Reading between the lines of Scripture, I think there is a principle of Christian Compassion:  not to “minimize suffering”, but instead to “maximize care.” Dr. C. Everett Koop said, “We have overemphasized curing, compared to caring, to our detriment.”

On November 4, 2008, Washington State voters will be asked to pass Initiative 1000,  “physician-assisted suicide”.  If passed, Washington will be the second state to adopt such a measure, following in the footsteps of Oregon. There are many ramifications of voting “yes” for such a radical departure from the Judeo-Christian moral/biblical
standard.
   

“The Gift of Life”
Scripture : Genesis 1: 26-28; Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18; Job 2: 1-10

Forty-one years ago a young teen-age girl, very suicidal, wrote the following letter:

To Whom It May Concern:  “I hate my life.  You can’t imagine the ache of wanting to end your life and not being able to because you’re a quadriplegic and can’t use your hands.  …After the doctors did surgery on my neck, I refused to wear a neck collar.  I hate it, too. Nobody understands and nobody will listen to me when I tell them I don’t want to live.  People fell sorry for me and I can’t stand it.  I can’t even go to the bathroom by myself.  I don’t have the energy to cope, I don’t have the strength to face the next day…I want out.        
                                     Signed, “a depressed teenager”

This young girl begged her friend, Jackie, to bring items from her home which could be used to take her own life…sleeping pills, razors, etc.  But, good friend that she was, Jackie stubbornly refused all of the pleas and entreaties of (some of you have guessed who I’m talking about) Joni Eareckson (now Tada).*  Jackie refused to be an accomplice to the suicide of her friend.  I think she realized that Joni’s frame of mind at that time was just to “escape”:  to escape into daydreams, into sleep, even into death. 

Within 30 days, we the registered voters in our state, must decide how to vote on Initiative 1000.  We will be asked to make it the law of Washington to allow “physician-assisted suicide”, to permit, legally, a medical doctor to help a person to kill him or herself.  In other words, to accomplish what Joni’s friend, Jackie, refused to do.

As many of you know, Oregon was the 1st (and so far the only) state to legalize “physician-assisted suicide” back in 1994, 51 to 49%.  Washington voters have previously rejected it was well as the voters of California, Michigan, and Maine.

Holland began tolerating it in 1973 (looking the other way) and it, along with euthanasia  was passed legislatively in 2001.  A medical journal reported that 60% of the elderly in Holland were fearful that their lives would be ended prematurely against their will. 

With these exceptions, Assisted Suicide has been prevented in medicine for over 2,000 years.  The Hippocratic Oath says that the doctor “will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.”  This oath and the tradition surrounding it became the medical ethics and the value system that made Western medicine the life-sustaining  blessing that it is today.

But now this noble tradition is under vigorous attack.  As some of you know, former Governor Booth Gardner, who has Parkinson’s, makes his campaign for Initiative 1,000 his final political battle.  He wants two results or rights to be created:

    1) The right to avoid suffering, and
    2) The right to determine the time and manner of one’s own
        death.

They seem worthy goals on the surface, reflecting Washingtonians’ commitments to individual autonomy and self-determination, the old “Pioneer Spirit of the West.” 

I.  But, are we truly “autonomous”?  In Genesis 9: 5,6 we read:
  

“Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning (or, an accounting); from the hand of every beast I will require it; and from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man!  Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the Image of God has God made man.”

Life is a GIFT, it is God’s life that flows through us.  Do we ourselves have any right to end it?  Our lives have immeasurable value, precisely because they are
“gifts of God.”

Someone has said, “The problem with suicide is that it represents an unwillingness to receive life moment by moment from the Hand of God – precisely what Job was capable of doing in the Job 2: 1-10 passage.  We didn’t give ourselves life, and it is not appropriate for us to take our lives.  That life is neither our own creation, nor is it our possession.  Our God Who created us and breathed His living Spirit into us owns our lives.  Therefore, I many not do whatever I please with my life, because it is a gift from God, for which I am accountable.”
The Apostle Paul also makes this principle clear in I Corinthians 6: 19,20:

    “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit
    who is in you, Whom you have received from God.  You are not
    your own; you were bought with a price.  Therefore, honor God
    with your body.”

God’s Word makes very clear that we are not autonomous at all, but oh so valuable because we have been made in God’s image for a purpose……The Westminster Catechism says that we’re “to glorify God and enjoy (worship) Him forever”…..The Bible tells us that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”.  We are incredibly complex beings capable of thought and deed, emotion and will, pain and pleasure, whom God loved so much that HE died to  redeem us from death!  Psalm 8: 4-6 says “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?  For You have made him a little lower than the angels.  And You have crowned him with glory and honor.” 

But, not only are we not truly autonomous, there is a 2nd fundamental truth that pertains both to believers and non-believers alike.  As moving as it may be to each of us to realize the truth that we ultimately belong to God, that we are “the called, beloved in God the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ” (Jude 2), it is also true that we belong to each other.  Remember the words of the English poet-preacher, John Donne, “No Man is an Island”.  The taking of our life deprives others of something of great value, for every life in which we share has intrinsic value.  The lives of the people around us affect who we are, and who we are becoming.  We do not exist in isolation.

