Focal Point

Dave Druey: You might be faced with a difficult decision of what to do when a loved one is sick or dying. What are the justifications for putting them on or taking them off life support? Join us for a serious conversation about euthanasia with Pastor Mike Fabarez, here on Focal Point.

If you have an elderly parent, or perhaps a friend or loved one who is suffering from a life-threatening condition, today's program is going to be one you don't want to miss. I'm Dave Druey, and thank you for joining us for this important edition of Ask Pastor Mike here on Focal Point.

Have you ever wondered what is the right thing to do when someone is unable to live without artificial life support? Right now we're joining Focal Point's Executive Director, Jay Wharton, and Pastor Mike Fabarez to find out. Jay?

Jay Wharton: Thank you, Dave. Pastor Mike, today's question addresses a topic we've been hearing a lot about in the news recently. This listener asks, is euthanasia wrong?

Pastor Mike Fabarez: This is a tough question in our day because the front pages are dotted with stories that lure us in. They make us respond compassionately, like we totally understand why someone would want to end their life. Euthanasia literally means "good death." It means that it would be better for this person to die now. Obviously, that's under the heading in the news today of mercy killings or the "right to die" movement. It’s the idea that it would be good for us to have that control, to be able to decide when I die and how I die.

There are biblical examples of people doing this. You've got Abimelech in Judges chapter nine where he's been fatally injured with a head injury. He's about to die, and he says, "I don't want to be known as dying this way, by this woman that's thrown this millstone." He calls his armor-bearer over and says, "You’re going to have to kill me because I want to die on my terms. I don't want to die the way that this is working out. It's going to be a disgrace to my history."

You remember Saul, same much the same. On Mount Gilboa, he's mortally injured, and as he's dying, he asks his armor-bearer to thrust him through to end his life. We see that, which is really a microcosm of this whole debate. Can I, on my terms, decide to die my way?

You look at even how David responded when they came trying to offer the news that they had run through the king. David's response as a godly man and a prophet in the Old Testament makes clear: no, it's not okay. He may die in a battle on Mount Gilboa by the enemy, but to finish him off is wrong. Even if Saul requested it, it's wrong. It's not right. That's the biblical constraint.

We'd like to be compassionate and say we don't want people to suffer or see them self-disgraced or lose control of their body or their functions. So, this seems like a more noble, dignified way to die. But in reality, it meets the criteria of what the Bible would say is murder, killing someone intentionally and ending their life. The Bible says you can't do that with a human being.

Jay Wharton: Pastor Mike, how would we counsel someone who says to us, "It's not compassionate to prolong the suffering" or "It's the most loving thing we can do to help end their pain"? What do we say to them?

Pastor Mike Fabarez: I guess we would look again into the Scripture where God has given us directives from our manufacturer, from our God, as to how to live our lives. The response that we see is not, "Hey, if you're suffering, end your life so that you don't have to suffer anymore." I think of Paul in Philippians chapter one, talking about the fact that he's in prison in a dire situation. He's afraid he might die or he might be killed. His response is to pray and declare the fact that he's going to be courageous. There's a great deal of courage in this.

It's a lot like the thorn in the flesh from 2 Corinthians chapter 12 where he's talking about this terrible ailment that he has. It's so bad he calls it a messenger of Satan. He then is told by God that his grace will be sufficient. He'll be able to bear up in a graceful, dignified way in this pain, and God will provide for him. Sometimes the suffering will be prolonged and it may be a terrible situation, but courage and grace are required.

Then even in the Bible, if you look throughout the Bible, you'll see the use of medication. Proverbs 31 speaks about the medicinal options they had in their day, saying to give them to those that are perishing. Clearly, medication has come a long way from the Old Testament times, but we ought to utilize that and utilize it in a liberal way for those that are suffering. We want to make people comfortable. Courage, the grace of God, and medications is the biblical paradigm, not ending their life.

If you think about the Bible in the Old Testament times and the New Testament times, they had plenty of options like we do. You could easily end someone's life. But instead, we see that as an immoral act that the Bible would condemn. Instead, we pray for courage and grace, and we administer medications as best we can to try and alleviate the pain. But we don't avoid it by ending a human life.

