Genuine Love, Wrong Conclusion
Imagine you are sitting in a coffee shop with a friend who just had a near-death experience. Her eyes still fill with tears when she tells you about it. She had a cardiac arrest. She floated above her body. A warm, golden light wrapped around her like a blanket, and she felt loved in a way she never knew was possible. "It was beyond anything I can describe," she says. "I knew I was home. I knew I was accepted. I knew God loves me — totally, completely, without any conditions."
Then she leans in and tells you what the experience "taught" her. "I'll never worry about hell again. I used to be afraid God would reject me. But now I know. God loves everyone the same. He would never send anyone to hell. Religions don't matter. Faith in Jesus, being a Buddhist, being nothing at all — none of that matters. Only love matters. Only love is real."
Something inside you stirs. Part of you rejoices. You believe she met God. The love she describes sounds like the God of the Bible — the Father who is rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4), the Jesus who welcomed sinners and ate with them, the Spirit who pours God's love into hearts (Romans 5:5). You do not doubt the encounter.
But another part of you catches on what she said next. "Religions don't matter." "God would never send anyone to hell." "Only love is real." You think of Jesus on the cross — the same Jesus who talked more about hell than anyone else in the Bible.1 You think of the crucifixion, where love and judgment met at the same wooden beam. You want to be glad for her. You are glad for her. But you are also worried, because the conclusion she drew from her encounter does not actually follow from the encounter itself.
This chapter is about that gap — the gap between a true experience of divine love and a false conclusion drawn from it. It is, in many ways, the most important chapter in this book. If you grasp what this chapter argues, you will be ready to engage the single most common error in near-death experience literature: the leap from "I was loved beyond words" to "therefore nothing else matters." The first statement is almost certainly true. The second statement does not follow.
Let me lay out the pattern clearly. It shows up in thousands of NDE accounts, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The NDEr reports something like this:
"I experienced love beyond anything I have ever known. It was total. It was complete. It accepted me exactly as I was. It had no conditions. After this, I cannot believe God would send anyone to hell. I know now that all of us are saved, regardless of our beliefs."
Notice the structure. The first half of the quote is a description of experience. The second half is a conclusion drawn from that experience. These are two very different things. The first is a report. The second is an argument. And the argument — however deeply felt — is not valid.
J. Steve Miller has made the helpful observation that NDEs and deathbed experiences are not usually designed to teach us every fine point of theology. They are often, he argues, designed to assure us of God's existence, His goodness, the reality of an afterlife, and the priority of love.2 They point to spiritual truth. They do not usually settle every doctrinal question. When NDErs treat their experience as though it settled every doctrinal question — especially about hell, salvation, and the exclusivity of Christ — they are usually going beyond what the experience itself can support.
The NDEr's mistake is not in trusting the experience. The experience may well have been real. The mistake is in treating the experience as a more reliable theological authority than the Bible, and in drawing logical conclusions from it that simply are not logically valid.
An NDEr may genuinely meet God and also draw wrong conclusions from that meeting. The encounter and the interpretation are two different things. Affirming the first does not require affirming the second. This distinction runs through every page of this chapter.
Let us slow down and examine the argument carefully. When an NDEr says, "I felt overwhelming divine love, therefore no one goes to hell," what is the logical structure of that claim? Here it is laid out step by step:
Premise 1: I experienced overwhelming divine love during my NDE.
Premise 2: Overwhelming divine love is inconsistent with final judgment.
Conclusion: Therefore, there is no final judgment.
The first premise may well be true. The problem lies in the second premise, which is usually just assumed — and which Scripture flatly denies. The NDEr has smuggled an enormous theological claim into an argument dressed up as simple common sense. When you pull that hidden premise out into the daylight, the argument collapses.
