The Gospel Briefing — Wed, July 15, 2026: Blanche on the Hot Seat, Iran Strikes Resume

This is The Gospel Briefing. I'm Charles King. Today... the man Donald Trump wants running the Justice Department faces the Senate, and a federal judge has already accused him of misleading Congress. American bombers are back over Iran. And a quiet piece from Christianity Today asks a question most of us are too busy to ask... what does it actually mean to grow old well? Headlines... Heartbeat... Hope. Let's get into it. Todd Blanche is set to be grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee today. He's the acting Attorney General of the United States. He was Donald Trump's personal defense attorney during the New York hush money trial. And he is trying to get confirmed to lead the Justice Department on a permanent basis. The road just got a lot harder. On Monday, a federal judge in Florida — Judge Kathleen Williams — issued what ABC News called an "extraordinary" order. She lambasted the Trump administration and the Justice Department for using her court to legitimize a settlement she says never would have survived judicial review. The settlement in question... an Anti-Weaponization Fund. Ten billion dollars. Set up after Trump's personal attorneys sued the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. One day after that settlement was announced, Blanche signed a separate document giving Trump and his family immunity from IRS investigations of all their past tax returns. Let that sit for a moment. Judge Williams has now referred Trump's attorneys for potential sanctions. And she sent her ruling to the State Bar of New York for possible disciplinary proceedings against Blanche himself. She said his testimony to Congress about how the settlement was executed may have been... misleading. Democrats are unanimous against him. Which means Blanche needs every Republican on the committee. And two of them — Cornyn of Texas and Tillis of North Carolina — are undecided. Here's the biblical frame. Proverbs 21:1 says the king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord. God turns it wherever He will. But the very next chapter — Proverbs 22:1 — reminds us... a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches. And favor is better than silver or gold. That verse is written for the person seeking power. Reputation matters. Integrity matters. Not because the world honors it. It often doesn't. But because God does. Christians on the left and the right can disagree about who should sit in that chair. What Scripture will not let us disagree about is that whoever sits there answers first to God. Overnight, U.S. Central Command completed another round of strikes against Iran. CENTCOM called it a seven-hour wave. Dozens of military targets hit near the Strait of Hormuz and along Iran's coast. The same day, the United States reimposed a naval blockade against vessels traveling to and from Iranian ports. Jordan's military reported intercepting three ballistic missiles that entered its airspace from Iran early Wednesday morning. No casualties. Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, says Iran has attacked seven commercial ships over the past week. Nearly a dozen civilian crew members are dead, injured, or missing. President Trump told Fox News the strikes will continue until — his words — "I say it's enough." He threatened Iran's bridges and power plants as soon as next week. And when asked whether a ground campaign was on the table... he did not rule it out. Peace talks, remarkably, are still ongoing. A memorandum of understanding was signed in June. And yet the bombs keep falling. Here's what I keep coming back to. James chapter 4 opens with a question... what causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? James is not writing about geopolitics. He's writing about the human heart. And he's saying every war on the outside starts as a war on the inside. Pray for the civilian sailors. Pray for the servicemembers on both sides. Pray for wisdom for leaders. And pray with the honest recognition that lasting peace is not something a treaty produces. It's something only Christ produces when He returns. The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has now crossed a grim threshold. Two thousand and eleven confirmed cases. Seven hundred and fifty-four deaths. Government data released overnight. Congolese authorities say it is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record. Seven hundred and fifty-three people are in isolation or in the hospital. Three hundred and sixty-six have recovered. The World Health Organization says at least eighty percent of new cases are emerging from unknown chains of transmission. The virus is spreading faster than health workers can trace it. I include this story because I don't want us to look away. It is easy, in a news cycle dominated by American politics and Middle East strikes, to let a headline like this slide past. Two thousand people in Congo. That feels far away. It isn't. Jesus, in Matthew 25, said that when we clothed the naked and visited the sick, we did it to Him. He didn't ask whether the sick person was our neighbor by geography. He assumed our neighbors are wherever suffering is. You may not be flying to Bunia this week. But you can pray by name for the medical missionaries there. You can support Christian relief organizations doing the tracing work. You can refuse to be a person for whom African suffering is background noise. A few more quick briefs. Twenty-six Meta employees are suing the company. They allege Meta used artificial intelligence to select workers for layoffs — and that the system disproportionately targeted people on medical, parental, or family leave. Proverbs 11:1 says a false balance is an abomination to the Lord. Whatever algorithm you build, God still weighs the scale. Iraq's anti-corruption authorities seized eight hundred and twenty-five pounds of gold and tens of millions of dollars in cash from lawmakers and government officials. First Timothy 6:10 hasn't aged a day. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. One person is dead and three are missing after a boat carrying twenty people sank near Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay on Tuesday. Pray for the families. Pray for the Coast Guard crews still searching. And Captain Sully Sullenberger — the pilot who landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River in 2009 — has revealed an Alzheimer's diagnosis. A reminder that the hands that saved one hundred and fifty-five lives still belong to a mortal man. All of us do. Christianity Today ran a piece this week titled "Old People Aren't Doomed to Misery." The writer's church prays every week for their elderly members — dementia, broken hips, robocalls. And it made me think of today's verse. Psalm 92, verses twelve through fourteen. The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord. They still bear fruit in old age. They are ever full of sap and green. Confirmation hearings. Bombing campaigns. Outbreaks. Layoffs. It all feels urgent. It all feels loud. But the person growing quietly greener in their ninth decade, still bearing fruit in a nursing home chapel... that person is closer to the center of what God is doing than any headline today. Thanks for listening to The Gospel Briefing. If today's episode helped you think more clearly, send it to one friend who's feeling worn down by the news. The headlines will change tomorrow. The One who holds them will not. I'll see you then.