Jay Wharton: Certainly this conversation hinges on the fact that there's a sacredness to life. Maybe you can speak to that a little bit on what the Bible has to say.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: If you think about it, people do this with their animals all the time. They take their animals to the pound and they're suffering, so we just put the animal down, put the animal to sleep. We don't do that with human beings because we're not animals. We're distinct from animals. We're made in the image of God. There's something sacred about life. That life is given to us by God. Human beings don't have the right to take it unless there's a divinely sanctioned reason to take it. And that's not pain and suffering. It's not disgrace or difficulty. We don't have the right to end the life because of those things. It's not on the list.

Because we're not animals, because we're made in the image of God, we can't do that at will. We can't even do it when it seems like it would be a good thing to do, better to die on your terms than to let this disease or this illness kill you. The Bible still tells us we don't have the option. To put your cat down, I get it, and you have the right to do that biblically. You just don't have the right to do that with your grandmother or your parents or your spouse or yourself.

Jay Wharton: Well, thank you, Pastor Mike. We're going to keep this conversation going with a message you did from your Thursday night study series called The Sanctity of Life.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Once you take your Bibles and pull up Genesis chapter one. We want to talk about what it means that human beings are described as being created in God's image. That's a big topic. If you look again at verse number 27, it says God created man. It doesn't say men; it says man, this word that encompasses the totality of humanity at this point, in his own image.

He makes very clearly here, and he'll get into more detail in chapter two about the creation of woman, but he says in the image of God he created him, mankind, male and female he created them. The distinction is being set as this creation is in the image of God and everything else is not. Animals are distinct from most creation because there's something about them that is parallel to mankind in having a soul, having some immaterial part to them.

But we need to recognize, as high as they are in the creative order, there is a clear line of demarcation between every animal that God has ever made and mankind in Genesis. They are up on the higher echelon of God's creative work, but they are certainly not in the image of God, as we'll see. Distinction number one is no distinction at all: God makes men and women in his image and they are equally in his image.

It has nothing to do with their distinction in gender that one is higher in terms of the center of God's image than the other. When it comes to animals, they are excluded from that definition or anything else in the creative narrative of Genesis one. I could build a long case for this, but let me make it as simple as I can. John chapter four, verse 24, says that God is described as spirit. In essence, he is spirit. That's the passage with the woman at the well. Jesus says he's looking for worshipers that worship in spirit and truth.

The idea is he's spirit. That was because we're doing away with the temple on Mount Gerizim and the temple in Jerusalem, and God's making a point about who God is. You could look elsewhere in the Bible; it's everywhere. God dwells in unapproachable light; no man has seen God or can see God. All the manifestations of God or the descriptions of God that present him in physical terms, clearly when we talk just about directly what God is, he's spirit.

Whenever spirit is described in any detail, like it is in Luke chapter 24, verse 39, it couldn't be more clear that spirit is not physical. There's no physical component to something that's spirit. "See my hands," Jesus says after the resurrection. They are afraid he's a spirit, a vision, or a ghost. "See my hands, see my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have."

We could build a larger case for that, but I hope it's not hard for you to see that those that would recommend to you that when you look in the mirror, you see something that kind of resembles God if God were to show up. Now, clearly we believe in the incarnation in Jesus Christ showed up, and he's got two ears, a nose, eyebrows, teeth, a chin, elbows, and toenails. That, of course, you could say sure, God, as he says to his disciples, is spirit, but if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. We must not be talking about a visual image of something physical because the Bible's clear that God is spirit.

Now, the world doesn't think that human beings are created in the image of God. Most people are naturalists; even if they believe in God, they believe that we got here through accidents and we're nothing more than animals that have evolved to a place where we can think and create art and do these things that we do. So, we're at the top of the heap in this same spectrum. The Bible would say we're in a whole different plane, we're in a whole different category as being made in God's image.

If that's true, and I don't see myself really as a part of some kind of cyclical or linear evolving of humanity, I'm really a special creation of God, specially and uniquely reflecting the character of God, the ontological character of God, having intellect, emotion, will, dominion, and all those things we talked about. What are the implications? People come first. They come first before everything. They are at the top of what it means in the physical world. In terms of honor and glory, there's nothing bigger unless you go beyond the natural.

