With a lifelong engagement in Adventist faith and tradition, I could not resist sharing this insightful analysis of recent developments by my friend and colleague Michael Peabody. Things are moving fast in today’s world.
I encourage you to become a subscriber to Peabody’s blog at ReligiousLiberty.tv. If you would like to write him, his mailing address is at the bottom of this essay.
The President Who Told the Pope to Shut Up (And the King Who Tried It 500 Years Ago)
Henry VIII wanted a church that would bless his decisions. Trump appears to want the same arrangement, without the bureaucratic paperwork. Pope Leo XIV’s response was unambiguous: “I have no fear of the Trump administration.”  Donald Trump issued a 334-word broadside on Truth Social attacking Pope Leo XIV as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” claimed credit for the pope’s election, and posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ.  That last part he eventually deleted, but without apology.
JD Vance, a Catholic convert, was dispatched to Fox News to manage the fallout. His answer was remarkable for its candor: “In some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality… and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”  What Vance was really doing was drawing a jurisdictional line between the spiritual and the temporal, with Washington on top. It is a very old argument, and it has a very old precedent. Henry VIII made precisely this case in 1534 when Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring the English Crown the “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” Henry had a matrimonial dispute Rome would not accommodate, and his solution was institutional: if the pope won’t cooperate, rewrite the chain of command.
The parallels are not perfect, but they are instructive. Henry did not destroy Christian faith in England; he nationalized it. He kept the liturgy, the bishops, the vestments. What he eliminated was the one thing he could not control: an external spiritual authority with the standing to say no. Trump has no Act of Supremacy, and the Catholic Church is not subject to American statute. But the impulse is identical. The pope drew Trump’s anger by speaking about the war in the Middle East and the treatment of immigrants. Vance’s argument that these fall outside the Vatican’s proper domain collapses on inspection: by any reasonable definition, they are precisely matters of morality. 
This is where Trump’s instincts reveal a fundamental misreading of what the separation of church and state was designed to do. The Founders of the United States had watched European history closely enough to know that state entanglement with religion produced persecution, coercion, and the weaponization of faith for political ends. The wall Jefferson described in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists was erected precisely so that no president could tell a religious body what subjects were and were not permissible topics for moral instruction. Trump has inverted the principle entirely, treating the Vatican’s prophetic voice as an intrusion into his jurisdiction rather than recognizing that his jurisdiction ends where conscience begins.
To be precise: the United States government cannot silence the pope, and it cannot silence any other religious leader. The First Amendment remains intact, and Leo XIV is an independent sovereign head of state beyond any American legal reach. But the attempt to delegitimize religious moral authority, to draw a government-issued map of what faith may and may not address, is its own kind of pressure. Normalized over time, it shapes what religious leaders feel free to say, what congregations expect to hear, and what churches are willing to risk. The danger is not a single executive order. It is the gradual redefinition of religious liberty from a right that protects prophetic speech into a privilege that requires political permission.
Many Protestant evangelicals have cheered this confrontation from the sidelines, pleased to see a pope put in his place by a president they regard as their champion. That comfort is badly misplaced. The principle Vance articulated does not stop at the Tiber. If the state claims authority to define which religious pronouncements count as legitimate “matters of morality” and which constitute improper interference in public policy, every church is subject to that same standard. The Southern Baptist pastor who preaches on immigration, the Pentecostal bishop who speaks to criminal justice, the evangelical college that declines to comply with federal mandates on grounds of conscience: all of them are vulnerable to the same logic Vance just supplied to Washington.
Henry VIII’s Protestant heirs learned this slowly and painfully. The Church of England became a state instrument not because England abandoned Christianity, but because it handed the Crown a veto over Christian witness. Nonconformists, Baptists, and Quakers spent the next two centuries paying the price for that arrangement in fines, imprisonment, and exile. Five centuries ago, Thomas More went to the scaffold rather than sign a loyalty oath to a king who had decided he outranked the pope. The question now is a quieter one, but not entirely different: who holds the final word on what belongs to Caesar, and what does not? Protestants who think that question only concerns Catholics have not read enough history.
