What is the Christian view of suicide? What does the Bible say about suicide?

But there is a privilege immeasurably greater than simply being immortal in the sense of the soul's perpetual existence. For it may have an issue unspeakably awful. Think of a perpetual existence in the lake of fire! Every one must come under the everlasting judgment of God, if he reject His Son: never-ceasing existence to suffer, and to suffer at the hand of God, because one stubbornly and wilfully refuses to believe that He in grace suffered thus judicially that the guilty might never suffer from Him, but only be blessed for ever! How rich God's mercy to proclaim salvation to the lost because Christ bore sin's judgment on the cross! And if I believe not on Him, nor in the glad tidings of what God wrought by Him, where am I? Under the power of Satan, the unrelenting power of the enemy that hates both God and man. But man cannot have non-existence. This becomes the terrible guilt of the sinner who would if he could make himself non-existent. He may commit suicide; but he must give account of it to God. For God gave him life; and who gave him licence to make away with that life by his own hand? How could such wicked folly work for any good? If murder in any shape be such as to denote a dark and deadly crime, self-murder is one of its worst forms, and a direct and extreme insult to God. As Jesus was ever the perfectly obedient One, it flowed from a life expressly eternal. In us who believe this does not always act, because flesh may work to our shame; but the new life, being eternal, always remains for due activity. The old life may break forth through unguardedness and lack of watching to prayer; for the old life, or mind of the flesh, is there too, and enmity against God (Rom. 8:7). It is man's own will; and whom is he obeying then? Satan. For man's will surely becomes Satan's service. Such is man's boasted free-will.

Self-righteousness will preserve its reputation to the very last, and seek to guard itself from the humiliation of a public exposure of that which it would fain hide. Pride cleaves to the last to poor Saul, and he who had pled with Samuel to remain and honor him before the people, now would seek to guard the last vestiges of that honor, which he had already sacrificed by his disobedience, from further degradation. What then is to be his resource? Will he, even when thus sorely wounded by the archers, turn to God and throw himself upon His mercy? Will he thus prove that though the archers have sorely shot at him and wounded him, his hands are made strong by the mighty One of Jacob? Alas, in this hour of hopeless distress, he does not turn to God. His own sword with which he had been meeting the enemy, a figure, we may say, of the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God, he turns against his own bosom and falls upon it. He thus becomes the first suicide of whom we have a definite record in Scripture. He comes to his end, so far as his responsibility is concerned, by his own hand. What solemn food for meditation is here!

Disobedience, or refusal to make a full end of the flesh, specious though the excuses for not doing so may be, ends in self-destruction. Sin is suicide. In what dreadful company does this act of self-destruction put king Saul! He is with Ahithophel, the traitor who, like himself, sought the life of David, and is associated also with that still darker traitor who sold his Lord and then, in hopeless remorse, went out and hanged himself. Dark indeed is the scene about mount Gilboa. We would not tarry there from choice. One of the high places of Israel, it is a scene of crowning dishonor, but we must linger a while longer, in order to gather further lessons of the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the utter futility of the flesh.

It seems that even in his own act of self-destruction, king Saul was not entirely successful. Passing over for a moment to the next chapter, in the Amalekite's account to David, we find that he was still leaning upon his spear when he passed that way, and it was again at his request that this stranger finally slew Saul. Thus, three times did he show the deliberate purpose that he would not fall alive into the hand of the Philistines. Three times was he a responsible suicide: once when he besought his armor-bearer to slay him; the second time when he fell upon his own sword; and the third time when he made the final request of the Amalekite. There can be no doubt, then, of his purpose.

A sad ending to one of the saddest stories of the Bible. Jonathan, Abinadab and Melchi-shua, Saul's sons, fall first. Then Saul is wounded. He asks his armour bearer to make an end of his sufferings. There is no evidence whatever of his repentance and turning unto the Lord. He died as he had lived in rebellion against Jehovah. The armour-bearer refused to kill Saul; then he fell upon his own sword and committed suicide. He is the first suicide mentioned in the Bible. Ahithophel (2 Sam. 17:23); Zimri (1 Kings 16:18) and Judas Iscariot (Matt. 27:5) are other suicides recorded in the Word. The first chapter of the second book of Samuel tells us of an Amalekite who slew Saul. This is not a contradiction at all as some have declared. First Saul asked his armour-bearer to slay him; he refused. Then he fell upon his sword but was not wholly successful. In anguish he leaned upon his spear and when the Amalekite came along, he told him that his life was still in him (2 Sam. 1:9) and he slew him. His end is sad and has its solemn lessons. His sin was the sparing of Amalek, we say again, the type of the flesh. Of this sin Samuel had reminded him in his message of doom (28:18). His disobedience ended in self-destruction. Such is sin. And an Amalekite made the end of him. Sin allowed and followed will do its dreadful work in the end, as this Amalekite, spared by Saul, ends his life.

Saul was badly wounded by an arrow. There was no compassionate stretcher bearer to carry him away, and his armour bearer was unable to do anything to help him. Therefore he urged his armour bearer to put him to death, for he feared the mockery of the Philistines when they found him. How pathetic is his utter absence of faith in the God of Israel! He would choose a death of dark hopelessness rather than to endure mockery from his enemies. But his armour bearer had more respect for the throne of Israel than to kill the king: he was rightly afraid of doing such a thing. Saul then deliberately committed suicide by falling on a sword.

