Clough Genesis Lesson 100

Burial, cremation, embalming; Jacob buried – Genesis 50:1-12

 

Again the theme is death and dying and it’s not surprising that the Scriptures give us specifics on death and dying because after all, as Paul said, the Scripture is sufficient unto every good work.  The Word of God ought to apply to every area of life.  I think one of the signs of the growth in our congregation has been what I’ve just observed over the last four or five months and that is watching the subgroups within the congregation just sort of spontaneously spring up and this is good because you can’t wave an organizational wand and make things happen in certain areas of spiritual life.  Things have to take place because there’s a believer here and another believer here and they just hit it off socially and in other ways, and then interest wise and they begin to cluster and they form a little cell and then that cell specializes in something.  It was intrigued, Saturday morning we had 20 men here studying economics from the biblical point of view on monetary theory and here’s an example of men who want to take their Christian faith out into the street, in the business world and they want background to do it.  A man obviously is going to be in economics and this is one area.  Another group of single people is meeting on Friday nights talking about American history from the biblical point of view and trying to understand where we stand as American citizens.  We have another group studying cultural themes, art and literature. 

 

So these are the fruits of what we’re striving for because we’re never going to be able to present a full orb historically valid gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and have people think that gospel has only something to do with your personal life.  Christ is King and it means that He has something to say in every area and that the Word of God is not just a sweet little devotional guide.  It is that but it’s a lot more than that.  And so here we show the comprehensive claims of Scripture.  And you are to be commended for those of you… and there may be other groups that I don’t know of.  Oftentimes someone will say well, I’ve been in Lubbock Bible Church 3 weeks and I know this about it and that about it; well, it always intrigues me because I’ve been pastor here 11 years and I still can’t figure out what all the different little sub groups are that work out, and they grow and then they disappear and then there’ll be another one grow and disappear and it’s been quite successful, I think, in training believers and having good in depth fellow­ship.  We’re not just having fellowship on sort of a trivial level but it’s an in-depth kind of fellowship and this is good. 

 

One of the great Psalms that we all quote at funeral times is Psalm 23 and one of the verses in Psalm 23 is the famous verse, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me.”  Now it’s interesting to notice that that psalm is talking about the worst case scenario any person can face, “walking through the valley of the shadow of death.”  And the Bible would argue this way, that you’ve got to build your life on the worst case; that is, you’ve got to think through what is the worst possible set of things that can go wrong, because in the fallen world we’re liable to that.  And then ask yourself whether your faith could sufficiently cope with that situation. 

 

I can remember back before I was a Christian and that was one of the things that God used to make me aware of the fact that (a) I was not a Christian and (b) I’d better start looking around and shopping around for something that was going to hack the course, for the reason that I was exposed to historical studies of the martyrdom of Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and one of the things that came out of that, since I was always involved in a professing Christian group but never truly a Christian, one of the things that came out of that was the fact that I could visualize myself quite easily being in that situation but not having that kind of a response to persecution to death. And it was the awareness that I did not have whatever it was that these 2nd and 3rd century Christians had that drove me to examine my life to see whether, in fact, I was a Christian at all.  This is why we go through death and dying this is what you want to do; you want to examine your life to see whether you can think through with confidence what would happen in your own personal death, or the death of your loved one.  Can you cope with it; can you deal with it; are you prepared for it?  And if you’re not, you’d better trade your faith in for something else because it’s not worth anything at the present situation if that’s the case.

 

We’ve looked at certain principles of death and dying and we said there are three.  This morning we’re going to show a fourth one.  Let’s review the first three. We said the dying have a right to know; just this week I ran across another case where somebody in a local hospital was dying and the doctors are afraid to tell the man he’s dying, so the man sits there, lies in bed, thinking he’s going to get better and better and he probably has about ten days left.  But nobody on staff has the courage to confront him with the fact and so now we have this episode that will be a great shock to him, it will be a great shock to others.  And so the story goes again and again and again.  That’s why we say from the biblical point of view the dying have a right to know and the reason they ought to have a right to know is they have a right to be able to take the opportunity to straighten out matters in their life that need straightening out prior to being absent from the body and face to face with the Lord if they’re a Christian, and if they’re not a Christian then getting the basic question straightened out, on what basis are they going to claim fellowship with God after death. 

 

We said the dying also have a right to remain lucid as long as possible and that’s for the same exact reason, to be able to take matters to heart, to think them through, to pray them through, to read Scripture, and to deal with those problems and you can’t deal with them if you don’t know they’re coming nor if you’re so drugged up you can’t be lucid and coherent.

 

Then the third principle of death and dying is that the dying people have a right to rule their posterity.  The dying have a right to rule their posterity and by this we showed you two practical illustrations.  One illustration is that the dying have a right to allocate inheritance to their heirs, that is the way the dying person has of ruling the surviving generation, allocation of inheritance, a thoroughly biblical concept and for the modern socialist state a very much hated and a very reviling sort of thing, but to the Biblical man and to one who seeks to bring his thought into the captivity of the obedience of Christ, inheritance is a very precious thing.

