An Appointment You will not Miss
Qin Shi Huang was one of China’s most powerful and ruthless emperors. First ruler of the Qin Dynasty, Shi Huang’s word was law. Despite his great wealth and power, there was one enemy he could not defeat. Death.
In a futile search for immortality Qin sent out hundreds of his alchemists to comb every nook and cranny in his immense kingdom for an elixir to life eternal. He never found it. Instead, he died suddenly at the age of 49 after drinking a vial of mercury which he had been told by his alchemists would prevent his soul ever leaving his body.
Since his body was almost 2 months away from his royal throne, his royal aides secretly carried his rotting corpse back to the palace within a basket of rotting fish to disguise the stench of the decaying emperor. An inglorious end to his quest for immortality.
Man has not changed much in the last 2000 years. In our futuristic techno-savvy AI world, three of the world’s most powerful leaders were recently caught in a hot mic moment searching for – you guessed it – immortality. Like Qin 2000 years before him, China’s president Xi Jin Ping walked beside the Forbidden Palace in Beijing with the Russian leader, Putin, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, discussing how to cheat death.
Said Xi: “In the past it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say at 70 one’s still a child”.
Russia’s president Putin responded approvingly: “With the development of bio-technology, human organs can be continuously transplanted and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.”
Xi then added, perhaps somewhat realistically: “Predictions are this century there’s a chance of living to 150.” There the hot mic ended but one wonders how this conversation ended. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when great leaders meet!
What does the Bible say about all this? What does the God of Heaven think about man’s attempts to cheat death? The Bible says that God is sovereign and that God alone appoints the day of our birth and death. Hebrews 9:27 states clearly that “It is appointed for man to die once and after that to face judgment”. And in Job 14:5 it says that “Since his days are determined, the number of his months is with You; You have appointed his limits, so that he cannot pass”.
Xi and Kim are atheist fundamentalists. Putin professes Christianity but uses it mainly as a tool to propagandise his rule. Xi and Putin are in their early 70s. Kim is in poor health. Their days are numbered. God has appointed the number of their days and has set an appointment with them. They cannot escape this appointment. Death is staring them in the eye. Like most people, they fear death and hope to escape it by some fantastical dream.
Now, Christians are not against legitimate and ethical advances in medical science to promote life expectancy and quality of life. Science can be a great tool and gift which promotes God’s glory and purposes. Science and medicine are gifts from God if used rightly. This is why many hospitals were built by Christian institutions.
But Christians, guided by the Word are realistic. Science has its limitations. Science cannot thwart God’s Word. In an age where Christians are often accused of being unrealistic and unscientific it is ironic that it is some of the world’s most powerful atheistic leaders who cook up some of the most far-fetched fairy-like stories on achieving immortality.
When confronted with life and death, Christians are both realistic and optimistic. Unless Christ comes in our generation, death will be universal. It’s inevitable despite all our AI and medical technological wizardry. Death will come to us all.
Our Puritan forefathers, long laughed at by today’s modern elites and nones, were murch wiser in their thinking about death. Rowland Hill (1744-1833) said honestly: “Some say we live in the land of the living, more properly it may be said we live in the land of the dying. For let us resist whatever diseases we may, I am witness that time brings on the diseases of old age, which are never to be resisted. Friends [like Xi, Putin and Kim] may surround you and tell you that you may yet see many days, but at last we must die”.
Science has helped lift life expectancies from about 43 in the Middle Ages to around 75 today. But science is not able to thwart God’s laws. God laughs at human attempts to escape God’s appointments (Psalm 2). The Word of God is confronting – the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Ashbel Green Simonton told his congregation this vital truth: “When called, neither youth, nor health, nor prudence, nor friends, nor physicians, nor wealth, nor esteem, can disappoint or delay the fixed purpose of Jehovah”. Green himself died aged 34.
Despite man’s faith in science, vitamins, blue zone diets, face lifts, day spas, and continuous organ transplants, we must in the end realise we are food for worms.
21st century nones want to live forever and like Qin and Xi are on an endless and futile quest to find immortality. Perhaps deep down they not only fear death but also suspect that there will be a judgment immediately after. They will try every vial and quackery to avoid it. They will not accept this simple truth: “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezekiel 18:20).
What the nones need to hear today is the inescapable truth that it is God who gives them their next breath, and it is God who appoints the day of their death. No medical advances now, nor in the future, will ever prevent your ultimate death. In a powerful sermon during the 1858 New York revival William Williams declared; “Nor are remedies and skill and science a competent discharge. These may, under God’s blessings, lengthen our life, and may restore and guard health. But walk the costliest shop of the apothecary and ask its owner’s history, you will find that, spite of all his medications, he has father and mother and perhaps also the wife of his youth, and darling children lying in the grave. And he himself owns a burial plot in some cemetery where he expects to be gathered one day to his fathers”.
In His High Priestly prayer, Jesus said: “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent” (John 17:3). Hell is said to be the “truth known too late”. Sadly, Qin and other elites seem determined to find this out immediately after they die. Let’s warn them, winsomely but firmly, of their date with God.
– Troy Appleton