not only Israel is seen in spiritual, worldwide terms, so are the enemies of Israel, represented as Babylon, the Euphrates River, Sodom, and Egypt. This is crucial for the interpretation of such symbols within Revelation.

The Church as a New Israel

But in what sense can the church be called Israel? Is it ethnic, geographical, or relational? In ethnic terms, Israel started out as a birth family with twelve sons physically descended from Jacob. But “Israel” as a name was not ethnic to begin with, it was the spiritual name given to Jacob after his wrestling match with the angel (Gen 32:24-30). The sons of Jacob/Israel first became a race, and then a nation. So should the church be called Israel in an ethnic sense? No. First of all, Israel as a name is a spiritual designation (Hebrew: yisra’el– “prince with God” or “one who strives with God” or simply “God strives”) rather than just a family name or the name of a country. From the beginning it applied to a spiritual victory in relation to God.

Revelation 5:9-10 applies the national language of kings and priests (Exod 19:5-6) to the New Testament people of God. It tells us that on the cross Jesus purchased His followers from every tribe, people, language, and nation and made them to be a kingdom of priests. So in Revelation the language of Israel is applied to all the people of the earth who accept Jesus Christ. Whoever is in relationship with Jesus belongs to Israel because Jesus Himself is the new Israel. When the language of Revelation 7:4-8, therefore, sounds as if the 144,000 are exclusively of the ethnic tribes of Israel, we need to remember that the things of Israel have been expanded in a spiritual way through relationship with Jesus Christ.

Jesus Himself is the new Israel, He has re-lived the experience of Israel during His earthly sojourn. Anyone who is in relationship with Jesus, therefore, is adopted into the family of the new Jacob. It doesn’t matter if you are German, African, Australian, Indian, or Chinese–it does not matter where you are from or what your ethnic background is–if you are in relationship with Jesus Christ, you are part of the family of Israel. So when Revelation uses the language and history of ancient Israel, we should not think in ethnic terms. When it comes to “Israel,” it is no longer who you are descended from but who you are related to that counts.

Old Testament Israel was also geographically oriented. The family/nation was attached to a particular place. They had borders–borders that would change from time to time–but were reasonably identifiable. Whenever individual Israelites moved away from that national territory, they would seize every opportunity to travel back home, particularly to Jerusalem. Should the church be thought of as Israel in geographical terms? The answer is also no. Jesus, the new Israel, is located in heavenly places (Rev 5:6-14; 7:15-17). There is no place on earth that is closer to Him than any other. No matter where you live you have equal access to Him through the Holy Spirit. To speak of the church in terms of Israel, then, is based on its relation to Jesus Christ. So while Revelation uses Old Testament language about Israel and its neighbors, the significance is neither ethnic nor geographical. Babylon, the Euphrates River, Jezebel, David, Egypt and Sodom are not to be understood in the old ethnic or geographical sense. They have to do with Jesus, the church, and the challenges the church faces in the course of Christian history.

The book of Revelation uses the geographical language of the Old Testament but the meaning of places and groups is different. Physical things about Israel and its neighbors are applied in a spiritual and world-wide sense. The new Israel, on the other hand, is not located in any one particular place or made up of any one particular people. Anyone in any place who is related to Jesus Christ can become a part of that new Israel. If the above is true, it has powerful implications for the interpretation of Revelation. An interpreter who misses this point will have as much difficulty understanding the book as will one who never heard of the Old Testament. Many sincere Christians do not read Revelation in this way. They believe that Revelation is not written to Christians, it is written to ethnic Jews living at the end of time. It really has nothing to do with the church, even though the beginning (1:11,19) and the end (22:16) seem to say that it does. We will look at evidence in Revelation that supports what I have been saying about New Testament Israel.

Israel and the Church in Revelation

This is the second in a series on Jesus Christ in the book of Revelation.

