(Guest Blogger: Dr. Robert Heerspink is director of Back to God Ministries International and a regular speaker on the weekly Back to God Hour radio program.  Before joining BTGMI, he served as the pastor for four churches in Michigan.)

This summer, I conducted a graveside service. Since I moved from congregational ministry, I don’t do many funerals anymore. But I received a call from a friend that their 42 year-old son had been found dead in his apartment. I had gotten to know him over the years. His father asked if I would do the funeral. Well, of course, I would. And so on a cool summer Saturday, I found myself standing next to a casket in the Grandville cemetery, surrounded by mourners.

Walking through that cemetery on that Saturday brought to mind an experience earlier in the week. Driving to my office in the suburbs of Chicago, I came off the expressway and at the stoplight, directly before me, was Burr Oak Cemetery. The cemetery had been staked out, police officers were combing the grounds, and cemetery workers were digging in the dirt along the edge of the road. It was unsettling—almost macabre. Burr Oak Cemetery had made international news when it was reported that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of graves were disturbed so that the cemetery plots could be recycled and resold.

I would imagine that those who emptied the caskets and scattered remains had a defense for what they did. They were able to sleep nights because they reasoned, “It’s just bones. Dead bodies don’t matter. Corpses don’t count.”

And yet that Saturday at the graveside, we closed the graveside service with these words of committal: “We commit his body to the ground . . . in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the body, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” We didn’t just talk about the soul of the deceased—we talked about his physical body.

It seems that bodies count after all. They certainly count to God. And that means they should count to us. You see, when Christians talk about resurrection, they aren’t using the concept as a nice way of saying that Jesus values or ideals were raised from death. The disciples themselves didn’t face martyrdom because they were carrying Jesus’ principles to the world. They faced death because they had the audacity to declare that Christ’s own body was raised from the grave—and if his body, then someday our bodies. Corpses count to God. They count so much God will raise my body from the grave.

But that poses a few questions with regard to our “way of death.” What practices honor the Biblical message of resurrection? The American practice of prettying the body so that loved ones say, “It looks like he’s sleeping!” Is cremation body-honoring? Do we honor the gospel by doing everything we can by embalming practices that ‘preserve’ the body? Or don’t any of these things matter to Christians? What ‘ways of death’ affirm the way of life?