 

Another illustration of this third principle was, as we saw in Genesis 49:28 you’ll see that Jacob is making funeral provisions, verses 28-33. There is an example of where he directs things that will take place after death and some of the things that are to take place after death, he says I want to control the money, verse 30, he says the grave has been bought, so he’s made financial provisions, it doesn’t mean he necessarily bought into a pre-paid plan from the local Canaanite funeral parlor but it did mean he at least had ample funds and had deployed those funds and had receipts for those funds so that when the time came his family wouldn’t be out all the cash.  He had provided for that.  Another thing that he told them distinctly was the location, where he wanted to buried.  And the third thing he dealt with in the passage, verse 31, is family records.  We often forget this, when people pass off the scene the family record often goes because they may have aces to records you don’t have and you may never retrieve them; family records are important, that’s your root in history.  And it sad if the person really doesn’t see their place in history; has no sense of what it was second and three generations back, what were your ancestors, where do you come from out of history.  Somewhere you’re related to Noah; somewhere you’re related to one of his three sons; you carry in your body the genes of these men.  So you ought to know the history of your past as well as you can; it’s a survival aid.  

 

Now the fourth principle that we introduce today and this will be the last one, and that is that the dying have a right to be respected through the treatment accorded their bodies.  How the corpse of the person is treated is linked to the respect of the person whose corpse it is.  Now when we come to this we ask the question, what is respectful treatment of a corpse.  Does the Bible speak to this issue and it does; in fact the passage in verses 1-3 deals with embalming, one of the methods used to deal with a corpse. 

 

Now let’s think, what would be some questions; there’s some options here, there’s embalming, there’s cremation, there’s direct burial, there’s the elaborate funeral of the modern times and so on.  The Bible gives us some controls here.  In fact, you might just save the cost of a considerable number of donations by listening to this fourth principle today.  The concept that we’re looking at with respect to the dead person is that we show our respect for someone in how we treat things related to that person.  I’ll give you a more abstract example is the flag of the nation.  Everybody intuitively knows this; even the unpatriotic coward knows that how you treat the flag is intimately related to your attitude to the nation.  This is why we have flag burning ceremonies by the protestors.  Why do they burn the flag, why don’t they burn Kleenex?  The reason they burn the flag is because the flag is a symbol that is intimately related to the nation and so people on a gut level know that, we’re not speaking something strange.

 

The Bible says the same thing about the body; how you treat the body can be related to what you think of the person whose body it is.  This introduces us to one of the great debates in the history of Christianity, one you may know of and one you may not know of but it is the debate over cremation. Down through the history of Christianity this has been a very, no pun intended, fiery debate.  The debate has been over whether this is disrespectful to the person or whether it isn’t.  And so we want to go through some of the pros and cons with cremation.  We’ll deal also with the matter of embalming, practical methods; these are things that you’re going to confront someday in your life.  And that someday is going to come and you’re going to be so emotionally distraught you’re not going to be able to think clearly so get the information now while you can think clearly and then you’ll have it available for later use or in helping other people in your home.

 

The practice of cremation is not the earliest treatment of the body.  The earliest treatment of the body, according to anthropologists is burial, simple direct burial, or entombment.  This cremation process or the burning to ashes of the body was something that began, as far as the data goes and someday this may be corrected, it’s dependent on the data available, it arose in what we call the late bronze era, which by readjusting chronologies would be contemporary with the time of Moses.  Prior to that time it seems like all cultures on all continents buried their dead but after that time more people began to burn the dead body and there would be a conscious effort at cremation.  In Europe, this is the first place it’s been found to have started.  In the Far East it became very extensive under Hinduism and Buddhism, but there I remind you it may be due more to climatic factors and maybe more to overpopulated local areas, they didn’t have enough cemetery space so they’d burn the body.  Or it may have been due to disease.  So just because I say cremation arose in a primarily Hindu, Buddhist, pagan milieu it doesn’t mean that it’s just due to those religious practices. 

 

Throughout history cremation has been opposed by three religions; all three of these are the religions of Shem; they are Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Those three monotheistic religions have reacted against cremation processes for various reasons: Judaism because of the respect for the person; Christianity because of the doctrine of the resurrection; and Islam because of various other factors.  Yet on the other hand cremation has also been opposed by the pagan Egyptians and the passage before, Genesis 50:1-3, that deal with embalming was the Egyptian answer to cremation.  The Egyptians fought cremation on the basic of the fact that they thought the body was necessary, the mortal body was necessary for eternal life.  Hence, not only would they embalm the body but they would put food, jars and jars and jars of grain in the tomb, and seal that food there so that when the person arose in the next life they could eat.  So theirs was a very physical idea of the afterlife which caused this anti-cremation attitude. 

