Should Doctors Medically Assist Someone's Death?

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Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

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And when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

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All right, Tim. So the question for today's episode is, should doctors medically assist someone's death?

01:34

Yeah, well, no. Short and concise.

01:40

All right, guys, that's the episode. The Bible says thou shalt not kill, right? So I think we should stay away from that kind of thing.

01:48

All right, well, here, let me help you try and reconsider your position.

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I found this article that I want to read to you, and I think it presents a pretty compelling argument as to why we should support this.

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So let me try and convince you. This comes from compassionandchoices .org.

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It's the first website that came up when I was Googling the terms to make sure

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I was using the same terms that everyone who is for this is using.

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Yeah, if it's the first result, that means it's the best, right? That means it's the truest. The truest, okay. All right, so the name of the entire article is

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Medical Aid in Dying is Not Assisted Suicide, Suicide, or Euthanasia.

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And then the very first section of the article says Medical Aid in Dying is

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Fundamentally Different from Euthanasia. Now, this is a pretty good argument,

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I'm going to say. This is a pretty good argument. I don't know how you're going to overcome this. While both practices are designed to bring about a peaceful death, the distinction between the two comes down to who administers the means to that peaceful death.

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Euthanasia is an intentional act by which another person, not the dying person, administers the medication.

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By contrast, and here's the kicker, Tim, this is going to get you. By contrast, medical aid in dying requires the patient to be able to take the medication themselves and therefore always remain in control.

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So I don't know about you, Tim, but I think I got you on that one. So it's not suicide.

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It's not assisted suicide. Because I've tried to imagine how this works.

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So it's not suicide and it's not assisted suicide. Yeah, you know, it's kind of like if you knew, if you had a friend who was like,

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Hey, man, I'm in a really bad place right now. And you're like, okay, cool. Here's a bunch of pills.

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You're clean, man. Come on, that's not convincing to you? Well, it's one of those things.

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It's doing violence to the concept of suicide. And then it's also doing violence to the concept of assisted suicide.

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Because, I mean, supposedly, if you give them the means to kill themselves and they take it themselves.

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Here's the rope, man. Here's the gun. Then somehow both people are morally absolved of the responsibility for the act.

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Because it was... Yeah, yeah. And when the cops show up at your door, you're like, whoa, hang on.

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I just gave him a rope. I mean, if he got the rope himself, that would be suicide. And then if you put the rope around his neck and kick the chair out from under his feet, then that would have been assisted suicide.

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But if you give them the rope and they use it themselves, then no one's to blame, right? It just makes no sense.

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I mean, besides that, one of the things that's funny about it, though, besides just how convoluted of logic this is that you can...

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Yeah, that's just... Imagine, imagine we're on the

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Day of Judgment and you're the person who helped someone kill themselves, right?

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Imagine going before God and saying, hey, I just gave them the medication.

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They took it. Well, then imagine them on the other side saying it wasn't suicide because they gave me the medication.

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Exactly, exactly. So it's a convoluted mess of we've taken these terms and we've just...

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I mean, just make them whatever we want them to be at this point. Yeah, of Plato at this point. But what's interesting about it, though, is just the primacy of the individual choice at that point.

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And it seems like the morality of everything, as it relates to topics like this that used to be considered taboo, there's few things that are left over in terms of the old morality.

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And what's left over is this idea of consent. Consent essentially is the most important aspect of any moral transaction in the minds of many people.

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So as you think through sexual ethics in general, most of our understanding of sexual ethics is now hanging on by a thread, and it's only hanging on by a thread as it relates to the topic of consent.

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So adultery is fine. It's okay because it's two consenting adults. Homosexuality is fine because it's two consenting adults.

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We're not yet at bestiality because there's the idea that the animal can't consent necessarily.

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I'm not sure. The more we humanize animals, then we may violate that line.

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Hey, that dog was asking for it. You see the way he wagged his tail or whatever.

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But then with children, like pedophilia, the reason why we're still holding on to that is because of this notion of consent.

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And the reason why rape is still wrong is because consent is what's left over. Well, and even with the pedophilia thing,

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I mean, that's going to go. Especially when you're fine with letting kids do all these other things.

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Yeah, so if a boy can self -identify as a girl, then you've done violence to the idea that you can't consent to certain moral actions below a certain age.

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So that's about to go. But what I'm trying to say is that the only thing left over of sexual immorality is the idea of consent.

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And then you carry that over into this discussion of suicide, assisted suicide. What's happened is that if you choose the act yourself, then that's a triumphant act of bravery at that point.

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Right. As long as you're in control, as long as you're making that choice. And so I think this is just another example of how the morality is defined by consent is just utterly insufficient and wholly inadequate to address the nature of the topic in general.

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Yeah, and so when it comes to... I mean, this is something that...

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I mean, even in the Old Testament, people killing themselves happens, right?

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Or people even... I guess it's Saul who...

