Hi, I'm Pastor Jason VanBemel from Forest Hill Presbyterian Church, and this is Ask the Pastor. And on this episode of Ask the Pastor, we're dealing with a very important and very practical question that many of us will have to deal with. I'd say most of us will have to deal with this question at one point in time in our lives or another, and that is the question of cremation or burial. So this question has come up because increasingly in America, And within recent years, within recent decades, more and more people are choosing cremation over a traditional burial funeral service. And one big reason for that is cost. The cost of funerals has been skyrocketing. And these are 2009 and 2012 numbers, so now we're in 2020. Easily, $10,000, $12,000 or more is what you can spend on a funeral. And cremation promises a much less expensive alternative. And so the question is, what does the Bible say about cremation? And should a Christian be cremated or buried? Now this is a sensitive question, one that we want to handle carefully. You can think of few topics that are more divisive or more emotionally sensitive or more highly charged than the issues of money and the death of your loved ones. Those are two of the maybe top three or four issues that we deal with that kind of give us stress and anxiety. How do we spend money and not spend money? What about the death of our loved ones? How do we honor? the loved ones and then there's often a difference between what that loved one expressed as their desire because they want to save money for their loved ones versus how other family members want to honor them, right? So this becomes a really hard, hard question. And it's one of these where the Bible doesn't give us a specific answer. This is not a question where I can say, oh, this is easy. Let's just turn to Romans chapter six, verse 12, right? There's not an answer from the Bible that's chapter and verse. And so we would say there's no prescription from the Bible or there's no prohibition from the Bible. So if someone were to ask me the question a little bit differently and say, Pastor Jason, does the Bible prohibit cremation? I would say, well, no, the Bible does not prohibit cremation. So if what you're asking for is permission because you really want to be cremated and you just want to know that you're not sinning by being cremated, well, that's one level at which I can say I can't call something a sin and I can't say it's wrong if the Bible doesn't explicitly call it a sin and say that it's wrong. So that's kind of where we are with this issue of cremation. But if the question is differently asked, which is what we're dealing with, the question is, you know, what does the Bible say about cremation or should a Christian be cremated or buried? Which is better, right? Which is more in keeping with biblical wisdom and biblical principles? Well, then we can move from the level of prohibition There's certain things we know. They're sinful. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. There's commandments that are clear. This isn't one of those. This takes us down to the next levels of sort of discerning biblical wisdom. And these levels are precedent, principle, and practice. And what I mean by these, precedent. What does the Bible give us? As precedent, what did people in the Bible do? Principle, what principles of theology or biblical truth relate to this question? Practice, what have Christians done through the ages? Let's deal with precedent first. Precedent is, what did people in the Bible do? Right? So people in the Bible, always, believers, buried. That's pretty much very consistent from beginning to end. Believers in the Bible always buried their dead. It was a way of honoring them, a way of caring for them, a way of esteeming them. And actually in several places in the Bible, we see that whether you were buried, where you were buried, had significant impact on how you were being honored, How you were being regarded, what your reputation was in your death, what your legacy was after your death. So let's just look at a couple, for example. In Genesis 23, we have the first burial, for sure, of a believer, Abraham, burying Sarah. He buys the cave at Machpelah. even though he has to buy the whole field, and it's actually pretty expensive, like the price that gets set on the field is pretty high. But he's willing to pay it so that he can have a place, a place of honor, a place of appropriateness to bury Sarah, his beloved. And then he himself is buried in that cave, and then Isaac is buried in that cave, and then Jacob, even though Jacob dies in the land of Egypt, he says, hey, guys, When i'm dead carry me out of here and go bury me in the cave of my father's in the cave of machpelah So they do they go and bury him and even joseph leaves instructions Regarding the treatment of his bones asking to be buried in the promised land and then picking up on that hebrews 11 says that was a an indication of his faith by faith hebrews 11 says joseph gave instruction concerning his bones in other words to be buried in the promised land at the cave of Machpelah. So, we have some pretty strong biblical precedent. In addition, later David and the kings of Jerusalem were buried in the royal burial place in Jerusalem. And if a king was particularly bad and died with a really terrible reputation, he would not be buried. He would be buried, but not with the kings, right? He would be buried, but not with the kings in Jerusalem. Now, there is an exception to this pattern of burial, and that is King Saul. Remember, he was king before David, and he disobeyed God, and the kingdom was taken away from him and given to David. And then Saul was killed in a battle by the Philistines. When the men of Jabesh Gilead, which was a northern city in Israel, when they heard that Saul had been killed, they went and took his body away from the Philistines, they burned his body, and then they buried his bones. So there was still a burial, but there was a burning first, and there's different schools of thought on to why this was. Some people thought, well, because the Philistines had taken his body and had defiled it, they needed to purify it. by cremating, but it wasn't cremating like we do it, taking it all the way down to dust and rubble. It's only burning off the flesh and then burying the bones. So it's different from our cremation. But that's the only case really of a someone from the believing community being burned at death. And there's enough information about Saul and God's opinion of Saul to think that this burning of his body was actually a sign of God's judgment against him because he had betrayed the Lord and died in dishonor. So that's precedent. Precedent's pretty strong, Old Testament and New Testament, that believers Wherever we see them, you know, dying and being taken care of, it's always burial. So, what about principles? Well, one principle at the very beginning is that when God made us in his image, he created us body and soul in his image. First, he formed Adam from the dust of the ground, formed his body, and then he breathed into him and he became a living soul. So, Adam was an embodied soul. Right? A living image of God, body and soul. And at the end of creation, when God looked at his creation, including Adam and Eve's bodies, he said it's very good. Right? So God's given us our bodies as a gift. A good gift of God, not as a curse, not as a trap, not as a prison, which some theologies and philosophies hold to. So, we are made in the image of God, body and soul. And our bodies are a good gift of God, not a trap or a prison. Right? Our bodies will be resurrected. 