 

Cremation died out historically with the expansion of Christianity in Europe; as Christianity spread across the continent and into the British Isles cremation went out of vogue and was not used, basically, all during the Middle Ages.  Up until the mid 1800s, and there’s been a modern revival of cremation since the middle 1800s but primarily the revival has been because of lack of cemetery space.  If you know the dense cities of Europe and the population problems you can see why; what land isn’t used for cities is used for farming; land is valuable and can’t be wasted on cemeteries and hence there is, shall we say, a land pressure that developed against traditional burial.  And therefore cremation arose.  It also arose, we have to acknowledge, because traditional Christianity relaxed its objection to cremation.

 

Now for the biblical argument, for and against.  First the argument against cremation; there are four that I’ll list and then I’ll list four counter arguments for cremation and then we’ll draw some conclusions.  I want you to be aware of the debate and I give you both sides so you can think this through for yourself. 

 

The Bible and those Christians who have opposed cremation insist that burial ought to have considerations other than the purely economics.  The first argument against cremation is that it is basically motivated by sheer economic reasons and [can’t understand words] and therefore it is a denial of natural affection, and natural respect for the dead.  It’s a sign of basic insensitivity to the dead person and it is to be contrasted with the great expense Abraham went to in Genesis 23 of buying suitable land to bury Sarah on.  So one of the arguments against cremation is that it’s solely motivated by the buck, by the cost; it’s solely motivated by the cost factor, and we’re to deal with people other than just an economic unit.

 

A second and more serious objection to cremation is that it treats the body itself disrespectfully.  Turn to Leviticus 19 and we’ll notice one of the provisions in the Mosaic Law.  Follow these arguments; even though you may be here this morning and you may not be interested in the topic of cremation, it may be furthest from your mind, granted this is not the usual Sunday morning fare. What’d you learn in church this morning?  Oh, we talked about cremation.  But in discussing these subjects you will pick up valuable elements of biblical thought and that’s why I take you to these passages.  This is how you absorb the mind of Christ out of the physical book.  This is how you come to know the Lord in a better way, by listening, by watching how He thinks on various topics. These passages are important.

 

Leviticus 19:28; this is a passage that has to do with keeping Israel pure from pagan customs and it says in verse 28, “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am Jehovah.”  The “marks upon you” are the primitive forms of tattooing; making any “cuttings in your flesh for the dead” was mourning procedures.  The cuttings of the flesh can be seen in that confrontation in 1 Kings 19 between Elijah and the prophets of Baal.  Remember, the prophets of Baal would go out on the hill of Mount Carmel and they raised up their hands and they’d start slicing themselves.  And the blood rolls down their sleeves and so on, and it makes kind of a messy prayer meeting.  The reason for that was because they thought that they could get God’s attention by screaming out and cutting themselves, emulating themselves this way.  This provision in verse 28 is to cut that off; you will not make marks in your body, and this is to protect the dignity of the body; it’s not to be mutilated.  There’s only one section I know in the entire Mosaic Code where the body is mutilated. 

 

The other parallel verse to this, Deuteronomy 14:1, just to show you this is not an isolated verse. And again by the way, notice it has to do with death; it has to do with the kind of mourning procedures that were used.   “Ye are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead; [2] For you are a holy people unto the LORD thy God,” this is pagan custom and again it is the desecration of the body that God condemns. 

 

The modern New Testament counterpart to these verses is the one we all know, 1 Corinthians 6:20 when it says “your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.”  In other words, the body does count for something in the Christian faith and it’s not to be just simply cut up and chopped up and destroyed. 

 

However, saying all that, also we must understand back in the Leviticus passage, if you turn to Leviticus 21:1-4 there’s a balance to this.  And that is that the dead body was to be treated with dignity, yet the dead body was also seen as defiling.  Leviticus 21:1-4 shows this feature of the Mosaic Law.  By the way, had this feature been seriously taken it would have reduced many plagues in Europe in centuries to come because what you’ve got here is a primary sign of inspiration.  What it’s telling us is that dead bodies are contaminated flesh and can be used to spread disease. 

 

Leviticus 21:1, “And the LORD said unto Moses, Speak unto the priest’s the sons of Aaron, and say unto them, There shall be none be defiled for the dead among his people.  [2] Bur for his kin, who is near unto him, that is, for his mother, and for his father, and for his son, and for his daughter, and for his brother, [3] And for his sister, a virgin, that is near unto him, who has had no husband; for her may he be defiled.  [4] But he shall not defile himself,” the priests could not be around dead bodies except for the exemption clauses in verse 2-3 which gave him the signal to work with his own kin. 

 

So we have this provision against contamination, so the second argument against cremation is, beside the first one, it puts economic first, the second argument is that it disrespects the human body; though the human body is contaminating after death, it is not to be something cut up and chopped up, that kind of thing. 

