It's always a puzzle to me when people commit horrible crimes, especially when they commit the crime and subsequently commit suicide. I've often wondered if they commit suicide after they perpetrate their crimes because they don't want to face the justice system and the families of the victims they've hurt or killed.
It seems to me that they lack an eternal perspective when they commit these crimes and follow them by suicide. They don't seem to understand that, even if they manage to avoid man's justice--in other words, the criminal justice system--by committing suicide, there's no way anyone can avoid God's justice. I don't know about anyone else, but if I were to commit a crime, I would much rather deal with the earthly justice system than avoid earthly justice and then have to face the judgment of God. God's judgment will be much more severe and sure than any reckoning one might have to face in an earthly courtroom, mostly because God knows everything, EVERYTHING, about a person, and God only deals in the truth.
Then again, if I try and look at it from God's perspective, when people commit a crime and then commit suicide, they probably aren't thinking rationally, at least as far as the suicide is concerned. When God created human beings, He put a very strong instinct for survival in us, so for someone to try, much less succeed, in a suicide attempt, something has to have gone radically wrong with that survival instinct, making it so the person has lost the will to live, for whatever reason.
I think the Catholic Church teaches that suicide is a mortal sin--that someone who commits suicide goes to hell (I could be wrong about that; they may have changed their teaching since I last knew anything). I don't believe that because I think that someone who commits suicide is not in their right mind, and since they're not in their right mind, they've lost the power to make informed choices--choices that lead towards life. I'm guessing that the reason behind the Catholic Church's teaching is because the injunction against murder is one of the ten commandments, number six, to be exact. Exodus 20:13 says, "You shall not murder."~~NKJV.
So if you carry the church's teaching to its logical conclusion, suicide would be considered to be self-murder. But is it a mortal sin if you kill someone else? If not, since suicide, or self-murder, is simply another kind of murder, then why would that be a mortal sin if other-murder is not. I don't think it is. It seems to me that when someone commits suicide, because they've lost their ability to make rational decisions about their life, they can't be held responsible, at least not entirely, for that act. Biblically speaking, the only reason someone can end up in hell is because they've rejected God's free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. I think we'll be very surprised by some of the people we meet when we get to heaven, people that shouldn't be there if we were to judge by man's standards. I thank God that we are NOT judged by man's standards!!
It seems to me that it all comes down to God's mercy or His judgment. Which one will be enacted when someone commits suicide? What about when someone kills someone else and then kills himself? I don't think it will be a matter of the crimes that were committed, but rather whether the person who committed them had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. Actually, I think it will be a combination of the two, God's mercy AND His judgment.
That's what I think, for what it's worth. I don't know how accurate or close to the truth I am, but until God enlightens me further, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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