The validity of near-death experiences as proof of heaven is a topic of debate among Christians. John Burke, a pastor and author who has studied and examined more than 1,000 accounts of near-death experiences, believes such reports provide faith-building evidence of God and the Bible.
“It’s when someone clinically dies, their heart stops and they have no brain waves,” he told CBN. “And yet either modern medicine or miracle brings them back minutes later, sometimes it’s hours. And when they come back, they talk about experiencing the life to come, and they talk about how it’s more real than anything they’ve ever experienced in this world.”
Burke said his latest book looks at scores of interviews with people from all over the world who have had these clinical near-death experiences. “They are seeing and experiencing the God of scripture,” he said. “And we’re looking not only at his love story told throughout history in the Bible but also his heart and characteristics, the mystery, the majesty of God.”
Trying to describe otherworldly experiences using the confines of human language is difficult.
“The way I like to describe it is, imagine if all of our existence is being lived on a flat black-and-white painting on the wall of your home,” he said. “Death means separation. Your soul separates from your body. So imagine at death you peel off that two-dimensional black-and-white painting, you come out here into a three-dimensional world of color, and then imagine getting pressed back in and you have to describe three dimensions of color in two-dimensional black-and-white terms.”
He said those who have near-death experiences are seeing God’s reality in an “extra-dimensional” way. “When I first heard about this, I was an agnostic,” Burke said. “So hearing these experiences as an engineer got me thinking, ‘maybe this is evidence,’ and then it got me into the scriptures and then I started to see the evidence, and I came to faith.”
–Alan Goforth | MV
