Yesterday I viewed a video that I considered posting here about a man who was deep into all the "conspiracy theories" and who ended up killing himself in April 2014. It was a lengthy video, over an hour long, and the fact that I didn't believe many could sit through the entire thing, I thought it better to talk about this topic without the video instead.
There are many people that are without hope, moreso than ever these days it seems, and for some it gets unbearable. The man in the video was said to have been bipolar and that is a whole other issue that involves medical issues that I cannot get into. However the fact that this hopelessness is now so common and the matter of suicide is on the increase, I feel it important to weigh in.
The stats of percentages of suicides per capita per year and the growing number being diagnosed as bipolar and/or suffering from depression (yes, I know not all that are bipolar suffer from deep depression, and those suffering from depression are not necessarily bipolar) is increasing, and those stats are available for you to search online. But I wanted to look at depression and suicide from a Biblical perspective.
The Psalms of David, beautiful as they are, display a range of emotions including depression, despair, and hopelessness. The anguish that David felt at the loss of his first son with Bathsheba was so profound that his closest friends feared for him. It was his faith in the justice of God that pulled him through. When we read Psalm 22, words which Jesus repeated on the cross, we enter into such depths of despair in those words that we think it is too deep for even God to enter such depths....but what we think and feel is often not the truth. Job went through worse trouble than many of us will ever see, yet he told his friends; "Though He (God) slay me yet will I trust Him" (Job 13;15) because one day we will all die, yet we have the promise that this is not all there is, and there is our hope, not that we will escape all our troubles in this life, but that we have a better hope of life with Him after this one.
Regarding hope Paul put it this way: "For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it." Romans 8:24,25
Ever since prayer was taken away for children in school the sense of hopelessness and despair has become more and more intolerable, look up the statistics if you don't believe me. Prior to prayer being removed from schools how many school shootings were there? What were the crime statistics? Sure there were murders and rapes, just as there were atheists and perverts then...the crime of murder began shortly after the fall of man right from the beginning.
However when we look to Christ, we still have hope. I won't go so far as to say those who commit suicide are hellbound. That I don't know, God knows. But if our faith and trust remains in Christ, through His ability to sustain us and strengthen us, we retain a hope that endures even if the enemies of God slay us, because in Christ we have crucified our flesh and our dying body that we inhabit is not where we place our hope.
Jesus is our only true hope.
