Euthanasia |
Here is
how euthanasia is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘The painless
killing of a patient suffering from an incurable disease or in an
irreversible coma’. In other words, it is a death hastened by doctors with
the permission of the sufferer’s relatives (or the sufferer himself) to keep him
from continuing to suffer. |
I exhort
you in the Lord to reject and expose euthanasia because it is a murder in the
sight of God. He who has the power to kill and to make alive is God alone (1 Samuel
2:6). Therefore, if the country where you live permits euthanasia and one of
your relatives is in a hopeless condition from a medical point of view,
because according to the doctors he is condemned to die after unspeakable
sufferings without any chance of recovering, you must not give the permission
to let him die in advance (before time) in order to put an end to his
sufferings or to make him suffer less, because if you give such a permission
you will share in a murder. And then who said that that man will surely die?
The doctors, thus human beings who can’t lengthen the life of men and who
have a limited knowledge like all the other human beings. Therefore they do
not have the last word, for it is God (the Omnipotent, the Omniscient and the
Omnipresent) who has the last word in the life of men. It is God who decides
when a man is going to die and what kind of death he will die. Thus what counts
is His decision, is what God says. |
So, let us
suppose that one of our relatives is dying of an incurable disease and is
suffering terribly. How should we cope with such situation? Well, first of
all, we should ask: ‘What did God determine to do? Did He determine to let
him live or die?’ Nobody knows (unless God reveals His will by a word of
wisdom). Therefore we must plead with God to heal that person who is dying of
an incurable disease. For we must never give up hoping in God, for our God is
able to raise up a man the doctors say he’s done for or a man who thinks he
is done for. Job is a clear example of how God can change the most desperate
situation. Job was suffering terrible pains, his flesh was wasting away from
sight and his bones clung to his skin and to his flesh, he thought that he
would soon depart from this world, and his wife was waiting for his death;
but God healed him and made him prosperous again. Another eloquent example of
what God can do when there is no more hope from a human point of view is that
of king Hezekiah, who was taken ill and in the midst of his illness thought
that he was a dead man, but God heard his prayer and saw his tears and added
to his days fifteen years. “I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go
to the gates of the grave: I am deprived of the residue of my years. I said, I shall not see the LORD, even the LORD, in the land
of the living: I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world.
Mine age is departed, and is removed from me as a shepherd's tent: I have cut
off like a weaver my life: he will cut me off with pining sickness: from day
even to night wilt thou make an end of me” (Isaiah 38:10-12) said Hezekiah in
his song after he was healed by the Lord, and he added: “What shall I say? he hath both spoken unto me, and himself hath done it: I shall
go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul. O Lord, by these things
men live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit: so wilt thou
recover me, and make me to live. Behold, for peace I had great bitterness:
but thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for
thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back” (Isaiah 38:15-17). As you can
see, the above mentioned examples show us clearly that God can change the
most desperate circumstances in the life of men, for both Job and Hezekiah
were ‘terminally ill,’ but God healed them. Knowing this, therefore, let us
pray for our relative who is terminally hill so that God may heal him, and
God will surely heal him if it is His will to heal him. Do not lose heart,
with God nothing is impossible. |
But not
only can God heal incurable diseases, which lead to death, if it is His will;
but He can also raise the dead. Therefore He can act on behalf of a man even
after his death. So he can allow a man to die of an incurable disease in
order to raise him from the dead before or during of even after his funeral. The
resurrections which are recorded in the Scripture confirm this concept. So it
is lawful for us to plead with God to raise a dead person, and obviously if
it is God’s will to raise him from the dead, it will come to pass that that
man will rise again in answer to our prayers. |
But what
shall we say if God has determined to let him die of that incurable disease
but not to bring him back to life? We will say: ‘The will of God be done.’ If
the dying person is a believer, when he dies he will go to heaven to be with
the Lord; if he is a sinner, he will go to Hades (hell), where he will be
tormented with fire, and thus he will continue to suffer in another world,
and we know that the sufferings in Hades are greater than any suffering on
the earth. |
I would
like to point out that many of those who die in severe pain are people who
have been struck by the rod of God for their wickedness. For God makes them reap the evil they have sowed. The Scripture says
that God struck king Jehoram with an incurable disease because of his wickedness,
as it is written: “After all this the Lord struck him in his intestines with
an incurable disease. Then it happened in the course of time, after the end of
two years, that his intestines came out because of his sickness: so he died
in severe pain” (2 Chronicles |