Is it a Sin to be Cremated? (and other funeral-related questions)

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Is it a sin to be cremated? Well, I'm gonna try to answer that today and some other questions about funerals that I've been asked recently in just the next few minutes.

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Hey guys, it's Keith Foskey, and I've been kind of doing something fun recently online.

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I've been posting songs that I've heard over the years in funerals. A couple people asked me, why are you doing this?

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Well, sometimes it's just fun. I enjoy posting videos, and short videos like that are easy to make, but also

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I have a lot of experience in the funeral industry, and it is an industry. I grew up, my stepbrother's father was a funeral director, so I was sort of in and around the funeral business all of my young life, kind of going back and forth with him, doing different things.

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He worked for the funeral business. He was a little older than me, and then when I was 16 years old, I got a job working for a funeral home in Jacksonville.

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So my young or young adult life was in the funeral industry, and I thought

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I was going to become a funeral director. God had other plans. He chose that I was going to instead work with the spiritually dead.

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See? Ha! No, that's not funny. Anyway, I've made that joke before.

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It's bad. But no, God wanted me to work in ministry. God had a plan for me, and I'm thankful for it.

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But I've still gravitated towards the funeral industry in my life, having, again, grown up around it,

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I know a lot about it, I know a lot of people who are still in it, and so when I post these videos and I say, you know,

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I'm a pastor, I've been a pastor for 18 years, and I've done over 150 funerals, some people are like, that seems like a lot.

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Well, it is a lot, because I make myself available to a local funeral home basically like a chaplain.

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So anytime there's a family that needs a minister but doesn't have one, they'll call on me.

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And if you think about it, that means that I'm dealing with a lot of people who are either not

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Christian or nominally Christian, but for some reason want a Christian funeral.

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So what it does for me is it gives me the opportunity to speak into these people's lives in a very difficult time, to help them to try to find comfort in Christ, point them to the

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Gospel, and to preach the Gospel at the funeral. That's always my one absolute caveat, or my one rule, if you will.

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If someone has me come and do a funeral, I say, you know what? I basically have two rules. One, I'm not going to say the person is in heaven if there's no evidence that the person was a believer.

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I'm just not going to do that. But also, I'm not going to do the funeral unless I can give the

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Gospel. And I'm very clear about that in the beginning, and I've actually been turned down for several funerals because of that.

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One I remember very specifically, it was a group of brothers who came to my church and wanted to meet with me to have me do the funeral for their father, and they came in, sat down, and I said, okay, just so you know, one thing right out of the gate, understand that one of the things

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I'm going to do is I'm going to give the Gospel while I'm there, I'm going to preach the Gospel. And they said, you can't do that.

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I said, why not? And they said, well, we're going to have Muslims and Jews there, and that would be offensive to them. I said, well, if I can't give the

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Gospel, then I can't come. And they said, well, then you can't come. And I said, okay, meeting's over. Thank you for coming. And that was it.

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I wasn't going to compromise on that issue. And I encourage you, if you are a minister, not to compromise on that.

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You know, people say, well, where are you willing to bend? Well, I'm willing to bend on things like music. I don't ever really choose the music for the funerals.

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I kind of let the families do that, especially if it's, again, they're nominal believers at best.

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I'll let them choose the music. And, you know, I let other people talk during the funeral.

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I did have to correct a guy one time, because he got up and spoke for a while, and he gave a really false understanding of God.

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And after he spoke, I got up and spoke, and I said, listen, everything that guy just said is basically wrong.

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I said it in a nice way, but I was very clear. And he wasn't happy about it, but it didn't matter to me. I wasn't going to allow that.

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The gospel is going to be proclaimed, and it's going to be put on display, not because I'm there to start a fight or anything, but I'm going to speak the truth.

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And I'm thankful that I had that opportunity. And I say that all because, you know, a few of the questions that I've had about funerals have been, you know, how do you give the gospel at an unbeliever's funeral?

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Well, I'm going to talk about that. And other questions are things like the question

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I began with, which is cremation. I'm kind of holding that one to the end. And then, you know, there's a lot of other kind of practical things people ask about funerals.

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You know, if you are a minister, you know, and you go to the funeral and there is this, you know, somebody gets up and says, this person's in heaven, do you feel the need to correct them?

