Why Suicide is a Mortal Sin (for Protestants, too)

Tim Anderson, a dauntless attorney from Virginia Beach whom I follow, posted an update on his page the other day. It seems the Democrats, emboldened by their recent victories in the Governor’s mansion and in the House, are moving to propose HB43 which would abolish the common-law prohibition against suicide in the Commonwealth of Virginia. He correctly predicts their next move, in 2027, as one to establish a provision for doctor-assisted suicide in our state.

Suicide has risen to levels almost endemic in the world we live in, increasing almost 40% over the last two decades according to the CDC, to a current rate of 49,000 people per year. Every 11 minutes someone commits suicide in our country and passes into eternity who is almost certainly not ready to face God. It is more than just loss, it is terrible tragedy.

The reason it was prohibited by law was not just on some technicality, or the result of an over-zealous judiciary trying to exert maximum and pointless control over society. Obviously the law cannot provide a punishment for suicide other than forfeiture of one’s estate. But the fact that common law goes all the way back to the Middle Ages is not inconsequential. Courts have held since ancient times that suicide was simply wrong and thus should be condemned by law, whether or not their condemnation could be enforced.

For lawmakers in Virginia to do away with centuries of moral conviction is also wrong, and it is wrong not only because suicide is. The government is not God, and for legislators to arrogate to themselves the power to decide which lives will have value and which will not (which must be requisite for a government which has the power to appoint assisted suicides) is the first step to a totalitarian society in which only properly aligned political constituents can ever be sure of their safety. Every socialist experiment in history has eventually devolved into a Communist experiment, and every Communist experiment into the establishment of a system in which lawless terror and unmitigated government overreach exist under the shadow of a news media that keeps the world from knowing what is really happening. And why given all their assumptions should they not? There is no longer any moral code which can underpin their laws, no balance of powers to restrain their executive decisions, no framework of justice to make them fear for doing wrong. Only the love for Big Brother is left.

The desire of left-leaning politicians to provide death on demand as among the dazzling array of options their constituents expect of them is not remarkable. Illicit drugs, illicit sex, free handouts, and immunity from lawbreaking are simply what people want, and unscrupulous leaders are more than willing to broker a deal in which they provide all these things in exchange for political power. They are come that you may have Death, and that in abundance. It is the response of the Church, and more particularly the Protestant Church, to suicide that is so much more shocking.

Jarrid Wilson, a prominent pastor of a megachurch in California who was a champion of suicide prevention and therapy, killed himself on National Suicide Prevention Day in 2019. He left a note for his wife and his two young sons in one of the most horrifying and cruel chain of events I have ever seen happen in an evangelical circle. But it was even more astonishing how quickly all the top-level pastors and counselors across the country weighed in on national news, and their messages were almost all the same: “Well, he’s with Jesus now.”

Well – what if he’s not with Jesus now?

Now, it would be callous and foolish for us to insist that he is not. The fact is that we do not know the state of another’s soul before God. The Scriptures teach that it is to their own master (i.e. to the Lord Himself) that each one will stand or fall, and they teach that we have no right to judge their state before Him. Nor should we try. But when we automatically insist that someone who has committed suicide must certainly be with Jesus, are we not then just as surely judging his state, just positively instead of negatively? Why is it that we are not able simply to mourn it as a spiritual unknown, which is probably the truest pronouncement we could or should make?

The instant judgment that he is with Jesus is not what the Church would have said in the Middle Ages, where our common-law comes from. Suicide was a mortal sin, and if you died in it unshriven, you had no hope of forgiveness. As Protestants we do not hold the distinction between mortal and venial sin, nor should we. But it might be wisdom for us to be slow to insist when someone who claims to be a Christian – and not just a Christian but a leader who is looked up to by thousands – that when that person commits a horrific sin that has a devastating effect on all those who looked to them for an example of Christ, they have been welcomed into Heaven as victorious and triumphant. Because there is nothing either victorious or triumphant about suicide. It is murder, and a human being has died by their own hand without provision of law or act of God.

