What is there to learn?

Don't know how many conclusions I can draw from what we did. There is one that comes to mind. Men like Osama Bin Laden force our nation to seek, train, and equip men and women to be killers. In God's world, that wouldn't be.
We talk about people in uniform who make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. I honor them. For what they do for us, there is not enough gratitude that I can show. But we don't talk so much about the penultimate, the second to ultimate sacrifice.
Osama Bin Laden and those like him have forced us, as a nation, to ask our soldiers to commit the sin of killing on our behalf. We train our people, we impose the most stringent code of conduct and justice that we can to minimize what they are being asked to do, but we ask them, permit them, require them to end life.
And I believe that, however justified, that scars the soul, no matter how evil that other one was. Let us thank them, bless them, surround them with all the grace and healing we can muster for what we ask them to do. Let us bring Jesus as close as we can to them.
We can be grateful for what they have done. We can breathe a little easier that a bad man is dead. But let us never forget the sacrifice we ask them to make in taking that most precious gift of our Lord, the gift of life, to make us all safer.

This Joyful Eastertide . . .

We killed Osama Bin Laden. By we, I mean Americans. $27 million dollars in reward money are set to be collected. . . unless our Seal team has something in their contract that would prevent it.

Best argument against taking Bin Laden alive: How many Americans would have been snatched around the world and beheadings begun, demanding his release?

Most disturbing image for me personally: Americans turning out into the streets to cheer, very much like our Arab brothers and sisters in the Middle East when something blows up over here.

Did we actually change things? Yes. Osama Bin Laden was the boogeyman, the defiant one against the military might and intelligence capabilities of the most powerful nation in the world. His was the face that frightened us at night.

How much did the Pakistanis know? Well, he needed dialysis a number of times a week. Was that available at the villa or did he travel to a clinic?

Why'd we bury him so quickly, and at sea? Was it to perpetrate a fraud? I don't believe so. No country wanted the body. Apparently it was offered to Saudi Arabia. And we showed the decency of proper respect and the carrying out of Islamic religious requirements, even if he didn't.

So what next? How should the church react? How should Christians react?

Sunday, I am preaching on Isaiah 2, beating our swords into plowshares. Thus is the Kingdom of God where peoples do not rise up against peoples. It is the dream that we, as people of Jesus Christ, are seeking to build. Our prayer should be always that although we equip our young men and women to fight and kill in the military, that they never have to be called upon to do so.

And when they must, we must in turn support them, but also repent that we have had to break God's command "Thou shalt not kill", even though justified, even though necessary, even though it is the best thing in these circumstances, and pray for the day when the Kingdom comes and we see God's will done as laid out in the first verses of Isaiah 2.

We needed to kill Osama Bin Laden. We have to repent and ask forgiveness for what we needed to do, praying that we will not need to again.