*Disclaimer: This article may contain content that is sensitive and could be traumatic or even triggering to a person. Please consider getting help immediately if you or your loved one has had thoughts of inflicting self harm. You’re not alone, and you matter. There is hope and help available.
“If someone killed themself, would they go to heaven?”
My son asked this question this morning.
He’s ten.
Yup.
He was watching a show on Netflix yesterday called The Extraordinary Woo. This show follows the career of an autistic Korean attorney, and in that episode, a man attempted suicide by hanging himself by the neck.
So now my ten-year-old's wheels are spinning, and he’s trying to make sense of suicide and it’s implications not as an end to this life but he’s wondering what might happen in the life to come.
Since he’s not alone in wondering about this question, I want to offer some encouragement to anyone who has ever lost a loved one to death by suicide. Suicide is not the “unforgivable and unpardonable sin” like we learned at catholic school or in evangelical camps.
People who have misused the Bible to shame others have taught this. The logic is, “since a person is unable to repent because that sin is committed and there’s no opportunity to ask for forgiveness for it, then the person must be damned forever.” How silly is this logic though? For many of us, we are going to die someday without knowing the exact moment of our death. So it’s probable that many of us head into death with numerous unconfessed sins, and if that’s true then God help us all with this silly logic. How many sins are there that we have committed that we aren’t even aware of (theologians call this sins of omission)? How is it possible to repent for a sin that I don’t even know I committed? This reasoning is absurd.
Rationality aside, the Bible does not teach that suicide is an automatic expulsion from the gates of heaven.
So what does the Bible say about suicide?
Let’s take a look.
Some have tried to use Mark 3:20-35 as a proof text for suicide as the “unforgivable sin” of blaspheming the Holy Spirit, but this is just flat-out wrong. The only unforgivable sin Jesus has in mind here is not suicide, but it’s calling the work the Holy Spirit does “satanic” (for example, when the Pharisees try to say Jesus “has a demon” when he just healed a person—that would be pretty unforgivable to done mess that up, A—aron).
In the Bible, suicide is mentioned only six times when six different people die by suicide.
To avoid an embarrassing death at the hands of a woman, Abimelech dies by forcing his armor-bearer to thrust him with a sword (Judges 9:50-57).
Taking a bunch of Philistines with him and while offering a prayer to God, Samson pulls the pillars of a house down upon himself and everyone in it (Judges 16:28–30). The mighty King Saul, wounded, doesn’t want to die by wounds from his enemies. So he asks his armor-bearer to kill him as Abimelech did in his story, but the servant refuses to do it. So Saul falls on his own blade and dies (1 Sam. 31:1–6).
Ahithophel hung himself under a tree (2 Sam. 17:23).
Zimri ignited a fire around him to die (1 Kings 16:18–19).
Judas Iscariot bought a field for himself with his murder money (the silver he won for turning in Jesus), and just like Ahithophel, he hung himself (Matt. 27:5; Acts 1:18–20).
In every one of these stories talking about each person dying by suicide, there is never a moral evaluation and determination made about their death by suicide. For Saul, there is plenty of moral evaluation about his wasted life and how he disobeyed God in other ways, but suicide itself is not listed as any reason for his fate and God’s displeasure with his life.
In the absence of anything in these texts, what then does the Bible say about suicide?
We do have God’s prohibition in the sixth commandment, which is a blanket statement about murder and maybe we’ve heard it said like this: “Thou shall not kill.” The commandment is clear: you shall not murder. This commandment forbids taking any person’s life and encourages us to seek and promote life to everyone around us. But of course, with just war theory there are exceptions if you are a soldier in a war and you must fight for your nation. And there’s also self-defense or protecting others around you from harm (which is the greater sin, allowing a person to murder you and several others or taking out the guy about to do it first?). That commandment while true, has a certain kind of flexibility with it in actual practice.
So going back to the topic of suicide, if we apply the sixth commandment to it we do know that murdering yourself (i.e. killing yourself) is a sin before God. We are depriving ourselves of the life that God has given to us, we are not protecting the sanctity of life, and in effect, we are saying that we know better than God when we should live and when we should die. In that way, there’s also a kind of hubris involved in it. So yes, suicide is a sin. But is it the sin above all sins? Is it the sin that separates us from God eternally?
There’s nothing here that would suggest to us biblically that suicide is an unpardonable sin, to a degree that is worse than any other sin that we could commit. What we know from the Bible is that suicide is a sin, just like any other sin like lying, stealing, committing adultery, coveting, and the rest.
I think where people get confused on this topic, it isn’t our misunderstanding of the Bible on this but it’s our misunderstanding of God on this. Fundamentally, we don’t get God. Our problem isn’t biblical, it’s theological. Many of us are convinced that our repentance—the amount of saying I'm sorry to God about x, y, or z, is what justifies us before God and makes us acceptable enough to walk through those golden gates. So if we just say the right thing, throw up enough Hail Marys or whatever, then we’re going to be good with God and get in.
The thing is, that’s all a big lie.
The only way we are ever acceptable before God is through repentance, yes, but there’s something even more important than that part. Turning away from our pet sins that we love so much is a part of it, no doubt, and turning away from trusting in our own way of doing this is a part of it, to be sure. But the most important part of acceptance with God is faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
We don’t just turn away from ourselves, but we turn toward God. We don’t just say I’m sorry, God. But we look to the only One who can take away all of our sins—past, present, and future. That kind of forgiveness can only be found in Jesus. It’s not our measure of repentance that seals us into the heavenly kingdom, but it’s the Holy Spirit who seals us for heaven (Ephesians 1:13, 4:30) when we trust in Jesus to take us to be with him forever.
The reason I said earlier that we don’t get God, is that we believe the lie that God is a kind of petty god who takes into account a list of rights and wrongs, and like Santa Clause, he’s just waiting up at the North Pole wondering if we made the naughty or nice list. But the kind of God that the Bible talks about isn’t petty, and he isn’t making a list and checking it twice to find out if we are naughty or nice—but he’s this kind of deity who would do anything to save us from our sin and misery. He’s this kind of God who doesn’t look down at us in judgment, but he actually went down to be with us and to be judged for us himself, taking on the penalty of our sins on our behalf. This God is a rescuer, not a ridiculer.
So when my son asks, “If someone kills themself, will they be in heaven?” my answer isn’t a direct “no” or “yes,” but it’s, “In whom did this person believe and trust?” If the person was a Christian and they died by suicide, I have no reason to doubt that they are with Christ forever. That’s not even a question. Not even suicide can stop the precious and perfect body and blood of Jesus from giving us the full and complete forgiveness of all of our sins.
