That’s Not Jesus. That’s Baal.
The heresy of Armageddon.
Jonathan Larsen broke a story yesterday that I can’t stop thinking about.
Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been flooded with complaints — over 110 of them, from more than 40 units, spread across at least 30 military installations, and every branch of the armed forces. The complaints are about commanders telling their troops that the Iran war is part of God’s divine plan. That it will trigger Armageddon. That Donald Trump was, in the words of one commander, “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
According to the complaint, he had a big grin on his face when he said it.
Let me say the first thing plainly: this is heresy.
Not in the sloppy way people use that word to mean “stuff I disagree with.” I mean heresy in the formal, classical sense: a teaching that contradicts the core logic of the faith it claims to represent.
What makes this heresy? It’s an inversion of the center. A perversion of the Church’s most ancient confession — Jesus is Lord — that makes Jesus not Lord at all, but a power to be summoned. A weapon to be wielded.
The same Jesus who is the Word, through whom all things were made, becomes a word we speak in order to compel him to appear. The same eschatological promise, that no one knows the day or the hour, not even the Son of Man, becomes something tied to the whim and will of political and military forces. The powers that be.
If the return of Jesus is something that can be manipulated like a cheat code, then what does that make Jesus?
Nothing. It makes him nothing.
This is paganism.
1 Kings 18. Elijah on Mount Carmel, facing off against the 450 prophets of Baal. And what are those prophets doing? They’re not just praying. They’re performing a sequence. Cry louder. Cut yourself. Dance the pattern correctly. Execute the ritual in the right order. If you perform the correct actions in the correct sequence, the god must respond. The god is a mechanism.
Elijah mocks them. Explicitly. “Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s on a journey. Maybe he’s taking a shit.”
There is an eerie similarity between the prophets of Baal and the command briefings Larsen reports: a secret sequence. Israel plus Iran plus the right military action equals Armageddon. If the chosen actors execute the sequence correctly, Jesus must return.
But the God of Scripture is not Baal. God is not a mechanism.
Blood-and-soil paganism couched in the language of Christendom has given theological cover to some of the worst actors in history. The framework is not new, and it maps with uncomfortable precision onto the premillennial dispensationalist eschatology that requires a bloody Middle East conflict for the completion of history.
At the risk of running headlong into Godwin’s Law, I have to name this framework’s most well-known practitioner. The Third Reich justified cruelty in the name of destiny. A sacred historical sequence. A chosen vanguard appointed to enact it. A cosmic omelette requiring a few million broken eggs.
The United States is not Nazi Germany, and these military commanders are not SS goons. But the spirit of the age is at work in the language they are using to justify and even celebrate an armed conflict that will certainly have unintended consequences and collateral damage, and will almost certainly NOT hasten the day of our blessed hope.
When you tell soldiers that a war must be bloody in order to fulfill the cosmic script, and commanders greet that prospect with a grin, you have removed moral accountability from everyone giving orders. Dissent becomes not just wrong but illegible. You’re either one of the ones who can see the truth, or you’re not.
And if you are among the initiated who can read the signs, then the people who will bleed are not people with lives and families and futures. They are variables in an eschatological equation. Their deaths have been pre-authorized by God.
But here’s the deeper problem with this logic of eschatological inevitability. A problem that exposes the framework as having nothing to do with the will of God expressed in the Biblical witness and fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.
A God who requires death to complete history is not a God who can enter death with us. Those are two different Gods. And only one of them can find you in the dark.
Three years ago, I buried my son Titus. I know what it is to sit in the dark and need God to actually be there, not as a concept, not as a historical force, but as the one who holds you close. And I am telling you: the god those commanders are preaching cannot find you in that room — that room with nothing but your son’s coffin and a box of used tissues.
Titus wasn’t — isn’t — a pawn in Bergman’s eternal chess match. There is no secret providence that required his death so the sequence could complete. The same is true of the six U.S. soldiers who have died so far as I write this. The same is true of the 175 civilians killed when bombs fell on an Iranian girls’ elementary school. The same is true of the countless tragedies unfolding every day that we know nothing about.
If Jesus is fully God and fully human, if Jesus is the fullest expression of God’s self-giving love, the fullest expression of God’s ideal for humanity, the place where the divine and the human are united in a single person, the place where God and humanity are reconciled, as the old Christmas hymn says, then how could that same God require the blood of children to consummate the kingdom?
There is a monstrosity to that which defies every Christian virtue, defies everything we understand about the God of the Bible revealed in the Word made flesh. All of this death, all this destruction, all these foreclosed futures — all of it is somehow pleasing to God because it is necessary for Jesus to return? Does God really expect me — us — to believe that the peaceable kingdom requires immeasurable violence before it can come into being?
No. The true God could not. The true God would not. Which means the god this theology of Armageddon teaches is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
This is not the faith once delivered to the saints.
This is what happens when the faith gets hollowed out and filled with power. What’s being preached at those briefings is a functional atheism. It doesn’t believe in a God who acts freely, who grieves with those who grieve, who meets us in our suffering, who raised Jesus in a way that broke the logic of empire rather than fulfilling it. It believes in a mechanism that responds to the right inputs. It disguises that mechanism in Christian vocabulary, but the god hiding underneath is Baal.
The actual tradition, the one that runs from the garden to the Abrahamic promise to the Hebrew prophets, through the apostles and the patristic writers, through Augustine through the Reformers through Wesley, through Barth and Cone and you and me, has always insisted that God is sovereign, not compellable. That history is not a script we perform. That the return of Christ is not an event we can engineer.
A god that is an instrument of history cannot be the ground of history. Creator ex nihilo means prior to all contingency. Outside all sequences. The God who becomes human in the person of Jesus Christ refused to call down legions of angels. He went to the cross. Went into the darkness. Came out the other side in a way nobody predicted.
That God I know. That God I have met in the worst rooms of my life.
My God isn’t Baal. It’s Jesus.
Jonathan Larsen’s full reporting, including the NCO’s email and the complete MRFF statement, is at jonathanlarsen.substack.com. He is an independent journalist and former executive producer at MSNBC. His work is reader-supported.
So thankful for your words! Today Hedgseth talked about “nothing but death and destruction coming from the sky”……and “we are winning”. …. and he was almost giddy. I can hardly listen. I grow sick. I question how such a heartless human came to be. And I know this very line of thinking you describe is part of who he is. “No mercy” he said. Mercy on his soul!