Chapter 4: Testing the Spirits — The Biblical Command That Shapes This Book

Why discernment is not cynicism, and why the Bible commands us to weigh every spiritual claim

Imagine two Sunday mornings in the same church.

On the first Sunday, a guest speaker tells the congregation about her near-death experience. She had a cardiac event three years ago. During the code, she left her body. She traveled through a long tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a being of pure light, full of love. The being welcomed her. He showed her a glimpse of a beautiful garden on the other side. He told her that she was deeply loved and that her life had meaning. Then he sent her back. She came out of that experience, she says, as a new woman. She prays more. She reads her Bible. She volunteers in the nursery. When she finishes her testimony, the congregation stands and claps.

On the second Sunday, a different guest speaker tells his story. He, too, had an NDE. He, too, saw a being of light. But the message he brought back is different. He says the being told him three things: there is no sin; there is no hell; every religion is just a different road leading up the same mountain. He urges the congregation to let go of old, fear-based beliefs. He encourages them to embrace the oneness that binds all people together. Some in the pews nod. Others fold their arms. Most simply sit there, unsure what to think.

Now for the question this chapter is about. How should the Christians in that church respond to these two stories? Are they allowed to say anything? Are they supposed to accept both accounts because each speaker had a real experience? Or are they supposed to reject both because God alone knows what really happened? Or is there a third option — one where they receive what is good, refuse what is false, and do both with warmth and humility?

The third option is the biblical one. It has a name. The name comes from 1 John 4:1. The name is testing the spirits.

The Apostle John does not ask Christians to decide whether they feel comfortable with a spiritual claim. He does not tell them to rely on their gut. He tells them to test. He gives them a command. That command is the foundation of this whole book. Every page that follows is written in obedience to that command and in service of helping ordinary Christians learn how to do it well.

This chapter opens with a claim that may surprise some readers. The same Bible that celebrates visions, angels, heavenly trips, and dying saints who see Jesus is also the Bible that warns about false prophets, lying spirits, and miraculous signs that point in the wrong direction. Those two things are not in tension. They fit together. Scripture is not naive about the spiritual realm, and it does not want us to be naive either. It teaches us that the spirit world is real, busy, and mixed. Some spirits are from God. Others are not. It is our job, as the children of God, to tell the difference.¹

The Ancient Command With Modern Urgency

Before we dig into the exegesis, it helps to remember how old this issue is. Testing spiritual claims is not a new worry invented by nervous Bible teachers in the twentieth century. It runs through the Scriptures from beginning to end. Moses warned Israel to test prophets against the character of God (Deuteronomy 13; 18). Jeremiah spent much of his ministry arguing against false prophets who told the people what they wanted to hear (Jeremiah 23:16–32). Jesus warned that false christs and false prophets would come and perform great signs to mislead people (Matthew 24:24). Paul warned the Galatians that even an angel from heaven could preach a false gospel, and that such an angel should be rejected (Galatians 1:8). John warned that the spirit of antichrist was already loose in the world (1 John 4:3). Peter warned about false teachers within the church who would quietly bring in destructive teachings (2 Peter 2:1). And the risen Christ, in His letter to Ephesus, commended the church because they had tested those who claimed to be apostles and had found them false (Revelation 2:2).

That is a lot of testing. It runs across both testaments. It covers Moses and the prophets, Jesus Himself, the apostles, and the exalted Christ speaking from heaven. You cannot read the Bible faithfully without bumping into the command to weigh spiritual claims. It is simply built into the Christian life.

Why is this commanded so often? Because the spiritual realm, according to Scripture, is not a safe zone. It is populated by beings who are not all on the same side. God is there. Angels serve Him. But fallen angels are there too. They oppose God, and they are very good at pretending to be on His side when they need to. Paul told the Corinthians, in a sentence that should shape how every Christian thinks about NDEs, that Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14).² We will unpack that passage in its own chapter. But notice what it implies. When something bright, beautiful, and loving appears in the spiritual realm, that by itself does not tell us the source. Beauty can be counterfeited. Light can be staged. Love-like feelings can be induced. The question is not whether an experience felt holy. The question is whether the claim holds up under the Word.

This is where the NDE conversation gets tricky. Two hundred years ago, Christians did not have to sort through dozens of popular books describing trips to heaven. Today they do. The NDE has become a genre. It has its own conferences, YouTube channels, bestseller lists, and conference speakers. Some of the content is wonderful and will deepen a believer's love for Christ. Some of it is not wonderful, and it will quietly lead a believer into unbiblical ideas. Most of it is somewhere in between. The only way to tell the difference is to apply the tools Scripture has already given us. That is what this chapter is about.³

The Anchor Text: 1 John 4:1–6

Let us look carefully at the passage that gives this book its title. Here is the full text in the English Standard Version:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 4:1–6, ESV)

Several things in this passage deserve close attention.

The tone: warm, not harsh

Notice how John opens. He does not say, "You fools, stop believing everything you hear." He says, "Beloved." The Greek word is ἀγαπητοί (agapētoi), which means "loved ones" or "dearly loved ones." John is writing to people he loves. He is not scolding. He is protecting. The command to test comes out of pastoral affection, not suspicion. That tone matters for us, too. When we test NDE claims, we are not trying to catch people out. We are trying to protect the flock. We are protecting the experiencer from being misled by their own interpretation, and we are protecting other believers from being led astray by secondhand teaching. Love is the reason we test. That is worth remembering every time we are tempted to be snide, sneering, or dismissive. Snide testing is not biblical testing. It is something else wearing the costume of testing.

