THE SUICIDE

There is no specific statement about suicide in the Bible!

Unless we have the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" as a statement of attack upon one's own life, which would be implicitly understood of the suicidal act. But the fact remains that the Scriptures say nothing about the suicidal, neither a priori nor a posterioriore.

The "idea" of attacking one's life is not even vented among the biblical characters. The very anguish experienced by some biblical characters as in the case of Elijah who asked God to take his soul, or as in the case of Job, who cursed the day he was born, suggests to us how much this "hypothesis of escape" from reality it was ruled out of them to attempt against themselves. Only God, the author of all life, had this right. They could be anything but suicidal!

However, in the Bible there are four narratives of characters who committed suicides and that even so, their motives were very explicit because of the act committed. Let's see:

Samson: (Judges 16:30) There was no intention of killing himself without a purpose. Samson was a valiant, solitary warrior; there was a strategy of personal combat where his death would kill more Philistine oppressors he himself killed in his entire life. It was the pinnacle of a solitary battle that had struck his life against his oppressing neighbors.

SAUL: (1 Samuel 31: 5) The king's act was a gesture of personal pride of a soldier-leader. Saul knew that his reign had come to an end. His state of mental confusion was huge and it got worse on the battlefield. There, in an end of combat, to take the life throwing on its own sword, was the unique honorable exit that it found.

Aitofel: (2 Samuel 17:23) Wiser than the counselors of the king's son, when he was disregarded, Absalom would be defeated, presuming exactly the vexation he would face over David, and Ahithophel preferred to kill himself.

JUDAS: (Matthew 27: 5) - The classic case most commented and taken as a referential of doom and final destiny to hell.

Jesus called Judas "the son of perdition." Somehow Jesus knew that Judas was going to get lost. This denomination of Jesus to Judas can have two meanings: Judas would not be reached with forgiveness and restoration as happened to Peter because of his desperate and premeditated act. There would be no time; Judas would hang himself, and with his state of remorse, one would not be able to bring him back to the feeling of forgiveness and grace. The presence of the devil is striking and revealing in the episodes in which the act of betrayal of Judas is manifested (John 17:12). His state of perdition has become a mental, physical, and spiritual perdition.

As for the present day, the reasons that lead a person to commit such an attack on his own life, we do not have any kind of judgment. The so-called Christian religions - Catholicism, Spiritism and Protestantism - dogmatized the suicide as a condemned and supposedly lost and wandering for all eternity but the Bible has nothing to say about it. Only God knows the final moments and the mental state of a person in the moment of great violence against itself. I do not believe that every suicide "is lost for eternity." The mercy of God goes beyond our dogmas and judgments.

In a way, all humanity is suicidal. Even at this very moment.

Reinaldo de Almeida.