This article presented with appreciation to Michael Peabody, who provides amazing insight into current events.
Another essay from Michael Peabody, balanced the political perspective in his last essay. I find his work very relevant and balanced. I share for the benefit of readers who value my opinion.
The Art of the Ultimatum: Trump, Iran, and the Importance of Being Presidential ReligiousLiberty.TV
Apr 7
This essay does not exist to defend what is happening in Iran. The human cost is staggering, the legal questions are serious, and anyone who writes about strategy from the safety of a desk owes at least that admission before proceeding. What follows is an attempt to understand the strategic logic at work and to acknowledge honestly that no one yet knows whether it will succeed.
With that said: the foreign policy establishment’s instinct to frame Trump’s approach as chaos and nothing more reflects a failure of historical imagination. Henry Kissinger, who understood power more rigorously than perhaps any American statesman of the twentieth century, helped develop what became known as the madman theory of diplomacy. The strategy involved a leader pushing so many chips into the pot that the other side would think he might be crazy and might really go much further.  The premise was that a rational actor making threats is less credible than one who seems ungoverned by ordinary self-interest. The appearance of irrationality makes otherwise non-credible threats seem credible, since threats by a rational leader to escalate a dispute may seem suicidal and thus easily dismissible by adversaries.  This was not fringe theorizing. It was Kissinger’s Harvard seminar. It shaped American foreign policy during some of its most consequential decades.
Whether Trump is consciously running this playbook or arriving at similar territory by instinct is a question worth leaving open. The outcome, so far, bears some resemblance to the theory in action. Since protests subsided in early 2026, Trump has used American military deployments to add leverage to his efforts to compel the beleaguered Iranian regime to agree to concessions ending the broad range of strategic threats it poses.  Each deployment was a bargaining chip. Each deadline extended and then hardened was another. By late March, Trump was telling reporters that Iran had agreed to never pursue a nuclear weapon and to forgo uranium enrichment, demands that had gone unmet for decades of quieter diplomacy.  Compare this with what the Obama administration achieved through the approach it considered more measured and responsible. Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated the 2015 JCPOA across multiple countries and years, with Kerry and his Iranian counterpart meeting on eighteen different dates, sometimes more than once per day, across eleven different cities.  The deal produced real constraints. It also produced, by its critics’ accounting, something more troubling: more than $115 billion in sanctions relief to the Iranian regime, cash the mullahs used to develop their nuclear program, fund their military, and finance their international terrorist network.  The agreement contained sunset clauses, meaning its restrictions were always temporary. Critics argued that once the JCPOA expired, Iran would be able to sprint to develop a nuclear weapon, meaning the agreement was not a lasting solution but simply kicked the can down the road.  Iran was, by early 2024, assessed to have enough highly enriched uranium for multiple weapons.
Trump’s approach has been built on a different premise: that Iran responds to existential pressure and nothing else. The evidence from the current moment supports this at least partially. By late March 2026, Iran’s leadership was described as paralyzed, with severely disrupted decision-making and internal power struggles fed by damaged communications infrastructure.  That is not the posture of a regime negotiating from a position of strength. It is the posture of an institution fighting for survival.
But here is where the war game assumptions most Western analysts use break down entirely, and where the comparison to past crises becomes inadequate. The regime in Tehran has never been primarily a geopolitical actor operating within a cost-benefit framework that resembles anything the State Department models. The Iranian regime considers their nation chosen by Allah to prepare the world for the coming of their messiah, the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, who will establish justice in the world. They believe that catastrophic world chaos and the defeat of their enemies, especially Israel, are prerequisites for this event.  Some factions within Iran’s clerical leadership believe the Mahdi’s return will be hastened by global destruction and war, meaning that if Iran’s leaders believe nuclear war would hasten the return of this prophesied figure, they would actually be motivated to start such a war regardless of the consequences.  This is a variable that no war game adequately accounts for, because no war game is designed to model actors who interpret national annihilation as a possible precondition for divine fulfillment. Western policymakers often rely on a rationalist model of deterrence, in which mutual vulnerability ensures restraint, but that model presumes survival is the highest good. In regimes where martyrdom and apocalyptic expectation are interwoven with state ideology, that assumption becomes fragile.  Iran has not been afraid to use suicidal techniques before. The Iran-Iraq war consumed a generation of Iranian youth sent to the front in human waves, with children given plastic keys said to unlock the gates of paradise. As the Iran-Iraq war demonstrated, if this struggle results in mass martyrdom, this is thought only to hasten the coming of the Imam Mahdi. 
