New Zealand China Cultural Connection
An inevitable ‘appointment’ with death awaits us all. Sorry if being blunt loses you here, but it’s the truth and using euphemisms like ‘passing away’ can’t balm this reality. Throughout aeons, humanity has relentlessly searched for ways to prolong life, still the futile pursuit of avoiding our “fight to the death” remains unattainable.
Murray Smith
Fear and uncertainty around death has been a source of despair through all generations. The mysteries of the afterlife found cultures wrestling with ideas about what lies beyond the grave; their various suppositions often dark and lacking hopeful re-assurance.
To mitigate their anxiety about dying, the ancient Egyptians concocted complex strategies to prepare for a comfortable ‘after-life’. Elaborate practices believed to be necessary for ensuring immortality after death, were invented. Various rituals including mummifying the body, filling tombs with food, clothing and tools as well as casting magical spells – were about assisting the deceased’s successful navigation through the underworld.
Things haven’t changed much over thousands of years with death, as always, still capturing humanity’s attention in one way or another. Quests for defeating death are more ‘technically’ sophisticated now. In America, the practice of ‘cryonics’ is available to those who can afford it and believe in it. This technology deep-freezes the bodies of people who have died, in the hope that scientific advances may allow them to be revived in the future. Putting a legally deceased human into frozen ‘hibernation’ with a view to bringing them ‘back’ in the future has never been proved feasible. But for some, that’s the hope that they’re banking on – of it becoming reality.
There are reports coming out of China where the quest for longevity is next level. Combating death is a big deal for leaders of the Chinese communist regime who prize ‘ruling’ above everything else. Clinging onto power without death ‘cheating’ them from achieving their agendas is paramount.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping said recently in a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child.” It prompted Putin, who, like Xi, is 72—to reference continued organ transplants as a key to everlasting youth. “Predictions are that in this century, there’s a chance of living to 150,” Xi has said.
That 150 year life expectancy plan is contingent upon industrial-scale organ harvesting in China. Inherent indifference to certain lives considered unimportant sustains inhumane practices designed to keep the elite alive. Doctors are warning of the dangers in treating the human body like a car, with human organs just getting swapped in and out repeatedly.
Where do China’s leader’s futile efforts stem from? The dread of dying… lacking hope, in death they’ll lose it all.
In facing death, there’s one true source of hope. It’s found in putting your faith in the One who has overcome death and offers us eternal life… Jesus Christ. He declared, “I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever. And I hold the keys of death and Hades”.
Death, a consequence of our sin, has been defeated by Jesus and He offers you forgiveness and the opportunity of sharing in His eternal victory.
New Zealand China Cultural Connection
