A Christian Overview Of
The Present Conflict With Iran
By Frank Mceleny, Part 2 Many speak as though the exercise of power were itself the great evil, yet history teaches that the absence of ordered power often produces something darker still. Idealistic visions detached from reality offer little comfort to those who must live under tyranny. The world will not be governed by dreams but by forces strong enough to impose their will.
The Christian perspective is neither naïve nor despairing. Believers understand that they are in the world but not of it. They are called to see clearly and to judge soberly. Scripture does not promise that the present age will culminate in peace among nations. Rather, it teaches that the world will continue in conflict until the final kingdom of God is revealed. 
Consider one final example. George S. Patton was by many accounts a flawed man; proud, ambitious, and often harsh. Yet when his Third Army broke through German lines during the Battle of the Bulge and relieved the surrounded soldiers at Bastogne, the men who had endured the siege did not pause to examine his character or analyze his motives. They cared that relief had come. So it is in the affairs of nations. Men act from mixed motives, ambition, necessity, calculation, and sometimes principle.
The purposes behind intervention in places such as Iran may be complex and imperfect. Yet if the day comes when ordinary people find themselves delivered from the rule of harsh clerical tyranny, it is unlikely that they will trouble themselves greatly with the philosophical purity of those who brought about that change.
Christians therefore must learn to think with steady minds. This world will never be redeemed by political power, yet neither will it be preserved from evil by wishful thinking. We are called to live as strangers and pilgrims, seeing clearly the broken order around us while fixing our hope on a kingdom not made by human hands.
Used with permission of
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