Recent articles in the New York Times about the pursuit of immortality through bioengineering have caught my attention. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/magazine/eternal-life-longevity-world-leaders.html The very rich have invested large sums into longevity research to try to beat or at least delay the great equalizer–death. Is this a fool’s errand or could it produce some fruit?
I would first like to point out that the Bible records some incredible lifespans for people who lived before Noah’s flood: Adam 930 years, Seth 912, Enosh 905, Kenan 910, Jared 962, the record holder Methuselah 969. People scoff at this and attribute it as myth. That is only because we rarely break 100 years and then usually in bad health, but something was very different in that era.
God did not create humans to die. Death is the product of sin. Not just as a sentence. It is the by-product of Adam and Eve breaking the only command they had–don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (referred to just as “the tree” from now on). Now this sounds very mythy. I don’t think it is. Jesus acknowledges Genesis as truth, and I feel strongly about Jesus being historically who He claims to be, and that is provable. Consequently, could there have been an actual tree that acted as a biological agent of some kind? The Bible speaks of our “sinful nature”. “Nature” refers to the product of our DNA. It has been verified that our DNA is programmed to eventually fail (like designed obsolescence in a consumer product). It can only replicate a limited number of times. The epigenetics, molecules that attach to our DNA to turn genes on and off, also eventually fail to work or come off.
God is not a bad designer. An eternally living body is not only buildable, one is promised to us at our death in Christ and again at our resurrection. The tree knocked people back from eternal to living nearly a millennium. God knocked us back further:
3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
Genesis 6:3 (ESV)
And that has been our potential ever since. Disease or violence usually shortens it much further. Living to the average of 80 is just 2/3 of the current potential. Did God just make a proclamation that He enforces in the verse above or did He build modifications into the human genome once He knocked the population back to just the family of Noah? It interesting that the 120 limit seems to phase in after Noah. It isn’t 120 immediately but it gets there. Within a few hundred years people were lucky to live to 45.
Two questions jump out of the New York Times articles to me. Can people figure out what was modified and undo it? Do we really want to?
If you have no faith in the original designer or in the promises extended to mankind through Jesus, then bioengineering or the even weirder idea of digitizing your consciousness and placing it either in a robot or a clone are your best bets. Perhaps it can be done or at least partially done. Maybe Jeff Bezos could live to be 900. How many marriages could you get into that period of time? With a population of 8 billion, this obviously will not be a resource for the common man.
I would love to live a healthy and vital life for whole time that God has plans for me here.
10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10 (ESV)
That could be 80 to 90 years. After that the purpose will need to be pretty good. I have no ambition to be 120. If I could be healthy, complete my work, then quickly achieve the goal of having this sinful body break down and die so that I can swap it out for my heavenly body, that would be ideal. https://afterdeathsite.com/2019/03/25/do-you-get-a-body-in-heaven/
It will be more than a change in body, it will be a change in environment. I realize that Bezos, Putin, Xi, Altman, Johnson, Thiel and their like, are probably enjoying this world (called the Great Tribulation in Revelation 7:14) as much as one can and would welcome greater longevity. I already have better digs and a superior body arranged.
afterdeathsite 