Suicide and Salvation
00:00:00.000 | We have now received almost 100 email questions from our listeners related to the very sobering
00:00:13.200 | question of Christians, suicide, and salvation.
00:00:18.120 | Several recent emails related to the suicides of pastors have come in.
00:00:21.480 | Andrew, a regular podcast listener from Ankeny, Iowa writes in, "Pastor John, recently the
00:00:26.400 | family pastor at a local church committed suicide.
00:00:29.640 | So what happens to the soul of a professing born-again believer who commits suicide?
00:00:34.280 | Is this the unforgivable sin?
00:00:36.320 | Does this show that the person was never actually a believer because he did not persevere?
00:00:40.640 | Or is it possible for someone that commits suicide to still go to heaven?"
00:00:44.880 | So Pastor John, these are hard questions, but they are not new questions to you.
00:00:50.960 | I have been involved closely in several suicides in my life.
00:00:58.240 | I cleaned up the basement after the police removed the body of a man who shot himself
00:01:04.120 | in the head, and I used a broom to sweep the blood and the stuff into a dustpan and pour
00:01:12.960 | it down the laundry sink so his wife would not have to see what we found.
00:01:18.320 | And then I did his funeral five days later.
00:01:22.160 | He was a professing believer.
00:01:24.240 | I've done a funeral for a young woman who leaped from the window of the locked ward
00:01:29.680 | at the hospital down the street from my house where she was being safely kept in her psychological
00:01:35.360 | distress and she died by jumping out of the window.
00:01:42.800 | So let's be clear now.
00:01:46.440 | Self-murder is serious.
00:01:49.760 | We are playing with fire here.
00:01:52.720 | It is spiritually and eternally serious to murder yourself.
00:01:59.280 | It is not a light thing.
00:02:01.660 | And anyone listening to me now who is contemplating suicide should hear me say, "Don't do it.
00:02:09.680 | There is a better way.
00:02:11.240 | I promise you in the name of Jesus Christ, there is a better way."
00:02:16.900 | You don't feel that, perhaps, right now, but your feelings are not true.
00:02:22.120 | They're deceiving you.
00:02:23.400 | It is true that God has another way for you.
00:02:27.320 | He always makes another way.
00:02:30.080 | Wait for him and seek the help you need because the Bible is very serious about talking of
00:02:38.040 | murder.
00:02:39.040 | Everyone, this is 1 John 3, 15, "Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer.
00:02:44.400 | And you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him."
00:02:48.760 | Now that should scare the wits out of people who are contemplating ending their life with
00:02:53.960 | murder.
00:02:56.240 | So what does that mean?
00:02:59.120 | Eternal life and murder don't go in the same soul.
00:03:05.600 | But let's be careful now.
00:03:06.920 | Let's not take this farther than it leads.
00:03:11.000 | Does he mean that everyone who has a moment of hate is a hateful person?
00:03:17.800 | Probably not.
00:03:18.840 | Does he mean that everyone who has a murderous moment is a murderer?
00:03:25.280 | That's an important question.
00:03:26.400 | I doubt it.
00:03:28.040 | Yes, the Bible says we must persevere to the end in order to be saved.
00:03:34.160 | Mark 13, 13.
00:03:35.920 | Or Hebrews 3, 14, "We have come to share in Christ if we hold our confidence firm to
00:03:42.360 | the end."
00:03:44.520 | That's a very serious warning.
00:03:46.840 | But it does not mean that our experience of confidence in God to the end is perfect so
00:03:55.600 | that we don't have lapses of sin which betray that we're not fully trusting Christ.
00:04:03.840 | All sin, all my sin, the sin that I do this afternoon, tomorrow, yesterday, is all rooted
00:04:10.040 | in some level of distrust in the superior goodness of God.
00:04:15.920 | And I don't go in and out of being a Christian when I sin and that measure of distrust becomes
00:04:23.600 | manifest in sinning.
00:04:26.000 | I don't cease to be a Christian.
00:04:28.440 | So saying that we must persevere to the end in confidence doesn't mean that you must persevere
00:04:35.040 | to the end in sinlessness or perfect trust in Christ.
00:04:41.320 | There is imperfection in our trust.
