What Does the Bible Say About Suicide? Life, Mercy and Hope

The Bible treats every life as a gift from God, and it never calls suicide the sin that cannot be forgiven. It tells of a few people who took their own lives, and of others, Elijah and Jonah among them, who asked God to let them die and found that he had not finished with them.

If you are thinking about ending your life, please tell someone now. In the United States, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour; it is free and confidential. Anywhere else, call your local emergency number. You do not have to carry this through the night alone.

One night in Philippi an earthquake threw open the doors of a prison, and the jailer, sure that his prisoners had escaped, was about to take his own life. Paul shouted to him across the dark: “Do thyself no harm: for we are all here” (Acts 16:28). Those few words hold most of what Scripture says to us on this hard subject. Our lives are not ours to end, and we are not alone. The jailer called for a light, and before the night was over he had washed the wounds of the men he had guarded, been baptized with his household, and set food before them, and he “rejoiced, believing in God with all his house” (Acts 16:34).

No verse uses the word, and yet the churches have read the answer in the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). Augustine noticed, early in the fifth century, that the commandment adds no “neighbour” to the one who must not be killed, and he concluded that “the law, rightly interpreted, even prohibits suicide.” The Westminster Larger Catechism, used by Presbyterian churches, lists among the sins this commandment forbids “all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others.”

Behind the commandment stands a gift. “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” the psalmist prays (Psalm 139:14), and Paul tells the Corinthians, “ye are not your own. For ye are bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it in a single line: “We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us.” Moses set the choice before Israel long ago, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

So the Catholic Catechism, the Orthodox Church and the Presbyterian Westminster Catechism all teach that taking one’s own life is wrong, and Baptist and Lutheran statements speak of it as a tragedy. As their own words below show, they say it with sorrow, and with mercy for the one who has died.

Scripture tells of a handful, briefly and without lingering. King Saul and the young man who carried his armour died by their own hand on the day of a lost battle (1 Samuel 31:4–5). Ahithophel, David’s counsellor who had gone over to the rebel Absalom, went home and ended his life when Absalom rejected his advice (2 Samuel 15:12; 17:23). Zimri, who had reigned seven days, also took his own life when his city fell (1 Kings 16:18). Abimelech, struck down by a woman in a siege, asked his armour-bearer to end his life so that no one would say a woman had killed him (Judges 9:53–54). Samson’s death is sometimes counted with these. He prayed, “Let me die with the Philistines” (Judges 16:30), and Judges tells it as the end of his long fight with them.

Then there is Judas. After the betrayal he came back to the chief priests with the silver and said, “I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.” Their answer is one of the coldest lines in the Gospels: “What is that to us? see thou to that.” He went out and took his own life (Matthew 27:3–5). The Bible does not hold up any of these deaths as an example to follow. Each comes at the end of defeat, disgrace or despair, and in the case of Judas, after a man confessed his sin to people who would not stay with him.

Yes, and some of the greatest. Elijah, running for his life from Queen Jezebel, sat down under a juniper tree in the wilderness “and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). God let him sleep. An angel touched him and said, “Arise and eat,” and there was bread baked on the coals and a jar of water by his head. Then the angel came a second time: “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee” (1 Kings 19:5–7). In the strength of that food Elijah walked forty days to the mountain of God.

Job, after losing his children and his health, cursed the day he was born (Job 3:1–3). Jonah prayed, “it is better for me to die than to live” (Jonah 4:3). Paul tells the Corinthians that in Asia “we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life,” and he goes on, God “delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver” (2 Corinthians 1:8–10). One psalm ends with no comfort at all: “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness” (Psalm 88:18). God kept that prayer in his Book. The darkness is allowed to speak there.

None of these people was condemned for wanting to die. Each was met, Elijah by bread, Jonah by God’s own question, “Doest thou well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4), Paul by deliverance, and each lived on. The verses are gathered, with a short reflection on each, in 15 Bible verses about suicide.

