Latest / The Daily Article / A biblical reflection on the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Transcript
- 0:02[SPEAKER_00]: It's Monday, March the 2nd, 2026, and this is Denison Forum's Daily Article Podcast.
- 0:08[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome!
- 0:09[SPEAKER_00]: Today's Daily article is authored by co-founder Dr. Jim Denison, and narrated by yours truly, Chris Elkins.
- 0:17[SPEAKER_00]: As Operation Epic Fury continues, Iran and its proxies are expanding their response as they fire missiles at Israel and the Arab States.
- 0:26[SPEAKER_00]: The US Central Command announced yesterday that three US service members have been killed in the conflict, and at least five others seriously wounded.
- 0:35[SPEAKER_00]: However, it stated that it remains steadfast in its, quote, relentless campaign to defend the American people by eliminating threat from the Iranian regime.
- 0:46[SPEAKER_00]: At the top of this threat list was Iran's supreme leader, Ali Kamine.
- 0:51[SPEAKER_00]: When news broke Saturday that he had been killed, one person in Tehran responded, I think the Middle East has become a better place.
- 0:59[SPEAKER_00]: Even the world has become a better place now.
- 1:02[SPEAKER_00]: A video shows teenagers at a school dancing and chanting over the strikes by U.S. in Israeli forces, one says high love Trump, an Iranian lawyer living in Los Angeles said, it is not an invasion, it is a liberation.
- 1:17[SPEAKER_00]: My support is 100% behind this, in quote, while large crowds in the cities across Iran celebrated the news of Common Ace Death, Iranian State TV showed mourners in Tehran packed into a square dressed in black with many of them weeping.
- 1:33[SPEAKER_00]: The Iranian government has declared 40 days of mourning and seven days of public holiday across the nation to commemorate Common Ace Death.
- 1:41[SPEAKER_00]: We can be grateful that he can no longer terrorize his own people and the world.
- 1:45[SPEAKER_00]: And there is another dimension of Kamine's death that we should consider as well one that far transcends the geopolitics of the moment.
- 1:54[SPEAKER_00]: Ali Kamine was born on July 17, 1939, the second of eight children.
- 2:00[SPEAKER_00]: His father was a Shiite cleric of Umbalmeans.
- 2:03[SPEAKER_00]: He studied for six years under Ruala Komeni, the cleric who went on to found the Islamic Republic in 1979.
- 2:11[SPEAKER_00]: Common A was proficient in Arabic, translating the works of the Islamist Said Kutab, whose insistence that Islam must return to its pure roots, as influenced many generations of jihadists.
- 2:24[SPEAKER_00]: When Common A joined his mentor's protests against the U.S.-backed shop, beginning in 1963, he was arrested repeatedly and spent three years in prison.
- 2:34[SPEAKER_00]: After the revolution, he served in a variety of posts under Comainee.
- 2:39[SPEAKER_00]: He narrowly escaped death in 1981, when a bomb planted by an Iranian militant group exploded near him, severely injured, he lost the use of his right arm and suffered damage to his vocal cords.
- 2:51[SPEAKER_00]: He was elected president in 1981 and again in 1985.
- 2:55[SPEAKER_00]: The day after Komeni died in 1989, Iran's assembly of experts elected him as a supreme leader.
- 3:02[SPEAKER_00]: In the year since, he has appointed the commanders of the Armed Forces, the nation's Supreme Judicial Authority, the Director of Media.
- 3:11[SPEAKER_00]: and members of the Guardian Council, Iran's top supervisory body.
- 3:15[SPEAKER_00]: He was also the driving force behind Iran's quest for nuclear power and mini-a-ledge, nuclear weapons.
- 3:23[SPEAKER_00]: Common aid repeatedly terrorizes his own citizens who protested his regime, most horrifically last January, when his security forces massacred thousands of Iranians.
- 3:33[SPEAKER_00]: He supported Proxys across the Middle East in their terrorism against Israel and the West.
