I Want to Live Forever (But I Don’t Want No Jesus)

Children of God are new creatures (II Corinthians 5:17)—a new kind of first fruits (James 1:18)—who enjoy glorious privilege and promise, but the privilege and promise are not often easily seen. 

When one is born-again, they become a child of God and immediately, God puts in motion the process of education and development; as you should expect, it is like nothing in this world.  We begin as a diamond in the rough.  At first glance, a diamond in the rough doesn’t appear to be of much value, but to the trained eye, serious potential is noted.  A diamond in the rough becomes a diamond of considerable value after it has experienced the cutting off of the clutter—the cutting away of everything that doesn’t look like a valuable diamond—and then endures the abrasiveness of polishing.  Malachi 3:16-17 speaks of the second coming of Jesus Christ to receive His church in the clouds:

16 Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.

17 And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.

All of God’s children must experience the cutting and abrasiveness of life’s trials, but as we traverse this life in faith and obedience, the final outcome is that we become a jewel of great value—even eternal value. 

A favorite verse of the redeemed is Romans 8:28:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

All things work together for our good, but very often it doesn’t appear that way.  It’s like baking a cake:  Individually, much of a cake’s ingredients by themselves are not very tasty.  A teaspoon of baking powder is not very appealing by itself, but when combined with all of the other ingredients and thrown in the oven—the crucible of life—a delicious, desirable product emerges.  God uses the circumstances of life, which in many cases are a contradiction to the child of God’s promises to perfect His own.  Often, the individual ingredients are not very appealing, but the outcome is glorious indeed.  This concept of development belongs to God’s children.  Have you been born into the family of God?  Have you been born again—born a second time, this time of the Spirit of God—as Jesus declares in 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.

Today can be your day of salvation where all your sin and shame are expunged and all—no matter how severe—Satan’s bondages broken.  This glorious new birth is just minutes away.  Follow my prompt now.  Are you ready? Click onto “Further with Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Genesis 3:1-5:

1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

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, 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: I want to live forever—but I don’t want no Jesus!

Now THE RECORD: Welcome to GodSaidManSaid feature 946 that will once again establish the supernatural inerrancy of God’s beautiful book, the Holy Bible.  All of these glorious features are archived here in text and streaming audio for the edification of the saints and as a platform from which to win the lost.  Every Thursday eve, God willing, they grow by one. 

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The standard which God established in the Garden of Eden—the standard of faith and its resultant obedience, known as righteousness—is still the standard today. When Adam and Eve believed God’s Word and acted accordingly, they were immortal and lived in Paradise, in the simplicity of innocence.  

The standard by which Satan functions—the method he used to destroy our grandparents Adam and Eve, and their immortality, their Paradise, and the simplicity of innocence—is the same method he employs today as it was then.  He offered another way.  God’s way was and is faith and obedience.  Satan’s way was and is unbelief and disobedience.  Simply 180° out.

Grandma Eve was offered another way to live forever.  Genesis 3:1-5:

1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Unfortunately for us all, Eve chose the devil’s words over the Creator’s. Adam followed his wife’s lead and immortality and paradise were lost; consequently, all of their offspring were spiritually stillborn. If restoration is desired, it necessitates that one be born-again—born a second time, but this time of the Spirit of God.  But Satan offered another way, and as always, his way is a dead-end. 

God has offered a way of escape to the fallen sons and daughters of Adam in the person of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ the Righteous.  The blood the Lord Jesus shed at Calvary cleanses us from all sin.  Jesus Christ is the only way to life and life more abundantly—even eternal life.  John 14:6:

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

Acts 4:11-12 speaks of Jesus Christ:

11 This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner.

12 Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.

Jesus Christ is the only way to regain acceptance with God and the reinstatement of child-of-God status, immortality, and Paradise.  This reinstatement requires faith in Christ and obedience to His Word, the two ingredients missing when all was lost. 

Since the fall of man, carnaldom has sought the reinstatement of immortality but one void of the immortal God and His Christ.  They will seek it another way.  GodSaidManSaid has published numerous features on this subject and it is again back in the news.  Foundational information from GodSaidManSaid features follow.  The concept of Adam and Eve and their original immortality was once roundly scoffed at by Satan’s critics, but now the word immortality exists in the lexicon of medical parlance. 

∞ Carnal man seeks another way.  Excerpts follow from GodSaidManSaid, “Special Report: Immortality:”

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 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]

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.” [End of quote]

Immortality was lost because of unbelief and disobedience and is only regained by faith in the blood of Christ and obedience to God’s Word—but, as usual, man attempts to find another way.  Jesus said in 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.

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]  

In summary of this long feature, published in the GodSaidManSaid feature “Immortality Keeps on Knocking—Part 1,” you’ll find this:

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 March 2017 headline on the cover of the research update by Life Extension Foundation reads, “Human Age Reversed.  Are We There Already?”  Headlines of various publications were sited in this feature:

• October 27, 2016, www.GeekWire.com:

“Is Jeff Bezos Looking for the Fountain of Youth?”
Jeff Bezos, billionaire founder of Amazon, and Mayo Clinic are investors in a startup that’s received $116 million to develop anti-aging therapies. 

• December 2, 2010, The Washington Post:

“A Harvard professor says he can cure aging, but is that a good idea?”

• November 29, 2016, The Telegraph:

“World’s first anti-ageing drug could see humans live to 120”

• April 24, 2016, The Wall Street Journal:

“Fountain of Youth? Drug Trial Has Seniors Scrambling to Prove They’re Worthy.” 

• June 26, 2016, New York Post:

“What if you could live forever?”

• September 2016, Scientific American:

“Will We Defeat Aging?”  

