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Can God die?

by | May 21, 2012 | God, Questions

No, God cannot die.  The Bible tells us that God is immutable (Psalm 90:2; Malachi 3:6). This means that he cannot change.  If he died, that would be a change.  The nature of God’s divinity is that he cannot change, so God cannot die.  Furthermore, death is a biological function where something that is alive ceases to be alive.  But God is not biological.  God is different than us.  In theology, we say that he is “Wholly Other.”  That is, he is completely different than what we are.  We die, but God does not.

Also, the idea of dying has the implication either of nonexistence or of some destructive division in nature (i.e., soul cut off from the body, etc.).  This is a further problem when considering the idea of God dying.  In Christianity, God cannot cease to exist, nor can God’s nature be broken or divided – again implying a change in his nature, which cannot be.  Therefore, God cannot die.

Sometimes people will say that Jesus can’t be God because Jesus died and God cannot die.  What they fail to understand is that Jesus has two natures: God and man.  In theology, we call this the hypostatic union.  It is the teaching that in the one person of Christ are two distinct natures, the divine and human.  It was the human nature that died on the cross, not the divine nature.  But because Jesus is both divine and human, it is sometimes said, although not with the greatest accuracy, that God died on the cross. Jesus, who possessed a complete human nature, experienced the fullness of human death. But His divine nature did not die and remained unchanged.

So, God cannot die; but in the person of Christ, who is a man with the divine nature, we see a biological death, not the death of the divine being who is God.

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