When news spread on February 28 that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead, Iranians’ reactions were sharply divided—almost like two countries.

Loyalists held pro-regime mourning rallies in Tehran and nationwide, drawing tens or hundreds of thousands. Many people expressed fury at the United States and Israel for the assassination. The government declared 40 days of public mourning. Emotional broadcasts filled state media. One television presenter broke down in tears.

At precisely the same time, streets nationwide filled with people dancing, honking horns, lighting fireworks, and waving pre-Revolution Iranian flags. Regime-linked monuments and symbols were toppled. It was the emotive outpouring of a people who have suffered for nearly half a century under the nightmare of tyranny.

What comes next for these people?

Biblical prophecy gives us a prescient overview. It reveals which of these two Irans will dominate the immediate future. It shows the outcome of America and Israel’s war. It exposes the fate of this radical Iranian regime.

Most importantly, it holds out a beautiful promise to the Iranian people. Their suffering is nearly over. The grip of the regime’s tyranny will be broken.

A People Betrayed

The public jubilation following Khamenei’s death was nothing compared to the triumphant, millions-strong celebrations that filled Iran’s streets in February 1979.

The Islamic Revolution had just ended the shah’s autocratic rule. A broad coalition of Iranians—leftists, liberals, nationalists, merchants, students, religious conservatives—had sought an end to a brutal police state, censorship, intimidation, torture and dictatorship. The revolution promised freedom, justice and independence. Ruhollah Khomeini offered a vision of a democratic system with genuine political liberties, free speech, fair elections, accountable government, equality, free electricity, better housing, education, water, health care, prosperity and dignified life for ordinary people. It was the dawn of a beautiful new Iran. Or so they thought.

Then, summary executions of shah-era officials began. Within weeks, Khomeini publicly rejected the term “democratic,” calling it a Western concept. He said the revolution was not democratic but Islamic. A referendum was held asking a single binary question: “Should Iran become an Islamic republic?” (details of what that meant to be decided later). It passed with a suspiciously high 98 percent approval. By that summer, revolutionary committees and militias began enforcing strict Islamic codes. Secular, leftist, nationalist and liberal groups were sidelined, banned or attacked.

In August, the Assembly of Experts was elected, filled with Islamic clerics. They drafted a constitution giving supreme power to a religious leader, Khomeini, and approved it that December.

And on November 4 of that year, 1979, a mob of Khomeini’s radical supporters stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran. They seized terrified Americans—mostly diplomats and staff—and brazenly demanded the return of the deposed shah for a show trial. Fifty-two hostages endured 444 days of brutal captivity while Khomeini openly mocked America’s president, sneering, “Carter does not have the guts to engage in a military operation.” A desperate rescue mission collapsed in flames in the Iranian desert, killing eight U.S. servicemen in a spectacular humiliation for the supposed superpower. The crisis further radicalized Iran, poisoned U.S.-Iran relations, and shattered American prestige.

Many Iranians who had marched for freedom and democracy felt betrayed. Within a few years, full consolidation of the theocratic system—with banning of opposition parties, mass purges and executions—was largely complete.

The bitter words of Solomon resonated: “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power …” (Ecclesiastes 4:1).

Since then, Iran’s theocratic dictatorship has been a plague on its people and on the world.

Life Under Tyranny

The revolution was carried out in the name of “the oppressed.” Yet it has produced hyperinflation, a currency in free fall ($1 bought 70 rials in 1979; today, 1.4 million), and total failure to employ, house or feed its population.

In place of the shah’s autocratic monarchy, Iran became a repressive, totalitarian, joyless, moral police state. “The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer,” Khomeini famously declared in August 1979. “An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.”

There is, however, sex. The regime permits a man to have up to four permanent wives, as well as temporary marriages for pleasure or short-term arrangements. It sets the legal marriage age for girls at 13, but exceptions below that tender age can be made with parental or judicial approval. Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Little Green Book,” Tahrir-ol-vasyleh, considered a manual of Islamic jurisprudence, explains gravely, “A man can marry a girl younger than 9 years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed.” But, he insists, one must respect the girl’s “rights”—which he explains as follows: “A man, however, is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than 9; other sexual acts such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than 9 years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged. If the girl, however, is permanently damaged, the man must provide for her all her life. But this girl will not count as one of the man’s four permanent wives.” Look at a little girl—maybe your own daughter—and imagine her growing up under this kind of demonic villainy.

