John Burke, an author and pastor who’s studied and examined over 1,000 accounts of near-death experiences, believes these reports provide faith-building evidence of God and the Bible. Burke, author of Imagine the God of Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Revelation, and the Love You’ve Always Wanted, told CBN Digital why he believes these experiences corroborate the Bible and also detailed what a near-death experience entails.
Burke said, “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.”
Burke said his latest book looks at numerous interviews with people from all over the world who’ve had these clinical near-death experiences. He said, “They are seeing and experiencing the God of Scripture. And we’re looking not only at His love story throughout history in the Bible but also his heart and characteristics, the mystery, the majesty of God.” However, Burke knows not everyone believes these heaven visitation stories and explains precisely why he thinks there’s so much skepticism.
He said one factor is a failure to understand “these are testimonies” that shed light on God’s nature. Another is the complexities that come from trying to describe other-worldly experiences using the confines of human language. Burke said, “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.”
He continued, “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. What’s perhaps most remarkable, Burke added, is the similarities in these experiences — happenings he believes back the biblical narrative and provide proof to non-believers.
“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.”
The preacher believes non-Christians can see God through these experiences, but he argued Christians, too, can take away valuable biblical lessons — including the Lord’s love for humanity — coming to life.