Crystal and I found out this past week that a young man we had grown up with in church had committed suicide. One of the persistent perplexities I have when I hear of a professing believer who ends his or her life is whether or not it is possible for someone who is truly born again to commit suicide.
To get some help, I listened to a funeral message John Piper preached over a year ago for a young man at Bethlehem who committed suicide. He addresses this issue in the following excerpt from the online manuscript:
The stake is this: True Christians can commit suicide. Or to put it another way: There is nothing unique or peculiar about the final act of life that makes it determinative in validating or nullifying our salvation. Or let me say it another way: The final season of faith with all its battles and failures is not the only season of faith that will bear witness in the Last Day that we were born again.
For example, suppose tonight, in my physical weariness, the remaining corruption in my born-again, Christian heart were to get the upper hand, and pride and self-pity and anger were to lash out verbally at my wife. And then suppose that in a great self-justifying huff, I stormed out of the door, got in the car, bolted carelessly through the stop sign on 18th Avenue and was broadsided by a truck and killed in an instant? Would I go to heaven?
Unless I have been a hypocrite through all these last fifty-five years of my Christian life, the answer is yes. For these reasons: 1) Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for my sins and bore the wrath of God in my place so that all my sins might be forgiven. 2) Jesus Christ lived a perfect life of obedience so that by his obedience many sinners could be counted righteous, including me. 3) This sacrifice and this righteousness become mine by faith alone when I trust Jesus as the Lord and Savior and Treasure of my life. 4) This trust is embattled till the day I die, with seasons of strength and seasons of weakness, seasons of darkness and seasons of light. 5) If the last season is so dark that I die by my own sin, that season is not the only season that God takes into account when he presents the evidence that my faith was real.
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March 9, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Jessica
Excellent. Suicide is maybe the only sin you can’t live to ask forgiveness for, but it is not the ‘Unforgivable Sin’, and so it will not factor into the Heaven/Hell decision (the same as if we disrespect our parents and die before asking forgiveness, or any other sin) – the Bible is clear that it is acceptance of the Cross that does that. Thanks for sharing this reading!
I’m sorry to hear about your friend,
Jessica
March 10, 2009 at 6:49 am
Mike
John, thanks for the post. I’m sorry to hear about your friend. Suicide is something that makes me more sad than anything else. During our time in China, there would be at least one suicide at our university every spring, and it was just such a terrible thing.
But not beyond the grace and forgiveness of God for those who have believed in Christ.
March 10, 2009 at 8:46 am
Underdog Theology
Thank you for this.
In a synergistic theological system, suicide is tantamount to an express-lane ticket to hell.
Nothing can separate the elect from the love of Christ.