Recovering a Biblical Vision of the Unseen Order That Surrounds Us
A pastor I know was once pulled aside after a Sunday service by a woman in her sixties. She looked shaken. Her mother had died the week before. In her mother's final hours, the old woman had sat up in her hospital bed, looked toward the ceiling, and spoken calmly to someone no one else could see. She smiled, nodded, and said, "Yes, I'm ready." Then she laid back and died. The daughter wanted to know what to do with this. Was her mother hallucinating? Was her faith strong enough at the end? Was it real? And why did the pastor feel the need to pause for several seconds before he answered?
The pause is the point. That pastor was trained in seminary. He believed every word of the Apostles' Creed. He could quote chapter and verse on the deity of Christ. But in the moment when a grieving daughter asked him whether the spiritual realm had just opened up beside her mother's bedside, he discovered something he had not known about himself: he had no ready category for the question. He affirmed the spiritual realm on paper. He had never really expected to meet it.
That pastor is not alone, and neither are his congregants. Most Christians in the modern West, even sincere evangelicals who love the Bible, live what Dallas Willard once called a "practical atheism" when it comes to the invisible world.23 We say we believe in angels and demons. We don't deliberate as if we do. We make our plans, raise our kids, buy our houses, and schedule our calendars as if the only players in the story are flesh-and-blood people and the blind forces of nature. Then a near-death experience or a deathbed vision or a distressing dream lands on our doorstep, and we find ourselves reaching for a theological framework that isn't there.
This chapter is an attempt to help rebuild that framework. Before Christians can evaluate near-death experiences (NDEs) and deathbed experiences (DBEs) with any care, they must recover a biblical conviction that the spiritual realm is real, populated, and actively engaged with the material world. Angels and demons are not metaphors or literary devices left over from an old worldview. They are real, personal beings — some holy, some fallen — and their activity provides the essential context in which NDE and DBE discernment becomes both possible and necessary. If there is no invisible order, there is nothing to discern. If there is, discernment is not optional.
Here is my thesis in a single sentence. The Bible does not merely mention spiritual beings as decorative details; it presents them as genuine inhabitants of a real realm that overlaps with ours, and Scripture assumes throughout that these beings can interact with human beings in ways we cannot always predict or control. If that is so, then when a dying person reports seeing her long-dead mother, or a cardiac-arrest survivor describes being met by a luminous being, we are not automatically in the territory of "made-up." We are in the territory where Scripture already lives. The question is not whether the unseen realm exists. The question is what kind of encounter a given experience actually is — and that is the question of discernment that the rest of this book will teach.
Let me name the problem more carefully. There is a difference between confessing a doctrine and inhabiting it. I can confess that my house has a basement without ever going down there. I can confess the Trinity without ever praying to the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. And I can confess the existence of angels and demons without those beings having any practical place in how I see my life.
The technical word for this gap between confession and life is functional naturalism. A naturalist is someone who believes that the natural world — matter, energy, time, and space — is all there is. A functional naturalist is someone whose theology affirms more than that, but whose everyday imagination operates as if the naturalist were right. Functional naturalism is not a heresy you sign on to. It is a habit you slip into. It is what happens when the Christian confession of the spiritual realm becomes a museum piece in the church's theology rather than a living conviction in the believer's mind.1
You can spot functional naturalism by listening for its tells. A Christian who is a functional naturalist will say, "I don't really know what to make of that," when a dying parent reports seeing a deceased relative. A functional naturalist will be embarrassed by the book of Acts when it describes an angel delivering Peter from prison. A functional naturalist will feel a mild flush of discomfort when a pastor prays against "spiritual powers in the heavenly places" as if that language had slipped in from an older, less sophisticated time. The words of Ephesians 6 remain on the page; the reality they point to has quietly gone silent.
This is the soil in which NDE confusion grows. Shaun Tabatt, whose book The NDE Conspiracy will be a steady conversation partner in this chapter and the next, puts it plainly. Many Christians have never been equipped to think about the unseen world because their pastors, their Bible studies, and their favorite Christian books have quietly stopped believing in it in the way their grandparents did.2 Then an NDE account lands in their lap — a beautiful being of light, a dead relative speaking words of peace, a dark tunnel, a sense of being watched by something malevolent — and they have only two options: swallow it whole or dismiss it whole. Both are errors, and both are the result of having no working theology of the spiritual realm.
I want to offer something better. I want to help us remember what our Bibles actually say.
Functional naturalism is the habit of affirming the spiritual realm in Christian confession while living and thinking as if only the material world were real. It is not a doctrine but a default posture, and it leaves believers without resources when the unseen order becomes suddenly hard to ignore.
Let me walk you through the biblical material on angels, from Genesis to Revelation. I will move quickly, since my goal is not a full angelology but a cumulative impression — the kind of impression a reader of Scripture is meant to form simply by reading Scripture. The Bible does not argue for the existence of angels the way it argues for the resurrection. It assumes them. They are present from the opening chapters of Genesis to the closing chapters of Revelation, and they are present almost everywhere in between.
The first clear reference to angels appears in a stunning poetic passage near the end of the book of Job. God is questioning Job out of the whirlwind and asking him where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. And then God says this:
"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements — surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (Job 38:4-7, ESV)
"The morning stars" and "the sons of God" in this passage are the angels. They are already present at the very creation of the material universe, and they are already worshiping. Before humans exist, before Eden is planted, before the first sunrise falls on the first hillside, there are already created persons who know and love the Creator. That is worth pausing over. John Burke's popular evangelical treatment of NDEs develops this biblical framework of the unseen realm at length, drawing together the scriptural testimony and the modern NDE reports.24 The Bible's picture of reality is not that the material world came first and spiritual reality was added later like a cherry on top. The spiritual realm was there first. We arrived into a universe that was already populated.
By the time we reach the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, angels are moving through the story as a matter of course. Three visitors come to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18). One of them is identified as the LORD Himself; the other two are angels who then travel on to Sodom and Gomorrah to investigate the city's wickedness and to rescue Lot (Genesis 19). These angels eat with Abraham, speak with Lot, are pressed around by an angry mob, and strike the men of Sodom with blindness. They are not vague presences. They are agents. Hagar, abandoned in the wilderness, is found by an angel and given a promise (Genesis 16). Jacob sees a ladder reaching into heaven with angels ascending and descending on it (Genesis 28). He later wrestles with a mysterious figure at the Jabbok (Genesis 32), a figure whom the prophet Hosea later identifies as an angel (Hosea 12:4).
