It's Thursday, May 23rd, 2024.

I'm Albert Buller and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian

worldview.

The death and funeral of Iran's president and other Iranian leaders has brought to American

attention and, frankly, global attention, the reality of the Iranian regime, and even as the headlines

right now have to do a Sunday's helicopter crash in a mountainous area of northern Iran in the condition of fog.

Even now, the big questions are what will be the future of Iran.

And we as Christians need to understand there's some very deep worldview issues here and it

requires us to go a little bit further back in the headlines. Indeed we need to go

back further in the headlines even than the term of President Ibrahim

Raisei. We need to go back to the Iranian Revolution that took place

in 1979.

We need to go back to ancient Persia in order to understand what we're dealing with here and why it is so consequential.

Now in order to gain some footing here let's think first of all of geography. The

geography puts Iran there in that critical portion of land in the east, in the border lands.

And in particular, you have many Asian countries to the south, and especially to the southeast,

and you have Russia very close as you look to the north and to the west.

And so interestingly as you look at a map of Iran these days a lot of it is the result of various military actions over the course

of the last several centuries, including ongoing conflict with Russia.

The Russian Empire and what vestiges of an empire were represented at the time by Iran.

But when I say vestiges of an empire, we need to remind ourselves that what is now the nation of Iran

that geography was at one point one of the most threatening and powerful

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