Truth Really Matters

buy gabapentin tablets A young lady in London named Mary was pregnant, but bleeding badly.  She had been seduced and deceived by a man who professed love and promised marriage, but when she told him she was pregnant, he confessed that he had a wife and five children . . . and so he abandoned her.

In the emergency room, she lost consciousness and found herself looking down from the ceiling, watching the doctors and nurses working on her body.  She then transited a tunnel, and was “overwhelmed by a radiant white light that seemed to embody all the concepts of love . . . I knew in my heart that this was God.”  She says that God gave her a life review, confronting the impacts of every good and bad action she had ever done.  “She actually felt how it made others feel,” along with seeing the ripple effects and consequences of her actions.

God showed her that her baby boy would live and she needed to be there for him.  She felt forgiven and unconditionally loved by God.  After reviving, only one nurse was interested in her experience.  Mary reported details of words exchanged by the medical staff while she was in cardiac arrest.  The nurse and an orderly got a tall ladder to see if there was indeed a red sticker Mary said she saw on the hidden side of the ceiling fan.  Her detailed description of the sticker checked out.

This is just one of the many near-death experiences (NDEs) reported by John Burke in his 2023 book, Imagine the God of Heaven:  Near-Death Experiences, God’s Revelation, and the Love You’ve Always Wanted.  The book is a sequel to Burke’s previous best-seller, Imagine Heaven.  Both books report on a wide variety of NDEs and I recommend them to you – but with a warning . . . We must consider the possibility that many NDEs are Satanically orchestrated.  In 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 we see that Satan can transform himself into an “angel of light,” clearly with the intent to deceive and to damn God’s image-bearers.  In this essay I’ll give you a few nuggets from Imagine the God of Heaven.

I decided to read these books after watching the author’s interview on Sean McDowell’s podcast.  Burke and McDowell seem to be “all in” for taking NDEs at face vaule.  Any particular NDE might well be doubted, although hard to explain.  Burke would admit as much.  Yet there are thousands and thousands of well-documented NDEs that, in their aggregate, make an overwhelming case that something quite real is going on.

The question is whether, by and large, they are consistent with biblical truth.  In a footnote Burke explains, “An NDE is not a final, biological death in which a person crosses over the border or boundary between life on earth and eternal life.  Reportedly, Jesus even says to some NDErs, ‘You have not died yet, go back.’  So NDEs do not reflect a person’s eternal destiny (Heaven or Hell).  But I do believe that God gives the NDE as a teaching for that person and as a witness to all of us.”

That’s the question that must be examined.  Is an NDE actually a God-given experience or a deception by the Adversary?

Burke reports that many of the NDErs were clearly not right with God when they had their ‘taste of Heaven.’  An analogy:  You may be invited to visit Buckhingham Palace, but that’s not the same as the King of England adopting you as part of the royal family and moving in permanently.  Indeed, Burke reports, some NDErs come back and seek to follow Jesus, and some do not.  Some may ‘turn over a new leaf,’ but never become born again Christians.

Some even deny Jesus after having met Him.  Some seek other supernatural experiences, despite Scripture’s warnings to have no traffic with the occult.  Burke cites 2 Cor 11:14 and admits that demonic spirits can deceive and even disguise themselves as angels of light, but he is confident that evil may not be able to personify love, at least to the degree many NDErs experience.  But what is Burke’s warrant for limiting Satan’s skills for deception and illusion?  Burke does properly warn the reader to make the Bible the authority, and not someone’s interpretation of an NDE.

Just after I drafted this essay I met a middle-aged fellow who described to me an NDE he had as a young man after receiving a severe electrical shock on the job.  It was a hellish NDE, and it provoked him to embark on a spiritual journey which led him into Oneness Pentecostalism.  Since then he has fully embraced those heresies, which include the necessities – for salvation – of ecstatic speaking in tongues and water baptism.  Anyone that doesn’t follow that path is lost, he assured me.

I asked him to explain to me what I could do to be saved if I only had a few minutes to live.  He insisted that there was nothing that could be done for someone like me.  Too late.  Doomed.

Over the years I’ve met other people while sharing the Gospel who have had remarkable ‘spiritual experiences.’  These experiences seem to trump everything else for many, including the plain teaching of the Bible, common sense, and simple logic.  They won’t listen to anything that contradicts their experience.  Who is the likely author of such experiences?

John Burke is a pastor now, but sees himself as basically analytical and skeptical, educated in science and engineering, once enjoying a career in engineering.  NDEs opened his mind up to the possibility of God’s existence.  In his research over three decades he discovered that there are millions of reported NDEs, and thousands that have been investigated in detail, rigorously.

