The Deep Freeze and the Quick Thaw
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
John 11:25-26
Do you believe in Jesus’ resurrection power?
There are many folks who don’t, so they’ve taken their own resurrections in to their own hands.
This news article recently appeared on the ABC News website:
The Deep Freeze
Freezing the Dead With the Hope of Reviving Them Later
C L I N T O N T O W N S H I P, Mich., Feb. 8 — Instead of racing toward the emergency room, sirens blaring, a special type of ambulance transports patients away from hospitals. In fact, in this ambulance the “patient” is already dead.
The urgency is to limit the damage dying does to the brain and the body so that someone, someday, can reverse it.
Ninety people in America have been frozen, hoping to be brought back to life when medicine can cure them.
At least half of the new cases have been frozen in the past three years. To the handful of companies that charge $28,000 or more to freeze the bodies, these cadavers are optimistically called "patients."
The Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township currently has 37 people, 10 cats and six dogs frozen in its facility. Its most recent patient came in three days before ABCNEWS’ interview with David Ettinger, whose father, Robert, founded the Cryonics Institute.
The elder Ettinger began researching life-extending possibilities when he had a brush with his own mortality as a soldier in World War II. He eventually came to believe in the future of cryonics, and opened the Cryonics Institute in 1976. The institute froze its first person in 1977.
The newest patient was — or is — a 90-year-old woman who suffered a heart attack and is now inside a box cooling to negative 40 degrees with the help of ice and chemicals injected to minimize damage.
After a week, she’ll be moved into another chamber and cooled with liquid nitrogen to negative 320-Fahrenheit degrees. A week later, she’ll join others inside sealed vacuum chambers.
There are currently several facilities in the United States that will freeze people after they die. Starting at $28,000 plus any additional transportation costs, the Cryonics Institute is the least expensive of the bunch.
Interested parties must first pay $1,250 to become a lifetime member of the Cryonics Institute, and they then sign a detailed contract. After death, the following steps are taken:
1. The person should be cooled as soon as possible after they are legally pronounced dead. The hospital or funeral director packs the body in ice and sends it to the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Mich.
2. At the institute, a process called "wash out and perfusion" is performed. In this five-step procedure the blood is replaced with a glycerin-based solution that helps minimize the freezing damage.
3. The body is placed in a sleeping bag, and then in an insulated box made of wood on the outside and fiberglass on the inside for one week. Dry ice is placed on a fabric platform above the box, and the cold vapors descend upon and cool the body. The amount of dry ice is increased each day until the body reaches minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit.
4. The body is then moved to an insulated container that has liquid nitrogen at the bottom. Every day for a week, the body is slowly lowered into the liquid nitrogen until it is completely submerged. When the process is complete, the body temperature is minus-196 degrees Celsius, or minus-320 degrees Fahrenheit.
5. Finally, the body (still in the same sleeping bag) is placed in a long-term storage container called a cryostat.
The liquid nitrogen level is checked every day. Relatives can visit at any time, though the bodies cannot be seen through the cryostat.
— Daria Hirsch, ABCNEWS.com
Now in a related book:
Heather Pringle, author of The Mummy Congress, said she was surprised to find out how many tech-savvy people intend to end their days as Popsicles.
Pringle’s book examines the long history of humans’ efforts to preserve their mortal remains.
When she began to research the chapter on modern mummification, she visited cryogenic labs, expecting to find that the client list would include "your new-age crowd, people with strange ideas and bizarre beliefs about immortality. Kind of a well-heeled version of the folks who believe Elvis lives."
But Pringle said that when she really thought about it, geeks on ice made perfect sense.
"The Silicon Valley crowd has an enormous faith in technology and the science of progress," she said. "They believe that you can conquer just about any problem if you throw enough money and technology after it -- so why not immortality?"
Pringle said she loves the image of entire warehouses stacked full of hackers, programmers and engineers, but thinks it is highly unlikely that the super-cooled techies will ever be defrosted and rebooted.
Said Pringle, "The technological problems in doing this seem just staggering to me, particularly for people who go the economy-class route, having only their heads preserved."
"To bring back to full functioning something as complex as a brain, and then to graft it back on to a body, just seems horrifically difficult."
Thank you Ms. Pringle for your clear thinking!
Now just incase you don’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection power here are some prices to be freeze-dried until science might resurrect you:
Whole Body Neuro
Remote Transport $14,050. $14,050.
Cryoprotective Perfusion $13,400. $11,500.
Laboratory Evaluations $ 950. $ 950.
Temperature Descent $ 8,350. $ 1,750.
Record Keeping $ 450. $ 400.
------------------------ -------- --------
Total $37,200. $28,650.
Annual Liquid Nitrogen $ 850. $ 50.
& Storage Costs
Now-a-days, just incase you don’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection power, you can now be freeze dried and vacuum sealed!
But before you do this, here is an important comment:
National Council Against Health Fraud president William T. Jarvis, Ph.D., calls cryonics "quackery’s last shot at you." In an interview he said:
Cryonic technology has not been demonstrated to work in laboratory animals. Even if the rest of a person’s body could be revived after hundreds of years, the brain could not. Brain cells deteriorate within minutes after death, and any still viable when the body is frozen would be burst by the freezing process. Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery. [Jarvis WT. Quotation in Butler K. A Consumer’s Guide to "Alternative" Medicine. Amherst, N.Y., 1992, Prometheus Books.]