- 3:38[SPEAKER_00]: praising Hamas for its brutalities on October 7th.
- 3:42[SPEAKER_00]: He was convinced that his regime was necessary to prepare for the return of the body, the Maslamasaya, and was therefore willing to do whatever was needed for it to survive.
- 3:52[SPEAKER_00]: As a scholar,
- 3:53[SPEAKER_00]: who wrote extensively on him said, he governed Iran as a cause, not a country.
- 4:00[SPEAKER_00]: Common A was clearly willing to deceive negotiators regarding his nuclear ambitions, perhaps employing the doctrine of Tequia that permits Muslims to lie to non-Muslims for the purpose of expanding Islam.
- 4:14[SPEAKER_00]: If he had developed nuclear weapons, the threat of mutual deterrence would not have deterred him.
- 4:19[SPEAKER_00]: As the Princeton professor and Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis noted, Iranians perishing in war did not concern commoner and his fellow clerics who believed they quote, would be doing them a favor by giving them a free past to heaven, in quote, as martyrs in a jihad.
- 4:36[SPEAKER_00]: For these reasons, the continued existence of his regime posed a continued threat to his own people into the world at large.
- 4:45[SPEAKER_00]: So far as we know, Ali Kaminei died as a Shiite Muslim.
- 4:49[SPEAKER_00]: As such, he would have rejected the divinity of Jesus since the Qur'an states that Jesus was no more than a messenger in the Surah on 5 verse 75 and quotes Kaminei as saying, surely, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him alone from Surah 19 verse 36.
- 5:07[SPEAKER_00]: However, the Bible teaches in Romans 5 verse 1 that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
- 5:14[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus said of Himself in John 14 verse 6, "'I am the way and the truth and the life.'
- 5:20[SPEAKER_00]: No one comes to the Father, except through me.'"
- 5:22[SPEAKER_00]: This is why the apostles declared in Acts 4 verse 12, there is salvation in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
- 5:34[SPEAKER_00]: Some so-called Christian universalist counter with the claim that all are saved through the atoning death of Christ, whether they know it or not.
- 5:42[SPEAKER_00]: This claim could be illustrated by the polio vaccine, which protects those who receive it, though they may not know of Jonah Salk's work to develop it.
- 5:50[SPEAKER_00]: But the vaccine must nonetheless be received to be effective.
- 5:55[SPEAKER_00]: We must similarly trust in Christ personally to experience salvation through him.
- 6:00[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus said of himself in John 3,
- 6:04[SPEAKER_00]: is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he is not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
- 6:11[SPEAKER_00]: As a result, people who reject the salvation found only in Christ will spend all of eternity separated from God.
- 6:19[SPEAKER_00]: Just as Paul and Jesus grieved for their unbelieving Jewish brethren noted in Luke 19, verse 41, and Romans 9, verses 2 and 3, we should grieve for the lost and seek their salvation with urgency.
- 6:31[SPEAKER_00]: If a nefarious enemy convinced us that cancer did not exist, wouldn't we be more likely to die from it?
- 6:38[SPEAKER_00]: Satan has convinced our secularized culture that there is no such thing as sin, thus we cannot be sinners and do not need the salvation or a Savior.
- 6:48[SPEAKER_00]: He has similarly convinced many that hell is not real, and thus they should have no fear of going there.
- 6:54[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you and I know better in principle, do we know better in practice?
- 6:58[SPEAKER_00]: A seminary professor once told me that Christians who do not actively share their faith are practicing universalists.
- 7:06[SPEAKER_00]: He theorized that they must not believe what Jesus said about the necessity of faith in himself.
- 7:11[SPEAKER_00]: If they truly believed that the lost people they know would spend eternity in hell, they would do whatever they could to help them trust in Christ.
- 7:20[SPEAKER_00]: Pastor, Alistair Bag claimed there is no greater communication of love than proclaiming the gospel of God.
- 7:28[SPEAKER_00]: Do you agree?