Judges 5:24-27
24 “Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, of tent-dwelling women most blessed.
25 He asked water and she gave him milk; she brought him curds in a noble's bowl.
26 She sent her hand to the tent peg and her right hand to the workmen's mallet; she struck Sisera; she crushed his head; she shattered and pierced his temple.
27 Between her feet he sank, he fell, he lay still; between her feet he sank, he fell; where he sank, there he fell—dead.”
In the time of the Judges, (1300 – 1100BC) Jabin, the King of Canaan had conquered the people of Israel and the head of his army was Sisera. When God raised up Deborah and Barak to defeat him, Sisera fled on foot and was led by God into the tent of Jael, who tricked him into falling asleep and then killed him by driving a tent peg through his head!
And the divinely-inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of the living God calls her, “most blessed of women” for the very reason of what she did to Sisera!
The death of Osama Bin-Ladin yesterday has brought about lots of questions and discussions among Christians as to how we should treat our enemies. We are told in Exodus 20:13, “You shall not kill” and Jesus said in Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies.”
With these two clear passages as a background, we must confront the question of whether or not it was right to take the life of Osama Bin-Ladin.
First, almost every contemporary version of Scripture translates Exodus 20:13 as, “You shall not murder.” While the Hebrew word used here simply means, “kill” the reason for translating it as “murder” is because there are several places in Scripture where it is not only permitted, but commanded, to take the life of certain individuals. Cf. Genesis 9:6; Exodus 21:12-29 (the very next Chapter after the Ten Commandments!) and Romans 13:1-5.
I believe that it is best understood as saying that we are not to kill human beings without biblical warrant which God gives to humans in certain situations such as mentioned above. By any reasonable standard, killing Bin-Ladin was a biblically-justified act. It certainly was an act of self-defense!
So, how then do we love our enemies? We love them by praying for their salvation, by attempting to get the gospel to them, and by showing mercy on them after they are captured or defeated. This is exactly what we have always done following the wars in which the United States was victorious.
Since godless people will answer to a holy and righteous God for every sin they commit, it is not a loving thing to stand idly by and allow them to continue to commit atrocity after atrocity!
Let us pray that God will bring about democracy in the Middle-East; let us pray that the gospel will be freely proclaimed there and that many will be saved. And let us pray that every godless mass-murdering tyrant like Bin-Ladin will be either be converted, or killed.
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