IS SUICIDE ALWAYS SELF-MURDER?

Hugo McCord

You do not own yourself. “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). You have life, but you did not manufacture it. If the manufacturer (“Maker,” Psalm 95:6, NIV) on his own made it without your help, whose property is your life? Are we all “his people, the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100:3)? Is it true that, “whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord” (Romans 14:7)? Should every human being say of God “whose I am” (Acts 27:23)?

Are we to “remember” our “Creator” only “in the days of “our” youth” and not when “the days of trouble come, ... when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men stoop, ... when men are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets, ... when man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets, ... when the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:1-7, NIV)?

How long are we to remember our Creator? Skeptics say remember him neither in the days of our youth nor in old age. They exclaim about life: “Meaningless! Meaningless! ... Everything is meaningless!” (Ecclesiastes 12:8, NIV).

But every normal (mentally competent) person of wisdom is grateful for life, whether pleasant or troublesome, and he humbly affirms:

Here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14, NIV).

That normal (mentally competent) person of wisdom, planning to be faithful to God until the day of his “death” (Revelation 2:10), knows that before his death he could become a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, or that he could be in an accident and become comatose, alive physically but not mentally. He looks ahead when he can serve neither God nor man any longer on this earth, and signs an “Advanced Directive” in which (1) he appoints a person to make health decisions when he is helpless and (2) he instructs physicians that he does not want “life supports” (“tube feeding,” etc.) while he is comatose because he wants to die naturally.

He knows that when the Advance Directive is in operation he will receive routine care to keep him clean and comfortable. Such an arrangement is far from self-murder, and certainly on the day of his death the benediction of Revelation 14:13 will be his: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,” resting from his “labor,” with good “deeds” following him.

Anyone without the ability to think is as irresponsible as a stone or a tree. Certainly then, a mentally disabled person, young or old, who injures his body or kills himself is not guilty of self-abuse or of self-murder. Beyond all disputation, God, who “is love,” and “rich in mercy” for all the people of his creation (Ephesians 2:4; 1 John 4:8) will save that helpless, innocent person just as he saves children who die in infancy (Matthew 19:14).

On the other hand, when people are mentally alert, who know right from wrong, who “reject the truth and follow evil,” committing suicide, “there will be wrath and anger” from the God who loves them (Romans 2:8, NIV). Though the Creator is “love,” he can also be “a consuming fire” into whose hands it “is a dreadful thing to fall” (Hebrews 10:31, 12:29; 1 John 4:8, NIV).

The mentally competent who commit self-murder are willfully destroying the property of some one else, God’s property, which they selfishly have enjoyed for awhile. They are returning it to God before he has asked for its return. Instead of their loving God with all their hearts and souls, they are self-willed and impenitent.

They are following the advice that Job, a suffering man, received from his wife: “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9). She thought that suicide was his best option. That suffering man, afflicted “with painful sores (shehin, boils, ulcers) from the soles of his feet to the top of his head” (Job 2:7, NIV) respected his Maker! To the woman who should have been his helper day and night, he had to say: “You are talking like a foolish woman. Should we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10, NIV).

Job’s word “foolish” (nebaloth) did not mean she was a fool mentally, but “impious” and “wicked” (Gesenius, 529). Job, “blameless and upright” (Job 1:1, NIV), never considered suicide. Instead, he lived on in misery despite no help from his “helper” (?) and three “friends” (?) (Job 2:11).

Often good people who have not violated God’s laws have bad health, sometimes with terminal illnesses. Job had done nothing to deserve his boils, but, unknown to Job, God had a providential purpose in allowing the ulcers. As good as Job was, “blameless and upright” (Job 1:1, NIV), loving his family (1:5), refusing to curse God (2:9-10), exercising a measure of patience (James 5:11), yet God could see in him a spirit of egotism and rebellion (13:2-3; 23:2), a lack of patience (21:4), flashing eyes (15:12), and a disposition to argue with his Maker (23:3).

Days of affliction humbled the man, and he listened to God’s rebuke, and repented in “dust and ashes” (42:6). He was a better man as a result of his disciplinary suffering than ever he could have been without it. Suicide would have been sinful.

Neither had Paul done anything to cause his tortuous pain, “a thorn in the flesh,” which buffeted him (2 Corinthians 12:7). He prayed for relief, not knowing that God had allowed the sharp pain to keep Paul humble (2 Corinthians 12:7). For the rest of Paul’s life he could by miraculous prayer heal other people’s bodies (Acts 19:11-12; 28:8), but not his own. He could tell Timothy how to relieve his “frequent illnesses” (1 Timothy 5:23), but his own health problem was terminal.

Instead, however, of turning to self-murder for relief, he became more humble, and came to realize that “when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10; cf. Psalms 119:67, 71, 75; Hebrews 12:11).

Even Jesus had to learn obedience through suffering. He, like Paul, prayed for relief “with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death,” but God could see that he personally needed the discipline to make him “perfect” (Hebrews 5:7-9). Suicide was not the answer.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, a court governing nine Western states, in striking down the Washington State law that bans assisted suicides, said that the “Christian view” is “that suicide was in all cases a sin and a crime” (THE OREGONIAN, March 7, 1996). In this he is mistaken, for, as shown above, suicide is a sin only when done by mentally competent people.

The judge searched the Bible trying to find some vestige of approval of suicide, writing in his decision:

The stories of four suicides are noted in the Old Testament--Samson, Saul, Abimelech, and Achitophel [sic]--and none is treated as an act worthy of censure.

But the Old Testament texts telling of the suicides of Samson (Judges 16:30-31), Saul (1 Samuel 30:4), Abimelech (Judges 9:54), and Ahithophel (2 Samuel 17:23) in no way approve of what the self-murderers did. The Old Testament texts only recite what happened.

In the judge’s further search for biblical approval of suicide, he wrote:

In the New Testament, the suicide of Judas Iscariot is not treated as a further sin, rather as an act of repentance.

Some English versions (KJV, ASV, NRSV) erroneously do say that Judas “repented” (which would call for metanoeo in Matthew 27:3), but other versions (CEV, and similarly NASV, NIV, NKJV) correctly say that Judas only “was sorry for what he had done” (translating metamelomai in Matthew 27:3).

Biblically, sorrow leads up to repentance (2 Corinthians 7:10), but in Judas’ case it stopped short of repentance. Godly sorrow is a necessary prologue to biblical repentance, which itself is a change of mind (metanoeo) that demands an action, a “fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matthew 3:8). Such would have been exhibited if Judas had returned to Jesus and served him as an apostle. Peter, like Judas, betrayed Jesus, swearing to a lie that he was not acquainted with Jesus. But Peter’s sorrow for that sin led him to repentance. He returned to Jesus and served him as an apostle. Judas’ killing himself was only a selfish exit for himself, displaying a corpse, not “a fruit in keeping with repentance.” There is no way to deduce from Scripture that Judas’ self-murder was “an act of repentance,” an approved self-murder. There is no way to justify suicide by any mentally competent person.