THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY

The Calgary Sun, October 3^rd, 2009. All men would be immortal if given the option and means. Immortality is the immemorial pursuit. It figured in the building of a tower called Babel. The ideal of it is in every stone making up the Egyptian pyramid. This great hope coils around every mummified body. Are we drawing nearer, maybe, to the long sought after conquest of conquests? It is hard to believe that scientists are on the track to achieving the glorious end to the benefit of their clients when we learn that tuna cans might have been used as pedestals for severed heads, and that the alleged tuna cans might have been removed by swings from a monkey wrench! Have you placed your confidence in something like cryonics? The quest for immortality has not yielded better means to the desired goal than what we’ve read about in science fiction. Frankenstein’s monster has a better chance at evading death than any man laid out on the table of 21^st century science! If man cannot yet make his balding head grow hair, be sure that he must be light years away from making old men perpetually young!

Other fields than cryonics are no further ahead in making mortal man into man immortal. Chelation therapy will not immortalize you. The hyperbaric chamber will not eternalize you. Some movie stars are quick to smile agreeably at the suggestion that they are ageless beauties. But wait a while; an opportunist paparazzo will show the truth on the cover of a magazine!

Men try hard to believe in some way of being, or becoming, immortal. The reason they turn to far-out fads like cryonics has more to do with unbelief than belief. “How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” (1 Corinthians 15.12.) Most men will not believe the biblical formula for immortality because it comes through death. Not only does it come through bodily death, but for immortality to beget the aspect of felicity, or bliss, there must first be the death of self while here on earth. Men do not like that. The doctrine of repentance puts them off. So they try for eternal life by their own means and on their own terms.

But no man will be immortal except by the word and power of God. And all men will rise from the dead. “Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his [Jesus’] voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5.28, 29.) Immortality is for everyone. Do you think that God would allow it to those alone who can afford to freeze-dry their bodies? Do you think that he would allow it without judgment being passed first?

Some men look forward to death as if immortality will not happen. It is because they despise biblical immortality and their own increasing decrepitude. They do not want to age; but neither do they want God. So they hope for a death of annihilation, or the lie of reincarnation. They will be granted neither. Some men look forward to death because, through grace in their soul they have tasted a drop or two of glory. Why were the twelve sent out by Jesus? “That men should repent” (Mark 6.12.) Turn from your most treasured sins; if you do, then Jesus did die for every one of them to give you immortality: ‘the resurrection of life.’