As “Operation Epic Fury” continues, Iran and its proxies are expanding their response as they fire missiles at Israel and the Arab states. The US Central Command announced yesterday that three US service members have been killed in the conflict and at least five others seriously wounded. However, it stated that it remains steadfast in its “relentless campaign to defend the American people by eliminating threats from the Iranian regime.”

At the top of this threat list was Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. When news broke Saturday that he had been killed, one person in Tehran responded: “I think the Middle East has become a better place. Even [the] world has become a better place now.” A video shows teenagers at a school dancing and chanting over the strikes by US and Israeli forces; one says, “I love Trump.” An Iranian lawyer living in Los Angeles said, “It’s not an invasion, it’s a liberation. My support is behind this 100 percent.”

While large crowds in cities across Iran celebrated the news of Khamenei’s death, Iranian state TV showed mourners in Tehran packed into a square, dressed in black, with many of them weeping. The Iranian government has declared forty days of mourning and seven days of public holidays across the nation to commemorate Khamenei’s death.

We can be grateful that he can no longer terrorize his own people and the world. But there is another dimension to Khamenei’s death that we should consider as well, one that far transcends the geopolitics of the moment.

Who was Ali Khamenei?

Ali Khamenei was born on July 17, 1939, the second of eight children; his father was a Shiite cleric of humble means. He studied for six years under Ruhollah Khomeini, the cleric who went on to found the Islamic Republic in 1979. Khamenei became proficient in Arabic, translating the works of the Islamist Sayyid Qutb, whose insistence that Islam must return to its “pure” roots has influenced generations of jihadists.

When Khamenei joined his mentor’s protests against the US-backed Shah beginning in 1963, he was arrested repeatedly and spent three years in prison. After the revolution, he served in a variety of posts under Khomeini. He narrowly escaped death in 1981 when a bomb planted by an Iranian militant group exploded near him. Severely injured, he lost the use of his right arm and suffered damage to his vocal cords.

He was elected president in 1981 and again in 1985; the day after Khomeini died in 1989, Iran’s Assembly of Experts elected him as supreme leader. In the years since, he has appointed the commanders of the armed forces, the nation’s supreme judicial authority, the director of the media, and the members of the Guardian Council, Iran’s top supervisory body. He was also the driving force behind Iran’s quest for nuclear power and, many allege, nuclear weapons.

Why was he so dangerous?

Khamenei repeatedly terrorized his own citizens who protested his regime, most horrifically last January when his security forces massacred thousands of Iranians. He supported proxies across the Middle East in their terrorism against Israel and the West, praising Hamas for its brutalities on October 7.

He was convinced that his regime was necessary to prepare for the return of the Mahdi (the Muslim messiah) and was therefore willing to do whatever was needed for it to survive. As a scholar who wrote extensively on him said, he governed Iran “as a cause, not a country.”

Khamenei was clearly willing to deceive negotiators regarding his nuclear ambitions, perhaps employing the doctrine of taqiyya that permits Muslims to lie to non-Muslims for the purpose of expanding Islam. If he had developed nuclear weapons, the threat of mutual deterrence would not have deterred him. As the Princeton professor and Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis noted, Iranians perishing in war did not concern Khamenei and his fellow clerics, who believed they “would be doing them a favor by giving them a free pass to heaven” as martyrs in a jihad.

For these reasons, the continued existence of his regime posed a continued threat to his own people and to the world at large.

“There is salvation in no one else”

So far as we know, Ali Khamenei died as a Shiite Muslim. As such, he would have rejected the divinity of Jesus, since the Qur’an states that Jesus was “no more than a messenger” (Suran 5:75) and quotes him as saying, “Surely Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship him alone” (Surah 19:36).

However, the Bible teaches that “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). Jesus said of himself, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). This is why the apostles declared, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Some so-called Christian universalists counter with the claim that all are saved through the atoning death of Christ, whether they know it or not. This claim could be illustrated by the polio vaccine, which protects those who receive it, though they may not know of Jonas Salk’s work to develop it.

But the vaccine must nonetheless be received to be effective. We must similarly trust in Christ personally to experience salvation through him. Jesus said of himself: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:18; cf. v. 36).

As a result, people who reject the salvation found only in Christ will spend all of eternity separated from God. Just as Paul and Jesus grieved for their unbelieving Jewish brethren (Luke 19:41; Romans 9:2–3), we should grieve for the lost and seek their salvation with urgency.

If you believed cancer did not exist

If a nefarious enemy convinced us that cancer did not exist, wouldn’t we be more likely to die from it?

Satan has convinced our secularized culture that there is no such thing as sin; thus we cannot be sinners and do not need salvation or a Savior. He has similarly convinced many that hell is not real and thus they should have no fear of going there.

While you and I know better in principle, do we know better in practice?

A seminary professor once told me that Christians who do not actively share their faith are “practicing universalists.” He theorized that they must not believe what Jesus said about the necessity of faith in himself. If they truly believed that the lost people they know would spend eternity in hell, they would do whatever they could to help them trust in Christ.

Pastor Alistair Begg claimed,

“There is no greater communication of love than proclaiming the gospel of God.”

Do you agree?

Quote for the day:

“To call a man evangelical who is not an evangelist is an utter contradiction.” —G. Campbell Morgan

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