The verb: a word of craftsmanship

The key verb in verse 1 is δοκιμάζετε (dokimazete), the second person plural imperative of dokimazō. It means "to test, to examine, to prove, to assay." This is not a casual word. It is the word used in the ancient world for the work of a metalworker checking a piece of gold to see if it was pure or whether it was mixed with cheaper metals. The test was not hostile. The test was how the goldsmith did his job. You cannot make good jewelry without testing your gold. You cannot run a fair market without testing your coins. And according to John, you cannot walk faithfully with Christ without testing the spirits.⁴

Paul uses the same verb in several important places. He tells the Thessalonians to test everything (1 Thessalonians 5:21). He tells the Romans to test what is the will of God (Romans 12:2). He tells the Philippians to approve what is excellent (Philippians 1:10, the same Greek verb). In each case the meaning is the same. Christians are expected to think, weigh, and evaluate. They are not called to check their brains at the church door.

One little note in the grammar is worth pointing out. The verb is in the plural. John is not telling a single star Christian to sit in judgment over everyone else. He is telling the whole church to test together. Discernment is a community project. This matters for NDE evaluation. A single Christian may easily be swayed by a moving testimony. A community of believers, praying together, reading Scripture together, and weighing a claim together, is much harder to deceive. If you are sorting through an NDE account alone, late at night, with a lump in your throat, you are probably not in the best place to decide whether to endorse it or share it. Sleep on it. Talk with your pastor. Talk with mature believers. The testing of 1 John 4:1 is a "we" assignment, not a "me" assignment.

The warning: many false prophets

John gives a reason for the command: "for many false prophets have gone out into the world." That word "many" should make us pause. John does not say there might occasionally be a false prophet. He does not say that once in a while, in very rare cases, a spiritual claim might not line up with Scripture. He says many. The first-century church had more false teachers and counterfeit visionaries than it could keep up with. That is why John wrote the letter. If anything, the amount of spiritual noise in the twenty-first century is greater than what John faced, not less. Our TV channels, our bookstores, our social feeds — all are full of voices claiming special spiritual knowledge. The command to test the spirits is not an old-fashioned relic. It has never been more urgent.

The first test: Christological

Then John gives the core test: "every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God." This is the central criterion. A spirit's relationship to the person of Jesus — the specific, historical, incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus — is the hinge.

To understand why John puts it this way, we need a quick history lesson. John was writing, most scholars think, in the late first century. By that time a family of teachings we now call Docetism was spreading. Docetism comes from the Greek δοκέω (dokeō), "to seem." The Docetists taught that Jesus only seemed to have a body. They said Christ was a pure spirit who appeared in human form but never actually became human in a physical sense. This was often tied to a wider movement we call Proto-Gnosticism, which viewed matter as bad and spirit as good. On that view, a true divine being could never really take on flesh. He could only look like he did.⁵

John is not having that. He insists on a Christ who has "come in the flesh." The Greek word is σάρξ (sarx), a concrete, earthy word for bodily humanity. John opens his letter by saying they had seen, heard, and touched the Word of life (1 John 1:1). There was nothing spooky or half-real about the Word made flesh. Christ was genuinely, physically, messily human. He got tired. He ate food. He died. He rose bodily. Any spirit that denies this — or wriggles out of it, or turns Christ into a vague cosmic consciousness — is not from God.

Now apply that to NDEs. When a being of light in an NDE report speaks as if Jesus were a kind of universal spiritual principle, available equally under a thousand names, with no particular attachment to the Jewish carpenter who died on a Roman cross — that being has failed the Christological test of 1 John 4.⁶ When a being of light affirms the specific, historical Jesus, agrees with Scripture's description of Him, points the experiencer to Him as Lord, and produces in the experiencer a deeper trust in the biblical Christ — that being has passed at least this part of the test. (Not the whole test. Just this part.)

The spirit of antichrist

John then drops a startling line: "This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already." Most modern Christians hear "antichrist" and immediately think of a future world ruler. That is not wrong. Scripture does speak of a coming figure who will embody rebellion against God in a concentrated way (2 Thessalonians 2:3–10). But John's word here is different. He writes that the spirit of antichrist — the posture, the stance, the animating spiritual force — is already active. Wherever a spiritual voice denies or distorts the true Christ, the antichrist spirit is at work, no matter how sincere or charming the package looks.

This is why we test. Not because we are paranoid. Not because we love arguing. But because a real enemy is really working, and his methods do not always involve pitchforks and pentagrams. His methods often involve light, love, and spiritual language. He is happy to cite Scripture, as long as he can bend it. He is happy to say the name of Jesus, as long as he can change who Jesus is.⁷

The promise: greater is He

Before we move on, notice the encouragement in verse 4: "Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world." John does not leave his readers in a state of nervous dread. The very same paragraph that commands testing also reminds believers that the Spirit in them is greater than the spirits arrayed against them. We test with confidence, not fear. The outcome is not in doubt. Christ has already won. We are simply identifying the enemy's counterfeits so that we are not personally taken in.

That posture — confident, loving, careful, unafraid — is the one this book tries to teach. Testing the spirits does not have to be a grim, paranoid exercise. It is a way of walking with the Lord with your eyes open.

