4-10-2016 Bioethics Part 52

In this transcription, the speaker discusses the topic of suicide under the realm of bioethics. They explore different reasons for why suicide may be considered wrong, including the idea of playing God and the religious belief that suicide leads to hell. The speaker also examines the biblical commandment "thou shalt not kill" and its implications for suicide. They argue that while the Bible contains exceptions to this commandment such as self-defense and capital punishment, suicide does not fit into these exceptions as it does not protect life. The speaker then addresses the argument that the Bible does not explicitly condemn suicide, explaining that the Bible is not a comprehensive manual for all aspects of life but provides a framework for decision-making. They mention that there are five examples of suicide in the Bible and discuss the first two cases: the suicide of Abimelech in Judges chapter 9 and the suicide of Saul in 1 Samuel chapter 31. They note that both cases are portrayed Alright, well let's pray and get started this morning. God, we thank you for bringing us here together this morning, and we pray that as we look at this very difficult issue that you would help us to understand both the issue itself and how to speak and think about it and how to help our neighbors, whoever they may be, who are wrestling with it, knowing that many people do and that many people do not like to talk about it. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. We started last week, and will continue this week, continuing on for a number of weeks, looking at the issue of suicide. Suicide under the realm of bioethics as a way of ending life. After this, we'll be looking at physician-assisted suicide, and then the step beyond that, which would be euthanasia. So, to begin, just kind of rehashing, what are some bad reasons or insufficient reasons for saying that suicide is wrong? You shouldn't play God. That's right. Okay? Anything else? You'll go straight to hell. There you go. Right. Now, in the case of the first one, the second one is yet to be determined. We haven't talked about that really, but let's start with the second. Why would just kind of telling somebody who's like, let's say they come to you and they go, I am contemplating suicide, or even worse, if you are talking to somebody, you have the blessed opportunity of talking to somebody, let's say three days after they try and commit suicide, why would it be so unwise bordering on absurdity to say, you shouldn't have done that or you shouldn't do that because you're just going to go to hell? Yes. Right. They already feel bad about it. You're just dumping gas on a fire. Even if at the end of the day, that's the theological reality, it's probably not what you should lead with and probably not what you should be just kind of blanket statementing out to the world. What about this idea that you shouldn't play God? Why is that very much insufficient and just kind of doesn't really help the situation? Okay, their future hangs in the balance of what you tell them. Okay. That's right. You make hundreds, thousands of decisions every day and rarely, if ever, have you ever thought, I wonder if I'm playing God right now? That doesn't come into play, so why would it come into play necessarily when it comes to taking your own life? You might be acting like God, you know, who are you to play God, but that doesn't fix the whole situation. There is, in the Bible, a recognition that we are going to die and that the end of our lives is a rather kind of, in a very real sense, surreal kind of thing that's going to happen to us. And we saw that the sixth commandment, what's the sixth commandment? Shall not kill. That's right. Good. We could have a little quiz and she goes through all the ten commandments and see how well we do. We're not going to do that this morning. But, you shall not kill. We saw that that seems like an open and shut case against suicide, but it's not, not necessarily at least. And then we ended our time looking at one reason why that is not exactly an open and shut case. Anybody remember why? Why the command, thou shalt not kill, is not necessarily, or at least it's problematic to just say, yep, that talks about suicide too. Throwing yourself on a grenade, we would say it would not count as suicide, right? We count that as like self-sacrifice or something. Some people would kind of determine that like a suicidal act, but even then you wouldn't go like, oh, we would respect such an action. We take part in the killing of animals, okay. Not to kill the community across the board. Yes. Great, yeah. So, that was the one I wasn't thinking of that I believe Ariane brought up last week, was that there are, and that's an example of the fact that there are exceptions in Scripture itself to the command, thou shalt not kill. So we talked about like the killing of animals, which is permitted according to Scripture in order to sacrifice them and also partake of them. What else, what other exceptions are there? Just war, and we would have to define everything what that is, but there are wars that are just, which naturally implies that there are also unjust wars, but just war is an exception in the Bible. What else? Self-protection, again, very narrowly and limited defined. What