Here is the heart of it: the Christian God, as revealed in the Bible, is both perfectly loving and the judge of all the earth (Genesis 18:25; 1 John 4:8). Those are not opposites. They cohere. The same apostle John who wrote "God is love" (1 John 4:8) also recorded Jesus saying, "Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him" (John 3:36). The same Jesus who welcomed little children (Mark 10:14) warned of outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12; 22:13).
If the God of the Bible is both loving and holy, both merciful and just, then no amount of personally experienced love can, by itself, prove the absence of judgment. All such an experience can prove is what it directly shows: that the person met divine love. The experience did not show the absence of judgment. The NDEr simply assumed it.
To see this more clearly, consider an everyday parallel. Imagine a child who has just had a wonderful day with her father. He has been patient, kind, playful, and generous. From this lovely day, the child concludes: "My father is so loving that he will never discipline me for anything, ever, no matter what I do." The child's experience of her father's love is real. Her conclusion does not follow. A father's love and his willingness to discipline are not in conflict. They are two sides of the same parental love.
The book of Hebrews makes this explicit: "For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives" (Hebrews 12:6). Love does not cancel accountability. Love, in its deepest biblical form, includes accountability. It is not ignoring sin. It is not treating every choice as equally fine. It is doing what is best for the beloved — which sometimes means confrontation, correction, and, in the final analysis, the ratification of our own free rejection of God.
Let me say clearly at the outset that the biblical picture of God's love is every bit as warm, as wide, as overwhelming, as personal as anything reported in NDEs. I do not want to suggest otherwise. The God of the Bible really is love, and that love really is breathtaking. Miller's survey of NDE love reports and biblical love texts shows a striking fit between the two.3 NDErs who say they met unfathomable love and then are told by a skeptical Christian, "That cannot have been God, because God is mostly wrath," have been misled about their own faith.
But precisely because God's love is so deep, we must be careful not to shrink it down to mere niceness. Biblical love is not sentimentality. It is not mere affirmation. It is something far greater.
The New Testament's characteristic word for God's love is ἀγάπη (agapē), often pronounced "ah-GAH-pay." In first-century Greek, this word was less common than other love words. The New Testament writers picked it up and loaded it with fresh meaning — the kind of love that gives itself for the good of the beloved, regardless of whether the beloved deserves it.4 Agape is not about feelings, primarily. It is about willed, self-giving action for another's genuine good.
This is the key point: agape loves what is best for the person loved. It is not the same as approving of everything they do. A human parent can love a child with agape while disapproving of the child's cruelty to a sibling. God can love a sinner with agape while hating the sin that destroys that sinner. To confuse "God loves you" with "God approves of everything you do" is to flatten agape into something it was never meant to be.
Miller rightly observes that the love NDErs describe is consistently agape-like in character: unconditional, self-giving, total, accepting of the whole person despite their faults.5 That description fits agape beautifully. But agape is not a synonym for moral indifference. Biblical agape includes God's unwavering commitment to make the beloved holy, and it does not wink at evil.
The famous line "God is love" appears twice in 1 John 4. Here is the fuller passage:
"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." (1 John 4:7–10, ESV)
Notice what John actually says. "God is love" does not stand alone. It is tied tightly to the cross. The display of God's love, according to John, is not a warm feeling. It is the sending of the Son to be ἱλασμός (hilasmos) — a word that means "propitiation," the sacrifice that turns away righteous wrath.6
Pause on that. In the same breath where John says "God is love," he says that God's love is shown by sending His Son as a propitiation for sins. This only makes sense if (a) sin is a real problem, (b) wrath against sin is real, and (c) love deals with sin rather than pretending it does not exist. "God is love" in its original context includes "and therefore He took sin seriously enough to send His Son to die for it." Strip out the cross, and you have not kept 1 John 4:8. You have gutted it.
When an NDEr uses "God is love" to mean "therefore sin does not matter," they are using the verse in a way that contradicts what the verse actually says. John's God is love — love that bleeds to address the problem of sin. That is a far more serious and powerful love than the greeting-card version.
