A couple of weeks ago The New York Times published an article concerning physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands from 2011–2014. Five states in the U.S.— Oregon, Vermont, Montana, Washington, and California—allow physician-assisted suicide for terminally-ill, mentally competent adults, but the law in the Netherlands defines candidates for doctor-assisted death as any with “intractable and untreatable” conditions, including psychiatric woes. The majority of people who requested to die for mental reasons during the time-frame addressed suffered depression. Sadly, many of them cited loneliness as the reason they chose to end their lives.
It’s not my intent to
discuss physician-assisted suicide in this column. Suicide of any sort and for any reason is
sin. The sovereign God and Creator shares
with no person the right to the day of his or her death (Ecc. 8:8). But that same God gives a prescription for
loneliness.
1)
God created marriage and the family. Already in the very beginning God declared
that it’s not good for man to be alone.
He created Adam a helper perfectly suited to meet his needs, and he
commanded them to bear children. The majority
in the Netherlands, along with the rest of Europe, largely reject Christianity
and traditional, Biblical marriage and family life. The United States isn’t far behind. Married adults are the minority in many
California cities; they soon will be the minority statewide. History shows that where our liberal
coastal states lead, the rest of our nation inevitably follows, usually
sooner rather than later. Marriage—though
considered little more than a disposable affiliation—and children are widely
regarded as impediments to self-fulfillment and advancement. When the prevailing mindset seems to be that one
should delay marriage or avoid it all together, and that one should have very
few, if any, children, it’s no wonder that people come to a point that they’re
so lonely they want to die. An age-old
idiom comes to mind: be careful what you wish for.
2) God created His
family. God
saves individual believers as part of a body, a body of which each person is a
vital member. This concept is foreign to
many in our increasingly self-centered and narcissistic society, and even more
and more professed Christians forsake “assembling together” (Heb. 10:25). God cares for the single person, the forsaken
spouse, the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the outcast
by placing those solitary believers in His family (Ps. 68:6). The children that he gives to believing
parents are the children of the Church, in which Christian brothers and sisters
look out not only for their own welfare, but also for the welfare of their
fellow saints (Phil. 2:4). Those saints
are still sinners, to be sure, but active members of a healthy local church
testify to the blessedness of belonging to God’s family.
3) God himself is Father and Friend to His people. All of us experience loneliness. No matter what our age or circumstances, we
can feel isolated, misunderstood, forgotten, or expendable. But the Bible teaches that God never leaves
or forsakes or his people. The God of
the whole earth is a Father to the fatherless, a Husband to the widow, a Friend
to the lonely. It’s true that He
sometimes seems far away. When that’s
the case with you or me, we’d better examine the state of our hearts and
lives. The Psalms testify again and
again that God seems far away when we walk in unrepentant sin. But we can rest assured that Jehovah is near
to all those who call on Him in truth (Ps. 145:18), for our elder brother,
Jesus Christ, endured the ultimate loneliness on our behalf: He was forsaken of
God so that we might never be forsaken by Him.
Our Savior is the Friend who sticks
closer than a brother and the One who has pledged to be with us always, even to
the end of the age. Indeed, His Spirit
dwells with us and in us. And
nothing—not tribulation, persecution, famine, peril, sword, death, life,
angels, principalities, things present, things to come…not loneliness,
either—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Cast all your cares upon Him, for He cares
for you (1 Pet. 5:7).
The man who rejects God
and the spheres of fellowship that He’s created—marriage, family, and church—will
undoubtedly be lonely. The prescription for
loneliness is not assisted suicide: it’s knowing the only true God and Jesus
Christ, whom He has sent.
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