This theological framework is also why the human shield strategy carries a logic beyond simple military calculation. Iranian officials called on all young people, athletes, artists, students, and university students and their professors to form human chains around power plants as Trump’s deadline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz drew closer.  The regime understands, with precision, that the United States values Iranian civilian lives more than the Iranian government does. That asymmetry is a weapon.
To be presidential in this environment cannot mean performing the grammar of presidential behavior for audiences who will never be satisfied. It means perceiving clearly what kind of adversary one is actually facing, what its internal logic is, and what it will and will not respond to. The JCPOA’s most fundamental problem was that it assumed a negotiating partner operating within a recognizable framework of national interest. The assumption may have been wrong from the start.
Whether Trump’s approach will ultimately succeed remains genuinely unknown. If Iran doesn’t budge, the worst outcome for Washington would be a symbolic or limited strike, a disadvantageous deal dressed as victory, something that would torpedo American credibility and embolden the regime like never before.  And the outcome of that collision has not yet been written.
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. ________________________________________ 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
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.
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. ________________________________________
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. ________________________________________ 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. ________________________________________ The remainder of this analysis is available to ReligiousLiberty.TV subscribers. Given the sensitivity of what follows, including the historical and prophetic implications for Sabbath-keeping communities, we’ve placed this content behind our subscriber wall. If this reporting matters to you, please consider joining the readers who support independent religious liberty journalism. ________________________________________ 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. ________________________________________ Michael Peabody is an attorney and publisher of ReligiousLiberty.TV, tracking First Amendment and religious freedom cases across the United States.
What can we learn from Scripture about how to treat those who do not meet the ideal (which includes every one of us at one time or another)? It is critical to begin by acknowledging that LGBT+ people (along with the rest of humanity, of course) bear the image of God (Gen 1:26-27. While the image of God may be marred in all of us, it is not fully eradicated by sin. To disrespect the image of God in anyone is to disrespect the One who created and sustains us all. But, more than that, LGBT+ people are “brothers (sisters) for whom Christ died” (Rom 14:15; 1 Cor 8:11). When we disrespect anyone for whom Christ died, we disrespect the cross, and the high value God placed upon the human race there. We also look to the example of Jesus Christ, who in His earthly life treated sinners of all sorts with dignity and respect, including tax collectors, whose very profession was offensive to followers of God at the time (Matt 9:10-12; Luke 15:1-2; 19:1-10). Jesus refused to look down on any sinner or condemn them (Luke 7:36-50), but invited them to re-orient their lives in relation to God’s ideals (John 8:11).
To know someone is to love them. When we take the time to know and love LGBT+ people, they are no longer abstractions, they are human beings who want to be understood, respected, treated fairly, and loved like anyone else. LGBT+ people have been disproportionately affected by stigma, discrimination, and abuse. The church and its institutions, often motivated by fidelity to Scripture, have nevertheless caused significant harm to LGBT+ individuals. So, any outreach to them must begin with repentance and heartfelt confession, followed by careful listening to their life stories and their struggles. It is from a context of love and understanding, acknowledging the brokenness we have in common, that we earn the right to invite them to consider the advantages in a life of sexual purity and self-control (1 Thess 4:4-7; Rom 12:2). “Our neighbor is everyone who is wounded and bruised by the adversary. Our neighbor is everyone who is the property of God.” Desire of Ages, 503.