No. Jesus names only one sin that “shall not be forgiven,” and it is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit: “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men” (Matthew 12:31). Suicide is not that sin, and no verse of Scripture says it shuts a person out of heaven.

The old fear that suicide damns a person rests on the thought that there is no time left to repent. Paul answers it with a list that leaves nothing out: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).

This mercy is for those who grieve. If you are the one in danger tonight, God’s word to you is Paul’s in the prison: “Do thyself no harm.” Call or text 988 now, or your local emergency number outside the United States.

They speak of the act in different words, and all of them speak with great care about the person who has died. None of the texts below says that a person who dies by suicide is lost. They leave the judgment to God, and the Catholic and Orthodox texts ask the living to pray.

The Catholic Church

The Catechism calls suicide “gravely contrary to the just love of self” and “contrary to love for the living God” (paragraph 2281). It goes on, in paragraph 2282, to say that “Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide” (2282). Then it says plainly, “We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance,” and “the Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives” (2283). The older law was stricter. The 1917 Code of Canon Law listed among those to be deprived of church burial, in the canon lawyer Cathy Caridi’s words, “those persons who deliberately kill themselves.” The law on funerals today, canon 1184 of the 1983 Code, no longer names suicide among the reasons a Catholic funeral may be refused.

The Orthodox Church

Orthodox practice is stricter about the funeral. The guidelines of the Orthodox Church in America’s Diocese of New England call suicide “a profound tragedy and sin that should elicit from the community of faith a deep prayer for forgiveness, repentance and sorrow – for the sake of the suicide and for the members of the community as well.” The Orthodox Church “normally denies a Church burial” in such a death, though “special pastoral considerations may allow a determination to be made, in consultation with the Bishop, to permit a service of burial.” A grieving family can speak with their priest, who can take the question to the bishop.

Protestant churches

The Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Houston in 2013, resolved that “families who have lost a member to suicide deserve great care, concern, and compassion from Christians and their churches, including the assurance that those in Christ cannot be separated from the eternal love of God that is in Christ Jesus.” The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s summary of its 1999 message on suicide prevention says that suicide “testifies to the tragic brokenness of living that some experience as a torment without hope,” and proclaims “that God’s boundless love in Jesus Christ will leave no one alone and abandoned.”

Tell someone today. Call or text 988 in the United States, call your local emergency number anywhere else, or go to a person you trust, a friend, a doctor, a pastor, and say the words out loud. Elijah slept and ate before he could hear anything else. Our minds can be very sick, as our bodies can, and being depressed is not a sin. Getting help is one of the ways God sends the bread and the water.

Jesus speaks to us as we are: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). And the psalmist, who knew the dark as well as any of us, says, “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18). Nigh means near.

Be the voice in the prison: stay, and say that you are there. Paul’s command to the churches is simple: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). When Job’s friends first came, they did the best thing they ever did for him. “So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2:13).

The 988 Lifeline asks us to “Be direct. Talk openly and matter-of-factly about suicide,” and to “Never keep it a secret if a friend tells you about a plan to hurt themselves.” You can call 988 yourself when you are worried about someone; its counsellors help friends and family as well. If a life is in danger right now, call your local emergency number and stay with the person until help comes.

He is weeping with us. At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus saw Mary crying and “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,” and then, in two words, “Jesus wept” (John 11:32–35). Grief after a suicide carries questions that may never be answered, and often guilt that does not belong to the person carrying it. God does not ask us to have the answers. He asks us to bring him the sorrow.

Paul does not tell the grieving church at Thessalonica to stop mourning. He tells them they “sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). We give the one we have lost back to God, whose love neither death nor life can break. And we may lean on the church, which owes every grieving family, in the Southern Baptists’ words, “great care, concern, and compassion.”

If you are reading this in the dark yourself, call or text 988 in the United States, or your local emergency number anywhere else. Someone is awake and will answer. We are all here. “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22–23).

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• Prayers for those who are grieving
• 19 Bible verses for the death of a loved one