If Jesus was God, did God die on the cross?

We may shrink from saying baldly, “God died”. How can God die who has immortality and is the Source of life?15 The bare statement, “God died”, needs important qualification. Firstly, the One who died was God the Son, not the Father or the Holy Spirit. Secondly, 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. The fact is that God the Son became a Man for this very purpose, that He might die.16 He did not cease to be God when He died. The blood that He shed was human blood, but it was the blood that He had taken as His own.17 The Son of God shed His blood,18 and experienced death.19 He who is God laid down His life for us.20 It is the infinitude of His Person that produces the infinite atonement.

We may shrink from saying baldly, “God died”. How can God die who has immortality and is the Source of life?15 The bare statement, “God died”, needs important qualification. Firstly, the One who died was God the Son, not the Father or the Holy Spirit. Secondly, 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. The fact is that God the Son became a Man for this very purpose, that He might die.16 He did not cease to be God when He died. The blood that He shed was human blood, but it was the blood that He had taken as His own.17 The Son of God shed His blood,18 and experienced death.19 He who is God laid down His life for us.20 It is the infinitude of His Person that produces the infinite atonement.

Of course, if I think of the Son as a divine Person, He could not die - no more, I repeat, could a human soul in fact. But if a man not having a soul was there, what is his death? Nonentity. If Christ was only as a man there, it was no more than another man there, only sinless - that is, it was nothing. The Son as a divine Person of course could not die, looked at apart; but He who was Son died and gave Himself, not as apart, but in all the infinite value of His Person and in His divine love to us. I do not say Mary was, the mother of God, if I may compare them, but she was the mother of Him personally who was God, and if He was not, His birth was nothing. A person may object to saying the Son died, because he is looking at Him apart as a divine Person; but if it be denied that He being Son died, I have lost the value of His death, which is infinite, both in love and value.

Judgment is divine and infinite, so also the Sacrifice. No Theophany — Divine manifestation as seen in the Old Testament again and again, will suffice. No, it must be the great and glorious Theanthropos, which is God and Man in one glorious Person for ever. But while insisting on the divine side nothing must be allowed to weaken the other. It was a Man who died, not merely a Divine Person in a human condition. A condition could not die for sinners, nor be nailed to a tree. No, we adoringly behold in Him who hung there God, in the full revelation of all that God is, while we see Him; a Man, the first to enter into all that that revelation unfolds.

Thus we know that the infinite glory of His Divine Person cannot be separated from His humanity in His death for us, and that it was no condition laid aside when the Lord tells us that He would lay down His life and take it again, saying, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades, nor wilt Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption" (R.V.); and the Holy Ghost explains that David "spake this of the Christ, that neither was He left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption." Where "flesh" is the explanation of "Holy One," and the Person spoken of as God's Holy One, is identified with the body of the Lord Jesus; so indissoluble was the union, so inscrutable the Person of the Son. How any man who reads his Bible could argue that when it speaks of Christ's dying for us, the just for the unjust, that He was "put to death in the flesh," that Christ, "our Passover, was slain," that "He was cut off out of the land of the living," that "He gave up the Ghost," that "by wicked hands He was crucified and slain," that we are "redeemed to God by His blood" (and "the blood is the life"), that Jesus our Lord was "raised from the dead," that "we are reconciled to God through the death of His Son," that He Himself announces that He must go to Jerusalem and "be killed"; and again, "I am He that liveth, and became dead," and that "the God of Peace brought again from the dead the Great Shepherd," that it means simply laying aside condition or position is almost past comprehension.

The reality of His death is a fundamental truth of Christianity, and to fritter this truth away by reducing it to a Person laying aside "human condition," or ascribing death only to the human nature of a composite Christ, is merely the vain effort of a speculative mind, anxious to reduce this wondrous and unsearchable mystery to what may be grasped by any finite mind.

I think we 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. This is one of the most difficult things to explain or understand. Perhaps the most helpful remarks on the subject are found in a footnote to John 11 in Mr. Darby's Synopsis.

