What does God think of suicide?

[SeekerOfTruth]

Some Christians believe you'll go to hell if you take your life even though you're saved. Others don't. I'm interested in hearing different views on this subject.

Thanks for your input in advance.
Seeker

[CatholicXian]

Some Christians believe you'll go to hell if you take your life even though you're saved. Others don't. I'm interested in hearing different views on this subject.

Thanks for your input in advance.
Seeker
Since God is the author of life, it is His to give and take away...

re: their salvation, this is my belief:
CCC 2283 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. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.

[Xmansmommy]

Seeker, I don't know for certain and I don't believe the bible actually addresses it. I tend to be torn over the issue. I believe God loves them, understands their despair and weeps over their choice. But at the same time, I wonder if they were exhibiting faith would they commit such an act? Sorry I'm not more helpful. :shrug:

[SeekerOfTruth]

Since God is the author of life, it is His to give and take away...

re: their salvation, this is my belief:
CCC 2283 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. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
Thanks very much for the input. What does CCC 2283 mean?

Seeker

[Jethreuel]

Suicide is a demonstration that you no longer value your life, a great gift that God has given you. I believe that we should not kill, nor do anything like unto it. Since another term for kill is take someone's life away, I don't think we should do so, especially if the life we take is our own.

As for the punnishment for those who commit suicide... That I do not know, I shall let Christ and Heavenly Father decide that.

[luv1another]

as far as I know it's considered self murder and goes against Gods commandment thou shalt not murder (kill).

[Berean Todd]

If a person is saved, then no sin can take that away. God paid for all sins on the cross, and to receive forgiveness is to receive forgiveness for ALL of your sins. The Bible never specifically addresses suicide, so one cannot in any way make it "the unforgiveable sin."

However, that said, I have a very hard time, as someone earlier mentioned sort of, imagining someone who had faith in God doing an act such as this. I am not judging any who has commited this act, nor will I judge such, but that is my opinion.

[TrinityKicker]

Some Christians believe you'll go to hell if you take your life even though you're saved. Others don't. I'm interested in hearing different views on this subject.I find it difficult to believe that ANY christian believes that you can both be saved and go to hell. Most people don't like taking a stance on this subject because the know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who commited suicide. Other avoid it because they don't want to 'judge.'

For myself, I ask myself similar, but less emotional example.

If the last act a professing christian performed was to murder someone, would that cause them to go to hell? I don't know. However, if I were to meet someone who recently commited murder, I would treat them as if they were not saved because murder seems to be a clear act of rebellion against God. Similarly, I lean towards suicides being a sign that the person is not saved. I mourn their deaths, and I hope that I am wrong.

[Furor]

For my own part, I am inclined to agree with Chesterton's take on the issue of suicide, however harsh it may seem:


Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny.

In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage.

For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront.

Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes--for it makes even crimes impossible.

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live.

The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.

Orthdoxy, and countless other works of Chestertonian delight, can be found online for public consumption here (http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/).