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And the answer to that is, yeah, I don't. I don't correct people unless they say something that I know is theologically wrong.

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In general, I don't know the spiritual condition of the person because I've never met them. I've never met the family before the funeral.

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I've become somewhat of an expert in preparing a funeral within 48 hours of someone I've never met.

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I've got a method for doing it, and it's worked pretty well for me. So people, again, going back to the whole why

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I'm doing the music thing, I like to do videos. As you know, you're watching one of my videos right now. I enjoy creating content, and it's easy just to pull out my phone, record myself doing something funny, and then putting a song behind it and say, this is a song you're most likely to hear at a funeral.

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Some of them have been ones that you probably knew were coming—Amazing Grace. I just put out one today with In the

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Garden. A couple other ones that have been pretty standard—Go Rest High on That Mountain. And I put a couple in there that maybe aren't as common to people who don't go to funerals a lot.

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Like I did Stairway to Heaven yesterday, and a lot of people go, oh, do people really do Stairway to Heaven? Yeah, they do.

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They ask for it, and I always remind them it's an eight -minute song, and I'm gonna be sitting up there on the chancel area.

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I'm gonna be sitting there basically staring out into the audience. And by the way, these don't normally happen at my church.

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These are happening in the chapel of the funeral home. So again, the funeral home decides what music they're allowing and things like that.

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So basically, I'm going in as a person to preach the gospel. One person on Twitter said,

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I don't think you should preach at funerals. I disagree. One hundred percent.

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A funeral is a time where people are often thinking introspectively. They're considering the fact that this thing that has happened to this person, which is death, is going to happen to them one day.

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This is the right opportunity to point them to the gospel and to point them to Jesus Christ.

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So funerals are good in that way. But funerals are... ministering at a funeral home does mean that you have to kind of learn a little bit about the funeral business and how things work, and it is, as I said, it is an industry.

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And later on when I talk about cremation, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the industry side of it and the fact that what we do in preparing bodies for burial today is nothing like what was done in the ancient world.

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There's just so many laws and things that go along with things like embalming and stuff like that.

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It's just very, very different, and so we'll get to that a little bit later.

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But I do want to answer this question about how to share the gospel, since that's part of this conversation. I'm gonna tell you how

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I do it. I'm not telling you this is the only way. I'm telling you that I have come to find that this is fairly useful, and believers who have come to the funerals that I have done, many of them have come up to me afterwards and thanked me and said,

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I am thankful that you gave the gospel. I'm thankful that you were clear in your presentation of the gospel.

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I've had a lot of unbelievers, or people who are maybe nominal believers, came up and told me that I gave them a lot to think about, and I have had several people who

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I could tell, while I was preaching, did not believe what I was saying, and it was confronting them in their unbelief.

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So those are just a few thoughts as to why I take the method that I do.

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And the passage that I typically preach is John 14, 1 through 6.

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Jesus said, let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many rooms.

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If it were not so, I would have told you, and I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

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And you know the way to where I'm going, Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know where you're going, how can we know the way? Jesus said,

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I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me. Now, I've memorized that text because I have preached it more than any other text, because I do it when

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I'm giving funerals. And people say, wait a minute, now that text sounds like you're preaching a Christian funeral. How can you say you're preaching an unbelieving funeral?

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Because this particular text, while it is a great comfort to believers, and I preach this text at believers' funerals too, but I preach it in a little different way, when

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I'm using this text at the funeral of an unbeliever or a person that I don't know—I think that's the safer way to say it—I don't know their spiritual condition, because I didn't know the person.

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I can discern certain things based on stuff that's said with the family, but I don't know for certain in most cases.

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Unlike somebody who maybe has been a member of my church for years, I've seen their faith, I've seen them confess Christ, maybe even baptize them, you know,

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I can speak with great confidence that this person had a living faith. But for a person

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I'm doing a funeral for I don't know, or have a good idea they're not a believer, I will still use this text.

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And here's my reasoning. This text is all about faith. This text has three parts.

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It has a call to faith, it has a promise for faith, and it has the object of faith.

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There's your outline. If you want to preach this text, the first thing is we have the call to faith.