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”John 11:25-26
Jesus alone has resurrection power!
Will you believe in the power and the promises of Christ or the quackery of Cryonics or some other nonsense?
Now the sin is not in the desire to live forever. This is a God-given desire. The Bible says:
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:11b
Oh, isn’t this verse a perfect commentary on the QUAKERY of cryonics!
God has created us to desire immortality. We are wired for the eternal!
So the sin is not in the desire to live forever. The sin is the quest for immortality apart from LIVING faith in Jesus Christ.
Jesus said:
“I am the resurrection and the life… Do you believe this?” --John 11:25,26
Will we believe in Jesus or is our hope in our affluence, science and technology?
Now Jesus made two promises in verses twenty-five and six of chapter 11.
The first promise is that we shall live even though we may die. (we studied this last week)
Jesus second promise is in verse twenty-six:
“I am the resurrection and the life...
…and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.
John 11:25,26
What is Jesus’ promise to us in verse 26?
…and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.
John 11:26b
This might be a challenge to understand had not Jesus said the same thing with more detail earlier:
I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of God and live.
John 5:24-25 (page 1054)
Note the present tense of possessing eternal life:
…whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me HAS eternal life…
Eternal life is a PRESENT possession; we have it NOW if we believe in Christ Jesus.
And notice the decisive action that takes place in the believer’s experience:
…he HAS crossed over from death to life.
And how is death defined?
Most commentators state that the death that Jesus is talking about in these verses is spiritual death, that is, condemnation in hell for sins committed on earth.
Note again:
I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and WILL NOT BE CONDEMNED; he has crossed over from death to life.
John 5:24
The NIV Study Bible offers this helpful footnote:
“Faith and eternal life are connected. Eternal life is a PRESENT possession because the believer has crossed over--a decisive action has taken place, and the believer no longer BELONGS to condemnation and death.” [NIV Study Bible, page 1604]
So what is Jesus teaching and promising in John 5:24, 11:25?
If I may use cryonics as a physical illustration of a spiritual reality, our hearts, our souls, our minds, wills and emotions are frozen toward God.
The apostle Paul proclaimed that before believers were made ALIVE in Christ through the power of the Gospel we were:
…dead in your transgressions and sins…Ephesians 2:1
Humankind can’t love the Lord God, as we should, our hearts are submerged in the nitrogen of sin and self-absorbed in unbelief.
The sinful self is stuffed with itself!
We are full of ourselves instead of filled with obedience to God’s law.
We register minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit in our warmth of obedience for loving God.
But from our death cryostats we hear the word of the Gospel.
Jesus said, “Whoever hears my word and believes has eternal life.”
God the Holy Spirit uses Jesus powerful word to thaw our cold sinful hearts and replace the stony ice of our spiritual selves with his warming life-giving Spirit.
We emerge from our fiberglass and pertile crypts ALIVE, not by the power of science, not by the power of technology, not by the power of what money can buy, not even by the power of self will, by the power of the Gospel!
We are summoned by the voice of Christ from spirit-bound cryonic SIN-suspension and freed from our sinful cryostasis!
At that moment we are ALIVE --we believe and we cross over from death and condemnation to eternal life.
Jesus said:
I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and WILL NOT BE CONDEMNED; he has crossed over from death to life.
John 5:24
A deep freeze caused by sin, but a quick and powerful thaw caused by the powerful Gospel!
This illustrates what Jesus meant when he proclaimed:
I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and WILL NOT BE CONDEMNED; he has crossed over from death to life.
John 5:24
This illustrates what Jesus meant when he promises:
…and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. John 11:26b
D.A. Carson rightly comments about this verse:
“Life stresses the internal change that must come about in a person’s (spiritually dead) heart wrought by the LIVE GIVING power of God. Believing is the stance a person must adopt.” [D.A. Carson, The Gospel According To John, page 413]
Jesus said:
…and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.
John 11:26
And so my friend where are you placing your hope in life after death?
Science or the Savior?
My friend have you heard the powerful word of Christ’s Gospel call summoning you to come forth from your death tomb of cold heartedness and apathy toward God?
When you hear God’s call your responsibility is to believe and trust Christ.
Have you heard the Spirit’s call?
God loves sinners.
Christ died for sinners.
Do you believe that you are a sinner in need of Christ and his atoning work and resurrection power?
Have you heard the powerful Gospel call of Christ beckoning you from your life of being stuffed with yourself and cold to God?
If you have NOT, then as we stand and sing, you listen to the Lord’s voice:
Telling you that God loves you!
Telling you that you are a sinner and need his forgiveness.
Telling you that Jesus died for your sins and rose from the grave.
Telling you that because Jesus died for you, you want to live for him!
Please listen to the voice of God.
Sermon Questions
John 11:25-26
1. How do some folks, who don’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection power, attempt to take their resurrections into their own hands?
2. Who is the only one who has resurrection power?
3. Is it a sin to desire to live forever? (see Ecclesiastes 3:11)
4. What TWO promises did Jesus make in John 11:25-26 and John 5:24-25?
5. When does the believer possess eternal life? (John 5:24)
6. What DECISIVE ACTION takes place when a person believes? (John 5:24)
7. What death is Jesus speaking of? (John 5:24)
8. What does a person need to do to have eternal life?
