Bin Laden is dead. This throws up all sorts of questions for me. There is hysterical joy among American students, Obama and Cameron spoke with dignity. But as Cameron pointed out, we will need to be particularly vigilant in the next few weeks. There are bound to be reprisals. And as a Christian, his death throws up questions of what happens when Bin Laden meets his Maker. I don’t believe anyone goes to Hell. Yes, philosophically, there has to be a ‘place’ for those who choose to reject God if we have free will (and we do) And God is present in each one of us. As Jesus says, if we give anyone a cup of water in his name we give it to him. And as an aside, the Gospel story says ‘when did we give you water’ so we won’t even be aware we’ve done it. But the reverse of this is that any time we harm anyone it’s counted as harming God. (Words aren’t adequate here). Anyway, forget this harming of God. It is horrific to harm anyone, let alone the thousands of people Bin Laden harmed. So here’s this man who was responsible for such evil, terror and sorrow. And now he has met his Maker.

Bear with me, but John gets awful pain that no painkiller will touch. The next drug up would be morphine. He often says that he doesn’t care what anyone has done, no one deserves to have pain like that for eternity. I believe him.

So how do I square an all-loving all-forgiving God with a God of justice? You can’t split God up. His love is his forgiveness is is justice. It’s all one. And the justice is more for the victims. Not retribution, but some form of redress. Of putting wrongs right.

The way I try to think of it is, that when Bin Laden meets God he is so overwhelmed (no words adequate again) by God’s love and beauty, that his regret and remorse and loathing of himself must be so great that this is Hell for him. And he can’t go back and change anything, so he will have to ‘live’ with this. So this is Hell, but I just can’t think that someone could be held in this hopeless state forever. Somehow, God’s love and beauty shines through, and overcomes the evil. But I’m so aware of the thousands of victims whose need for justice mustn’t be ignored. I think they might have to wait for their own heaven, and in the meantime live in their own temporal hell if they are still alive on earth.