Perspective.
I had this crazy thought the other night as I watched the news come pouring in – I turned to my wife and said:
Wouldn’t it be crazy if we saw Osama Bin Laden in heaven?
She shrugged. She already knew the correct answer while I needed to wrestle with it a bit (like I always do).
The “correct” response to Osama’s death is one that is as complex as the God that we serve and as complex as we humans beings are. Scripture paints a contradiction, at least to human cognition, that our God is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful – at the exact same time.
He’s also apparently infinitely loving towards his creation while infinitely jealous of the things that we choose to worship instead of himself. He’s a paradox wrapped in an enigma, shrouded by mystery amidst a riddle.
And yet He’s made Himself very real and very knowable. Incredible.
We want to try to love the person of Osama and curse his acts at the exact same time and yet we find it nearly impossible to do. We want to compartmentalize his person and his acts. Separate the sin from the sinner, as many say. Regardless, there is no heart’s balance here, no sturdy peace. It’s not possible.
But it’s there where I find the most comfort: That I serve and follow a God of the impossible, of impossibility. I want to believe that a God who could make the dead rise could also turn the hearts of murderers. In fact, he did with some of our most glorious biblical heros, David of the Old and Paul of the New. The former is much harder than the latter, right?
For some the idea is impossible to even entertain let alone march toward an answer to the question of whether we’ll see him in heaven. A last minute, before-the-bullets-pierced-his-body-coming-to-jesus-moment? A 10 year process of finding the ultimate truth? Who knows. Who knows.
But I still want to believe it’s possible. Why? Because a God who can do the impossible (or the seemingly impossible, like bringing a mass murderer to Himself) is more than capable of entering into my life and healing the pain and hurt that I struggle with every single day.
I want to know a God that is everything that I’m not and yet is everything that is perfect in my potential; Christ is what I want.
My wife and I were having that same discussion last night.
I think you had a little slip-up while typing this. You used “Obama” instead of “Osama” in the 4th paragraph:
“We want to try to love the person of Obama and curse his acts at the exact same time and yet we find it nearly impossible to do. We want to compartmentalize his person and his acts. Separate the sin from the sinner, as many say. Regardless, there is no heart’s balance here, no sturdy peace. It’s not possible.”
Anyway, this is a tough topic to deal with and I know I thought about it for a while after hearing about the news.
fixed. i knew i’d do something stupid like that. thanks.
I’m not from the USA, and have not been directly affected by anything that Osama has masterminded, so I probably find it much easier to hope that he found truth in Christ.
While it seems unlikely in our own minds, we don’t know the mind and hand of God. He is beyond human comprehension or understanding.
I liked this post a lot and felt that it is something that we must always be mindful of because God can redeem everyone, even those we choose to hate.
Also it made me laugh when I read this: “We want to try to love the person of Obama and curse his acts at the exact same time and yet we find it nearly impossible to do.” Reminds of the video of the news guy proclaiming that President Obama had died.
From what I heard, there were a lot of people that made this mistake…haha…even me.
In talking with my wife yesterday, I don’t know how many times I made that mistake. I find that referring to him as OBL makes it a lot easier to refrain from making the same mistake again. 
The only thing that even allows me to think that this is even remotely possible is that only God knows his heart. The only thing that would prevent OBL from being in heaven is whether or not he committed the unpardonable sin – which is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit…In laymen’s terms, to blaspheme the Holy Spirit is the complete rejection of Jesus Christ.
That being said, OBL was a muslim, a sworn enemy of Israel – God’s chosen people. Whether this constitutes blasphemy of the Holy Spirit or not, is mere conjecture; thankfully, conjecture will not get one into heaven, nor does it damn one to hell.
Regardless of whether he is in hell or not, I’m just glad that I server a risen Savior. I’m also glad that I can say I’m saved, born again and on my way to heaven, which is more than I can say for him.
Ha! Got my gravatar details wrong again…lol
I liked everything about this post.
From C. S. Lewis on forgiveness:
So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is any-way possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
John, I’m so glad to read a post such as this. I’ve seen far too many Christians posting to Twitter and Facebook something along the lines of “burn in hell, Osama.” Really? Since when are we supposed to take great joy in seeing someone “rot in hell?”
I did a post yesterday on Osama and as I wrote it, what you posted here kept swirling around in my mind. Am I glad the man is gone? A little. I’m not going to rest any easier. I mean, the next guy is probably just waiting in the wings to take his place.
No, I take comfort in that God is still on the throne no matter what. I don’t take any pleasure in bin Laden having been killed any more than God does.
And like your post says, bin Laden has been relatively quiet recently. What if for the past several months or years God spoke to him and he started coming to believe in Jesus? How do we know this didn’t happen? And if it did, how would that change how we feel about his death?
This is just great John. It is like you have been in my head the past couple of days…
Wow John, great post. You know, my reaction was the same when I heard the news. To Americans, it’s a victory, and I suppose if I’m honest with myself, I felt a little bit of that too. But more than anything, I found myself praying and thinking about how God sees it. He loves all of His children…regardless of Bin Laden’s terrible acts on this earth, God loves him and longs to draw him to Himself. And while we can’t possibly know if this man ever experienced a relationship with Christ here on this earth, we as Christians should hope and pray that he did.
I enjoy reading your posts on theology John. You’re an excellent writer too! I’ll be comin’ back here…