When War Becomes Prophecy

What happens when military power starts quoting Revelation.

Pete Hegseth

I was terrified of the rapture as a kid.

And I don’t mean that in a cute, exaggerated way. I mean I lost sleep over it. I scanned the sky. I panicked when the house got too quiet.

It started when my Sunday school teacher thought it was appropriate to show a room full of elementary school kids the late-70s Christian propaganda film A Thief in the Night. If you’ve ever watched it as an adult, you know how painfully dated it is. The acting is…well I don’t know that you could even call it acting. The music is dramatic in that very specific low-budget way. The special effects are almost charmingly bad.

But when you’re eight years old in the 80s, long before today’s CGI, it is not charming. It is life-altering.

The premise is simple: people disappear. Chaos erupts. Those “left behind” face persecution, guillotines, and eternal damnation. It is filmed like a horror movie. Because that’s what it is. It was made for one purpose- to scare the hell out of you.

Here’s something you may resonate with. I constantly worried about Jesus coming back. If my parents were gone too long? Rapture. If I got to church and the parking lot was empty? Rapture. If I forgot to say my prayers before falling asleep? Rapture. I’m not kidding when I say I either thought, believed, or felt compelled to do all of those things.

As a teenager, my biggest prayer was embarrassingly specific: “God… please wait to send Jesus so that I can have sex. I don’t want to die a virgin.” That was it. That was my eschatological framework. I would even say out loud, “Jesus is coming back today,” because Scripture says no one knows the day or the hour. I thought I’d found a loophole. If I guessed it, surely it wouldn’t be today.

That’s what fear-based theology does to a kid. It makes you try to outwit God.

So when I read today that a combat-unit commander reportedly told non-commissioned officers that the Iran war is part of God’s plan to usher in the End Times and bring about Jesus Christ’s second coming, internal alarm bells started going off. According to journalist Jonathan Larson, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it has fielded more than 110 similar complaints from more than 40 units across at least 30 military installations.

Let that sink in for a second. Seriously…read that again.

People in positions of military authority telling subordinates that a war is part of God’s prophetic script.

Hear me when I say this: I do not want anyone’s end-times theology (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or otherwise) driving military and/or geopolitical decisions that will cost who knows how many lives. History is littered with the wreckage of leaders who believed they were accelerating God’s plan.

If you’re lucky enough to not know anything about rapture theology, here’s a quick primer: The idea of a secret, pre-tribulation rapture (believers suddenly disappearing before a seven-year tribulation) is not something the early church ever heard of much less taught. It became systematized in the 19th century, especially through the work of John Nelson Darby, a leader in the Plymouth Brethren movement. His framework, often called dispensational premillennialism, later spread widely through prophecy conferences and, eventually, through the Scofield Reference Bible in the early 1900s. That study Bible embedded Darby’s interpretive notes directly alongside Scripture, which gave the impression that this reading was simply “what the Bible says.”

By the time A Thief in the Night hit Sunday school classrooms in the 70s, it felt like settled fact in many evangelical circles.

But it isn’t the only way Christians have read apocalyptic texts. Not even close. For most of church history, Revelation was read symbolically, pastorally, as resistance literature under empire and not as a literal newspaper timeline for modern geopolitics.

That doesn’t mean everyone who believes in a rapture is dangerous. It does mean that when that belief hardens into a conviction that we can or should help God along through military might… we are in dangerous territory.

When you believe war might trigger Jesus’ return, war stops being an unspeakable tragedy and starts looking like a catalyst. And once that shift happens, human beings become chess pieces in a cosmic end-times board game.

That’s not theology.
That’s called fanaticism.

And can we just be brutally honest for a moment? The church helped create this environment. Decades of under-educated or poorly trained pastors confidently teaching complex apocalyptic literature as if it were a simple blueprint. Instead of giving historical and cultural contexts, these pastors created and parroted so called prophecy charts. They handed their people fear and certainty. And we all know that when fear solidifies that certainty, things are about to get dangerous.

Now, I want to be careful here. I genuinely believe good faith people can hold different strains of rapture theology and not participate in or support reckless government action. Not everyone who believes Jesus could return at any moment thinks we should force the issue through bombs and troop deployments. I know thoughtful, kind, serious Christians who hold a pre-tribulation view and would be horrified at the idea of using war to fulfill prophecy.

This isn’t about labeling every dispensationalist as a zealot.
It’s about drawing a bright line between private belief and public power.

Believe whatever you want about the timing of Christ’s return. That’s your right. But once that belief starts shaping military rhetoric, influencing command structures, or justifying geopolitical escalation, it is no longer just theology. It is policy. And policy costs lives.

As a kid, I was scared Jesus would come back before I got to grow up.
As an adult, I’m scared of leaders who think they can make him come back by lighting the world on fire.

Those are very different fears. But they come from the same root: a theology that mistakes speculation for certainty and apocalypse for strategy.

If Jesus returns, I trust he won’t need our missiles to clear the way.

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