Rev. Robert Fleischmann, National Director, Christian Life Resources
The two most common questions I get about end-of-life care deal with resuscitation orders and obligatory care and treatment. You can read what I have written on resuscitation orders here.
I want this article to focus on the line between preserving life and prolonging the dying process. When asked this question in the middle of a presentation, I tend to give the rather simplistic answer: “We treat and care until it is clear that God is calling someone home.”
This is a true statement, but admittedly, it sidesteps the critical issue of how we know when God is calling someone home. For anyone in the hospital room facing the question of what to do next, things look much more complicated. This article is my deep dive into that matter.
We tend to look for the black-and-white answer to settle the matter. However, if you have ever been in this situation, you know that many related issues are not black-and-white. While this answer is long, I want to give you a framework for various unanticipated end-of-life decision-making circumstances.
Understanding “Preserving Life”
We are called upon to preserve and care for life in three circumstances:
- Curative Objective: We preserve life when we take steps to care for and treat a patient with the reasonable expectation that what we are doing will work and the patient’s condition will improve. This is the easiest circumstance to be in. When someone is injured or has gotten sick, we want them restored to full health. We look to use the resources we can that have the highest expectation of success in bringing healing. We may even consider participating in medical studies for the promise that it would cure and accelerate the healing process. I do not recall ever encountering anyone who has trouble taking the necessary steps to preserve life in such circumstances, so long as those steps are consistent with medical ethics and religious dogma.
- Status Quo Objective: Sometimes, we work to care for and preserve life to maintain the status quo. Maintaining the status quo means we do not expect the patient to get better or worse under our care. We encounter this when a person is in a serious accident or suffers debilitation from some medical crisis. There is medical intervention to stop the bleeding and stabilize the patient, but the damage has already been done, and by all known standards, the patient will not recover fully. I have most experienced this with some brain injury from an accident or a stroke. The damage is done, and the doctor tells you that the patient will never walk again, will always need help eating, or will never regain the cognitive clarity he had before the accident. Again, we may be interested in participating in some medical studies in the dim hope of improvement. Still, for the most part, we do what we can to care for life, striving to keep things from worsening, preserving the status quo, and maintaining a stable quality of life.
- Terminal Condition: A terminal condition is an incurable injury or illness beyond the reach of known medical intervention. When someone’s condition is deemed “terminal,” death is expected within a few months or years. The trajectory is clear, and we are out of options. Our focus is on preserving the patient’s life to ensure comfort. Unless something extraordinary comes along, we likely have no reasonable expectation that any experimental treatment will change the outcome.
In these three situations, we preserve life. How we do that will vary depending on the circumstances. Minimally, in all three circumstances, we do not want our decisions and actions to have a detrimental effect on the patient so that it causes their condition to worsen or hastens death. Our actions reflect a motive to help a patient continue living, recognizing that in some circumstances, living may mean a lesser quality of life than the patient had previously. I will explore the concerns of “quality of life” later in this article.
Understanding “Prolonging the Dying Process”
If we think simplistically about this, everything we do prolongs the dying process. Whether we undergo surgery, bandage wounds, practice good hygiene, eat well, and stay hydrated, everything can be perceived as kicking the can further down the road. Death is inevitable for everyone. Everything we do merely postpones it.
It is helpful to remember that. In our affluent culture of instant gratification, we spoil easily. We forget that life is a ticking bomb that eventually goes off. Someone once said, “Dying is not a technical glitch in the operating system; it’s a feature.”1Belinda Luscombe, “Life After Death” (Time magazine, 4/24/17, p. 41)
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, Inc., was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October 2003. It was a terminal condition that made his observations about death especially sobering in a June 2005 commencement address to graduates at Stanford University:
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.22005 Standford Commencement Address by Steve Jobs, https://tinyurl.com/2k68sc95 (accessed 3-27-25)
As Christians, we understand this reality, though we are not immune from the fallacy that “we can beat this despite the odds.”
Even though everything in life can be seen as “prolonging the dying process,” what I mean by the phrase is the action we might be tempted to take near the end of life that, by all reasonable expectations, ignores the obvious: death is coming soon. Or, to put it more clinically, death is imminent.
So, that is what I mean when I say we are preserving life on one side of the line. On the other side, we are ignoring the “death is imminent” diagnosis, expending enormous resources, and subjecting a patient to burdensome care that will antagonize and maybe even accelerate the dying process. Our task is to try to identify when to keep trying and when to stop trying and focus on making the patient comfortable.