else? Capital punishment, yeah. Punishment for crimes. And the capital punishment that the Bible lays out, there's only one, what is the capital punishment in the Bible? Killing of another person. There you go. So those three are exceptions in the Bible. Now, we are not going to get into whether those apply today or everything like that. What we're saying is the Bible contains these exceptions. So, to just kind of blanket statement quote the Sixth Commandment and say there doesn't really work when it comes to suicide, because if I'm the suicide person and I know my Bible halfway well, I can go, oh yeah, I can't kill myself because of the Sixth Commandment, well then why would we kill people who kill people? And you go, oh, well, that's different. Now, this does not mean that I believe that suicide is okay. Suicide, we saw at the end of the day, is very much in a sense a breaking of the Sixth Commandment because the exceptions to the Sixth Commandment are exceptions for what purpose? What purpose do those three things uphold? Self-protection, capital punishment for the killing of another human being, and just war. Protecting life, that's right. Is suicide the protection of life? No. So that's the way you approach it. You say, okay, there are these exceptions, but what are those exceptions for? Is suicide like those things? You say, no, it's not like those things. You go, okay, well, then we're going to have to see something different. There's a second argument that makes our case a little bit more difficult. That's what we're going to look at this morning. It's that Scripture never explicitly condemns the practice of suicide. There is no commandment that says thou shalt not commit suicide. Therefore, it might be argued, oh yeah, I can't commit suicide? Show me that in the Bible. Now, why is that argument, we're going to talk about this for just a moment, why is that very argument, show me that in the Bible, why is that not exactly a legitimate argument? The Bible is not a comprehensive handbook. To what? Most everything. That's right. I love the Bible, right? If you've been here for more than five minutes, you know that. However, the Bible is not a comprehensive manual for everything, or really a whole lot of things. The Bible will not tell you how to plumb a toilet. The Bible will not tell you how to fly an airplane. The Bible will not tell you how to get an A in physics. The Bible will not answer every question you have when it comes to biomedical ethics. Simple as that. However, what does the Bible do when it comes specifically to bioethics? If it doesn't give us an answer about whether in vitro fertilization, for example, is a proper Christian practice, what would the Bible? Is the Bible useless? There we go. It's a framework for how we approach decisions. It gives us general categories of thinking. Are there some times when, it's just like chapter and verse, we can quote something and go, oh yeah, there it is. Does that ever exist? Yeah, absolutely. We've seen examples of that. There are five examples of suicide in the Bible. We're going to look at every one of them. And what we're going to do is say, okay, now knowing how the Bible speaks about these suicides, maybe we can say something about suicide. So, let's look at them. The first one is in Judges chapter 9. Judges 9, looking at the character of Abimelech. Abimelech is a terrible human being, a rather noxious human being. He is well known for killing 70 of his brothers, sacrificing them. And in Judges chapter 9, we're going to read, beginning in verse 50, about the suicide of Abimelech. It says this, Then Abimelech went to Thebes and camped against Thebes and captured it. But there was a strong tower within the city, and all the men and women and all the leaders of the city fled to it and shut themselves in. And they went up to the roof of the tower, and Abimelech came to the tower and fought against it and drew near to the door of the tower to burn it with fire. And a certain woman threw an upper millstone on Abimelech's head and crushed his skull. Then he called quickly to the young man, his armor-bearer, and said to him, Draw your sword and kill me, lest they say of me, A woman killed him. And his young man thrust him through, and he died. And when the men of Israel saw that Abimelech was dead, everyone departed to his home. Thus God returned the evil of Abimelech, which he committed against his father in killing his seventy brothers. And God also made all the evil of the men of Shechem return on their heads, and upon them came the curse of Joth and the son of Jerubal. According to Judges chapter 9, what is the suicide of Abimelech? It's physician-assisted, that's right. There is that. What else is it? Yes, it is just retribution. It is the reflection of God's judgment against him. Now, I want to be very careful to say that I am not saying that everyone who commits suicide is receiving the just retribution of God against them. That is not what I am saying. I want to make that very clear. I am saying that it is true in this case, and it might be true in some cases. Is suicide seen in a positive light in the book of Judges chapter 9? No. Rather negative. We'll chalk that one up on the negative category. Look at the next one, 1 Samuel chapter 31. 