People Are Eating from the Tree of Life For Real!

It’s called the blessed hope.  It’s life after life—even eternal life—but few there be that find it.  Jesus speaks in Matthew 7:13-14:

13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Jesus says, “strait is the gate.”  Strait means: narrow, close, intimate, strict, rigorous, difficult.  Those are the definers of the entrance into the Kingdom of God. “Narrow is the way” defines the highway the redeemed travel upon.  Deadly latitude is forbidden. 

Will you and I be counted with the few that Jesus speaks of who find life that lasts forever?  Have you been born again?  John 3:3:

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. 

Will today be the day that Jesus Christ becomes the Saviour and Lord of your life?  Do you yearn to be free from the foolishness of this carnal existence?  Are you ready to begin the glorious life of the strait and narrow?  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT. 

GOD SAID, John 10:1:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.

GOD SAID, Genesis 3:22-24:

22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

GOD SAID, Romans 5:12:

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

GOD SAID, John 11:25-26:

25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:

26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

MAN SAID: The idea that there was an immortal Adam and Eve who lost it all as a result of unbelief and disobedience—and that somehow followers of Christ regain this immortality—is ludicrous: downright stupid. 

Now THE RECORD:  Welcome to GodSaidManSaid feature article 803 that will once again certify the inerrancy of God’s Holy Word.  All of these faith-building features are archived here in text and streaming audio for your edification and as ammunition in the battle for the souls of men.  Every Thursday eve, God willing, they grow by one.  Thank you for coming.  May God’s face shine upon you.  May His angels encamp about you and may you dwell in a blessable place. 

Carnal men will always try to find another way.  Like Adam and Eve of old, their carnal sons and daughters seek another way—any way that doesn’t require God’s restrictive Words.  The idea that lost immortality can only be regained through the blood of Christ and one’s surrender to “The Word of God” is fully and totally repugnant to the psyche of these fallen men.  They seek another way. 

Could the Bible’s position on original immortality be true?  Is science once again knocking at the door?

GodSaidManSaid has published numerous features regarding immortality and today, the subject is back in the news.  Foundational excerpts from previous GodSaidManSaid features follow.

▶ GodSaidManSaid, “120: They Just Can’t Help Themselves:”

The headline in the March/April 2015 issue of Psychology Today reads, “Tinkering with Mortality.”  The subhead reads, “The quest for eternal life has been with us eternally.  But the latest interventions raise questions we’ve never before encountered.”  A few paragraphs follow:

The prospect of such treatments has energized a more radical group of thinkers, including Aubrey deGray, controversial chief science officer of SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), who has suggested that, as we engineer aging out of our very cells, some people born today may live 1,000 years.  Such claims have drawn intense interest from certain Silicon Valley magnates who have made the war on aging a near obsession.

In 2013, Google invested in Calico, the California Life Company, hoping that its application of “moonshot thinking” to biotechnology could cure aging once and for all.  (Google and pharmaceutical giant AbbVie have since pledged up to $1.5 billion to Calico.)

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, is counting on artificial intelligence advances that will enable the brain to be downloaded to a computer, bringing about effective immortality, especially if and when that consciousness is uploaded into a fresh bio-robotic husk.  “The whole idea of a ‘species’ is a biological concept,” he says.  “What we are doing is transcending biology.” 

This idea is more fully explored in Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality, by Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., a technologist and medical ethicist who, as CEO of the biotech firm United Therapeutics, is perhaps the nation’s most prominent transgender executive.  Her heady book explores how virtual humanity will extend human life, or at least consciousness, indefinitely.

She proposes nothing less than “liberty from death” via “technoimmortality,” and aims to guide readers through the inevitable transition from “a society of flesh only to a mind-centric society.” [End of quote]

In the May 2015 issue of Discover magazine, the headline reads, “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Immortality.”  A few sentences follow:

Two things are certain in this world: We are born, and we die.  But must we?  Billionaire Dmitry Itskov and his group, the 2045 Initiative, want to cheat death by creating artificial bodies to house human intelligence.  Itskov and friends think they can develop a hologram “avatar,” housing an individual’s personality in an artificial brain, within three decades.  Terasem’s LifeNaut project claims to offer longevity today.  All you need to do is create a LifeNaut account and upload as much information about yourself as possible.  Apparently, the “mindfile” may be used to reconstruct you in the future.  Immortality isn’t merely a 21^st-Century quest.  In the third century B.C., Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang ingested mercury to gain eternal life.  It didn’t work. [End of quote]

The headline in the May 8, 2015 issue of The Week reads, “Tech’s Quest for Immortality.”  The subhead, “Silicon Valley’s billionaires have a new project, said Ariana Eunjung Cha.  They want to defy death.” 