1 Corinthians 15 is the most explicit chapter on this. In the church at Corinth, some people had come along teaching a false view that there was going to be no bodily resurrection, but that we were just going to spiritually be with the Lord, out of body, in spirit forever. And Paul writes very clearly in 1 Corinthians 15, no, there will be a bodily resurrection of the dead on the last day. And this is the clear teaching of the New Testament. Stewardship. What's our stewardship responsibility? Well, if we believe that our bodies are part of what means to be image of God, are created by God and given to us as a good gift, and will be raised at the resurrection, then the question is, what's the best way to take care of that body while we wait in hope for the day of resurrection. Now, I know if you're dead for a long, long time, it's ashes to ashes and dust to dust. And that's what the Bible says as well. Your body does decay and it does return. You know, the body returns to the earth. Ecclesiastes 12 says, the body returns to the earth and the spirit returns to God who gave it. I understand that, but there is still this principle, it seems, that you should be taking care of the body that God gave, even though he's going to give a new one. It seems wrong to just completely dispose of it, right? Another question is how do we love one another? How do we love one another? How do we both, those who have lost a loved one, How do we honor the one that we lost and love them? And then also, if we're dying, how do we love our loved ones who we're leaving behind? How do we honor and love them? And it seems to me that a grave A burial place with a headstone has a place that doesn't move, right, where you can go and visit, you can remember, you can reflect. And it also shows sort of a lasting monument of remembrance and of thanksgiving and of love for the person, as opposed to just a little urn that might sit on someone's mantle or, you know, get moved around, forgotten about, lost. I think the worst, personally, I think the worst is scattering my ashes over the ocean or something like that. Because then the person, like, all trace of the person is gone. And it's not really Christian to say, well, the person's gone anyway. Because their body is part of who they are. And there is resurrection. And the body is part of the image of God. It's not a useless nothing. Okay? And finally, there's a testimony in death. You might think I'm a little bit weird, but I like to go and visit old grave sites and graveyards, church graveyards especially, and walk among the headstones and read them if I can. Sometimes they're so old they're faded, but you know you can do rubbings and you can actually pick up the message on something that's so old and faded you can't read it otherwise. But I like to see the testimony of those who have gone before. And often there's a scripture verse or a poem or a reflection of faith, and that can be a testimony to the world, right, of the faith and the hope that we have in Christ. And then finally, we go from precedent to principle to practice. And the practice of Christians throughout the centuries has always been to practice burial. It's only been a very recent phenomenon, the last 25 years or so that Christians have started to embrace cremation in larger numbers. And again it has to do with economics, with cost almost exclusively. It also I think has a little bit of influence of eastern religions. and pagan religions. See, we see movies where people are being burned, you know, the big funeral pyre. We think, oh, that's really cool, right? Well, it's Eastern religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and it's pagan religions like Viking paganism or Celtic paganism, where they burned the body. And that's because to them, the body was a prison that imprisoned your soul. And your soul had to be set free. And so part of it is by burning the body, the smoke going up frees your soul to enter into the cosmos. That's not what we believe as believers. We believe that as soon as you die, the Lord takes your spirit, takes your soul, that non-material part of you, to be with him, and then your body, the Westminster Confession says it's still united to Christ. You're still in Christ. Your body is buried in the hope of resurrection. Another truth from history is that the church would burn heretics as a sign of God's judgment against them. Now, I'm not in support of burning heretics. I'm just saying theologically there was a statement that was being made when someone was burned that they were a heretic, that they were a denier of the faith, that they were an enemy of the church. So, again, I do not endorse burning heretics. I think that's wrong. I think that was a wrong thing to do. But burning, again, has always been sort of associated within Christian theology as a sign of judgment, as a sign of wrath. And it's not usually been associated with positive things. So we have the precedent from Scripture that all believers in the Bible that we have a record of were buried, with that one exception of Saul. And he wasn't really an ideal person by that time. We have the principles of the theology of the image of God, of the resurrection, of stewardship, of love. And then we have the practice. And all together, I think these come together. So again, we don't have a prohibition. Again, if you were to ask me, does the Bible forbid cremation? I can't tell you the Bible forbids cremation or that if you get cremated, you're sinning. That's not true. But burial, I would say, is strongly preferred. by precedent, by principle, and by established practice. And that's a lot of weight of biblical wisdom and of historical wisdom to take into account. Again, cremation is not forbidden, but I think we're always called to seek to do what is best if we can, not just what's allowed, right? The right way to live as a Christian is not to ask, well, what am I allowed to do? What can I get away with? Rather, it's to ask the question, how can I honor God with my life and my death? How can I do what is best, not simply what's permissible? And I think the stewardship of the body, the honoring of our fathers and mothers, our testimony to the world and other things should be carefully considered against the cost. Now, if it's a situation where there simply is not enough money available to do a burial, and a family is destitute and it would leave a family destitute to pay for a burial, Well, maybe the church should come in and help pay for that. Maybe an appeal should be made to the church if we would like to bury our loved one, but we don't have enough money. And most churches I know would rally around that and would support that. But again, it's not that cremation is forbidden, but I just think it really fails the test of biblical wisdom when we look at it by precedent from scripture, from principles of theology, and from the established practice of the Christian church. And I would strongly encourage you that if this is a decision that you're wrestling with, that burial honors God, honors our loved one, honors those who remain behind by giving them a better way to grieve, and makes a lasting testimony to the world. And so all of those considerations together would lead us to say burial is strongly preferred over cremation. Well, I hope that's helpful to you. This has been Ask the Pastor, and I'm Pastor Jason VanBemel from Forest Hill Presbyterian Church.