1 Samuel is the story of a prophet, the first prophet, really, of Israel by the name of Samuel and two kings. The king of the people and the king after God's own heart. Which one is the king of the people? Saul. Saul. Which one is the king after God's own heart? David. That's right. And the story is interesting because it begins, once we get past the history of Samuel and Samuel going out, we see that Saul starts out in a very high position and David in a very low position. And then as the story goes along, it's like a big fat X and those things cross. And it ends with David in an exalted position, though not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. And Saul just nosedives throughout the book until you get to the very end of the book. And Saul has been, for a number of chapters, trying to kill David, rather passionately, without success. In chapter 31 of 1 Samuel, in verse 4, we read, Then Saul said to his armor-bearer, Draw your sword and thrust me through with it, lest the uncircumcised come and thrust me through and mistreat me. But his armor-bearer would not, for he feared greatly. Therefore Saul took his own sword and fell upon it. Saul, here at the end in 1 Samuel, the king of the people, in very real sense, their idol, they desire to be like all the other nations, is killed on a mountain and the people of Israel are scattered and it seems like all hope is lost at the end of 1 Samuel. This is the tragic end of a long period of decline in the life of Samuel. His sons will die with him. The very way this is written, had we read the entirety of 1 Samuel up to this point, is very much seen as this is the fitting end to a man who had abandoned God and abandoned his people and was only looking out for himself. Even to the point of just killing himself because he didn't want the Philistines to win. Next we have two suicides that look very, very similar. That is Ahithophel and Judas Iscariot. We go to 2 Samuel 17. This might ring a bell. 2 Samuel 17, in verse 23. When Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his donkey and went off home to his own city. He set his house in order and hanged himself and he died and was buried in the tomb of his father. The second one, Judas Iscariot, we can find that recounting in Matthew chapter 27. In verse 5. Where it says, about him and throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, Judas departed and he went and hanged himself. In the case of both of these individuals, we have somebody who is working closely with their masters in the case of Ahithophel, it's David. In the case of Judas Iscariot, it's Jesus. Both aided the enemy trying to overcome this master that they served and both killed themselves when the events take a rather dramatic turn. Both killed themselves in despair as a result of their treacherous actions not going well. The last one we'll look at is a rather infamous figure. Go back to 1 Kings. 1 Kings chapter 16. Beginning in verse 15, it says this, Question. Is this suicide viewed positively? No. That's right, no. No, it is not. Not in any way, shape, or form. It is not. It is not. It is not. No, that's right, no. No, it is not. Not in any way, shape, or form. This Zimri is a rather infamous figure because he has the shortest reign of any king in the book of 1 and 2 Kings of seven days. Suicide here, again, like our first case, is seen as divine retribution for his unrighteousness. Clearly, none of these suicides are seen as virtuous, noble, good, well-intentioned, accidental, no, nothing like that at all. They are all very much an act of despair and very much an act of pride and arrogance. They are not acceptable in any way, shape, or form. Let me ask you a question. This is going to help us actually understand all of Hebrew narrative and all of the Bible narrative. Why doesn't it just come out and say what he did was wrong? Anybody have an idea? And suicide is wrong always. Why doesn't it do that? Yeah. Yeah, good. So, that's not what the purpose of the Bible is and also because the narrative is written in a narrative way which forces us as we're reading the narrative and as we're kind of coming into the actions of people and then the results of the actions, what is required of us as we're reading that to kind of determine whether their actions were right or wrong because the story is not really going to tell us? What does it require? Thought, exactly. Yeah, seems pretty basic, right? But the pursuit of wisdom, which is the pursuit of the people of God, what is necessary, requires you to actually think and not just memorize. It requires you to think hard about what the Bible is saying about something instead of just saying, well, it says in such and such a verse X so we're just going to go with that. That idea is such a modern one that we can just kind of quote a verse and then run with it. Interestingly enough, people quote verses and run with it in opposite directions all the time. Proof texting gets us nowhere. It's nice if we have a verse, but what's the context of that verse? As we take these five stories and we put them together, which are the five stories of suicide in the Bible, then we don't have a perfectly crystal clear answer, possibly, but when we say, when the Bible speaks about suicide, it sees suicide how? I know we haven't spent a lot of time in these passages, we