I don’t remember the exact date and time, I just remember that it was close to dinner time and I was frying chicken.  My son called for me from inside our bedroom where he was watching TV with his Dad. I must truly be a mother because I did not respond to the call as much as to the tone of urgency in his voice. Something was up.

My husband wanted me to see the breaking news on CNN that there were unconfirmed reports that Moammar Ghaddaffi had died.  I followed the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen and in my mind, I swatted the news of Ghaddaffi’s death like a fly–his death was still unconfirmed.  But then I remembered something: “Isn’t he supposed to have secretly fled into Nigeria? What’s he doing back in Libya?”  Ah, I concluded, just another press release, just another example of psychological warfare so that the troops loyal to Ghaddaffi would lose heart and cease fighting.

Before going to bed, curious, I surfed the channels.  Ghaddaffi’s death was already confirmed.  He died from a gunshot wound.  He was also wounded when NATO forces bombed a nearby target.  He was hiding in a storm drain. Hah! I said to myself, a fitting end to a mad dog….cowering in fear in a storm drain.  (In Tagalog the word for storm drain is “imbornal.” )

The next morning, though, I tuned in to CNN again and this time they had amateur cellphone video clips taken of Ghaddaffi.  He was hiding in a storm drain during a NATO bombing.  He sustained minor injuries from the flying debris which was why he was hiding in the storm drain.  But he was discovered by rebel forces.

The video clip showed unidentified freedom fighters trying to lift the wounded but still conscious Moammar Ghaddaffi onto the back of a pick-up truck.  Blood was trickling from a head wound and he was bald on the left side of his head.

He seemed disoriented to me, he had no presence of mind to parry the blows that were coming at him from all sides.  He had his hands in front of him but he wasn’t defending himself.  He wasn’t covering his face. He wasn’t asking for mercy, but he wasn’t defiant, either.  He bore the look of a person with Alzheimer’s coming back to lucidity after a momentary black-out.  He was being mauled and yet no anguish registered on his face because his pain was no match to his incomprehension.

“How are the mighty fallen!” was all I could say.

A few hours later, CNN was running slide shows of Ghaddaffi when he was 29 years old, just after he had seized power in Libya.  He was smiling, he was handsome, affable, he looked benevolent.  There was no trace of the foaming-at-the-mouth madness in his demeanor for which he had become notorious in the last decades of his rule.  I remember that on CNN when they show videos of Ghaddaffi making a speech, I would turn the volume off.  I wanted to concentrating on his face, his body language.  It was a game I played: trying to decipher the delusions he was spouting off without actually hearing the translator.  He seemed no different from Hitler when he is making a speech: the same fervor, the same passion, and should I say?  The same delusions of grandeur and self-deceit.  Maybe they had the same PR handlers, Ghaddaffi and Hitler,  who knows?  Maybe there’s a class somewhere for dictators: how to make a speech and seem like you really mean every word.

I cannot say as I blame the freedom fighters.  42 years of pent-up anger, poverty and fear can push people to revenge.  The adrenaline levels must have been high — they had been in the thick of battle.  The carnage and ruin, the pain and suffering  would have so easily been avoided had Ghaddaffi just gone into exile or had he just stepped down.  If I were a freedom fighter there and I saw Moammar Ghaddaffi dazed and wounded, I might not have been able to keep myself from punching him myself.  Those freedom fighters could be sons and grandsons of political enemies of Ghaddaffi whom he had put to death.  They had all the reasons to hate Moammar Ghaddaffi.  The mad dog is dead.

And the mighty is indeed fallen! The man Libyans feared for 42 years now lies in a vegetable freezer of a grocery store. Open to curious scrutiny, cold, dead, unadorned and unmourned.  It is easy to jeer at him.  The Germans have a word for it: shadenfreude:  it is the enjoyment felt at someone else’s troubles. And Moammar Ghaddaffii deserves out spite.

It is easy be angry with a person who perpetrates injustice, who destroys lives on a whim.  It is easier to be happy and relieved that such a mad dog as Ghaddaffi is dead.  It is so easy to feel a lightness inside that the world is a better place without someone so violent, so irrational, and so unreasonable.

But this is human passion.  We often excuse such shows of fury and anger by saying that the anger was called for; that it was righteous.  But something at the back of the mind keeps tapping at our consciousness: beating a man when he is down is just not fair; shooting an unarmed criminal is just not fair; no matter how universally acknowledged his malevolence was.

This is the reason why theologians succinctly declare that God’s wrath and God’s anger is not like man’s.  Man’s anger is capricious, often brought about by un-diagnosed or ignored physiological and psychological conditions. Man is impulsive.  Man’s anger is often self-indulgent: controlled by selfish desires for revenge or greed.  Our anger is often petty, man is irritated by the smallest of things. And our anger comes all too quickly, at the slightest of provocations. Our anger is borne of our selfishness, our self-centeredness and our self-absorption: we cannot bear not to get what we want, when we want it and we will crush anyone who gets in the way.

God’s anger is long-suffering.  It is gracious, merciful and yet just and judicial.  God’s anger is always righteous.  Because God knows all our hearts, our motivations, our thoughts and our imaginations, his anger at the evil that lies deep within us is right and holy.  He reads us and understands us more than we read or understand ourselves.  We cannot hide anything from God, and so his anger is always based on a superior knowledge of us, what we are thinking of doing, and what we have done.

But the depth and breadth of the wrath of God against sin does not make him cruel or mean: God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, yes, even wicked men like Ghaddaffi.  What gives God pleasure is that the wicked repent, turn from his sin and change his ways.  But the death and the judgment of the wicked gives God no pleasure. This does not make his day, it does not make him smile. He is not relieved or gladdened by the death of the wicked. He is truly a judge: he declares judgment and metes out the sentence of death dispassionately.

What is more sobering than the thought of the wrath of God is the truth that ALL are under sin.  All are under the penalty of death. No one is exempt. As the wrath of God is a reality and our judgment is secure, the question that begs to be asked is: how shall we escape the wrath of God?

How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?  The grace that brings salvation has appeared to all men, it is Jesus Christ.  Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.  God can cancel out sin and forgive it because someone else had paid the penalty for our sin:  it was Jesus Christ. Behold, he stands at the door and knocks.  Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your heart.  God has no pleasure in the death of him that dies: wherefore, turn yourselves, and live.