What Does the Bible Say About Cremation? — What Does the Bible Say About That?

What does Scripture say about burning vs. burial? Cremation has gone from 0.01 percent in 1900 to 63 percent in 2026. At the same time, pagan practices like tattoos and piercings have exploded in popularity also. Does how we treat the body matter – and if not, what’s wrong with cannibalism? Does destroying the image of God in fire communicate something, vs. planting it in the ground? And how does the resurrection factor in?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome, friends, to Generations, Kevin Swanson, your host with you, also Joshuisa with me in studio. Welcome, brother. Good to have you here. Today we're going to do another segment of What Does the Bible Say About That? And somebody actually sent this one into us. So again, if you've got a question on what the Bible says about this or that, please just email us at mail at generations.org this time. What does the Bible say about cremation? So, what does the Bible say about burning the body versus the burial of the body? Uh and since the move into a post-Christian culture here in the Western world, cremation has gone from 0.001% in the 1900 to 56% in 2020. So it crossed over the 50% mark, I'm going to say, in probably 1999 or upwards of maybe 2010. Now it's at 63%. 63% of bodies are cremated in this country. I grew up in Japan, which cremation was the typical pagan rite. Pagans have done cremation all along. Christians have not done it for thousands of years. And this post-Christian world, in which we are past at least a thousand years of Christian influence in the Western world, we are reverting back into just about every pagan body piercing, cannibalism, uh you name it, it's coming back. If it's pagan, America loves it. So that's that's you know, the pagan culture is coming back. Now, sometimes, you know, this isn't your decision as to whether or not you're going to cremate a loved one. Sometimes it's other people make decisions for us. In the case of uh my mother-in-law, she would have preferred cremation prior to the stroke, but uh we uh the survivors had unity on the burial and we chose the Christian approach. And uh we think she actually changed her worldview. We actually believe that she became a Christian towards the end of her life. She couldn't communicate with us the last year after the stroke, but she was very much drawn into uh the the Christian testimonies that we would share with her. So the question today is what does the Bible say about cremation? And again, Josh, it's it's a 63% now. So the Western world has gone full bore into this. Now it's not necessarily just a money issue. I'll say that up front. I think we did $500 for the burial, and maybe, I don't know, maybe it was four or five hundred dollars for the coffin. You could have gone uh three, four hundred, five hundred dollars for the coffin. You can go up, you can go up to two, three grand if you want. But you can easily do it, at least here on the eastern plains of Colorado, here in Elizabeth for eight, nine, nine hundred dollars. Your average cremation runs twelve hundred to two thousand dollars. So just to say you can do it cheaper. By the way, there are green burials in some of the states as well, but we didn't do that. Uh so yeah, five hundred dollars uh plus four hundred for a cheap coffin puts you at nine hundred dollars. That doesn't include an expensive headstone. So again, you know, you can drive it up if you want to, but basically, uh I would say you could do it much cheaper than a cremation. That's that's certainly easy. Um now, though so the question is why why should we do this? Why should we do this? And I want to get to what the Bible says about this, but first uh Josh, we bring worldview in quite a bit. And when it comes to cultural issues like this, there's the concern and then there's the greater concern. And to me, the greater concern is the loss of the Christian worldview, the Christian foundation, the Christian fundamental faith. Uh there's a very thin subscribing to somebody named Jesus in the churches today, but the concrete or the foundation, the worldview is gone. And uh that's why you're dealing with 1% of Gen Zers having a Christian worldview, while 56% think they are Christians, only 1% think like Christians. And so you have this massive apostasy going on in the foundations. So here's here's the illustration that I like to bring out. Should we complain about the windows being cracked on the 40th floor of the building, or that the foundations have eight-foot fissures? Yeah, clearly the foundations are more important. Yeah. And should I spend time on a radio program dealing with cracks in the windows, that is cremation. I mean, in some sense, I don't really want to be dealing with this because I know the foundations are cracked. I know the faith is virtually dead in the Western world. So, therefore, my commitment is to bring back a fundamental faith, uh holding to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, uh, and those have slipped away.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Yeah, and that's really the key question. And as you pointed out, Kevin, with the shift in statistics on cremation versus burial, clearly the United States had a strong Christian worldview heritage in that there was little to no cremation happening. So whenever we see these major cultural shifts on any of these issues, we should be asking, why did this happen? How did we get here? It didn't just happen, and it wasn't just because of economics. So, what actually took place in terms of the worldview assumptions of the people of our country that led to that shift? And that leads us back to those fundamental worldview questions.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

And you know what happened culturally at the turn of the 20th century was a denial of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yeah, which was happening with liberal theology in the early 1910s, 1920s. What was Jay Gresham Machin, you know, struggling with uh when he stepped out and said, Hey, this is destroying the faith. Well, they were denying miracles, they're denying the resurrection. Right now, now there's a lot of people out there, we still hold on to the resurrection, but I contest that. I do, I contest it. I wonder if we live resurrection hopeful lives. I wonder that. I wonder if, you know, we uh in the head we're saying, yeah, we kind of subscribe to maybe kind of sort of a resurrection of Jesus on the third day, but at the end of the day, do you live that way? Yeah. Do you wake up every morning and know that you will be resurrected this Sunday? Do you live this way?

