Suicide and the mercy of God

If you are thinking about ending your life, please reach out now. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It is free and confidential, and someone answers at any hour. In other countries, findahelpline.com lists free helplines near you. If you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number.

If you are here because you are hurting, or because someone you love has died this way, you are welcome here, and you are not alone. Scripture’s deepest word on this subject is that nothing, not even death, can separate a person from the love of God, and the mainline churches commend everyone who dies by suicide to that love.

What does the Bible say about suicide?

The Bible tells of the deaths of a few people who took their own lives, among them King Saul (1 Samuel 31) and Judas (Matthew 27:3–5). Scripture never says what became of any of them after death. When David heard that Saul had died, he did not curse him; he wrote a lament that honors him:

Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely! In life and in death they were not divided.

2 Samuel 1:23, NRSVUE

The only sin Jesus calls unforgivable is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Mark 3:28–29), which the church has understood as a settled, final refusal of God’s mercy. An act done in agony, by someone overwhelmed by pain, is something very different. You can read more in What is the unforgivable sin?

What the Bible does say, again and again, is that God’s love reaches farther than any human darkness. Paul’s list in Romans 8 includes death itself:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38–39, NRSVUE

Psalm 139 says the same thing in the language of prayer. It begins with a question, “Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7), and answers that there is nowhere God is not. Sheol, in the psalm, is the Hebrew name for the place of the dead:

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.… If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and night wraps itself around me,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

Psalm 139:8, 11–12, NRSVUE

Where did the idea that suicide sends people to hell come from?

The old teaching was real, and it hurt many families. Augustine of Hippo, writing The City of God in the early 400s, argued that the commandment “You shall not kill” forbids killing oneself as well as killing a neighbor (City of God 1.20). His argument shaped Western Christian thinking about suicide for more than a thousand years.

Church law followed, in East and West. The canons of Timothy of Alexandria, a fourth-century bishop whose rules the Orthodox churches still use, denied the church’s prayers to a person who took their own life, though they made an exception for someone who was out of their mind. The Church of England’s 1662 prayer book barred its burial service to people who had taken their own lives. In England, people who died by suicide were often buried outside the churchyard or on its north side, away from everyone else.

Families who had just lost someone they loved were told, in effect, that the church would not pray over that person, and many carried that grief for generations. If you grew up hearing that your grandfather or your aunt or your friend was lost forever because of how they died, many of the churches that once said so now pray for them and commend them to God.

What do the churches teach today?

The mainline churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, give a person who dies by suicide the same Christian funeral as anyone else. The commendation said at Episcopal and United Methodist funerals entrusts the person who has died to Christ as “a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming.” Those words are said over every Christian, including those who died by suicide. The ELCA’s social message “Suicide Prevention” (1999, updated 2021) calls congregations to care for people in despair and for families after a suicide, and it proclaims that “God’s boundless love in Jesus Christ will leave no one alone and abandoned.”

Other churches have followed the same path. The Church of England’s General Synod voted in February 2015, by 262 votes to 5 with 6 abstentions, to change Canon B 38 so that people who die by suicide can be buried with the church’s ordinary rites. Speakers in the debate noted that clergy had long ignored the old rule in practice.

The Eastern Orthodox churches have kept the old rule, and they apply its exception with growing mercy. Bishops can allow a funeral where the person was mentally ill, using the exception in Timothy of Alexandria’s canon. In 2011 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church approved a “Rite of prayerful consolation for the relatives of those who have taken their own lives,” so that families can pray in church for the person they lost, and it reminded its clergy that a funeral may be served when the person’s mental illness can be confirmed.

Is suicide a sin?

Christian teaching has always held that human life is God’s gift and that ending it is not ours to choose, so the church does not call suicide good. The churches today also recognize what doctors and pastors see every day: most people who die by suicide are not acting freely and calmly. Many are suffering from depression or another illness, from unbearable pain, or from a despair that narrows their sight until they cannot see any other way.

Whether an act is wrong and whether the person who did it is condemned are two different questions. On the second question, the church leaves the judgment to God, and God’s judgment is made by the one who “saves those who have a crushed spirit” (Psalm 34:18). Jesus called the weary and burdened to come to him for rest. A long line of Christian teachers, from Gregory of Nyssa to Isaac the Syrian, has hoped that God’s love will have the last word for everyone; see Is hell real? For more on God’s mercy, see Will God forgive me?

If you are struggling right now

If you have been thinking about ending your life, you are in the company of faithful people in the Bible who prayed to die. The prophet Elijah, worn out and afraid, sat down in the wilderness:

But he himself … came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.”

1 Kings 19:4–5, NRSVUE

God met Elijah with tenderness. God gave him food, water, and sleep, and then gave him food again. The first help God sent was the most ordinary kind.

The help you need may be ordinary too: a phone call, a doctor, someone who will sit with you tonight. Tell one person how bad things are. Call or text 988. If you belong to a church, call your priest or pastor; clergy are used to these calls and will not be shocked. Thoughts of suicide are very often a symptom of illness such as depression, and depression can be treated. You can read more in Is anxiety a sin?

Your life matters to God and to people who would be shattered to lose you. Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

If you have lost someone to suicide

Grief after suicide often comes mixed with guilt, anger, and questions that have no answers. The church makes room for all of that grief. Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend (John 11:35).

You may pray for the person you lost. The church does, and it does so in hope. You can entrust them to the God from whom, Paul says, not even death can separate us. For more on what the church hopes for the dead, see What happens when you die? and Why does God allow suffering?

Whether you came here fighting to stay alive or grieving someone you lost, you are within reach of God’s love. The God who fed Elijah under the broom tree is near to you tonight, and the love that holds the living holds the dead as well. Please let someone help you carry this.

If you are thinking about suicide, or worried about someone who is, call or text 988 in the United States to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any hour of the day. Outside the United States, find a free helpline at findahelpline.com.