Death — The New Panacea

It’s Monday night, one week ago. My friend arrives at Bible Study. He asks us to pray. His wife and oldest daughter are in Melbourne. His daughter had been summoned to the hospital bed of a long-time friend. Why was she in a hospital bed? She had just slashed herself open in an attempt to take her own life. (By the mercies of God, in a lucid moment and given her seeming failure to achieve a quick death, she was prompted to call 000)

Move forward one week. We are at Bible study. It is time to start. My friend has not arrived. Having not heard from him, I call. He answers, “Murray, I am sorry. I have just been in a meeting with Harry (middle son). I wanted to be with him for this meeting.” He continues, “A 19 year old lad that Harry played football with committed suicide on Sunday.”

Twice within a week, our Bible study group started with prayers in which we pleaded with God for the lives of strangers. In this second case, the pleading could only be for those that remained. This lad had, by his own hand, ushered himself to the judgement seat of God. There, the possibility of counsel ceased. There, without Christ, one only had the fearful prospect of falling into the righteous hands of the living God.

These things are sobering. Yet, hard words must be spoken. Friends, get used to this type of body count. For many years now, people like Francis Schaeffer and Rousas Rushdoony warned that we were embracing a culture of death. Nearly half-a-century ago, Francis Schaeffer warned that we had slipped below “the Line of Despair”.[1]

What brings about this state of despair? The very easy answer is the abandonment of the true Christian worldview!

Despite the rhetoric popular in our day, the simple reality is that our culture stood upon a firmer and better foundation when it stood upon Christianity. Rebellious man does not like being dependent on God, so he is only too eager to abandon the knowledge of God. With this abandonment of God, man enters into despair because he has abandoned Hope, Meaning, Purpose, and Future.

When the eternal God stands as the foundation, a culture has meaning and purpose. An infinite eternal God created man. This immediately means that man has a future – an eternity. There is always something to work toward. Similarly, it means that there is a purpose – all things to the glory of God through the fulfilment of His design.

We can then think of some other issues, like:

• An eternal, Self-revealing God means certainty. It means fact. It means the sun rises tomorrow. It means stability. It means peace. It is to be at ease.
• An eternal God means truth. Truth, coupled with purpose, dissipates despair and futility.
• With truth comes meaning. With meaning comes knowledge. With knowledge comes the ability to rise above and surmount obstacles.
• Obstacles then become a challenge to be embraced. Obstacles are not the end, but rather one more way in which we can be productive in the application of truth, meaning, purpose and hope.

Remove God and all these are removed.

What we must come to see is that the rejection of God does not ever, under any circumstances, leave a permanent void. The person or culture who rejects God will instantly attempt to fill the void with something new. That new thing is never inert. It must eventually have an impact when the logical ramifications of its tenets are realised in the lives of the person or the culture.

Our culture has rejected God. The replacement theories are, in some ways, legion. Nonetheless, there are a few dominant ones. Most relevant here, is the Theory of Evolution.

We wrote an article recently, Adam Goodes Is an ape, in which we looked at the furore surrounding the supposed Racial Vilification of Adam Goodes by a 13 year old child. In that article we question the impact of evolution. As we state in that article, there was not one “ape” on the field, but 36. There were stands full of them. In fact, we are all apes. So says Evolution. So what did this child do wrong? How did she transgress when all she did was to repeat aloud the origins of this and every other person in accord with the tenets of evolution?

Such questions, however, only lead us to realise that the ramifications of evolutionary theory go far beyond names and labels. One of our readers, viewing the above article, left this comment: “I believe the teaching of evolution over the last fifty years or so, is now beginning to bear its fruits in church, state, and society at large.”

“Darn tootin’”, it is! (I would also add family.) Now is the time for us to awaken and understand the basic concept that ideas have consequences. The rejection of God is only half of the equation. The other half comes in the form of the question, “What individual and cultural forms does the new ideal spawn?”

Most noticeably, it brings despair. How? Here is but a few:

• If you are but a monkey’s uncle, you have no identity. You have in effect come from no one and you will move unto no one.
•  If you are the product of random chance, you have no worthy beginning and no glorious end. You are little more than a pointless bookmark in the annals of time.
• As the product of chaos and random chance, you cannot have certainty. Everything about you must be flux. Importantly, you yourself are flux. You are restless and discontent. You become as a nomad – ever wandering.
• As the product of chance, there can be no rule of law or ethic, for such things depend upon an absolute. It is impossible to speak of “right and wrong” let alone try and implement such a concept.
• With all being chance, there can be no help, no words of wisdom, and no encouragement; apart from, “Keep going! Maybe your luck will change?”, which is no encouragement as it falls back upon chance and chaos.
• With all being chaos, the slightest obstacle becomes insurmountable. Despair sets in. Why climb this barrier? Who knows, there may be another bigger one just on the other side? Why expend energy on what is almost sure to be a futile exercise.

