Key Life Network

Narrator: Does the Bible forbid cremation? The answer to that and other questions on Key Life. Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Life's hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us. But there's a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So here's seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson from Forge Truth to answer your questions.

Steve Brown: Thank you, Matthew. Hi Pete.

Guest (Male): Hey, how you doing?

Steve Brown: I'm doing really good as a matter of fact.

Guest (Male): You look good.

Steve Brown: I feel, you know, for an old guy.

Guest (Male): You preach, you're preaching this weekend.

Steve Brown: Yeah, I do occasionally.

Guest (Male): That's good.

Steve Brown: I have to, you know, I have to be helped into the pulpit, but listen, it's okay.

Guest (Male): No, not unless they have weird stairs. That was in the dark that one time.

Steve Brown: They were trying, I think they were sitting out to kill you. I know, I listen. There are people that are really bad in the church.

Guest (Male): I know, right?

Steve Brown: It's called ageism. They go after you, man. I'm glad I'm not a pastor of those folks anymore.

That's Pete Alwinson, by the way. Don't send us letters. We're just kidding around. Go to Forgetruth.com if you want to find out something about one of the greatest and most effective men's ministries in the country. Forgetruth.com.

Hey, we do love your questions, and you can send your questions to keylifenetwork post office box 5000, Maitland, Florida 32794, or if you're in Canada, to Key Life Canada, post office box 20860, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8.

Or you can email your question to Steve@keylife.org. If you want to ask a question at 3:00 in the morning and don't know where to go with it, pick up the phone and dial 1-800 Key Life. That's 1-800-539-5433. Follow instructions. Sometimes we put your question on the air.

By the way, and you knew I was going to say this, if you can help us financially, please do. I promise we'll apply that to so many who can't help us financially. We try to be faithful with every dime, squeezing the dimes for the glory of God.

So help us if you can, and if you do, we'll rise up and call you blessed. If you can't, we understand. Pete, lead us in prayer and we'll get to these questions.

Guest (Male): All right. Our Father, we come to you today at the end of this week, and we're just grateful that we belong to you. We come to you and we thank you for the fact of who you are and what you do. Thank you that you're eternal, immortal, invisible, the only true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that you never change, that you're always the same, that you're loving and merciful. Thank you that you're kind, but also that you're bold toward us as your children. Thank you that you don't treat one child better than another.

Thank you that you confront us at times. Thank you that you accept our confession of sin when we sin. In Jesus, all because of what you've done. So we we ask for your righteousness to continue to pervade our lives. We pray you give us more hope, more faith, more trust, and I pray that you'd use this weekend to build all of that into us as we go to church.

So we pray for our leaders. They've got a big job to do, Lord. And we pray they would stay faithful to the text. They would help us as they preach the word to help us know how to navigate living in a very broken world. Thanks for the time of QA now and we just commit this time to you. Ask for your wisdom as we do it. In Jesus name. Amen.

Steve Brown: Amen. Pete, an email question, does the Bible prohibit cremation?

Guest (Male): Nowhere that I know of.

Steve Brown: I don't, me neither. I, you know, my wife says she's going to be cremated so she'll be warm. That'll be the first time in her life she was warm. Have you, have you ever watched cremation?

Guest (Male): I never have. No. I mean, you would have to get a special dispensation to get into the factory where they do that, right?

Steve Brown: Yeah, you know, early on, and I was in ministry before when you were still diapers. But during that time, they were writing books. One of them was The American Way of Death that were very critical of the funeral industry.

I met a guy on Cape Cod where I served my first church. His name was Norm Hallet. I liked him a lot. I went to him and I said, Norm, people are saying bad things about you guys. If they're true, I'm going to be your worst nightmare. If they're not true, I'll be your defender, but you're going to have to show me.

He took me under his wing, and we actually, I did everything except I didn't go when they were doing the embalming thing. When he explained it to me, I almost fainted. But I went to a casket factory. I watched a cremation from behind and saw it done and realized what it was all about.

I helped with some funerals that I didn't conduct, and I became a person who really admired those who were doing a service and doing it as a ministry in order to glorify Christ.

Guest (Male): Yeah. I I don't think the Bible outlaws it. I I think, I think you're within rights to do it. I think that resurrection is not a molecule by molecule thing. I mean, it's a supernatural work of God. There are some that would say that it it honors it honors God by having the body in a memorial service to show that there'll be a future resurrection. So there are some that will take a pretty strong argument. In the body of Christ, we have both sides.

Steve Brown: Boy, don't we.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: Hey, listen, enough on that. Let's go to our phone lines.

