A completed life??

Last week a friend of mine - an atheist who I talked to every week - decided that he had a "voltooid leven", that his life was complete. This is something that can be done in the society here in the Netherlands. “A completed life” means that you have decided to kill yourself. Society in general agrees that this is okay.

The man that I knew disagreed with me on lots of things that we talked about. Politics. Economics. Morals. But we also agreed on many other things. The value of people. That things are not the most important in life. Still, our world views differed greatly. 

I believe that God created us, is not the same as we are, and has the right to let us know how best to follow Him. I believe we have good evidence for this and a wonderful way to not only find truth, but to follow truth in Jesus Christ. This also means that our life here on earth is not all that exists. We are spiritual beings and look forward to eternity. 

My friend believed that we all were creations of chance, thrown together throughout the millions of years he believed had existed before our current age. He believed that we were basically noble animals, slightly better than most animals and often worse than all other animals. He believed that dying was the end of existence - despite the evidence he himself brought up concerning love, hope and the need to believe in one another. 

He was dying. We are all dying. He had pain and believed that dying quicker presented him with the answer to his pain. We talked about the reality - in my view - that there is a much worse pain than the pain he was now feeling, an eternal pain of the body and soul. 

I struggle to understand how a society can ask people to be “good”, to care for others, to do what is “right” and build on hope when this same society accepts and lauds the idea that there is nothing more than physical life and that each person can make a choice that is purely selfish, egocentric. 

Such a mixed message can only create a society of lost souls. People searching for truth and love and value, but unable to find it because they have blinded themselves to the very truth in front of them in every piece of nature. 

This society has always been present. It was so in the time of Jesus Christ, in the time of the first disciples, in the ages following as the church grew. And it is still present today - in every country around the world. And the answer, the antidote, the solution is still the gentle Healer who has come to present life. I pray that I will not tire of presenting this life as best I can.