Since He was God—the man who stood before them—and since the human life which He had assumed was as truly His own life, as His Deity was His own, He possessed the right to dispose of it as He wished, and in sovereign grace and yet in obedience to the will of the Father, He lays it down, He dies, as Peter speaks in Acts 2:31, that, as was prophesied of Him in the i6th Psalm, "His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption," thus telling us that the laying down His life was the separation of soul and body, He no more for a time in living humanity, but laying down His life and taking it again.

Of none but Jesus is it or could it be said that He gave up (παρέδωκεν) the spirit, which is wholly distinct from the "expired" (ἐξέπνευσεν) of Mark and Luke, confounded with the former by our translators. To expire could apply to anyone's death, the blessed Lord being man as truly as any other; to give the spirit up, as said in John, expresses His Divine glory though a dying man, as the One Who had title to lay down His life no less than to take it again. So Matthew implies Who the dying Messiah was in "He dismissed the spirit" (ἂφῆκε τὸ πν.). Nor can words be more characteristic of Luke than "Father, into Thy hands I commit My spirit," nor of John than "It is finished." He was man, though God; He was God though man; and both in one Person.

The reader will remark how perfectly the account of the Lord's death suits the general character and special design of John's Gospel and of no other. Here Jesus is the conscious Son, the Divine Person Who made all things, but became flesh that He might not only give eternal life, but die as a propitiation for our sins. And here, therefore, here only, He said, "It is finished, and bowing His head, delivered up His spirit." There are witnesses, as we shall see, but they are of God, not of man or the creature, and they intimately flow from His own Person. No darkness is mentioned, no cry that His God had forsaken Him, no rending of the veil, no earthquake, no centurion's confession; all of which meet to proclaim the rejected Messiah (Matt. 27). So substantially, save the earthquake, the Servant Son of God obedient to death in Mark 15. Luke 23 adds the testimony to His grace in the crucified robber, His firstfruits in Paradise, and the centurion's witness to "Jesus Christ the righteous," after He had committed His spirit into His Father's hands. It was reserved for John to set forth His death Who was God not less surely than man, and as such. The Creator but man lifted up from the earth could say, in dying for sin to God's glory, "It is finished." The work, the infinite work, was done for the putting away of sin by His sacrifice. Thereon hangs not only the blessing of every soul that is to be justified by faith, but of new heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. "It is finished," τετέλεσται: one word! yet what word ever contained so much?

Both Matthew and Mark tell us that after crying with a loud voice Jesus expired. It would appear that Luke and John each give us a part of that last utterance. If so, it must have been, "It is finished, Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." The first part helps to emphasize His Deity, so John records it: the second emphasizes His perfect Humanity, in its dependence upon God, so Luke records it. True also to the character of his Gospel, John chronicles the very act of His death in a special way — "He delivered up His spirit" (New Trans.). The wise man of the Old Testament has told us, "There is no man that has power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither has he power in the day of death" (Eccles. 8:8), but here is One who had that power. He is able at one moment to lift up His voice with unimpaired strength, and the next moment to deliver up His spirit, and thus fulfil His own words recorded in John 10. True, there He spoke of the laying down of His "life" or "soul," saying, "No man takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." But the two statements are entirely in agreement for we all know that when the human spirit quits the body a man's life on earth ceases. When God calls his spirit, go he must. Here is One who has full command over His spirit; He delivered it up to His Father, and thus He laid down His life.

Now God was in Christ, which changed everything; but not with respect to the reality of His humanity, with all its affections, its sentiments, its natural needs of soul and body, which were all in Jesus, who underwent consequently the effect of all that surrounded Him, only according to the Spirit, and without sin. No man takes His life from Him, He lays it down, but He does this when the moment appointed by God was come. In fact, He gives Himself up to the effect of the iniquity of man, because it was the will of God that He came to accomplish. He allows Himself to be crucified and put to death, only He is master of the moment in which He yields up His spirit. He works no miracle to hinder the effect of the cruel means of death which man was using, or to screen His humanity. He leaves it to the consequence of those means. His divinity is not used to screen Him from it, to screen Him from death, but to add all its moral value, all its perfection to His obedience. He works no miracle that He may not die, but He works a miracle by dying. He acts according to His divine prerogative in dying, but not in screening Himself from death, for He commends His spirit to His Father as soon as all is finished.