Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch, and in today's episode, we're asking the question, can the rich beat God. This is prompted by an interesting article I read in the Wall Street Journal recently about billionaires who are fueling the quest for longer life. Uh, people like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Mark Andreessen. Uh, They've invested over $12.5 billion in over 200 longevity startups, companies whose chief goal is increasing the time that people stay alive. Uh, $200 million is being invested just recently in reversing aging. Things like cellular regeneration, age related diseases, consumer health optimization. Look, any way they can try to figure out how can we stay alive longer? You can follow a lot of these efforts on social media where they're talking about what they eat, what they put in their bodies, injections, all kinds of things showing themselves aging but seemingly staying young. Everyone's excited about this, from celebrities to investors to billionaires, chasing the idea that somehow we can crack the code of living longer and living as long as we possibly can. In some ways, it's chasing the fountain of youth, only instead of a mythical destination, it's through the pursuit of science. Now, what's interesting about this from a spiritual perspective is that we spend most of our lives not thinking, at least on the surface, about death, not thinking about our own mortality or what comes next, not admitting our fear. But can we just say if we're investing $12.5 billion in companies whose only goal is keeping us alive, we are afraid of our own mortality. We're afraid to die. And in this way, we're acknowledging the spiritual realities that we're afraid about what happens when we die. In particular, this idea, the Bible says, is written onto our conscience that there is a God and that when we die, we will stand before him in judgment. So let's just start with this. Uh, the Bible tells us Genesis 3 way back in the beginning, when Adam and Eve eat from the tree, you will surely die. Uh, you can eat well, you can take care of your body. You can do everything you can to try to elongate your life. And, uh, certainly my guess is, on average, eating healthy and eating poorly result in two different qualities of lives and probably two different lengths of life. But either way, you're going to die. So am I. We might not want to think about it. We might not want to acknowledge it. We might want to spend all of our money trying to avoid it. But death is a certainty because death is part of the judgment of God for our sin. And the other thing here is that control in this area is an illusion. James 4:14 says, you are a mist of vapor that appears one day and is gone the next. Mist doesn't have a lot of control over its evaporation. It just goes when it's time to go. And that's you and I. Look, all these things are trying to do is give us the sense of control. And the sense of control can comfort us in a thin kind of way. But it is just that. It's just a sense. The Bible actually speaks a lot about our fear of death, uh, the, uh, upcoming reality of our death. But it's interesting because all these billionaires spending money to avoid it are actually going in the complete opposite direction. The Bible says. The Bible tells us, don't lean away from the idea that you're gonna die. Instead lean towards it. And what that means is acknowledging that death is a part of God's judgment over our sin. But, uh, that Jesus Christ came to take that judgment in our place, that he lived, he died, and he rose from the dead. 1 Corinthians 15:52 says that because he rose from the dead, the dead will be raised. Hear this. Imperishable. In other words, what these billionaires are chasing through startups, through spending money, through eating well, the Bible says is, uh, available for free through Jesus Christ. You might just take a second, by the way, if you're listening to this as a Christian and praise God for the fact that you might not have 12, a half billion dollars to invest in elongating your life, but you don't need it. Because in Christ you have the certainty of life everlasting. And that's why the Apostle Paul could say in Philippians 1:21 that death was not the enemy. He says this to live is Christ, but to die is gain. What he meant is, hey, in this life there's a lot to do. There's joy and happiness and purpose and meaning in this life. But whenever this life ends, there's all of those things times infinity in the future. It's why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5 that our bodies are just tense. They earthly dwellings our souls are longing for, our bodies made new, our heavenly dwelling in which we will be with God forever. Listen, the way of dealing with your fear of death, grappling with your own mortality, isn't by trying to organic your way to more life, to spend your way to more life it's by looking at Jesus and saying, however long a life I have, this is but a brief interlude before the life that is coming that will last forever. Hey billionaires, I know you're listening to Wake Up Lookup. You don't need to spend your money to live forever. All you need to do is confess your sin and look to Jesus. Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up, Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. 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