What does this pattern tell us? At minimum, it tells us that the world of the patriarchs was not closed to the unseen. The sky above Abraham was not merely air and distant stars. It was a sky through which messengers came and went.
The giving of the Mosaic law at Sinai is often remembered as a direct encounter between God and Moses, with thunder and smoke and a trembling mountain. That is accurate, but the New Testament adds a detail that Exodus does not emphasize: angels were involved in the delivery of the law. Paul writes that the law "was put in place through angels by an intermediary" (Galatians 3:19, ESV). The author of Hebrews calls it "the message declared by angels" and treats it as weighty precisely because of the beings who mediated it (Hebrews 2:2, ESV). Stephen, in his great speech before the Sanhedrin, tells his accusers that they "received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it" (Acts 7:53, ESV).
The picture emerging here is of a spiritual realm that is not a distant echo but an active participant in the most important redemptive moments of the Old Testament. When God gives His people His covenant, angels are in the room.
The stories of Elijah and Elisha are saturated with angelic activity. When Elijah flees from Jezebel and collapses under a broom tree, an angel comes and feeds him, touches him, and tells him to get up and eat for the journey is too great for him (1 Kings 19:5-7). This is tender. It is practical. It is also supernatural. The angel does not scold Elijah for his despair; he brings bread and water and points him onward.
The story that I find most helpful for our purposes in this chapter, though, is the story of Elisha and his servant at Dothan. The king of Syria is hunting for Elisha and has sent an army by night to surround the city. Elisha's servant wakes in the morning, looks out at the enemy army, and panics. He cries out, "Alas, my master! What shall we do?" Elisha replies with one of the most famous lines in the Old Testament: "Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them." Then Elisha prays a prayer that has stunned every careful reader of Scripture for three thousand years: "Please, O LORD, open his eyes that he may see." And the Lord opens the eyes of the young man. He sees. And behold, "the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha" (2 Kings 6:15-17, ESV).
Notice what that story does not say. It does not say that the horses and chariots of fire suddenly appeared. It says that they were already there, and that the servant's eyes had to be opened for him to see them. This is one of the most important texts in all of Scripture for thinking about the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The unseen order is not far away. It is right here. The reason we do not see it is not that it is absent; the reason we do not see it is that our eyes are closed to it.
John Burke, whose work on NDEs from an evangelical perspective has shaped many Christian readers, draws on this very passage when he describes the NDE as a kind of momentary opening of the eyes of the dying — a brief and partial glimpse of the realm Elisha's servant saw.3 That is a suggestive way to put it, and I think it is basically right. I would only add that not every NDE is that kind of opening, and that some apparent "openings" are to different beings than Elisha's servant saw. That is the discernment problem we will spend many chapters on.
By the time we reach the prophetic literature, angels are often guides and interpreters. Daniel sees a terrifying figure by the Tigris who strengthens him and explains the visions he has been given (Daniel 10). An angel interprets the vision of the ram and the goat (Daniel 8:16). Gabriel, named by name, delivers the prophecy of the seventy weeks (Daniel 9:21). Zechariah's entire book is structured around visions that an angel interprets for him.
What is striking here is that angels are not merely messengers; they are teachers. They help the prophets understand what the prophets have seen. They explain, they question, they clarify. This is one of the reasons I think we need to be careful when modern Christians describe their own angelic encounters. The pattern in Scripture is that angels direct attention away from themselves toward God. Their role is ministerial, not central. When modern reports describe an angel who draws ongoing devotion to itself, or who gives a teaching that relocates the spotlight from Christ onto the experience, the biblical pattern is already being violated.
In the New Testament, angelic activity increases dramatically around the incarnation, ministry, and resurrection of Jesus. The infancy narratives are saturated with angels. Gabriel announces the birth of John the Baptist to Zechariah (Luke 1:11-20). Gabriel announces the incarnation to Mary (Luke 1:26-38). An angel reassures Joseph that Mary's pregnancy is from the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:20-21). An angel leads the shepherds to the manger, joined by "a multitude of the heavenly host praising God" (Luke 2:13-14, ESV). An angel warns Joseph to flee to Egypt (Matthew 2:13) and later tells him when it is safe to return (Matthew 2:19-20).
During Jesus' own earthly ministry, angels appear at key moments. They minister to Him after His temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4:11). An angel strengthens Him in Gethsemane (Luke 22:43). At the resurrection, angels are at the empty tomb, speaking with the women, explaining what has happened (Matthew 28:1-7; Luke 24:4-7). At the ascension, two men in white robes tell the disciples that Jesus will come again as they have seen Him go (Acts 1:10-11).
The New Testament also shows angels active in the life of the early church. An angel delivers Peter from Herod's prison in Acts 12. An angel tells Philip to go south on the road to Gaza, leading to the encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26). An angel appears to Cornelius, directing him to send for Peter (Acts 10:3-6). An angel strikes Herod dead for receiving the praise due only to God (Acts 12:23). An angel stands by Paul in a storm at sea and promises that no life will be lost (Acts 27:23-24). This is not an occasional, ornamental angelology. This is a sustained portrait of a spiritual realm whose inhabitants are woven into the fabric of redemptive history.
If I were asked to pick a single verse that sums up the Bible's teaching on the present ministry of angels, it would be Hebrews 1:14. Here is the full text in the ESV:
"Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" (Hebrews 1:14)
Two things in the original Greek deserve notice. First, the word translated "ministering spirits" is λειτουργικὰ πνεύματα (leitourgika pneumata), literally "liturgical" or "serving" spirits. The word λειτουργός (leitourgos) is a public servant, one who performs an official duty on behalf of another. These are not freelance spiritual beings; they are on assignment. Second, the verse is in the present tense. The author of Hebrews is not describing what angels did in the past. He is describing what they do now. The ministry continues.
The verse also tells us for whom the angels serve: "for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation." That is the church. That is every believer. That is, if you trust in Christ, you. Steve Miller, in his careful survey of NDE and DBE reports, lists many accounts in which people at the edge of death describe being met or escorted by beings they identify as angels.4 Miller does not claim that every such account is a literal angelic encounter; he is careful, as we must be. But he does insist that the biblical picture of angels as present and ministering is not a fanciful overlay on the New Testament. It is the New Testament's own picture. Miller's systematic reviews of NDE accounts on the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) website have consistently found that angelic and Christic elements appear far more frequently than critics of NDE literature typically acknowledge.26
Billy Graham, whose careful evangelical ministry reached hundreds of millions, once described the death of his grandmother. The room, he said, "seemed to fill with a heavenly light." His grandmother sat up in bed, smiled, and said, "I see Jesus. He has His arms outstretched toward me. I see Ben [her husband who had died some years earlier] and I see angels." Then she slumped back and was, in the words of 2 Corinthians 5:8, "absent from the body and at home with the Lord." A thousand details of that scene fit the biblical picture exactly. None of it is a stretch from the text.5
Having walked through the narrative material, let me pause and draw together a few points of doctrine. The Bible tells us only so much about angels, and we should not go beyond it. But what it tells us is enough to give us a working framework.