 

The third argument against cremation, and this probably is the most serious.  Amos 2:1, this is the key verse that is used down through the history of Christianity to attack cremation.  It is a direct judgment against it and this has been used by those who try to assault the whole concept.  “Thus saith the LORD: For three transgressions of Moab, and for four, I will not turn away its punishment, because he burned the bones of the king of Edom into lime; [2] And so I will send a fire upon Moab, and it will devour the palaces of Kerioth; and Moab shall die with tumult,” now clearly verse 1 is talking about cremation, and clearly there’s a condemnation of cremation in this passage.  The reason why this is condemned is because in this kind of a situation cremation is taking vengeance too far; in other words, it wasn’t enough just to kill the king of Edom but they had to go take his body and burn it into lime too.  The reason that this is offensive is that it’s man’s vengeance, it’s too far, man has taken too much into his hand; he is trying to exterminate the person totally from history.  So the third argument against cremation is that it seizes the prerogatives of God; it denies God’s lordship over the body in judgment and resurrection.  It’s an attempt, so to speak, to take your fist and throw it in God’s face and say I’ll see to it that this person is totally disintegrated from history.  So that’s the third argument against cremation in the Scriptures.

 

The fourth argument against cremation is that if you look at history you’ll find that wherever cremation occurs it’s usually in a pagan culture, it’s never in a Christian culture.  For example, today Japan is the world’s leader in cremation; 84% of the bodies in Japan are cremated.  Of course one can also that Japan is a high dense population on an island; but nevertheless, this is the argument.  Great Britain who is increasingly drifting from the Christian position now burns 59% of its corpses.  And finally, Sweden, which has never been known for its great biblical faith, is burning 43% of the corpses there.  Now looking at the United States and taking a unit of 100, as 100% cremations performed in the United States today, the argument goes that look at what regions of the United States cremation is most popular.  40j% of the cremations today in the United States occur in three states, Oregon, Washington and California and we all know what California stands for.  And so again the argument is that in highly pagan cultures we have the ascendancy of cremation.  Now in the states that are known in the Bible belt area, less than 1% of cremations occur.  So clearly, say the opponents of cremation, clearly this is a signal that the practice is intimately related to historic Christian faith.

 

So those are the four arguments against cremation.  They ought to start you thinking whether this pricks consciences or not. 

 

Now the arguments that would permit cremation.  The first argument is found in the passage we’ve been studying 1 Corinthians 13, of all places, the chapter on love.  In 1 Corinthians 13:3 it talks about death by fire, all the way, presumably into cremation and the death and destruction of the corpse, the disintegration of the corpse by flame.  The first counterargument that allows cremation is that God’s lordship over the body is not affected by the mode of disposal of the body; it’s not going to stop, the resurrection is not going to be affected by the mode of destruction of the body.   It doesn’t hinder God’s lordship and the case is the case of the martyrs.  In 1 Corinthians 13:3 Paul argues that he could give his body to be burned, there in the context he means death by burning, which was used against Christian martyrs, and in the 1800s when the modern revival of creationism began in Britain, oddly enough, one of the men who spoke up permitting cremation was the great Christian statesman, Lord Shaftesbury, and Lord Shaftsbury said on the basis of this verse, he said what do we do about the Christian martyrs?  If cremation is so terrible are we to say then, that the souls of the Christian martyrs, the heroes of our Church are never going to be reunited with the ashes?  Can we make that deduction?  And so obviously not, so the first counterargument for cremation is that it can’t affect the ultimate reunion of the soul and the body, once again, the resurrection. 

 

Another argument, Job 19:25; this is one of the fascinating passages in the Bible because it shows that the doctrine of the resurrection was understood a few centuries after Noah’s time; long before the great body of the Old Testament was enscripturated we have people like Job who understand resurrection, which means somehow God did reveal this at a very early time in history.  And in Job 19:25 it says, “I know that my redeemer lives, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; [26] And though after my skin worms destroy this body yet in my flesh I will see God.  [27] Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins [heart]” or inner organs “be consumed [within me.]”  Clearly he’s talking about dissolution of the body and yet he says in verse 26, “in my flesh I will see God.”  So the second argument is that bodies are totally destroyed by worms; you have a total oxidation and a total destruction of the physical body in the soil, you know, carried away piece by piece by little crawly things.  All right, if that’s the case then what difference does it make between how the pieces are carried away, whether by bugs or by high speed oxidation called flames?  It shouldn’t make any difference.  So the second argument is that cremation is just a rapid destruction of the body which would occur anyway and Job isn’t bothered by it because he knows that total destruction will take place and yet he announces, “In my flesh, I will see God.” 

