Anonymous Asks (338)

“Will serial killers go to heaven with no punishment if they believe in Jesus, repent and ask for forgiveness?”

The great King David once plotted the murder of his own faithful servant in order to cover up his adultery with the man’s wife. Yet upon his confession of guilt, Nathan the prophet told him frankly, “The Lord also has put away your sin.” David himself writes concerning that same incident, “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise”. That sounds like forgiveness to me. I think we’ll see David in heaven. In fact, I’m sure of it.

Admittedly, that doesn’t deal with the “serial” aspect, does it?

Drilling Down

Okay, let’s drill into this a bit. We’ve established one cold-blooded, carefully plotted murder can be forgiven, because we’ve got a concrete biblical example. How about two? The Lord Jesus taught that his disciples must forgive someone who sins seven times in a single day and asks for forgiveness. Can we really imagine God is less forgiving than he requires his own children to be? Impossible!

That gets us to at least seven. Then let’s consider the example of the apostle Paul for sheer malice. He says of his pre-Christian days, “I not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them.” He confesses to bearing shared responsibility for the judicial murders of an unknown number of innocent Christians, Stephen included, for which he was freely forgiven by the Lord and went straight to work preaching the gospel upon believing and being baptized.

All Sins Will Be Forgiven

Again, murder is a truly heinous crime, but the New Testament teaches that God forgives all manner of deeds. Mark quotes the Lord Jesus as saying, “All sins will be forgiven the children of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter.” No little caveats and qualifications clutter up the narrative, or exclude murderers — even repeat offenders — from the forgiveness God offers. Christians for centuries have confidently affirmed the sacrifice of Christ is sufficient to cover the sins of the “vilest offender who truly believes”, and we praise the Lord for that. In theory at least, we Christians hold that a serial killer who genuinely puts his faith in Christ, repents and asks the Lord for forgiveness can receive eternal life just like all the rest of us sinners. As the Lord puts it in Ezekiel, “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone; so turn, and live.”

Now, is such an eventuality likely? Personally, I doubt it. The problem I have with it is not some arbitrary mental limitation on the grace of God. It’s the sneaking suspicion that a man so morally twisted and intellectually perverse as to calculatedly and repeatedly take the lives of others for his own pleasure or convenience has probably seared his own conscience so badly that he would never come to the place of genuine repentance. Mind you, the fact that I can’t picture such an occurrence doesn’t make it so. God is a great deal bigger than my impoverished imagination.

“With No Punishment”

We should probably address three little words in our question, and those are “with no punishment”. It’s not clear whether our reader means punishment in this life or punishment in the next. We can definitely rule out the latter: the concept of any kind of purgatorial expiation of sins through suffering after death is foreign to the Bible’s teaching. A genuine believer may lose his reward because of the way he has done business in this life, but he will never be punished in eternity for sins committed in time. (More on the purgatory concept here and here.)

As far as this life is concerned, we must distinguish between God’s forgiveness and the justice system excusing someone from paying the price for his crimes. I am quite content to see professing Christian murderers put to death for crimes committed prior to knowing the Lord notwithstanding their present faith and repentance. Forgiveness by God does not give us a blank slate in this life. The consequences of our choices are what they are, and they play out independently of our new life in Christ. God forgave David for Uriah’s murder, as well as his adultery with Bathsheba, but both he and his offspring paid a tremendous price for his actions.