Such inhumane, perverse thinking promoted by the power of the state makes life horrific for many Iranian women and girls. Morality police enforce stringent rules on dress, speech and public behavior to control “dangerous sexual desires” and shield society from moral corruption. In 2022, a woman detained for improper hair covering was killed. It ignited an uprising among young women and many others—which was then brutally crushed. A subsequent Amnesty International report gathered testimonies from dozens of Iranians, including children as young as 12, who had been raped and tortured by intelligence and security agents.

Political opposition in the Islamic “republic” is strictly bridled, independent parties banned, elections heavily vetted by religious authorities, and critics—journalists, activists, academics—routinely imprisoned. Trials in Revolutionary Courts are grossly unfair, often lasting mere minutes, with no real defense. Cruel punishments like flogging, amputation and public hangings are routine. Torture is widespread and systematic in facilities like Evin Prison, including sexual violence, electric shocks and mock executions. Iran ranks among the world’s top executioners of its own people. Capital crimes include drug offenses, vague “national security” charges and political activities.

French-Iranian sociologist Azadeh Kian described how Khomeini’s regime treated young women it had arrested for political offenses; her shocking charge was later confirmed by a British parliamentary report. The clerics believed that if a young woman was a virgin when she was executed, she would go to heaven. Their solution? Rape her, then execute her. Kian explained, “A temporary marriage was organized and a dowry in the form of sweets sent to the girl’s family.” Such practices expose just how satanic this movement and its authors are!

Little wonder, then, that millions of oppressed and desperate Iranians have risked death to take to the streets and chant, “Death to the dictator.” Little wonder that many Iranians supported the U.S. and Israel even as they bombed their country. Yet time and again, security forces have crushed these uprisings with lethal force.

These people need relief. They need justice. Not a return to the shah’s royal dictatorship but the dawn of a government that will truly will help them flourish!

Psalm 103:6 promises, “The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed.” God is not indifferent. He sees the Iranians’ oppression, hears their cries, and has promised to bring justice in His time. Dozens of prophecies promise that tyrants will be deposed and people freed. “But thus saith the Lord, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible [the tyrant, the oppressor] shall be delivered …” (Isaiah 49:25). This vision will ultimately be realized across the Earth.

Plague on the World

Today, however, Iran’s regime remains determined to do more than just crush its own people. It views the Islamic Revolution as ongoing and asserts its duty to spread its Shia Islamist-revolutionary model and promote its anti-Western ideology far beyond the borders of one nation-state. “We shall export our revolution to the whole world,” Khomeini said. “Until the cry, ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.”

Pursuing this goal, Iran has used vile, malevolent means. As the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, it funds, trains, arms and directs violent groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthis and Shia militias across the Middle East and beyond. Iran has thus built proxy architecture that has enabled it to project power and encircle rivals, fighting indirectly while avoiding full-scale conventional war. Its network of allied governments and militias has destabilized nations, prolonged wars and left millions displaced or dead. Its troops and gunmen have killed Americans, British, French, Saudis and Emiratis.

Iran fuels conflicts in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Turkey and elsewhere. Its official military strategy is to build missiles and drones to fire into civilian areas of densely populated cities. It exports suicide drones that Russia has used in Ukraine (when you see children die in a Ukrainian playground from a suicide drone, Iran is directly or indirectly responsible). It assassinates dissidents overseas, uses embassies for terror plots, and spreads paranoia and anti-Western hatred. It has plotted numerous assassinations, both failed and successful, globally, including more than 160 critics of the regime living in other countries.

The regime explicitly seeks to destroy the Jewish state. “Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in 2018. “It is possible and it will happen.” Iran systematically indoctrinates its children to hate Jews. State-controlled textbooks and school curricula teach students to chant “Death to Israel” and frame Zionism as a global conspiracy against the Muslim world. Through its proxies, the regime has launched thousands of rocket, missile, drone and terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, including a major war via Hezbollah in 2006 and repeated conflicts with Hamas in Gaza. It masterminded and enabled the demonic Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre that killed over 1,200 souls.

Israel, though, is only the “little Satan.” The “great Satan”—the primary source of global arrogance, imperialism and corruption that must be defeated for the revolution to succeed—is America.

