The QUESTIONS episode tackles organ donation through a Christian lens, arguing that brain death criteria may prematurely harvest organs before God declares true death. The speaker links historical opposition to cremation and embalming to the doctrine of bodily resurrection, citing biblical judgments against scattered remains to emphasize treating bodies as eternal physical entities. While advocating for sacrificial generosity, he warns against Gnostic tendencies that devalue the flesh, urging a balance between donation and respecting the body's significance for potential miraculous reassembly. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Theological Underpinnings of Embalming00:02:52
What are your thoughts on organ donation?
Knowing God sustains life and death, has numbered our days and predestined our life, should or should we not donate our organs after we die?
That's really a thoughtful question.
I don't know.
I haven't given this a lot of thought, but I have immediate thoughts.
I have my hot take, if you will.
You're right, because I think what Tiffany is getting at for our listeners is.
She's recognizing that just practically, in most cases that I'm aware of, the timeline of when the organs are harvested, the person is still alive.
So it could be an instance where the person is brain dead, for instance, but their heart is still beating, their lungs are still breathing.
And so it gets into the question of when do we actually declare that a person is dead?
And certainly we have modern ways of doing that within medicine, but it gets into the question of.
When does the soul leave the body?
And when is a person dead?
Not by modern medical criteria, but by God's criteria.
When does God recognize someone as being dead?
And so it gets into that.
So are we counting someone out too soon?
Because we have a miracle working God.
Somebody could be brain dead and they could come back to life.
And so, harvesting organs and those kinds of things.
So, one, I would say you probably need to be careful with that.
And have some very clear stipulations of if you're going to be an organ donor, when your organs should be donated, that you should be truly dead, not just brain dead, but like you are dead, dead.
So that's one thing that I would say.
Two, in addition to that, and you guys, some of you are probably going to feel like this is almost even superstitious, but I do believe this is a Christian thought.
Historically, the Christian church has been against cremation.
Are you aware of that?
Cremation, meaning that when someone dies, they would be cremated, burned, incinerated, and then their ashes placed in an urn or something like that.
Traditionally, historically, the church has been against that practice.
We believe as the Christian, it's not just, oh, it's our vanity, and so we embalm someone so that they still look like they're alive.
Put on makeup, you know, and we basically have a beauty dresser come in, you know, when someone's dead and make their body look aesthetically and physically pleasing.
Yeah, there may be some vanity from our culture in that and the way that we do open caskets and funerals.
But there are actually also some theological underpinnings of even embalming and trying to preserve the body.
Belief in Bodily Resurrection00:11:32
We know the body's going to decay, the Bible talks about that.
But trying to make the body intact as long as possible and even as it decays, that it would decay in one place, namely in a casket buried underground.
Why do we bury bodies?
Because we don't want coyotes and beasts and birds of the air to come and eat the carcass.
That was another, that's what David says to Goliath, right?
And that was a judgment.
That's a judgment of God.
David says, Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that taunts the armies of the living God?
I tell you, I will feed your carcass to the birds, right?
And that was a judgment.
That's not, I'm going to kill you and then give you a really respectable funeral.
No, feeding your carcass to the birds is a bad thing, just in case somebody missed that.
That's a bad thing.
Same thing with Jezebel.
When Jezebel is cast down out of her window by the eunuchs and she splits open on the ground and dies, one of the judgments, and this was prophesied of her that this would happen, but one of the judgments is that the wild dogs come and tear apart her body and eat it and devour it.
And again, that's a bad thing.
That's a judgment.
And it's bad in one sense because it's not respectable.
Of the person, right?
That person who we loved and cherished, not in the case of Jezebel, but for us, when a loved one dies, we want to show our respects.
And one of the ways that we show our respects is the way that we deal respectfully with their body, even though they're no longer alive.
We want to deal respectfully with their body.
But from Christian doctrine, it's also the sense that we actually believe.
I know that this is crazy to some people, but this is Christianity.
