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.
Burke, author of the new book 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 Scripture and also detailed what a near-death experience entails.
“It’s when someone clinically dies … their heart stops, they have no brain waves,” Burke said. “And yet either modern medicine or miracle brings them back … minutes later, sometimes it’s hours.”
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He continued, “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’ve 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.”
Burke, though, knows not everyone believes these heaven visitation stories.
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.
“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.”
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