Praying for spiritual regime change in an ancient land
Last night, the Pentagon released the last two names of the six US soldiers killed in a Kuwait attack a day after the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. The other four Americans had earlier been identified. A military official said of the soldiers, “We honor our fallen Heroes, who served fearlessly and selflessly in defense of our nation. Their sacrifice, and the sacrifices of their families, will never be forgotten.”
If Iran has its way, they will be only the first of many American deaths to come.
As the New York Times reports, “The Islamic Republic of Iran’s first priority is to survive. To do that, its leaders will want to drive up the cost of the war for President Trump—in terms of American casualties, energy costs, and inflation—to try to persuade him to declare victory and go home.”
The reason the Iranian regime wants to survive this war at all costs is not just personal, as selfish as it was for them to massacre thousands of civilians who protested against them. Their larger agenda is ideological.
Until we understand it, we will be unequipped to win this war in ways that will matter long after it is over.
Sunnis, Shiites, Twelvers, and the Mahdi
(For an expanded explanation of this section, please see my books The War in Israel and Radical Islam: What You Need to Know.)
Around 85 percent of Muslims are Sunnis; around 15 percent are Shiites. The latter are the majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, though sizable populations also live in Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.
We can think of the two groups somewhat like Catholic and Protestant “denominations,” with historic and significant differences but still part of the larger faith. Their divergence goes back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632. Sunnis (from sunna, “habit” or “usual practice”) believe that the caliphs (“leaders”) who followed Muhammad were his proper successors. Shiites (“partisans” or “party of Ali”) disagree, claiming that Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali, the fourth caliph, was his rightful heir.
Approximately 80 percent of Shiites are “Twelvers.” They believe that the twelfth imam (the Shiites’ supreme spiritual leader), Abu al-Qasim Muhammad, was hidden by God in AD 872 and then transported to a transcendent realm in AD 934 (this event is called the “occultation”). In their theology, this “twelfth imam” is still alive and waiting to reappear at the end of history as the Mahdi (“the guided one”), a kind of Muslim messiah. Many Shiites voice and write prayers to him daily.
Many Twelvers also believe that a time of great chaos will precede the coming of the Mahdi. According to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (the military that dominates Iranian politics and society), Israel must be destroyed before the Mahdi will reappear. This is why the possibility of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons is an existential threat to Israel and the West. This also explains why negotiations to prevent Iran from permanently acquiring such weapons have never succeeded.
We should add that for many jihadists, dying in a jihad (“holy war”) is their only certain guarantee of a place in paradise. Now that senior clerics in Iran have declared this conflict to be a jihad, this element should not be overlooked.
What Iran needs most
This ideology explains why, following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It has supported proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah in their atrocities against Israel and repeatedly incited violence against the West.
Their purpose is not geographical—Iran does not seek to “conquer” the land of Israel in the way Putin seeks to conquer Ukraine and Hitler tried to conquer Europe. Rather, it is ideological: they believe that their theological worldview is the only proper version of Islam and want to export it across the Muslim world. And, as we have seen, their even “higher” purpose is to prepare for the arrival of the Mahdi, who will then dominate the world for Islam.
The Iranian regime believes that it exists in the service of these agendas and that it is serving Allah in so doing. Accordingly, Israel and the US are encouraging a regime change by which the Iranian people revolt against their leaders and take control of their country.
However, what Iran needs most is a spiritual regime change. Its population has become dramatically more secularized in recent years (only 15 percent agree that “the hijab should be mandatory in public,” for example). As the Christian population in Iran grows exponentially, this is a crucial time for the gospel in this historic country.
The ancient land of Persia (as Iran was called prior to 1935) is mentioned some thirty times in the Bible. For example, the Persian King Cyrus liberated the Jews from their Babylonian captivity, enabled them to return to their homeland (2 Chronicles 36:22–23), and helped them rebuild their temple (Ezra 6:3–5). Many historians believe the Magi who worshipped the infant Christ were Persians as well (Matthew 2:1–12).
“If we don’t believe that the end is near”
Christians can therefore stand with this ancient people by praying for a transforming spiritual awakening to sweep their land. The more Iranians and their leaders turn to Christ, the more they will seek peaceful relations with other nations (cf. Hebrews 12:14) and the more they will help to advance such transformation across the world to the glory of God.
There is enormous urgency in our spiritual response to this spiritual conflict. Not just for the sake of those for whom we intercede, but for ourselves as well. In his famous sermon “Learning in War-Time,” C. S. Lewis, himself a veteran of World War I, observed:
War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
Br. James Koester of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston, therefore, notes:
If we don’t believe that the end is near, then it doesn’t matter how we live. After all, whatever messes we have made, we can clean them up tomorrow, or whenever, as the case may be. But if the end is coming, if it is near, then how we live, and the mess we have made in our own lives, and in the lives of others, needs to be cleaned up, not whenever, or tomorrow, or even later today, but right now.
Do you have some “clean up” to do today?
Quote for the day:
“The only reason we don’t have revival is because we are willing to live without it.” —Leonard Ravenhill
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