First, angels are created beings. Psalm 148 calls on all creation to praise the LORD, and the psalmist specifies: "Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his hosts!" and then adds, "For he commanded and they were created" (Psalm 148:2-5, ESV). Angels are not eternal. They are not little gods. They are creatures, made by God at some point before the material creation (since they were present at it, per Job 38:7). They have a beginning. They depend on God for their existence just as we do.
Second, angels are personal beings. They have intelligence. Peter writes that the saving work of God is something "into which angels long to look" (1 Peter 1:12, ESV). They have emotion. Job says that at creation they "shouted for joy" (Job 38:7). They have will. Isaiah 14, as traditionally read, speaks of a heavenly being who declared, "I will ascend to heaven" (Isaiah 14:13) — a statement of self-exaltation that implies choice.6 Angels are not forces of nature. They are someones.
Third, angels are normally invisible to physical senses but can become visible. The story of Elisha's servant, which I mentioned earlier, makes this explicit: the chariots of fire were already there; his eyes had to be opened to see them. At the same time, angels can take on bodily form. Hebrews 13:2 urges Christians to show hospitality to strangers, "for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" (ESV). That verse would make no sense if angels could not appear in human form indistinguishable from ordinary travelers. Abraham, as we saw, hosted angels who ate with him. The young men who rescued Lot were assumed by the men of Sodom to be ordinary visitors.
Fourth, angels are organized in some hierarchy. Paul writes of "thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities" that Christ has created (Colossians 1:16, ESV). Michael is called "the archangel" (Jude 9) and "one of the chief princes" (Daniel 10:13, ESV). An archangel is mentioned at the Lord's return (1 Thessalonians 4:16). Scripture does not give us a detailed chart of angelic ranks, and I am suspicious of books that claim to have filled in the gaps with confidence. But Scripture does tell us that the angelic realm is ordered, not chaotic. It has structure.
Fifth, angels are numerous beyond counting. The writer of Hebrews describes "innumerable angels in festal gathering" (Hebrews 12:22, ESV). John in Revelation sees around the throne "the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands" (Revelation 5:11, ESV). The Greek construction is a kind of poetic intensifier — literally "tens of thousands of tens of thousands and thousands of thousands." Whatever the exact number, the answer is: a lot. More than we can picture. More than we can count.
Sixth, some angels are named. Michael appears in Daniel 10:13, 10:21, and 12:1, in Jude 9, and in Revelation 12:7. Gabriel appears in Daniel 8:16 and 9:21, and in Luke 1:19 and 1:26. Those are the only two angels whose names Scripture gives us. The named angels in non-canonical Jewish literature (Raphael, Uriel, and so on) are interesting historically but are not in the Bible, and I want to resist the temptation to treat them as authoritative. Scripture's reticence about angelic names is itself a form of instruction. We are not meant to build a spirituality on a catalog of angelic personalities.
Seventh, we are not to worship angels. Paul warns the Colossians against "asceticism and worship of angels" (Colossians 2:18, ESV). Twice in the book of Revelation, John falls at the feet of an angel to worship, and twice the angel stops him: "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers… Worship God" (Revelation 19:10; 22:9, ESV). This is important for NDE discernment. A genuine angel always directs worship to God. A being that accepts worship, or that subtly draws ongoing devotion toward itself, is not what it appears to be.
Angelology is a field where Christians easily go beyond what Scripture says. The Bible tells us enough to establish that angels are real, personal, ordered, and active — and then it stops. When an NDE teacher or popular book produces elaborate charts of angelic orders, assigns specific functions to specific ranks, or offers techniques for communicating with particular named angels, this is a sign to slow down. The Bible's restraint is itself a doctrine.
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If I could write a book that only talked about good angels, I would happily do so. It would sell better. It would be more comforting. It would also be an incomplete Bible. The same Scripture that tells us about ministering spirits also tells us, from beginning to end, that a rebellion has taken place in the heavenly realm, that some of those personal beings are now hostile to God and to human beings, and that their activity is among the most consistent features of the biblical worldview.
I want to handle this subject with care. There is a certain kind of Christian book on demonology that I have come to mistrust — the kind that finds a devil behind every flat tire and a territorial spirit over every coffee shop. Scripture does not talk that way. But there is also a far more common kind of Christian posture that I mistrust more: the embarrassed shrug that treats demons as a quaint first-century concept. Scripture does not talk that way either. Let me walk you through what the Bible actually says.
The Bible nowhere gives us a clear, complete account of the fall of the angels. We get hints and allusions, mostly delivered through prophetic oracles aimed originally at human rulers — the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14, the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28 — but which many readers throughout church history have understood as opening a window onto the fall of a great angelic being behind those earthly rulers.7
Isaiah 14:12-15, addressed to the king of Babylon, says, "How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!" It then quotes the fallen figure's self-exaltation: "I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high… I will make myself like the Most High." The passage ends, "But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit" (ESV). Ezekiel 28:12-17, addressed to the king of Tyre, describes a being who was "the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty," who was "in Eden, the garden of God," who was "an anointed guardian cherub," and who was cast out for pride: "Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor."
The traditional Christian reading is that these passages have two layers: a historical reference to human kings who were puffed up beyond their station, and a deeper reference to a prior fall of the angelic being now known as Satan, of whom these human kings are echoes. That reading is not universally accepted; some careful modern scholars question it. But it fits the larger canonical picture, in which Jesus says, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18, ESV), and in which Revelation 12:7-9 describes Michael and his angels warring against the dragon and his angels, with the dragon "thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him." The New Testament assumes a fall of some spiritual beings. 2 Peter 2:4 states it plainly: "God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment" (ESV). Jude 6 says the same.
Tabatt collects these passages together in his chapter "There's a Conspiracy Afoot," and his summary is useful. He observes that across both testaments, the cumulative witness strongly associates Satan with the angelic realm and presents him as a being who was originally created good but fell through pride.8 Satan is not God's equal. He is not an eternal counter-force. He is a creature, and a rebel, and his rebellion has consequences for the human race.