Of course, comfort is a goal throughout life. To preserve life, comfort is sometimes secondary to the measures necessary for healing. A good example would be emergency surgery. Sometimes, being cut open, repaired, and stitched closed brings additional discomfort for a while. The goal is to heal. It is short-term pain for long-term gain. Resetting broken bones, patching up wounds, and repairing damaged internal organs come with discomfort.
When we judge that no more can be done to preserve life and that death is imminent, our focus shifts to doing everything we can to make the patient comfortable. Comfort rather than healing becomes the foremost priority.
Understanding how our view of life and death can be easily distorted over time and through exposure to the fantasies of books, television, and movies is helpful.
The Bigger Picture
Despite death being a universal and ever-present reality, we work hard, especially in our affluent culture, to ignore that reality. Centuries ago, medical care often occurred in the home. When death came, the body and burial were taken care of by the family.
Today, it is different. We are far more spectators of life’s frailty and vulnerability than its caregivers. We pass off physical challenges to experts who can best treat and hopefully heal the maladies. Each year, our knowledge of human disease and aging is met with a new onslaught of technology to make healing quicker, maladies less painful, and rehabilitation more effective.
However, there is a bigger picture that we often miss in the drama of unexpected injury or illness. When we see ourselves within the context of the bigger picture, it helps us understand the decisions we can make that might preserve and protect life and better judge when there is nothing more we can do.
The “bigger picture” I am talking about is coming to grips with why we exist in the first place. To answer that question, let’s start with how the Apostle Paul explained it to the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers gathered at the Areopagus3The Areopagus is also referred to as Mars Hill due to its connection to the Greek god of war, Ares, who was known as Mars in Roman mythology. The name “Areopagus” literally means “Hill of Ares” in Greek, which translates to “Mars Hill” in Latin. It was a gathering lecture/discussion center in the Grecian city of Athens, which was under Roman rule at the time of the Apostle Paul.:
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ (Acts 17:24–28)
Paul acknowledges that God established everything. The contemporary competitor to this notion is science.
A world without God looks to scientific constants to explain all things. For example, science teaches us that light travels at 186,282 miles per second, gravity pulls a lesser mass to a denser mass, and there are four laws of thermodynamics. The Apostle Paul essentially says that while there may be scientific rules of life, God established those rules. All we can do is observe them and measure them. A greater power is behind them—that greater power is God.
God established the physical properties upon which science is based. God also established human life. He established not only when in history a life occurs but also where it is geographically located, and he did it with a purpose for life. That purpose in life is to be directed not internally at us but externally at him (God).
Think about that for a moment. Our lives often become so wrapped up with happiness, career, and accomplishment that it is easy to forget that life is all about God.
Regardless of the culture, we live in a world of choices. We can choose what we want to do and the values we wish to live by (Joshua 24:15; Romans 12:1). Often, we are tempted to think that the ability to make these choices makes the choices themselves correct (Proverbs 14:12; Acts 16:6-10).
However, the rightness of those choices is not defined by our ability to make decisions. Instead, as God’s children, rightness begins in the heart. Therefore, it is essential to understand motivation correctly.
Introspective Motivation Rooted in Faith
Motivation drives our decisions. It is the “why” behind the “what” that we do. In this context, I am specifically talking about introspective motivation. That is the deep-seated, values-based, heartfelt reasoning behind what drives you to do what you do, say what you say, and think what you think.
Motivation has an obvious or superficial component. I see someone ready to step into an open manhole cover, and I yell out to stop them so they do not fall into the open manhole. Introspectively, however, what drives my concern?
Maybe I genuinely love that person and do not want them to get hurt. Maybe I like all people and want no one to get hurt. Perhaps I want to impress others with my awareness so they might consider me a hero.
When I talk about introspective motivation, I am talking about what we value most and how that translates into our daily lives. Introspective motivation is also called a worldview. It is a mindset that shapes how we see the world around us, the needs of others, and our place within that world.
My example shows that outward actions do not always reveal our true motivation. Even when I save someone from getting hurt, I might be more driven by the desire to show off and be admired by others who watch me.
It is a biblical truth that decisions can look good on the outside, but if rooted in the wrong motivation, they are not essentially good (Isaiah 64:6; Matthew 23:27). Faith is the core ingredient behind God-pleasing motivation (Romans 14:23; Hebrews 11:6). When we live first for God and his glory, it transforms us. The ability to live first for God’s glory emanates from faith.