‘The Great Satan’

The regime yearns to drive the U.S. from the Middle East, undermine American power globally, and hasten the humiliation and collapse of the U.S.-led world order. It has struck U.S. interests across the Middle East, killing hundreds of Americans. During the Iraq War, Iran’s Quds Force and Shia militias supplied weapons and training for insurgents who killed or wounded hundreds of U.S. troops. In recent years they have carried out over 180 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria and Jordan.

But Iran doesn’t restrict its strikes to the region. It indirectly supported the murderous 9/11 attacks—training al Qaeda in explosives, intelligence and security; facilitating travel for the hijackers; offering safe haven after the attack. It has long used Hezbollah, which maintains extensive criminal networks in Latin America, to traffic mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the U.S. (which weaken and even kill thousands of Americans each year), then funnel the hundreds of millions in annual profits into terrorist activities. Iran has conducted influence and espionage operations inside the U.S., with documented cases of agents and sympathizers infiltrating policy circles and government positions during the Biden administration. It has organized assassination plots against American leaders, including several in 2024 to kill presidential candidate Donald Trump.

And all the while, this radical terrorist state has pursued nuclear weapons and consistently lied about it. It views its nuclear program—as well as its ballistic missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads—as a source of national pride and leverage, the ultimate guarantor of regime survival. And among its hard-line clerical and Revolutionary Guards factions, it even has prophetic implications. They believe the messianic return of the 12th Imam to establish global Islamic justice and rule will only occur in a time of apocalyptic war (the earth being “stained with infidels’ blood”). Some regime radicals want to hasten the Mahdi’s return by using nuclear weapons as a divine tool to fulfill prophecy—destroy Israel, confront America, and trigger the cataclysm. This is their nonnegotiable conviction that transcends citizens’ welfare, national interest, self-preservation and even sanity.

JAHANGIR RAZMI

ISNA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

ISNA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

President Trump has rightly insisted that Iran must never obtain nuclear weapons. This motivated the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer. But clearly, the attack didn’t obliterate the threat. When the Trump administration sat down with Iranian negotiators in February, Steve Witkoff said they flatly, shamelessly claimed to have enough enriched uranium to make several nuclear warheads and “an inalienable right” to keep enriching. He said Iran’s negotiators “were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs” (Fox News, March 2).

Iran isn’t just an evil regime. It is a regime that treats its own people as subjects to be broken and the world as a battlefield to conquer. It is a regime that has repeatedly attacked America and that was about to hold the world at nuclear gunpoint.

Prophecy shows that it cannot endure. It will not stand.

However, prophecy also reveals that limited efforts by America and Israel will fail to defeat the regime. Much greater force is needed to uproot this cancerous plague.

Head of the Snake

After 9/11, President George W. Bush launched America’s “war on terror,” first by striking the Taliban, then by decapitating Iraq. Trumpet publisher Gerald Flurry criticized America for ignoring Iran. “The only way to win such a war is to deal with the main source of the terrorism, or cut off the head of the terrorist snake,” he wrote in November 2003. “But neither the U.S. nor Israel has the will to tackle Iran—even though it is the key part of the ‘axis of evil’ in the Middle East” (“Why We Cannot Win the War Against Terrorism”).

At the time, Iran’s regime was economically isolated, militarily conventional, and still recovering from the devastating Iran-Iraq War. Its nuclear program was in its infancy, its ballistic missile arsenal rudimentary. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc) had not yet achieved the economic empire, regional proxy network or domestic surveillance apparatus it commands today. A decisive U.S. strike could have exploited these weaknesses and might well have succeeded.

Mr. Flurry foretold terrible consequences of this strategic blunder. Those consequences are unfolding to this day.

America exhausted its strength in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars cost over 7,000 American lives, more than 50,000 wounded and nearly $8 trillion. They crippled the nation’s will to fight, deepened public distrust in its leaders, and gutted its global prestige. And removing Saddam Hussein eliminated Iran’s single greatest regional competitor, enabling and accelerating Iran’s rise.

The fundamental reality America faces now is that the Iranian regime it is fighting is far more entrenched, sophisticated and resilient than it was in 2001.

A quarter century of missed opportunities, let alone active support from Barack Obama, enabled Iran’s radical regime to transform from a vulnerable theocracy into a hardened security state.