The Old Testament speaks more quietly about demons than the New, but it is not silent. The book of Deuteronomy forbids the Israelites from sacrificing to "demons that were no gods" (Deuteronomy 32:17, ESV). Psalm 106:37 uses similar language: "They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons." The prophet Samuel, after Saul's rejection of God's word, describes how "a harmful spirit from the LORD" tormented Saul (1 Samuel 16:14, ESV). The book of Job opens with Satan appearing among "the sons of God" in the heavenly court (Job 1:6). The book of Daniel describes a fascinating episode in which the angel delivering a message to Daniel says he was delayed twenty-one days by "the prince of the kingdom of Persia," until Michael came to help him (Daniel 10:13, ESV) — a glimpse, apparently, of angelic and demonic beings operating in conflict behind the political history of the nations.
The most direct Old Testament treatment of the occult, which will matter greatly for later chapters on psychics and mediums, is the strict prohibition in Deuteronomy 18:9-14. The passage forbids divination, sorcery, fortune-telling, the casting of spells, consulting mediums or necromancers, and any practice that seeks contact with the spirits of the dead. The assumption behind this prohibition is not that none of these practices ever "work." The assumption is that they put the practitioner in contact with the wrong kind of spirit. John Cooper, in his careful survey of the Old Testament teaching on the dead, discusses the Saul-at-Endor episode (1 Samuel 28) as exactly this kind of case — a story that treats the appearance of Samuel's spirit as genuine but condemns Saul's method of seeking it.9
When we turn to the Gospels, demonic activity comes suddenly into sharp focus. Jesus is never surprised by demons. He addresses them directly. He casts them out. He gives His disciples authority to do the same. His ministry of exorcism is so prominent that Mark's Gospel uses it as one of the main identifying marks of who Jesus is.
The list is long, and I will only sample it. The Gadarene demoniac lives among the tombs, cutting himself, breaking chains, crying out night and day (Mark 5:1-20). The demons in him identify themselves — "My name is Legion, for we are many" — and beg Jesus not to send them into the abyss. A Syrophoenician woman comes to Jesus begging Him to deliver her daughter, who has an unclean spirit (Mark 7:24-30). A father brings his son, who has a spirit that throws him into fire and water (Mark 9:14-29). A man in the synagogue cries out, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are — the Holy One of God" (Mark 1:24, ESV).
Several features of these accounts are worth noticing. The demons are intelligent and speak. They know who Jesus is. They are sometimes violent toward the people they inhabit. They are not stock characters in a morality play; they are presented as real personal beings with knowledge, will, and intent. And Jesus treats them as such. He does not say to the man in the synagogue, "There is no spirit inside you; it is simply an ancient cultural interpretation of your epilepsy." He says, "Be silent, and come out of him!" (Mark 1:25, ESV).
I want to pause on this for a moment. One of the classic liberal theological moves of the last two centuries has been to say that Jesus "accommodated" to the beliefs of His time about demons without Himself actually believing in them, or that Jesus was simply mistaken about this subject because He shared the prescientific worldview of His age. Both moves have serious problems. The first makes Jesus a deceiver, teaching what He did not believe. The second makes Jesus ignorant on a fundamental spiritual matter, which is very hard to square with His identity as the incarnate Son of God. C. S. Lewis once observed that the attempt to strip Jesus of His belief in the devil always turns out to be an attempt to strip Jesus of much else besides, and that this operation tends to leave not a wiser Jesus but a Jesus who is barely there at all.10
If Jesus is who the Gospels say He is, His testimony about demons is decisive. He treated them as real. They are real.
The book of Acts continues the pattern. The apostles cast out demons as Jesus did (Acts 5:16; 8:7; 19:12). In Philippi, Paul encounters a slave girl with a "spirit of divination" (πνεῦμα πύθωνα, pneuma pythōna, literally a "python spirit," an allusion to the oracle at Delphi) who follows him around crying out, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation" (Acts 16:16-18, ESV). This is a fascinating case, because the demon is telling the truth. What it says is factually correct. But after many days, Paul becomes "greatly annoyed" and commands the spirit to come out. The lesson, for our purposes in thinking about NDEs, is important: a spiritual being can say true things and still not be a being one should listen to. Truth on the surface does not settle the question of source.
Paul's epistles treat demonic activity as a constant spiritual backdrop to Christian life. The most famous passage is Ephesians 6:10-18, where he tells believers to "put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil," because "we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:11-12, ESV). The vocabulary here is rich and a little frightening. Archai (ἀρχαί, "rulers"), exousiai (ἐξουσίαι, "authorities"), kosmokratores (κοσμοκράτορες, "world-rulers"), and pneumatika tēs ponērias (πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας, "spiritual forces of evil"). Clinton Arnold's careful work on Ephesians argues persuasively that these are not political metaphors but real spiritual beings organized against the people of God.11
Paul continues the theme in 1 Timothy 4:1-2. Here is the text in the ESV:
"Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared…"
Two phrases in the Greek deserve attention. "Deceitful spirits" is πνεύμασιν πλάνοις (pneumasin planois). The adjective planos is where we get our English word "planet" — literally "wanderer" or "misleading." These are spirits whose effect is to lead people off the path. "Teachings of demons" is διδασκαλίαις δαιμονίων (didaskaliais daimoniōn). The word didaskalia is the ordinary Greek word for "teaching" — the same word used to describe sound Christian doctrine elsewhere in the pastoral epistles. Paul is saying that demons have teachings. They have doctrines. They actively try to instruct human beings in spiritual falsehood.
This is an enormously important verse for NDE discernment, and we will come back to it throughout the book. Paul is not saying that everything spooky or unusual is demonic. He is saying that some of what passes itself off as spiritual teaching in the last days comes from an actual source: demons who teach. If a teaching identified in Scripture as a demonic teaching — say, the denial of Christ's incarnation (1 John 4:2-3), or the claim that there are many ways to God apart from Christ (Acts 4:12), or the promotion of occult practice (Deuteronomy 18) — shows up in a spiritual experience, the biblical worldview has already told us where it came from.
Merrill Unger's classic mid-twentieth-century treatment of biblical demonology gathered these passages and many more into a careful doctrinal summary, and despite its age it remains a reliable guide. Unger argued that the New Testament's picture of demons is not a primitive survival but a unified doctrine: demons are fallen angels, personally evil, active in deceiving and oppressing human beings, subject to Christ, and destined for judgment.12 That is the biblical doctrine, stated briefly.
I want to underline something. The authority for Christian belief in the reality of demons is not primarily the Old Testament, although the Old Testament is clear. It is not primarily Paul, although Paul is clear. It is Jesus Himself.