Just as Christ fulfilled the history of Israel in His own experience, so in Revelation the experience of the church is also modeled on that history. When the New Testament talks about the church, it often does so in the language of Israel. In 1 Peter 2:4-10, the members of the church are living stones built up into a spiritual temple. Peter then quotes texts in Hosea that applied to OT Israel and applies them to the church, including Gentiles in this new Israel. In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul likens baptism into Christ as a new Exodus through a new Red Sea. The experience of the church is modeled on that of OT Israel.

So when Revelation introduces the 144,000, 12,000 come from each of the twelve tribes of Israel (On the 144,000 as applying to the church rather than end-time literal Jews see Rev 7:4-8– Excursis on the 144,000). It is talking about the church as twelve spiritual tribes descended from the witness of the twelve apostles (see also Matt 19:27-28). The letters to the seven churches (chapters two and three) contain many references to the people of God in the OT. They will have access to the tree of life (Rev 2:7; Gen 2:17), they will receive the hidden manna (Rev 2:17; Exod 16:33), and they have among them Balaam (Rev 2:14; Num 22-24) and Jezebel (Rev 2:20; 1 Kings 18-21). The church, in the book of Revelation and throughout the New Testament, is modeled on the experience of Old Testament Israel.

So the church really has two models for its behavior. On the one hand, it is modeled on the experience of Old Testament Israel. In the book of Revelation the church is dealing with Sodom, Egypt, and Babylon (Rev 11:8) just as Old Testament Israel did. The experience of the church is described in the language of the past, the language of the Old Testament. But we have already seen that Jesus went through all the experiences of Old Testament Israel. So the church also models on Jesus Christ. “Where I am, there also will my servant be” (John 12:26). Jesus’ life, death and resurrection become models for the life, experience, and behavior of the church. In the book of Revelation, you can see it illustrated in some fascinating ways– the church is pursued into the wilderness (12:6,14), is put to death (6:9-10), endures suffering (13:9-10; 12:14), is made up of kings and priests (1:5-6; 5:9-10), serves 1260 days clothed in sackcloth (11:3– Jesus ministry was 3 1/2 years long), is slain and mocked (11:7-10), but is also resurrected and ascends to heaven (11:11-12). So in the book of Revelation, the church is described in terms of both Jesus and Israel.

Finding Christ in the Book of Revelation

From a New Testament perspective, all prophecy is Christ-centered. In other words, if one’s interpretation of prophecy does not deliver a clearer picture of Jesus, that prophecy has probably not been truly understood. If the interpreter is not careful, he or she might get the impression that the beasts, the vultures, the darkness, the earthquakes, and the hailstones are what the book of Revelation is all about. But they are more like the form in which the central message of the book is given. The true centerpiece of the book of Revelation is not war or catastrophe, it is Jesus Christ and him crucified. His presence permeates the book even when He is not named. Almost every chapter has a reference to Him in one way or another. Besides the direct use of His name, He is also observed in symbols like Son of Man (1:13), Lamb (5:6, and the male child of the woman (12;5). In addition to Christ, there are also references to churches and the cross (for example, Rev 1:5-6,11; 5:6; 11:11). To read this book without gaining a clearer picture of Jesus is to miss the key point.

In the book of Revelation, the symbols of the Old Testament are transformed because of what Christ has done. Revelation is built on the prior revelations in the Old Testament (also called the Hebrew Bible) and its major themes. But because of Jesus’ earthly life, His death and resurrection, and His ministry in the heavenly sanctuary, these Old Testament themes find fresh and creative meaning. Since the book of Revelation is a New Testament book, it picks up on the New Testament’s understanding of Old Testament themes in the light of the Christ event. While it is full of Old Testament symbolism, Revelation is a Christian book designed to teach us something about Jesus, life in the church, and the meaning of the cross.

