The bombs fell on a Tuesday. By Sunday, the worship leaders were on stage with their hands raised, weeping and prophesying about a spiritual harvest. The problem is, none of this bodes well for the Christians in Tehran, if recent history has anything to say about it. While we can hope and pray it’s different this time, American intervention is almost always the death knell for Christians. Find out why that is, and why the prophecy peddlers have it all wrong.
My friend, Greg Locke, is not just a Tennessee preacher and Dispensational Zionist. He’s also an alchemist who can somehow convert evangelical outrage into viral videos. I assume those are then turned into gold, but I’m not sure. Never asked him. And Greg just announced to his followers that “the modern-day Haman, threatening to eradicate the Jews, has been eliminated just a couple of days before the feast of Purim begins.”
Greg’s on to something. It’s not a prophetic fulfillment, though. It’s an observation that the dating of Israel’s attack (it was their attack; don’t dare think otherwise) on Iran was intentional. I keep calling Israel an apocalyptic desert war cult for a reason. Unless you understand that war for Israel is theological, you’ll never understand why they do the things they do. But Greg wasn’t alone in tying this war to Biblical prophecy.
Sean Feucht, professional worship leader, took to social media to ask his followers how Christians should respond to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, then answered his own question, “The greatest harvest in the history of Iran is coming!” Franklin Graham thanked President Trump for giving “the Iranian people a chance to be free” and praised him for having “the guts to take them on.” Amanda Grace, the charismatic movement’s designated prophetess-for-hire, declared the whole operation prophetically foreordained, helpfully informing her audience that God had whispered to her months earlier about “a ferocious February setting up for a roar in March,” which she now presents as divine foreknowledge rather than the kind of thing anyone with a newspaper subscription and a passing familiarity with carrier group deployments could have written on a napkin. It’s what I call a “fortune cookie prophecy,” except usually the super vague ones are publicized ahead of time; ordinarily, the prophecies nobody mentions until afterward are startlingly specific (and made-up).
I’m not saying these are bad people (except for the false prophets, and they should be stoned to death according to Deuteronomy 18:20, and I’m down with that). Most of them are sincerely wrong, but sincere nonetheless. They love Jesus, really super-duper love Israel, and probably love America, maybe or maybe not in that order. And right now, all three loves are firing simultaneously in their chests like a triple-barreled shotgun loaded with patriotic buckshot. It’s a big day for them. But the problem is not their hearts or their intentions, but their theology. It’s their End Times charts. They are reading a prophetic atlas that was drawn incorrectly, updated with the theological equivalent of flat-earth cartography, and distributed to them by men with strong financial and political incentives to make ancient Persia look exactly like modern Iran.
The result of the Industrial End Times Prophecy Complex is a generation of American Christians who have been trained to see bombs as blessings, regime change as revival, and the opening death toll of a four-to-five-week air campaign as the prologue to the Great Commission. I’m here to tell you if the American Air Force is raining fire and brimstone down on a country like the wrath of God Almighty, any type of optimism you’re feeling should be cautious at best. There are so many things that can go so catastrophically wrong that this is a time of humble prayer and earnest pleading. In fact, even if everything goes catastrophically right from our perspective, that means it’s definitely going catastrophically bad from someone else’s, and you should be praying for them.
But they’re not just wrong prophetically. They are also wrong historically. And Iranian Christians, the real ones, the ones meeting in secret, the ones who could be arrested before this article finishes loading for the crime of owning a Farsi Bible, are going to pay the price for that wrongness in ways that will likely never trouble Franklin Graham.
Ellilcit Prophecy P0rn
The theological engine behind all of this enthusiasm runs on two passages of Scripture, neither of which means what the prophecy industry insists it means. This is, admittedly, a condition the prophecy industry applies to most passages of Scripture.
The first is Jeremiah 49:34-39, the oracle against Elam. Elam was an ancient kingdom in what is now southwestern Iran, centered around the city of Susa. Jeremiah pronounced judgment upon it. God would break Elam’s military might, scatter its people to the four winds, bring disaster, fierce anger, and the sword. Then, in the passage that has been quoted in about a million social media posts and counting, Jeremiah declared, “But it will come about in the last days that I will restore the fortunes of Elam.” One verse later, the line that really gets the prophecy crowd’s engine revving: “I will set my throne in Elam.” This final promise, combined with the genuinely remarkable growth of the underground church in Iran, gets read as God’s announcement of an imminent, war-triggered spiritual harvest. The bombs break the bow. The regime collapses. The harvest arrives. The prophecy chart gets updated. Everyone goes home satisfied with their theological conclusions.