Faith is more than a conviction about something. Faith is the ability to believe something for which you have no empirical evidence. I would go one step further to say that true faith is the ability to believe in things you might otherwise feel all evidence is to the contrary. Consider the definition of faith we have from Scripture:
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1)
Think about it. How can you be confident in what you are hoping for? How can you be sure of what you do not see?
Look at the obstacles we face in naturally having any allegiance to God:
Life in this world is naturally opposed to God (Genesis 8:21; Romans 8:7). Why do you think we embrace science so quickly? We often look for the logical, explicable, definable, and justifiable based on our standards. When the disciples gather in the Upper Room and are greeted by the resurrected Jesus, why do the doubts of Thomas resonate with us (John 20:24-29)? Like Thomas, we have an imperfect faith. We feel safer with the tangible, measurable, and verifiable things of life.
Do you remember Paul having to chastise Simon Peter (referred to as Cephas) (Galatians 2:11-21)? Peter’s imperfect faith recognized that Christ came for all people. Still, when faced with potential conflict from Jewish leaders, Peter started slipping back into old Jewish ways that treated the Gentiles as outside of God’s kingdom.
When you live by faith, you surrender the standards, fears, and apprehensions associated with this world. Demanding quantifiable evidence, being accepted, and achieving admirable things in this world mean nothing. The more we live by faith, the more the world will oppose us (John 15:18-19; 2 Timothy 3:12). As I have often said in sermons and presentations, “If you find living the Christian faith is going well for you, you are probably doing it wrong.”
When faith drives your motivation, your focus is not on the things of this world but on the things of God. The Scriptures refer to this as a transformation, literally a metamorphosis (Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18).
This is a supernatural event. We can’t explain it logically. Think about it. We believe God created all things (Hebrews 11:3). We believe that the only truly innocent person ever to live had to die to save all of us guilty ones (2 Corinthians 5:21), and this innocent person was none other than the son of God (John 3:16; Colossians 2:9).
Because of what Jesus did, his believers live in this world, mindful that we are temporary residents and have an eternal home in heaven (John 14:1-3; Philippians 3:17-21; Hebrews 11:13-16).
Of special significance is how this faith changes our perspective of death. The Apostle Paul called out this unique perspective in this way:
But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Corinthians 15:12–22)
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is central to how we view life and death. Knowing that this resurrection is a certainty, Paul stated:
I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me. (Philippians 1:20–26)
This supernatural ability to believe the unbelievable compels us to treat life not as a playground for selfish pursuits but as an opportunity to glorify God in all things (Isaiah 43:7; 1 Corinthians 10:31).
Glorifying God
Preserving life comes with a purpose: glorifying God. Glorifying God means our words, actions, and thoughts are focused on meeting God’s desires ahead of our own. For example, God wants all people to be saved and to know the salvation he procured through the sacrifice of his son (1 Timothy 2:4). Because God wants that, we want that.
God loved us with an incredibly sacrificial form of love. And because he has loved us that way, he wants us to love others that way (John 13:34-35). Because God wants this, we want it.
Glorifying God is not something we do to earn God’s favor but to reflect an awareness in our lives of what God did to save and sustain us. We call it appreciation. It is a demonstration of wholehearted gratitude. When people see us, they should see a reflection of God’s love in us (2 Corinthians 3:18; 1 Peter 2:21).
It Starts to Make Sense
Do you remember all those peculiar and seemingly illogical things Scripture calls us to do? We are to walk through the most dangerous places without fear (Psalm 23:4). We are willing to be abused by and even to love our enemies (Matthew 5:38-44). We are to think of the needs of others ahead of our own (Philippians 2:3-5). We are even willing to sacrifice for the sake of others (John 15:13; Romans 12:1).
Jesus was clear on this point. As he loved us, so are we to love others (1 John 4:11-12). It is a challenging point when you consider the reality Jesus cited for life in this world:
Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold. (Matthew 24:12)
This creates an interesting phenomenon. We know our calling is to spread the message of salvation to all people (Matthew 28:19-20; 2 Corinthians 5:20), and we think somewhat formalistically about that. We believe we need to memorize many Bible passages and have a fluent grasp of Biblical doctrine to start sharing our faith. One of the most extraordinary things is how, when we live as children belonging to the heavenly kingdom, acting Christ-like in the way we live, it looks peculiar to others. Peter put it this way:
But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. (1 Peter 3:15)
When Christ is revered in our hearts, we turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, and sacrifice even for the sake of those who are our enemies. And when we do that, we stand out as profoundly different in a world where the love of most has grown cold. That kind of lifestyle prompts curiosity and questions. In other words, living this way can often bring the mission field to you (Matthew 5:16).