This general picture (Revelation is a Christian book) is confirmed by an introductory statement in plain language near the beginning of the book, Revelation 1:5-6. There we are addressed with a minimum of symbolism, in language that cannot be misunderstood, as if John wanted to establish without question, right at the beginning, just what this book is about. It is about Jesus Christ, the “faithful martyr” (cross), “the firstborn from the dead” (resurrection), and the “ruler of the kings of the earth” (His ministry in heaven). No matter how strange the language of the book may seem, therefore, it is a deeply spiritual book, it unveils Jesus Christ and calls forth mighty songs of worship and praise. Jesus Christ is the center and substance of each part of the book, even the seals and the trumpets. He transforms the symbols and ideas the vision draws from the Old Testament. Truly in the book of Revelation “all the books of the Bible meet and end” (Ellen G. White, Acts of the Apostles, 585).

There is a basic insight that we need to keep in mind here. Throughout the New Testament, Christ is seen as the one who fulfilled the whole experience of God’s Old Testament people. The author of Revelation is constantly pointing to the New Testament Christ, but he is using Old Testament language to do it. God meets people where they are. John, as he is writing Revelation, sees the Christ of the New Testament in the Old. This leads to amazing depth when you dig behind the surface of the text, discover the Old Testament allusions, and see how the gospel transforms the Old Testament in the light of the doing and dying of Christ. For detailed study on how Christ fulfills the life and experience of God’s Old Testament people, see my book Meet God Again for the First Time, published by Review and Herald, 2003.

What I Think I Know About Rev 17: 8) The ten horns of Revelation 17 are distinct in meaning from the seven heads of the beast.

In Revelation 16 and 17 one encounters the kings of the east (16:12), the kings of the whole inhabited world (16:14), the kings of the earth (17:2), the seven kings (17:10), and now the ten kings (17:12)! We have seen that the kings of the whole inhabited world and the kings of the earth both represent the secular political alliance of the end-time. As such, they are to be equated with the Euphrates River and with the beast of Revelation itself in its final phase. We have seen that the kings of the east (Rev 16:12) are the end-time equivalent of Cyrus the Persian and his allies who conquered Babylon by drying up the Euphrates River. The kings of the east are represented by the Lamb and His called, chosen and faithful followers in Revelation 17:14. This leaves two groupings of kings unaccounted for, the seven heads of the beast, which are seven kings (Rev 17:9) and the ten horns of the beast, which are explained in 17:12-14. Both the seven heads and the seven horns are attached to the beast in the initial vision (Rev 17:3). What relationship do the seven kings and the ten kings have with each other, if any?

We have noticed already that the seven kings (the seven heads of the beast) are consecutive. In the explanation (17:7-18) of the vision (17:3-6), John is told that five are fallen, one is now, and one is yet to come. So while the beast is pictured with seven heads, the heads are not contemporaneous, they are consecutive. As in Revelation 13:14, when one of the beast’s heads is wounded to death (Rev 13:3), the whole beast dies and is then resurrected with a new head (Rev 13:14). So the seven heads (kings) represent seven consecutive phases of the beast.

In contrast, the ten horns, which are also pictured on the beast (17:3), are ten kings (Rev 17:12). As one pictures the beast, with its seven heads and ten horns, one might get the impression that the ten horns are scattered fairly evenly across the ten heads. But whoever they are, they are not an entity that existed in John’s day. They do not, in reality, have any connection with the seven heads except that all seventeen kings have some relation to the beast. But the seven and the ten are not contemporaneous with each other. The ten kings do not come into play on the world scene until the seventh head has passed off the scene. They are an end-time group without a pedigree or back story. Rather than being consecutive, they come to power together (17:12), they have authority together and take actions together (Rev 17:13-14), and they go out together (Rev 17:12, 14, 17). They receive their dominion along with the beast (17:12) in the last period of earth’s history, the time of the “eighth” (Rev 17:11), earth’s final crisis. It is not until the beast rises in support of Babylon during the final crisis, that they come into play.

