Where do those who take their own lives go?

Question 07022.

Where do those who commit suicide go? I have been asked this question across a kitchen table more often than from a pulpit, usually by someone whose face tells me the answer matters more than any other thing in the world just now. So I want to answer it plainly and gently, and I want to say the most important part at the beginning rather than making you wait for it.

A believer who dies by their own hand is saved, and is with Jesus. Their salvation never depended on the manner of their death, and it does not depend on it now.

Why the Traditional Answer Was Wrong

For a long stretch of church history, people were taught that those who commit suicide were automatically damned. The reasoning ran that this was a mortal sin which, by its nature, could not be repented of afterwards, and therefore the person died in unforgiven sin. Bodies of those said to commit suicide were refused burial in consecrated ground, and families carried the shame for generations.

That reasoning has a fatal flaw, and it is worth naming precisely. It assumes that forgiveness is applied sin by sin as we confess them, so that anything unconfessed at the moment of death remains outstanding. But when Jesus died, every sin I would ever commit was still future, and he dealt with all of it at once.

Colossians 2:13-14 says that God forgave us all our trespasses, cancelling the record of debt that stood against us. All means all, including the ones we never got round to confessing, including the last one.

What Eternal Security Means for Those Who Commit Suicide

If salvation could be forfeited by a final sin, then none of us would be safe, because none of us knows what our last conscious act will be. Every believer who dies in a coma, or in an accident during a moment of anger, or in the middle of an unresolved quarrel, would be in jeopardy.

Scripture does not teach that. Romans 8:38-39 says that neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Death is the first item on Paul’s list, and he attaches no exception for those who commit suicide or for any other particular kind of death.

So a Christian who does commit suicide is held by the same hands that held them the day before. I have written the wider case in what eternal security is.

Suicide in Scripture

The Bible records several people who took their own lives, and it is instructive how it handles them. Saul fell on his sword after a lost battle. Ahithophel hanged himself after his counsel was rejected. Samson brought the temple down on himself and is nonetheless listed among the faithful in Hebrews 11. Judas hanged himself, and Matthew 27:5 ties his condemnation to his betrayal rather than to the manner of his death.

What Scripture never does is add a comment about the eternal consequence of the act itself. There is no verse anywhere that says those who commit suicide are excluded. The doctrine that those who commit suicide are lost was built by later reasoning, not by exegesis.

That silence is significant. On a matter this weighty, if the Bible had meant to teach automatic damnation, it had ample opportunity to say so.

Is It Still Sin?

Yes, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending would not help anybody and would insult the intelligence of the grieving. Life belongs to God, human beings bear his image as Genesis 1:27 says, and taking a life, including your own, is a serious wrong.

But naming it as sin settles nothing about salvation, because every believer sins and every believer’s sin was dealt with at the cross. The category of sin that cannot be forgiven is very narrow indeed, and I have looked at it in what the unforgivable sin is. Suicide is not in it.

So both things are true at once. To commit suicide is a wrong, and for anyone who is in Christ it is a forgiven wrong, covered like every other.

Illness, Not Wickedness

I want to say something about how we talk. The phrase commit suicide comes from an era when it was a criminal offence, and many people now prefer to say died by suicide. I use the older phrase here because it is what people search for, but I want you to hear the older phrase without the verdict attached to it.

Most people who commit suicide are seriously ill. Depression is not sadness that has got out of hand. It distorts thinking, blocks hope, and can produce a settled conviction that everyone would be better off without you, which the sufferer experiences as a fact rather than as a symptom.

That does not remove moral responsibility altogether, and I am not arguing that it does. It does mean that judging such a death as though it were the calm decision of a healthy mind is both cruel and inaccurate.

Elijah, Jonah and Job

Scripture is more familiar with this darkness than many Christians realise. Elijah, days after the greatest public victory of his ministry, sat under a broom tree and asked God to take his life. Jonah told God twice that it was better for him to die than to live. Job cursed the day he was born and said his soul chose strangling.

Notice how God responded to Elijah. No rebuke, no sermon. He let him sleep, fed him twice, let him sleep again, and only then spoke to him, and quietly. That is a striking picture of how God handles a servant who has reached the end of himself.

None of them went on to commit suicide, but every one of them wanted to die, and 1 Kings 19:4 records Elijah’s prayer without a word of censure. If some of the greatest figures in the Bible wanted to die, then wanting to die is not evidence of a false faith. It is evidence of being human under too much weight.

A Word to the Bereaved

If you are reading this because you have lost someone, let me say the things nobody may have said to you. It was not your fault. You could not have known what you did not know. The what if questions that circle at three in the morning have no answers, because you are trying to solve a problem with information you did not possess at the time.

If the person who died trusted Jesus, they are safe now, and they are more themselves at this moment than you ever saw them. Whatever pain drove them to commit suicide is finished. That is not a sentimental hope; it is the plain consequence of what Scripture teaches about those who belong to him.

And if you are not certain what they believed, then leave the matter with God, who knew them completely and who is perfectly just and perfectly compassionate. You will not do them any good by adjudicating a case only he has the evidence for.

A Word to Anyone Struggling

If you are reading this because the thought has been in your own mind, please hear me. What you are feeling is a symptom, not a verdict, and symptoms respond to treatment. The conviction that you are a burden is the illness talking, and it is lying to you with great confidence.

Tell somebody today. Your doctor, your minister, a friend who will not flinch. You do not have to explain it well or make it sound reasonable. You only have to say it out loud to one person.

In the United Kingdom you can call the Samaritans free at any hour on 116 123, and if you are outside the UK your local emergency number or a national crisis line will put you in touch with someone straight away. Please use them. This is a sensitive subject and there is no shame whatever in needing help with it.

How the Church Should Handle This

Badly, is the honest answer for much of our history, and we have work to do. Families bereaved this way often report a silence around them that they experience as judgement, whether or not it was meant that way. People do not know what to say, so they say nothing, and nothing is heard as condemnation.

So say something. Use the person’s name. Go to the funeral. Keep going round in six months when everyone else has stopped. Do not offer explanations, because there are none that help, and grief does not need a theory.

And teach this doctrine before anybody needs it. A congregation that already knows what Scripture says about those who commit suicide will not have to work it out in the worst week of somebody’s life.

So, now what?

So, where do those who commit suicide go? If they belong to Jesus, they go to Jesus, and the last dark act of a tormented mind does not reverse the verdict of the cross.

If you are grieving, I hope that settles something tonight. And if you are struggling yourself, please do not read this alone and then close the page. Speak to someone today, and let somebody carry a little of it with you.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39 (ESV)