There are several holes of logic with this reading, each one serious enough to drive a seminary bus through. To begin with, the prophecy already happened. Babylon conquered Elam in 596 BC. Persia absorbed it under Cyrus the Great. The scattering is documented. The judgment is documented. The restoration is documented, and it is documented in the New Testament itself so we can be confident it was fulfilled. Elamites were present in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:9), which suggests that God’s throne had already found its way into the descendants of Elam approximately two thousand years earlier. To then reach back into this ancient regional oracle and superimpose it onto a 21st-century air campaign requires the interpreter to ignore everything the text accomplished historically and declare it still pending.
More damning still is what Jeremiah 49 does with itself. The same chapter contains restoration promises for Moab, Ammon, and Egypt, using language that is virtually identical to the Elam promise. “Yet afterward I will restore the fortunes of Moab.” “But afterward I will restore the fortunes of the sons of Ammon.” Nobody in the prophecy industry is watching Jordanian news for harbingers of the end times. Nobody is calling Mubarak’s removal a fulfillment of Jeremiah 46. The Elam passage receives its special treatment not because the text demands it but because Iran is currently on fire and Elam is on the map, and that is the whole of the exegetical case. It fits in a tweet. It has to, because it cannot survive a commentary.
The second passage is Ezekiel 38-39, the Gog and Magog invasion, where Persia appears explicitly as part of a military coalition that attacks Israel in the last days. Dispensationalists render this as Russia leading a grand alliance including Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and Libya against Israel, a coalition God supernaturally destroys on the mountains of Israel while the watching nations see His glory. Here the prophecy peddlers run into an awkward internal problem because by their own theological rules, this battle has specific preconditions they do not claim are currently satisfied. Yet they are simultaneously pointing to the U.S.-Israeli campaign as fulfilling the “breaking of Elam’s bow.” They cannot logically have it both ways. Either these are carefully sequenced eschatological events requiring precise preconditions, or they are a prophetic inkblot test onto which sincere Christians project whatever is currently happening on television. The prophecy industry has chosen the inkblot approach, which is not theology. It’s more like astrology with a concordance.
Here’s where the prophecy peddlers should do a full stop. The Ezekiel 38 invasion force includes Cush and Put. Cush is Sudan and Ethiopia. Put is Libya. These are nations in the very coalition they are busily mapping onto current events. They are also, not coincidentally, nations where American-led regime change has already produced catastrophic outcomes for Christians. Gaddafi’s Libya was an imperfect but functional state that protected its minorities. After NATO’s 2011 regime change operation, cheered enthusiastically by the same evangelical hawks now cheering Operation Epic Fury, it became a failed state and human trafficking depot where ISIS lined up 21 Coptic believers in orange jumpsuits on a Mediterranean beach and beheaded them on camera while the sea ran red. Sudan’s Christian communities have endured decades of massacre and displacement in conflicts that American policy did nothing to prevent and often worsened through its choices of favored factions. The nations in the prophecy peddlers’ own end-times map are nations whose Christians have already been ground to powder, in part by the same foreign policy logic now being applied to Iran. Their prophetic coalition is a body count they refuse to read. This is, to put it gently, an embarrassment to the discipline of biblical interpretation.
What History Actually Says About Christians and Regime Change
The cheerleaders for this war would benefit from a simple exercise before their next social media post. Name one country where American-sponsored regime change improved the situation for Christians. Take as much time as you need. There is no timer.
Iraq had 1.5 million Christians before 2003. Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syriac Orthodox, communities that had worshiped in the land where Abraham drew his first breath since the days of the apostles, representing some of the oldest continuous Christian witness on earth. The American invasion blew open the gates. I met them. I worshiped in their homes. I preached in their churches back at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, when, at 23 years old (I think, math is hard), I was dropped in Baghdad with State Dept papers to teach U.S. government to the college in Erbil in Kurdistan (Northern Iraq). But then, ISIS walked through the doors we opened. By 2021, fewer than 250,000 Christians remained. Friends, that is not collateral damage. That is the near-total elimination of a two-thousand-year-old Christian community, accomplished under American air cover and the enthusiastic moral support of American evangelicals who had been assured that democracy delivered by cruise missile was God’s preferred method of fulfilling the Great Commission.
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