Conclusion to the Whole Series
Revelation 17 is one of the most difficult passages in the whole Bible. For many years it made little sense to me. Little by little, some things began to fall into place and in this essay I have attempted share those things I think I have come to know about the chapter. There are many aspects of the chapter that are still a puzzle to me. I am hoping that, working together, we might be able to expand the elements of the chapter that I think I know.


What I Think I Know About Rev 17: 7) While Daniel 7 plays a strong role in the background of Revelation 17, the major Old Testament background is the fall of Babylon motif.

The fall of Babylon motif is signaled by Revelation 16:12 and 17:1, as noted earlier. The mention of the Euphrates River (Rev 16:12) and the “many waters” (Rev 17:1) are clear allusions to ancient Babylon and its fall to the armies of Cyrus, King of Persia. To understand this relationship, it is helpful to visit the fall of Babylon texts in Jeremiah and Isaiah. A good beginning point is Jeremiah 50:33-34 (NIV): “This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘The people of Israel are oppressed, and the people of Judah as well. All their captors hold them fast, refusing to let them go. Yet their Redeemer is strong; the LORD Almighty is his name. He will vigorously defend their cause so that he may bring rest to their land, but unrest to those who live in Babylon.’” This text makes it clear that Babylon’s fall was not an accident. It was part of the direct purpose of God on account of Babylon’s oppression of God’s people.

God continues His indictment of the Babylonians in Jeremiah 50:35-36: “’A sword against the Babylonians!’ declares the LORD—‘against those who live in Babylon and against her officials and wise men! A sword against her false prophets! They will become fools. A sword against her warriors! They will be filled with terror.’” Yahweh’s attack against the Babylonians specifically targets Babylon’s officials, her wise men, her false prophets and her warriors. This is a listing of the people who made Babylon strong; her administrators, her thinkers, her religious leaders and her military personnel.

The prophecy continues in verse 37: “A sword against her horses and chariots and all the foreigners in her ranks! They will become women. A sword against her treasures! They will be plundered.” The previous verses talk about officials, wise men and warriors. Now this verse talks about horses and chariots, mercenary troops and treasures. Again this is a listing of the resources that make Babylon strong! But there is one more resource that has not yet been listed (Jer 50:38 [NIV]): “A drought on her waters! They will dry up. For it is a land of idols, idols that will go mad with terror.” What are the waters being dried up here? The waters of Babylon, the Euphrates River!
You see, the Euphrates River was part of the defenses of ancient Babylon. It provided a moat around the city that made an attack against the walls almost impossible to carry out. But the Euphrates River was even more than this in Jer 50:38. It had become a symbol of all the resources that supported ancient Babylon, including the warriors and officials and treasures that made Babylon strong. When Revelation 17:15 interprets the Euphrates River as a symbol of the civil and secular powers of this world in support of end-time Babylon, it is using the Euphrates River in a way consistent with its usage in the Old Testament. The drying up of the Euphrates symbolizes the loss of Babylon’s strength to defend herself. This theme is repeated in Jeremiah 51:36-37 and Isaiah 44:24-28, with the inclusion of Cyrus as a key player in the drama of drying up the Euphrates (Isa 45:1-4).

With this in mind, let’s summarize the fall of Babylon, as narrated in the Old Testament, in a sequence of five events. Cyrus, king of Persia (a “king from the east”—Rev 16:12), dried up the literal Euphrates River, conquered the city of Babylon, permitted Israel to go free, and arranged for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. This five-part narrative clearly sets the foundation for the last portion of the Book of Revelation (chapter 15-22). In the Book of Revelation an end-time Cyrus (the “kings from the rising of the sun”—Rev 16:12), dries up the end-time Euphrates River (Rev 16:12, cf. 17:15), delivers end-time Israel (Rev 18:20 – 19:1-5), leading to a New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22). In other words, the fundamental narrative substructure of the Revelation 16-22 is grounded in the Old Testament story of Cyrus and Babylon’s fall. The conquest of Cyrus is, so to speak, a subtext for everything that happens in Revelation 16-22.