Osama bin Laden is dead -- and there was much rejoicing?

I'm sure you have all read the headlines and heard about the crowd gathered by the White House to celebrate.

"Justice has been done," said the president in a dramatic late-night announcement at the White House.

Justice? What is the world's idea of justice?  This just makes me think that it's "eye for eye, tooth for tooth."  So many are REJOICING over the DEATH of someone -- but Christ is about life!  I want to dig deeper into the biblical understanding of justice. I'm certain that it does not include rejoicing over the death of a nonbeliever.

Here are some of my thoughts from just a few hours after hearing this news (all over Facebook).

I wasn't sure that they could know it was really his body, but my friend told me they confirmed it with DNA tests. 

Killing the leader of a terrorist organization isn't going to stop terrorism overnight.  That's like assassinating the president and expecting the country to fall to pieces immediately.  And it's not going to bring the dead soldiers back to life. 

President Obama's announcement has such an appeal to our emotions:  the imagery of 9/11, "empty seat at the dinner table," claiming to be the victims, and a sense of patriotic unity.  Maybe I'm a heretic, but this almost seems like propaganda.

This other part stuck out to me too:

So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. 

 Following Jesus usually includes some level of "threatened security."  Think of the believers in Central Asia, China, and Muslim countries, where believers can be killed for their faith.  This shows me that the American dream has gotten mixed into Christianity, where many value their comfort over following Christ.


Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live in a war state or dictatorship, and I understand that it is the military's role to defend the country.  What bothers me is this jubilation and patriotism stemming from a person's death.  bin Laden is (was) a human being just like any of us -- he laughed, he cried, he had family, he wrote poems (I just learned that today).

Recommended Reading: Tea with Hezbollah