could spend a whole bunch more, but just from our general observations, what can we say about suicide? Negative. Good. One word kind of response. It is seen as a negative thing. Anything else? Yeah, the culmination of someone's sin. Absolutely. This is especially apparent when we see, for example, the story of Job, who desired to die, was told by his friends and even his wife to give up and die, to curse God and die, and would not do it, refused to do it, and is seen as a noble character for doing so. Or Paul, who in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 said that he despaired even of life, but did not bring about the end of his life by his own hand. Suicide is simply not an acceptable Christian option. There are two other major considerations, theological considerations, that would lead us to believe that these practices are off-limits for Christians. Now, I still want to say, we probably won't get to it this week, I'm still going to answer the question, but leave everybody hanging, probably for another week. The question being, could a person who is truly Christian commit suicide? I'm not going to answer that one today. We haven't answered that one. But, when I'm saying it is not a legitimate Christian option, I'm not saying Christians can't commit suicide. I'm just saying it's not something that Christians ought to legitimately take up in their thought and consider a viable legitimate option. Yes? Right. Yeah. Absolutely. It is true. Right? It's the culmination of their sin, and they did not have any hope in the end. I totally agree with those statements. Absolutely. Still doesn't answer the question whether a real Christian could commit suicide or not. Okay. Good. So, we're all on the same page. So, here are two very interesting theological considerations that you are going to help me think through. Okay? I'm going to give you the thing, and then we're going to work through these together. Here's the first one. Humans are created as social creatures. We've seen that in past weeks. This entails that every human being has certain duties towards other human beings. You are expected to live in particular ways towards other human beings. Now, you might not have ever thought about this, but you actually believe this. You believe this maybe very profoundly or not very profoundly, but in some sense, you believe that human beings have things that they must do towards other people or refrain from doing. Give me an example. You've got to go to work for your family. Okay? What else? Now, I'm not just talking about your family members. I'm talking about the duties you have towards every other human being. You're... Okay? You're required to be truthful? Right. Now you're getting all Christian on me. Except for the fact that maybe you're not, because do you expect non-Christians to be untruthful to you? Yeah. But take that. Are you expecting other human beings... Do non-Christians expect other human beings to just lie to them all the time? No. We expect people to tell us the truth. We know that they're going to lie to us because we're a bunch of filthy liars. Right? Just like other people. So we might be thinking, I know people are going to lie to me, but what I'm expecting, what I kind of demand of society, even if I don't demand it of myself, is that people tell me the truth and that other people tell other people the truth. You don't just have to tell me the truth. What other things do we expect from other human beings? Yeah, respect our property, our lives. Right? All these things kind of fall into very simple golden rule things. I don't want you to steal from me. I don't want to steal from you. If stealing goes on, we consider that wrong. I also expect you to not kill me and for me not to kill you or harm you or harm me. Now, we can get into all kinds of definitions of what harm is. That's very complicated because beating you with a bat is probably pretty simple. However, certain things like taxation might fall into that category for you or something. So harm is a very broad category. But still, we have these just general notions of like, that's wrong. Now, we could probably make up a list and continue this list for a very long time and get very detailed about it. But what's interesting is, is that we don't naturally have these kind of things where we're like, I know exactly what I demand from every other human being and I know what every other human being ought to expect from me. We just have this general sense inside of us that like, yeah, people should do certain things for other people. Now, this is interesting because as we saw last week, and as we'll continue to see, we also believe, kind of inherently, especially in our society, in the notion of autonomy. I belong to myself. I am my own thing. I do not belong to the state. I might be a citizen of the state. And that's not even necessarily completely a voluntary thing. I kind of have to belong to a state. But my body, this thing, is mine. Okay? You can't tell me what I can do with this. Now, in some senses, you can. But we should be, as we saw in the, we've been seeing, we should be always striving for maximal freedom. Okay? Which doesn't mean completely free. That's anarchy. But for most freedom. And our argument comes over what most freedom looks like. We also believe in the