 

Now arguments for and against cremation have always sought to find a passage of Scripture that would speak distinctly to the issue.  And we know that if we could find at least one case of cremation in the Bible, that might help put things in perspective, and in studying through this issue I discovered one; a passage, by the way, never discussed by the anti-cremationist Christian.  This passage, before I have you turn there, I want to show you the force of the passage by noting a little history.  We take the time line of the Old Testament and we get down to the time of the monarchy, particularly the early monarchy around the time of David, we have exciting things going on elsewhere in the world at that time.  Then and a little bit after then is called in history the Homeric epic and in that Homeric epic you have The Iliad and The Odyssey, that record interesting things about life at that time.  One of the interesting things that they record is that the heroes were put to death by cremation.  Their bodies were burned and this occurs, it’s just a motif that happened at that time.

 

Now since that was the culture that permeated the Levant, the eastern end of the Mediterranean, wouldn’t it be striking if we could find a burning of the hero’s body in the Scripture some place, which would be cremation and it would show that the cremation culture of the time was not rebelled against by strict Israelites but was permitted by the Israelites and sure enough, there’s a passage.  1 Samuel 31:9 and a surprise as to whose body it was that was cremated.  In this passage is the death of Saul and Jonathan, so they’re not just any heroes, they happen to be the king and the crown prince of the nation, but they die in battle and the Israelites lose control of the ground in which the bodies are so the enemy forces, the Philistines take over the battlefield and they come in to strip the slain. The reason they did that is the same reason in a more crude way that we have every time we have an aircraft accident within twenty minutes we’ve got all the public out there ripping off the watches off the people that burned to death in the plane. 

 

And so in the ancient world the same thing would happen; you’d have a battle ground, there’d be valuable jewelry and armor and so on, and they’d just go in and strip the dead.  And this took place, and then they found out that among the dead was the body of the king and the crown prince.  And so it says in verse 9, “And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armor, and sent it into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people. [10] And they put his armor in the house of Ashtaroth; and they fastened his body to the wall of Beth-shan.”  So now they are desecrating Saul’s body.  Now watch what happens.  [11] And when the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead,” these are Israelites, “heard of that which the Philistines had done to Saul, [12] All the valiant men arose, and they went all night, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth-shan, and came to Jabesh, and burned them there.” Cremation.  So cremation was used in at least this one instance in the Scripture.  [14, “And they took their bones, and buried them under a tree at Jabesh, and fasted seven days.”]  The significance of the instance is that it was used on a hero, the king himself; it’s not just any citizen of the country, it was the king, and it was part and parcel of the culture of the time. 

So the third argument for cremation, that would permit cremation, is why is it that you have this instance in Scripture.  Clearly the cremation custom is not being excluded from Israel, it is allowed to permeate the nation, or at least it’s a possibility and it was done, of all things, on the king himself. 

 

Finally, a fourth argument which would permit cremation and that is that the issue isn’t the mode of treatment of the body, that is whether you bury it, whether you burn it or whether you drop it in an ocean some place, the issue isn’t the mode of treatment of the body, the issue is the respectful attitude to the person’s whose body it was.  Here in Jeremiah 22:19 we have the case of the prophet condemning an accepted mode of treatment, which was burial.  It says, “He will be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”  The burial of an ass was a burial of animals and beasts of burden and they’d just scrape out a trench, drop the body in and throw some dirt over it, like you’d bury your pet cat out in the alley some place.  So if that were the case, then clearly the mode of burial isn’t the issue because here they’re doing the right mode, they’re burying him, or the mode of treatment of the corpse, they’re burying him, not burning him, and yet even burial here is considered to be bad.

 

Another part of this argument; leaving the body out on the ground without burning it or burying it is considered an abomination in Israel and all the way into the New Testament.  Do you know what happened to bodies that were left out?  The vultures and the scavengers came and ate them.  And this is why when Goliath hurls his insults at David and David insults Goliath back again, he says your body is going to be food for the vultures before I’m through.  Now what do they mean by that?  You’re not going to be buried, there’s going to be no respect shown you, and so therefore your body will be like debris in the fields.  This is carried all the way into the New Testament to the last book in the Bible, the book of Revelation.  When the Lord Jesus Christ comes back again and he fights with the kings on earth, it says, “And he calls the vultures of heaven to come and the bodies of those He’s destroyed.”  That’s Christ and that’s His disrespect for those who are the reprobate of His time when He returns.  So other modes than cremation are opposed in the Scripture too. 

 

So now we come to some conclusions.  What about this great cremation controversy?  What are some things we conclude about it as Christians trying to work our way through and live our lives in a way that will glorify God and deal with this problem of death.  The first conclusion we can come to is that cremation is not absolutely opposed by the Bible.  Cremation is not absolutely opposed by the Bible; proof text, 1 Samuel 31:12.  The fact that they allowed their own king to be cremated is proof that they didn’t absolutely avoid cremation. 

