Did God Die?
Introduction: A question worth asking
By Family Minister, Dr. Brandon Steenbock
It’s the perfect “gotcha” question for Christians. “If Jesus is God, and Jesus died, then did God die?” Many Christians have posed this question and been stumped. It’s a favorite of groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims, who do not believe Jesus is God.
If you are a Christian, can you answer with confidence? If you are not a Christian, are you willing to wrestle with the implications? What if the truth is so implausible that no one could invent it? What if it’s too incredible to be untrue?
The Problem
We want to be clear on the problem: If God is the unchanging (James 1:17), eternal (Deuteronomy 33:27) source of all life (Psalm 36:9), how could he possibly die? Isn’t death a change, an ending, and the opposite of life? So, no Christian could agree that God can die without denying the nature of God.
But Christians believe that Jesus is God, and that Jesus truly died for sins. Which sounds like saying God died. Some would say that Jesus’ human nature died, not his divine nature. Put another way, Jesus the human died, but Jesus the Son of God lived on.
Two problems with this solution: One is that this denies what historic doctrine calls “the hypostatic union,” which states that in Jesus, God and man are one being (Colossians 2:9); Jesus’ humanity and divinity cannot be separated without denying his personhood. Two, this raises serious questions about the validity of Jesus’ sacrifice. If Jesus is to die for all sins of all people of all time, it requires a sacrifice much greater than that of a single human being.
Therefore, no Christian could possibly agree to the idea that only the human Jesus died. It seems that Christians must agree to one of two impossible statements: Either God died, or Jesus is not God. How can we solve this problem?
Truth Claims
Let’s start with the truths Christians claim.
First, God is Triune: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. All three are given honor, worship and praise as God. Yet, there is one “name” that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Jesus says in Matthew 28:19. The Old Testament declares that God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). Yet, the Father and the Son are not the same person, as Jesus says he was sent from his Father (John 14:24), is going back to his Father (John 20:17), and he regularly prays to his Father (e.g., John 17). The Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, because Jesus says at one place that the Father will send the Holy Spirit (John 14:26), and at another that he himself will send the Holy Spirit (John 15:26; 16:7).
Christians hold that the Triune God is a mystery beyond human explanation. “God is three persons in one God and one God in three persons, without mixing the persons nor dividing the divine being” (Athanasian Creed). Now, none of this says anything about whether God can die, but it gets us closer to the answer.
The Bible identifies Jesus as the Son of God, the second person of the Triune God. As mentioned above, Christians believe Jesus is fully God and fully human. As it says in Colossians 2:9, “The fullness of God lives in bodily form.” Jesus is the Son of God incarnate as a human, and as such, his humanity and his Godhood cannot be separated. God became man; this man is God.
As a separate person from the Father and the Holy Spirit, what happens to Jesus does not happen to the Father or the Holy Spirit. It defies our explanation of how one person of the Trinity can experience something while the others do not, but Christians agree that God is above us and beyond our comprehension. This is not a problem of logic but a problem of capacity.
The Bible is clear that Jesus, the man who is God, died. He suffered, he “gave up his spirit” (Matthew 27:50), his side was pierced, and blood and water flowed out (John 19:34). Despite some past attempts to explain away Jesus’ death (the “Swoon Theory” and the “Replacement Theory,” for example), the fact is that if we take the biblical record as is, we must agree that Jesus died.
One more important acknowledgment: When we say “die” we have to be clear about what we mean. “Die” is often confused with “cease to exist.” Someone claims God cannot die, because if God died, then he ceased to exist! But to “die” does not mean “cease to exist.” Humans don’t cease to exist when they die; the human body goes into the ground, and the human soul goes elsewhere until Judgment Day. Both body and soul will be reunited on that day. As we wrestle with the question, “Did God die?” we are not saying, “Did God cease to exist?” but rather, “Did God experience death the same way we humans experience it?”
An Implausible Solution
If Jesus is the Son of God, and is, therefore, the second person of the Triune God, and is, therefore, God himself, and if Jesus died on the cross, and if we cannot separate out his divine nature and human nature in such a way to say that only his human nature died, then the only thing we could conclude is that the answer to our question, “Did God die?” is “Yes, he did.” But that still makes us uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Because once again, how can God die?
There’s a theological statement that goes like this: “Jesus died and was buried according to his human nature.” You might think that’s saying that only Jesus’ human nature died. But that is not what this is saying. Jesus’ human nature and divine nature “communicate” attributes to each other. That is, in becoming human, the Son of God becomes all that a human is and can do all a human can do, and in being God, Jesus is all that the Son of God is and can do all that the Son of God can do. So, when we say he died “according to his human nature,” we are saying that because the Son of God has become human, the Son of God is now able to die. This is the answer to the question, “How can God die?” He can die by becoming human.
And this is the implausible solution to our problem. Jesus, the Son of God, died. Not God the Father nor God the Holy Spirit. How it can be that one person of the Triune God could die while the others live on? Well, once again, if “die” does not mean “cease to exist,” we still are faced with a mystery, but not an impossible one. Only one that goes beyond the bounds of our understanding. The divine-human body of Jesus went into the grave, while the divine-human soul of Jesus went to his Father in heaven. On the third day, his divine-human soul returned to his divine-human body, and the whole Jesus, fully God and fully human, who had died, rose again, fully human and fully God.
The Answer to the Question
The answer to the question is as simple as getting there is complex. Did God die? Yes. The Bible affirms this. In Acts 20:38, as Paul gives his farewell address to the Ephesian elders, he says, “Be shepherds of the Church of God, which he bought with his own blood.” God bought the Church with his own blood. What else could he mean other than that God died?
Conclusion: A hope worth holding, a peace beyond understanding
This is the hope our world needs. The Son of God became so completely human that he was able to die, and the infinite value of his divine life paid the ultimate price for us. But he did not stay dead. By his resurrection, he defeated death forever. And we have peace. Peace with God, who demands our perfection, and sees it in us because of Jesus. Peace with ourselves, because our God is one of us. Peace with each other, because we are known and loved and can know and love each other.
In Philippians 4:7, Paul describes “the peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding.” The peace that we find knowing that Jesus, the God-man, died on our behalf, goes beyond our ability to understand. But in Paul’s statement, the word “understanding” is a noun. In other words, he is saying, “All that we can understand – this peace is greater than that.” This is the peace we have when we let go of the objection that “God cannot die!” and sink into the mysterious and implausible truth that is too incredible to be untrue.