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Testing Is Multi-Dimensional

The New Testament actually gives us more than one test. John's Christological test is central, but it is not alone. Put the whole Bible together and we end up with a cluster of criteria by which spiritual claims can be evaluated. Chapter 10 of this book develops a full seven-test framework for NDEs and DBEs, so I will not unfold the whole thing here. But a quick preview of five biblical tests will help us see how serious Scripture is about evaluating spiritual claims.

1. The Christological test (1 John 4:2–3)

We just unpacked this one. Does the spirit confess the true, incarnate, historical Jesus? A spirit can look radiant and still fail. A spirit that bows to the biblical Christ is not automatically angelic — more tests follow — but a spirit that refuses, reshapes, or replaces the biblical Christ is immediately disqualified. Period. This is the floor.

2. The doctrinal test (Galatians 1:8–9)

Paul writes, "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8). Notice the extreme case he chooses. Not a traveling preacher. Not an itinerant teacher. An angel from heaven. Paul seems to know that dramatic, miraculous, glowing figures are very persuasive. He does not care. If the message they bring contradicts the apostolic gospel, they are anathema.

Apply that to NDEs. When an NDEr returns with a message from a "being of light" — and that message undermines the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and risen for sinners — the Christian is not obliged to accept the message because the being glowed. Paul has already ruled on this case. The brightness of the messenger does not give the messenger authority over the gospel. The gospel judges the messenger, not the other way around.⁸

Because Chapter 8 treats Scripture as the final standard in depth, I will not linger here. The principle, though, is plain. A message from the spiritual realm is not self-authenticating. It has to fit with what God has already said. If it does not, no amount of luminous scenery changes that.

3. The moral or fruit test (Matthew 7:15–20)

Jesus taught that false prophets could be recognized by their fruit. "Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit" (Matthew 7:17). The test is not whether the prophet claims to speak for God. The test is what grows out of their life and their teaching over time.

This test works nicely for NDE evaluation, but with a catch. Short-term fruit can be deceiving. An NDEr may come back deeply moved, more kind, more loving, more prayerful, and still be heading in a direction that will eventually drift from Christian truth. Long-term fruit is what we ultimately look for. Is this person, ten years later, walking more closely with the biblical Jesus, more involved in a faithful local church, more grounded in Scripture, more willing to submit their experience to the Word? Or have they drifted into teaching novel doctrines, spiritual celebrity, and a private authority that answers to no one?⁹

4. The prophetic accuracy test (Deuteronomy 18:21–22)

Moses gave Israel a way to tell a true prophet from a false one: if what he predicts does not come to pass, he is not speaking for the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:22). Prophecy that fails is evidence that the source was not God. This matters because many NDErs, especially those who drift into New Age or psychic territory, begin making predictions — sometimes about the world, sometimes about individual lives. When those predictions fail at a rate any higher than sheer chance, the source is in question. Scripture does not grade on a curve for prophetic claims.¹⁰

5. The orthodoxy-against-signs test (Deuteronomy 13:1–5)

This fifth test is so important that I want to give it its own section. It is the deepest of the biblical tests, and it is the one most often missed by well-meaning Christians who get swept up by a powerful NDE story. Let us go to the passage.

Deuteronomy 13 and the Line We Often Miss

Here is the full text:

If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, "Let us go after other gods," which you have not known, "and let us serve them," you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has taught rebellion against the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 13:1–5, ESV)

Now read that again slowly. Moses sets up a case where the sign is real. The prophet's prediction actually happens. The wonder is not fake. Something supernatural is going on. If we were grading by spiritual impressiveness alone, this prophet scores high. But then he turns and says, "Let us go after other gods." At that point, Moses says, everything changes. The supernatural sign no longer proves anything good. The Lord allowed it as a test. The people must reject the message.

Think about what that means. It means spiritual reality is not the same thing as spiritual truth. Something can be genuinely supernatural and still be genuinely wrong. A prediction can actually come true, a sign can actually happen, and the source can still be leading people away from the true God. Moses did not let the impressiveness of the sign cancel out the wrongness of the teaching. Teaching trumps signs.¹¹

I find this principle life-changing for NDE discernment. Many Christians assume that if an experience feels real, if it had physical effects, if it produced verifiable knowledge the experiencer could not have had, then it must be from God. Deuteronomy 13 tells us no. All of those things can be true, and the experience can still be teaching something that pulls the experiencer away from the Lord. When that happens, Moses is crystal clear about what to do. You do not follow the sign. You walk after the Lord.

Apply this to the NDE landscape. A person who experienced something undeniably supernatural may come back with a teaching that "all paths lead to God," or "there is no such thing as sin," or "we are all little pieces of God." The experience may be real. The teaching fails. And Scripture has already told us what to do with such a case. We do not follow the teacher because the sign was impressive. We hold fast to the Lord.

Notice too what Moses says about God's purpose in these cases: "the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart." In other words, the very existence of impressive spiritual claims that contradict God's revealed truth is itself a kind of test. Our response to such claims reveals whether we love the Lord enough to reject even beautiful sounding lies. It is the same kind of loyalty test that was put before Adam and Eve in the garden, before Israel at Sinai, and before Christ in the wilderness. Will we stick with what God has said when a bright, persuasive voice says something different?¹²

This is why I push back on the common Christian argument that says, "But the experience must have been real, because look at all the details that checked out." Maybe it was real. That still does not settle the question of whether its message is trustworthy. Reality is one question. Truthfulness of content is another. Deuteronomy 13 draws that distinction in bold letters. We must learn to draw it too.

