If Jesus was God, did God die on the cross?
The question sounds like a trap, but it goes to the heart of who Jesus is: if the One nailed to the cross was truly God, then what exactly happened when He died? Commentators handle this with great care, because both a careless yes and a flat no can damage the truth about Christ's Person.
The One who died was God the Son
Writers do not dodge the question. They answer it with the qualifications Scripture itself requires:
Truth & TestimonyWe may shrink from saying bluntly, "God died." How can God die, who has immortality and is the Source of life? The bare statement "God died" needs important qualification. First, the One who died was God the Son, not the Father or the Holy Spirit. Second, He did not die as God, but in the Manhood He had taken. However, to qualify a statement is not to deny it. To say it was the Son of Man and not God who died is to divide His Person and make Him two Persons.
So the answer is neither a simple yes nor a simple no. It is: God the Son died, and He died in the humanity He had taken for that very purpose.
Deity itself cannot die — which is why He became Man
The reason the incarnation matters is exactly here. God, in Himself, cannot die; so He came into death by another route.
James McBroomAlthough God cannot die, He has in wonderful grace taken His own way to come right down into death in its deepest and most solemn sense, even the death of His own offended majesty and judgment against sin. This is where the Incarnation fits in with divine precision. The Son, who is God, becomes Man to bear, on one side the judgment due to man, and on the other, to give effect, on God's part, to all the purposes of eternity.
One Person from beginning to end
A common escape route is to say the man Jesus died while the divine Son did not. Commentators reject that, because it splits Christ into two people. One writer points to the flow of Paul's sentence in Philippians 2:
VariousThe Person who is in the form of God at the beginning of the magnificent sentence in Philippians 2 verse 6 is the same Person who was obedient to the death of the cross in verse 8. The subject of the sentence is the same throughout. There is no change of Person halfway.
Why the answer cannot be a flat "no"
If we refuse to say the Son died, something enormous is lost. Darby weighs both sides in a single breath:
J. N. DarbyOf course, if I think of the Son as a divine Person, He could not die… The Son as a divine Person of course could not die, looked at on His own; but He who was Son died and gave Himself, not in isolation, but in all the infinite value of His Person and in His divine love to us… A person may object to saying the Son died, because he is looking at Him separately as a divine Person; but if it is denied that He who was the Son died, I have lost the value of His death, which is infinite, both in love and in value.
The size of the Person sets the size of the sacrifice:
C. StanleyThe infinite Son of God can only offer an infinite sacrifice… Nothing short of the sacrifice of an infinite Person could meet the claims of the holy, infinite God.
What death is — and what it is not
Part of the confusion comes from assuming death means a person stops existing. Scripture does not use the word that way.
George DavisonWe must guard the fact that death does not touch anyone's personality, much less that of the Son of God; the person does not die, it is the condition in which the person is.
He was never death's captive
Nothing forced this death on Him. He was never subject to it; He entered it deliberately.
A. J. PollockOur Lord did die, a glorious sacrificial death, and that because death had no claim whatsoever on Him. Our Lord plainly affirmed this. We read: "For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again" (John 10:17-18).
Commentators differ in emphasis on how far the wording should be pressed. One warns that "carelessness in use of words is dangerous and can lead to serious error," while others insist the fact must still be confessed. The safest speech follows Scripture's own: the Son of God gave Himself, and God purchased the church with the blood of His own.
Summary
- Person — The One who hung on the cross was a divine Person: God the Son, not the Father, not the Holy Spirit.
- Manhood — He did not die as God, who cannot die; He died in the humanity He had taken, and He took it for that very reason.
- Undivided — Splitting Him into a man who died and a God who did not makes two Persons out of one; Philippians 2 runs from "form of God" to "death of the cross" without changing its subject.
- Value — Because the Person is infinite, the death is of infinite worth; deny that He who is the Son died, and the value of the cross collapses.
- Voluntary — Death had no claim on Him. He laid His life down by His own authority, and took it up again.