For God so loved the world...
Reflections on eternity, near-death experiences, and the love of God.
For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son so everyone who believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. John 3:16-17
Near-death experiences and the unreliability of memory
I have read of many near-death experiences over the years. Some are very much Christian experiences, however people of any faith and no faith also have these experiences, and they are often different, and quite contradictory, really. One might say, well, we’re dealing with eternal things here – they don’t have to conform to the narrow constraints of our human minds. The problem is that such experiences clearly give birth to ideas and doctrines about the after-life, and some of these doctrines contradict what the Bible teaches and what Christians know and believe to be true about God.
One question I have is, to what degree are people who have had these experiences telling the truth, in retrospect? I have not known too many people who have had near-death experiences, but I have known people who have been saved by miracles.
In a box in my linen cupboard, there is a letter from a girl; she was two years younger than me and I loved her. She had written to me because she had gone to Sydney, to escape her past, which was quite traumatic and abusive. In Sydney she had fallen in with a low-life scumbag who gave her heroin; her boyfriend at the time. He then said to her that he couldn’t pay for the drugs, she would have to work for him as a prostitute - yes, he was a pimp, and used their relationship as a lever to make her into one of his girls. She eventually realised this whole thing was dreadful and that her life was spiralling downwards. She went to the phone booth open up the phone book and prayed, “God, please save me,” put her finger down randomly on a page and rang the first number she saw.
Amazingly, it turned out to be someone she knew, a friend. He took her in and helped her through the three day withdrawal period.
In her letter to me, she was not quite ready to say that God had saved her. It was the “force”, the “Cosmos,” but this was a significant move closer to God than she had expressed beforehand.
In time, though, she completely forgot this episode. I mentioned it to her maybe ten years later, and she could only recall it to her mind with an effort.
I have known others – one person who had an extreme, life threatening reaction to the first Covid jab – I prayed for this person and she recovered immediately. The thing is, months later, she couldn’t remember the role that prayer had played in her recovery, indeed, events had actually switched order in her memory, to make the dependence on God’s help no longer a ‘thing’.
This might well be a psychological trick that our minds play on us, in cases of trauma, to help us to adapt to everyday life again, or then again, it might be proof of the ubiquity of sin. Maybe this is why I’m unusual, in some ways, because I myself don’t seem to have this facility to forget trauma. I tend to remember traumatic events quite vividly, and the order of events and the things that happened don’t tend to dissipate, although with time the pain goes away.
But I wonder, if some people who have near-death experiences actually do experience Christ and God the Father, but when they come back, they edit these memories to exclude what they don’t want to believe or submit to (to believe in Christ is natural for the human spirit, but the human flesh rebels against submitting to the Creator).
Some near-death experiences might also be lies. What motives might some people have to mislead others? What if they went to hell, and want to take revenge on God by misleading people? How do we know? Or perhaps, in a vulnerable state, the mind is open to other spiritual influences, evil spiritual influences, that deceive them.
How do we know what is true in relation to eternity?
The New Testament - a historical record
What we have in the New Testament is something more solid and dependable, really: a historical record of the visit of the Eternal God to this globe, this earth, spinning through space, which we all share. If anyone is willing to honestly look into the historical context and the archaeological proof of the New Testament, he or she will find that it is thoroughly dependable. Again and again, the New Testament has been verified by archaeology. The historical background is thoroughly consistent with what is written there.
Furthermore, the testimony of the early church – which was incredibly heroic, completely pacifist, and in which many, many Christians were willing to be martyred horribly rather than give up their Christian faith and light incense to the Emperor. I contrast this with the recent Coronavirus debacle, in which so many were eager to bow to the coercion and light incense (ahem) I mean, take the jab, which was a symbol of bowing to the earthly power and putting one’s trust in its protection and salvation.
I can only see this willingness to die in the early church as a result of two things: 1) the empowering of the Holy Spirit to change people from ordinary, self-centred people who are cowardly and selfish, into people empowered by an unearthly power to be willing to die and sacrifice everything for the unseen God and 2) the fact that Jesus’ (many) disciples were still alive and were able to tell people, yes, this really happened, Jesus really did rise from the dead, Jesus’ body was resurrected, he was the same person, but different and not just revived but had a different kind of life, empowered by the Spirit.
