Not long ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to Alcor, established in 1972, which describes itself as “the world leader in cryonics and preservation science.” Perhaps, like me, your initial reaction went something like this: huh?
She sent it because she knows I write against euthanasia. At first glance, cryonics seems the polar opposite of assisted suicide. Alcor isn’t trying to hasten death but to cheat it altogether. Instead of ending life early, Alcor seeks to develop the medicine and technology to not merely prolong it, but to revive those who have already passed. Again: HUH?
Cryonics, in plain terms, is the low-temperature preservation of a human body (or sometimes just the brain) after clinical death, in the hope that medicine centuries from now will be able to cure whatever killed the person and restore youthful health. As one of its pioneers, Dr. Ralph Merkle, admitted, “Cryonics is an experiment.” Alcor itself frames the practice less as medicine and more as an emergency bridge to a tomorrow that hasn’t arrived yet.
The story of Alcor began in heartbreak. In the 1960s, Fred Chamberlain watched his father suffer a massive stroke and die. Unwilling to accept that verdict as final, Fred and his wife Linda founded Alcor. In 1976, they made Fred’s father Patient One as he was suspended in a dewar of liquid nitrogen, with his family still waiting for a resurrection science might one day grant. Fred himself was cryopreserved in 2012. Linda, now in her late eighties, still guides the organization. Alcor’s own website frames this as a tale “driven by love and determination.”
From a purely secular viewpoint, that framing is understandable. Love for a dying parent, determination to defy the grave — who wouldn’t feel the pull of such emotions? But I am not a secular observer, I am a Christian. This means I am bound to see this story through the lens of Scripture. And when I do, something else comes into focus far more clearly than love or determination: fear.
It’s not merely a matter of grief, but perhaps terror of death. Not just sorrow, but rebellion against the very boundary God Himself has set. The driving force behind Alcor is not ultimately love — it can’t be. After all, it bears too much resemblance to the ancient, serpentine whisper, only rewritten in modern scientific language: “You will not surely die.”
To be fair, love and determination likely have their role to play. However, Scripture is unflinching: “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Death is not a malfunction to be engineered around; it’s the wage of sin (Romans 6:23), the divinely ordained and inevitable gateway through which every soul will pass to meet its Maker for better or for worse. To freeze a body in the hope that future technology will raise it is, at its core, an attempt to seize control over the one appointment no human being can reschedule.
This brings us back to euthanasia. On the surface, the two movements look like opposites — one hastens death, the other tries to reverse it. Yet they drink from the same cup: A false conviction that God (if He’s even acknowledged at all) has no rightful claim on the timing of one’s exit.
Euthanasia’s marketing is slick: “autonomy,” “dignity,” “compassion.” Give people control over their final chapter. Begin, the pitch goes, with the terminally ill. But follow the principle to its logical end and every restriction collapses. If so-called bodily autonomy is absolute, then no age, no diagnosis, no degree of despair can be allowed to limit it. The lonely teenager, the bankrupt breadwinner, the elderly woman afraid of being a burden — all are eligible for the same lethal injection. Cryonics is merely the mirror image. Instead of pulling the plug early, it refuses to let the plug be pulled at all. Both are acts of high-tech rebellion against the sovereignty of the One who numbers our days.
Unbelievers facing mortality without Christ tend to react in one of three ways. Dismissal — “When you’re dead, you’re dead; eat, drink, be merry.” Defiance — “If death is inevitable, at least let me write the terms.” Desperate bargaining — pouring billions into longevity research, neuralinks, or liquid nitrogen … anything to postpone the reckoning. All three postures flow from the same root: refusal to bow to the God who holds life and death in His hand.
In the end, whether through euthanasia or cryonics, these are not triumphs of human hope but towering monuments to human unbelief — an icy altar erected by those who would rather stake eternity on the cold singularity of engineered death or the fantastical dream of an earthly resurrection than bow before the coming King.
That King, who will soon split the skies in glory, has already settled the matter with sovereign finality for every soul made in His image: apart from Him there is only the second death — everlasting, conscious torment. But to everyone who repents and believes the gospel, Christ has already sworn with an oath: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24).
Believers do not escape physical death (yet), but we will never taste the second death. While the world clutches at frozen corpses and silicon dreams, we await the trumpet, the shout, the sudden blaze of glory when this corruptible body puts on incorruption and death is swallowed up forever (1 Corinthians 15:54). So, those who consider euthanasia and cryonics may have fear behind their decisions, but the Christian, dear reader, has nothing to fear. We have our victory sealed by the blood of Christ. His children are permanently written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. For those who rightly fear His name, there is truly nothing else to fear at all.
So let the faithless build their alters of ice and their capsules of poison. But may those of us who know the risen Christ refuse to stay silent. Every life is precious to God, from the womb to the final breath. It is not ours to discard or to hoard against His decree. And may these strange new industries remind us that this decaying world is not our home. We are strangers here, with hearts fixed on a city whose builder and maker is God. And as Christ’s people, neither euthanasia nor cryonics should have any appeal. One defies our Lord; the others seek to pull us away from Him. One robs us of our earthly mission, the other of our heavenly dwelling place.
So, we lift our eyes to the clouds, for our redemption draws near. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
