Sunday Devotional: Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live

John 11:1-2, 5-8, 11, 17, 25-27, 32-35, 38-44

Now a man was ill, Lazarus from Bethany,
the village of Mary and her sister Martha.
Mary was the one who had anointed the Lord with perfumed oil
and dried his feet with her hair;
it was her brother Lazarus who was ill….
Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.
So when he heard that he was ill,
he remained for two days in the place where he was.
Then after this he said to his disciples,
“Let us go back to Judea.”
The disciples said to him,
“Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you,
and you want to go back there?”….
He said this, and then told them,
“Our friend Lazarus is asleep,
but I am going to awaken him.”….
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus
had already been in the tomb for four days….
Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”
She said to him, “Yes, Lord.
I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God,
the one who is coming into the world.”….
When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him,
she fell at his feet and said to him,
“Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping,
he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said,
“Where have you laid him?”
They said to him, “Sir, come and see.”
And Jesus wept….
So Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb.
It was a cave, and a stone lay across it.
Jesus said, “Take away the stone.”
Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him,
“Lord, by now there will be a stench;
he has been dead for four days.”
Jesus said to her,
“Did I not tell you that if you believe
you will see the glory of God?”
So they took away the stone.
And Jesus raised his eyes and said,

“Father, I thank you for hearing me.
I know that you always hear me;
but because of the crowd here I have said this,
that they may believe that you sent me.”
And when he had said this,
He cried out in a loud voice,
“Lazarus, come out!”
The dead man came out,
tied hand and foot with burial bands,
and his face was wrapped in a cloth.
So Jesus said to them,
“Untie him and let him go.”

Did you know that physicists have discovered the equivalent of the soul, i.e., something that endures after the death of our bodies?

Renowned British physicist Sir Roger Penrose and other physicists believe that human consciousness is something ineffable that’s “beyond the computational laws of physics,” and that our consciousness is “a packet of information” that’s stored at a quantum or sub-atomic level in microtubules within human cells. When a person dies, his or her quantum information (or consciousness) leaves the body and is released into the universe, only to return to the body’s cells if the host is brought back to life. Penrose argues that this explains why people can have near-death experiences, and believes that this quantum information amounts to a soul leaving the body. He said:

“”If the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

As reported by Australia’s News.com on Oct. 31, 2012, Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology and Director of the Center of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, developed a quantum theory of consciousness asserting that our souls are contained inside structures called microtubules within our brain cells. Our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects inside these microtubules — a process they call orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR). In a near-death experience the microtubules lose their quantum state, but the information within them is not destroyed. Or in layman’s terms, the soul does not die but returns to the universe.

In the documentary Through the Wormhole, Dr. Hameroff explains:

“The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says ‘I had a near death experience’. [If the patient dies, it is] possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body indefinitely — as a soul.”

May the peace and love of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,

~E

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