I apologize for a long gap between postings in this series on What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? It has been a very challenging couple of months and I am writing these from scratch as we go along. Hopefully from now one I will be able to post a new segment each week until the series is complete.
What impact did Jesus’ teaching and example have on the church? A whole lot, right from the beginning. When reading the New Testament, it is surprising how many women were in leadership from the first. Paul mentions a co-worker named Apphia in the second verse of Philemon. Nympha was the head of one of the churches in Colossia (Col 4:15). Priscilla is not only part of an evangelistic/teaching team (Priscilla and Aquila), she is usually mentioned first before her husband, which in Greek would suggest she was the leader or primary teacher. Phoebe, a deacon (the normal term for that church office, she is not called a “deaconess”), is the one delegated by Paul to deliver and explain his epic letter to the Romans (Rom 16:1). The same letter makes mention of Junia, a female name, who was “renowned among the apostles” (Rom 16:7), so a major figure in the church, whether or not Paul is saying she is an apostle herself (somewhat ambiguous in the Greek—episȇmoi en tois apostolois). Lydia became the leader of the house church in Philippi (Acts 16:40). Euodia and Syntyche are described as “fellow strugglers” (Greek: sunȇblȇsan) with Paul in the preaching of the gospel. One does not have to read far into the attitudes and practices of the Greco-Roman world to realize that this is a dramatic shift at the time.
But the impact of Jesus’ teachings and practice was not limited to the treatment of women. Early Christians would collect and adopt exposed infants, raising them in their own homes. During the time of persecution from the Empire (100 to early 300s AD) this was the only way they could show the value that God places on each person, including unwanted babies. But when Christianity became the religion of the Empire, many of the teachings of Jesus became institutionalized by the Christian emperors.
Emperor Constantine the Great (co-ruler from 306-324 AD, sole ruler from 324-337) began to favor Christianity in 312-313. When He was in a position to do so, he followed the implications of Jesus’ teaching by outlawing the branding of slaves and crucifixion. He also encouraged the establishment of orphanages to help care for abandoned children. Constantine’s son Constantius (337-361 AD) ordered the segregation male and female prisoners, ending a practice subject to great abuse of women. Valentinian (364-375), at last, abolished infanticide as an acceptable practice in the Empire. That decree would later on be re-affirmed by Justinian the Great (527-565). While abortion was never practiced by the early church and was condemned by the church fathers Athenagoras (circa 133-190) and Tertullian (circa 155-220), it was not abolished by the Christian emperors until the time of Justinian.
In spite of the influence of Jesus in many aspects of the Empire, another practice that the Christian emperors did not give up for a long time was the cruel sports in the arena, where people fought to the death for the entertainment of the crowds. Then on January 1, 404 AD, the gladiatorial games came screeching to a halt. A Christian monk named Telemachus was visiting Rome and got swept into the Colosseum by the crowd for a gladiatorial spectacle in the presence of the Emperor Honorius (395-423). When he realized the gladiators were fighting to the death, the small man ran out into the arena and attempted to separate the gladiators and convince them to stop fighting. The crowd began to hiss at this interference, so one of the gladiators ran him through with a sword. The audience gazed at the scene in horror and began to leave the arena. This turn in popular sentiment enabled Honorius to abolish the games from that day forward. But it was a single man, inspired by Jesus, who played the key role in ending these cruel spectacles. Would that have happened if Jesus had not been born?
The cross is also the New Testament’s final answer to the problem of suffering we began to address in the previous chapter. The cross is the most powerful response to the question, “How can I believe in God after September 11? How can I believe in a God who allows thousands of innocent people to suffer when He could have done something to stop it? If God exists and He is good, why doesn’t He do something at times like that?”
These questions are directly related to what happened to Jesus on the cross. As Jesus was dying on the cross, His greatest suffering had little to do with physical pain from the spikes through His hands and feet, the thorns piercing his forehead, or the torturous effort to breathe enforced by crucifixion. His greatest suffering arose from the apparent absence of God in the midst of His suffering.
