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| A Biblical Understanding of Suicide
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People often respond to the shock of suicide with questions. The questions that I hear normally have to do with the relationship between the Bible and suicide. People who have experienced suicide, as survivors, or as people who have unsuccessfully attempted it, normally want to know: Is suicide wrong? What are the causes of it? And can somebody who commits suicide still go to heaven?
It seems to me that for Christians, the Biblical data ought to be primary, and everything else merely explanatory to the Biblical data.
First - is suicide a sin? Usually, but not always.
Jesus, of course, "laid down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Now while I am not calling Jesus' death suicide, I am saying that there is an overriding principle here that ought not be overlooked. Jesus chose death for a higher good. Death was manifestly not inflicted upon him, it was the surrender of his own life in the pursuit of some great purpose.... As John the Apostle wrote, "The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep" (John 10:11).
I say this not to encourage suicide, nor to engender discussion about the death of Christ. Merely to note that there are specific "suicides" that need to be taken off the table of discussion immediately - those involving, for instance, the Marine who dives onto a hand grenade in an attempt to save his squad mates.
Having excised such deaths from the discussion, we can certainly say that suicide is normally a sin, being a violation of the sixth commandment, "You shall not murder" (the Hebrew word here is, in fact, "murder" and not "kill" - since God was routinely telling someone to kill someone or another, you have a supremely disturbing ethical problem if you postulate that the sixth command is about "killing" in all circumstances, and happily, the Hebrew indicates that this is not so....). That the act is one of self-murder does not make it less murder. So suicide, as a general rule, is wrong.
At this point, we need to all be a little wary of the current cultural bug to clinicalize every single behavior aberration that comes down the pike. It is simply NOT true that God creates us (as a matter of routine) with either mental illnesses (II Tim. 1:7) or with any compulsion to sin other than the original stain of sin, which we all possess (James 1:13-14). The Lord's brother makes it very clear: we sin when we are drawn away of our own lusts, and enticed. Sin is a choice, it is not a sickness. And to the extent that "mental illness" may exist as an objective category, its connection to "sin" is tenuous based on James 1:13-14... imho.
(Leaving aside, for a moment, the question as to whether our choices can make us sick, which is certainly the case, but I am approaching this from the level of first principles.)
Though it may make us feel better to simply postulate that the person who commits suicide is not in control or was under some twisted compulsion born of mental illness, that is simply not the way that the world works. The Bible is clear: when we do wrong, we are responsible. And doing wrong is not a product of sickness, except as "sin" is reckoned to be a sickness which all men are afflicted with.
There are three, I think, instances of suicide in scripture which are informative on this question (you might postulate more) - those of Saul, Samson, and Judas. Any discussion of a Biblical conception of suicide must invariably start with these three passages.
In Judges 16:26-31, Samson coldly and rationally plans his suicide (v. 26) complete with a prayer for success (v. 28) and, note, his death was not a byproduct of his war on the Philistines, but rather the goal of his act: "Let me die with the Philistines!" (v. 30).
Two important things, I think, can be learned from Samson's act. First, note what this passage says about the potential motivations for suicide - they were varied. Samson undoubtedly was tired of the mockery of his enemies (v. 25), so an element of selfishness or escape may have been present. Samson desired to kill himself, and others, as an act of revenge against those who had hurt him ("vengeance on the Philistines for my two eyes" v. 28). Samson undoubtedly saw his death as continuing the purpose of his life - doing God's will in destroying the Philistine oppression of God's people. In fact, the narrator of Judges seems to sum up the act in just that way ("So the dead that he killed at his death were more than he had killed in his life" v. 30). Note that there is ZERO indication that Samson was "sick."
The other great lesson to be learned from Samson is that suicide, while it is a sin, is not an unforgiveable sin, as Samson is present in the Hall of Fame of Faith in Hebrews 11 - a listing of redeemed heroes.
Consider the tragic end of Saul in I Sam. 31:3-4 (I am disregarding the Amelekite's tale in II Sam. 1, as it seems self-serving and in contradiction to the plain text of I Sam., so was likely a fabrication of the Amelekite to purchase favor with David.). Saul, now wounded and certain of death, desired to minimize his own suffering and avoid mockery and abuse by his enemies, so he falls upon his own sword. Note again, no mention of "mental illness" here, and though Saul was not the nicest fellow throughout his reign, any assignment of "mental illness" to him is mere speculation and not called for by the Biblical text.
So what do we learn from Saul? People sometimes commit suicide to minimize their own suffering, as a response to certain death, or as a means of avoiding dishonor (if we can see inside his mind, we might postulate that the dishonor that he hoped to avoid could be either that of himself or of his God). Further, since God had "given Saul a new heart" back in I Sam. 10:9, we can know that he also wound up in heaven based on Romans 8:29-30.
Finally, there is the suicide of Judas in Matt. 27:3-5. Very little is to be learned from this passage, except that sometimes sin and guilt can be so overwhelming that suicide seems preferable to dealing with the mess that one has made of one's life.
If we could summarize the principles from these passages, I think we might come out with something like this:
1) There is suicide which is both sin and not sin.
2) Even among suicide which is sin, there is suicide which is noble and suicide which is not noble.
3) The BIBLICAL motivations for suicide are many, including at least:
a) A desire to maintain honor - one's own or God's
b) A desire to avoid suffering
c) Revenge
d) Guilt
e) Inability to deal with the mess one has made of one's own life
f) Selfishness
g) A simple desire to escape
4) Biblically, suicide is as likely to be connected to external realities as it is to internal chaos.
5) The one "cause" of suicide that seems to be lacking in these Biblical passages is "clinical depression" or some other "sickness."
And we may not have even exhausted the possibilities of these passages. The primary points of these passages that I would draw, however, are that there are many - not one - "reasons" or "causes" of suicide. Secondly, among those causes, perhaps the least likely (though certainly not completely ruled out) is "mental illness." And thirdly, that even though suicide is certainly a sin, it does not bar one from heaven.
BTW, I think that as an aside, it is important to note that suicide was not widely believed to be a bar to heaven until Catholic doctrine solidified to require the "last rites." Obviously, the person who commits suicide does not generally receive last rites, so it is a logical extension of the need for last rites that one who commits suicide does not receive their benefit... etc. etc.
Suicide is a complex and emotional subject, especially considering that those who are left behind have to try to sort it all out and make sense of it. However, we all need to do that based on Biblical truth (as we do every other issue in life) and not bend to the need of our current culture to clinicalize every single behavior of man. And further, we need to avoid the compulsion to reach a "one-size-fits-all" explanation of why this thing happens - the Biblical data is clear that suicide takes place in a variety of contexts, among a variety of people, ostensibly for a variety of reasons. We also need to take comfort from the fact that, sometimes the person who commits suicide is a person of noble sensibilities who makes a bad choice, but whose bad choice does NOT, in any fashion, keep them out of the realm of God's gracious redemption.
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Posted by contraeverything on 2008-07-04 14:33:24 | Rating: | Views: 176
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