Assisted Suicide: No Lives Matter

Word from the Center
Written By LCRL Staff

Happy Fourth of July! As we celebrate America, please also help support our efforts to contend for the freedom to proclaim the faith.

Illinois' legislature just passed a bill that will make physician assisted suicide the law of the land. We are living in strange days, where some good is happening in some red states, while the blue states seem to be heading into deeper darkness.

Make no mistake, legal suicide corrupts. Corrupts doctors who have taken an oath to do no harm. Corrupts a medical system that comes to think of patients as costs. Corrupts sacred bonds of a family, and the ties that bind generations. The fact that we are so willing to kill an unborn child, the fact that Obama, when in the Illinois legislature, would not even vote to ban partial-birth abortion should tell us something. The weak and the vulnerable are found at life's beginning and end and then everywhere in between. Where there is not right or wrong, there is only power; where life is not held as precious, it becomes cheap.

But think that it won't affect you? Think again. Assisted suicide is an insidious brain worm. The right to die soon enough becomes the obligation to die. Surely you don't want to obligate your children or cause undue strain upon a spouse. And what of the inheritance or the mounting bills? And the time taken away from others' vacations? Wouldn't it be better for you simply to take one for the team? Abortion teaches that your life doesn't matter unless other people want you around. Assisted suicide is just the next version in which people are judged to be inconveniences and burdens upon the healthy and the strong.

Any mom and dad will tell you that having children is one of God's ways of stealing from us our selfishness or moving us to see beyond ourselves to the needs of another. Family creates lifelong bonds beyond friendships, which comes to us as gifts, but are relationships that ebb and flow. Ross and Rachel, Phoebe and Joey won't always hang out in the coffee shop. Life moves on.

Care for the little ones, care for the old and feeble, for the struggling. Such love makes all the difference to the one hurting, but makes also all the difference in our society, in ourselves, in the heart of our humanity. Abortion and assisted suicide are twin sins of selfishness, of abandonment, of the cheapening of life. Canada, which is right to chafe against being the 51st state has other problems, one of them being that one in twenty of their deaths is now caused by assisted suicide. Because a person is a drain. Because a person is lonely. Because a person has a terminal illness. A chronic illness. But is not life a kind of terminal illness, and as we age do not all things become chronic? And the young are not immune. What is presented as a possibility becomes an escape, a way out of a tough or sorrowful situation.

Assisted suicide is on the march, and no wonder. A people that loses God, loses eternal life, a people that has lost family and faith is prone is escapism, to annihilation, to a numbness that leads to death. It's a crisis. Black lives matter? Is that still a rallying cry? And it was said to be wrong to say that all lives matter. Well, assisted suicide says that no lives matter. Not your unborn child's, not your grandpa's, not the depressed kid's, and ultimately, not yours either.

The Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer is chairman and professor of Exegetical Theology and director of the M.A. program at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind.

 

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See Also
Assisted Suicide: No Lives Matter
Assisted Suicide: No Lives Matter

Make no mistake, legal suicide corrupts. Corrupts doctors who have taken an oath to do no harm. Corrupts a medical system that comes to think of patients as costs. Corrupts sacred bonds of a family, and the ties that bind generations. The fact that we are so willing to kill an unborn child, the fact that Obama, when in the Illinois legislature, would not even vote to ban partial-birth abortion should tell us something. The weak and the vulnerable are found at life's beginning and end and then everywhere in between. Where there is not right or wrong, there is only power; where life is not held as precious, it becomes cheap.

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Think for a moment about which hymn stanza would best conclude a cantata at a wedding. What words should be echoing in the ears of bridegroom and bride as they prepare for married life together? Which would be best?

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Their eyes got as big as saucers, and their huge smiles started to waver. I paused for a bit with a very serious look on my face, because it is all, sadly, true. I then continued, “However, you’re about to enter one of the most beautiful experiences you can ever have on earth. You’ll have glimpses of heaven that most will never see. You’ll delight in the love of Jesus overflowing to you from your spouse. When you fall, you’ll have each other to speak words of forgiveness and renewal. Your joy will grow and overflow to everyone. And I can say this with certainty.”

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Pro-Death Penalty, Pro-Life

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A reed shaken by the wind? What do you seek in a church? The Roman Catholics, back in 1940s, endorsed the higher critical method (Divino Afflante Spiritu), which allows for Scripture not to mean what it means, just like liberal Protestantism. Perhaps it's not so strange to think a little yeast can leaven many a lump. To what then is the church moored? Tradition is not enough, unless, of course, you think the truth is so pliable as to be reinterpreted for each successive generation. Unless, like the once great biblical scholar Richard Hayes, you can now endorse gay marriage under the umbrella of "the widening of God's mercy."

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Christian Citizenship

Let not one say that this “cannot be the purpose of the Church.” We know that it is not the purpose of the Church to influence culture. The Church is distinct in origin and purpose from the civilization in which we live and of which we are a part. The question is whether Christians as citizens shall bear an equal share with the rest of the population in fashioning the character of the American community. The question is whether we shall leave, for instance, the avenues of the daily press, the policies by which journalism is governed, to men of no spiritual understanding, of nothing but material interests, of nothing but carnal ambitions, governed by desire for praise and the love of power, more dangerous than a wild beast, more destructive than a pestilence, if imbued with an atheistic or communistic attitude; or whether the Christian, the Lutheran, shall use the potent influence of journalism to mold and guide public opinion.

LCRL Staff
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A Father Sacrifices His Son: Dads Matter