The Ten Commandments provide a stern warning regarding the act of murder — “Thou shalt not kill.”
But while the Bible is clear in its admonishment God’s children should not take the lives of others, the question remains if suicide is a sin and whether those who take their own lives will enter the kingdom of heaven.
Just as any sin is seen as an act of disobedience, suicide also defies God’s will. Joni Eareckson Tada points to the consequence of disobedience against God in her 1992 book on suicide and euthanasia, “When Is it Right to Die?”
Tada said the Bible has a response for those who believe their bodies are their own and they are free to do with them as they wish.
She cites 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “You are not your own, therefore honor God with your body.”
“In short, any means to produce death in order to alleviate suffering is never justified,” Tada said. “Or in the language of the Bible, it is never right to do evil.”
The author said in the book’s footnotes that “some evangelicals believe moral principles can be violated when there is a conflict of duties. However, in Scripture it is never right to disobey a command of God, and it is never sinful to do right.”
Addressing the issue in an article published in a Jan. 28 article in The Columbus Dispatch, a professor with Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said an individual may lose his or her chance at salvation by taking his or her life.
“Human beings have potential for life beyond life,” said Ted Cabal, dean of undergraduate studies and philosophy at Southern. “If a person cuts off life before they come to know Christ, they’ve cut off that possibility.”
But what of the individual who has asked Christ into his or her life, yet takes his or her own life?
Asserting suicide is a sinful act, Gary Fenton, pastor of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church, Homewood, said suicide would most likely not determine an individual’s place in heaven, stressing “any individual sin” is no greater than another in determining where one spends eternity. “The means of eternal life is trusting Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord,” Fenton said.
James Hillman offers a similar conclusion that suicide is a sin in “Suicide and the Soul.”
Hillman cites the interpretation of first-century Christian theologian St. Augustine that the commandment humans shall not kill cannot be modified by presuming God said to Moses, “Thou shalt not kill (only) others.”
Suicide, Hillman said, “is a form of homicide just as the law maintained. And as the law can be said to order us to live, so theology commands us to live.”
Hillman echoes Fenton’s observations in his book, saying “to decide whether an act is merely a theological sin or truly religious depends not upon dogma (with dogma being the church’s teaching against suicide) but upon the evidence of the soul.”
Addressing the issue later, Hillman said “For the soul, it is as if death and even the manner and moment of entering it can be irrelevant.”
Offering yet a third analysis that a believer who takes his or her life would not lose his or her chance at salvation, Lewis B. Smedes cites “the hope-giving promise of Romans 8:32, that neither life nor death can separate the believer from the love of God in Jesus Christ.”
Smedes, professor emeritus of theology and ethics at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., made his observation in an article posted June 6, 2000, on Christianity Today’s Web site at Christianitytoday.com.
Donal O’Matthuna, author of several books on medical ethics and a professor of ethics and chemistry at Mount Carmel School of Nursing in Columbus (Ohio), said in the Dispatch article that it is more than a coincidence biblical characters like Judas who commit suicide are portrayed in an unfavorable light.
Using Elijah, Job and Paul as examples, he said those who cried out to God endured.
“The important ethic in the Bible is our lives are here to be used by God and to serve others, that there is a way God can work through us in spite of the circumstances,” Matthuna said.
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