Beautifully disguised

I was looking to improve my French. My son suggested Duolingo, but that was like watching paint dry. “Learn French Through Stories” seemed promising but turned out to be a stealth delivery system of leftist values.

Then I stumbled on recorded interviews of people with near-death experiences. It was perfect—natural conversation full of concrete nouns and verbs, like about swimming pools, cars overtaking trucks on curvy double yellow lines, and surgeries gone wrong.

With 30,000 square feet of church building to clean and me the only cleaning lady, I figure I racked up 50 or 60 interviews of people who tasted the other world while clinically dead. The claim they all had in common was that their souls left their bodies, and they could observe their lifeless matter from somewhere hovering above it.

In the early 1970s our college professor said that consciousness is the product of the brain’s neural activity. Five minutes’ reflection told me that couldn’t be right: Matter is matter and thought is thought, and no amount of fancy psychological jargon can paper over the yawning gap.

NDEs (near-death experiences) favor the Bible’s ontology of man over my materialist college professor’s, hands down, because we Christians have known all along that a human is a spirit temporarily encased in a “tent” in which we groan, “longing to put on our heavenly dwelling” (2 Corinthians 5:1-5). NDEs are also consistent with Lazarus’ cadaver becoming reanimated when his spirit returns to it, and also with the story of that other Lazarus and the rich man who both die, their bodies rotting in the ground but their spirits able to converse with Abraham (Luke 16).

Not only that, but the Apostle Paul may very well be describing his own NDE, if you put 2 Corinthians 12:1-4 together with Acts 14:19-20. In a letter to the city of Corinth, where fickle converts want proof of Paul’s super-apostle status, Paul resorts to sharing a strange personal experience, only because they have put him in the distasteful position of having to boast a bit:

“It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up … into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:1-4, NKJV).

Perhaps the incident occurred during Paul and Barnabas’ missionary trip to Lystra (Acts 14), where antagonistic Jews from Antioch and Iconium showed up and turned the people against them. The crowd stoned Paul, dragged him outside the city, and left him for dead. What brief excursion may his spirit have experienced in those hours?

Honestly, I felt different after hearing a few dozen interviews than after hearing the first one or two, and not in a positive way.

One reason is because, although every returnee was excited to tell us about the glorious light, and the tunnel, and the heavenly welcoming committee, hardly anyone mentioned or was excited about Jesus or repentance. The final impression left on the hearer is that we’re all going to be OK. (I’m OK—You’re OK by Thomas Anthony Harris is another book we had to read in college. No mention of the need to get right with God there either.)

Here is the thing: While I do not doubt that a lot of people who drowned or had car accidents received beautiful brushes with the supernatural, one must at least consider that a percentage of these were compliments of Satan. The devil counterfeits everything: God turned Moses’ staff into a snake, so the devil turned the Egyptian magicians’ staffs into snakes.

Remember Jesus’ warning that at the end of history many will fall under a “strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie” (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12). Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), or as your sweet old grandmother (whom many report meeting during their NDEs).

In these last days, we can avoid being taken in by “wiles” of the devil (Ephesians 6:11) only by knowing the word of God backwards and forwards (verses 14, 17). They say the best way to spot a counterfeit hundred dollar bill is to study a real hundred dollar bill.

So I use Jesus’ own rule of thumb: “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Any NDE that is conspicuously absent of mention of Christ, or that gives false assurance of happily ever after without repentance and Jesus, is a bright red flag.