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Jesus said, let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me.

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Now the question on this is whether or not it's indicative or imperative. You believe in God, believe also in me, can be you do, you do, or you do believe in God, therefore you should believe in me, and then it becomes a command, believe in me.

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Or they're both commands, both imperatives, believe in God, believe also in me.

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The way I understand it, having looked at the original language and come to my best conclusion, is that you have an indicative and imperative.

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You believe in God, therefore believe in me, is what Jesus is saying. If you want to correct me on that, if you have a different understanding,

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I'm willing to listen to it, but that's kind of the that's where I've landed on that. Because what

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I see Jesus saying is, because you believe in God, believe in me. Let not your hearts be troubled.

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You believe in God, therefore believe in me. And that's the way I approach this when I'm preaching a funeral. I say to the crowd, or to the congregation, to the family,

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I say, you know God exists. The Bible says that all men know that God exists. The Bible says in Romans 118 that nature itself has demonstrated that God exists.

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So Jesus says, because you know God exists, you should believe in him. And I use that as a way of saying,

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Jesus is calling you to faith. You know God exists, therefore you should trust in his Son.

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And so that's the call to faith. And the second part is the promise for faith. The promise is, in my

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Father's house there are many rooms, and if it were not so, I would have told you. I love that part.

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It's Jesus' way of saying, if it weren't the case, I wouldn't have said so. If it weren't true,

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I wouldn't have said it. And I stress that. I have two illustrations that I use. I don't use them both.

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It depends on, sort of, if I see people are tracking me or not, or if I see certain things in the crowd

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I'm looking for, I will either go to the illustration of C .S. Lewis, who said, in mere

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Christianity, that when we are confronted with the person of Christ, we have to realize that he is either a liar, a lunatic, or the

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Lord. Either he said what he was saying and he knew it was untrue, that makes him a liar. Or he said what he was saying it was untrue and he didn't know it, that makes him a lunatic.

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Or what he said was true. And it's called, I think it's called Lewis's Trilemma.

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And I confront the audience with that. I say, Jesus is saying here, I'm not a liar.

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He is saying here, if it were not so, I would have told you. So I confront the congregation, the audience,

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I say, look, who is Jesus? Is he a liar? Is he a lunatic? Or is he the Lord? And I've had several people who

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I think, who I believe are unbelievers, come up to me after and say, I've heard of Lewis, I've heard of Narnia, and that can connect with them.

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The other illustration I'll sometimes use is, I will use the illustration of my favorite book, which is

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Animal Farm. Outside of biblical books, my favorite biblical book obviously, outside the Bible, is R .C.

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Sproul's Holiness of God. But there's a book called Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, and in that book there's a character called

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Moses, he's a raven, and he represents the clergy, it seems, because he's always promising the animals that if they do good and work hard, they're going to get to Sugarcandy Mountain.

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But everybody knew he's a liar, right? There is no Sugarcandy Mountain. It's all a fable. And I believe in the book, what's intended is

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George Orwell saying that, you know, we know the clergy is giving us pie in the sky.

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We know it's not true. But they're still out there doing it. And so I talk about that a little bit, about how some people think the promise of eternal life is just pie in the sky.

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But Jesus said, if it were not so, I would have told you. And I say, instead of George Orwell and his cynicism,

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I'm gonna go with Christ and his promise. And so that's sort of another way, and I've had a lot of good response.

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People really seem to be thinking during that part. But the last one is the key, and that's the object of faith.

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Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the

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Father except through me. A lot of people, when they do funerals, they stop in John 14, they stop at the end of the discourse about, in my

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Father's house are many rooms, if it were not so, I would have told you. No, keep going. Because Thomas said, Lord, we don't know where you're going, how can we know the way?

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Jesus said, I am the way. And I expressly point to the fact that Jesus is the object of our faith.

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It's not enough just to believe. It's not enough to believe in our belief. It's not enough to have confidence in something.

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We must have confidence in the right thing, and that right thing is the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. So that's my, that's the way

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I share the gospel. And maybe some of you are watching this and I've done funerals for you or your family, you've heard me say these very things, because I believe this is a powerful way to point people to the truth of who

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Christ is, and the reality and truthfulness of what he said. So that's my answer to the question, how to share the gospel at a funeral.

