In September of last year, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were caught on a live broadcast in Beijing chatting about something you might not expect two of the most powerful men on earth to be discussing on the way to a military parade.
Living forever.
Putin talked about biotechnology and organs being continuously transplanted, with immortality as the goal. Xi chimed in about predictions of dramatically longer human lifespans this very century.
And before you chalk that up to a couple of aging dictators dreaming out loud - - - in August of 2022, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, said this during a livestream promoting his book: "I think there's a good probability that my generation is - hopefully with the advances in science - either the first generation to live forever or the last generation that's going to die."
Read that again.
This is no longer science fiction. Devices have already been placed in human brains that allow a paralyzed patient to move a cursor on a screen by thought alone. Artificial intelligence is being built to enlarge human intelligence. And a growing number of very wealthy, very powerful people are openly dreaming of overcoming the limits mankind has lived under since the beginning.
The philosophy driving it has a name: TRANSHUMANISM. It seeks to use science and technology to enhance human beings until mankind is transformed into something beyond his present biological condition. Its boldest dreams fall into three categories - super longevity (conquering aging and death), super intelligence (expanding the mind beyond its natural limits), and super wellbeing (eliminating disease, disability, and suffering).
Now I want to make sure I'm not misunderstood here... There is nothing wrong with using medicine and technology to relieve human suffering. We thank God for doctors and nurses, for medications and surgeries. I personally thank God for anesthesia - there are a few operations I've had that would have been BRUTAL otherwise.
But there is a tremendous spiritual difference between using technology to care for the body God gave us - - - and using it to grab for what only God can give.
The Oldest Sales Pitch in the World
Genesis 3:4-5 - "And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 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."
Do you hear it? "Ye shall not surely die." "Your eyes shall be opened." "Ye shall be as gods." Life without death. Knowledge without limits. Godhood without God.
Super longevity, super intelligence, and super wellbeing were not invented in Silicon Valley. They were first offered by a serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Look how cunning the devil's approach was. He took obedience and repackaged it as a limitation. He took rebellion and repackaged it as advancement. In other words: "God is holding out on you. There's an upgrade available, and He doesn't want you to have it."
Think of a goldfish who gets to thinking the water is what's holding him back. "If I could just get out of this bowl, I could see the world." So one day he jumps. For a moment he feels like he's flying - - - then he lands on the kitchen counter and discovers too late that the water was never his prison. It was his life.
That is exactly what sin does. It convinces the creature that the very thing God designed him to live in is the thing keeping him from living.
Made in His Image, Not Theirs
Here is where this becomes a sanctity of life issue - and a serious one.
Genesis 1:27 - "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Adam was not an evolutionary accident or a rough draft waiting on a firmware update. He was the deliberate, personal handiwork of Almighty God. David said it this way in Psalm 139:14 - "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
God made us in His image. Elitist man now wants to remake us in the image of the machine.
And please hear what I'm about to say. Once you decide the human body is just hardware and the human mind is just software, a human being stops being an image-bearer to be cherished and becomes a product to be improved. And products that can't be improved - the disabled, the elderly, the slow, the sick - eventually get labeled as obsolete.
C.S. Lewis saw where this road ends. In The Abolition of Man he warned that "Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man." The question is never just whether we CAN remake man. It's who gets to hold the blueprint - - - and who gets left on the shop floor.
And here's the irony. Mankind once had access to super longevity. Methuselah, a godly man, lived 969 years, and yet Genesis 5:27 ends his life with three words that ring like a bell all through that chapter: "and he died." Did those long lifespans make men better? One chapter later, God saw that "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5). Longer lives didn't produce better hearts. They just gave sin more time to get into deeper levels of mischief.
Mankind also had access to super intelligence as well... Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived, and his heart still wandered after other gods (1 Kings 11:4). You can increase a man's intelligence without increasing his righteousness one bit.
As for super wellbeing - Jeremiah 17:9 tells us "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Some of us have owned a car that looked great on the outside. Fresh wax, new tires, shining in the sun. But underneath, the frame was rusted through - and a beautiful finish won't fix a rotten frame.
Mankind is trying to put a showroom shine on a frame that sin has rusted through.
Man keeps searching for the cure to the curse while refusing to name the cause of the curse. And the cause, dear friends, is SIN.
What God Has Already Fashioned
And now comes my least favorite part. Because the serpent's lie still works on Christians - it just whispers it a little quieter. "God is holding out on you." So we look to our screens more than our Saviour, and we find our comfort in what men build rather than in what God has promised.
Church, He is not holding out on us. Everything this world is trying to manufacture, God has already promised to those who belong to Jesus Christ.
Man wants to postpone death. Jesus said, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live" (John 11:25). Man wants a mind wired to a machine. God promises that one day "then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Man wants to patch the frailty of the body. Christ "shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body" (Philippians 3:21).
And remember that flaming sword God placed east of Eden "to keep the way of the tree of life" (Genesis 3:24)? Turn to the last chapter of your Bible. In Revelation 22:2, the tree of life is standing there again - - - open, bearing fruit, its leaves "for the healing of the nations."
Man could never fight his way past that sword. But Jesus Christ took the sword of God's judgment into His own body at Calvary, and now the way is open to all who come through Him.
Every time our phones download an update, the release notes say the same thing: "Bug fixes and performance improvements." But sin goes deeper than any patch can reach. It has corrupted the whole system.
We don't need an upgrade. We need a new birth. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3).
So let me ask you plainly - which promise are you leaning on? The one whispered in a garden, or the one written in blood on a cross and echoed by the risen Son of God - the world's Saviour?
Everything fallen man is trying to become without God is a distorted imitation of what redeemed man will become through Jesus Christ.
You can either repent and freely take God's offer - or perish and take the imitation sinner man is rebelliously offering today.
Your choice.
Just know, I've made mine and I gladly follow the carpenter from Nazareth.