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Yeah, and the New Testament has such a strong emphasis upon resurrection life. You know, you read any of the epistles, and there's when it when it comes to the applications to the Christian life, the idea is uh you are raised with Christ, uh, you are alive, walk in newness of life. And all of that is to flow into the way that we live, the way that we think. You think back to like Romans 13, where he says, the night is far gone, the day is at hand, let us cast off the works of darkness, let us put on the armor of light, we are children of the day, and all that just connects back to resurrection hope. Of course, there we're we have to look forward to our physical bodies being raised at the return of Christ. But in the meantime, there's a lot of immediate implications for this resurrection issue. Aaron Ross Powell Well, let's hit the biblical data on this.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

I know the biblical standard, the typical biblical standard is burial back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were buried, right? In fact, Abraham went to the the the work of buying a burial plot. Right, exactly. And that was a big deal. It's like a whole chapter dedicated to the idea that we're gonna do burial. We're gonna take care of the now. I realize some people say, yeah, but that's just indicative. But there's a tremendous number of Baptists that are out there going, well, there's a there is a strong indicative on the burial under the water. For some reason the Baptists find that indicative. Of course, there's also an indicative of the sprinkling, so you have both indicatives, and so the Baptists and the Presbyterians have been fighting that one out for 500 years. Uh, and we're not going to resolve that today. But you know, it seems to me that Christians have gone to indicatives and said, well, the indicatives have some degree of biblical authority behind them. Yeah. That, you know, the believers of the Bible would bury their dead should have some influence. In fact, it's almost universal, with a few exceptions. And you found some exceptions where they actually did burn the dead, but it seemed to me the exceptions you gave me were indications of uh judgment and and a curse upon the people that were subjected to it.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Yeah, there's a lot of negativity whenever burning shows up. In Leviticus 20 and 21, there are a few civil sanctions that required burning in the context of some heinous sexual sin. Uh, there could be the body being burned as an act of judgment. Or purification. Purification, because certainly it ended in the death of that individual, what one might view it as the purification from the community. For the community. For the community. Um, you do you do have the death of Saul and his sons in chapter 31 of 1 Samuel. In that case, what's interesting about that instance is that their bodies are burned after they were killed by the Philistines, but their bones are buried actually thereafter, whatever was left after that burning. Uh additionally, we have Joshua 7, verse 25, Achan's family is burned as a judgment. They are burned. This is again a judge stone. Uh, and that is a very negative thing. So we have these significant examples of burning, but they're all in the context of a negative judgment of some kind. Now, interestingly, you have Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, he's giving these hypotheticals about love. And one of them is I I could bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and I give my body to be burned, but have not love, I am nothing. Which seems to suggest that there could be a possible martyrdom, some sort of loss of life. Right. And that would not be an um a bad thing if one was to give one's life in martyrdom, but the burning itself would just be an unjust act of a pagan evil authority against Christians in that case.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

In that case, the burning of the body is a negative sanction imposed by the cruel government. Right. So I guess my encouragement is try not to be the cruel and evil government. You know, try a good thing. If you want to be a cruel and negative uh government bringing some kind of a negative sanction upon uh some believers out there, please uh you know avoid that as much as you you you can. Well, the burning of the body is considered as a judgment or curse, possibly a purification of a horrible sexual contamination issue upon the society, as you mentioned. But I think as Christians, you know, yes, we're sinners, but Jesus' blood is sufficient for the cleansing for us. I think we should at least trust that.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

We don't want any burning for the purpose of cleansing, in other words, we don't need that. There's not the body or soul being burned up in hell because we're set free from the fires of hell, and there shouldn't be any burning of the body here in the present as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Well, the the connection between the worldview commitment to resurrection and the cultural expression of burial, I think, is is key. Number one, they did not cremate Jesus, and I think any believer would have known that the Father would not have left his body to see corruption. There was at least a decent cultural system in place that goes back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And and we don't cremate, and here's why. Because I'm gonna be resurrected on Sunday. That's the expectation, that's the imminent hope. There's an imminent hope of resurrection. Now, it could be that I may not be resurrected on Sunday, but I'm expecting it. Yeah, it makes us a page maybe next Sunday. In fact, it may be three Sundays from now. The reason I'm using Sunday is it's the resurrection day, yeah. Exactly. So so again, culturally, of the expression, the the life we live out as our fundamental heart belief in the resurrection power of God is that that I am gonna be resurrected on Sunday. And in fact, there's something in this existing body that will be reflected in the resurrected body. That's 1 Corinthians 15. Uh was it 42?