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Something else I wanted to mention in this is how I see funerals and the industry and these things changing, because I do see a lot more cremations now.

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We're gonna get to that question again in just a moment, but I do see a lot of changes. I see a lot less people attending funerals than it seems to be years ago.

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Again, I've been watching this trend for, I guess, going on now 20 something years, 23 years, and I see a lot less people even having funerals.

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A lot of people don't even have funerals anymore, and I think that that's not good. I think that there is a sense in which death needs to be acknowledged, it needs to be given its due, in the sense of it's an important time of grief and grieving, and coming together and recognizing that this is actually not the way

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God created the world to be. Remember, death is an enemy that entered because of sin.

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Death isn't part of the natural order, and people who believe death is part of the natural order, I think are really misunderstanding the

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Scripture, because there's a reason why we feel the way we feel when we experience death in our family or among our friends or whatever, and the reason why we feel the way we feel is because death is the enemy.

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Death is not the way it's supposed to be. And so I remember listening to a podcast a few years ago,

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I think it was from the guys at Warhorn Media. If I can find it, I'll put a link in the description, but they did a really great job of talking about how to help people through grief, and also helping people prepare for the funeral experience, and actually...because

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a lot of...we try to sanitize it nowadays, we try to sanitize it by saying things like, oh, we're gonna do a celebration.

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We're not doing a funeral, we're doing a celebration of life. We've even changed...even our architecture and things have changed a bit.

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Used to, in the home, there was something called the parlor, which is where, when a person died, they would lay the body in the parlor, and it would be in the home for people to come and grieve.

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And then it became the funeral parlor, right? Then became the funeral home. And now, the funeral home...the

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ones I work at locally, a lot of them have removed any look of a church. They've removed the pews, they've removed the pulpit, now you've got a little round table to put your notes on, and the families are all sitting at round tables, and it looks more like a conference room than it looks like a funeral.

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It just...everything seems to be an attempt to sterilize, sanitize, and even somewhat sanctify this as something that it's not.

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Funerals are meant to be a time of grief. Now you say, well, what if the person's a believer?

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Can't we celebrate their homegoing? And that's another phrase people do. Yes, but we can still also recognize that what we are witnessing, even in the life of the believer, is the reality of what sin brought into this world.

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I expect that when my wife passes away, if she passes before me, I expect to grieve.

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I expect to grieve a long time. Abraham grieved at the death of his wife, and the sons of Israel grieved at the death of their father.

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All of Egypt grieved. I preached on this when I was preaching through Genesis, just the fact that grief is something we shouldn't ignore.

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This is such an important reality, and again, I'm not saying if you say homegoing service, or if you say celebration of life, that you're wrong.

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I'm just saying I think that that's just one of the ways in our vernacular that we have sought to sanitize this thing that's actually a little bit...

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that needs a little bit more reality in our mind of, this is supposed to hurt.

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Death hurts, and it's okay to acknowledge that. We don't have to hide that, and we shouldn't deny our grief.

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We shouldn't deny the pain. Abraham was a believer. Abraham grieved. You know,

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Jesus wept outside of the tomb of Lazarus, and we can argue as to why, and what the reasoning was, and all those things.

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He knew he was about to resurrect him. Of course, Jesus knew what he was going to do. But man, those little words, Jesus wept, should bring us great comfort when we weep, and I hope they do.

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So let's get to the question that many of you tuned in for, and that is the question of, is cremation sinful?

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Well, the reason why this question is being asked more today than ever is because more people are turning to cremation today than ever before, at least in my experience.

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I have certainly seen more people turn to cremation than ever in my experience, and if you are a funeral director or a mortician and you have an experience that's different, please share it in the comments.

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I'm sure the audience would love to hear it, but I know that people in my life, family members and things like that, many of them have been cremated.

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Sometimes it was a purely financial decision, because the family either didn't have insurance or couldn't afford a funeral, or didn't want to pay the vast expense that goes with a funeral.

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And there is a lot of expense that goes with a funeral. There's a lot of things that have to be done. In the state of Florida, you can't view a body unless that body has been embalmed.