Jesus knows from experience what it is like to suffer undeserved suffering and pain. He did not deserve to be whipped, beaten, slapped and spit upon. He did nothing to deserve a sentence of death, a hateful mob, or the torture of crucifixion. To the victims of September 11 the cross says: “God knows, He understands, He has tasted what it is like to suffer without having caused it in some way.”
Like the book of Job, the cross offers up no definitive answer to the problem of unjust suffering. What it does, however, is offer companionship in suffering. The times when we experience undeserved suffering and pain are like our own Friday in Jerusalem. We feel as if our experience were unique, as if no one has ever been more alone. But Jesus Himself went there in depth on the original Good Friday. He understands what it is like to be totally alone, totally rejected and abused. He’s been there and done that. And in a sense He tasted just a bit of everyone’s experience (1 Pet 2:20-24).
But for Jesus the story didn’t end on that Friday. It seemed to and He Himself seemed to see no hope for the future when He cried out to God, “Why have you forsaken me?” But His suffering and abandonment turned out to be a prelude to the incredible affirmation of Easter Sunday. When He was raised from the dead His acceptance with God was re-affirmed. In some sense the whole human race stands in a new place with God. The cross has turned human suffering into a prelude.
What difference does it make to believe in the cross today? For me it changes everything about suffering. Some have used undeserved suffering as an excuse to disbelieve in the existence of God. But atheism has not lessened human suffering one iota. If anything it makes it worse, because one is all alone in the suffering, the suffering has no meaning, and it offers no future.
But the cross demonstrates several things that make a difference. It tells us that we are not alone, even though it may feel that way. It tells us that suffering doesn’t mean that God doesn’t care, He cares ever so much, but he doesn’t always intervene to avert pain. God’s absence in suffering is not a hostile one or a helpless one, it has a higher purpose. In the light of the cross we have a reason to endure, even though we may not know the particular reason why. When we suffer without deserving it, we share in the experience of Jesus. When we feel the absence of God in our pain, we share in the experience of Jesus. He went there before us and understands how we feel.
Why September 11 and similar tragedies in the course of history? There is no satisfactory answer at this time. Yet it is possible to discern a merciful hand in the events, in spite of their horrific nature. The toll at the World Trade Center could easily have been tens of thousands dead– if the planes had struck a few hours later in the day, if they had struck the towers at a lower level, if the towers had collapsed more quickly, if evacuations hadn’t started so quickly and efficiently in the south tower. As horrible as events were, it could have been, in a sense should have been, much worse.
For those of us who experienced it, September 11 was an unimaginable expression of evil at its worst. It fundamentally altered our perception of the world and our own role in the world. But September 11 was not the most evil act of all time. The Holocaust, as chillingly brutal and unfair as it was, was not the most evil act of all time. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the genocides of Armenians, Russians, Rwandans, and Cambodians in the 20th Century, the slave trade across the Atlantic, all of these qualify as acts of systematic pre-meditated evil. But none of them qualify as the most evil act of all time.
The cross was the most evil act of all time. When human beings, for temporary and limited political advantage, crucified the God who came down and lived among us, they acted in the most incomprehensible, unfair and evil manner possible. In rejecting Him, they were doing more than just condemning an innocent man to death, they were destroying the source of their own life and rejecting their own place in the universe. The cross of Jesus Christ is an evil act of infinite proportions. If the human race is capable of such an act, no evil action is unimaginable.
But there is a silver lining to the dark cloud of human evil. God has turned the cross into a powerful act of reversal. The greatest evil ever done has been transformed by God into the most powerful act of goodness ever performed. By death God brings life. Through defeat comes victory. Through shame, humiliation and rejection come glory, grace and acceptance. Through the cross God has turned the tables on evil and death. The greatest evil has become the basis for the greatest good.
