When Someone Wants to Die

by Bill Robinson

Elijah had just won. Fire from heaven, four hundred false prophets exposed, the drought broken. Then one threat from a queen, and the same man walked a day into the wilderness, sat down under a broom tree, and asked God to let him die. "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life" (I Kings 19:4).

If a prophet who had seen fire fall could get there, so can anyone in our pews. So can we. That's where we ought to begin, because the church has too often begun somewhere else, with a verdict, and a verdict is the last thing a man under a broom tree needs.

What the Bible Actually Says

Scripture never looks away from this. Moses asked God to kill him rather than keep carrying Israel (Numbers 11:15). Job cursed the day he was born and longed for the grave (Job 3). Jonah said twice that death was better than life (Jonah 4:3,8). Jeremiah wished his mother's womb had been his tomb (Jeremiah 20:14-18). Paul told the Corinthians that in Asia he and his companions "despaired even of life" (II Corinthians 1:8). Psalm 88 ends without a note of hope at all. "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness."

These aren't the words of weak believers. They're the words of God's people, preserved in God's book. Scripture first tells us that the wish to die is not foreign to faith. It has visited some of the best people who ever lived.

The Bible also records suicides. Saul fell on his sword (I Samuel 31:4). Ahithophel set his house in order and hanged himself (II Samuel 17:23). Judas went out and did the same (Matthew 27:5). Samson pulled the temple down on himself and his enemies (Judges 16:30). The text reports each one and commends none. But notice what it doesn't do. It adds no editorial verse of damnation, no "and so he was lost." The judgment is left where it belongs.

Here is the conviction we hold, and we hold it plainly: life is received, not owned. "See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive" (Deuteronomy 32:39). "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away" (Job 1:21). "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price" (I Corinthians 6:19-20). Taking our own life is taking what isn't ours to take. That's a necessary inference from the sixth commandment and from the whole Bible's account of whose we are. We won't soften it.

But two things have to be said right beside it, or we've misrepresented the Book.

First, nowhere does Scripture teach that suicide is the unforgivable sin. That idea came from later church tradition, not from the text. The blood of Jesus "cleanses us from all sin" (I John 1:7), and nothing, "neither death nor life," separates God's people from His love (Romans 8:38-39). A Christian is not saved by never failing at the end. A Christian is saved by Christ.

Second, the Bible itself distinguishes the act from the agent. The man who killed "unawares" got a city of refuge, not the avenger of blood (Numbers 35). The servant who didn't know his master's will was beaten with few stripes, not many (Luke 12:47-48). Responsibility has always depended on capacity. Severe depression attacks capacity directly. It narrows the world to one door and lies to a person about everything on the other side. How much of a given death was the person and how much was the illness is something only God can weigh. We're not asked to. We're asked to grieve with those who grieve (Romans 12:15) and to leave the verdict with the Judge of all the earth, who will do right (Genesis 18:25).

What to Watch For

Suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death in America. The CDC counted just over 49,000 deaths in 2022. Most people who die this way gave signals first. We miss them because we don't know what they look like, or because we saw them and didn't want to believe it.

The signals below are drawn from the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. None of them alone means someone is in danger. Together, especially with a recent loss, they mean we should ask.

Talk is the clearest one. Someone says they want to die, or that they'd be better off dead, or that people would be better off without them. We tend to hear this as venting. Take it as information.

Hopelessness, and its cousin, feeling trapped. "Nothing will change." "There's no way out." "I'm a burden." That last one is especially telling. The conviction of being a burden is one of the strongest predictors in the research, and it's almost always false.

Withdrawal. Pulling away from friends, from church, from things they used to love. Elijah went into the wilderness alone. So do most people in that place.

Sleep gone wrong, in either direction. Increased drinking or drug use. Rage or agitation that doesn't fit the situation.

Putting affairs in order. Giving things away. Saying goodbye in ways that feel a little too final. Ahithophel "set his house in order" before he died. That detail is in the text for a reason.
And one that fools people: a sudden calm after a long darkness. Families often say afterward, "He seemed better that last week." Sometimes he was. Sometimes the peace was the peace of a decision made.

How to Help

We start by asking. Directly. "Are you thinking about killing yourself?" Not "you're not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you," which tells them what answer we want. The plain question.

Many of us fear that asking will plant the idea. It doesn't. That's been studied repeatedly, and the research is clear: asking about suicide does not increase suicidal thinking, and it often brings relief, because the person finally has permission to say it out loud. A 2014 review of the studies in the journal Psychological Medicine found no evidence of harm from asking and some evidence of benefit. Proverbs 18:13 warns that answering before we hear is folly and shame. We can't hear what we won't ask about.

Then we listen. Not to fix. To hear. Elijah's story is our model here. God didn't correct him under the broom tree. He sent an angel with bread and water and let him sleep, then did it again, and only afterward asked, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" The Lord fed the body before He addressed the soul. We should be slow to preach and quick to bring a meal.

We stay. "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). The single most protective thing in the research is connection: one person who won't quit. A text that asks nothing. A visit that doesn't come with an agenda. "Two are better than one... for if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).

We don't leave them alone if the danger is immediate. We ask whether they have a plan and a way to carry it out; if they do, we help them put distance between themselves and it, and we get help that night, not next week. Call or text 988. Go with them to the emergency room. Sit in the waiting room. Being a Christian doesn't make us the treatment. It makes us the ride.

We keep coming back. Most people who survive this season are glad they did. In follow-up studies of people who were prevented from dying, roughly nine in ten never went on to die by suicide. The wish felt permanent from the inside. It wasn't. Our job is to help them get to the other side of a night they can't see past.

And we take care of ourselves. Elijah's despair came after an enormous effort. Caregivers burn out. If we're the one carrying someone, we need someone carrying us.

Our Responsibility when the Questions Come

People ask us about this. Neighbors, family, strangers on the internet. Sometimes they're arguing policy. Sometimes they're asking about a father who died that way thirty years ago and have never said it to a preacher before. We need to be ready for both, and to know the difference.

Peter tells us to be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks, "yet with gentleness and respect" (I Peter 3:15). Paul says our speech should be "gracious, seasoned with salt" (Colossians 4:6). Jude tells us to "have mercy on those who doubt" and to save others "by snatching them out of the fire" (Jude 22-23). Gentleness and urgency, both at once.

That means a few things in practice.

We tell the truth about the standard. Life is God's. We don't pretend otherwise to be liked.
We tell the truth about the mercy. No verse condemns the person who died this way to hell. If a grieving mother asks, we don't give her a theory. We give her Romans 8 and our presence.

We don't argue with a suffering person. When someone tells us they want to die, that's not a debate. It's a door. We walk through it and sit down.

We don't pretend to know what we don't. Whether a particular person was in their right mind, whether God will judge them harshly or gently, what happened in the last minute of a life: these belong to God. "The secret things belong to the Lord our God" (Deuteronomy 29:29). Saying "I don't know, but I know who does" is a faithful answer.

We refuse to make the church a place where we can't say this. If the only time our people hear the word suicide is in a warning, they'll hide their struggle from us, and we'll find out when it's too late. Better that we speak of it plainly, from the pulpit and in the foyer, so that the man under the broom tree knows he can tell us.

And we watch for the ones who go quiet.

Elijah's story didn't end under the tree. It ended on a mountain, with a still small voice, and then with work to do, and a successor to train, and a chariot of fire. The man who asked to die got decades more, and they were not wasted. We don't know that for everyone. We know it for enough to keep going back into the wilderness with bread.