Did God die on the cross

The Trinity and Why God Cannot Cease to Be God

So what's your question? All right, so I've never heard really anyone speak of this, but I thought I'd give it a shot. I've been struggling with this a little bit. When we talk about Christ's death on the cross, we'll always reference, you know, Him dying and resurrecting three days later.

So can you comment a little bit on what exactly is it that died when He died? Was, can we, is it accurate to say God died? Because I've heard you speak about the definition of dying, you know, a separation from God.

Is it, you know, the whole God estranged from God idea where God separated from God for a certain period, or is that inaccurate to say?

Okay. So the doctrine of the Trinity is that there's one God in three distinct persons. God is eternally the Trinitarian Lord. That's what He is. By the nature of Him being a Trinity, He can never not be a Trinity.

Therefore, there can be no disruption of the nature of God in a Trinitarian form. It cannot be, so to speak, that one of the members of the Godhood, Godhead separates by nature from the other members, so to speak, and then you essentially have two gods, which can't work.

Now, we're talking in anthropomorphic terms because how do we describe this, what the Trinity really is? Well, we're already at a disadvantage, but nevertheless. That's why that cannot happen. Jesus Christ, when He was born, was born under the law, Galatians 4, 4, little lower than the angels, Hebrews 2, 9.

He emptied Himself and took on the form of a man, that's Philippians 2, 5 through 8. So what basically happened is that the second person of the Trinity, the Word, became flesh, and what that means is He added to Himself human nature.

When we say He added Himself to Himself human nature, we don't say that He combined into a new third thing the kind of God-man blended thing, the way you'd put red into water, and you get a blended thing.

It's not like that. That would be the error called Eutychianism, and it was not, or actually, that's monophysitism, that a new third thing, that'd be monophysitism, that's a heresy. Nor was it so, the nature so blended that they could not be distinguished from each other.

And that's Eutychianism. So I'm bringing this up because when we look at what the true doctrine of Christ is, it's called the hypostatic union. The hypostatic union simply says that in the two natures of Christ, or in the one person of Christ, are two distinct natures.

There's one person. One person says, I am hungry. I am with you always. The one person says, I am whatever it is. I'm thirsty. I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm with you always. At the end of the earth, I know your heart.

The one person is recognized by the single person, I, Jesus, the one person. But that one person, the two distinct natures, the human and the divine nature. The man, Jesus, did not come into existence until the incarnation, until he was conceived.

The human nature aspect did not come into existence. So we would say, technically speaking, the man, Christ Jesus, is not eternal. You would say the man, the human aspect of Christ, is temporal, had a beginning.

But the divine word was eternal. So the eternal word joined with a new human nature and became the person we call Jesus. So this person, Jesus, has two distinct natures, the divine and the human. Now, there's a doctrine called the communicatio idiomatum, and that is the communication of the properties.

What that means is that the attributes of both natures are claimed or ascribed to the single person. So the single person, I, says, I am hungry. I am thirsty. The single person says, I'm with you always to the end of the earth.

So the one person laid claim to both the divine attributes as well as the human attributes. This is really important. The single person laid claim and claimed the attributes of both human nature and divine nature.

We see this because Jesus said, I am thirsty, etc. I'm hungry. You know, I walk around and things like that. And also, I will be with you always to the end of the earth. Matthew 28, 18 through 20. And Father, glorify me with the glory I had with you before the foundation of the world.

So he's before the world was even created. So we see Jesus laying claim to this. Okay, now, on the cross. The nature of divinity is that it cannot die because death, in the sense that we're talking about on the cross, is a biological function.

But the divine nature is not biological. So death does not equate with that. There's a spiritual separation of death issue, which is typified in Genesis 2 .17, Isaiah 59 .2, and Romans 6 .23. And that means separation from God spiritually.

So, Jesus bore our sin in his body on the cross, 1 Peter 2 .24. Now, he quoted, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He quoted that out of Psalm 22, verse 1, while he's on the cross. Some theologians think that what's going on there is a type of separation.

But there cannot be an ontological separation in that the word stopped being member of the Godhead. That can't be, cannot be true, because that would violate the doctrine of the Trinity itself. So what extent was there a kind of a spiritual separation?

We don't know. And we should not say what it was, because the Bible does not say that. He just quotes Psalm 22, verse 1, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In part because it's a messianic psalm.