Paul's Balance: 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22

Thankfully, the biblical picture does not stop with warnings. If it did, Christians might conclude that the safest move is to reject every spiritual claim out of hand. Paul rules that response out in a short but powerful passage.

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:19–22, ESV)

Five short commands. Read them in order.

First, do not quench the Spirit. The Greek σβέννυτε (sbennyte) means to put out, as you would put out a fire. The Spirit is like a flame, and God's people can smother Him with hostility or with heavy-handed control. Paul says, do not do that. Leave room for the Spirit to work.

Second, do not despise prophecies. The word is ἐξουθενεῖτε (exoutheneite), a strong word meaning to treat something as worthless or to look down on it. Paul assumes that some in the Thessalonian church will receive prophetic messages of one kind or another. He does not want those messages treated as junk by default. He wants them weighed.

Third, test everything. Here again is dokimazete, the same verb as in 1 John 4. Test. Examine. Weigh. Paul does not want the church to accept every prophecy simply because it claims to be from God. He also does not want them to reject every prophecy simply because they are nervous. He wants them to test. Testing is the middle path between gullibility and coldness.

Fourth, hold fast to what is good. When the testing is done and something passes the test, keep it. Embrace it. Use it. Do not throw out the good along with the bad. Testing is not an excuse for permanent skepticism. Testing leads to sorting. Sorting leads to keeping.

Fifth, abstain from every form of evil. What fails the test is to be set aside. Christians do not get to hold on to things that have been identified as false, just because they are emotionally attached to them.

This five-part sequence is the posture this book models. We do not quench the Spirit, so we remain open to the possibility that God really is meeting people at or near death. We do not despise prophetic or visionary claims, so we take NDEs and DBEs seriously. We test everything, so we evaluate each account by biblical criteria. We hold fast to what is good, so we celebrate and benefit from the NDEs and DBEs that pass the tests. We abstain from evil, so we do not endorse or spread accounts that teach what Scripture condemns.¹³

J. Steve Miller captures this balance well when he reminds readers that some Christians, worried about spiritual deception, swing so far that they end up dismissing any experience they cannot explain, while others, trusting every loving spirit, swing so far that they end up believing everything they hear. The biblical path is neither. It is the path of testing.¹⁴

The Bereans: A Model of Good Testing

Luke gives us one of the loveliest pictures of this testing posture in Acts 17. Paul and Silas arrive in Berea and preach the gospel in the synagogue. Luke writes:

Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. (Acts 17:11, ESV)

Pause on that sentence. Luke calls the Bereans "more noble" precisely because they tested the preaching of the apostle Paul. Think about that. They did not merely assume that an apostle could not be wrong. They checked his words against Scripture every single day. And Luke, writing under the Spirit's inspiration, commends them for it. Paul apparently did not mind. No hurt feelings, no complaint about Bereans being doubtful or rebellious. On the contrary, they are held up as an example for the rest of the church.

The Greek word translated "examining" is ἀνακρίνοντες (anakrinontes), a judicial term meaning to sift or cross-examine, like a judge investigating a case. It implies a serious, methodical, daily practice. These were not quick skimmers. They opened the Hebrew Bible and traced Paul's claims through the texts until they were sure.

If the Bereans could test Paul, we can test an NDE speaker. We can test a bestselling NDE author. We can test a viral YouTube testimony. None of them has apostolic authority. None of them has been sent to us like Paul was sent to Berea. If the Bereans were commended for holding Paul up to the Scriptures, surely we are not being cold or arrogant when we hold modern NDE teaching up to the same standard.¹⁵

Jesus on Signs and Wonders That Mislead

We have to look at one more passage before applying all of this to the NDE world. Jesus Himself taught that the end of the age would include spectacular spiritual deceptions. He said:

For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. (Matthew 24:24, ESV)

Notice the details. These deceivers do not just claim to be prophets. Some claim to be christs — messianic, divine figures. They do not merely teach. They perform "great signs and wonders." The Greek phrase is σημεῖα μεγάλα καὶ τέρατα (sēmeia megala kai terata), the very same vocabulary used for the miracles of Jesus and the apostles. Counterfeit signs can resemble real signs closely enough to fool careful people. Jesus even says the goal is to lead astray, if possible, the elect — the true people of God. He is not saying they will be successfully led astray, thankfully. He is saying the deception will be so convincing that even the saved could be in danger if they were not protected.

Michael Sabom, a cardiologist and a committed Christian, points to exactly this passage in connection with NDEs where a luminous figure claims to be Jesus. Sabom notes that we are faced with the real possibility that some of the "christs" reported in NDEs are in fact counterfeits — a question that can only be answered by testing. One of his most striking observations is that in the vast majority of NDE reports, the experiencer never actually asks the shining figure to identify himself. The figure feels holy. The experiencer assumes Jesus. And often, that assumption goes unchallenged. Sabom references one rare case recorded by cardiologist Maurice Rawlings in which the NDEr did directly ask, "Are you Jesus?" The reply was simply, "No."¹⁶

That one little exchange — "Are you Jesus?" / "No." — ought to give us pause. Not every bright and loving presence is who we first assume. The test question matters. The content of the being's message matters. The fruit that follows the encounter matters. Shaun Tabatt, in his careful framework for evaluating NDEs, stresses the same point. The devil has been deceiving human beings since the garden, and he has not lost his interest in hijacking spiritual experiences for his own ends. Accepting every glowing figure uncritically is not faith. It is naivete dressed up in spiritual clothes.¹⁷

Let me be quick to say what I am not saying. I am not saying that most NDErs encountered a demon. Earlier in this book I made clear that the majority of NDEs lack clearly unbiblical elements, and that figures named "Jesus" in those accounts often do turn out, on careful examination, to have strong fingerprints of the biblical Christ. Chapter 13 makes the positive case in detail. What I am saying is that such a conclusion has to be reached by testing, not by assumption. If we take every glowing NDE figure to be Jesus without examination, we are doing the opposite of what Scripture commands, and we have no defense against the cases where the figure is not.