It is important that we not lose sight of how deceptive and overpowering sin can be. Depression is a horrible reality that is so for many Christians. Charles Spurgeon, William Cowper, and many other faithful saints have endured onslaughts of vicious and unrelenting emotional attacks that could easily have ended in suicide. Anyone who downplays the seriousness of such thoughts likely has not actually experienced it and thus should remain silent about it. But our decisions still matter, and to end one’s own life is arguably one of the most tragic and surely regrettable acts one can take. Only God gives life, and only God has the authority to take it. No human being and no government ever has the authority to do so outside the provisions of Scripturally based Law.

The Church in antiquity saw suicide as a grave wrong, one that actually had bearing on one’s eternal fate. In Book 1 Canto 9 of Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth-century epic poem The Faerie Queene, the hero and protagonist Redcrosse Knight is on a mission in search of virtue, to rescue Una, and to defeat a terrible dragon. He comes across a scene where one has killed himself, and when he rebukes the character Despaire who has induced the other’s death, he is hit with the full force of that same subtle despair which overwhelmed his predecessor:

Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

The knight is not prepared to withstand this sudden emotional onslaught. When the man goes on to recount how grievous the knight’s own sins have been and how preferable it would be to end his life before something worse happens, the knight is tempted even to the point of taking hold of the knife to kill himself. Una confronts him in anger and reminds him of what his mission is, and that this false hope is certainly not it. Then a few stanzas later Spenser fills out his warning to any who would be tempted to kill themselves to escape the hardships of life:

O man have mind of that last bitter throw;
For as the tree does fall, so lyes it ever low.

He is actually quoting from the book of Ecclesiastes here, and his argument is a powerful one. If you die committing a terrible sin, is this an act of faith? One could argue that Samson did, and it would but add to all the other errors he was guilty of in his life. But it was also for him an act of war because in so doing he killed more Philistines than he had during any of his military campaigns. To lose your life in battle is in the hands of God, which is where every Christian who serves in the military leaves it when they venture onto the field of honor. But to take your own life is by definition a mortal sin if there ever was one, without any need for a doctrinal delineation between mortal and venial. It literally costs you your life, and it costs you your opportunity for ever repenting of it.

Must we always repent of a sin to be forgiven of it? We know that our salvation was completed at the Cross, and we know that Jesus Christ will lose none of them the Father has given Him. What we do not know is how deceitful our own hearts can be, to the point that St. Paul even insisted on examining himself lest after preaching to others he should be disqualified. Nor do we know that any of us is at the last not capable of such a thing; because in truth we are. The Bible teaches that the human capacity for self-deception is such that people (many people, as Matthew 7) will arrive at Judgment Day and try to tell God they were faithful servants of His, when in fact He never knew them.

Suicide is a terrible, tragic loss. The insistence of the LGBTQ movement that the suicides of those who are not affirmed in their sexual immorality may be laid at the doorstep of those who (along with God) could not affirm them, is wrong. Taking one’s own life is wrong. Laying the judicial foundation for the government to superintend assisted suicide is wrong. The Church effectively celebrating suicide with the glib insistence that it is the professing Christian’s ticket to Heaven is wrong.

The birthright of every Christian is that sin no longer sits on the throne of our hearts, so that if we are in Christ we do not have to sin any more. Depression and despair can assault us in the valley of the shadow of Death until we cannot hardly even see the path any more, but through the regular exercise of the means of grace we have all we need for life and godliness. The Word of God is authoritative, sufficient, and able to be clearly understood so that we can withstand the vicious darts of the enemy. The Gospel of the faithful life, sinner’s death, and miraculous Resurrection of Jesus Christ has the power to save you from this and from every other sin. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, call 988. Call a pastor. Call a friend. Call a family member. Call me at 540 886 6155. There are people – perhaps more people than you may think – who care deeply about you and will help you walk through the difficult trial with hope. It is not worth risking eternal loss to find the deadly peace that is offered by the clever man with the bloody knife. For as the tree does fall, so lies it ever low.

Jeremy Vogan
Staunton, Virginia

Photo Credit: Dama G, 2025