The cross shows us how to live in conflicted times. In the light of the cross there is plenty we can do in the face of terrorism. We can learn to love our neighbors the way God does. We can help to build bridges between groups in our communities. We can make a daily effort to project love and care into the world, and not return evil for evil. We can visit the sick, feed the hungry, and comfort the suffering. We can even learn to love our enemies the way Jesus did! The cross demonstrates that, in the grace and power that come only from God, evil can be transformed into good.
The cross was a day of great terror, and many who saw it ran away dismayed about what was happening. The person who had healed others, who banished disease and hunger wherever he walked, who gave love and hope to downtrodden multitudes, was cruelly and unjustly executed while still a young man. What if those who watched this senseless act of violence had said, “How can we ever trust God again?” What if they had gone home, renounced their belief in God and said, “Either God does not exist, or he is a monster that has a complete disregard for love and justice.” If they had, they would have missed the greatest act of God’s love and justice in human history.
That’s why I believe that God can be trusted after September 11. Evil seems to rule only if we don’t look carefully or wait long enough. God is still going to use people like you and me to change the world in the aftermath of evil. Wars, violence and terrorism are born in the heart. But the cross has exposed the fundamental weakness of evil: it can be overcome with good. So I have become willing to fight evil wherever it is found– among “them” (whoever they are), among “us” (whoever we are), but most of all “in here,” inside of me. I think it’s time to start a new conspiracy in this world, a conspiracy with a world-changing message, evil will be overcome with good. This is our mission.
According to the Bible human beings are not simply imperfect creatures that need improvement, we are rebels who must lay down our arms. The only way out of our human condition is to “lay down our arms,” acknowledge that we are on the wrong track and allow God to work whatever changes are needed in our lives. This is our ultimate jihad, our ultimate struggle to overcome evil.
This “repentance” is not fun. As the chapter on my personal jihad illustrated, accepting the reality of our brokenness is something we naturally shy away from. Acknowledging failure is humiliating and repugnant. But it is the necessary path toward redeeming our lives from the downward spiral of the evil that besets us all. It is the only way to bring our lives into the sunshine of reality. This “repentance” is simply recognizing the truth about ourselves. The day that changed the world can never change us unless we are willing to be changed, unless we recognize that change is needed.
The neat thing about God’s plan is that He understands what this struggle for authenticity is all about. In submitting Himself to the humiliation of the cross, Jesus experienced the kind of surrender we need. In the Garden of Gethsemane He struggled to give Himself up to God’s plan. And the Bible teaches that if we follow Him in His surrender and humiliation, we will also share in His conquest of death and find new life in our present experience (Rom 6:3-6).
September 11 was more than just the work of a few kooks and fanatics, it was a symptom of deeper issues that plague us all. As we have seen, the struggle toward authenticity is not an occasional necessity, it is fundamental to the human condition, whether we acknowledge it or not.
A fundamental need of human beings is to have a sense of personal value, that who we are truly matters. This need is in stark contrast to the reality (described in the jihad chapter) that the more we know about ourselves the more we dislike ourselves and the worse we feel. We need a sense of worth, yet authenticity seems to lower our value. How can we elevate our sense of self-worth without escaping from the dark realities within? That’s where the cross comes in.
How much is a human being worth? It depends on the context. If they were to melt me down into the chemicals of which my body is made, I understand I would be worth about twelve dollars (make that thirteen, I’ve gained a little weight). But the average American is valued by his or her employer at a much higher level than that, something like $50,000 dollars a year. But suppose you were a great basketball player like Michael Jordan. Suddenly the value jumps to tens of millions of dollars a year. And if you were the nerdy designer of the software everyone in the world uses, you would be valued at tens of billions of dollars (Bill Gates)!
You see, we are valued in terms of others. But according to the Bible human value is infinitely higher than the value we assign to each other. According to the Bible, Jesus was worth the whole universe (He made it), yet He knows all about us and loves us as we are. When He died on the cross, He established the value of the human person. When the Creator of the universe and everyone in it (including all the great athletes and movie stars that people often worship) decides to die for you and me, it places an infinite value on our lives. And since the resurrected Jesus will never die again, my value is secure in him as long as I live .