You have to go to the supernatural, the Elohim of Psalm eight, to one-up man. By that, I mean mankind, human beings. People come first. Now, flip the page over, if you would, and let's talk a little bit about Genesis 2:27, kind of this re-going into another layer of information about the creation account. Here he says, being more specific about the creation of man, "Then the Lord formed the man of the dust of the ground."

That's how he got him: out of the dirt, the same material in the dirt, same material that makes up the minerals in your body. Then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. I want to talk about this for the remainder of our time: humans created with two facets. The two facets in this text, just to use the words in the text, are dust and breath.

The composite of man in this text is described as being made from the dust and then having injected into him something God here calls breath. Then he becomes a living creature. That's unique. It's a unique making of the person, as it was described in chapter one, verse 26, in the image of God. Now, here is more description of how that takes place. We talk about the material and the immaterial part.

The dust is the material. The breath is the immaterial part, and we're not talking about the air that moves through your lungs, but something that God is describing here that makes someone alive. It's what I often call hardware and software. You have a material part: the dust of the earth, the minerals in your body, the textures of your body, and the fibers of your body. And then there's the software.

The fact that we are more than just material—death is such a vivid expression of that—that we're more than just the material cells of a body and more than just a little electricity running on top of those cells. We are someone besides that: software running on hardware, immaterial indwelling material. If you want to be real simple about it, we are body and we are spirit.

And just to think in those terms before we set up a couple of views here on this, I want to think through what it means when the Bible continually says that when the spirit is gone, then death takes place. Take a look at this illustration. It was such common knowledge, it was the foundation for James talking about how you can say you're a Christian without any changed life. Just as the body, he says, apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.

You put these two together and you have a living being. That's what took place in Genesis chapter two, verse seven. It's also what took place in Genesis chapter one, verse 27. But the recapitulation or the retelling of the story in chapter two, we get more detail, go another layer deep, and we learn that out of the dirt he was made: material. He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; now he is a living creature.

If you separate those two, you're dead. Well, that makes sense. When Jesus died on the cross, he cried out again with a loud voice and he yielded up his spirit. Acts chapter seven, Stephen is dying. He's being stoned to death, people throwing rocks at him, and as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, "Lord, receive my spirit." Something very clear about the Bible, as we get more and more Discovery Channel talk about us just being physical beings.

But if you recognize from beginning to end in the Bible, you only have a person when you have spirit and body. You have that as a human being, a living creature here on planet Earth. The separation of those is death, and it would be good for us just to state what is so obvious in the Bible and make sure we get that clearly in our minds. Our bodies are important to God.

Our material bodies are sanctified and elevated and esteemed because of the presence of the spirit, my spirit. You may put all the emphasis on the software, but the hardware is elevated and esteemed because of the software. 1 Corinthians chapter six, verse 15, says, "Don't you know that your bodies are members of Christ?" You're now part of God's thing here, God's organization, God's organism. "Shall I take then the members of Christ and make them a member of a prostitute? Never!"

Why would I commit sexual immorality? Because now my body is important to God. God is a God who will redeem the body and resurrect the body, just like he did Christ's body. Your body's important. It's been graced and esteemed by the presence of the spirit. Four verses later, he says, "Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?" How important was the temple that Solomon built? It was looked after, kept after, talked about, nourished, and cherished. You've got the Spirit from God. You're not your own; you're bought with a price. So, glorify God in your bodies.

And the Bible says one day, just like the body's being corrupted, the world's being corrupted and it will obtain freedom from all that corruption. It will enter into the freedom of the glory of the children of God, for we know that the whole creation's been groaning metaphorically together in the pains of childbirth until now. Not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruit of the Spirit, we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons.

We want the culmination of our redemption and ultimately the end redemptive work will be the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. What hope? This goes back to the final conclusion and consummation of our redemption, which is the redemption of our bodies. We're saved in that hope. Now, hope that is seen is not hope. If we already have it, who hopes for what he sees and what he already has?

All I'm saying is the Bible puts a high premium on people made in the image of God. Those people are software encased in hardware, and there's probably more unity there in that than even my illustration represents, but the idea of then seeing the body as much more important and valued, that is a part of the theology of the Bible. The picture we have at the initial description of man is material and immaterial, two primary parts: software and hardware, body and spirit.

