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Cremation Question I know what a lot of you all are thinking, “yuk,” or,” gag me with a spoon.” Believe me, this is not my favorite topic either. However, I recently received an email asking me why I think most Christians are not cremated. I was surprised anybody wanted to know my idea on this subject. After getting over my shock I got to thinking about cremation and its popularity or unpopularity among certain groups of people. Finally, I tried to focus on why people feel the way they do about cremation and what the Bible does and does not say about cremation. The word funeral comes from Cremation has become a little more popular than burial in that it tends to be cheaper than having the body embalmed, a casket, and a burial plot. I dare say the average burial cost somewhere between eight thousand to $12,000. Where the average cremation cost range from two thousand to $4,000. In certain areas of this country cremation is widely practiced. The following numbers were found on the internet at cremation.org (and yes there is an internet cremation society) based on deaths in 2000.
Compare the above numbers with the popularity of cremation in some other countries. The following information was found at http://www.srgw.demon.co.uk/CremSoc5/Stats/Interntl/2004/StatsIF.html and is based on 2004 statistics.
In case you are wondering, the country with the lowest
percentage of cremations is I have been asked what the Bible says about cremation. My
short answer is “not much.” We can read of different Bible characters being
buried. Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob were buried in the There are cases in the Bible where people sinned against God and were punished with fire. Nadab and Abihu may have been the first people cremated. “Then Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censor and put fire in it, put incense on it, and offered profane fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. So fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord” (Numbers 10.1-2). Later on we read that a man who married a woman and her mother was to be “burned with fire” (Leviticus 20.14). Achan and his family were stoned and burned with fire, Joshua 7.24-26. King Josiah had the priest of Baal killed and burned with fire, 2 Kings 23.19-20. We can see a connection between the burning of the body and sin. However, in some of these cases the burning with fire was the source of death. In the New Testament we are told the Law of Moses and its
regulations were abolished. A dead
body does not make one “unclean.” We are not told how to dispose of the
body. Let us remember that the soul or spirit goes back to God, Ecclesiastes
12.7b the destruction of the body does not affect the soul. I am forced to
wonder if some Christians believe the physical body will be raised instead of
the spiritual body. For some seem to be against cremation based on the
presumption that there will be nothing left to be raised if one is cremated. I
could ask what about the person that was burned up in the My guess is that most people do not favor cremation more for emotional than religious reasons. While burying a loved one is hard we know their body is in the casket. It is just not the same as looking at an urn of ashes. Burning up the body has a finality to it that can be hard to accept. I tell people that personally I don’t like either option. Perhaps the Indians had the right idea. The body was left out in the open for the animals to devour. The thought of being placed in a casket and buried kind of gets to me. I get claustrophobic just thinking about it. I realize this is not an intellectual reaction since I will not know what is happening at that point. At the same time to be incinerated seems harsh. I am left to say that fortunately all will be raised from the hadean world when Christ comes and then we will face the judgment. – Dennis Tucker |