Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Suicide and The Bible

So,..maybe you take a bottle of sleeping pills and then before you konk out, you ask for forgiveness...?

The Bible doesn't say anything about suicide.

Personally, I don't want to meet God and have to explain why I didn't finish the work he gave me.

I don't have THE answer. I reckon it's what's in your heart when you do it.

Generaly, suicide is not a rational choice made by well reasoned, stable people. Sometimes the pain of living (either physical, mental or emotional) just overpowers rational thought.

Suicide is considered �self murder�.

The murder dies without the chance to ask for forgiveness�

Anyway that is how I understand it.

To disobey scripture is to sin.

"Thou shalt not commit murder" "Love thy neighbor as thyself" "Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit"

Those 3 cover suicide.

Talk of doing yourself in for the sake of family or to avoid a slow painful death is disregard for the work the Lord did. It's covered by this one.

"By His stripes ye were healed".

As far as God is concerned you're healed, it's a done deal and there's nothing more He'll do about it because nothing else needs done. That you never exercised your faith and received the healing is your shortcoming, not His. He already did his part.

"The just shall live by faith."
"Faith calls those things that be not as though they were."
"Without faith it is impossible to please God."

"To every man is appointed a time to die."

Some don't make it to their appointed time, others live beyond it.

As you can plainly see, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are going to be very disappointed in most people. Very.

It was all right there in the book the whole time. You threw it to the wind.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.

....along with the 5th commandment..

Thou shall not kill. It includes self.

Judas hanged himself. We can also bet he went to Hades.

The LORD gives and The Lord takes away. Blessed be The Name of The LORD. So, the taking away of life is obviously reserved for Him only, as opposed to an individual taking a life.

I had a discussion with a wise old pastor about this topic about 30 years ago when on of the congregation had chosen suicide as his end (unbearable cancer pain).

Other than the instances given in posts above, which this pastor cited as well only as interpretation, he offered up the following as an opinion but one that I found valid.
Being a well-read literary and religious scholar, he brought up the middle Ring of circle 7 in Dante's Inferno in which suicide is described as the 'ultimate sin'. The pastor reflected on this literary work and opinion from one of history's great religious scholars of the past as forming some of our society's feeling towards suicide in general. He also prompted me to remember that several other faiths do not believe suicide to be anything near a sin at all.

I am not arguing in favor of the insanity defense, or the abuse of the insanity defense, in our legal sysetm but simply point out that even a legal system devised by humans contains enough compassion to not punish those incapable of rational thought. Is God at least as compassionate as humans?

Suicide, other than perhaps in the case of a painful terminal illness, is not the act of a person capable of rational thought. I simply cannot accept that God cannot forgive someone in those circumstances and cannot find anything to contradict my belief in the Bible. Ward

All our days are in The LORD's hands. They are not in our hands.

Yep.

The movie "Luther" deals with this question in a beautifully pastoral way when a young parishoner of Luther's kills himself and, contrary to (Roman Catholic) Church tradition, Luther buries him in the church yard (symbolizing the young man's salvation). Luther gives a sermon to the onlookers who are shocked by what he is doing. It was extraordinarily moving.

He reminds everyone that while Scripture condemns the unjustified taking of life, the grace of God in Christ forgives all sins including this one.

Praise God for His grace even to those so despondent as to feel the need to take their own lives!

Hmmm.... it says in the bible that they did. You could either read the bible for confirmation of that or go to http://www.christiananswers.net/q-dml/dml-y038.html for the story that the above is copied from.

Sin? Christ has made me free from the law of sin and death by my faith in Him. That does not mean I may not do acts which were once considered sin after the fall, but it does mean if I do, I am free from their penalty.

Many would take that response as being too simplistic; but I think you've come the closest thus far.

Basically it's not there. The issue of suicide is a judgement call on the part of the believer. But churches have basically codified what is at best an inferrence. I consider that to be a bit dicey from the standpoint of "taking away from, and adding to" the scripture, and heaping wrath upon yourself.

People like things to be easy, cut and dried, black and white. But our world has many shades of gray.

At the end of the day, The Bible does not specifically say that suicide is a sin; it is MAN who is saying it�s a sin�there�s no getting around that.

Now MAN can make many good cases for such a position. Those cases can find strong support from the scripture; of that I cannot argue.
On the other hand, a person can make many strong cases FOR suicide where one could say it�s NOT a sin. Again, nothing direct, but many scriptures that would support selfless or less-selfish reasons for suicide.

The more �conservative� Christians are (in my observations) uncomfortable with not having an answer for everything. Theologians make interpretations of The Bible and many will make an interpretation and INSIST that it is THE ONLY correct interpretation; and any other interpretation is incorrect or a sin. THIS IS GOD�S WORD, NOT MAN�S WORD. Maybe I�m a Birkenstock wearing �liberal� Christian, but I just don�t have the stones to say it�s my way or the highway where God�s word is concerned. And I�m not so insecure that I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE an answer for everything; especially if I risk �adding to or taking away from God�s word�. I�m okay with telling someone, �I�m not sure� or �I don�t know��I�ll ask God when I�m in his presence. (In this case I don�t need to know the answer so bad that I�m going to kill myself just so I can find out).

For those who answered that suicide ABSOLUTELY is a sin, put some thought into why you�re so convinced. For those who responded, thank you. I was making sure I didn�t miss something.

As I get older, I find that there are less and less definitive answers in life. Jesus, is the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the father but by him. I�m absolutely sure on THAT one�but not so sure about most everything else in life.

Is suicide sin?

I am sorry Kevin, but how much clearer can it be than to be put into the 10 commandments?

God is the giver and only legitimate taker of life. Period. My life is as much my own as yours, and I haven't the authority to take either.

Now to your gray comment... you're right. There are an awful lot who would say that this (like homosexuality) automatically means you're going to hell, but I don't see that either.

As RickyD said, if you're in Christ it is He who has paid the penalty for ALL your sins, human sensitivity to one over the other notwithstanding.

A MOH recipient went down with his sub during WWII. He knew too much to be captured. I posted a video of Charles Durning sharing his D Day experience on Memorial Day. He spoke of wounded crawling in front of troops to take the bullets so others would be spared. Self sacrifice yes, but also suicide.

It seems odd to me it's ok to execute someone for murder and ok to demand another to die in agony and pain while wasting away the family's money.

Yeah, I tend to think God is far more compassionate than the religious legalists say he is. All is about the condition of the heart, not some legalistic border/milestone/rule. There is no pulling the wool over God's eyes; it's all about your heart.

I'm very confident when I say (on the subject of suicide), that I just don't know for sure. I can tell people what I THINK, based on my interpretation of the scripture, but if it's not black & white in The Bible, then I'm not going to lie to myself or anyone else that I KNOW for sure the black & white answer.

It sounds to me like you're confusing two separate issues here.

The question of whether something is sin or not has no bearing upon God's grace. If calling your brother "blockhead" is tantamount to murder as Christ suggests, then killing yourself must be too.

As I said before, that doesn't mean that those who are in Christ aren't forgiven that sin. If a person is forgiven on account of Christ's work on the cross ALL of his sin is accounted to Christ and the debt paid.

It seems to me that what you're saying is that you're not convinced it is the "automatic damnation sin" that fundies (and the Roman Catholic Church) say it is. I agree with you on that for sure.

Does what I'm saying here make sense?