A Question Only God Can Answer

It's one of the hardest questions I get asked.

"Can someone who commits suicide still go to heaven?"

My answer is always the same:

I don't know.

And I think it's important that we are willing to say, "I don't know," when Scripture doesn't give us a clear answer.

What I do know is this:

God is perfectly holy.

God is perfectly just.

And God is incredibly merciful.

The Bible tells us that God sees what no one else can see. He knows every thought, every wound, every struggle, every motive, and every detail of a person's heart. While we can only judge what happened on the outside, God alone knows what was happening on the inside.

Some people argue that suicide automatically condemns a person because they didn't have the opportunity to repent. Others believe that if someone truly belonged to Christ, Jesus' sacrifice covered all of their sins, past, present, and future.

I understand why people arrive at both conclusions.

But instead of making a declaration that Scripture itself does not make, I choose to trust the character of God.

The Lord is the righteous Judge. He never makes a mistake. His justice is perfect, and so is His mercy.

Romans reminds us that God says, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy." That doesn't give us permission to assume someone's eternal destination. It reminds us that judgment belongs to Him alone.

Suicide is a heartbreaking tragedy. It grieves the heart of God because every human life is precious and created in His image. At the same time, I am thankful that our hope rests in the character of God rather than in our own assumptions.

So when someone asks me where a loved one is, I don't pretend to know what only God knows.

I simply point them to the One who is perfectly just, perfectly merciful, and perfectly trustworthy.

There are questions we won't have answered this side of eternity.

But there is one thing we can know with confidence:

The Judge of all the earth will always do what is right.