A Lesson From Old Yeller: Soft Hearts and Strong Hands
Celebrate freedom, not death. Seek salvation first, not violence. We wrestle not against flesh and blood — but sometimes justice and liberty require it.
By Mike Arnold
I need to talk to my own people for a minute.
As American and Israeli strikes hit Iran this week, I watched my social media feed fill up with Christians celebrating. Fist pumps. Memes. Emojis. “Glass the whole place.” “Turn it into a parking lot.” High-fiving each other like the Super Bowl just ended.
I understand the impulse. I share the relief. The Iranian regime is one of the most evil governments on earth. It has tortured, raped, and murdered its own people for forty-seven years. It has funded terror across the globe. It has pursued nuclear weapons to threaten the existence of millions. Something had to be done. Something is being done.
But I need to say this plainly: if you are a follower of Jesus Christ and you are celebrating human beings being blown to bits, something is wrong with your heart.
The Right Thing and the Sad Thing
There is a scene at the end of the movie Old Yeller that every American of a certain age carries somewhere deep.
A boy’s beloved dog — his companion, his protector, his best friend — has been infected with rabies. The dog didn’t choose the disease. The dog didn’t do anything wrong. But the infection has taken hold, and there is no cure. The animal that once guarded the family will now destroy it.
The boy does what must be done. He raises the rifle. He pulls the trigger. And he weeps.
That scene endures because it holds two truths at the same time: it was the right thing to do, and it was devastating. The boy doesn’t celebrate. He doesn’t high-five his little brother. He doesn’t post about it. He grieves — because something that should have been beautiful was destroyed by something evil, and the only way to protect the innocent was to end it.
That is the posture of a person with a functioning conscience. That is the posture Christians should have right now.
The Infection
Islam is the rabies. Not the people. The ideology.
The men being killed in Iranian military installations were, many of them, born into a system they did not choose. Raised under an ideology that was forced on them before they could think for themselves. Trained from childhood that this was the will of God. Some became true believers. Some became enforcers. Some were just surviving — doing what they were told because the alternative was prison or death.
None of that excuses their actions. The regime is guilty. Its enforcers are guilty. Justice demands a reckoning, and that reckoning is underway. I support it. I believe it is necessary. I believe President Trump is doing what must be done.
But I will not celebrate the death of image-bearers. Even corrupted ones. Even dangerous ones. Even ones who would kill me and everyone I love without hesitation. Because the moment I start enjoying the destruction of human beings — the moment death becomes entertainment — I have lost something that I cannot afford to lose.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem. The city that would kill Him. The people who would reject Him. He looked at the ones who were about to nail Him to a cross and said, “Father, forgive them — they don’t know what they’re doing.”
He did not say they were innocent. He did not say there would be no consequences. He said they didn’t know. And He grieved for them even as He accepted what had to happen.
That is the standard. I will not pretend I can meet it perfectly. But I refuse to abandon it entirely.
The Boy and the Dog
Here is what I celebrate: the liberation of the Iranian people.
I celebrate the women who are removing their hijabs for the first time in their lives. I celebrate the young people dancing in the streets — an act that was a crime for forty-seven years. I celebrate the millions who poured into the streets knowing they might die, because freedom was worth more than survival.
I celebrate the more than one million Iranians who have already found Jesus — in house churches, in secret, through dreams and visions, at the risk of everything. Iran has the fastest-growing church on earth. That is worth every hallelujah you can muster.
I celebrate the end of a regime that murdered thirty thousand of its own citizens in a single month. That hunted down the wounded in hospital beds. That dragged corpses from morgues to prevent families from mourning.
The liberation — yes. With all my heart, yes. But the killing? The bombs? The bodies? That is the rifle in the boy’s hands. It is necessary. It is just. And it is sad.
If you cannot hold both of those truths — if the justice makes you forget the sorrow, or the sorrow makes you forget the justice — then you are not seeing clearly.
The Other Lesson
There is another character in that scene who matters.
Amos — Travis’s little brother — tries to stop him. Tries to free Old Yeller. He doesn’t understand. He loves the dog and cannot accept that the dog has become a danger. In his innocence, in his compassion, he nearly gets everyone killed.
That is a portrait of every slimy politician, every progressive or prosperity pimp “pastor,” every ignorant left-wing activist, every naive citizen who flings open the doors to an ideology that has destroyed every society it has ever governed — and calls it tolerance.
They think they are being compassionate. They think they are being enlightened. They are Amos, trying to unleash a rabid animal on the family because they cannot bring themselves to face the truth about what it has become.
The boy who pulls the trigger is not cruel. He is the only one in the scene who loves enough to do what is hard. The one who tries to free the dog is not kind. He is the one whose “kindness” will get the family destroyed.
Real love — the hard kind, the kind that costs something — sometimes looks like a boy with a rifle and tears on his face.
Pray and Prepare
I believe the only way forward with radical Islam is binary: they are either saved or they are stopped. There is no third option where the ideology remains intact and everyone coexists in peace. Fourteen hundred years of unbroken history has settled that question.
We should all pray for their salvation. Fervently. Daily. With real faith and real tears. Because every jihadi on earth is a human being made in the image of God, infected with an ideology that degrades and destroys them before it destroys anyone else.
Here is where the analogy breaks down — and praise God that it does.
There is no man-made cure for rabies. Once the infection takes hold, from our human reasoning, violence appears the only solution. Old Yeller had to die because Travis had no other option.
But we serve a God who specializes in what humans cannot do. And He is doing it right now — across the Muslim world, at a scale that defies every natural explanation.
More than a million Iranians have come to Christ. Many through dreams and visions — Jesus appearing to people who have never held a Bible, never met a Christian, never heard the gospel preached. In a country where conversion is punishable by death, where Bibles in Farsi are contraband, where every missionary was expelled decades ago — God showed up anyway. House churches are multiplying. Iranian officials admit that youth are converting in Qom, the epicenter of Islamic scholarship. Fifty thousand of Iran’s seventy-five thousand mosques have closed.
And it’s not just Iran. Across the Muslim world — in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia — researchers document millions of Muslims encountering Jesus and leaving Islam. Approximately one in four Muslim converts reports that a dream or vision of Jesus played a role in their conversion. The accounts are remarkably consistent across cultures, continents, and languages: a figure in white, radiant, speaking peace, calling them by name.
There is a supernatural cure for this infection. It is not a program. It is not a policy. It is not a military operation. It is Jesus Himself, showing up uninvited in the darkest corners of the earth, doing what no human strategy could accomplish.
The fastest-growing church on earth is inside one of the most oppressive Islamic regimes on earth. God is not finished with the Muslim world. Not even close.
But we must also acknowledge that there comes a point — a specific, identifiable, morally clear point — when salvation is no longer possible for the ones holding the guns and giving the orders. When the rabies has taken full hold. When the dog that once could have been saved is now a threat to every living thing around it.
At that point, you do the needful. Sadly. Resolutely. With tears if you’re honest. And without apology, because the alternative is the destruction of the innocent.
That is where we are. Pray for the captives. Celebrate the freed. Grieve for the lost. And support the men and women who are doing the hardest thing in the world right now — the right thing — so that millions of Iranians might finally live without fear.
Don’t turn it into a meme. Don’t make it a punchline. Don’t act like this is a game.
A boy is holding a rifle. And he is crying.
That is the correct posture.
#EarthShaker
Mike Arnold is the author of EPICENTER: Nigeria, Radical Islam, and the War for Global Order (#1 Amazon Bestseller) and founder of Africa Arise International. He has made sixteen trips to Nigeria since 2010 and operates schools serving more than 600 children displaced by terrorism.