We know that many suicides are caused by deep emotional depression, but the proposed “physician-assisted suicide” initiative is offered to justify a calculated, rational decision to “blot out the world” and to “cut off any possibility of REDEMPTION,” regardless of the cost to society around us.  This brings us to the question (for ourselves as well as for non-believers):

    “May I really abandon my responsibility to others with impunity?”
    "Does nothing matter more in the world than my will and my desire?" 
    "What is the cost?"

Perhaps you’ve known someone who’s been affected by such a tragedy:  son or daughter whose parent took their life.  What an impact this has, dominoes down the generations.  Suicide not only short-circuits my obligation to the LORD, it is also an affront to the human community to which I belong. 
Another question remains, you may say.  What about “pain and suffering”?  None of us wants to see another suffer needlessly…but, I suggest that this is a “straw man,” in the assisted suicide debate.  Today pain and suffering are largely eliminated by modern drugs.  Dr. C. Everett Koop says:

    “40 years ago and earlier, the debate about euthanasia centered
    around pain that could not be relieved.  But today, when it is now
    possible in virtually every case to relieve pain and suffering,
    the debate has shifted to ending the lives of those despairing of
    their situation, who don’t want to die of their diagnosis, who
    know they are incurable, or who have lost self-command or
    quality of life.”

Dr. Koop says, “We have overemphasized curing, compared to caring, to our detriment.”

But even if the pain cannot be 100% eliminated, do we have the right to end our lives prematurely in an attempt to avoid that pain?  We rightfully consider Job to be one of the Scripture’s most noble and praiseworthy heroes, precisely because of the way he faced and dealt with the reality of suffering:  He lost everything, all his children; he experienced terrible, ulcerated sores over his entire body, was continually  scratching with broken pottery to try and relieve the itching.  On top of all this, his wife told him, “Curse God and die!”  (Job’s wife would have been in the front ranks of those supporting Initiative 1,000.)  From the depth of his unfathomable misery, this man of faith cries out:  “You are talking like a  foolish woman.”  I’ve learned that the Hebrew word translated “foolish” here is actually a very strong word meaning “moral deficiency.”  And then Job asks, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”  Job shows that he fully understood that life was not his possession, but instead came from God in “whatever form he received it.”

God’s Word at Hebrews 5:8 tells us that “though (Jesus) was a Son, yet HE learned obedience  by the things which HE suffered.”  I think this means that Assisted Suicide or Euthanasia denies God the opportunity to work creatively in the lives of sufferers, and also robs people of the spiritual fruits which suffering can produce in their lives.  Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that the Father might spare Him the horrific suffering of the cross, but ended His prayer, “nevertheless, not My will, but (Yours) be done.”  (Christ refused to move from complete and joyous acceptance of the will of the Father).  Paul tells us, in Romans, that suffering is all part of what it takes to shape us into the image of Christ.  The blessing, he says, will be ours, “if indeed we share in His sufferings, in order that we may also share in His glory.”

Reading between the lines of Scripture, I think there is a principle of Christian Compassion:  not to “minimize suffering”, but instead to “maximize care.”  Both in God’s word and in the history of humankind, it is so often that the great and noble things come out of suffering, and not out of affluence, perfect health and ease.  Suffering in and of itself is an evil.  But our God, Who in Christ Jesus has not abandoned us in that suffering, can and will bring Good from the evil, even as He did with Jesus.

The whole movement towards the legalization of Physician-Assisted Suicide and euthanasia  (and it seems on the surface to be so compassionate) is founded on a contradiction of true human values as defined by Scripture.  The late Dr. Francis Schaeffer wrote that:

    “Times of monstrous inhumanity do not come about all at
    once; they are slipped into gradually.  Often those who use
    certain emotions and appeal to “rights”, do not even know
    what they have started.  They see only some isolated condition
    they want to accomplish, but have not considered soberly the
    overall direction in which things are moving.”  (down a slippery slope)

There are questions that arise here for us:  What happens to a society which increasingly turns to (death) as a resolution to its social problems?  When will the “right to die” become the “obligation to die”?  When will the physicians be coming around with their lethal needles? 

Our culture, which was once known as Western Christendom, is slowly, but surely becoming a culture which seeks to solve societal problems with the violent act of death.  And it is especially in America that we are so obsessed with personal rights that we are willing to sever our traditional, biblical ties of duty, compassion, and love to the weak and the unwanted.  We are becoming not just inhospitable, but even a dangerous place for those too weak to compete effectively in what has become a “contest of rights” – the very young, the unborn, the elderly, the dying, the handicapped.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we need make no apology for affirming the value of every human life.  God sovereignly gave us the Gift of Life, God saved His Breath for the creation of human beings.  Genesis 2:7 says:  “the LORD GOD…breathed into (man’s) nostrils the breath of life, and man be came a living being.”  We are created in the image of God and endowed with His very breath to live.  That is sacred.

And we need make no apology for condemning (opposing) the use of violence to solve our social problems, even when seemingly admirable reasons are given for that violence.  For no human being, no unborn child, no person with a disability of whatever kind, no one who is elderly, or sick, or dying is a problem to be solved, but rather a person to be loved and cared for.

The call to life and the call to end life belong to God .  The Washington State
Medical Association understands this and opposes Initiative 1000.  May the
voters of Washington State follow suit and not allow this travesty against
Biblical and moral law to happen. 

   
From a sermon delivered at Charleston Baptist Church in
Bremerton, Washington on October 5, 2008. Click here for the No on Assisted Suicide website.