Saints Sometimes Feel So Bad That They Want to Die
The prophet Jonah displayed one of the most selfish attitudes of all the prophets in being irritated that God had mercy on the pagan city of Nineveh. And God rebuked him with a desert wind. “When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live’” (Jonah 4:8). Listen to the account of a young Christian graduate student.
Although I have always been reasonably healthy, insomnia has plagued me from adolescence until now. Only those who are unable to sleep at night can appreciate the distressing toll this ailment takes on one’s life: the omnipresent sense of fatigue, the susceptibility to irritation, and the grossness of an unrefreshed mind. All through the university I struggled against a never ending torpor, mental and animal. Each night the disquiets of mind prevailed over weariness. And the more the tensions of graduate work mounted, the more I fought off the effects of insufficient sleep. One Friday afternoon, as I prepared for the spring language examinations, I emotionally exploded. Having lost sleep with such regularity, I lacked courage to face the future. My mind was like a mass of live rubber: continually expanding, it threatened to divide down the center. This would leave me powerless to cope with responsibilities in the university . . . Everything I conceived became a burden; every anticipated obligation threatened to impale me. Even so ordinary a responsibility as conversing with others overwhelmed me with consternation. Nor dare I conceal that fact that even suicide took on a certain attractiveness.
This graduate student went on to become a great professor of theology. He wrote books that are among the most penetrating and moving I have ever read. But in the end he was found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills. The coroner wrote, "I find death undetermined whether Accidental or Suicidal." But those closest to him conceded that there was an addiction to the sleeping pills and that this was connected to his mental condition and "that dependency finally proved his undoing." If this beloved professor intentionally took too many pills, it would not prove he was unregenerate.
Saving Faith Can Be So Weak That the Heart Gives Way to Grievous Sin
Or to put it another way, those who are truly forgiven for their sins and accepted by God forever can give way temporarily to temptation and fall into sin. The biblical evidence for this is: The seventh chapter of Romans describes how Christians struggle with the remaining corruption in our lives Romans 7:15: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Philippians 3:12: “Not that I . . . am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” 1 John 1:8: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In Matthew 6:12 Jesus says we should not only pray for daily bread but for daily forgiveness too: “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.”
Saving faith can be so weak at times that the heart gives way to grievous sin. But this does not mean that the saving relationship with Christ goes in and out of existence with each of our sins. When a believer yields to temptation, his faith in Christ is weak and the enticements of sin and the power of Satan get the upper hand. But there is a great difference between Satan getting a temporary upper hand and Satan being the Lord of life. There is a great difference between yielding with resistance to an evil that I hate to do, and doing that evil as part of the usual pattern of my life.
The evidence of the Master’s hand is the warp and woof of the fabric, not the snags in our thread.
In the years of your friend’s unbelief he was like a captive in a concentration camp far behind the lines of Satan’s territory. Like all of us at one time or another, he had given himself over to the side of the enemy by refusing to trust in Christ. The result was a kind of numbness toward spiritual things.
Then one day, it appears that Jesus set himself to penetrate the lines of Satan’s territory, break through the fences of the concentration camp, and shock him out of his stupor of unbelief. But as they were leaving the concentration camp, the sirens went off, the ensuing combat was fierce. The sword was knocked out of his hand and the shield slipped on his arm. And the deceptive dart of temptation sank so deep into his heart that he fell in the combat.
And where was Jesus? We believe he caught him when he fell and carried him home. And if we say to Jesus, “You should have protected him while he was escaping,” I think he would say, “My ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. You can no more grasp my wartime strategies than a child can read the graphs of the Chief of Staff. And remember, if I hadn’t broken through the prison of his unbelief, you would have never seen him again.”
Funeral Mediation for a Christian who committed suicide - John Piper
