Life After Death
In 2014, a 14-year-old girl identified only by her initials “JS,” died of a very rare form of cancer. She left behind two understandably bereft parents. But before she died, JS who was too young at the time to make a will, went to the High Court in London with a very unusual request. Her desire, which was ultimately granted, was that immediately after she died her body would be cryogenically frozen so that at some point in the distant future she might be brought back to life again.
The court ruled in her favour, stating that the girl’s mother, who separated from her father, should become solely responsible for making the decision over the disposal of the young girl’s body after death. In a letter to the court, JS stated that,
“I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo‐preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time. I don’t want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer; and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish.” (1)
Presiding Judge, Mr. Justice Peter Jackson said, “She died peacefully in the knowledge her body would be preserved in the way she wished.”
The father of the teenage girl, separated and divorced from her mother, initially opposed this move. His concern was for a future where this type of technology might actually work, and what would then become of his daughter if she were ever brought back to life,
“Even if the treatment is successful and she is brought back to life in, let’s say, 200 years, she may not find any relative and she might not remember things. She may be left in a desperate situation – given that she is still only 14 years old – and will be in the United States of America.”
In the end, though, he acquiesced to his daughter’s final wishes. Therefore, at the point of her death, a process of cryogenic freezing began that would theoretically preserve the girl’s body almost in perpetuity. When she died, professionals were directly on hand to begin the process of preparing her body for the cryogenic freezing process that lay ahead.
Immediately after death, JS was placed into an ice bath to cool her body before it was pumped full of “organ preservation solution.” Her body was then flown to the United States of America whilst packed in ice.
Once at the cryogenics facility, her body was then further cooled down to a temperature of -110C over a period of hours using nitrogen gas. After this, and over the next few weeks, her body was slowly and methodically cooled further to a temperature of -196C, before finally coming to rest in storage vats of liquid nitrogen in “patient” storage bays. All this was in preparation for the day when they hope science and technology develop to the point where both her cancer can be cured, and her body be revived.
JS died on October 17, 2014. Her body arrived at the storage facility in Michigan eight days later. At the time, this 14-year-old girl then became the 147th “patient” at this site.
Life after death is increasingly becoming big business. Or perhaps the science of cheating death has become big business. Over the last 150 years, life expectancy in the western world has doubled from roughly 40 to 80 years of age, and science has high aspirations over where we go next.
Vast amounts of money are currently being spent in the quest to better understand what might lay behind that great veil separating life from physical death. Death is now and always has been the obsession of mankind. It would seem that we are reaching a point when science believes it can realistically think about mitigating against death itself, perhaps even try to reverse death.
This subject, life after death, that was once greeted with widespread skepticism, distain and derision within the scientific community, is now gaining swift acceptance in the mainstream. At the University of Southampton, scientists have just concluded a four-year study examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. They found that up to 40% of patients, from a wide variety of backgrounds and faith systems, reported that they had “awareness” during the time of their clinical death states, before their hearts were restarted.
Whereas before these type of remembrances would be ascribed and written off by scientists and skeptics as the last actions of a dying brain, now science has come to understand, as Dr. Sam Parnia explains, “that the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating” (2). If true, this therefore creates a problem. If the brain cannot function for more than mere seconds after the heart stops beating, where then do these detailed remembrances, sometimes lasting for minutes, come from, if not from the brain?
Dr. Parnia continued, “Conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.”
Of 2,060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived; and of 140 surveyed, 39 per cent said they had experienced some kind of awareness whilst being resuscitated. Some recalled seeing a bright light, or something like the sun shining in all its brilliance, and some remembered a sense of real peace.
Others, however, recalled a much more ominous experience. Others recounted a sense of overwhelming dread and impending doom, feelings of drowning or of being dragged through deep water, or of being pulled relentlessly downwards at ever-increasing speeds. (3)
Dr. Parnia believes that these types of near-death or post-death experiences are much more common than many believe. He concludes that the heavy sedation commonly used to alleviate pain and suffering as patients approach the end of their lives is stopping people communicating what they are experiencing and seeing just prior to their deaths.
Dr. Parnia has come to believe these experiences to be scientifically legitimate: “The four-year observational study used a three-stage interview process by which the researchers tested the accuracy of claims of visual and auditory awareness/memories during cardiac arrest and then objectively verified these claims.” (4)
He concludes by stating that, “…estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best… And a higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.”
Research Psychologist Dr. David Wilde, from the University of Nottingham Trent, agrees. He has spent the last few years compiling lists of data on individuals who have had “out of body” experiences with a view to establishing commonalities between them. He has collected a “really large…sample size” which he believes gives this work a new kind of scientific “validity.”