concept of individual liberty. And that's a good thing, right? I should not only be free, this doesn't only belong to me, but I should also be free to do things in the world. Now, how much I should be able, free to do? Well, that's always a fight. But still, we believe that there's no human being that believes that the state should control every single aspect of your life. We like to talk about communism, being in control of everybody's life. And that's only true like in a very generalized way. Even people in the most communistic and repressive countries still have options. Right? Give me an option that somebody that's living in Cuba might have today. What to eat for dinner? Thank you very much. Yes. The state does not control what you eat for dinner. They will severely limit your options. You cannot buy, for example, steak in Cuba on the open market. You can buy it on the black market. Right? They call it the gray market because they don't like to mess with their consciences. So they buy stolen stuff, but you cannot, it would take months worth of salary to buy one piece of meat there. Right? On the open market. So they limit that, but that doesn't mean that you can't choose between rice and beans. You can keep the beans out if you wanted. You can put garlic in there if you wanted. You can put a little cilantro. Right? You can use chicken stock or not. There's all kinds of things. So the range might be limited, but again, we're trying to strive for individual liberty and autonomy. You go, what the heck does rice and beans have to do with killing yourself? Here's what it has to do with killing yourself. The important thing to point out is that you are not the only human that exists in this world. For most of us, that's not hard to believe. Right? Most of us believe that other human beings actually exist. Now, there is a philosophy out there called solipsism that does not believe that any other human beings exist, that you are actually the only human that exists and everybody else just exists in like this imaginary world. It's very interesting and there's some philosophers who actually defend that. They are kind of crazy, but severely hilarious. We do not expect or allow humans to act in all ways as if they were the only human alive or the only human that mattered. What do we call those people? People who act as if they are the only people that mattered in the world. Narcissist. What else? There's like lots of terms we come up with these people. Jerks. Right. Radically self-centered. Selfish. Nobody likes those people. You didn't like those people when you were six years old. You don't like those people when you're 60 years old. If you lived to 600, you'd still hate those people even more. You'd be an older crotch to the older person who had dealt with more people who were selfish. You'd be like, those people are just super selfish and terrible. Nobody likes those kind of people. But here's the thing. Work that backwards. If we don't like people who are radically narcissistic, then what about people who are kind of narcissistic? See, the difficult thing here is that all of you want some level of narcissism in the world, right? And the hard part is, one of the hard parts about being a Christian is that you have to curtail your narcissism. It's not optional. There are certain people who are nicer in the world or more kind of generous and kind to other people. In Christianity, you don't have that option. You don't have the option to be like, I'm just going to be kind of a jerk today. That's wrong. It's not like, it's maybe understandable because I feel that way too. But you're not allowed to just take me days, right? If me days are just like, I'm not going to think about anybody else, I'm just going to focus on me and just think about me and live for me. Now, I don't mean that like you can't go to dinner, have a vacation or something. Go for it. But in living in very self-centered ways, we should always be considering other people. The funny part is, every single one of you in this room highly respects people who think about other people even if you don't think about other people very often. Not only that, but you want other people to think about you very often even if you don't really find yourself liking to think about other people. Right? Nobody thinks that people who are generous and think about other people, nobody goes, that person's a jerk. You might think that person's crazy, but you don't think that they're just ridiculous. Again, what does this have to do with killing yourself? Like it or not, what you do has an effect on other people. And I would say that every single thing that you do has an effect on other people. C.S. Lewis one time said that there are no morally neutral acts in the universe. There is not a single one that is just morally neutral, that is devoid of morals. Everything is either a positive act or a negative act. The circle of people that you would affect with your action might be large or small. And the effect that it has on other people could be very large or seemingly insignificant. It could also be known or unknown. So let's have a little thought experiment. I want you to give me what is a possible action that you take in your life, suicides off the table because we're already talking about that, a possible action