 

However, second conclusion, the cases for cremation are obviously miniscule for cremation.  It seems to be something used only under strong set of unusual situations.  The reason that Saul’s body was cremated tells you in the context; the Philistines occupied the territory and they had to do one of two things; to get his body out of there, they were trying to keep it from being desecrated, they could have buried it but then what would the Philistines have done, since they controlled Beth-shan?  They would have come back and dug it up again and stuck it back on the wall, it could have gone on for months.  So obviously burial wasn’t an option in that situation, so what could they do?  They could transport the body.  Well, who wants to transport a corpse for a hundred miles without being refrigerated, so they didn’t want to do that.  So what else could they do; they cremated it, but that shows you that cremation was used as sort of a backup system when nothing else would work.  Today, for example, cremation would be used if we had a large scale disaster in the city and we had hundreds and hundreds of people dead in the streets and no morgue space and so on, you can’t just leave bodies out in the street, just scoop them off and burn them all.  And the emergency authorities would have to do that, just put them on trucks and dump them and burn them and get them out of here or we’re going to have problems.  Now in that case the Christian would go along with that.  If a Christian were involved in that sort of a situation, that would be a decision I could make as an emergency official in this situation because you’ve got no other option to go.  So cremation under those unusual circumstances is possible in the Scripture. 

 

But now I want to take you to what I think is the nub of the issue, and that is this fourth principle, the way we treat the body of the deceased is related to our respect for the person.  Turn to Matthew 8:21-22, this is a famous retort by Jesus Christ; everybody who’s read their Bible at all has heard of this at one time or another, but I’d like to show you, reverse it a little bit.  Jesus is talking about loyalty to Him over against normal everyday details of life.  And He says in verse 21, “And another of His disciples said unto Him, Lord, allow me first to go and bury my father.  [22] But Jesus said unto him, Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”  Now, in the context what Jesus is getting at is that I want you to have super respect for me and then just normal respect for these other things down here.  Just like He said go ahead, whoever doesn’t hate his mother or his father for My sake is not worthy of Me.  Now he’s not teaching that you hate your parents; He’s just contrasting the super respect for Him versus normal respect.  Now the force of verse 21-22 depends on the fact that burial was an important item.  If burial with respect was not an important item Jesus would never have used it here in verse 21-22.  The very fact He pulls on that custom shows you that the custom of the time, accepted by Christ, was to show respect for the dead.  There was to be a funeral, there was to be a time shown, there’s nothing wrong with that, He’s just arguing that don’t let that get in the way of Me, that’s all.

 

So our third conclusion is that respect is the issue, not the mode.  I’ll show you another illustration of this: Matthew 26:10, the woman comes to Jesus prior to His death; she takes a bottle of ointment, she pours it all over Him, and you wonder what’s all that.  Jesus understood it, and in verse 12 he says, “she has poured this ointment on my body, she did it for My burial.”  And who is objecting to showing this kind of dignity to the body?  Parallel passages say Judas Iscariot was; being the utilitarian he was and thinking of the almighty dollar as the end point of everything, it was Judas who objected to being concerned about the treatment of His death.  So we find that respect is an issue.  Another reference that I have in mind is the one on resurrection Sunday, John 19:38, when the women come to the tomb?  Why did the women come to the tomb?  They weren’t coming to have bleacher seats on the resurrection.  They were coming to the tomb precisely because they didn’t believe in a resurrection, they thought the body was in there and they wanted to take care of it.  So isn’t that showing concern and respect?  Obviously it is.  So we say that a third conclusion that respect is a central issue, not mode. 

 

Now another conclusion, also in Matthew; Matthew 10:28, again we look at a very familiar passage to most of you, that famous refrain of Christ, “Fear not them who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”  That’s one of those passages people don’t like when Jesus mentions hell.  If you want to do a statistical study, I challenge you; you will find Jesus talks about hell twice as much as He talks about heaven.  In verse 28 He says, “Fear not them who kill the body,” now if cremation is so serious that it prevents the spirit from ever reuniting with the body, we ought to fear, but Jesus tells us not to fear and so therefore again objectively the mode of treatment of the corpse does not in any way prevent the reunion of the soul with that, objectively talking now.  If you don’t believe this then I suggest you turn sometime to Revelation 20:13 and do a study there at the great judgment and at the great judgment it says, “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it,” now I suggest when a body floats down through the water in a drowning situation, you not only have the fish that eat it but you have rapid disintegration and so for the sea to give up the dead that was in it means the recollection of the material counterpart in resurrection. 

 

So again our conclusion is this: cremation is not absolutely prevented, but, point 2, it is something that is, shall we say, second and third way to go, and because of other things that prevent burial.  Three, the issue is respect, not the mode.  And four, the mode doesn’t change objectively the spirit/body problem.  We’d say this, that cremation under circumstances would not be wrong, it’s rather that cremation is an awful hard system to use and show respect for the body, and therefore for the person.

