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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.
Ask the Pastor: Cremation
Series Ask the Pastor
| Sermon ID | 23202222501724 |
| Duration | 17:22 |
| Date | |
| Category | Question & Answer |
| Bible Text | Genesis 23 |
| Language | English |
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