We believe in a bodily resurrection.
That we're not just going to be given new bodies, but that we will have new bodies, but our new bodies will be this actual body made new.
This body, not another one, but this body made new.
Not another new body, but this old body glorified.
This old body resurrected.
And that is going to be our eternal existence.
What I'm saying is this a million years from now, this is not hyperbole, this is Christian doctrine 101.
A million years.
Years from now, I will be in fellowship with all you who are saints and born again by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, and in fellowship with you and in communion with the triune God, living a physical existence in this body.
Now, this body will have undergone some serious renovation, but it will be this body.
And you guys will recognize me in heaven.
You will.
You'll be able to say, That body's different than it was then.
His skin is a little bit better.
And clear.
You know, like his, you know, he looks a little bit more fit and in better health and this and that.
And like, you know, but you'll be able to say, that's Joel.
Oh, that's the right response guy.
I know him because it'll be this body made new, changed, renovated.
Yeah, uh huh.
Praise God.
But not a completely separate body, this body.
You know, even some of the creeds and confessions and even old Christian hymns talk about the sea, those who were lost at sea, but who are in the Lord, who are Christians, that the sea will give up its dead.
At the last trumpet with the final return of Christ.
And think about that.
I mean, bodies that were lost at sea and that were eaten by sharks and all this kind of stuff.
And it's been thousands of years and particles all over the seven oceans, you know.
But that's actually going to happen.
Jesus is going to return.
And all these bits and pieces of people's bodies over thousands of years have been spread out in the ocean with people who are sailors, who were Christian sailors lost at sea and that were eaten by fish and sharks.
And it happened 20,000 years ago or whatever.
This is going to happen.
I'm not saying the world is 20,000 years old, but if Jesus tarries, just for the record, but it happened 5,000 years ago, Jesus is going to return and every little particle of their body is going to be somehow zapped up together by Christ and his power and then glorified and resurrected and made new.
It'll be their body.
So Christ is going to do that and Christ can do that and will do that.
The question is though, just because Christ can take every little particle of a human body scattered abroad in every ocean over, you know, Thousands of years with a Christian sailor who was lost at sea.
Can Christ do that?
Will Christ do that?
Yes.
But should we make Christ do that?
That's kind of the question.
Should we make him do that?
That should by cremation, right?
Should we burn our loved ones and then scatter their ashes over the ocean, which is a fairly common practice?
My uncle did that with my grandmother.
And I believe my grandmother was a Christian.
And I believe that Jesus will make short work of finding every single one of my grandmother's particles in the ocean whenever he returns and resurrecting her body and glorifying it.
I think Jesus will be able to handle that with ease.
But should we have done that?
I think there's Gnosticism, is what I'm getting at.
I think that Gnosticism has pervaded every element of our lives and the way we think as Christians today in this modern era.
We are not just spiritual beings, and we're not just going to be floating on the clouds as bodiless souls for all of eternity.
We are physical beings.
The body matters, the physical world matters, the physical nations matter.
And that's why we don't care about politics.
Well, that's a physical kingdom.
Jesus' kingdom is not of this world.
Yeah, it's not of this world.
But Jesus' kingdom is in this world.
It is in this world.
It's not of this world, meaning it's not carnal.
It's not Jesus' kingdom, it doesn't operate by worldly principles.
It's not of the world.
But Jesus' kingdom is in the world because God loves the world.
Same thing, our bodies, it's not another body.
It'll be this body made new.
Same thing with the earth.
The earth is not going to be disintegrated, annihilated, and dissolved like snow.
That's not what Peter's talking about in his epistle.
This is symbology and it's talking about the old covenant.
And it's not literally saying that God is going to disintegrate the entire planet and we're going to have a whole other earth.
No, it'll be this earth.
It'll be the new heavens and the new earth.
But what'll be new about this earth is that it will be the old earth made new, same as our bodies.
So we should care.
We should care about our bodies and we should care about the earth.