 

Now Genesis 50, another way: embalming.  Embalming is used in most funerals today, in America at least, widely used, and here in Genesis 50:1-3 you have the only section of history in the Bible that has embalming.  [1, “And Joseph fell upon his father’s face, and wept upon him, and kissed him. [2:]And Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father: and the physicians embalmed Israel.
[3] And forty days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed: and the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days.”] The reason for this is that in most cases in the Bible they followed the mode of what we call today direct burial, a person dies and they’re buried, their body is not left outside of the grave because it’s being transported a long distance or because every body wants to have it outside or people are fighting over it or something.  Embalming was used to preserve the body when it was kept from burial for a long time.  As I say, the Egyptians used it because of their religious faith.  In the United States embalming began during the Civil War.  Embalming was not used prior to the Civil War; it came in the Civil War because so many young men had been killed and they had to be transported by the hundreds, their bodies back to their home town and there was no way to do it apart from some sort of embalming.  So if embalming is so central it’s peculiar what people did before the Civil War.  Nobody was embalmed before the Civil War in this country, or at least it was not done on a large scale.

 

Three or four reasons for embalming are given today.  And again, I’m not trying to be an iconoclast and argue against all the funeral procedures but I’m just trying to open your eyes, Christians, to the fact that you may be victims of your own culture and not realize it on these points, so let me rehearse some things.  Usually when death occurs the funeral director will give reasons, if you ask him why the body should be embalmed, why not.  The reason you’d ask the question, incidentally, is because it’s cheaper not to do it.  And after we’ve stated that we want to be respectful to the body, being respectful to the body does not mean you have to lose your inheritance on getting the thing into the grave by some extravagantly wealthy funeral.  That’s not biblical either; the Bible uses a very simple method of direct burial in most cases and scripturally that is sufficient to show dignity to the person.  But in our day we have a lot of people that want to make a big issue out of it.  Let me give you the four arguments because you or your loved ones one day are going to encounter these and you want to know how to respond to these and you’ll be least able to respond to them because you’re going to be emotionally down when it happens. 

 

The first argument that will be thrown your way is: well, the body has to be embalmed because the law says so. Wrong; the law in the state of Texas does not say the body has to be embalmed it if is buried within 24 hours of death.  And if it doesn’t, it can be alternately refrigerated for transport; oftentimes it’s not practical but I’m just showing that the blanket statement, you have to do it because the law says so is wrong.  The law does not say any such thing. 

 

The second reason given for embalming is that it protects public health.  Wrong again; listen to the deputy minister of health of British Columbia who did one of the leading studies on the problem of embalming and the spread of communicable disease.  “It is our view that the process of embalming serves no useful purpose in preventing the transmission of communicable diseases; in those few cases where a person dies of a highly infectious disease a far better procedure would be to wrap and securely seal the body in heavy plastic sheeting before removing it from the room where death occurs,” (end quote).  Embalming is not that effective, so the second reason is not technically true.

 

The third reason often given for embalming is well it preserves the body.  It depends on how many centuries you want to be preserved.  If you want your mummy to be dug up in the 25th century with Buck Rogers, fine but otherwise who wants to be preserved.  Resurrection is God’s answer to the preservation of the body.  Moreover, there’s no real decisive evidence.  Now when a body is donated to medical schools, and by the way, the Christian has no reason not to donate the body for medical science, that doesn’t come under mutilation, it’s not being done to mutilate you, it’s being done to aid our knowledge of how God works in general revelation, but preservation of the body that goes in the medical science, where they really want to preserve it because they’ve got to keep the thing in halfway decent condition for at least 8 months during the semester when the anatomy students are working on it, they use a different mode of embalming than most funeral  homes.  So the argument that normal embalming and a funeral preserves the body doesn’t work either. 

 

So, if it isn’t necessarily legal, mandated by law, if it isn’t absolute protective of public health, if it doesn’t really preserve the body, then for heaven’s sake, why do we spend all the money and embalm it.  Well, transport for one reason; there are bona fide reasons in some cases but here’s the real case.  In America for some reason in the last hundred years more and more and more funerals are open casket funerals and so therefore, because they want the corpse in a reasonably viewable state, that’s one of the reasons they use to embalm it.  So you’ve got two expenses; now you’ve got your normal expense for embalming plus you’ve got all the hullabaloo of an open casket funeral, which I despise as a pastor.  It is ridiculous, open casket funeral; all that does is go over… furthermore in one way if violates Leviticus 21, which says that the body is a defilement.  The body is to be treated with respect but remember Leviticus 21 do not let the priest be defiled from it.  The picture there is it’s a picture of corruption.  Who wants to look at a picture of corruption; it’s like walking down in the sewer; do like to walk through sewers?  Well then why do you like to look at corpses for; same thing.  The person isn’t there, it’s their body.  Now you treat it with respect but remember Leviticus 21, it is considered in God’s sight to be that which defiles. 