Guest (Male): So I'm reading the book Evangelical Pharisees. The author, Michael Reeves. Who are the Sandemanians? They are a group that seems to believe that through Bible knowledge, you can go into heaven. Or the other question is, the Socinians, I think they're called. They are a non-Trinitarian group that believes on right reasoning back in the 1500s.

Steve Brown: Well, I, you know, we we listened to your question before and we decided we didn't know what you were talking about. So we, so we did some research. And some of those are dangerous views, aren't they? I mean, are we going to get to heaven by how much we know and how accurate it is?

Guest (Male): No. No, we're not. It's faith in Christ, right?

Steve Brown: That's it.

Guest (Male): Not even how much faith we have. It's faith in Christ. Period.

Steve Brown: Yeah. Period.

Guest (Male): So that's important to keep in mind, but it's been, this has been the problem down through the church history is that people stray away from the radical nature of the gospel, and they get into self-righteous actions.

Steve Brown: It's really true. And, you know, in fact, it's the most dangerous thing around because the good news is not news with a kicker.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: I mean, it is just what you said. You run to Jesus, you can't fix yourself, and he'll fix you and fix and forgive you and accept you, and you'll go to heaven, period.

Guest (Male): That's right. Don't add anything to that.

Steve Brown: And these groups that you mentioned in that book, who added things are doing a great disservice to the word of God.

Guest (Male): Yeah, absolutely. We've heard of the I I looked up Sandemanians, that took place in Scotland in the 1730s, and, you know, they had some good things and some bad things. But we just need to be biblical. We and and I think that Michael Reeves probably is doing a service in writing this book and and pointing out how easy self-righteousness is.

Steve Brown: Yeah. Yeah.

Guest (Male): As we grow in Christ, and self-righteousness ought to diminish in our life.

Steve Brown: In fact, the sign of Christ's presence and how much the person is walking with Christ is humility.

Guest (Male): Yeah, that's right.

Steve Brown: It really is.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: You know, you just don't see people who are close to Jesus being arrogant.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: They know better.

Guest (Male): They know better. But I want to say something in addition to that, you can be humble and bold. You can be humble, you can be humble and powerful.

Steve Brown: Oh, yeah, that's right.

Guest (Male): And so sometimes we think that that you got to be nice, and and nice means never contradict anybody. Never say you're wrong. Well, Jesus oftentimes contradicted people and in Mark he says, you're wrong to the Pharisees, you don't understand the scriptures or the power of God. You're wrong.

Steve Brown: You know something that hit me recently and I was teaching in Galatians where Paul was saying some real bad things about his enemies.

Guest (Male): Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Brown: If you read the book of Galatians, you move toward the end and he starts talking about the fruit of the spirit, love, and joy, and peace, and gentleness. And you think, Paul, you didn't do that at the beginning of the letter. Are you a hypocrite? Not at all. He was exactly what you're saying. He spoke truth, but at the same time, there was humility and love that was a part of that.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: This is an interesting question. If the Jews didn't have the death penalty that they could administer how to put Jesus to death, why were they able to stone Stephen and for that matter, Paul and Barnabas?

Guest (Male): Yeah, good question, huh?

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): I I I think the answer to that is that they did have the death penalty under the theocracy in the Old Testament.

Steve Brown: Yeah, but they were under Rome.

Guest (Male): But now, they're under Rome. And so they they kind of cut loose on Stephen. Stephen was not a a criminal in the Roman system at that point. Jesus was too big, too big a person for them to just stone to death.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): They couldn't do it.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): That would have caused an insurrection.

Steve Brown: But these were probably clandestine things that took place apart from the legal structure.

Guest (Male): Right.

Steve Brown: If you ever watched The Chosen, a lot of things were going on that Rome didn't approve of but didn't know about.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: And so surely that's true about those things. Now Paul became a political prisoner of Rome as well. And that's why he and he's a Roman citizen. So they couldn't just nail him like that. Barnabas, as far as we know, Barnabas was Barnabas was not.

Guest (Male): Executed.

Steve Brown: I don't know about that.

Guest (Male): I don't think so.

Steve Brown: Okay. This is a good question and we can answer it in 15 seconds. What does the Bible teach about the way we should worship?

Guest (Male): Ah.

Steve Brown: Not much, but it is we should.

Guest (Male): That's right. There's a lot of latitude.

Steve Brown: Yeah, there really is.

Guest (Male): We should be praying, we should be singing, we should be reading scripture, we should be expounding scripture. But we have a lot of latitude.

Steve Brown: We do, but not some places. It's time for us to go. But first, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.