Among the guests was Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist and biogerontologist who had garnered attention for doubling the life-span of a roundworm by disabling a single gene.  Also, there was  Aubrey deGray, a British computer scientist turned theoretician who prophesied that medical advances would stop aging.  And Larry Page, co-founder of an internet-search darling called Google that had big ideas to improve health through the terabytes of data it was collecting. 

The chatter at the dinner party meandered from the value of chocolate in one’s diet to the merits of uploading people’s memories to a computer versus cryofreezing their bodies.  Yet the focus kept returning to one subject: Was death an inevitability—or a solvable problem?

A number of guests were skeptical about achieving immortality. But could science and technology help us live longer—to, say, 150 years? [End of quotes]

▶ GodSaidManSaid, “Adam Was to Live Forever:”

The following excerpt is from the article in U.S. News and World Report, titled "The Cells of Immortality." It reads:

Over the past century, vaccines, antibiotics, and good sanitation have upped the average American's life expectancy by decades, to today''s 74 years for men and 79 for women. Now, new understanding of the genes and chemicals involved in aging may not only help humans live far past that age but, more important, may also help people retain health and strength in those latter years. The discovery of biological clocks ticking away in each of our cells, and a knowledge of how to reset those clocks, open the possibility that a human would never die—at least not from old age.

Then again reiterating information about DNA that we recorded earlier, the article continued:

But even if everyone were to receive special longevity genes, each cell in the body nonetheless carries the plans for its eventual death right in its DNA. At the end of each chromosome is a long strand of "nonsense" DNA called a telomere. Each time a cell divides, the strand gets a bit shorter, like a burning candlewick. When it runs out, the cell can no longer divide and is left to age and die. But scientists have found that the enzyme telomerase can rebuild the strand over and over again. With the help of this substance, human cells have been enjoying immortality in a petri dish at Geron Corp. for more than 200 normal lifetimes.

Now don''t forget, UV rays and bacteria kill DNA.

The following is a lead paragraph in an article in Discover magazine titled "Immortal Cells:"

The clusters of human skin cells basking in a sterile incubator, with alarms poised to go off if the level of carbon dioxide drops or the temperature wavers from 98.6 degrees, appear to be blessed with eternal youth. Under normal circumstances, skin cells divide about 50 to 70 times and then quickly wither and stop dividing. But after nearly two years in a laboratory at Geron, a Menlo Park, California, biotech company, these genetically altered cells are approaching 400 divisions and still show no signs of aging. They just keep multiplying.

From the same article, biochemist Cal Harley had this to report:

"Telomeres are now known to be the clock of cell aging. Telomerase is the enzyme that can rewind the clock. It gives us a way to restore an increased life span, a youthful life span, to aging cells." [End of quotes]

▶ GodSaidManSaid, “Immortality Keeps On Knocking—Part 1:”

The theory suggests that if you can live for the next 20 years, technology and understanding will have increased to such an extent that cures will be found for the physical problems you’ll be experiencing at that time, extending your life by another 20 years.  When you’ve lived your 20-year extension, technology and understanding theoretically will have again increased to cure the physical problems you’ll be experiencing, extending your life even another 20 years, and so on.   Now, that’s providing you’re not murdered, or killed in an auto accident, or killed by terrorists, etc.  Of course, students of the Scriptures know that Hebrews 9:27 reads:

And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:

World-renowned doctor Sanjay Gupta wrote the following in his book, Chasing Life:

All over the world and right in your backyard, there are people who are steadily pushing back the frontier of aging.  They are not content to simply wither away, becoming frail and feeling worthless.  Instead, they are achieving a sort of practical immortality—living as long as they want to live and dying only when they are through living.  … Immortality is on the horizon and it is within our reach for the first time. [End of quote]

Popular Science, in the August 2011 issue, published a feature titled “The Man Who Would Stop Time.”  The article deals with the quest for immortality.  A few excerpts follow:

And last year, Harvard University researcher Ron DePinho published two studies in the journal Nature that have reframed the debate about telomerase activation.  DePinho created an ingenious model whereby he could turn off telomerase in a mouse and then restore it, simply by administering, or withholding, a synthetic estrogen drug.  In the first study, the mice with turned-off telomerase exhibited signs and symptoms of decrepitude akin to what we might endure at the age of 80 or 90: wrinkled skin, sluggish intestines, shrunken brain.  When telomerase production was turned back on, the tissues rejuvenated within a month. 

