The dead will be raised imperishable, ...and the mortal with immortality.
(1 Cor. 15:52b, 53)

When 83-year-old Dora Kent died, a cryonics company froze part of her body, with the anticipation that someday science would make it possible for her to be revived and live in a new body without the disease that plagued her first life. While some think of cryonics as being "visionary," others think of it as absolute foolishness and a horrendous waste of money.

Actually, cryonics is the freezing of the dead in hopes that technology will someday advance to the point that the bodies can be revived—a practice scoffed at by most medical authorities. A body is frozen at 320 degrees below zero and then kept at this low temperature as liquid nitrogen swirls through canisters containing the remains of individual.

In the event you are interested, you had better have a sizable estate—because the practice costs over $100,000 in U.S. dollars and no small amount to maintain the body year after year. Those who adhere to the practice believe that science will eventually learn how to grow bodies, and that by attaching a body to a head, the person will live again.

This sounds bizarre, somewhat like science fiction. What is not so strange, though, is that the objectives and goals of cryonics parallel exactly what the Bible says will happen. Jesus put it like this: "...the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear His voice come out—those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned" (John 5:28-29).

Jesus taught that at the end of the age there will be a resurrection of all men, not those whose frail, decayed remains are frozen and left stored in a vault, but that all men and women will come forth unto a judgment of eternal life or death.

All men and women, from the dawn of recorded history to the present, aspire to another life after death. One of the oldest of all Biblical dramas is that of Job's struggle with illness and justice in our world. Even then the question was in his mind as he asked, "If a man dies, will he live again?" (Job 14:14), and then Job answered emphatically, "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God" (Job 19:25,26).

Think what this means. A soldier may have fallen in battle. The jungle with its heat and humidity may have claimed that body. A sailor dies and is buried at sea. The centuries of time may gnaw away at what remains, but it does not matter, for at the sound of God's voice, the whole process will be reversed.

Do you have trouble accepting this? Those who believe in cryonics have no trouble accepting the hope that there will be a second chance at life. But if you struggle with this, your real problem is whether or not the Bible is true. It assumes that God is sovereign and that He who created you in the first place can restore your body as it was prior to death.

In the Egyptian Museum at Cairo are artifacts taken from the tombs of the ancient Pharaohs. Food for the journey into the hereafter was placed in the tombs, including grain now more than 5,000 years old, yet when the grain was planted, new life sprang forth and sprouted more than 50 centuries after it was placed there. If God can honor the law of reaping and sowing after that many years, should it be thought strange or incredible that what the Bible says about a resurrection will take place? Think about it.

Resource reading: 1 Thessalonians 4.