Assisted deaths and suicides are a tricky thing to discuss. When Pastor John Piper was asked if Christian doctors are allowed to help dying hospital patients get out of their misery, he answered that it was a "slippery" topic to tackle.
"It seems to me we should start with some clear things and then end with some ambiguous things, because I really, really sympathize with the ambiguities that doctors, especially, and family members, face in these moments. But establishing what is clear will help us with the ambiguities," he writes on his Desiring God website.
Piper also says Christians must submit themselves to Biblical convictions, adding that God wants His children to obey Him even if they cannot see "all the good fruit that will come" from their obedience.
"God usually gives some of his reasons for his commands, but leaves many of those reasons for us to discover long after the act of obedience, even decades or centuries after," he says.
Piper also states that both the Old and New Testaments command people not to murder or take the life of an innocent person.
"The Bible underscores this command repeatedly by using various phrases. And one dominant one is, 'Don't shed innocent blood,'" says Piper. The topic is so important that it was mentioned 19 times in the Bible.
The pastor also believes that human life is a gift of God, and only He owns it and may do with it as He pleases.
"Human life in its fullest sense is a miracle that only he can create and only he has the right to take, unless he has given the state the right to use the sword in various settings to take life. But as far as medical things are concerned, I think it is clear that God's rights are at stake here and we dare not intrude on what he alone has the right to do," he explains.
But because human suffering is so horrible, Piper also believes that it is a loving act when physicians use whatever medicines they have at their disposal to minimise the pain of their patients.
"Nothing I say should be considered to contradict that, and I think it could be shown from Scripture that the fall of man into all the miseries that we have doesn't justify the refusal to help men avoid being in pain," he says.
Piper adds that the line between taking life and not duly sustaining life is not always clear, and it is not easy to discern when death should come to a person who is suffering.
"I am just admitting great ambiguity here," he says. "The will of the patient to live is one key factor. Yes, strive to sustain life for a patient who desires life. But the will of the patient to die is not a decisive word."
Piper's conclusion is that people do not "have the right to help a patient take his own life or the right to take it ourselves."
"The laws that put such things into our hands are bad laws and should not constrain Christian physicians to act against their convictions even if they have to lose their job in the process," he says. "The ambiguities of end of life decisions regarding what is fitting life support and what blocks a timely, natural death, those decisions remain very, very difficult."