Jesus spoke about Satan and demons constantly. He spoke of Satan as a real person: "the devil… a murderer from the beginning… a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44, ESV). He described Satan's fall: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18). He resisted Satan's personal temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4; Luke 4). He explained His own work in terms of binding the strong man (Mark 3:27) and plundering his house. He told His disciples to pray, "Deliver us from the evil one" (Matthew 6:13). He warned Peter that Satan had demanded to have him, that he might sift him like wheat (Luke 22:31).
If Jesus is the Son of God, and if we take His teaching as the supreme revelation of God's mind to humanity, then the question of whether demons are real has already been answered. The question was answered in the Gospels. What remains is whether we will live as if that answer is true.
Christian belief in the reality of personal spiritual evil is not grounded in ancient superstition or modern sensationalism. It is grounded in the teaching of Jesus Christ Himself. To dismiss the demonic as primitive is, in the end, to dismiss Jesus as primitive — a theological move with much more serious consequences than its advocates usually recognize.
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Let me address a question that many readers will have. Some Christians, particularly those shaped by certain strands of Reformed or cessationist teaching, have been told that the unusual activity we read about in Scripture — miracles, prophecies, angelic appearances, demonic oppressions — belongs primarily to the biblical era. Once the apostolic age closed and the canon of Scripture was complete, the reasoning goes, God's normal mode of working became ordinary providence through ordinary means, and the dramatic spiritual activity we see in Acts should not be expected as a regular feature of present-day Christian life.
There are parts of that argument I respect. I do not think every Christian who claims to have seen an angel yesterday has actually seen an angel. I do think we should be cautious about sensational claims. And I do think the ordinary means of grace — Scripture, preaching, prayer, the sacraments, Christian community — are where God does His most important work in most believers' lives most of the time. None of that is in question.
But the argument that angelic and demonic activity itself ceased with the apostolic age cannot be sustained from Scripture. Let me give three reasons.
First, the texts themselves are in the present tense. Hebrews 1:14, which I quoted above, asks about angels, "Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" The present tense is not "were they at one time" — it is "are they." Hebrews was written probably in the sixties of the first century, at least a generation after the resurrection, to a Christian community that was already well past its founding. The author assumes his readers are the ones angels are sent to serve. If that was true then, and if the ministry is tied to the ongoing work of saving God's people, there is no textual reason to think it has stopped.
Second, 1 Timothy 4:1 explicitly speaks of "later times." Paul tells Timothy that "in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons." The phrase en hysterois kairois (ἐν ὑστέροις καιροῖς) refers to the age between Christ's first and second comings — that is, the current age. Demonic teaching, according to Paul, is a feature of the time we live in. It did not end in Ephesus in the first century.
Third, and more broadly, nothing in the New Testament suggests that angelic or demonic activity is tied specifically to the apostolic period. Cessationist arguments typically focus on sign gifts (tongues, prophecy, miraculous healing) and argue that these had a specific authenticating function that ceased when Scripture was completed. Whatever one thinks of that argument (and I am cautious about it), it does not apply to angelic and demonic activity. Angels did not cease ministering to God's people because the New Testament was written. Demons did not cease deceiving human beings because the apostolic office closed. The spiritual realm is still populated. Its inhabitants are still active.13
I am making a narrow claim here. I am not claiming that every modern story of an angelic visit is genuine, or that every Christian should expect to see angels. I am only claiming that the biblical grounds for expecting continuing angelic and demonic activity are strong and that the grounds for denying it are weak. The default biblical posture is openness, not denial.
C. S. Lewis, in the opening pages of The Screwtape Letters, wrote a sentence that has become almost proverbial among thoughtful Christians: "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."14
I want us to sit with that sentence for a moment, because it captures the tightrope this chapter — and this whole book — is trying to walk. If you take one lesson from everything I have written so far, it might as well be this: the spiritual realm is real. But if you take only that lesson, and you begin to look for demons under every rock, you will become the second kind of error. You will become the kind of Christian who blames every setback on a territorial spirit and every unusual feeling on spiritual warfare. That is not what the Bible teaches.
Consider how the New Testament actually counsels believers to engage the spiritual realm. Peter writes, "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith" (1 Peter 5:8-9, ESV). The counsel is sobriety, watchfulness, resistance, and faith — not obsession, spiritual thrill-seeking, or paranoia. Paul tells the Corinthians that "we are not ignorant of his designs" (2 Corinthians 2:11, ESV), but he does not give them a taxonomy of demonic strategies to study. He gives them forgiveness as the antidote.
James writes, "Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you" (James 4:7, ESV). Note the order. Submission to God comes first. Resistance comes in the context of submission. It is never the case that a Christian fights the devil from a position of independent spiritual strength. We fight from under Christ's authority, or we do not fight at all. The middle path Lewis pointed to is not a half-measure. It is the confident, humble posture of a Christian who knows both that the enemy is real and that the victory has already been won.
My own pastoral judgment, for whatever it is worth, is that most Christians today err on the side of disbelief rather than excessive interest. That is why I have spent so much of this chapter establishing the reality of the spiritual realm. But I want to stop and warn against the opposite error before we go any further. Reading about the spiritual world should make us more humble, not more fascinated. It should drive us to prayer and to Scripture, not to supernatural investigation. The sign of a healthy theology of the invisible world is a person whose inner life is more anchored in the ordinary means of grace, not less.
There are two opposite errors: disbelieving in spiritual beings, and becoming excessively fascinated by them. Scripture avoids both. The believer who takes angels and demons seriously should be marked by more prayer, more Scripture reading, and more ordinary Christian obedience — not less. Obsession with the unseen is not spiritual maturity. It is the mirror image of unbelief.
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At this point a careful reader will want to ask a harder question. If the spiritual realm is real, and if its inhabitants can sometimes interact with the material world, how exactly does that work? Are angels and demons in a "parallel dimension"? Are they physically located somewhere? Do they pass through walls? Can they read our thoughts?
I want to admit, up front, that Scripture does not answer most of these questions with the kind of precision we would like. It uses spatial language — angels "come down," demons are "cast out," spirits are "sent." But whether these terms are meant to describe actual physical motion or are simply the only language available to describe spiritual transitions is not always clear. What Scripture is clear about is more limited, and I think that limitation is deliberate. Let me try to summarize what we can say.
