“Dead All Over”

Sunday, March 03, 2013

     When does true physical death occur?  I read a study recently where given the proper treatment, a person can technically be revived up to 90 minutes after they are pronounced "dead" because many brain cells do not lose function until about 8 hours after a person dies.  Is death the point when all cells lose function?  Some have used such evidence to deny resurrection events in the Bible as miraculous.  What does the Bible say on the subject?

Sincerely,
Morbid Curiosity

Dear Morbid Curiosity,

The Bible says that the death happens when the spirit leaves the body (Jas 2:26), but that doesn’t answer your question because we don’t exactly know when that is.  We once thought people were dead when they stopped breathing, but we’ve since learned that isn’t always true.  We then said it was when the heart stopped… except we now use defibrillators to restart people’s hearts.  The exact moment of death is the unanswerable question – but everybody agrees that there is a point of death; we just can’t precisely pinpoint it.

However, the arguments that resurrection events in the Bible weren’t miraculous are easy to handle.  Jesus was in the tomb – THREE days.  Everyone agrees that after three days, the person is really dead.  When Lazarus was raised from the dead, the people didn’t want to open the tomb because the body would have begun to decompose (Jhn 11:49).  Decomposing bodies definitely have crossed the threshold of death.  These are at least two resurrection events that cannot be rationalized away by saying they weren’t actually “dead”.

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