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Yeah, it speaks about somewhere in there, you know, sowing the body like a seed in burial. It says uh verse 42, so it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory, it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. And then earlier he says, verse 37, what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel. So he's recognizing that there's something that's buried, but it's not gonna be, there's a piece that's still gonna be in the resurrected body, as it were, just like a seed comes to fruition in a plant, right? But it's gonna be glorified.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

There's a connection between the oak tree and the acorn. Yeah, there is a connection.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

There's a connection that they're vastly different.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

But the oak tree turned into something different. And that's the point being made in 1 Corinthians 15. Yeah. Now, also, the Christian faith has always respected the body. And the question, of course, is out there: shall we cremate the body? Shall we cannibalize the body? If we're gonna go, you know, full bore into one could do something. The Taiwanese would do that. In fact, I in missionary story, that's very grotesque. It's in one of our books, but they they were storing grandmother's body and was getting rather stinky. But the missionary noted that uh they were about to cannibalize the body. So again, is this the direction we want to go? Given that 63, 64% of Americans, many of whom are professing Christians, are cremating bodies. My question is, are you ready to cannibalize the body? Well, I think, you know, as Christians, we we want to respect the body as much as the soul. We're not dualists, and so the body is treated as you would want to treat the soul, not to grind up the body in a meat grinder, not to hack off the limbs or decapitate the head or even consume the body, because we would consider that to be a dishonoring treatment of the body. Humanist man pretends that man is important, but then he turns out he's not important. He turns uh he turns his his relative into compost. This is one thing Washington State has just legalized the composting of human bodies. So you can turn your your your loved one into fertilizer for your garden. Okay. Now, again, this is the kind of thing that the pagans do. But as Christians, of course, we reject this kind of stuff. We we actually do expect imminent resurrection. And uh for that reason, I think culturally speaking, we would advocate the burial of the body.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Yeah, and there's actually been environmentalist concerns brought up around burial versus cremation. There's some that argue it's actually environmentally more friendly to cremate. And so what that tells you is for folks that have that perspective, the worldview is fundamentally this sort of idolization of this present creation. And there's really no resurrection hope there whatsoever. Uh, but we need to have that as Christians, where we're constantly anticipating, well, this is this is not the final earth here. We're looking forward to the new heavens and new earth, so we don't have to try to keep this thing running. And we look forward to these bodies being restored as well.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

And I think people need to understand that cremation is what pagan cultures do. Leviticus 19 defines uh pagan culture. Pagans eat blood, uh, as in the Twilight series. They consume blood-rich organs like the placenta and things like that. And that's very popular out here in the Western states with uh the midwifery systems, the humanist-based uh midwifery systems. Pagans practice witchcraft with Harry Potter. Pagans take uh off all maleness and celebrate androgyny, and pagans don't care who their daughters have relations with. And that's Leviticus 19, 26. You shall not eat anything with the blood, nor shall you practice divination or suit, saying you shall not shave around the sides of your head. This has to do with androgyny, you shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you. I am the Lord, do not prostitute your daughter to cause her to be a harlot, lest the land fall into harlotry and the land become full of wickedness. And that, by the way, is happening quite often today, uh, where young women are not being protected, hardly at all, anymore, by their own fathers. Now, Acts 15 confirmed these cultural laws forbidding the consumption of blood, for example. And uh so so I I I would say Leviticus 19 are cross-cultural, cross-generational exhibition of pagan cultural systems that that align with bad things.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Well, and it's noteworthy because Leviticus 19 and Acts 15 are separated by thousands of years in terms of time, but the apostles are still seeing the relevance of those commands, but I view them as applications of the moral law, is kind of how I would express some of those things, because they are universal pagan markers, and that's why the apostles wanted to make sure that the Gentiles who were coming to faith, they didn't have to become Jews in terms of circumcision and so forth, but they needed to separate from idolatry and paganism, and those were critical issues at that time.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