The February 2017 issue of Time magazine published a multi-page feature titled “Longevity Special Report.”  One of the features in the section is titled “Young-Blood Transfusions.”  A few excerpts follow:

It may sound vampiresque, but 50 people in the US have paid $8,000 for a transfusion of plasma from someone between the ages of 16 to 25.  The study is run by Ambrosia, a company based in Monterey, California. 

The concept stems from mouse research by Irina Conboy [associate professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley] and others.  In 2005, she and her research partner and husband Michael Conboy showed that when older mice were surgically sutured to younger mice, their tissues got healthier.  The takeaway was not that young blood is a cure-all, but some entrepreneurs ran with the idea.  “The story has switched into a highly-exaggerated search of young blood as a silver bullet to combat aging,” Irina says. [End of quotes]

∞ GodSaidManSaid, “Twenty-One Signs of Doomsday (Update XLII)—Another Way, Part 1:”

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:

What you are about to read is a blueprint by which newly developing technologies may be used to induce biological immortality in human beings. 

This research goes far beyond what is normally published in Life Extension Magazine. 

When perfected, the discoveries you are about to learn may enable doctors to inject progenitor cells that will regenerate every tissue in your body, thus restoring you to youthful health and vigor. [End of quotes]

The headline in the March 29, 2019 issue of The Week reads, “Hacking Immortality,” with the subhead, “A fringe group of scientists and tech moguls think they’re closing in on the fountain of youth.” Several paragraphs from the article seeking to take immortality out of the realm of science fiction follow:

Silicon Valley is built on the idea that technology can optimize, or “hack,” any aspect of our lives—so why not the human lifespan?  Until recently, anyone hawking pills or treatments that promised to restore youthfulness was considered a quack, yet a growing number of “transhumanists” are convinced that in time, human beings can be transformed through bioengineering, and that aging will be curable just like any other malady.  In light of rapid gains in gene editing, nanotechnology, and robotics, some futurists expect this generation’s biohackers to double their lifespans.  Aubrey de Grey, a regenerative medicine researcher backed by tech mogul Peter Thiel, insists that someone alive today will live to be 1,000.  “It’s extraordinary to me that it’s such an incendiary claim,” de Grey says.  Korean physician and financier Joon Yun has offered two $500,000 prizes to anyone who can restore a test animal’s youthful heartrate and who can extend its lifespan by 50 percent.  For humans, the mortality rate at age 20 is 0.001 percent, Yun figures, “so if you could maintain the homeostatic capacity of that age throughout your life, your average lifespan would be 1,000.” 

One poster boy of biohacking is Bullet-proof coffee founder Dave Asprey, who recently turned 45 and is certain he’ll live to be at least 180.  Last year a doctor extracted stem cells from Asprey’s bone marrow and injected them in organs and joints throughout his body, a process Asprey intends to repeat twice annually in the belief he’s refreshing his body with brand-new cells.  He takes 100 supplements a day, and has equipped his British Columbia home with gadgets such as a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and a platform that vibrates 30 times a second to stimulate his muscles.  By Silicon Valley standards, Asprey’s lifespan goal is modest: Oracle’s famously arrogant founder, Larry Ellison, says he finds mortality “incomprehensible,” and Google’s co-founders, along with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, are also investing in ways to extend human life.  Tesla CEO Elon Musk founded Neuralink to develop digital implants for our brains.  If we don’t use technology to enhance our cognitive abilities, Musk reasons, artificial intelligence is destined to conquer humanity.

Are scientists on board? Most are either skeptical or firmly opposed to any effort that purports to reverse aging or extend human lifespans indefinitely.  University of Michigan professor Richard Miller wrote an article co-signed by 28 aging experts that called de Grey’s lifespan goal “so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community.”  The oldest humans have lived to about 120, a feat that hasn’t been topped in recent decades despite vast improvements in health care.  That fact has led many experts to believe that’s pretty much the biological ceiling for human longevity.

Is superlongevity truly desirable? Biohackers claim they’re only accelerating evolution, but many ethicists believe something much graver is at stake.  Political scientist Francis Fukuyama cited the transhumanist movement as among the most serious threats to humanity—not only because of the potentially disastrous consequences of botched treatments but also because of the equally alarming possibilities of success.  For centuries, claims that one group of people was superior to another were based on junk science and myth. If the dreams of biohacking are realized, wealthy people who can afford a wide array of enhancements will be “genuinely superior” to the rest of humanity, British technology ethicist Blay Whitby has warned.  “We need to think about the implications before it is too late.” [End of quotes]

Theses fountain of youth seekers have overlooked a few things.  For example:

1. As a result of harmful mutations—which literally erase or garble ID genes—Stanford University professor Gerald Crabtree says our best brains existed 2,000 to 6,000 years ago—and because of mutations, each generation is actually dumberthan the one before.  Soon, society will be as dumb as a box of rocks and no longer able to function.

2. They have overlooked methods of death like being shot by your neighbor, poisoned by your spouse, decapitated by terrorists, or being run over by a cement truck. 

Carnal man’s immortality doesn’t even come close.  Revelation 21:1-4:

1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Man continues to seek another way, any way but the God of immortality’s way.  His efforts will lead to Satan’s dead-end.  If you are serious about living forever, the necessary science is available and it is found in God’s Holy Bible.  If you have yet to be born-again, click onto “Further with Jesus” now. The secret formula is there. 

GOD SAID, Genesis 3:1-5:

1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

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, 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: I want to live forever—but I don’t want no Jesus!

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

“Hacking Immortality,” The Week, March 29, 2019

GodSaidManSaid, “Special Report: Immortality”

GodSaidManSaid, “Twenty-One Signs of Doomsday (Update XLII)—Another Way, Part 1” 

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