First, the spiritual realm and the material realm are distinct but overlapping, not identical and not separated. The Bible's picture is not of two sealed boxes, one labeled "spiritual" and one labeled "material," with no traffic between them. Nor is it of a single continuum in which spirit and matter are just different names for the same thing. It is of two orders of reality that interpenetrate. The material world is really material — it is not an illusion, as some Eastern religions teach. But it is not all there is. There is another, deeper layer, and that layer touches this one at every point.
The Elisha passage I discussed earlier is the clearest biblical picture of this overlap. The chariots of fire were on the same mountain as the Syrian army. The servant did not need to be transported to another dimension to see them. His eyes needed to be opened. The spiritual realm was already there, right where he already was.
Second, spiritual beings can perceive the material world, and the material world can sometimes perceive them. Angels are sent on errands that require them to know what is happening on earth. Demons are aware of human beings — the man in the synagogue's demon knew Jesus by name (Mark 1:24). At the same time, human beings are normally blind to spiritual beings and have to be granted unusual perception to see them. This is why Scripture treats visions and angelic appearances as rare events, not as routine experiences.
Third, demonic perception is real but limited. This is important for NDE discernment. Satan is not omniscient. He cannot read the mind in the way God can — Scripture treats mind-reading as a divine prerogative (1 Kings 8:39; Jeremiah 17:10). Demons seem to be able to observe behavior, draw inferences, remember what they have seen and heard, and perhaps to pick up patterns of human thought through long observation. But they are finite creatures, and their perception is not absolute. This matters because some NDE reports describe a being telling the experiencer "everything about your life, down to the smallest detail." If the being is genuinely God, this is unsurprising. If the being is merely a created spirit, it would not actually have this capacity — though it might create the impression of it through knowledge of externals, or might simply lie.15
Fourth, spiritual beings cannot violate the moral order. Demons can tempt, deceive, oppress, and afflict, but they cannot force a Christian to do what the Christian does not choose. Paul's promise that "no temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man… but with the temptation [God] will also provide the way of escape" (1 Corinthians 10:13, ESV) holds. Satan had to ask permission to afflict Job (Job 1:12; 2:6). He had to request to sift Peter (Luke 22:31). The spiritual realm is not a zone of lawlessness; it operates under God's sovereignty.
Beyond these four points, I think we should resist the temptation to speculate. There are a thousand fascinating questions about the mechanics of the spiritual realm that Scripture does not answer, and that many Christian books claim to answer by going beyond the text. I would rather end with a careful "I don't know" than with an overconfident theology built on inference.
Now, finally, let me turn the theological machinery we have built toward the specific question that brought us here. What does all of this mean for evaluating NDEs and DBEs?
Begin with what we already have. This book has argued, and will continue to argue, that human beings are composed of both body and soul (substance dualism), and that the soul can exist and function apart from the body after death (the conscious intermediate state). John Cooper's landmark biblical-theological defense of this position is the backbone of the case, and readers who want the full argument should consult his book. But the short version is this: the Bible teaches that at death, the believer is "with Christ" (Philippians 1:23) and "at home with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8), consciously and personally, before the bodily resurrection that will come at the end of the age. That biblical teaching of the intermediate state implies some form of dualism as a matter of metaphysical necessity — and Cooper argues the case across Old Testament, intertestamental, and New Testament materials.16 The strength of his case is that it does not depend on any single proof-text; it rests on the cumulative weight of a consistent biblical witness that traces a steady line from Old Testament Sheol through intertestamental developments to New Testament fellowship with Christ between death and resurrection.25
If that is true — if the human soul can function apart from the body at the point of death — then an experience in which the dying or near-dying person perceives something is not automatically impossible. In fact, it is exactly the kind of thing we should expect. The soul, temporarily or partially separated from the body, is doing something it does not normally do: perceiving without the ordinary filtering of the physical senses and the brain. Cooper himself notes this implication. His careful discussion of NDEs in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting is cautious — he will not go beyond the evidence — but he treats the phenomenon as consistent with biblical anthropology rather than as a threat to it.17
Now add the material we have built in this chapter. The realm the dying soul perceives is populated. It contains both holy angels and fallen angels. It also contains human souls — the righteous dead with Christ, and the unrighteous dead in Hades (an intermediate state distinct from the final Lake of Fire). When an NDEr describes encountering spiritual beings, the biblical framework has already given us categories for what they might be encountering. The question is no longer "did they encounter anything?" but "which kind of being did they encounter?"
Joshua Farris's careful work in theological anthropology reinforces the point. The soul, for the dualist tradition he defends, is not a merely abstract principle. It is a subject of experience, capable of conscious states without the body.18 If the soul in the intermediate state is a genuine subject of experience, then the experience it has — including perception of other spiritual beings — is something worth taking seriously. The philosophical arguments for the simplicity of the self — that the "I" who thinks, remembers, and experiences is not identical to any collection of material parts — converge with the scriptural teaching of the intermediate state to give substance dualism strong support.30
Here is a simple framework that I will use throughout this book and that I think will help the reader organize what they read in NDE accounts.
In any NDE that reports encounter with spiritual beings, at least three categories must be considered:
(a) Holy angels sent by God. These include the angels described in Scripture as ministering spirits, as escorts of the righteous dead (Luke 16:22), as messengers who bring assurance and guidance. A genuine holy angel will never draw attention to itself at the expense of God. It will glorify Christ. It will comfort. It will, if anything, turn the experiencer's gaze upward. The angels in the biblical narratives are not self-promoting; they are servants. A properly Christ-centered angelology — the kind of angelology that follows from the Chalcedonian confession that Christ alone is the one in whom divine and human natures are united — will always keep the angelic in its proper subordinate place, oriented toward the incarnate Son.29
(b) Fallen angels (demons) impersonating messengers of light. The next chapter of this book is entirely devoted to 2 Corinthians 11:14 and the biblical principle that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. For now, it is enough to say that the Bible assumes this is possible and likely. Not every luminous being in an NDE is what it claims to be. Light and beauty are not sufficient identifiers.
