NP How will God resurrect people who’ve been cremated?
Ed ‘Resurrection’ means rising from death to life. When Christ returns, ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’ (Daniel 12:2). The early followers of Christ buried their dead in tombs, awaiting the resurrection (for example John 11:38–44), and this is still common practice today.
What if someone has been cremated (their body incinerated)? Or blown up, or died at sea and their dissolved body washed through the oceans? It doesn’t matter. Let’s face it, whether or not you’re buried, in time there’ll be nothing left of you.
So how will resurrection work? The fact is, ‘All things are possible with God’
(Mark 10:27), and really that’s all we need to know. But let’s give it some thought.
Your body is constantly renewing itself. Cells die and regenerate. Most of the physical matter that makes up your body now is different from what made it up ten years ago. Your special identity as you does not depend on the actual atoms you’re made of, but on the way they’re put together. There’s a hint of the way God knows and records our bodies’ design in Psalm 139:
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them (vs. 15–16).
When God resurrects the dead, He will rebuild their countless trillions of molecules. He may or may not use the same actual matter that they contained previously.
There’s more to us than physical matter. When God created the first human, there were two components: ‘The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature’ (Genesis 2:7). He made Adam’s body, then breathed into him the breath of life. It’s by this breath of life that we and all animals live (Psalm 104:29–30).
When someone dies, God takes away their breath and their body decays and disappears. When they’re resurrected, God will reassemble their body and return their breath. However long they’ve been dead and whatever has happened to their body, they will be the same person who died.
There’s more to resurrection than simply being restored as you were before. After the resurrection there will be a judgement (2 Corinthians 5:10), and those who are found faithful will be changed: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable… For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality’ (1 Corinthians 15:50–53). That’s another subject!