One pastor and author, who has studied and examined over 1,000 accounts of near-death experiences, believes that these types of incidents further prove God and the Bible.
Its when someone clinically dies their heart stops, they have no brain waves, Burke, author of the new book Imagine the God of Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, Gods Revelation, and the Love Youve Always Wanted, told CBN Digital in a recent interview. And yet either modern medicine or miracle brings them back minutes later, sometimes its hours.And when they come back, they talk about experiencing the life to come, and they talk about how its more real than anything theyve ever experienced in this world, he continued.
According to CBN News, Burkes latest book includes scores of interviews of people worldwide whove faced near-death experiences.
They are seeing and experiencing the God of Scripture, he said. And were 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.
At the same time, however, Burke notes that there are many others who remain skeptical of these types of stories. He said one reason is a failure to understand these are testimonies that give evidence of God while another reason is the limited human understanding of near-death 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, Burke 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.
The pastor explained that people who went through near-death experiences are witnessing Gods reality in an extra-dimensional way. He contended that the similarities in these experiences support the Bible and offer evidence to unbelievers.
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.
Not only does Burke hope that non-Christians would see God through these experiences, he hopes Christians can learn important biblical lessons through them, such as God’s love for humanity.
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Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for CrosswalkHeadlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.