Without any opportunity for hope; without any expectation of wise words; without any surety that there is something better to be experienced, without even the slightest belief that the touch of another human hand or a smile might bid the pain “Be gone!”, we see that the evolutionary worldview is bankrupt. Evolution can only produce despair. When its devotees ask of it some answer; when they plead for some relief, Evolution gives its only cure – Death!

Evolution is an ideology of death. Everything about our coming to be is the result of death. Species only evolve because of death. Thus, when the devotee wants to progress beyond despair, the only avenue evolution offers is death. Death is the new panacea!

Please think this through. An illicit affair results in a pregnancy? What to do? You kill the child. You try for a baby. You fall pregnant, but the child has the wrong sex? What to do? You kill the baby. Grandma, bless her soul, is going a bit “potty”, you know, “kangaroos loose in the top paddock!” What to do? Simple. You kill grandma. An elderly person is dying of an incurable disease. What to do? You relieve the burden on all and kill them sooner.

Oh yes, we call it “abortion”. We call it “choice”. We call it “euthanasia”. Yet, what it boils down to is this – death is the panacea of evolution.

Evolution will not, indeed it cannot, teach you how to live. If there were an evolutionary bible, it would be very small. It would need but one page. Its single word would stand boldly alone – “Die!” If other words were there, they would be the past tense and the noun. You see, evolution does not have any other tenet. It knows naught of compassion, kindness, gentleness, tenderness. It knows of no respect for the weak. It knows nothing of true lordship and of dominion.[2] It is dog eat dog (or monkey eat monkey). It is survival of the fittest and – this is the logical implication – death to all others! If you are not fit, you deserve death. Those led to despair are as the weak and unfit. Their only option is death.

However, as was noted in the Adam Goodes article, we seem to have a very difficult time living consistently with evolution as a dominant theory. Why do we have an ambulance service? Why waste all that money on hospitals? Fit people live, the unhealthy die. C’est la vie, à la evolution!

Why is it acceptable to murder those who have not yet seen life; to murder those who have supposedly seen too much life; to murder those whose lives may be ending, but not acceptable for someone in the “midst” of life to end their life?  

Sadly, it seems to take the suicide or attempted suicide of teenagers for us, as a culture, to feel uneasy and to experience this awkward moment of evolutionary incongruity. Why is this? I mean really, why do we get uneasy when faced with youth suicide? As a society we kill babies. As a society we kill the elderly, the sick, and the infirmed. When killing babies, we even call it “choice”. So why is it that when a teenager exercises this same “choice” that we find it unsettling deep down inside?

I remember putting that question to a lady 15 odd years ago. She thought I was deluded. Her response was along the lines of “They are young. They have everything to live for.” Do they? Do our young people have everything to live for? No, they do not. In a society that has raised their young on a steady diet of evolution, random chance, and chaos, these young people have nothing for which to live. Their word is a world of despair.

The essence of the problem encountered in the conversation with this lady is one to which all Christians must be made aware. The essence of the problem is this: Paradigm Shift! You see, we have moved form being a Christian country (even if only in part) to being a pagan country fuelled by Humanistic and Evolutionary philosophy. When I spoke with this lady, she would have been around the age of fifty. She was by no means a Christian, but she had been raised at a time when the Christian worldview still had currency. This meant that she was severely conflicted on moral issues. She had parts of the new philosophy and subscribed to choice. Yet she still had a partially Christian worldview, which meant that teenage suicide did not make sense to her mind.

Here is the point – subsequent generations do not have this conflict. The Biblical worldview has been totally eradicated from our society and, particularly, from the public education system. (I doubt that many Christians even understand the full implication of a Biblical worldview, so complete has been the process of eradication.) The moderns know nothing but despair.

 Just this morning, I read an unhelpful article on male suicide that sadly seems to believe that carnality and crassness will somehow solve the situation. The one useful piece of information carried was the statistic – the biggest killer of men 15-45 is suicide.[3]

Why this age group? Simple. This is the generation that has been almost entirely robbed of the Biblical worldview. What is more, as the Biblical worldview has been eroded, their roles as men have been assailed by Feminism, Homosexuality, and secular social constructs. Thus, these people really are experiencing a crisis in life. It is not a wonder they are depressed and suicidal. Everything innate within themselves as men is questioned today by our society. So rank has it become that, according to many modern television programmes, you do not know how to please a women, cook, or even interact appropriately with the opposite sex unless you are a homosexual or, at the very least, feminised and in touch with your feelings.

