Bryan Johnson is a billionaire entrepreneur who made his first $800 million when he sold Braintree, a payment processing company, to eBay in 2013. He went on to launch Kernal, a biotech company that specializes in providing non-invasive brain measurements through the use of a helmet-like headset.
But Johnson has been making headlines most recently for his public declaration that he doesn’t think he will die. Indeed, over the last several years, he’s given loads of his time, energy, and money to ensure that he won’t.
But cheating death is no simple task. In order to achieve peak health and longevity, Johnson maintains a rigorous daily routine (that’s putting it lightly) that involves specialized exercise, a serious amount of vegetables, laser therapies, and age-reversing facials. So all-consuming is Johnson’s regimen that some are asking if trying not to die is really the best way to live.
But Johnson is undeterred by such philosophical musings. He actually loves what he is doing. “I derive tremendous pleasure from the entire process of what we’re trying to do,” Johnson told Christopher Stokel-Walking in a 2023 interview with GQ magazine. What is it that he and his team are trying to do? The immediate aim is for Johnson to avoid his own demise. But there’s a larger goal as well: he wants to provide the public with scientific tools and resources to increase their own wellness and, perhaps, escape the reaper themselves.
When we hear of billionaires like Johnson (and Jeff Bezos) leveraging their lives and wealth to avoid death, we might be tempted to look with disdain and disgust at the waste of resources on what is a patently futile venture. Admittedly, there is something almost comical about the effort that Johnson puts into something we know cannot be achieved.
Johnson, of course, doesn’t believe he’s pursuing the unattainable. That’s because his view of death is built upon naturalistic evolutionary assumptions about the origin of human life. If it is true that we’ve evolved from basic molecules to more complex animals, then there is the built-in expectation in the evolutionary framework itself that we can (and will) finally achieve immortality—it’s just a matter of when. Death is not the penalty humans bear for sin against their Creator—it is an unhappy glitch in the universe that can eventually be overcome by the universe.
Johnson is encouraged by the current state of technology and believes that we are close to finding the answer to life’s most troubling dilemma. Yet, as Christians, we can say without a hint of arrogance or Gnostic elitism that Johnson will never find a cure for death. That’s not because he isn’t brilliant or because we revel in the folly of unbelief. We can say such things because we know where death came from, why it exists, and the only way it can be overcome.
While Johnson’s $2 million-a-year self-care program is excessive by any standard, we shouldn’t nurse an attitude of contempt toward this man. He is made in God’s image and he, with us, bears the consequences of sin that we inherited from our first parents (Gen 2:15; 3:1ff). He is doing what all people do in the face of imminent death and judgment: they run and hide. The fear of death grips all sinners, and Johnson is not exempt from this reality (see Heb 2:14-15). The only difference between Johnson and the rest of us is that he has the financial resources to make self-made immortality sound plausible.
But what a relief the gospel would bring to this soul, running on an endless treadmill of health and wellness, seeking with all its might to avoid what must come to every person. Johnson does not need to concoct immortality—it has been achieved already by the Lord Jesus Christ, who lavishes the riches of eternal life upon all those who call upon him in faith (Rom 10:14-17).
The Lord Jesus has tasted death on our behalf so that we no longer have to live in fear of it. Having been raised bodily from the grave, Jesus Christ has overcome our greatest enemy and will someday provide his people with a body that will no longer decay or require millions of dollars’ worth of plasma transfusions or organic diets (1 Cor 15:42-56).
Johnson is right in an important sense. He will never die. Humans are immortal in that we all live forever. So terrible is eternity apart from Christ, however, that Scripture describes it as a kind of eternal death (2 Cor 4:3; 2 Thess 2:3; Rev 20:14). Not only must we die, but our death will never end if we haven’t had our sins forgiven by God through Jesus Christ and made new by the Holy Spirit (John 3:3; 2 Cor 5:17). When Johnson finally goes the way of all the earth, if he is without Christ, his efforts at immortality will prove to be a double failure: he will not only die physically, but he will die unceasingly in judgment (Rev 21:8).
Bryan Johnson needs the gospel. But so do we. Thankfully, the gospel is free for the taking and not reserved only for those who can afford it. Scripture encourages us to, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isa 55:1). Christ has died for our sins and been raised from the dead, never to die again (1 Cor 15:3-4). Those who trust in him will have their sins forgiven and can look forward to really living forever. May Johnson soon find the cure for death that will relieve him from his endless striving for immortality.
