The other truth we shall consider is that God died upon the cross. Here again I am reminded of another street-corner question of about the same vintage: "You say that God died upon the cross; what happened to the universe while God was dead?" The suggestion is made that it was not God who died on Calvary, but the humanity of Christ. But in death, it is always someone who dies, a person; and upon Calvary’s cross, only one Person hung: God the Son in the manhood that was his.
Thus it was God the Son who died—not, of course, in his divine nature, which cannot know death and which holds the universe in existence, but in the human nature which was so utterly his. Death, remember, does not for any one of us mean annihilation. It means the separation of soul and body, a separation that at the last judgment will be ended. Upon Calvary, the body that was God the Son’s was separated from the soul that was likewise his. And on the third day they were united again. In his human nature God the Son rose from the death that in his human nature had been his.
In our reading of the Gospels, it is vital that we should never forget that every word uttered and every action performed by Christ is uttered and performed by God the Son. With the words, perhaps even more than with actions, we shall find sayings we are often tempted to call hard. The one Person said I, in the divine nature and in the human nature, in an infinite nature and a finite nature. He could say, "I and the Father are one"; he could say, "The Father is greater than I"; it is the same Person, uttering the truth of distinct natures, but asserting each nature as truly his own.