Peter went out then, and "wept bitterly." Repentance did its proper work in his soul, as he saw his folly and sin in the light of his Lord's love. Here is the difference between repentance and remorse. Repentance is the judgment of my sin that I have in the light of love, and grace known. Remorse is produced by viewing the sin in the light only of its probable results. Repentance begets hope, remorse leads only to despair. Repentance leads the soul back to God, remorse drives it to deeper sin, and further into Satan's hands. This is all illustrated in the consequent pathway of Peter and Judas. Judas, who did not know what grace was, went out and, in remorse over his consummate wickedness, hanged himself; Peter, who did know what grace was, and who knew better than ever then how deeply the Lord loved him, went out and wept bitterly. The last thing Peter had done was to deny his Master, and the next thing his Master did was to die for Peter; and if He had not died for Peter, he never could have been restored nor saved.

(2) A hope seems to have remained or freshly risen in the heart of Christ's betrayer that, after all, He might not be condemned. Perhaps the words here do not convey as much as that, but rather the horror produced by the actual thing when now accomplished, never to be undone. What tales have we of deeds deliberately done, which when done have assumed at once a new shape of terror and dismay, as if never contemplated before. With what different eyes might the traitor have seen the actual condemnation of his Lord and Master from those with which he had looked on to it, however certain. Clearly it is the awful agony of remorse that awakes now in Judas, and not repentance. He cannot keep the money he has gained, to which even for the chief priests the blood-stain indelibly attaches. Nay, he shrieks out even in their ears the confession of his sin in having betrayed the innocent blood. But there it ends: "innocent blood;" not holy or righteous, still less "the Holy and the Righteous One": the glory of the Son of God has no part in it ― neither heals nor even smites him. There is no turning to Him with whom he had companied so long, ― no sense of any one to whom he can turn. There is, in short, no faith, and therefore no repentance. "He cast the silver pieces into the temple" ― practically, the sanctuary, the part proper to the priests alone, ― "and departed and went away and hanged himself." In this we see again the opposite of faith. How many times must he have seen the miraculous deeds which testified that "the Son of man had power on earth to forgive sins"! but he seems to remember nothing of all this, or else cannot believe in the divine mercy toward himself; and thus he plunges headlong into irrecoverable ruin.

Let us look further at Jonah's prayer. He continues: "And now, Jehovah, take, I beseech Thee, my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live." This is the only request in Jonah's prayer, a request that he might die. Why? Because he could not have his own way. Self-will and disappointment made him long to give up his honorable position as prophet and servant of Jehovah, a witness to Him, even in a foreign land; and escape all his troubles in death. It was very wrong and very cowardly — just the kind of thing we do. When things go all wrong, and we do not get our own way, and are disappointed and discouraged; then we sigh, and hope that the Lord may soon come and take us away to heaven. The writer has to confess that he has done just the same thing as Jonah, and very possibly the reader is little better. If we allow it, how the sword of the Spirit cuts us, and how truly it is "a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)

He went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree, and he requested for himself that he might die. It is not but what we see the man of God, but still the man who was tired of life. That was not a feeling of faith. There is very often much more faith in being willing to live than in wishing to die. Wishing to die is not the proof of faith at all. I grant you that no man that knows what death is, that knows what judgment is, that knows what sin is, that knows what God is, could wish to die unless he knew the Saviour. But having known the Saviour we may wince under the trial to which we are exposed in this world. Elijah did, and he wished to die, wished to get out of the trial — certainly a most unbelieving wish. The Lord never did. And there was the perfection of it. If the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane had wished to die it would have been the same failure. It could not be, and God forbid such a thought, but on the contrary the perfection of the Lord Jesus was that He did not wish to die — "Not my will, but thine be done." On the contrary, He felt death, and He felt the gravity. I grant you, there was all the difference between the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and that of any other. In any other case death is a gain. Death to a believer is gain, but still we ought not to wish to gain till the Lord's time comes for it. We ought to wish to do His will, the only right wish for a saint. He said, "It is enough; now, O Jehovah, take away my life." He was impatient. "Take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers." Yet he was running away from Jezebel. He was vexed; he was unhappy. He now fails after his testimony. He, was miserable now, but after all he wanted not to die when Jezebel wanted to take his life, and now that he is here he wants to die.

Again, we find Elijah the Tishbite, in a moment of heavy pressure, when a dark cloud was passing over his soul, flinging himself down under a juniper tree, and requesting for himself that he might die. "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers." (1 Kings 19:4)s This was the language of Elijah, one of the most highly honoured of the servants of Christ — language evoked, no doubt, by a combination of the most discouraging influences — but still it was the language of Elijah the Tishbite; and let no one blame him until he himself has passed, without a wavering feeling or a faltering word, through like conditions.

David is warned and all his people pass over the Jordan: not one is missing. Thanks to this service, God's true people set a barrier between themselves and the enemy. Ahithophel, whose pride is wounded but who above all is apprehensive of David's final triumph, takes his own life, precipitating himself into eternal judgment in order to escape future vengeance (v. 23)!