And if you go to about verse 12 or so and start reading, then you start seeing that it talks about the crucifixion. They pierce his hands and his feet. They count his bones. They divide his garments among them.

And it's a prophetic thing. So he's pointing to that. Now, biologically speaking, only the human nature died on the cross. Only the human nature died on the cross. The divine nature cannot die and did not die on the cross.

Death in the biological sense on the cross is only of the human nature. Well, then that raises the question, if only the human nature died, then how is the sacrifice of divine value? And how could it be said that God died?

The answer is found in that doctrine I mentioned earlier called the communicatio ideomatum, which says that the attributes of both nature are ascribed to the single person. So the person of Christ is what we see.

If you and I are walking on the ground in a path and there's Jesus in front of us, we see the human being and we see the attributes of humanity in voice, in rationality, in his awareness of us, in his awareness of himself, communication, and things like that.

We don't see the divine attributes unless they're manifested through the human. So if he were to walk on water, we would see the divine attribute manifested through the physical manifestation of being a human.

All right. So when we see that Jesus died on the cross, we see that the person died on the cross. And what we're experiencing, what we could see, so to speak, if we were watching it, would be the divine let's just say manifestation through the physical.

When he said various things earlier about being with everybody always, that was him claiming the divine attributes in his personhood. But we experience a death of Christ in the personhood of the human personhood kind of thing as we look to the man and we see the man die.

So what we're experiencing is the attributes of humanity dying physically, but the divine person let's just say that I messed up there, not the divine person, but the divine nature did not die biologically.

So there's a lot of doctrine that kind of weaves in here. But the thing is that only the human nature died on the cross, but since it was the person who died and the person had divine quality, therefore the sacrifice was a divine value.

And by proxy, so to speak, we can say God died.

The Human Nature of Christ Did Not Cease During the Burial

Yeah, it's a little bit of a headache, but yeah, I got you. So my follow-up question then there is if the human nature died, does that mean that Jesus did not have a human body for three days and he stopped being human for those three days?

Yes. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. Now, let's take a man and he's in a coma and because of various problems with his body, they have to amputate his arms. Is he still human? Yes. Well, now his legs got to go.

Sorry, buddy, but that's the way it is to save your life. So he cut his legs off. Still human? Yes. Okay. Well now we've got to get rid of his genitalia. Sorry, but this is a really bad disease. Is he still human?

Yes. You know, now he's blind. Sorry. Is he still human? Yes. No. I'm sorry. His ears don't work anymore. He's deaf. Is he still human? Yes. Humanity is not defined by the physical attribution. Humanity is something that exists internally.

It's something that is by nature an essence. When I ask people, we talk about this kind of thing, I'll say, how much does humanity weigh? What's the human essence? How much does it weigh? That's a non sequitur.

What color is human nature? That's another non sequitur. It just doesn't work. We observe humanity by the attributes of humanity. So I know that you're a man, for example, by all your masculine voice, and I know that you're a person because you say you and yours mean mine, and you have a will, and you think, and I exhibit or I experience the properties of your humanity through the physical attributes.

That's how I recognize your humanity. So when Jesus died, the physical aspect of his humanity died, but the essence of humanity that he is did not cease. Because the the Bible says, for example, in 2 Corinthians 5 .8, to be absent from the body is to be home with the Lord.

And then in 2 Corinthians 12 verses 2 and 3, I think it is, it says there that 14 years ago there was a man, Paul says, I do not know whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know, but such a man was cut of the third heaven and saw inexpressible things he can't mention.

So what he's talking about there is the issue, it looks like the spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, being separated from the body. There is a continuation of something outside of the body. That's the essence of humanity.

That continued on in the doctrine of the hypothetic union, in the true union of the divine essence and the human essence in the one person. That union still existed after death. The one person still existed after death.

But it's the physical aspect that died. And just as if we were to die, our spirit continues on without our body. When it's resurrected, we will be united with that body. Because the essence of our humanness continues on after death.

That's what happened with Christ. Okay?

Okay. All right. Sounds good. That helps? Yeah, yeah, it helps. It's a lot to think about.

Yes, it is. The questions you asked are very good questions. It's a little technical. I hope I got it out clearly enough for people to understand really what the issues are there. Okay?

I appreciate that, Matt. Thank you very much.

All right, Aziz, and God bless, man.