00:04:44.360 | So the question now is, whether a person who commits suicide goes to heaven, that question
00:04:53.960 | boils down to this.
00:04:56.600 | If a person has been trusting in Christ as their Savior, their Lord, their treasure,
00:05:03.480 | does the last act of their life prove the decisive one in showing their true standing
00:05:13.840 | as a child of God?
00:05:15.480 | There's the key question.
00:05:16.960 | Does the last act, in their case murder, count as the decisive one at the judgment day in
00:05:26.600 | showing that we were in Christ or not?
00:05:32.120 | Is the last act the one that determines if our faith was real?
00:05:37.600 | Or do all the other acts of life count as evidence as well?
00:05:43.920 | Let me give you an analogy.
00:05:46.480 | This has helped many people as I've shared it.
00:05:49.840 | I hope it helps.
00:05:52.840 | Suppose that I, one night, let's just say right now, 68 years old, could have been at
00:05:59.000 | any point, get so angry at my wife that I storm out of the house.
00:06:04.560 | I slam the door.
00:06:05.840 | I jump in the car and I head for the road and I am so out of control and so angry, so
00:06:15.720 | sinful, let me add, so sinfully angry that I totally misjudge one of these narrow turns
00:06:23.160 | here where the telephone poles are about two feet off the road and I smash into that telephone
00:06:28.840 | pole going 60 miles an hour and I am dead.
00:06:35.160 | Now my last act was sin and I killed myself by my sin.
00:06:43.960 | I didn't intend to kill myself, but I did.
00:06:48.200 | And it was sin that made it happen.
00:06:50.240 | So the last thing I did was sin.
00:06:55.280 | Is that last sin decisive in determining whether John Piper was born again?
00:07:03.400 | And my answer is, not necessarily.
00:07:06.800 | In other words, God will look at my life.
00:07:09.000 | He will look at my whole life.
00:07:11.560 | And the evidences of whether I belong to him will be assessed not because of that failure
00:07:17.760 | alone, any more than any other failure alone.
00:07:22.400 | Why would the last one be decisive when the others are just as serious?
00:07:27.360 | So the last question then becomes this.
00:07:31.460 | Can a Christian be so depressed and temporarily blinded to the hope of the gospel that he
00:07:38.960 | takes his life in a temporary moment of despair?
00:07:44.520 | And I think the answer to that is yes.
00:07:47.320 | Now that's a judgment call on my part to say that seasons of darkness come and go in the
00:07:56.200 | Christian life.
00:07:58.320 | It is dangerous to say this because we're all so easily deceived and we should be terrified
00:08:05.880 | to try to meet Jesus by means of murder.
00:08:09.200 | That is a horrible choice.
00:08:13.440 | But between that terror that we should feel about that choice and the hopelessness for
00:08:20.880 | the victim of suicide, between those two, I'm waving a flag of hope that true faith
00:08:28.760 | can have a season that dark.
00:08:33.400 | That is very sobering.
00:08:35.580 | And I appreciate you sharing your experience and your pastoral wisdom and thinking through
00:08:39.820 | the many related questions that come out on this issue, Pastor John.
00:08:44.600 | These are the types of serious and sober questions we get and try to address on the podcast.
00:08:49.800 | And for more books and articles and sermons from John Piper, please go to DesiringGod.org.
00:08:55.080 | At the website, you can even find three of his funeral sermons for those who committed
00:08:59.520 | suicide.
00:09:00.880 | Search for the term suicide in sermons at the website.
00:09:04.360 | We'll be back tomorrow on a happier note to talk about the discipline of singing to the
00:09:09.080 | Lord alone.
00:09:10.080 | It's an important part of the spiritual life and we will be back tomorrow to address it.
00:09:14.280 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:09:15.800 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John Podcast.
00:09:17.840 | [End of Audio]
00:09:18.840 | 1
00:09:18.840 | Desiring God's Word 2.
00:09:19.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord" 3.
00:09:20.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord's Word" 4.
00:09:21.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord's Word" 5.
00:09:22.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord's Word" 6.
00:09:23.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord's Word" 7.
00:09:24.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord's Word" 8.
00:09:25.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord's Word" 9.
00:09:26.840 | "The Spirit of the Lord's Word" 10.