Applying This to the End of Life
We are being watched as we approach the end of our lives. We may be watched by more people near the end of our lives than at any other time. Some will watch us, fearing for the inevitability of their own death that lies ahead. Some will watch us to see our reactions to our earthly life coming to an end. Will we be frustrated, disappointed, sad, or angry? These are the reactions you get when people have spent their entire lives living for things in this world, only to have found it coming to a crashing halt with a terminal illness.
As we age or when we get a terminal diagnosis, our thoughts instinctively shift to life coming to an end. That may be the case, but I suggest a different perspective for people of faith. Instead of measuring the end of life by what you will lose in this world, see it as a shift in your mission field. The mission of every Christian to be an evangelist is to proclaim the Gospel message of salvation. Your mission never changes, but the mission field may change. Approaching the end of life often means we will encounter other people, new people, many of whom might be without faith and at a vulnerable time in their own lives, who need to see us and hear from us as we cope with the changes in our lives.
Consider how the perspective that life is all about glorifying God and doing his will affects treatment decisions. More worldly-minded people are inclined to lean on “quality of life” considerations. They often will pursue or reject continued treatment or try new treatments based on worldly goals. Maybe they want to hang on long enough to meet a new grandchild, complete a bucket list, or reach some alternative worldly milestone like an anniversary or birthday.
Conversely, some have wanted to “give up” on life because their condition has robbed them of being able to go hunting, shopping, playing a favorite sport, or visiting a favorite vacation spot. Living solely by the world’s standards, many people reject life-extending treatment because it would not restore enough quality to do the things they like. Some have opted for assisted suicide just to get it over with.
As Christians obsessed with serving God, we need to see that avenues to do his will might continue to exist in such circumstances. Undoubtedly, the quality of life diminishes, but is that a legitimate criterion for taking steps to shorten life? Not really. Even in these darkest valleys, it is still all about God.
When the doctors announce there is nothing more that can be done and that death is imminent, our reaction will reveal the nature of our hearts. When we see death as having lost its sting (1 Corinthians 15:53-58), we don’t need to prolong the dying process because we know what lies ahead – paradise (Luke 23:43).
The Gray Areas
Yes, there are gray areas in end-of-life decision-making. We are imperfect people compromised by our imperfect hearts. In partial humor, I remind people that it is called a “medical practice” because everyone is still trying to get better at it. Sometimes, we misread symptoms, misunderstand what is happening physiologically, and make decisions based on incorrect information or assumptions. At times like this, the paralyzing thought enters our minds, “What if I am wrong?” We worry that we will make the wrong decisions that will harm and not help. Out of the sincerity of faith, we worry we make bad decisions based on a misunderstanding of God’s will or the circumstances.
There are many mistakes we can make along this decision path. The memories and the emotions of the moment can perhaps deceive or distract us. When wrestling with gray area decisions that must be made, keep in mind the following:
- Glorifying God is what life is all about. Sometimes, we can actively glorify God by doing things that honor him and care for others. Sometimes, we are passive as others care for us. The point is, never take your focus off the reality that so long as we live, we live to glorify God in all things—actively and passively.
- God is not trying to see where you are on such matters. After all, he is God. He already knows your heart and the future. Even in these harshest circumstances, God may be trying to reveal to you where your heart truly is.
- God gets his way. Even our decisions, made from the sincerest of faith, are tainted with sin. Chances are pretty good we will make mistakes. Do not worry; God gets his way. In more than four decades of serving in this area, I have helped to make decisions that should have preserved life, and the patient died, and I thought we were conceding that life was ending, and the patient recovered. God gets his way despite us.
- Go with certainty. We spend our lives growing in our knowledge of God and his will. It is an imperfect journey conducted by imperfect people. We spend a lifetime working on it and never nailing it until we stand before God’s throne in heaven. I imagine that in heaven, we will experience many “Now I understand” moments. This side of heaven, however, is challenging. When in doubt about God’s will, go with what you can be sure of. Instead of fretting over what you imagine could be God’s hidden agenda, settle for the clarity of what he has already stated in his word. Seek the more objective counsel of your pastor to help you see and understand the clarity.