“We treated these animals that were the equivalent of your grandmother,” DePinho says, “and they became like young adults.”  He says he had expected to be able to stop or slow down the rate of aging.  What he found was the proof-of-concept that living tissue could actually go back in time.  [End of quote]

The following paragraphs are from the February 2013 feature of the magazine Life Extension.  The headline on its front page reads: “How Engineered Stem Cells May Enable Youthful Immortality.”  Several paragraphs from the feature’s nine-page presentation follow:

Very early in the course of human development, a small cluster of cells form, each of which has the power to become any of the cell types in the human body.  Cells that have this power are said to be pluripotent, meaning they have the power (-potent) to become a variety (plurality or pluri-) of cell types.  These cells commit to the cell type they will eventually become, that is, each cell will commit to becoming a reproductive (sperm or egg) cell, or one of the body’s many somatic or life-functioning cell types such as muscle, blood, or brain cells.  If pluripotent cells differentiate into sperm or egg cells, they are remaining in the germ-line, that lineage of cells that connects the generations and is the biological basis of the immortality of the species.  When cells make the decision to become somatic, they turn off telomerase, an enzyme that synthesizes a repeated sequence of DNA over and over again at the end of DNA strands needed to maintain cellular viability.  A recent discovery showed that the use of just a handful of molecules can effectively restore aged somatic cells back to pluripotency.  It is possible to utilize these advances to not only revert a cell in the body back to the all-powerful pluripotent stem cell state, but also to activate telomerase and reset the clock of cell aging all the way back to the very beginning of life.  [End of quotes]

The headline in the August 2016 edition of Life Extension magazine reads, “A New Era!  Curing Aging in Our Lifetime.”  This feature is highlighting a conference that will be held in San Diego, California, from August 4 through 7.  Many presenters will speak at this event.  Each one is profiled and the subject of the talk that will be given.  A few of the headlines regarding the various presentations follow:

• Aubrey de Grey, PhD: Why aging’s days are numbered, and the diseases of aging even more so.

• Greg Fahy, PhD: Reversal of human immunological aging, along with suppression of autoimmune factors.

• Dobri Kiprov, MD: Inhibition of senescent cell behavior in elderly subjects via removal of aged plasma and infusion of young plasma components… Prophylactic plasma exchange in an attempt to suppress inflammation and induce age reversal. 

• Liz Parrish and Bill Andrews, PhD: Extending telomeres to reverse the clock to aging and declining health. 

• Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD: Deep learning and artificial intelligence advances that can accurately evaluate efficacy of age-reversal therapies. 

• Ben Goertzel, PhD: Using advanced artificial intelligence to identify pathways to super-longevity and super-abundant health. 

• Dr. Kristin Comella: Harnessing your body’s own stem cells to reverse the effects of disease and aging. 

Medical science that will add to life expectancy is a wonderful thing, but the underlying quest for many is a virtual immortality—an immortality void of Jesus Christ, the Creator of the universe.  That’s the way it was in Eden and nothing has changed.  The sons of Adam will seek another way.  Christ-less options in this article include:

♦ Cryofreezing;

♦ Uploading yourself in the “digital cloud;”

♦ Hologram avatars;

♦ Telomere extension;

♦ Taking a particular “health elixir,” and many others. 

Access to the Tree of Life was lost to carnal man forever, but God has provided another way, and it, too, is a tree.  I Peter 2:24:

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.

John 11:25-26:

25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:

26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

This is the only way back to immortality, yet man will continue to seek another way. 

GOD SAID, John 10:1:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.

GOD SAID, Genesis 3:22-24:

22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

GOD SAID, Romans 5:12:

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

GOD SAID, John 11:25-26:

25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:

26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

MAN SAID: The idea that there was an immortal Adam and Eve who lost it all as a result of unbelief and disobedience—and that somehow followers of Christ regain this immortality—is ludicrous: downright stupid. 

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

Faloon, W., “A New Era! Curing Aging in Our Lifetime,” Life Extension, August 2016

GodSaidManSaid, “120: They Just Can’t Help Themselves”

GodSaidManSaid, “Adam Was to Live Forever”

GodSaidManSaid, “Immortality Keeps on Knocking—Part 1”

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