As Christians, should we be, you know, bringing these things out and saying we need to have strong faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? We need to have a strong foundation in biblical law first, a commitment to biblical law, and not be so easily taken by the pagan customs that uh surround us, especially an apostate world that we've grown up in. Uh I think it's important that we root and ground ourselves in biblical truth on these matters. Uh cannibalism, I think, is is is an issue we need to be discussing. Well, sadly, it's it's kind of disappointing that we have to explain why we don't consume human blood, you know, as in the case of the Twilight Series. Twilight series, remember I was in a pastor's house one time. This would have been, you know, 15 years ago, whatever. But evidently his his daughter was very interested in the Twilight series. I mean, this is you know, they're very drawn into this. Star Trek, you know, emphasizes cross-species mating, for example, at points. And we as Christians should say, no, that's uh that's a violation of Leviticus uh 18, 19, and 20. And you know, I realize bringing in God's law is is something the average Christian doesn't want to do today. But I think it's either that or it's bestiality. It's either that or cannibalism. It's either that or cremation. It's it's either you're gonna bring God's law to bear or this autonomy, this antinomianism is gonna lead to all-out paganism. Yeah. So the reasons for not cannibalizing the body, and I I think we need to express this, uh, is that it's a desecration of the image of God in the Bible. Cannibalism is mentioned several times, again, in the context of judgment, that this is this is judgment that comes upon a nation that is forced to eat the placenta or forced uh to eat you know, some other organ of the human body because yeah, they're they're being starved. I mean, this is why they revert to this. They're under the judgment of Almighty God. And I don't think we should sign up for that, Josh. I don't think, you know, by cremation, by cannibalism, we should invite or subject ourselves willingly to God's curse and God's judgment upon us.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Well, and Kevin, somebody might uh suggest that you're being too alarmist about this, but my response to that would be the reason that you're asking these questions about cannibalism, for example, is to say, well, what standard is there for how we treat the human body? Because there's plenty of other pagan ways in which this has been done. And the question is, what would Christians do if Christians were going to express how they care for the human body upon death? What would inform that? Uh, nothing? Is that what you're saying? Or is there actually some standard that scripture would guide us in and give us a picture? And I do think that you know, burial is gonna give us an opportunity to better represent the resurrection as we you know proclaim these things. Let's think about a Christian funeral. What do you want to accomplish at a Christian funeral? You want to speak about Christ and his resurrection hope. And cremation is not going to be a very helpful picture in expressing that in such a context. Right, right, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Now we're not saying, let's, let's, let's correct this. We're not saying that uh God is incapable of raising up a person who has been cremated or burned to death, as in the case of the martyrs.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Yeah, absolutely. There's no preventing of the resurrection in terms of God's power, and also the fact that Christians who have been buried a thousand years ago, rightly buried, their bodies are decaying, their bones are not going to be in the same condition they were when they were buried. None of that prevents resurrection. The question is, what has God called us to do in terms of how we treat the body and what best expresses resurrection hope? Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

And I think the the bottom line is are we expressing resurrection hope on a daily basis? Not just in terms of burial. Burial is one out of a hundred thousand uh cultural expressions of a faith that that should be, I mean, even you know, in terms of our our hope and our joy in the midst of trials. You know, and that's that's a big one, right? If if we believe in resurrection power, resurrection life, that that we participate in eternal life from here to eternity, uh, then we ought to express that in the way that we wake up in the morning and interact with each other. You know, the the grumpy Christian is is you know culture bringing out cultural expressions that are not apropos for what he claims to believe. So I'm saying as much as we can believe in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and our resurrection that comes directly after it, uh, we should be expressing that, you know, in our everyday cultural expressions.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Yeah. There reminds me, Kevin, of 2 Corinthians 1, where Paul talks about how they were burdened beyond strength, even desparative life itself and the afflictions they experienced in Macedonia. But then he says, but this was to make us trust in God who raises the dead and who will deliver us. So it's interesting, like even in that affliction and trial, he says, Oh, yeah, we believe in a God who raises the dead, therefore we will be delivered. And there the apostle makes a proper cultural expression. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

And that's I think what we need to be bringing about. So, so again, the the force and the the focus of this program is not uh to to just you know talk about how we ought not to be cremating grandma as much as it is for us to believe in the resurrection, yeah and then live out that belief in the resurrection every day. That's right. And that's the thrust of the program today on generations. Friends, you've been listening to what does the Bible say about that this time? What does the Bible say about cremation? You got any other interactions with the program or other questions to ask concerning what the Bible says about this or that, please just email us at mail at generations.org. And I would also recommend my book, The Tattooed Jesus, what the real Jesus Would Do with Popular Culture. And I deal with cremations ever so briefly in that short book, very, very short book, but it definitely does the best job that I can do to draw lines between what we believe in terms of our worldview and the kind of cultural expressions we should be, we should be living out or appreciating or receiving in terms of culture. That book is uh available at generations.org. Again, the book is The Tattooed Jesus, what the real Jesus would do with pop culture. This is Kevin Swanson and Josh Ashuiso inviting you back again next time as we continue to lay down a vision for the next generation. This has been a production of the Generations Media Network. For more information, go to generations.org/slash media.