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Applying the Command to NDEs and DBEs

So what does this all look like when a Christian sits down with an NDE account, or listens to a family member describe what they saw near death? How does the command to test the spirits actually take shape in practice? I will sketch an answer here, with the full seven-test framework developed in Chapter 10.

Step one: separate the experience from the interpretation

Every NDE has two layers. There is the experience itself — what the person actually saw, heard, and felt. And there is the interpretation — what the experiencer, or the ghostwriter, or the publisher, concludes about what it all means. Those two layers are not the same.

Miller highlights this distinction as one of the most important discernment moves a Christian can make. A person may genuinely encounter the love of God, for example, and then interpret that encounter through a secular framework as "love is all there is, so sin and judgment are not real." The love may be real. The conclusion is the experiencer's own theology, and it can be tested like any other theology. We do not have to accept the conclusion just because we accept the experience. Chapter 9 of this book unpacks the experience-interpretation distinction in depth. For now, just notice that the first move in applying the testing command is to sort which is which.¹⁸

Step two: identify what can be tested

Once the experience and the interpretation are separated, we can ask what elements of either layer are actually testable. Some parts of an NDE simply cannot be weighed against Scripture because Scripture does not comment on them. If a person reports that the grass on the other side was unusually vivid, or that the air smelled like honey, or that the colors were beyond what our eyes can see, the Bible does not refute or confirm those details. We do not need to anxiously evaluate them. We can take or leave them with a shrug.

Other elements, though, are deeply testable. If the experiencer was told that there is no such thing as sin, we can weigh that against Romans 3:23. If the experiencer was told that all religions are equally valid roads to God, we can weigh that against John 14:6 and Acts 4:12. If the experiencer was told that they had lived past lives, we can weigh that against Hebrews 9:27. If the being of light said, "I am not who you think I am," or refused to confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh, we can weigh that against 1 John 4:2. Testable claims get tested. Untestable details get filed as color and texture.

Step three: run the experience through the biblical tests

With the testable claims identified, we apply the criteria we have just surveyed.

Is the figure at the heart of the experience consistent with the biblical Christ, or does he resemble instead a generic "universal consciousness" that fits no biblical portrait? Christological test.

Is the message of the experience consistent with the gospel Paul preached, or does it preach a different gospel — one with no cross, no sin, no exclusive Christ? Doctrinal test.

Is the long-term fruit of the experience greater love for the biblical Jesus, deeper commitment to a faithful local church, more eagerness to obey Scripture? Or is the fruit self-branded spiritual celebrity, private authority, and teaching that pulls others toward universalism and reincarnation? Fruit test.

If the experience included predictive elements, did those predictions come true? Prophetic accuracy test.

If the experience was spiritually impressive — real signs, real knowledge, real effects — did the content of the teaching nonetheless lead the experiencer toward other gods, other doctrines, other ways of salvation? Then Deuteronomy 13 tells us to walk after the Lord and leave the impressive sign behind.

No single test is the whole verdict. Together, though, they give us a multi-angle picture of the experience. Running an NDE through these questions does not feel cold. It feels careful. It is the kind of care a good jeweler takes with a piece of gold.¹⁹

Step four: reach a verdict with humility

After testing, we land somewhere. Maybe the experience passes the tests cleanly, and we receive it with joy. Maybe the experience passes most tests but has one or two concerning elements, and we receive the good while questioning the problematic bits. Maybe the teaching attached to the experience clearly contradicts Scripture, and we set it aside or disagree with it openly. Maybe we are uncertain, and we wait.

In every case, our verdict is about the teaching, not the person. We do not claim to know the experiencer's heart or eternal destiny. We evaluate public teaching against Scripture, the way the Bereans evaluated Paul. The experiencer may be a wonderful believer caught in a mistaken interpretation. The experiencer may be in a far more troubled spiritual place. We do not pretend to know. We only weigh the claim.²⁰

Two real-world examples

A few small examples may help make this concrete.

Example one. A believer in your small group comes back from a hospital stay and shares that while her heart was stopped, she saw a warm light, felt held by Jesus, had the sense that "it was not her time," and came back with a deeper love for her husband and for the church. She is reading her Bible more. She is volunteering in the kitchen on Wednesday nights. Her teaching, when asked, is simple and biblical. She talks about Jesus by name. She talks about the cross. She talks about heaven in ways that match the Bible's portrait. What do we do? We receive her testimony with joy. The testing has been quiet, not loud, but it has happened. The fruit is good. The Christology checks out. The doctrine is unremarkable — in a good way. We thank God and move on with our lives.