His first book, Imagine Heaven, focused on the amazing commonalities of the NDE experience of Heaven, a Heaven very much in sync with what Scripture describes.  Burke has personally collected thousands of accounts and he reports that the most emphatic and consistent comment is that there is absolutely nothing on Earth “that compares to being in the presence of God!”

In almost all of his accounts the characteristics of God are the same, independent of religion, nation, or culture.  NDErs may interpret God’s identity from within their own religious framework, but the descriptive details are consistent with the God of the Bible, Burke reports.  Two characteristics are key:  light and love.  NDErs consistently identify their contact as personal and that it must be God.  None that he reports expressed any concern that there might be a deceptive spirit behind their experience.

A typical NDE testimony of the love of God:  “Imagine all the love you’ve ever experienced – from parents, grandparents, lovers, spouses, children – and put all that love across your lifetime into a single moment.  Then multiply by a thousand.”

Blind people who have an NDE can see clearly during their experience.  Their experience gives them enormous hope.

Dr. Bell Chung, a PhD in cognitive psychology, had an NDE when he crashed his hang glider in New Zealand.  From above he saw his broken body on the ground, dying, but then experienced a golden light, peaceful and calm, a source of great love.  He found himself in a cinema, with thousands of screens, playing scenes from his life.

It took a rescue team thirty minutes to cut him out of the wreckage.  He was in a coma for the next three days, but emerged a different man.

Dr. Rajiv Parti, a chief anesthesiologist, was an NDE skeptic, until one of his patients survived a risky, difficult surgery in which the heart and circulatory system are stopped and the blood is temporarily replaced with a cool liquid to lower body temperature.  Upon recovery, the patient described details he observed which startled the doctor, who argued, “Your heart was stopped.  Your brain didn’t have any activity.  You couldn’t have seen anything.  Your head was packed in ice.”

Parti was raised a Hindu in India, but rejected all belief in gods and the supernatural by the time he finished medical school and moved to New York.  Everything changed at Christmas, 2010, years after the experience with “the frozen man.”  At age 53 he had his own NDE.  In the UCLA Medical Center, he told the resident anesthesiologist that he’d watched him from the ceiling.  The other doctor scoffed, until Parti offered disturbing details of the procedure.  During the NDE, Parti visited his mom and sister in India and then found himself on the edge of Hell.  Parti’s NDE destroyed his skepticism and now knew that God is real.

Determined skeptics have over thirty alternate naturalistic explanations for NDEs, but Burke points out that they can plausibly account for only an element or two out of the richly textured and uncanny experiences that people actually have.  There are no comprehensive explanations, which is why there are so many attempts to discredit the phenomenon.  Burke invoked Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation offered by the NDErs themselves:  “There is a soul.  I left my body, but I was still myself, fully alive in a world more real than anything I’ve experienced on Earth.”

A 1980 scientific study of NDEs was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, by Dr. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist and a Christian, who initially set out to disprove NDEs.  The study summarized five years of listening to and examining the claims of heart attack survivors.  Since then, over 900 articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

NDErs testify that their experience was more vivid and real than anything else in their lives, and continue to stand by their testimonies many years after the event.  Dr. Jeffrey Long, an NDE researcher, contrasts the experience with dreams, hallucinations, pyschotic events, etc. – “You typically have confused sensorium.  Experiences may skip around in dreams, you have decreased lucidity,” whereas in NDEs the experience is hyper- lucid, logical, and ordered.

Kenneth Ring, professor of psychology at the U. of Connecticut, conducted a study on the NDEs of the blind.  Fourteen were congenitally blind, with no light perception at all.  Yet in their NDEs they reported perfect sight with all the typical details a sighted person would notice.  Debbie, a forty-eight year old who lost sight at birth, recalled, “I saw this beautiful light and it was different colors; it was, gee, what can I say?  Colors I couldn’t even begin to describe.  It was fantastic.”

In another study, Dr. Pim van Lommel notes that ten to twenty seconds after a heart attack, brain waves cease and the EEG is flat – no electrical activity.  Of 344 patients studied, 18 percent reported an NDE.  Clearly, NDE memories are not stored in the brain’s neural networks.  The simple answer is a soul that transcends the brain.

What about NDEs for people in non-Christian religions?  Arvin, a Hindu from India, after a cardiac arrest reported a huge light which he identified with the goddess, Kali.  But Kali is often described in Hinduism as black or blue, naked, with a long tongue and multiple arms.  Burke:  “An NDEr may interpret what they saw as a certain goddess or god, but their description often matches the God of Light and Love described in the Hebrew Scriptures.”