And we should care about when a Christian dies, how we treat their body, not just for the sake of showing respect, but also for the sake of recognizing this body.
In real terms, it's not, we don't just believe a hocus pocus, it's not a fairy tale, right, guys?
Do we believe this stuff or not?
Like, I actually believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and that one day he is going to physically return.
And he is going to say, instead of Lazarus, come forth, this time he's going to say, redeemed, church, come forth.
And every single Christian is going to burst out of the grave or out of the sea, will give up its dead or out of wherever they are.
And Jesus is going to resurrect them and glorify their bodies for an eternal physical existence with Him in the new heavens, which will be on this earth made new.
That's Christian doctrine.
That's what we believe.
So, all that being said, some people need a kidney, some people need a liver, some people need a heart.
And Christians, Christians, we are generous people, we are sacrificial people, we are helping people.
We are.
We are.
But we're also not Gnostics.
So, I guess what I'm saying is I'm not saying no Christian should be an organ donor.
But what I am saying is that no Christian should be a Gnostic.
And we should somehow try to strike the balance and hold the tension between being sacrificial, even at the cost of our own lives and our organs, but also recognizing that the physical body matters.
The physical body matters.
It's not nothing.
I think some Christians, in an overly idealistic and even Gnostic sense, Are willing to be organ donors because the body is of no account to them.
I mean, Paul even says physical training is of no value.
No, physical training is of some value.
Godliness supersedes it.
Godliness is more important, but the physical body and exercise and all these kinds of things has some value because the body has meaning.
And the body is actually eternal.
It will be.
Yes, you will die.
And yes, your body will decay.
But just because these things are true doesn't mean that your body won't be resurrected and glorified and eternal, having an eternal bodily existence with the Lord and not with another body, but this body.
And so we should care.
We should care.
And so, with that, yeah, first, make sure you're really dead.
And I don't know how I feel about the brain dead thing.
I really don't.
I really don't.
That your heart is still beating, but you're brain dead.
But you're an organ donor and you've got that bracelet on, and they're already slicing up your body and taking out your heart or your liver, your lungs.
That's, I don't know.
I don't feel comfortable with that.
So, one, make sure you're actually dead.
And two, I think there's a difference in, like, for instance, like my dad has one kidney.
And he's fine.
He's had one kidney for years.
But if that kidney got injured and he needed a kidney transplant, I think there's a massive difference in me giving my dad a kidney, which it might have to be one of my brothers because I'm adopted and they might for the biological purposes and those kinds of things and the genes, but whatever.
Giving, as a Christian, a kidney, I think there's a difference in that versus laying in the hospital, your heart's still beating, it's being cut out of your chest.
And it's like the doctor said, you know, that it's over.
This guy's dead.
But did God say it's over?
Did God declare you dead?
Was it over?
And then, even with that, you know, multiple organs now being harvested.
And now it's like there's, you've got a part of your body buried underground.
And then you've got your liver in this person, Ted, who lives in Kansas, and your heart is over there, and Susie in, you know, in England.
Again, when Jesus returns, he can figure it out.
He's the supernatural God.
But I don't know.
So I'm not saying no, but I'm just saying we should make those decisions as Christian theologians and not as Greek mythical Gnostics.
And I think a lot of Christians do the latter.
They make those decisions that are hard decisions that maybe the answer is yes, but they make those decisions too quickly and too easily because they don't have a Christian view of the body.
Right Response Conference Announced00:00:42
And its significance.
Big news, really big news.
Our next Right Response Conference is in the works.
We've got a number of things already lined up and organized.
This is what we've got so far the whole conference, three days long on post millennialism and theonomy.
And the speakers Dr. James White, Dr. Joseph Boot, Gary DeMar, and of course, yours truly, Pastor Joel Webbin.
We've got a great lineup.
We've got great topics.
If you want to find out dates, And location and registration and anything else, go and visit our website, rightresponseconference.com.