War With Iran? A Blood Moon on Purim? For Some Christian Influencers, That Can Mean Only One Thing: The End Times

On Sunday, two days after President Donald Trump ordered the start of “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran, John Hagee, the 85-year-old televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), delivered a sermon at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Standing in front of a banner that read “God’s Coming… Operation Epic Fury,” Hagee thanked Trump, “whose wisdom and courage has crushed the enemies of Zion.” He then quickly pivoted to a familiar refrain for anyone who — like me — has followed Hagee’s career since he founded CUFI in 2006: that the American and Israeli attack on Iran will trigger a series of biblically prophesied events, including the invasion of Israel by a Russian-led army, and Jesus’s eventual defeat of the Antichrist at the Battle of Armageddon.

For decades, Hagee has argued that he loves and supports the Jewish people and the state of Israel; that it is a biblical imperative that America support Israel, including going to war on its behalf; and that Israel will be the site of the ultimate showdown between good and evil, at which Jews will burn or convert, and after which Jesus will rule the world for one thousand years from a throne on the Temple Mount.

Hagee also has spent decades arguing that Iran is central to this sequence of events, leaning heavily on the story of the Jewish holiday of Purim, celebrated this week. The holiday commemorates the biblical story of the heroism of Queen Esther, the secretly Jewish wife of the Persian king, who saves the Jews from an extermination plot by the villainous court official Haman. For Hagee, the Purim story is not a lesson about the evils of religious hatred and genocidal ambitions; it is a biblical guide for attacking modern-day Iran (Persia) to save Israel from the wicked designs of its leaders. For Hagee, who has long been close to Republican officials and lawmakers, real-life occurrences are relevant primarily as harbingers of biblically prophesied events or signs from God about his divine intentions. 

President Barack Obama’s negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal, triggered Hagee, a leading opponent of the deal, to add some new twists to his prophetic claims. In 2014, Hagee published a book, and made an accompanying documentary, about the “four blood moons,” or a tetrad of lunar eclipses of a full moon that occurred on Passover and Sukkot in 2014 and 2015. The coinciding of a full moon on Jewish holidays is commonplace, since the Jewish calendar is a lunar one. But for Hagee, “God is using the sun, moon, and stars to send signals to mankind,” and the blood moon is a sign from God that something significant is going to happen regarding Israel. While blood moons, or lunar eclipses, are fairly regular, such a tetrad on Jewish holidays had only previously occurred around the Spanish Inquisition, the founding of the modern state of Israel, and the 1967 Six-Day War, things that Hagee naturally saw as prophetically significant — for Jews and for Israel. 

Muslims, on the other hand, are at worst an existential enemy and at best collateral damage. Reviewing the Four Blood Moons documentary, the religion writer Michael Shulson observed, “Throughout the film, it’s Muslims — swarthy, disorganized, kaffiyeh-clad troops — who antagonize the Jews in most dramatic reenactments. And it’s Muslims — ISIS, and especially Iran — whom the film’s experts suggest will be the wicked actors in this next blood moon drama. A brief section citing the shared Abrahamic heritage of Jews and Christians entirely omits Islam, the third Abrahamic faith.”

  Hagee’s blood moon prophecies have become enormously popular in evangelical circles. The Christian Broadcasting Network cited them this week in its coverage of the war. An “analysis” the network published on its website acknowledged that the blood moons might be a coincidence, but that “doesn’t mean there also wasn’t an intentional message that was pre-ordained from the time God set the sun, moon, and planets in motion in Genesis 1.” The blood moons, along with the war, could be a sign of the end-times.

Hagee may be the godfather of Iran-related prophecies, but prophets echoing them have become commonplace. Charisma magazine, a leading source for charismatic and Pentecostal Christians whose publisher has written several hagiographic books about Trump, this week featured “prophetic voice Joseph Z.,” who posted “a powerful new livestream” about the convergence of Operation Epic Fury, Purim, and the lunar eclipse. Joseph Z. claimed “it’s likely we’re going to see revival in Iran” — meaning a Christian revival — and “if you don’t understand that we’re living in biblical prophecy right now, you need to really begin to open your Bible.” Another prophet, Amanda Grace, also was featured on the magazine’s website for a broadcast in which she maintained that the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with other Iranian government officials, mirrored the death of Haman in the book of Esther. “Hidden within Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is Haman,” she added as supposedly potent evidence of the biblical importance of these events.

Christian Zionists frequently cite Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, along with his move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, as major first term accomplishments. Now they have the war they’ve long been advocating, the war they’ve long claimed will set off the end-times and the return of Jesus. When it doesn’t, and just leaves senseless death, destruction, and bloodshed, there will likely be a new prophecy that keeps the prophetic industry in business, and sanctifies Trump of responsibility for any of it.