Another Hindu, whose faith taught him that Brahma, the Creator, is impersonal, in his NDE encountered “the Divine Giant of Pure Light.” He knew instantly that this Person, who loved him while knowing everything about him, was the true Creator.  Furthermore, he was offered – not another reincarnation – rather a choice between a deep dungeon with flames or a narrow door, another chance.  “Why did He give me a second chance?  I was not a sinless person.  I committed many sins in my life.  Since the wages of sin is death, I definitely deserved to be dead.”

Dr. Rajiv Parti, whom we met before, traveled to “a very hellish realm . . . pitch dark . . . thunderstorms . . . dark entities with crooked teeth running about . . . I could hear other souls crying and wailing.”  He desperately wanted to get away, wondering, “Why am I here, what have I done?”  He met angels, a total surprise considering his Hindu upbringing.  His life review was painful.  When he told his wife about all this, she asked, “How come you didn’t see any Hindu gods?”  He had no explanation.  Parti asked the Being of Light, “Who are you?”  The reply:  “I am Jesus, your Savior.”  He was told to return to Earth and spread God’s message of love.

The messages NDErs bring back often speak of God’s love or that the individual needs to show love to the people in his life, etc.  What is consistently lacking is the message that we are all sinners in need of the Savior.  If an NDEr really meets Jesus on the other side, wouldn’t repentance and saving faith be the key elements of what he learns?  What good does the ‘love message’ do if the fellow comes back, still lost, and has no clue what to specifically do about it?

Burke notes that the apostle Paul may have had an NDE when he was stoned in Lystra.  In 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 he reports that he was caught up to the third heaven and could not tell whether he was in his body or not.  Paul also states that he was not allowed to tell all that he had experienced, an element common to NDErs.

Burke relates results of one study in which hellish NDEs were reported by 23%.  Another study across 35 countries found an even higher percentage.  Burke:  “It is important to note that at times God seems to give NDErs a glimpse of hell’s reality, but that does not mean hell is their eternal destination.”  When they return to their bodies, they can still choose.  These percentages are problematic.  In Matthew 7:13-14 Jesus observes that the road to destruction (Hell) is broad and many are on it; the road to life (Heaven) is narrow and few find it.

Polls of Americans over the last generation indicate that only a few percent have a basically biblical worldview.  My own experience in talking with thousands of Americans one-to-one tells me that less than two percent of American adults are genuinely born again, with some evidence to demonstrate it.  Shouldn’t the vast majority of NDEs be hellish?  And if someone has a feel-good heavenly NDE, if not a Christian already, shouldn’t their encounter with Jesus point to truths about sin, judgment, repentance, and saving faith?  There is little of that in the accounts.

Dale Black, an airline pilot, had an NDE after a plane crash.  His heavenly experience was notable to him in that there was no strife, no competition, no sarcasm . . . “nothing contrary to the light and life and love . . . I had been in heaven for some time before I recognized sin’s absence . . . the one thing that dominated everything on earth.”

Howard was raised in church, but turned away as an adult, living a reprobate life.  His NDE turned him around:  “Here’s the nicest, kindest, most loving being I’ve ever met who, I realized, is my Lord, my Savior, even my Creator.”  He realized each of his sins was like stabbing Jesus in the heart.  “And the last thing I want to do is hurt him, and I don’t want to hurt him to this day.”  That sounds like genuine repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus, an apparently rare exception to the usual account.

Imagine the God of Heaven is filled with NDE accounts, along with considerable Scriptural analysis by Burke to interpret them in light of Christian doctrine.  Although it seems impossible to construct a complete and fully coherent picture of NDE phenomena, it is evident that much is real and substantive.  Something supernatural is going on!  Any individual NDE may be doubted by others; after all, these are uniquely personal, subjective experiences.  Yet many relate observed knowledge that is truly uncanny.

This side of the veil, I don’t think it is possible to judge every detail of NDE encounters.  Where God is involved and where Satan is working to fool us may be difficult to discern in any particular circumstance.  I have not heard of any NDEs that involve a serious, Bible-savvy, definitely born-again Christian.

Nevertheless, I think we can learn or reaffirm some profitable points overall.  For example:

• NDEs are strong evidence for the supernatural and for life after death.
• Everyone can expect a life review and will give an account – our individual records are exhaustive and indelible.
• Life is short and eternity lies ahead – everyone should feel a poignant urgency to decide to follow Jesus and to live for Him.
• Hell is real and awaits the lost. Let’s get busy and reach out with the Gospel.  Get any tracts out this week?
• Don’t forget to judge accounts of the supernatural on Biblical grounds. Whether NDEs are ‘valid’ or not, our paths on Earth must be guided by Scripture.  John Burke, I believe, would certainly agree with that.

Make your days count.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com