Is It OK for Christians to Be Cremated?
by David K. Bernard
Podcast recording (no venue stated in the delivered transcript)
Kind: teaching
Scripture: Romans 14

Source: https://acts238.life/repository/sermons/david-k-bernard--is-it-ok-for-christians-to-be-cremated
Published by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon transcript on that page.
Free to copy and share with attribution.

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i believe the bible is silent on the subject of cremation now sometimes people quote some old testament passages i think those have to do more with uh avoiding pagan practices idolatrous practices now the root of this however is we as christians have respect for the body as the temple of the holy spirit and you know some pagan concepts or concepts or secular concepts or even greek philosophy is that you know we're the true person is a soul and we're kind of entrapped in a body or temporarily in a body but the biblical view is humans uh are not just spirit or soul but also body and that the body is created for us and is the temple and of course the new testament the temple of the holy spirit and for us salvation is not just floating around in the atmosphere as a spirit but we'll have a glorified body we will be reunited with the body our body will be transformed into an immortal glorified body so we have a rightly a high view of the human body and that's why we teach sexual morality abstaining from alcohol drugs and tobacco and you know because we do have you know and that what we wear and what we do with our body is you know our eyes our tongue all that is important to god uh our you know our body is part of the whole person and and we can't separate we're supposed to glorify god in our body in our spirit we're supposed to present our bodies a living sacrifice so i do support this high view of the human body as created by god as the temple of the holy spirit should be respected protected valued now having said that when we die our body is going to decay uh through the natural process unless we're embalmed and protected in some way if you just buried a human body without you know without any type of special protection it's going to gradually as the bible discusses turn back to dust and in extreme cases if someone's caught in a fire their body could actually be burnt up just as much as cremation however we don't think that limits god we believe in the resurrection uh we will have a recognizable body in some way but transformed but the resurrection is going to be a miracle no matter how you look at it so whether god takes a dead embalmed body that's lying in a tomb or whether god takes a body that was just put in the ground and crumbled to dust and eaten by worms or whether you take a body that was completely destroyed in a in a fire or a body that was drowned in the bottom of the sea and eaten by fish and now the molecules are part of other animals still we feel like god will re will resurrect that body will transform that body so i don't think cremation will stop the resurrection from happening from that point of view while we do respect the body and therefore it's understandable that even after death we would respect the body i don't see that there's anything theologically wrong with a choice of cremation now we haven't faced this as much in the u.s until recent times as you mentioned but i was raised in korea korea is a small country very highly populated very densely populated their historical tradition was burial in the countryside on the mountainside but with millions of people crammed into a small space that became impossible so almost everyone in korea my whole life they were cremated i've actually gone to the crematorium and watched them cremate the bodies and so you know almo almost all of our believers were cremated we never felt that they were sinning or that they weren't going to go in the rapture we felt like that was a cultural choice the bible doesn't say as i mentioned whatever the old testament passage that might be deemed somewhat relevant i think are dealing with pagan practices a dollar source practices the new testament doesn't have any discussion so i will come back around to say i do believe it is covered by romans 14.

that is it's a matter of christian liberty if you if it's important to you not to be cremated we respect that and we don't ridicule that if you think it's acceptable but be cremated we respect that we don't really kill you for that i believe that's something that god leaves to the personal choice of each believer