(c) Human spirits in the intermediate state. The intermediate state, according to Scripture, includes both the righteous (with Christ) and the unrighteous (in Hades). It is not theologically impossible for an NDEr to encounter a human soul in that realm. The Transfiguration, where Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, shows that the dead are not in a condition of unconsciousness. Hebrews 12:1 speaks of a "great cloud of witnesses," and Revelation 6:9-10 shows the souls of the martyrs fully conscious and communicative. Many DBE reports describe encounters with deceased loved ones, and there is no biblical reason to exclude such encounters as impossible a priori.19
However — and this is crucial — the Bible also warns that demons can present themselves as deceased loved ones. This is the logic behind the Old Testament prohibition on mediumship. When a "grandmother" greets the NDEr with specific personal knowledge and comforting words, there are at least two possibilities: it could be the grandmother, or it could be a spirit impersonating the grandmother. Sabom's careful discussion notes that familiar spirits — spiritual beings "capable of adopting 'familiar' images and characteristics" — could account for the consistent appearance of already-known figures to the experiencer.20 Sabom himself, a practicing cardiologist and PCA elder, documented in his Atlanta Study that several NDErs reported perceiving what they took to be evil spiritual presences in the midst of otherwise pleasant experiences — a finding that cuts against the simplistic assumption that every NDE is a purely benign event.28 The evaluation of such encounters, therefore, has to turn on more than the mere form of the encounter. It has to turn on what is said and what the encounter directs the experiencer toward.
A fourth category — though this is not a spiritual being in the same sense — is the person's own mental content. Dreams, memories, and subconscious imagery can be mixed into what the experiencer perceives. An NDE is not a pure spiritual experience; it is a spiritual experience that is still, in some measure, filtered through a human mind. This is not a denial of the spiritual reality of the NDE; it is simply a recognition that the experiencer remains a human being, with human memories and human expectations, throughout the event.
Chapters 14, 15, 19, and 21 will develop detailed criteria for sorting out which category a given NDE encounter belongs to. For now, it is enough to have the framework. When we read an NDE account in which the experiencer describes a being, we are not asking "did you really see something or did you make it up?" We are asking "what did you see?"
When a dying parishioner or loved one reports seeing angels, deceased relatives, or a being of light, the first and kindest response is not to rush to categorize the experience. It is to listen. In most cases — especially with dying believers — the experience will turn out to be exactly what it seems: a gift of God easing the passage from this life to the next. But the listener should be aware that not every vision is what it seems, and the discernment framework of this book is meant to equip both the dying and those who love them.
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If the spiritual realm is real and populated, and if human beings occasionally perceive it, we should expect Scripture to contain some descriptions of what such perception looks like. It does. I want to briefly walk through a few of these passages, because they function almost as biblical case studies for the kind of experiences NDErs report today. My point is not that every NDE is like these biblical events. My point is that biblical experiences of the unseen realm lay down a pattern that makes the basic shape of modern NDE reports unsurprising rather than shocking.
In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah the prophet had an experience that shaped the rest of his ministry. "I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim… And one called to another and said: 'Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!' And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke" (Isaiah 6:1-4, ESV).
Notice the features. Isaiah sees. The seraphim — spiritual beings with six wings each — are visible to him. The throne is high and lifted up. The glory is overwhelming. Isaiah's response is to cry out that he is a man of unclean lips, and one of the seraphim flies to him with a burning coal to cleanse his mouth. This is a vision, not a physical journey, but it is emphatically not a dream or a hallucination. Isaiah treats it as genuine divine revelation. And it fits closely with what NDErs describe: a realm of blinding light, holy beings, a deep awareness of personal sin before the holiness of God, and a transformative aftermath that reorients the rest of life.
Ezekiel begins his book with a vision that leaves him struggling for language. "The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God" (Ezekiel 1:1, ESV). He describes four living creatures, wheels within wheels, a crystal expanse, and a throne like sapphire with a figure of a man upon it "like gleaming metal, as it were the appearance of fire enclosed all around" (Ezekiel 1:27). He piles up qualifiers. "Something like." "The appearance of the likeness of." "I saw something resembling." The language of Ezekiel is famously halting, and that is not because he is a poor writer. It is because he is trying to describe what cannot be described in earthly terms.
Steve Miller has noted this same feature in NDE accounts. Experiencers consistently report that the realm they visited cannot be put into words. They reach for similes and analogies, then abandon them. "It was like a color I had never seen before." "The music was like nothing on earth." "The light was brighter than the sun, but I could look at it." This quality is called ineffability, and it has been a feature of NDE reports since Raymond Moody first catalogued them in 1975. It is also a feature of the biblical prophet's attempt to describe his visions.21 Jeffrey Long, who founded the NDERF database and has analyzed hundreds of NDE accounts statistically, has documented the striking consistency of these reports across cultures and religious backgrounds — a consistency that he himself interprets through a universalist lens, though his data (as distinct from his interpretation) is worth careful attention.27
This is a small point but I think it is worth noting. When a modern NDEr says "I can't really describe it" and then tries several times anyway, they are not displaying ignorance or confusion. They are doing exactly what Ezekiel and Daniel and John did. The realm they encountered exceeds the categories of ordinary human language.
Paul himself describes something close to what we would now call an NDE or a mystical vision. In 2 Corinthians 12, he writes:
"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter" (2 Corinthians 12:2-4, ESV).
Paul describes this event with extraordinary reticence. Notice what he says and does not say. He says "a man in Christ" — probably himself, speaking in the third person out of humility. He says he does not know whether the experience was in the body or out of the body. He says the third heaven — paradise — is where he was taken. He says he heard things that are not lawful to repeat.
This is important for several reasons. First, Paul treats spiritual experience as something God can genuinely give, without for a moment suggesting that his Corinthian readers should doubt it. Second, Paul refuses to make his experience a source of additional revelation; he will not repeat what he heard. Third, Paul boasts about his weaknesses rather than his visions (2 Corinthians 12:5-10). He does not build his apostleship on the experience. He barely mentions it.
That restraint is a model for NDErs and for the Christians who listen to them. An experience of paradise, even a real one, is not a platform for new teaching. Paul had such an experience and used it to illustrate the need for humility, not as a source of doctrine. The NDEr who returns and immediately starts giving conferences on what heaven "really" taught them has already departed from the Pauline pattern.
In Acts 7:54-60, as Stephen is about to be stoned to death, something extraordinary happens. "He, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, 'Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.'" He then prays, forgives his killers, and dies.
Tabatt, in his careful survey of biblical analogs to modern NDE-like experiences, treats Stephen's vision as a striking biblical example of a deathbed vision.22 Stephen is not in a cardiac arrest; he is conscious and about to be killed. But the structure of the experience — a dying believer seeing Jesus at the very moment of death, speaking what he sees aloud, and then dying peacefully — is a close parallel to countless modern DBE reports. When a dying grandmother sits up in her bed and says, "I can see Jesus," she is reporting something not unlike what the church's first martyr reported.
I find this comforting. The Bible does not present Stephen's vision as an unusual or problematic event. It presents it as a gift. Stephen's vision does not contradict Scripture; it embodies Scripture. It is, if you will, the Bible showing us what the biblical worldview looks like from the inside, at the moment of death.
