Author and pastor John Burke is detailing his examinations of over 1,000 near-death experiences in his new book, Imagine the God of Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Revelation, and the Love You’ve Always Wanted. Burke was formerly an agnostic who was intrigued by stories of near-death experiences. “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,” he told CBN. He described near-death experiences as “It’s when someone clinically dies … their heart stops, they have no brain waves. 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.” 

 His book focuses on interviews with people across the world who have had these experiences. He admitted the difficulties people face when trying to describe their experiences. “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. 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 believes that describing these events will help non-believers come to faith. 

Burke also appeared in the Christian documentary, “After Death,” which was released in October to share stories of near-death experiences. The film went on to be the highest grossing documentary since 2019. It focused on near-death experiences detailed in books like 90 Minutes in Heaven, Imagine Heaven, and To Heaven and Back. Of course, near-death experiences do have their difficulties to prove. A study in May found that there was an uptick in gamma activities during acute asphyxia and cardiac arrest. The effect in dying patients seemed similar to that of having dreams. There is also the difficulty of faked near-death experiences, such as in the very public retraction of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven. Answers in Genesis has concluded that while near-death experiences are hard to prove, the need for Christ is not. “Whether any particular near-death experience is a reliable experience from God can be challenging to discover. However, one thing remains true of everyone: we will all die. And there is only one rescue from a just and eternal judgment: repenting and believing the good news of Jesus Christ.”