Replacing it with a less-radical, less-provocative, less-lethal government would take much greater resolve—resolve that, frankly, America does not have.

Built to Survive

The Islamic Republic was built to survive a siege. Its ideologically driven leaders assume hostility from abroad and dissent at home. Its primary purpose is not prosperity or popularity, but power—and survival.

The irgc is at the center of the survival machine. Unlike a normal military, this is an ideological army, a huge force of hundreds of thousands of men tasked with protecting and promoting the revolution. Over decades, it has expanded into a sprawling network that includes intelligence, domestic security and regional militias. Its commanders wield enormous political influence, control lucrative industries, and supplement their economic empire with massive smuggling and black market operations. There is evidence that economic sanctions, while hurting legitimate businesses and everyday Iranians, have enriched the irgc by expanding their black-market opportunities.

Meanwhile, Iran’s opposition movements—courageous though they may be—are fragmented, leaderless, heavily surveilled, and ruthlessly attacked. The irgc oversees the Basij militia—between half a million and a million strong—for internal repression, meeting waves of domestic unrest with crackdowns that have refined its tyrannical tactics and tools. Because demonstrations are closely monitored by security services, who often use them to identify and punish dissident networks, some believe the regime actually allows these occasional protests periodically to smoke out—then snuff out—disloyalty. Each crisis, far from weakening the system, allows the hard-liners and irgc to purge moderates and tighten their grip.

Driving its determination and resilience is the regime’s radical ideology. It views its struggle with the West as deeply rooted in Shiite history: endurance under oppression, sacrifice in the face of enemy force. As Ali Hashem wrote in Foreign Policy, the regime has been using language signaling “the glorification of resistance in the face of existential threat over compromise. The idea of ‘dying on one’s feet and not living on one’s knees’ challenges the United States’ logic of proportional response and coercive diplomacy” (February 23).

In other words, America errs in thinking that, since we are pragmatic and willing to compromise our religion and our principles, all the world is also. In truth, we cannot bomb these fanatics into renouncing their ideals.

Foreign attacks are a badge of honor, proving that they are ideological troops on a civilization-conquering mission. The soldiers of Allah are fated to fight and die.

Soon after Israel and America launched attacks in February, President Trump made this stunning statement: “Hopefully the irgc and police will peacefully merge with the Iranian patriots and work together as a unit to bring back the country to the greatness it deserves.” He promised “total immunity” to “the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police” who laid down their weapons.

This comment betrayed the president’s fatal naivety about the people he is fighting. He has learned nothing from what has happened in Gaza. That place has been pulverized to dust, yet Hamas has steadfastly rejected all demands to disarm. They will remain ideologically pure even if it means ruling a dung heap. (Of course, many Islamist leaders, particularly Gaza’s leaders, live elsewhere, and live richly.)

On February 17, in his final speech before he was killed, Ali Khamenei said the “U.S. empire … truly is crumbling. They have problems in their economy, problems with their policies, and problems in their society. More than 50 percent of the U.S. population don’t approve of their current president. … The Americans themselves who are constantly threatening that ‘there will be a war’ or that ‘such and such will happen’ know that they don’t have the staying power for such a thing. Their economic problems, their political problems and their international reputation and standing cannot endure a confrontation of that nature.”

Sadly, evidence supports this bleak assessment. Limited wars rarely topple systems like the one leading Iran, and an operation of the current scale will not. The Islamic Republic is braced to absorb the shock—far more than America is braced to win victory at any cost. These are the hard facts.

What Is Victory?

This regime is determined to fight to the death and to enhance its claim as the ideological “king” of radical Islam.

President Trump announced that he wanted a say in selecting Iran’s next leader. Iran responded by installing the exact man Trump vetoed. Mojtaba Khamenei (though as of this writing, he has not appeared in public and is rumored to be wounded) is reportedly even more hard-line than his late father and in close league with the irgc. Will the U.S. and Israel kill him too? Will they keep liquidating successors until Iran installs a Persian Thomas Jefferson? Assassinations and bombings only get you so far. They don’t win wars (“Why American Tech Can’t Win Wars,” page 10).