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And so if you want to have a family visitation where the body is on display publicly, that body has to be embalmed.

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Well, embalming costs money. And if you're going to cremate the person, sometimes it's like, well, why do we want to spend this money on embalming and all these different things?

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And even embalming itself is a very strange process. I've been a part of it before, actually performed as an assistant while it was being done, doing the things, you know, handing utensils, watching it being done.

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It's very odd and not something I want to get into here. But the reality of it is, is a lot of people are turning to cremation for financial reasons.

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A lot of people are turning to cremation because they recognize the oddness of sort of the methods that we are using for body preservation, and they don't think that they are good.

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I personally think that the Jewish method is best. My wife and I have talked about this.

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It would probably be difficult for us to have it done this way, because I think it has to be done within a day.

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But the method that I'm familiar with, at least for Jewish funerals, is that a person, the body is cleaned, washed, and is properly put into a casket that doesn't have any metal.

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And the casket is then put into the ground, where it is allowed to go back to the earth. There's no wood in the casket, and the body itself is meant to, with the wood of the casket, to simply deteriorate and go back into the ground.

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I think that's great. I think that that models a good way of doing it. And it's certainly different than what we do with the standard

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American burial, which is full embalming, which includes the introduction of an embalming fluid into the body, the blood strain fluid is put in, and then all kinds of other things.

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Cosmetics are used to dress the body so that it can be put on display. And after that, typically a metal or wood casket that has locks is locked.

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There's something called a casket key. We used to carry them in our pockets so that you could lock the casket. It's like an Allen wrench, but it has a handle.

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And you lock the casket, and you put it in a tomb in the ground.

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It's called a vault. And in the state of Florida, it has to be put in a vault because the water table is so much that it has to have something that would resist the casket being able to come back up.

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And so the vault allows for that to keep it down, at least as far as I understand.

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These are all things that, as I've worked with the companies and things, these are things that have been said. I may be misunderstanding this somewhat.

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But ultimately, you're not going back to the ground. You're in a concrete vault, which is,

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I believe, metal -lined concrete, and then you're inside of either a metal or wood casket. And then the body itself is put into formaldehyde.

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So it's just—or not formaldehyde, but embalming fluid. All of that to be said, it's not like the body simply goes back to the earth.

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And so the question becomes then, okay, well, is that better than cremation? Is that better than burial?

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Or excuse me, is that better than burning the body? And here are my thoughts.

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And again, I want to say from the outset, if you disagree with me, that's fine. I think on this issue we can have a disagreement and still be brothers and sisters in Christ.

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I posted this on Facebook and on YouTube, got a lot of great comments. A lot of people had a lot of thoughts.

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And I wasn't looking to start an argument. I just want to hear your thoughts. I asked the question, is it sinful? A vast majority of people said no, never.

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Some people said yes, always, and some people said that they were unsure.

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They didn't know. And what's funny is, I remember years ago—not to take an aside real quick, but to tell a quick story—when

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I was still in seminary, I was the associate pastor at our church, and the pastor that was there, we had a man die, and he had a relative that was from the

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Eastern Orthodox Church. And I'll never forget, because that man came to the church, and he was very adamant that—or let me go back.

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The man who had the family member died, and this man from the Eastern Orthodox Church came in, and he was adamant.

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Cremation is absolutely sinful. Cremation is wrong.

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And he wanted to argue about it. I don't remember how everything went. I just remember he was so adamant.

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So if you are from the Eastern Orthodox Church, if you watch this—I don't know how many Eastern Orthodox people

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I have who watch my show, but if you are watching this show, I would love to hear your comments. Is that common in your—not denomination—is that common in your understanding among Eastern Orthodox, or is that an anomaly for that man?

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So I'd love to hear that in the comments. So what do I think? Number one, the act of—whatever is done to the body is not done by the individual himself, because he or she has already passed away.

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And so there is no sin on the part of the individual, because ultimately they're not the ones doing it, and their destination is already—when you die,

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I believe your soul leaves your body, and you're either in comfort with the Lord or you're in torment awaiting final judgment.

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Either way, nothing that's done to the body can imperil the soul.

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And so even if it were sinful, it wouldn't be something that would change a person's ultimate destination.

