What Happens to a Soul that Commits Suicide?
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What happens to the soul that commits suicide? Is there any way for redemption for such a death?
We define murder as intentionally taking an innocent life or a person’s life in an unjust way, and we rightfully point out how wrong, evil, and sinful it is to do something like this. “Thou shalt not commit murder” is a literal translation of Exodus 20:13. John wrote in 1 John 3:15, “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Inspired by the Holy Spirit, John informs us that hatred is equal to murder and murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them. This seems fairly straight forward, but even in cases of one human killing another, we realize that not every instance of that happening is murder. Sometimes people are killed accidentally. Sometimes it is due to carelessness. One who takes another’s life is not necessarily guilty of murder.
Suicide is similiar to this in many ways. A suicide may very well be a case of self murder, in which case, self hatred would precede such an act, and what the apostle John said about it in 1 John 3:15 would imply that the person who did this to themselves would be lost. However, not all suicides fall into such a category. People commit suicide for many different reasons. Some of these reasons may fit into John’s evaluation and some may not. Accidental suicides happen every year, and such suicides do not involve the same kind of motives.
To be clear, anyone who dies outside of Christ will be lost due to the sins that they have committed. Romans 6:23 says that the wages of sin is death. Without the protection of Christ’s sacrifice, a sinner will be held guilty for all of his sins and punished for it eternally whether he dies by his own hand or not. Romans 2:8-9 says, “but to those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness—indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, on every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek.”
The question that we need to really think about is in reference to a child of God who commits suicide. What will happen to him? Some have suggested that Samson committed suicide. However, in Samson’s prayer before his death, he is seeking to gain justice for the wrongs the Philistines did to him. He does kill himself, but as an act of war, not self hatred. There are really only two clear cases of suicide in the Bible of those who were God’s people. King Saul is one of them, and Judas is the other. By the end of their life, neither one stood in a right relationship with God. They allowed their sinful choices to control their lives and ended up in a place that they could not bear. They both chose to end their lives because of it. We do not have any examples in the Bible of a faithful child of God committing suicide.
Having said that, there may be some cases where a Christian accidentally kills himself or has lost the ability to reason correctly or is in some state of behavior where he is not considered responsible, and ends his own life. We may commit such cases into the hands of a just and righteous God who is merciful and good. We need not come to any conclusions about their eternal estate. Moreover, no one is privy to the thoughts and motives of any other person, which makes it impossible to judge one way or another. Only God may do that.
The bottom line is that there are better ways of dealing with life’s difficulties than to end one’s own life, and it may very well be a choice that separates one from God eternally. Job was a man who endured great loss. He lost his family, his possessions, and his health, but he never lost his faith and trust in God, and that is what kept him going through all of the pain and problems that he suffered. We should look to his example of faithfulness and try to do what he did when we are faced with such suffering. It is much better to suffer through this life and to end up in eternal life than to risk ending suffering in this life only to face an eternity of more suffering. Paul wrote, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18).
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