A culture like ours, drunk on the arrogance of our own technological innovations but without any sort of consensus about the true and the good, simply cannot deal with the moral dilemmas that we ourselves are creating. 

A heart is available, the clock is ticking, and doctors are forced to choose between three viable candidates for a transplant: A woman who could live for several more years with a new heart but doesn’t want it; a beloved middle-aged father who’s chronically overweight; and a young rich kid who might have just overdosed on cocaine but whose dad is dangling a $25 million donation to the hospital if his son gets the heart. All of this is in the plot of the new movie, “The God Committee.”

The team of doctors and nurses deciding who will live or die are given the nickname The God Committee. But this is a corrupt understanding of God. God doesn’t work from an algorithm. He doesn’t give good gifts like new hearts to those people who will be missed the most, and withhold them from people with bad attitudes or harmful habits, or who are kind of annoying. Nor does He “play dice” with the universe.

A Christian worldview of life and human value is not based on quantifiables such as how many people love a particular person or how many years someone might go on to live. Because every life is endowed by God with His image and likeness, every human life is equally valuable. It is intrinsic to each and every person, and God doesn’t make what He doesn’t mean to make. God created people to bear His image and likeness before the rest of the created order.

In “The God Committee,” doctors accuse each other of “playing God” and it is meant as an insult. But the Book of Genesis describes how — within vitally important created and moral boundaries — God actually intended His people to play Him before the Creation. When Adam and Eve were commanded to be fruitful, to multiply, and to fill the earth and subdue it, they were told to do what God had just been doing. Throughout the first chapter of Genesis, God filled and formed an earth described in the second verse as being empty and void. Now, His image bearers are to carry on that work, ruling over the created order by filling it and subduing it. In fact, even after the Fall, that task continues, though now it is complicated by pain and by thorns.

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