Board index ‹ Suicide

[Ecipse]

Can you explain to me why suicide is worse than murder? I understand that suicide is a sin because it is the willful taking of a life, I'm just not sure why it's worse than murder.

[jimwalton]

I'm not particularly convinced that it is worse than murder, except in our minds. The Bible doesn't say that it is. As far our attitude and emotions, we know that someone has to be in a particularly desperate state of mind—different from anything else we know—to take their own life. Some have said that suicide is the most selfish action possible, but I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes suicide is motivated not by total selfishness but by total despair.

As far as the Bible is concerned, there aren't any verses that talk about suicide. Some people in the Bible committed suicide (Possibly King Saul, definitely Judas), but there are no teachings in the Bible about it. Obviously, suicide is taking a life, and the Bible does say that it's wrong to willfully take a life by violence (Ex. 20.13), but it doesn't say anywhere that suicide is worse than murder.

Some people consider that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that anyone who suicides goes directly to hell. While some Catholics agree to that, others don't. But what we definitely do NOT find is the Bible teaching that. The Bible never says that people who kill themselves go to hell, even though the last act they committed on this earth was murder. The teaching of Scripture is clear that your final destiny is not dependent on an action like that, but the state of your soul (with a sin nature or the nature of Jesus) at the end of life.

Does that help?