Example two. A different believer hands you a book by a famous NDE author. The author describes a stunning experience of light and love. The book becomes a bestseller. As you read, you notice that the being of light says there is no hell, no judgment, no need for a savior, and no sin. The author concludes that all religions are equal paths to the same God. The author now gives talks at New Age conferences. The doctrine does not match Scripture. The Christ who meets the author sounds more like the "universal Christ" of New Age teaching than the incarnate Jesus of the Gospels. What do we do? We thank our friend for lending the book, and we gently share our concerns. We do not claim the author went to hell. We do not claim the author is certainly demonized. We simply apply the tests, and we note that on the Christological and doctrinal tests, this particular teaching fails. We can love the author as a human being while disagreeing with the teaching. That is what biblical testing looks like in real life.²¹

Specific popular authors who present challenges like these — Eben Alexander, Betty Eadie, Anita Moorjani, and others — will be evaluated in detail in Chapter 30. I will not pile up those names here. The point for now is simply that the biblical testing framework gives us a way to engage such books thoughtfully rather than either swallowing them whole or throwing them out unread.

A note on what testing is not

I want to flag a few things biblical testing is not, because I have watched well-meaning Christians take "discernment" in directions that Scripture does not support, and I do not want this book to give any momentum to those patterns.

Testing is not guilt by association. A person is not automatically in error because they read a book or attended a conference where something unbiblical was taught. Paul himself quoted pagan poets without endorsing their wider worldview (Acts 17:28). The question is always what the claim itself says, not who its neighbors are.

Testing is not mind-reading. We do not claim to know what is in an NDEr's heart when they describe their experience. We do not judge whether their motives are pure, whether they love God, or whether they are saved. We evaluate their teaching against Scripture. That is a very different — and much more limited — project than pronouncing on the soul.

Testing is not prooftexting one verse against an entire experience. A single out-of-context verse is not a biblical test. Biblical testing weighs a claim against the whole counsel of Scripture, against the historic consensus of the church, and against the broader pattern of how God has revealed Himself. Using one verse as a hammer is a caricature of testing, not its substance.

Testing is not gossip. Sharing concerns about a teacher's published work is legitimate when the concerns are documented, careful, and aimed at protecting other believers. Trading speculative stories about a teacher's private life, assumed motives, or spiritual state is a different activity, and it is not what Scripture commands. This book will try hard to stay on the right side of that line. I ask readers to do the same in their own conversations.³⁴

· · ·

Addressing Two Opposite Objections

Whenever we talk about testing spiritual experiences, two opposite worries tend to come up. Let me address both.

"Isn't testing just cynical and unspiritual?"

Some Christians feel uneasy about testing spiritual claims at all. They worry that the very act of testing is a sign of weak faith. "If God is really moving, who are we to interrogate it? Shouldn't we just receive whatever comes?"

The short answer is: no. The Bible could not be clearer. The church is commanded to test. Refusal to test is disobedience to Scripture, not a higher form of faith. The Bereans were praised, not scolded, for their examination (Acts 17:11). The Ephesians were praised by the risen Christ Himself for testing those who claimed to be apostles (Revelation 2:2). The Thessalonians were commanded to test prophecies (1 Thessalonians 5:21). If testing were spiritually dangerous, none of this language would be there.

Moreover, refusal to test has produced some of the worst disasters in biblical history. Saul went to the witch of Endor because he wanted a spiritual word without submitting to God's revealed will, and the result was catastrophic (1 Samuel 28). The northern kingdom followed Jeroboam's golden calves without asking hard questions about whether golden calves could actually be the God who brought Israel out of Egypt (1 Kings 12). The disciples of the false messiahs Jesus warned about would follow miracle workers right off a cliff. Untested spirituality is not a higher spirituality. It is a vulnerable spirituality.

The uneasy feeling that testing is unspiritual often comes from a particular strand of modern Christian culture that treats a warm feeling as evidence of a divine visit. That is understandable, but it is not biblical. Scripture never teaches that a warm feeling is an adequate test of a spirit. It teaches the opposite. A warm feeling may come from God, and it may come from many other sources. The feeling alone cannot tell you which.²²

"Isn't testing just a cover for rationalist dismissal?"

The opposite worry is raised by those who have watched some Christians use "discernment" as a way to shut down anything supernatural. They have seen ministers who dismiss every reported vision as either a hallucination or a lie. They have seen teachers who quote 2 Corinthians 11:14 as if it meant that every spiritual experience is demonic. They have seen Christians mocked for reporting an encounter with God. And they worry that a book like this one is going to give that crowd more ammunition.

I want to name that worry and then disagree with it. Biblical testing is not wholesale rejection. Paul did not say, "Reject every prophecy." He said, "Test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). That means some of it will turn out to be good. That means we have to be willing to find good things and keep them. A testing posture that can never say yes is not a biblical testing posture. It is a prejudice dressed up in testing language.

The same Bible that commands testing also reports angels who appeared in dreams (Matthew 1:20), visions that shaped the mission of the church (Acts 10), ecstatic visits to the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:1–4), prophetic utterances that needed weighing but were still welcomed (1 Corinthians 14:29), and deathbed encounters with glory — such as Stephen seeing Jesus standing at the right hand of God as he was being stoned (Acts 7:55–56). Testing the spirits does not mean denying the spirits. It means sorting them. If your testing framework cannot receive a single spiritual experience as genuine, you are not testing. You are denying.²³

This matters especially for NDE evaluation because one branch of evangelical teaching, associated with John MacArthur and others, has argued that all NDEs should be dismissed as either hallucinations, lies, or demonic deceptions. Chapter 35 engages that position at length. I want to say only here that such a wholesale rejection does not match Scripture's own posture. Scripture receives some dreams, some visions, some angelic appearances, and some deathbed visions as genuine works of God. The question is not whether such things can happen. It is whether this particular claim, in this particular case, holds up under the tests. That is a different question, and a healthier one.

