Audio

(Note: This was recorded before Albert Mohler's Briefing on 6/17, where he has similar things to say on the topic.)TranscriptIf you get too old and live in Belgium, they might just kill you.

This week in the Daily Signal, a UK based news source, there is a article about thousands of elderly people being killed in Belgium by their general practitioners without ever asking to die, and in fact one in every sixty deaths of a patient by their general practitioner involved someone who hadn't requested euthanasia — who had not requested their doctor to end their life. We'll talk about the whole ending of life prematurely in a few minutes, but right now I want to focused on this unauthorized killing.

Half of the patients killed without giving their consent were over the age of eighty, and two-thirds of them were in a hospital and weren't even suffering from a terminal disease such as cancer. What's even more outlandish and ridiculous about this story in Belgium is that a lot of times the doctors won't even inform the families of their plans to end the life of their loved ones. They didn't see it as a family or a social decision. They saw it as a medical decision, and so they acted unilaterally to end the life of someone who wasn't terminal without their family's permission.

Now, you may say, "Oh my gosh, that's horrible. It could never happen here," but before you get to the point where doctors are unilaterally ending life, you get to the point where we let doctors end life with the patient's permission. So, euthanasia becomes legal, and then the next short step is doctors doing it based on their "medical decision making abilities." This is a large problem in the world and in fact in our culture too. The whole “death with dignity” movement is about you killing yourself or having your doctor kill yourself or help you kill yourself.

What does the Christian worldview have to say about this? Well, it has a few things to say. First, euthanasia suffers the same problems as abortion does. It involves taking and ending a life that is not ours to end. All life is God's. He is the creator of it, he is the sustainer of it, he is the owner and ruler of it, and we do not have permission to play “God” and server in his role and play decision maker with who lives and who dies, whether that's us, someone else, the unborn, or an elderly person. So, that’s the first thing: we are, as a human race, are starting to try and take, by the act of law, the role of God when it comes to end of life decisions that is not ours to take.

Furthermore, the Christian worldview has lots to say about the unauthorized taking of life. For instance, these doctors killing their patients. Because life doesn't cease to be valuable when it ceases to be functionally valuable or economically valuable. Your worth as a person is not based on your ability to bring in a paycheck or walk or use your lungs. These are arguments that have been touted out in favor of abortion. “Well, you can kill the unborn because it doesn't contribute to society. It's not as valuable as a fully grown person or it doesn't even use its lungs.” These type of things.

The same arguments are being used in favor of euthanasia. You can kill old people, because they're in a coma. What about people who go into a coma and supposedly lose their valuable status and then come out of the coma? How did they regain their valuable status? Where did that come from? Now, I think the most common sense observation is they were valuable the whole time, and they were valuable not because of their economic worth or their mobility or athleticism or use of their functional limbs or those types of things. No, they're valuable because they're created in the image of their creator, of God. They have a soul. They have in…