What would win this war? President Trump’s description of victory has shifted a few times: simply preventing Iran from developing a nuke; encouraging the Iranian people to rise up and take control over their government and shape their own future; suggesting openness to working with a new leader in the current regime; demanding “unconditional surrender”; simply “wiping out” Iran’s military capacity; insisting on a “fair and just” leader who will “treat the United States and Israel well.”

Throughout, Iran has remained utterly unbowed. Its Revolutionary Guards said, “We are the ones who will determine the end of the war.”

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

KAVEH KAZEMI/GETTY IMAGES

JAMSHID BAIRAMI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

A fair and just leader who will treat the U.S. and Israel well would require nothing less than subjugating, if not reforming the hearts of, hundreds of thousands of hard-liners who control Iran’s military and clerical infrastructure. The Washington Post reported on a classified report by the National Intelligence Council (which synthesizes the analytical work of all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies) saying that even a large-scale assault on Iran wouldn’t do the job.

President Trump has shown himself more than willing to ignore such assessments from experts who have often discredited themselves. But this intelligence assessment agrees with history: Considerably larger and longer military operations didn’t bring favorable regime change to Vietnam, or to Afghanistan, or to Iraq, or to Libya.

Most importantly, this assessment agrees with Bible prophecy.

Who Decides the Outcome?

Men plot and plan, men strategize and war, men struggle to steer the course of events. They brawl and buck against oppressive regimes, then succumb to—or become worse than—the regimes they overthrow. They mix weapons, money, promises, deceit and faith in attempts to exert power and determine the future.

But they forget: “The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples” (Psalm 33:10; English Standard Version).

Pompous potentates believe they can simply impose their will on the world through muscle and might. But history repeatedly exposes the limits of man’s power. “There is no king saved by the multitude of an host: a mighty man is not delivered by much strength. An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength” (verses 16-17).

Who decides the outcome of wars? Scripture reveals that world leaders have power only because God has allowed it (Romans 13:1). His purposes prevail. “… I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. … I have made the earth, the man and the beast that are upon the ground, by my great power and by my outstretched arm, and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto me” (See Isaiah 46:9-10 and Jeremiah 27:5.)

(It is crucial to understand that this present evil world is not God’s world, but Satan’s. And while God is ultimately in charge, during this limited age He is letting mankind get the bitter taste of rejecting His rule. This profound biblical truth is explained in Mystery of the Ages.)

And God communicates to us in advance many of His purposes, and the outcomes of events—through His Word, in Bible prophecy. He then ensures what He has foretold unfolds as He has said.

This includes the outcomes and consequences of wars. “The horse is prepared for the day of battle, But deliverance and victory belong to the Lord” (Proverbs 21:31; Amplified).

This is perspective that Americans, Iranians and the world are missing! God trumpets that “the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance …” (Isaiah 40:15).

Even best-case scenarios offered by the most naively optimistic watcher of the Iran war pale in comparison to what God is planning and actively working out for the Iranian people, as well as for the American and Israeli peoples and the other peoples descended from ancient Israel. While this wicked world is the unhappy product of our sins, God in His mercy is about to bring a better world!

Few believe real justice and the transformation of men’s hearts is coming, but this is exactly what these and other tumultuous events are leading to. Bible prophecy says so!

God is going to rebuke the evils that envelop us. He is going to do it directly, very soon. Yet even in the world today, He uses other nations to execute a measure of that correction.

Iran is deeply, demonically immoral. It must be and will be corrected. Is God using America and Israel to do that to some degree even now? “[H]e removeth kings, and setteth up kings” (Daniel 2:21). In this war, some of these murderous, lecherous clerics and officials have already received their comeuppance for their sins.

The Trumpet has written for decades of the need to attack the Iranian “head of the snake” of terror. America and Israel have just done so, albeit in a belated and limited way. These nations’ power is truly fierce when used. You get a sense of what could be accomplished if America and Israel were blessed nations fighting for a righteous cause.

But America is not being blessed. We are cursed—because of our own sins, for which God must correct us (“Will America Win?”).

Unintended Effects

God is withholding true military victories from America today. He has permitted or overseen the rise of a power in Iran that has been a thorn in America’s side for nearly 50 years and even today is frustrating the U.S. despite its best efforts. Just as little Vietnam did half a century ago, and just as Afghanistan and Iraq did a generation ago.