The pastoral posture between the two errors

The shape of healthy discernment, then, is not hard to see in principle. It is harder in practice, but the principle is clear. We take spiritual experiences seriously because Scripture takes them seriously. We do not treat them as automatically true, because Scripture does not treat them that way. We apply biblical criteria with humility. We celebrate what is good. We set aside what is false. And we love the person whose testimony we are weighing, whatever we conclude about the content.

Tabatt summarizes this posture well. He reminds readers that both errors — wholesale acceptance and wholesale rejection — are ways of escaping the harder work of real discernment. The only faithful path is the middle one, where a believer reads to "keep the meat and spit out the bones." We are not trying to discredit every NDE. We are trying to eat what is nourishing and leave what is harmful, the way any thoughtful guest would do at a meal where not every dish was prepared with the same care.²⁴

Why the Command Still Binds the Church Today

Someone might read all of this and say, "Fine, the early church needed testing. John was writing to people threatened by Docetists. Paul was writing to Galatians threatened by Judaizers. The Thessalonians had false prophets. We live in a different world. Do we still need all of this?"

We do. Arguably more than ever.

In John's day, false spiritual teaching spread through traveling teachers and hand-copied letters. Today it spreads through hundreds of thousands of books, Kindle downloads, podcasts, livestreams, conferences, algorithmically promoted videos, social platforms, and publishing houses whose business model depends on emotional best-sellers. The volume of spiritual content flooding the average believer is vastly greater than anything John's readers faced. If testing was essential then, it cannot be optional now.

Moreover, the subject matter of this book — NDE and DBE accounts — has become its own industry. Major publishing houses have entire imprints devoted to heaven-and-afterlife books. Christian publishers put out titles that range from careful and biblically grounded to theologically careless. Secular publishers put out titles that freely mix the legitimate phenomenon of the NDE with New Age, psychic, and reincarnationist teachings. A Christian who walks into the relevant section of a bookstore without any testing tools is almost sure to end up drinking from a mixed cup.²⁶

The pastoral stakes are also high. Every year, millions of people come near death and live to tell about it. Some will have experiences that are genuinely of God. Some will have experiences that were real spiritual encounters with problematic elements. Some will have experiences that are essentially the product of brain chemistry during a dying process. Some will fabricate entirely. The family members and friends who hear those accounts will form beliefs about heaven, about hell, about God, about Jesus, and about salvation based in part on what they hear. If the church has no framework for testing the claims, those beliefs will drift wherever the loudest or most moving storyteller points them. We cannot afford that.

And the stakes are higher still because, as Scripture repeatedly reminds us, a real enemy really does work to counterfeit God's work. Satan is not the equal of God, and Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 will press into what the Bible actually teaches about the devil. He cannot create. He cannot read minds. He cannot know the future the way God does. But within his limits, he is intelligent, malicious, and well-practiced at the craft of deception. The entire biblical narrative from Genesis 3 through Revelation 20 includes, as a constant minor theme, the reality that someone is lying about God. Testing is not an optional feature added to otherwise simple Christian living. Testing is a load-bearing wall in Christian maturity. Without it, the house is unsafe.²⁷

Testing Across the Whole Bible: A Wider Witness

Before we turn to our final thoughts, I want to spread the biblical net a little wider. The passages we have already looked at — 1 John 4, Deuteronomy 13, 1 Thessalonians 5, Acts 17, and Matthew 24 — are the anchor texts. But the command to test is not confined to those five passages. It runs all the way through the canon, often as a side comment or a warning embedded in a larger argument. When you start noticing it, you find it everywhere.

Consider Elijah on Mount Carmel. The prophets of Baal were spiritually busy all morning, calling on their god, cutting themselves, shouting until the afternoon. Something was going on in their religious experience. Elijah does not conclude from their intensity that their god must be real. He does the opposite. He sets up a public test. When the Lord sends fire and Baal does not, the contest settles the question. Elijah did not mock the reality of their spiritual experience as such. He tested its content against the revealed character of the Lord (1 Kings 18:20–39). That is Deuteronomy 13 applied in public.

Consider Jeremiah and the false prophets of his day. Jeremiah 23 is a devastating chapter. God says of the prophets who had not been sent: "I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied" (Jeremiah 23:21). They were saying the right religious words. Some of them probably had moving experiences. But their content was false. They told the people peace when there was no peace. And the Lord called their whole enterprise a lie. The failure, again, was not that they lacked religious enthusiasm. The failure was that they had no real word from God. Untested spirituality kept Judah on the road to exile.³¹

Consider the apostolic letters. Second Peter 2 is a long, furious warning about false teachers who will slip into the church "secretly bringing in destructive heresies" (2 Peter 2:1). Jude writes almost the entire letter to sound the same alarm. Paul, in his farewell speech to the Ephesian elders, tells them that fierce wolves will come in among them and that even from their own number, men will arise "speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them" (Acts 20:30). Pastoral epistles like 1 Timothy warn against "the teachings of demons" disguised as Christian practice (1 Timothy 4:1). The entire New Testament takes for granted that false teaching will arise, and that the church's job, under the Spirit, is to see it and resist it.³²

Consider the wisdom literature. Proverbs tells us that "the simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps" (Proverbs 14:15). Critical thinking is not suspicious of faith. Critical thinking is a form of wisdom. It is what the prudent do. Proverbs never opposes faith and discernment. It puts them side by side, as features of the fear of the Lord.