And before anyone tells you complacently, “Oh, these things were written more than a hundred years later,” it simply isn’t true.
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (certainly written within twenty years of Jesus’ resurrection) mentions that many of the five hundred people who saw Jesus’ resurrection were still alive; in other words, Paul was saying, ‘if you doubt what I’m saying, go ask them’.
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas,[b] and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
The three Synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, were certainly written before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD, for these gospels have the prophecies concerning this event mixed up with many other prophecies, and do not distinguish between those which were fulfilled and those which were yet to be fulfilled.
Note that the Christians (i.e. mostly the Christian Jews) fled Jerusalem when the Romans attacked, as Jesus told them to do, when it was surrounded by armies, and they did not remain as the other Jews did, who were then massacred and destroyed. Indeed, the surviving Jewish institutional religious bodies then blamed the Christians for the destruction of the temple, and this was the end of the church as a Jewish sect that before 70AD often met in synagogues.
John’s gospel alone does not mention the destruction of Jerusalem, and many scholars think this is because it had already happened, i.e. John’s gospel was written after 70AD. The accent of John’s gospel is more spiritual and speaks about spiritual worship, worship in ‘spirit and in truth,’ not tied to a particular geographical location.
And lest anyone says, “Oh, maybe the apostles were lying, maybe the New Testament is a big lie.” Unlike the big climate lobbyists who fly to COP 27 and 28 without heeding their own warnings about their carbon footprint, and who eat beef despite telling us to eat insects - in other words, they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to make a single sacrifice for the disaster they portend - the apostle were willing to live sacrificially and to die for their faith – indeed, early church fathers recount that all of them died as martyrs, except John, who may or may not have been the author of the late gospel, but who seems to have died of old age at Ephesus. Or maybe didn’t die at all - John’s gospel contains an intriguing note about this rumour, but that’s another story - it seems that he actually died in Ephesus, where his church was.
The after-life, and why it’s important to get this right
One area in particular that most non-Christian near-death experiencers get wrong is how many lives we have to “get it right,” to “get right with God.” They often tell us that God is so loving that if we get wrong in this life, we will have another opportunity to get to know God in our next rebirth.
Well, I somehow doubt this. I think the people who fail to get to know God in one single life, according to the light given to them, despite His grace and kindness being shown to them again and again through the years, will not get to know Him even if given another chance. They will simply repeat the same mistakes, perform the same avoidance mechanisms, and end up in the same place at the end.
The Bible tells us that we only have one life in which to get things right, and strangely enough this is related to the fact that Jesus only died once for our sins in the letter to the Hebrews:
Nor did He enter heaven to offer Himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Otherwise, Christ would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But now He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of Himself. Just as man is appointed to die once, and after that to face judgment, so also Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many; and He will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await Him. Hebrews 9:25-28
…“man is appointed to die once, and after that to face judgment”…
What is judgement?
I read recently about a man’s near-death experience where he commented that God did not judge, but that people’s words judged themselves. I don’t know if this is true, I think something like this is true, but Jesus does seem to indicate that people will be judged according to what they say they put their hope in, when really at the end of the day they are only looking for glory - that is, approbation and approval - from other people.
(Jesus said) “How can you believe if you accept glory from one another, yet do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, in whom you have put your hope. If you had believed Moses, you would believe Me, because he wrote about Me.…” John 5:44-46
But at the end of the day, Jesus’ words themselves are what is important, not what we ourselves say or think:
(Jesus said) “If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day. For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.” John 12:47-50
CS Lewis said, that “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” Well, don’t end up like that: if you’re still alive, and you haven’t yet responded to Jesus, open the door:
(Jesus said) “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with Me.” Revelation 3:20
The food that Jesus gives, is the bread of life, eternal food, Himself, and is the only satisfying spiritual food that there is.