Not to mention that other distinctions are unaccounted for. When we look at the immaterial part of who we are, we get passages like Mark 12:30: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength." Strength is an immaterial thing that runs my muscles. My mind, the way I'm thinking. My soul, whatever that is, and my heart. I got a hard time in building a whole theology on the difference between soul and spirit. I got a hard time doing that with Mark 12:30.

I could do a lot on this, but I figured I'd be right about where I'm at, and that is out of time. But let me just say, as Kim Riddlebarger says, it's true that most theologians throughout church history, at least in the mainstream of orthodox Christianity and evangelicalism, have all believed that we are not primarily three parts; we're primarily two parts. The trichotomist notion of human nature as tripartite is unmistakably Greek and pagan rather than Hebrew and biblical.

I would agree with that. The idea of the trichotomy, once you try to build on it a distinction between soul and spirit, I think we've got lots of extraneous things that we're not going to find in the Bible to create such a structure. Therefore, let's ask the question: are we primarily two parts? That's called a dichotomy. I believe in the dichotomy of man: material and immaterial, body and spirit, hardware and software.

Well then, what about the word "soul"? With little time left, let me just say the word "soul" is even shown up in Genesis chapter two, verse seven. "The Lord God formed the man out of the dust"—clearly that's the material part. "And breathed into his nostrils the breath"—that's the Hebrew word for spirit. He breathed in him the spirit of life. So he was material, he got spirit, and then he was a soul. Follow that thinking now.

Acts chapter two, verse 41, says that those who received his word were baptized. There were added that day about 3,000 souls. It's like a ship or the ark; it's like a captain saying, "How many souls on board, sir?" That idea of the whole of the person is a fairly consistent use of the distinction between spirit and soul. Soul being the totality of someone, spirit being the immaterial part in distinction to the material part.

1 Peter 2:25 says, "For you were straying like sheep, but you've now returned to the Shepherd and the Overseer of your souls." Now, just on the argumentation I made in 1 Corinthians, how concerned is God with my body? Very concerned. What does he think about my body? Temple of God. All of that is God's concern for my body as well as my spirit. Here in the text, he is the Overseer and the Shepherd of my life, my soul.

Matthew 6:25 and many other passages: when the word "soul" is found in the text, they translate it oftentimes as "life." Here's the word for soul: "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your soul." That translates "life." What you're going to eat, what you're going to drink. That's about my life; those are things about my life that need to be attended to. Or about your body, what you will put on. Is not your soul more important than food and your body more important than clothing?

People can try to make hard distinctions and contrast between body and soul like body and spirit, but we're talking about your life, the totality of your life. This one may be stronger, Matthew 20:28: "The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his soul as a ransom for many." All you have to do is look throughout the Bible regarding the giving of Christ, and just as important in the descriptions of this is his bodily crucifixion.

Certainly, he doesn't just give his spirit. This is not the immaterial part. I believe this is the totality. He gave all that he was. So if that is how I understand soul, even though I realize it has that sense of immaterial, I believe it's immaterial and more. Spirit is the immaterial part, body is the material part, soul is the description of the totality of who we are.

Dave Druey: You're listening to Focal Point and an abbreviated version of the message titled "The Sanctity of Life." It follows a conversation Pastor Mike Fabarez had regarding euthanasia. To hear this program again or find resources related to today's topic, go online to focalpointradio.org. You'll also want to download the Focal Point app, packed with tools and messages to keep your study going all week long.

Did you know that you can put your questions directly to Pastor Mike? "Ask Pastor Mike Live" airs every Tuesday through Thursday at 1:00 PM Central, and you can join the conversation by calling in during the show. To find out more, go to focalpointradio.org/live.

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And one more thing. Pastor Mike sets off September 19th through the 26th on a fall cruise along the New England and Canadian coastline with stops in Boston, Halifax, and Quebec City. Cabins are filling up, so lock yours in today at focalpointradio.org. I'm Dave Druey, and we'll see you next time for more from Pastor Mike Fabarez right here on Focal Point.

Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.