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Burning the body does not consign a person to hell. Please be clear. No matter where you stand on this issue,

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I think we should all agree on that. The second thing is that when we think about the biblical examples that we have throughout the

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Bible, the biblical examples that we have are for the faithful—that being

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Jewish people in the Old Testament, Hebrews, and in the New Testament, Christians—the model that we are given is either entombment or burial.

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You know, Jesus was put in a borrowed tomb. All of the Old Testament saints, when we read about their death, it was always burial.

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And the reason was because what it represented. It represented a reminder that this is not all there is, and that there's going to be a resurrection of the body.

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Now, immediately somebody's going to say, well, burning the body doesn't keep it from being resurrected any more than if a person dies in a house fire, or if they're eaten by a shark, or if they are drowned in the sea and they float to the bottom of the sea and are crushed by the pressure.

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These things aren't going to change God's ability to resurrect them. I understand that, but it was what the picture of burial was.

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The picture of burial was, you're putting them in the ground like a seed because one day they're going to come back, and this is the picture that we are given in 1

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Corinthians 15, which tells us a seed falls on the ground, it dies, and then becomes a plant.

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That's the picture of resurrection. We die, we go into the ground, and then one day we will be raised.

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So there's a reason why, typically, within Christian history, burial has been the more common and more preferred method.

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And I remember hearing a conversation about this, and one pastor made a really good point. He said it was also the method

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God used when God chose, because there's one person in the Bible that was buried by God, and that was

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Moses. Remember, God buried Moses when he died, and a man didn't do that,

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God did that. So if you wanted to argue method from the scripture, there is a preferred method, as far as I understand.

29:52

But this doesn't necessarily make the other method sinful, in the sense that it's going to imperil the soul, or the person who's doing it is doing something that would necessarily be sinful.

30:04

Unless, of course, there was attached to it a sinful motivation.

30:12

Lack of finances is not necessarily a sinful motivation. I realize that sometimes, and I'll give a personal testimony on this one.

30:19

But my grandmother was cremated, and she was cremated because she didn't have life insurance, and most of the family didn't have very much money.

30:28

I was younger, I didn't have a lot of money to contribute, I contributed some, most of us contributed some, but we just didn't have a lot.

30:35

And so it was really a financial decision at that point, and somebody may condemn us for that, but that was our reasoning.

30:42

My grandmother's a believer, I believe her soul is safe and with Lord, and she's fine. But there was the question of whether or not we did something wrong.

30:52

I don't believe we did. I would have preferred her being buried, but it wasn't my decision to make.

30:58

I was a grandchild, not a child. But again, there was some financial parts of making that decision.

31:08

The next thing, though, is the question of, when you talk about motivations, there are some times where the motivation to burn the body can be attached to pagan rituals.

31:23

If the motivation to burn the body is tied to some type of a pagan ritual, then I would argue that it should be abandoned, that it shouldn't be done, that that would be ungodly.

31:34

Not because you're burning the body, but because you're doing so in accord with some type of ritual that is not meant to honor

31:40

God, but is meant to honor some pagan deity. So I would say that would be the time when it would be, would be, and could be sinful.

31:50

So those are my thoughts. I really look forward to your thoughts. I also want to ask you one other question before I sign off.

31:57

I've been doing some more of these short videos where it's just me, not always doing interviews, because sometimes it takes a lot of time to get guys in the studio or on the internet and getting the interviews set up.

32:08

Sometimes it's easier for me to just throw on the camera and answer a question. And I've got, I'm going to start probably having to do mailbag episodes at least once a week because I've been having emails come in almost every day.

32:20

And I'm thankful for that. But my question to you is, are you enjoying these? So if you are enjoying these episodes, please let me know in the comments.

32:28

If you think I should continue to do this, I'm not going to give up. Don't worry, I'm not going to give up the interviews. I'm still going to do those.

32:33

Still got bowtie dialogues lined up and all those things, but this is a little easier and it works better with my schedule sometimes just to throw the camera on and do something like this.

32:41

So if this is working and you guys are enjoying it, please let me know. And again, if you like this episode, hit the thumbs up button.

32:47

And if you didn't, hit the thumbs down button twice. I want to thank you for watching the show today. My name is