in your life that has a large effect on a large number of people and you know that it's going to have that effect. Anybody have any kind of ideas about what that would be? It doesn't have to be something really negative. It could be positive. That a human being could do. That would have a large effect on a lot of people, a large effect. Yeah, alright, being faithful to your spouse. Good. That doesn't fit. That doesn't count. That's going to go the other way. Because remember, it's a large effect on a lot of people. It might do that, but you know that this is going to have like broad... So the longer that we're married and faithful, then what happens to that, that action is amplified, isn't it? It's amplified in two different ways, at least. How is it amplified? The longer you stay married. More people are involved in your marriage. That's right. So there's more people being brought into it and what else? If I'm married for five years, it's like, oh, congratulations. What happens when I hit 50 years? It's a bigger example. So I'm reaching more people and it's a broader example and we'll have, you know, more kind of appeal. Now, this is one of the nice things about having folks in our congregation like Larry and Teresa who are clocking, what are you, 43 years now? 44? God bless you, Teresa. 44 years, right? That is something, right? It's interesting because Marge and I talked to a lot of people about being married or getting married or stuff like that and we got married at 19, right? So people are like, whoa, you've been married for 15 years? And it's like, yeah, wow, impressive. But, then, all Larry and Teresa have to do is step in the room and go, yeah, we've been married for 44, oh shoot, all right, yeah, it's like nothing, right? We look like children again. They have a very broad effect on a large number of people and the longer you stay married, the more people you know, the bigger effect it's going to have. And you know it's going to have that effect, especially in a society that is lacking that kind of sense of commitment. Okay? Now, let's work in the opposite direction. A very small amount of effect on a limited number of people that might not even be known. Failing a class. There you go. Yes. Great example. Who really does that affect? You, right? Is it going to ruin your life? I mean, I'm sure you think so like in the moment, right? But is it actually going to probably ruin your life? No. And you might not even know what kind of actions are going to come as a result of it. Good. Two very broad things. And there's decisions in the middle of that that float all over. Lots of people, small effect, unknown cause. Little effect, or big effect on a single person, a known cause. That's preaching the gospel. Right? That's what that would be. And that might even have like a bigger effect on more people coming later. All of our actions have a result on other, some kind of expression towards other people. What's the point? And we'll get into this more a little bit next week because we've run out of time. Right to die advocates champion the idea that it is a person's right to kill themselves. The question is, and we'll talk about this next week when we start, does anybody else matter in that decision? Yes. Autonomy and personal individual liberty are things that Christians should uphold and respect. However, everybody believes there's a limit to that. The question is, where is the limit? Next week what we're going to begin with is thinking through what are some of the possible outcomes of being a society that embraces people freely because they have the right to taking their own lives. Because these decisions, the decisions we make are not just, this is one of the reasons why bioethics is so much fun as we've seen from the very beginning. It doesn't just affect you and it's not just like for the glory of God or something like that. This affects everybody around you and the society at large which is why there might be, in some cases, particular ways in which we ought to live. So, let's pray. God, we thank you for brains to think and we thank you for time that gives us the ability to think through some of these things, to acquire wisdom as we think about what it means to act in this world. We pray that as we continue to think about suicide, which is very much not an easy topic to look at and not something we would naturally want to spend time on, that we would see that this is going to take some work and that both in working through our own thoughts and talking to others, either those who desire to help those who are contemplating suicide or those who are contemplating suicide themselves, that we are going to have to spend some time first of all, thinking ourselves and second of all, thinking through this with those who desire to commit those actions about why such things are truly wrong without defaulting to simplistic answers and a desire to just get people to not do something we don't want them to do. We pray that as we continue to study these things, we would not only be better, more informed Christians, but that we would be better human beings, better citizens, better friends, better neighbors, better employees, employers, that we would be, as a result of this, conformed in the image of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.