I have reflected much in the last 24 hours on how most of the large-scale evil in my adult life has stemmed from Iran. My 18th birthday was the year Jimmy Carter was elected – which lead, in no small part, to the beginning of the Islamic Republic of Iran and that fledgling nation’s invasion of the US Embassy and the hostage crisis that followed, defining the last year of the Cater presidency. And things have proceeded downhill every since. Carter a good, but horribly naive, man simply could not deal with the kind of evil that the Islamic Republic represented. Carter was not alone in his naivete – most politically liberal Christians shared it – and they still do to a large extent. They assume the world a decent place that just needs to be cleaned up a bit. Would that such was the case.
The Islamic Republic has been the embodiment of an ideology that has killed by the thousands and tens of thousands. Like a cancer it has metastasized and continues to poke its head up wherever it finds an opening. Because the evil is ideological in nature the death of Khamenei, while progress, in no way solves the bottom line issue. Even a new regime in Iran altogether will not end the evil, but without state embodiment it will be much easier to deal with and its expressions will be less, but still, deadly. Evil always seems to find a way – before Iran, the Soviets and before the Soviets, the Nazis.
We simply do not want to face the reality of evil. We do not want to explore evil’s depths because in them we find temptation. We do not want to acknowledge evil’s proximity because it forces us to admit our own depravity. We live in our cloistered little bubble where there may be the rude or the arrogant or the distasteful and we decide that such must be the nature of sin and evil. We reduce the truly depraved expressions of evil to cinematic experiences that we can watch but not allow to really touch us. And so we fail to understand what sin and evil is really capable of.
From this failure flows two very important results. Our ethical thinking becomes very skewed. Suddenly the truly evil is unthinkable and the lesser wrongs become paramount in our thinking. I think that defines the current state of American politics very well. Secondly, we fail to see our own deep need for salvation. We do not need to be merely trained or improved, we need to be saved, changed and recreated. Sin, the sin that creates this evil, cannot be removed from us. We must die and be resurrected without it. We must share in the cross of Christ.
As this military action proceeds and this embodiment of evil is destroyed, evil will most definitely find a new way to express itself. It’s next expression may still involve the ideology that underpinned Iran, or it may not – only time will tell. Be certain of this. The actions being so expertly taken by our and the Israeli military are necessary and good. But they are a battle, not the war. The war is not with any particular expression of, or ideology rooted in, evil. No, the war is with evil itself.
That is not a war that is fought on battlefields with weapons of destruction. It is a war fought in the heart of each person on a spiritual level. It is a war already won with the resurrection of Christ from His wrongful execution, if we but permit that victory into our hearts. Such permission must of necessity involve our acknowledgement of our own capacity for evil – an admission of our own propensity to sin – “confession” in church talk.
Let’s not reduce this conflict with Iran to another cinematic experience that we can hold at arms length. Let it touch you. Come to terms with how it reflects the evil you keep so deeply buried. Then turn to Christ and experience a miracle.