When we compare the biblical accounts of visions of the unseen realm (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Paul, Stephen, John) with modern NDE and DBE reports, several features show up in both: overwhelming light, difficulty putting the experience into words, transformative aftereffects, awareness of personal unworthiness before holy beings, and a deep sense of peace. These parallels do not prove every NDE is genuine. They do show that the basic shape of NDE reports is consistent with the shape of biblical experiences of the unseen order — and that alone should make Christians slower to dismiss them.
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I want to say a pastoral word before I close this chapter. We have spent many pages establishing the reality of a spiritual realm that most Christians rarely perceive. That might leave some readers feeling as if they are missing something. "If the unseen realm is real and active, shouldn't I expect to experience it? Is there something wrong with my spiritual life if I have never seen an angel?"
I want to answer that question carefully, because it is important. The short answer is no. There is nothing wrong with your spiritual life if you have never seen an angel or had an unusual spiritual experience. In fact, I would gently suggest that the opposite posture — actively seeking such experiences — is not encouraged in Scripture and is not a sign of spiritual maturity.
Consider the ordinary life of a Christian as Scripture describes it. We are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31). We are to read the Scriptures, meditate on them day and night, and be nourished by them (Psalm 1; 2 Timothy 3:16-17). We are to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). We are to gather with other believers for worship, for the preaching of the word, and for the Lord's Supper (Hebrews 10:24-25; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26). We are to serve the poor (James 1:27), care for our families (1 Timothy 5:8), and bear witness to Christ wherever we find ourselves (Matthew 28:19-20). This is the Christian life. Scripture does not tell us to seek visions. It tells us to live faithfully.
Most of the great saints of the Christian centuries — Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lewis, Stott — do not report unusual spiritual experiences. They were men shaped by Scripture, prayer, and the sacraments. Their spiritual depth did not come from extraordinary visions. It came from ordinary faithfulness over time. That is still the main road of Christian discipleship. If you have walked that road faithfully, you are not behind anyone.
At the same time, the ordinary road does sometimes open, briefly, onto the unseen. Most often this happens at death. That is one reason DBEs are so consistent across Christian history: the dying believer is approaching the place where the veil is thinnest, and sometimes the veil lifts a little early. It can also happen in unusual seasons of life — in moments of great danger, in times of deep suffering, occasionally in settled seasons of prayer. But these are gifts, not achievements. They are not the point of the Christian life. They are, at most, occasional signposts along the road that the road itself is going somewhere real.
I do not want this chapter to leave any reader wondering whether they are a "less spiritual" Christian because they have never seen an angel. The answer is firmly no. The humble believer who has faithfully read their Bible, prayed their prayers, served their neighbor, and loved their family for fifty years is closer to Christ than the dazzled visionary who had one remarkable experience and built a ministry around it. Scripture's own priority is clear. The "sure word of prophecy," Peter writes, is the Scripture that is "more fully confirmed" even than his own experience at the Transfiguration (2 Peter 1:19, ESV). Ordinary Christian obedience, nourished by Scripture, is the heart of Christian life. The extraordinary is peripheral.
You do not need to have seen an angel to be a mature Christian. Scripture, prayer, sacrament, and faithful Christian community are the ordinary means of grace. The Christian who walks these paths faithfully is not spiritually behind the Christian who has had extraordinary experiences. NDEs and DBEs, when they occur, are gifts. They are not goals. They are not required. They are not the point.
· · ·
Let me draw this chapter to a close by summarizing where we have arrived and pointing to where we are going.
The spiritual realm is real. Angels are real. Demons are real. The Bible teaches these truths from Genesis to Revelation, and Jesus Himself, whose teaching is decisive, treats both holy and fallen angels as genuine personal beings. Modern Christians have often slipped into a functional naturalism that affirms these truths in creeds while ignoring them in practice. That posture is not sustainable when NDEs and DBEs arrive in the life of the believer, the family, or the church. A biblical framework is needed, and this chapter has tried to sketch one.
The framework I have offered has several elements. First, angels are created, personal, ministering beings who continue to serve God's people in the present age. Second, demons are fallen angelic beings who actively deceive and oppose the work of God, and whose activity is a real feature of the current age. Third, the spiritual realm and the material realm are distinct but overlapping; the unseen is not far away but is, as it were, right next to us, normally hidden by the ordinary opacity of our physical senses. Fourth, when the veil occasionally lifts — at death, in unusual visions, in providentially given experiences — the realm a person perceives contains several kinds of beings, and telling them apart is the work of discernment.
I want to be very clear about what this framework does and does not do. It does not tell you that every NDE is genuine. It does not tell you that every NDE is demonic. It does not tell you that any particular grandmother who saw Jesus on her deathbed was or was not really seeing Jesus. It tells you only that the question is a real question, that the categories needed to answer it exist, and that the biblical materials for the answering are in your hands already.
The chapters that follow will develop the discernment framework further. Chapter 7 will focus on the single most important biblical principle for evaluating spiritual experiences: 2 Corinthians 11:14, that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Chapter 8 will establish Scripture as the final standard by which every spiritual claim is to be tested. Chapter 9 will introduce the experience-interpretation distinction that runs throughout this book. Chapter 10 will consolidate everything into a seven-test framework for evaluating any NDE or DBE.
For now, I want to leave you with one image and one exhortation. The image is the young servant at Dothan, rubbing sleep from his eyes and looking out over the enemy army surrounding the city. He did not know what was on the mountain with him. Elisha prayed, and suddenly he saw: the chariots of fire had been there all along. We live, most of us, as if we were still before the prayer. We walk past mountains of unseen reality and notice only the dust at our feet. Scripture is telling us, gently and consistently, that there is more. Not a distraction from the ordinary Christian life, but a deeper truth within it. The God who loves us has dispatched His servants on our behalf. The enemy who hates us is real but defeated. The realm that NDErs and DBErs glimpse is not a fiction, and the discernment needed to evaluate their reports is not paranoia — it is simply the posture of a people who know what kind of world they live in.
The exhortation is simple. Do not live as a functional naturalist. Read your Bible as if its spiritual worldview were true, because it is. Pray with a quiet awareness that your prayers are heard in a realm more populous than you can imagine. Listen to dying loved ones with hope, and to extraordinary claims with thoughtfulness. Be neither a materialist nor a magician, in Lewis's terms, but a Christian who believes what the Bible teaches and lives as if what the Bible teaches is real. That is the posture from which discernment grows. And it is the posture from which the rest of this book is written.
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Wilkinson, Michael A. Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022.
Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. New York: HarperOne, 1998.