 

So therefore we would argue against this point that open casket viewing…why is open casket viewing pushed today? Do you know why?  Professionally in the field it is pushed because (quote) “it if grief therapy,” that is, they argue that until somebody sits there and sees the open casket they really can’t believe the person’s dead so psychologically it’s healing to have grief therapy of an open casket funeral. That’s the professional reason given for open casket funerals and I say bull, and a few other things.  It is not therapy; the therapy is going to come because if you’re a Christian and the person who dies a Christian, “to be absent from the body is to be face to face with the Lord,” there’s your grief therapy, it’s not waltzing down the aisle so everybody can go into hysterics at the front of a funeral home because they’re looking at some defiling piece of flesh.  So rethink this concept of open casket funerals.  Back to Genesis 50; we’ve looked at the great cremation debate, we’ve looked at the matter of embalming, embalming is permitted by the Bible but again it’s optional as far as it being necessary to the faith. 

 

Genesis 50:4, “And when the days of his mourning were past, Joseph spoke unto the house of Pharaoh, saying, If now I have found grace in your eyes, speak, I pray you, in the ears of Pharaoh, saying, [5] My father made me swear, saying, [Lo, I die: in my grave which I have digged for me in the land of Canaan, there shalt thou bury me. Now therefore let me go up, I pray thee, and bury my father, and I will come again. [6] And Pharaoh said, Go up, and bury thy father, according as he made thee swear].”  In verse 5 he appeals to transport the body and that’s why Jacob is embalmed.  He’s got to transport the body hundreds of miles into the land to be buried, so there’s an adequate reason for embalming in this situation; it’s a luxury and there’s no reason for it under a normal situation. 

 

Moreover in verses 4-5 you see something else of great wisdom in the ancient world and that was the period of mourning.  Why is this so interesting?  You talk about grief therapy I submit to you that in verse 4-5 you’ve got real grief therapy, not the fakey kind because we add a thousand bucks to the funeral bill just to have an open casket funeral.  The real grief therapy is the period of mourning; during the period of mourning, it doesn’t mean a person cries all the time, it means that the normal responsi­bilities of life are removed.  So the person doesn’t have to think about getting to work on Monday morning, the person doesn’t have to think about food; the person doesn’t have to think about something else; that’s the origin of the custom we have of bringing food to the people who have lost a loved one.  The origin of that whole thing is to release the pressure on the person so they can just be by themselves and then we turn around and have 50 people in the living room sitting there and that really is grief therapy in reverse.  The best thing to do under these kinds of situations in life, where you have this tremendous psychological wrenching, where somebody has been ripped off and you can almost feel it being ripped, when you have that situation in life what you’ve got to do is the same thing you’d do if you had severe physical injury or trauma to your body.  What would you do, go out and have a major surgery on your chest or heart and go out and lift weights?  You wouldn’t do that, you’d let your body heal itself. 

 

Well, it’s the same thing with grief; there’s no simple pill that removes grief; grief is something that has to be handled within a Scriptural context but it takes time and your soul has to heal.  So you give it a chance to heal by removing normal daily heavy stresses off of it and that’s what the ancient world did with a period of mourning.  It was their way; maybe they didn’t realize psychologically what they were doing but that’s, in fact, what they were doing, they were letting the soul heal itself of all this shredding and wrenching and tearing and ripping that has occurred because of the death of a loved one.  And then after that was healed, then finally they went on, as verses 7-12 say, they bring the body back.  [7, “And Joseph went up to bury his father: and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, [8] And all the house of Joseph, and his brethren, and his father’s house: only their little ones, and their flocks, and their herds, they left in the land of Goshen. [9] And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen: and it was a very great company. [10] And they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days. [11 And when the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning in the floor of Atad, they said, This is a grievous mourning to the Egyptians: wherefore the name of it was called Abel-mizraim, which is beyond Jordan.”]

 

Notice,  after, Joseph doesn’t make any decision about body transport until they finished with the days of mourning because he can’t be mourning and do we have five camels in this caravan, 4 over here, who does this, who does that.  He can’t be bothered and preoccupied with all that stress of making decisions when he’s trying to get healed of the loss of his father. 

 

So now in verses 12-13, the passage finishes by “And his sons did unto him” Jacob, the father, “according as he commanded them,” there’s your third principle of dying again, the dying have a right to rule their posterity; the sons reflected their dad’s wishes.  [13] “For his sons carried him into the land of Canaan, and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought [with the field for a possession of a burying place of Ephron the Hittite, before Mamre.]” the family burial plot. 

 

The four principles of death and dying, next week we’ll finish the book of Genesis itself: the right to know; the right to remain lucid; the right to rule posterity; and the right to be respected by the treatment of the corpse.  Think it through; think through this and let it be a challenge to your own thinking in this area, realizing that the Word of God is sufficient to every good work.