Dr. Wilde’s conclusions, like those of Dr. Parnia, may be disturbing to those who cling to entrenched non-supernatural worldviews: “There is some very good evidence here that these experiences are actually happening after people have medically died.”
Dr. Mary Neal concurs, commenting that these experiences are not simple, normal recollections, but are “…qualitatively different type of memories.”
Dr. Peter Fenwick, eminent neuropsychiatrist, also believes that these out-of-body, post-death experiences are indeed very common, and have been so throughout human history. Like Dr. Parnia, Fenwick states that, “During cardiac arrest, the brain is not functioning; however, many people have come out of their body to perceive what is going on around them.” This leads Fenwick to conclude that, “this suggests that the mind and the brain can separate.” (5)
“…this suggests that the mind and the brain can separate.” This is exactly what the Bible has always taught. Man is a tripartite being, with a completely separate body, spirit and soul; and the Bible makes a distinction between all three. Man has a spiritual nature that is totally separate and distinct from the body in which it, for a time, dwells.
You are a triune being. “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
The Bible also talks of the breaking of a “silver cord,” and that once this cord breaks, that is it (Ecclesiastes 12:6-7).
We have now reached a time in history, as happened eons ago during the reign of Nimrod, when mankind has all but abandoned God. This will only continue to get worse from this point on. Many are beginning to cling to the vain and completely false belief that through science we are perhaps reaching a point in time where we can mitigate against even death itself.
With the small exception of those who follow Jesus, the world today is rudderless and desperately lost. This ever-present fear of death, that has so dominated every culture and each individual since the dawn of creation, will increasingly come to dominate the minds of men and women as we move ever on towards the chaos of the tribulation period. From this point on, the world isn’t going to get more stable, but more chaotic.
And then, one day very soon, a man will appear who will seemingly have overcome and defeated death itself. But this will not be through science, but through his own supernatural power. And the whole world will be utterly amazed by him. Here is a man who will seem to have an answer to the age-old question of death itself. Here, seemingly, is a man who has overcome death.
But it will be a deception, and almost the whole world will be ensnared by it. Multitudes will willingly follow him. He will cruelly exploit this eternal need in all men and women, their individual longing after eternity, in his supposed rise from death. To the people of the world, including scientists, his rising from the dead will be an empirically observable and demonstrable scientific fact. Yet these people, to their tragic doom, will have been deceived.
There is not now, nor ever will be, any other way under heaven by which men or women can be saved other than through Jesus Christ alone. Salvation is found exclusively in the name of Jesus.
“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
At some point, either in the near future or at the beginnings of eternity, every human being that has ever lived is going to realize that their entire lives were really only about one thing: what did they do with Jesus Christ whilst they lived? Did they accept him, or did they reject him? Did they live for him, or did they work against him?
God has put eternity into the hearts of all men and women, including yours and mine (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Each of us has a shared destiny, whether through rapture or death. “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).
The hour is obviously late. We are all short of time now. Yet God is patient, abundantly so, and wants no man or woman to leave this life without really, truly knowing Him. God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). That is why He tarries at this late hour, out of His patience and love for the lost.
He is desperate for reconciliation with you, for reconciliation with your loved ones, before that fateful day when the silver cord, when your silver cord, is finally and irrevocably severed. So remember God now, and turn to Him for healing. No matter who you are, or how wretched you have become, no matter how far you have backslidden and irrelevant of the depth of your sins, there is still a place to be found for you in His house. He is waiting for you even now.
“Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:6-7).
There is simply no escaping the fact, though many will still strenuously try to deny it, that you and I were created to be immortal. This is what the scientific experiments mentioned above are finally beginning to discover. Long after the sun and all the stars in the sky have withered and died, and millions of years henceforth, you will still be. The question is where exactly, and more importantly, who will you be with? Will you be with Jesus in His eternal kingdom, or will you not be found there?
When the silver cord is broken, that is the end of the matter. There are no more decisions to be made after that point. The die is cast for eternity, despite the desperate efforts of modern science to avert death, and the deceptions of what is soon to come.
God is the God of the living, not the dead (Mark 12:27). This very day He is saying, “In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.” I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).
So, “…choose you this day whom ye will serve…” (Joshua 24:15).
For people like the young girl identified earlier only as “JS,” despite her hopes and that of her family, it is too late. But not yet too late for you or your loved ones. Time is pressing as the end of this Gentile age fast approaches. Make that decision to stand with the Lord right now. Before the chaos comes.
“He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:36).
Sources:
- 14-year-old girl who died of cancer wins right to be cryogenically frozen
- First hint of ‘life after death’ in biggest ever scientific study
- Results of world’s largest Near Death Experiences study published
- From Parnia S, Spearpoint K, de Vos G, et al. AWARE—AWAreness during Resuscitation – A Prospective Study. Resuscitations, 2014
- Scientific Study: There Is Life after Death