Can you recognize a curse when you see it? America’s and Israel’s costly exertions to confront our enemies and solve problems, if they are not fruitless, are actually boomeranging and backfiring. Consider: The considerable firepower we directed at Iraq had the inadvertent effect of enabling Iran’s rise. Last June’s 12-day war apparently had the unintended effect of hastening the regime’s contingency plans for the ayatollah’s death. In the end, this present conflict will prove to have accomplished little that America and Israel hoped for and much that they did not: It will have further radicalized Iran, divided America, galvanized Europe, weakened nato, enriched Russia, united the Arab world, strained relations with Israel, intensified global resentment against the U.S., and surely accelerated still more prophecies (article, page 13).

America is spending its strength in vain, fulfilling a prophecy of curses for disobedience, plainly delivered to our ancestors by God through Moses in Leviticus 26:20.

God is teaching us an agonizing lesson, showing the fault of trusting in our decisionmakers and military capabilities, just as He warned our ancestors not to trust in their own counsels and chariots. He wants us to realize that our worst national security vulnerability is our sins. He seeks to bring us to repentance, to draw us back to Himself.

In fact, He is teaching the world lessons that will ultimately bring all nations out of ideologies, deceptions and sin and to the true knowledge of the true God!

Outcomes to Expect

What are the outcomes God is bringing about from this present war?

Prophecy shows that Iran will yet rise to provoke Europe into war. Further, it will do so after having built a new “axis of resistance,” including Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia, to replace what it has lost (see Daniel 11:42-43; this is explained in Mr. Flurry’s booklet The King of the South). And it will continue to find ways to attack Israel. This plainly indicates which of the two Irans—that of the mourning hard-line loyalists or of the reveling moderates—will dominate the immediate future.

By all appearances, the current war is making these outcomes less likely. But just watch and see how events ultimately work to bring about exactly what God has foretold. History shows this is often how the Bible’s sure prophecies mysteriously, miraculously unfold.

God often works circumstances to serve His purposes even when they seem directly opposed. His purposes likely include punishment for some evil men in Iran through these operations by America and Israel! But they definitely include correcting the U.S. and Israel.

Barring these nations’ repentance, God is not going to use America or Israel to end the Iranian regime. No, He will punish these nations with yet another military loss.

Iran is a long way from regime change. It will require far more than dropping bombs to destroy it. In fact, it will take “a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships”—a force that enters in and overflows, not just passes over (Daniel 11:40). That will not be led by America.

God prophesied through Daniel that He will use “the king of the north” to correct Iran. The Iran-led “king of the south” will push against this king—Catholic-led, German-dominated Europe—and provoke this shockingly violent response. The war Europe wages will be significantly more powerful and comprehensive than the one we are now witnessing. The present war vividly shows that nothing less will eliminate the king of the south.

This prophecy exposes the grim, imminent fate of this evil Iranian regime.

Think of Europe being capable of such ferocity, militarily, operationally, morally. It is hard to imagine, yet it too is prophecy that will be fulfilled! In fact, the Continent is acquiring this kind of power right now—with America’s blessing.

Astonishingly, many other prophecies warn that God is also going to use this fierce European empire to correct America and the other nations of modern Israel! This will involve world war and terror on a scale the world has never seen. You need to read this warning in The United States and Britain in Prophecy—we will gladly send you a free copy.

The Bible’s forecasts don’t end there: They show that God will then correct the king of the north with an attack from an incomprehensibly vast Asian army He calls “the kings of the east”! (Revelation 16:12; 9:16).

These catastrophic blows of world war will be the final acts of the age of man before Jesus Christ returns to make good on His promises to all mankind: to establish judgment and justice worldwide.

This is God’s beautiful pledge to the Iranian people and to all peoples. The day is coming soon when all the world’s tyrants will be deposed. God, Defender of the downtrodden, will deliver justice and liberty. “He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor” (Psalm 72:4). God is about to rout all the evil rulers over mankind and establish a kingdom ruled by the King of kings (Revelation 11:15). That kingdom will never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44).

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice …” (Proverbs 29:2). At that time, the celebrations won’t sprout up and then die. They will go on and on. The oppressed have hope. Even the oppressors have hope, once God brings them to repentance. He is about to destroy not only sinful men but the sin in men, and—whether in this life or in the prophesied resurrection—He will subject all men to the one and only good government there has ever been: the literal Kingdom of God on Earth.