So the cross provides a true and stable sense of value. This is what makes the story of that Friday in Jerusalem so very special. The cross is not just another atrocity. It is about God’s willingness to take on human flesh and reveal Himself where we are. It is about the value that the human race has in the eyes of God. It is about God’s plan to turn the human race away from evil and hatred and violence. The original day that changed the world, therefore, provides hope for a better world in the aftermath of September 11.
It is clear that none of the great faiths have lived up to the ideals of their sacred texts. Followers of each have, at one time or another, succumbed to the temptations of earthly power and wealth. Followers of each have thought so highly of their thoughts as to feel justified in destroying individuals who thought differently. After September 11we must beware our own personal tendency to judge others, to despise those who think differently, to marginalize those who look different, talk different, and pray different.
The best hope for this world after September 11 is an authentic walk with God that not only takes the “terrorist within” seriously but sees in others the value that God sees in them. If every one of us is flawed yet valuable, all other seekers after God become potential allies in the battle to create a kinder and gentler world. Armed with a clear picture of reality and a sense of our value, we can become change agents in the world. And the seeds of that change were planted one Friday in Jerusalem.
Almost two thousand years ago there was a Friday in Jerusalem that changed the world. All the elements of September 11 occurred within the experience of a single person, but that experience had implications that affect every person who ever lived. For followers of Jesus that Friday in Jerusalem was, more than any other, the day that changed the world. Jesus’ death was more than just the execution of an innocent man, it was designed by God to unite the human race and ultimately the entire universe (John 12:32; Col 1:20). According to the Bible, Jesus is much more than a man, much more than a prophet. He is God come to earth, but in disguise, housed in a human body (John 1:1, 14). His mission did not end in a tomb, but continues to change the world today. The relevance of Jesus’ mission to our search for God is directly proportional to the reality of that claim.
This central aspect of Christian faith was perhaps best explained by C. S. Lewis, the great British scholar and novelist. According to his book Mere Christianity, Christians believe that behind events like September 11 is a universal war between the principles of good and evil. It is a civil war and this world is being held hostage by the rebel forces. Evil exists here because the world is enemy-occupied territory. On the other hand, the good we see in the world is evidence that God has not abandoned it to the Enemy. He continues to exert His influence with any who are willing to follow Him.
How did this evil get into the universe? Lewis argues that God created beings with free will. If we are free to be good we are also free to be bad. So free will has made evil possible, even though God did not choose to create evil. Why make people free then? Because the same freedom that makes evil possible is also the only thing that makes love, joy or goodness truly worth having. True happiness can only occur in the context of loving choice. Evidently God thought that the pluses of freedom were well worth the risk.
But what if God’s creatures used their freedom to go the wrong way, what if they used it to turn from Him, what if they used their freedom to produce unspeakable horrors like September 11? What then? Does this mean God Himself is evil, or perhaps powerless? The Bible says no to both options. Evil exists not because God is a tyrant, but because He prefers openness and freedom. Evil exists not because God is powerless, but because He wanted human beings to be powerful in ways that mirrored His own freedom of action.
But what has God done to start overcoming the evil in the world? According to Lewis, God has done several things, and these are outlined in the Bible. 1) He has provided the conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong that few humans are without. 2) He has provided some, from Abraham to Moses to Paul, and perhaps Mohammed and others outside the Christian sphere, with visions and dreams that helped clarify the central issues of good and evil. 3) In the Old Testament He provided the story of a people (Israel, the Jewish nation) and the struggles through which God sought to teach them more clearly about Himself.
But then came something special, something surprising. 4) Among the Jews appeared a man who went around talking as if He were God. He claimed to be able to forgive sins, something only God can do. Jesus could not be simply a good man. If a mere man claimed to be God he could not be a good man. To quote Lewis, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.”
If Jesus is merely another prophet, a man among many, He is a fraud. But if He is what He claimed to be, God Himself taking on human flesh, then the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are the greatest events that ever happened in the course of human history. That Friday in Jerusalem would then be the day that changed the world.