Having been robbed of a Biblical worldview; having been disassembled and rebuilt according to modernist standards; having been subjected to ridicule for simply being ‘manly’, is it any wonder that these men are taking up the only option that evolution provides and choosing death as the panacea?

Friends! Brethren! We need to do something about this ever increasing state of despair. We must because we are the only ones who can. Every night on the news, we are told of doom and gloom. The polar ice caps are melting. Global Warming will either cook us or freeze us. The “share market” is dodgy. There are flu pandemics. All these statements are a direct consequence of our abandonment of God and a worldview based in His being. Hope is replaced by despair.

The only answer is Jesus Christ, in an ultimate sense. May I posit, however, that there is also Jesus Christ in a lesser sense. We are aware of Peter’s injunction ‘to always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you’. Most think of this as, “Repent and believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins.” Yes, that is there, absolutely. However, on a lesser scale, there is also the amelioration of society’s problems by the faithful application of God’s standards to all of life. Unlike evolution, God’s panacea, Jesus, is about life, and abundant life at that, not death

Not everyone who has lived under a dominant Christianity has been a Christian, yet their lives have been improved and bettered because of the application of Biblical truth to both mind and body. In such a society hope, purpose, and meaning are present. There is protection. There is justice. Implicitly, there is a social conscience that works to heal and restore the whole man. Broken homes – the source or consequence of many suicides – are reduced. Friendship, communication, and true perspective are restored. This last item is particularly important. How many young people do you know who are taken up in worry about the inconsequential?[4]

Friends, we need to proclaim Jesus as the Life-giver. This needs to be vociferous. However, it does not always need to be with our mouths. As Christians, our lives speak volumes. It is the credibility of our lives that indeed gives us the opportunity to speak when asked, “Why do you have hope!” Yet our lives will only be credible if they understand and implement the whole counsel of God.[5] In other words, our faithful, obedient, Christ-like life will help preserve lives and will illuminate the darkness so that Jesus may be seen.

Our task is to shine our light.[6] We are to illumine the darkness so that people may see Jesus.[7] We are to be a savour that preserves. In short, we should stop the decay of culture, which leads to the embracement of death. Our lives and the Biblical theology of life should flow through us to the preservation of life.[8]

The Christian life is not summed up in the words “repent and believe …”. These words are the beginning of our life. Our life begins with this transformation. Our Christianity starts with, in Schaeffer’s words, “How shall we then live?” This being answered with the obvious – “by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God!” The question for us is, “Are we truly living the Christian life and thereby shining the Christ light?” Are we endeavouring to so apply God’s standards to our lives that we become, to our friends, countrymen, and culture, the Light and Savour of Jesus Christ? On the other hand, “Have we so complied with the world’s demands that our light is not only hid, but nearly extinguished? In hard times, we must ask hard questions.

We are our brother’s keeper. We do have an obligation to our countrymen. Indeed, our countrymen, dark and dull through sin, need us more than they realise or admit.

Friends, I dislike hearing about teenagers who believe life is such pain and misery that they commit suicide. It aches because they seem ignorant that, without Jesus, their pain and misery has just begun. I dislike hearing of these things because we, the Church, do not preach “Hell” and “eternal torment” anymore. Thus, we are partly guilty of our countrymen’s blood, for we have not warned them sufficiently.

Brethren, I earnestly plead with you, Please give up this emotional, gooey mess of pottage that has become Christianity. Please, give up this religious insecurity that seeks affirmation from the world. Please cast aside the philosophy that insists that we be friends with the world, that we be popular and likeable, rather than obedient. Please, brethren, remember that it is absolutely obscene to refuse to shout “fire, fire” because you respect people’s rights to have a goodnight’s sleep. Not one of you would do this on a temporal scale, so why have we, in general, capitulated to this obscenity on an eternal scale?

Friends, our countrymen are dying. Moreover, our countrymen are dying at their own hands. The young have given up on life; nay, they have been robbed of life by an evil philosophy that peddles death. Yet, the Church seemingly does nothing. We are not only blind watchmen; we are culpable watchmen for we seem to refuse to take our place upon the wall and cry out.

Suicide is tragic. Suicide is a marker that we have departed far from God. Suicide will continue to be a marked event in our culture so long as evolution is allowed to dispense its only panacea, death.[9]

Brethren, God saves ultimately. That is His sovereign right. However, we must understand that we have an ability through righteous living and the constant application of a Biblical worldview to save temporally. We have an ability to spread hope, meaning, and purpose. It is ours to be salt and light. It is ours to shine in the darkness and to eradicate despair. It is ours to be the salt that preserves and staves off decay and degradation.

Brethren, please let us be all of these things. I do not wish for my friend to turn up to Bible study this week with the news that another young life has been sabotaged by evil. In fact, I desire that none of us should have to hear such news.