Tag Archives: The Iran War

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.
________________________________________
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.