Consider 1 Corinthians. Paul lists the "distinguishing between spirits" as a spiritual gift alongside prophecy and tongues (1 Corinthians 12:10). Discernment is not just a discipline we do by our own reasoning. It is a Spirit-given gift. Some Christians are especially gifted in this area, and the church benefits greatly when those believers are identified and listened to. If you read this chapter and sense a clearer gift for this kind of work, that may be God's voice nudging you to take responsibility for serving the church through discernment.³³

Consider, finally, the whole narrative arc of Scripture. The drama of redemption is framed at both ends by scenes involving spiritual deception. Genesis 3 opens with the serpent whispering a subtle lie in Eden, tempting Eve to mistrust God's word. Revelation closes with the beast and the false prophet deceiving the nations through signs and wonders before being cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 13; 19; 20). From beginning to end, the biblical story warns us that a liar is on the loose, that his methods include signs, wonders, and attractive offers, and that the people of God will flourish only if they learn to test what comes to them.

Pull all of this together, and the command to test is not a late addition or a quirk of the Apostle John. It is the cumulative voice of Scripture. Moses, the prophets, the wisdom writers, Jesus, Paul, John, Peter, Jude, and the risen Christ from heaven all agree. God's people test the spirits. The only question is whether we will do it badly, unevenly, and too late, or well, humbly, and on time.

Testing and the Intermediate State: A Quiet Foundation

Before we close, one more thought that will carry through much of this book. The reason Christians take NDEs and DBEs seriously in the first place — the reason they are not simply dismissed as hallucinations — has to do with what Scripture teaches about the soul and the intermediate state. If the soul can consciously survive the death of the body between death and the final resurrection, then reports of conscious experience during clinical death are not automatically impossible.

John Cooper's careful work, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, argues that the Bible teaches what he calls "holistic dualism" or "dualistic holism." Human beings are a genuine unity of body and soul in this life, but that unity can, in the mystery of death, come apart. The person continues to exist in conscious fellowship with Christ while the body decays and awaits resurrection. This is the traditional teaching of historic Christianity, affirmed in the creeds, the councils, the early fathers, the medieval doctors, the Reformers, and the bulk of Christian tradition since.²⁸ Cooper points to texts like Luke 23:43, where Jesus tells the thief he will be with Him today in Paradise; 2 Corinthians 5:8, where Paul expects to be absent from the body and at home with the Lord; Philippians 1:23, where Paul longs to depart and be with Christ; and many more. The biblical picture is that death separates body and soul until the resurrection reunites them.²⁹

This matters for our chapter on testing because it means NDE reports cannot be dismissed a priori. If the soul really can persist in conscious awareness when the body has stopped functioning, then NDE accounts are not impossible by definition. They become a real category of potential spiritual experience, worth investigating, worth weighing, worth testing. The very commitment that makes testing possible — that there really is a spiritual realm, populated by real beings, in contact with real human souls — is the commitment that also makes testing necessary. A merely physical world would not need discernment. A world where souls can meet spirits does.³⁰

I mention this here because many Christians, reading about NDEs for the first time, feel pulled between two instincts. One instinct wants to reject the whole category as unbiblical. The other wants to accept the whole category as sacred. The traditional Christian doctrine of the intermediate state splits the difference and gives us a better path. It says yes, something real can happen in that liminal space. Then it hands us over to the command of 1 John 4:1. Test the spirits.

Conclusion: The Posture of the Book

We end where we began, in that imaginary church with two Sunday morning speakers. The question was, how should Christians respond? By now the answer should be clear.

We respond with warmth. We listen carefully. We separate the experience from the interpretation. We weigh the testable claims against Scripture. We apply the Christological test, the doctrinal test, the fruit test, the prophetic accuracy test, and the orthodoxy-against-signs test. We reach a careful verdict on the teaching without presuming to judge the soul of the teacher. We celebrate what is good. We set aside what is false. We walk with the Lord.

For the first speaker, we likely have much to celebrate. Her experience aligns with Scripture. Her fruit is good. The Jesus she met sounds like the Jesus we know from the Gospels. Her message leaves her listeners pointing to Christ. We can receive her testimony with thanksgiving.

For the second speaker, we have more work to do. His doctrine — no sin, no hell, all religions equal — fails the doctrinal test at several points. His Christ is not the biblical Christ. His message, however beautifully delivered, would lead his listeners away from the gospel of grace. We do not need to denounce him in anger. We do not need to pretend we cannot disagree. We can say, gently and honestly, that the teaching does not line up with Scripture, and that the testing standard Scripture itself gives us requires us to say so.

From this chapter onward, every claim in this book — including the author's own — is offered under the same standard. I am not writing as an apostle. You are not reading an inspired text. I am a Th.D. candidate writing about spiritual phenomena in light of Scripture, and I ask you to do to me what the Bereans did to Paul. Test these claims. Examine the Scriptures. Check the footnotes. Hold fast to what is good. Abstain from what is evil.

That is not cynicism. It is obedience. It is how the people of God stay safe in a spiritual world that is bigger, livelier, and more contested than we often imagine. May this book help you do it well — with the mind of a Berean, the heart of a disciple, and the courage of those who know that He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world.