Suicide and Salvation by John Piper swordify.com Swordpress Nigeria

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We have now received almost one hundred email questions from
our listeners related to the sobering question of Christians,
suicide, and salvation. Several recent emails related to the
suicides of pastors. Andrew, a regular podcast listener from
Ankeny, Iowa, writes in: “Pastor John, recently, the family pastor
at a local church committed suicide. So what happens to the soul of
a professing born-again believer who commits suicide? Is this the
unforgivable sin? Does this show that the person was never actually
a believer because he did not persevere? Or is it possible for
someone that commits suicide to still go to heaven?” So Pastor
John, these are hard questions, but they are not new to
you.

I have been involved closely in several suicides in my life. I
cleaned up the basement after the police removed the body of a man
who shot himself in the head, and I used a broom to sweep the blood
(and other stuff) into a dust pan and pour it down the laundry sink
so his wife would not have to see what we found. And then I did his
funeral five days later. He was a professing believer. I have done
a funeral for a young woman who leaped from the window of the
locked ward at the hospital down the street from my house, where
she was being safely kept in her psychological distress. And she
died by jumping out of a window.

Distrusting God

So let’s be clear now. Self-murder is serious. We are playing
with fire here. It is spiritually and eternally serious to murder
yourself. It is not a light thing. And anyone listening to me now
who is contemplating suicide should hear me say: Don’t do it. There
is a better way. I promise you, in the name of Jesus Christ, there
is a better way. You don’t feel that, perhaps, right now, but your
feelings are not true. They are deceiving you. It is true that God
has another way for you. He always makes another way. Wait for him
and seek the help you need, because the Bible is very serious about
talking of murder.

“God has another way for you. He always makes another way.”

This is 1 John
3:15^[1]: “Everyone who hates his
brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal
life abiding in him.” Now that should scare the wits out of people
who are contemplating ending their life with murder. So what does
that mean? Eternal life and murder don’t go in the same soul. But
let’s be careful now. Let’s not take this further than it leads.
Does he mean that everyone who has a moment of hate is a hateful
person? Probably not. Does he mean that everyone who has a
murderous moment is a murderer? That is an important question. I
doubt it.

Yes, the Bible says we must persevere to the end in order to be
saved, Mark
13:13^[2]. Or Hebrews 3:14^[3]: “We have come to share
in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the
end.” That is a very serious warning. But it does not mean that our
experience of confidence in God to the end is perfect so that we
don’t have lapses of sin which betray that we are not fully
trusting Christ. All sin, all my sin — the sin that I do this
afternoon, tomorrow, yesterday — is all rooted in some level of
distrust in the superior goodness of God. And I don’t go in and out
of being a Christian when I sin and that measure of distrust
becomes manifest in sinning. I don’t cease to be a Christian.

So, saying that we must persevere to the end in confidence
doesn’t mean that you must persevere to the end in sinlessness or
perfect trust in Christ. There is imperfection in our trust.

Our Last Act

The question now is whether a person who commits suicide goes to
heaven. That question boils down to this: If a person has been
trusting in Christ as their Savior, their Lord, their treasure,
does the last act of their life prove the decisive one in showing
their true standing as a child of God? There is the key question.
Does the last act — in their case, murder — count as the decisive
one at the judgment day in showing that we were in Christ or not?
Is the last act the one that determines if our faith was real? Or
do all the other acts of life count as evidence as well?

“All sin is rooted in some level of distrust in the superior
goodness of God.”

Let me give you an analogy. This has helped many people as I
have shared it. I hope it helps. Suppose that I, one night — let’s
just say right now, 68 years old; it could be at any point — get so
angry at my wife that I storm out of the house. I slam the door. I
jump in the car and I head for the road and I am so out of control
and so angry, so sinful — let me add — so sinfully angry that I
totally misjudge one of these narrow turns here where the telephone
poles are about two feet off the road and I smash into that
telephone poll going sixty miles an hour and I am dead. Now, my
last act was sin, and I killed myself by my sin. I didn’t intend to
kill myself, but I did. And it was sin that made it happen. So the
last thing I did was sin. Is that last sin decisive in determining
whether John Piper was born again?

And my answer is: not necessarily. In other words, God will look
at my life. He will look at my whole life, and the evidences of
whether I belong to him will be assessed not because of that
failure alone any more than any other failure alone. Why would the
last one be decisive when the others are just as serious?

Moments of Despair

“I am waving a flag of hope that true faith can have a season
that dark.”

So the last question then becomes this: Can a Christian be so
depressed and temporarily blinded to the hope of the gospel that he
takes his life in a temporary moment of despair? And I think the
answer to that is yes.

Now that is a judgment call on my part to say that seasons of
darkness come and go in the Christian life. It is dangerous to say
this, because we are all so easily deceived, and we should be
terrified to try to meet Jesus by means of murder. That is a
horrible choice. But between the terror that we should feel about
that choice and the hopelessness for the victim of suicide, between
those two I am waving a flag of hope that true faith can have a
season that dark.

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