The Padlocked Door in Tehran

In 2018, Iranian authorities raided an apartment in Tehran where nine Christians had gathered for worship. They confiscated Bibles, arrested the host, and padlocked the door. The dragon had struck.

But within weeks, the group was meeting again — in a different apartment, then another, then a home forty minutes outside the city. Each time authorities closed one door, believers found another place prepared for them. The church did not just survive. It multiplied. By 2020, three separate house churches had grown from that original nine.

Iran's underground Christian community has grown from roughly 500 believers in 1979 to an estimated one million today — one of the fastest-growing church movements in the world. The government imprisons pastors, bans Bibles, and threatens converts with death. And still the church grows.

This is the vision John saw in Revelation 12 — a great and terrible dragon poised to destroy, and yet utterly failing. The woman, the people of God, flees into the wilderness, but it is a wilderness where the Almighty Himself has prepared a place. The child destined to rule is snatched beyond the dragon's reach. And a voice thunders from heaven: "Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God."

The dragon is real. But so is the place prepared. And so is the victory already declared.