Heavenly Minded – Always
Jesus once said, “For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes” (Luke 12:23). Jesus is saying that there is something more than the sustaining and caring we do for our bodies. As we labor to work the soil to grow the food to nurture our bodies (Genesis 3:17-19), the time is coming when we will not hunger or thirst. There is a place where no sun or scorching heat will beat on us. In a world of sorrows, there is a place with no tears (Revelation 7:16-17).
Our time on this earth is imperfect. The crops we grow are never as robust, the homes we build are never perfect, and our relationships are great but flawed. We cannot watch enough YouTube videos to fix things perfectly and permanently. Eventually, they will wear out and need to be fixed again. Yet, what we fidget at in this world is fulfilled in the next.
C.S. Lewis once wrote,
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. (Mere Christianity)
As we strive to find comfort and joy in this world, it gets close, but never close enough. Perfection is always beyond our reach.
What often happens in life is that we strive to create heaven on earth. We take our eyes off the goal and start wandering down paths in a futile attempt to do so. The idols scattered around our personal Areopagus of the heart might be our careers, families, possessions, etc. All of them may be nice and wonderful, but they are always incomplete.
Once we find ourselves on these wrong tracks, we consider death the ultimate defeat. Indeed, from this perspective, if we ignore Christ’s resurrection, we are to be greatly pitied (1 Corinthians 15:19).
Surrendering the notion that we must find heaven on earth changes life’s trajectory. Understanding that we are not living for this world and for ourselves but for God has us doing what we can while it is day to honor God with our lives (John 9:4). We eat and drink to his glory (1 Corinthians 10:31). We rest to be better prepared to serve him the next day.
And there are no disappointments. When rightly motivated to glorify God, we persevere when things go wrong. When the circumstances of life typically frustrate and demoralize us, we embrace the experience as a check on our priorities vs. God’s priorities (Jonah 1:1-3; 3:1-3; Acts 16:6-10).
Accepting Death
If you take God at his word, you realize that death is unavoidable (Ecclesiastes 3:19; 1 Corinthians 15:22; Hebrews 9:27). But you don’t have to take God’s word for it. The evidence is obvious. The obituary pages remind us daily that death comes for each generation, as it has come for the generations that have passed.
God teaches us where death comes from (Romans 3:10; 6:23). Death is a consequence and byproduct of sin. We brought it on ourselves. But God provided the solution – the sacrifice of his son, Jesus, and then raised Jesus back to life (1 Corinthians 15:15-22).
My experience has been that Christians understand that death is the result of sin. They also know that we are redeemed through Christ, that we will be resurrected, and that heaven is our eternal home. The issue that torments us is the separation between loved ones. Perhaps the most pertinent instruction on this reality comes from the Apostle Paul to the members of the church in Thessalonica who had experienced the death of family and friends and were mourning:
Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14)
Paul contrasts two kinds of mourning. There is the mourning of those “who have no hope.” Do you remember that the definition of faith includes being sure of what we hope for (Hebrews 11:1)? When someone dies, what do we hope for? Whether we learn it from the Bible or from looking around us, the death of any loved one is inevitable, and we must learn that hard lesson (Ecclesiastes 7:2).
Because death is inevitable, our hope, therefore, cannot be that death will not come. What do you think inevitable means? The mourning going on in Thessalonica was not that death wouldn’t come. The people mourned because death had already come.
Instead, the hope Paul is referring to is the resurrection and reunion. Paul points to the certain hope (faith) that death is not the end.
Everything about the death of a loved one hinges on the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:12-22). All the science and medical technology in the world cannot change the trajectory of life, which eventually ends with death. Our distinctive hope is rooted in the fact that Jesus died for our sins and was raised to life. He was resurrected.
When Martin Luther grieved deeply over the death of his 14-year-old daughter, he said:
“I am joyful in spirit but I am sad according to the flesh. The flesh doesn’t take kindly to this. The separation [caused by death] troubles me above measure. It’s strange to know that she is surely at peace and that she is well off there, very well off, and yet to grieve so much!”4Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 54: Table Talk, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 54 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 432.