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I can't remember who they're fighting, but they get overrun, essentially. And he tells a sword bearer to run him through with a sword, right?

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And so this is not an idea that's foreign to the Bible. And really, normally, it's presented as an act of cowardice.

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It's an act of cowardice. And so the servant actually did that. And then another servant saw it, and he reported back to David.

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And he was trying to take credit for it, essentially. So he's trying to take credit for it. And because he wanted

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David to know he was on his side, but David put him to death for the act itself. And he didn't even actually do it, right?

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And so David put him to death. And the logic of it was, how dare you lay your hand against the

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Lord's anointed in that way? Weren't you afraid to do that? And because you weren't afraid, then... If you would kill him, you would kill me, essentially, right?

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But then what's undergirding even that is just the notion that thou shalt not kill. You shall not kill.

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So in the Old Covenant, you have the idea of you shall not kill.

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And we shouldn't want anything to do with it. Now, okay, so we shouldn't kill, right?

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Murder. We shouldn't murder. But then if someone...

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Typically, murder is the unjust taking of life, right?

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Which it seems like implies some form of... The other person is totally unwilling, right?

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But then that's different than the person who's willingly laying down their life for someone else, right?

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Right, yeah. So we shouldn't murder, and murder is the unjust or unlawful killing of another human being in that way.

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And so there are certain actions that we can undertake that means that we should forfeit our life.

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Like if we kill another person, our blood will be spilled. That's the definition of retributive justice at that point.

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You take a life, you lose a life. So that would be an act of judgment, but that's not an individual thing that's performed in a vigilante kind of way.

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So meaning that job of avenging that life is given to the government, and it's not something that we just have the authority on our own to do.

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So human life is sacred. It's a gift given to God, and we need a morally sufficient, justifiable reason to take life.

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Now, you kill someone in self -defense, then that's different from murder in that murder is intentional, it's planned.

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But then all you're doing at that point is you're defending yourself, and you're using the same level of force that's being used against you, and that's someone throwing away their life in that way.

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But that's not just some sort of intentional act at that point. Now, in the idea of assisted suicide, essentially what you're doing is you're playing

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God and you're saying that you have the right to determine that this life is no longer valuable in that way, and there's no morally sufficient reason like the scriptures would give us that would allow us to play that kind of calculus.

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Even with your own life, right? Even with your own life, yeah. It's an act of cowardice. It's a refusal to accept

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God's sovereignty at that point. It's basically just a failure of long -suffering, right?

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So God's the one who gives life. Life is precious, and there are times when life gets hard, and there's times where someone's given just an overwhelming sickness or suffering that we wouldn't wish upon anyone, but we don't have the authority just to casually lay aside their life just because we think it's compassionate.

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We serve God, and God sets parameters for these things, not us. Now, is there ever a concession made for the person who is just incredibly sick?

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So the person who is very elderly, and then they get sick with something, and they can technically live, right?

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Or someone who's basically a vegetable. You can pull the plug.

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There's moral distinctions to be made between letting someone die and killing them.

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Okay. Now, a lot of what hospice is doing, and most people aren't aware of this, is they go in, and they actually are killing people.

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And so they're blurring those distinctions. They're blurring the distinctions between letting someone die and taking their life.

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And we should be very hesitant to adopt certain policies and certain procedures that are going to be crossing that line.

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Now, I mean, you can artificially hook someone up to technology, like a breathing apparatus, to where their brain is dead, they have no brain activity, and you have them hooked up to that.

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So the Bible doesn't command us to artificially preserve life through any means possible at any expense necessary for as long as it takes, forever.

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Meaning, there are certain technologies that we have access to now where we can keep them hooked up to a breathing machine or whatever else.

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They don't have any brain activity. They're a vegetable. And so it is not incumbent upon us to take advantage of those technologies.

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But then if you refuse to do that, all you're doing is letting them go. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah.

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And that's a very different moral act. A natural process is taking over. Yeah, I mean, that's like their body is done, you know?

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And you're just recognizing what's happening, and you're refusing to continue to resuscitate indefinitely.

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That's very different, though, than poisoning them, right? Right. Or starving them to death.

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Yeah, yeah. Those are very different. At that point, you're not just allowing them to go to their inevitable end.

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That's a different moral act. Right. And so I guess just as a final closing thought, basically for the doctors who are helping do these things and thinking they're doing the compassionate thing by helping someone end their own life, really that blood is on their hands as well, right?

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And there's not like a technicality that says, well, hey, just because I gave them the medicine, right, that doesn't absolve me in God's eyes from the wrongful taking of life, right?

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I mean, it's like if you built some apparatus in your home that built the bomb, built the chair, built the shack or whatever, built the button that you can press to end it all.

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You open the door up and you show them where to sit, you show them what to do, and then you walk out, you press the button.

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And then you say, I didn't have anything to do with that. That's not going to pass. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

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