From God Who Is There, The: Finding Your Place in God’s Story
By and large, the New Testament does not talk of God dying. It speaks of Jesus being the God-man, and it speaks of Jesus dying. Never is there a hint that the Father dies. Of course not: he is not a human being that he could die. Only the Son can die, only the “Word made flesh.” Jesus can die because he is a human being, a man. But if he is also confessed to be God and worshiped as God (see for example John 20:28), is there not a sense in which we may speak of God dying?
By and large the Bible avoids such choice of words. Once in a while, however, we find passages that come so close to this. When the apostle Paul gives a speech to some church elders from Ephesus, he says, “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood” (Acts 20:28, emphasis added). Isn’t that remarkable? “God … with his own blood”? Now, of course, if pressed, Paul could parse that a bit. He could say, “Of course, the person I have in mind is not God the Father but the Son of God, Jesus, who is himself God and because he is God and because he does give his life and shed his blood, therefore, it is appropriate to say that God sheds his blood .” If you want to unpack it, that is what Paul means.
Nevertheless, do not let the shock of the language stop you. This is God’s action in Christ Jesus, the man who is also God. This is not the death of one human individual and no more. It is a human individual who is also the living God who hangs on that cross, not because he is forced to do so by circumstance but because he is fulfilling in himself all the strands of the Old Testament’s sacrificial system, the temple system—all the strands from the fall and the promise of the seed of the woman coming to crush the serpent’s head by his own death. Elsewhere Paul can write, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8, emphasis added). As the old hymn says,
Bearing sin and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned he stood.
Sealed my pardon with his blood!
Hallelujah, what a Savior!Philip P. Bliss
It is appropriate to speak of the God who dies.