When we face the impending death of a loved one and are offered all the experimental resources of science and medicine, what drives our decision as to what to do? When thinking like the world, we often deceive ourselves into believing we can beat death. We think that with the right medicine, surgery, technology, and medical experts to tend to the patient, we will win, and death will lose. The world can offer no solution for the sin that brought death in the first place. At best, with all the expertise and resources we can muster, we are merely kicking the can down the road. Life is transitory, and death is inevitable.
As God’s children, our intent to prolong life centers on serving the Lord of life. When death approaches, the core of our sorrow is the pain of separation (John 11:35). There can only be one remedy for the pain of that separation: a reunion. A reunion can only occur when the torments that brought death and the decomposition that returns all of us to dust can somehow be undone or reconstituted. That is resurrection.
As Jesus exited the tomb on that first Easter, his body bore the wounds of his execution, but they did not hinder the new reality that he who once was dead is now alive. The hope for the Thessalonians was rooted in the historical fact that the resurrection of Jesus Christ truly happened. Countless people witnessed his execution. The flow of blood and water that spilled from his body when speared on the cross testified that the biological breakdown of the body had begun.
Equally important were the witnesses that he was resurrected. There were the accounts of the women and his closest disciples. But that was not all. More than two decades later, Paul wrote:
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Corinthians 15:3–8)
The resurrected Jesus Christ appeared to more than five hundred men and women, and when Paul wrote the letter, most of those people were still living. It was as if to challenge them to ask around. Twenty-plus years after Jesus rose from the dead, you can talk to people who witnessed it. Very few historical events we embrace as absolute fact had over 500 witnesses. This is real. This is certain hope.
We have no interest in prolonging the dying process. Not when we have been given this eternal solution to the inevitable and insurmountable challenge of death.
As Christians, we are not afraid to accept that by all reasonable standards, there is nothing more that we can do. To the best of our judgment, and the judgment of those who make it their profession to care for life, there comes a time when we accept that God is taking a life home to himself.
We will mourn. Some have said that when Luther’s beloved 14-year-old daughter died, he never fully recovered. But he did not grieve hopelessly.
When you think the time has come to stop more treatments because you have the reasonable expectation that they will be futile or agonize the dying process, you might be wrong, but you are not killing anyone. God still has the final say. Even when we medically make incorrect decisions at the end of life, our times remain in his hands. He did not surrender his authority so we could flounder on a matter beyond our ability.
Opportunities to Demonstrate Faith
Sometimes, we can’t tell. Our imperfect knowledge of things does not always make the path forward clear. We think God might be taking a life, or maybe not. This is where faith comes in.
Think about that familiar love chapter of 1 Corinthians 13. The last verse says,
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)
At first glance, doesn’t it seem like “faith” should have been the greatest? When faith is described as “confidence in what we hope for” and “assurance about what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1), that means in heaven, we have received what we were hoping for, and we are sure about it because we live in that reality. You no longer live by faith.
In the same way, the ultimate tests of our faith are not when the decisions are straightforward. That is not faith. That is just logic. Your faith leads you to make decisions calmly, accepting that God will always get his way (Psalm 46:10) and that he will always get it right (Psalm 18:30). God uses our decisions to guide the course of life, but our decisions never usurp his will. When he works all things out for the good of his people (Romans 8:28), he is not just massaging all the right things in life but also the wrong things that we may do in life (Genesis 50:20).
Summary
Killing and self-killing are things we can do. We have the ability. We can also lie, steal, commit adultery, covet, and so forth. Being able to do those things means it is what free choice looks like. It doesn’t make any of those things the right choice. When it comes to assisted suicide, it is never right to use our freedom to challenge the will of God.
Our entire existence typically focuses on preserving and prolonging life. The “why” we do that depends on where our heart lies (motive). When we understand that our existence is totally about honoring and glorifying God, we act accordingly.
The day will come when living in this world comes to an end. There is no avoiding it. Sometimes, it will seem clear that God is calling us to our heavenly home. Sometimes, our imperfect knowledge blurs our understanding of whether life is a momentary struggle or on the way out. Our inclination is to cling to life, understanding there is a reason for life in this world, and it is all about God. Our desire, however, is to be with Christ in heaven, which is better by far (Philippians 1:23). God will get his way. This is not a test to prove to God what you are made of. Remember, he is God. He already knows.
Instead, the challenges we face teach us about ourselves, our priorities, and the condition of our faith. Learn the lessons well.