God's love, as Scripture describes it, extends to the entire world. John 3:16 — the most famous verse in the Bible — says so: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." Romans 5:8 says that God shows His love in that "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." God loves sinners. God loves His enemies. God sends sunshine and rain on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45).
I want the reader to feel the force of this. The biblical God is not stingy. He is not small-hearted. He is not looking for excuses to exclude people. He is the father in Luke 15 who runs down the road to embrace his prodigal son. He is the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one. He is the Son who dies for enemies who hated Him. There is nothing in the Bible that contradicts the NDEr's sense of being met by a love that is breathtaking, accepting, and overwhelming.
What the Bible adds is this: that love has a shape. It flows through Christ. It leads to repentance. It calls for response. It will not be mocked. It should remake the person who encounters it. Biblical love is active, not passive — and its goal is to draw the beloved into a real, free, reciprocal relationship with God. Love that left the beloved stuck in rebellion, never calling, never warning, never correcting, never reaching for change, would not actually be love.
The Old Testament has its own rich vocabulary for God's love, and one word in particular deserves our attention: חֶסֶד (hesed), often translated "loyal love," "lovingkindness," or "steadfast love." It appears around 250 times in the Hebrew Bible, concentrated especially in the Psalms. The word carries the sense of a love that keeps covenant promises — love that stays, love that is reliable, love that is not yanked away at the first disappointment.38
Psalm 136 opens with a line that repeats through all twenty-six verses: "His steadfast love endures forever." The Hebrew there is hesed. The psalmist is not describing a vague, generic warmth. He is describing a covenant faithfulness that outlasts every human failure and every cosmic shaking.
Here is what is striking: the same Old Testament that celebrates hesed on almost every page is also full of God's judgments. The same God who shows steadfast love to a thousand generations (Exodus 34:6–7) also refuses to let the guilty go unexamined. These are not two different Gods. They are the same God, understood in the two-sided fullness of His character. Biblical Israel never imagined hesed meant the absence of judgment. They worshipped a God whose loyal love was the motive behind both His rescues and His corrections.
This matters enormously for our chapter. The NDEr who says, "I felt overwhelming love, so there cannot be judgment," has forgotten — or never been taught — that the deepest form of divine love in Scripture already holds love and judgment together. Hesed does not eliminate judgment. Hesed is what makes judgment bearable, redemptive, and aimed at restoration. To experience hesed is not to experience a love that denies sin and its consequences; it is to experience a love so strong that it is willing to deal with sin all the way to its painful root.
If we want to see biblical love at its most intense, we should read the Old Testament prophets. Many modern readers assume the prophets were angry men thundering threats. That reading misses almost everything. The prophets were, above all, lovers. Their sermons are love letters in the voice of a jilted spouse — Yahweh speaking through His human messengers about a people He cannot bear to lose.
Hosea is the clearest example. God tells Hosea to marry a woman whose unfaithfulness becomes a living picture of Israel's unfaithfulness to God. Yet God's word through Hosea is never that He is done with Israel. His word is, again and again, "How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?" (Hosea 11:8). The judgment language in Hosea is real. But it is wrapped in a love that refuses to let go. That is biblical love.
The same is true in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in Isaiah. The judgments the prophets announce are never arbitrary. They are always the painful next step when Israel has ignored God's gentler words. And the judgments always come with a promise of restoration for the remnant who return. The prophets do not pretend that love and judgment are opposites. They show again and again that love is what motivates the judgment and drives the eventual restoration. Take away the judgment, and you take away the depth of the love.
I bring this up because NDErs often assume that the Bible's judgment passages are the uncomfortable leftovers of a more primitive theology, while its love passages represent the real God. The prophets will not let us divide Scripture this way. They insist that the God who judges is the God who loves, and that the God who loves is the God who judges. One without the other is not the biblical God. It is a ghost.
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Having said all of that about love, we have to honestly address the other half of the picture. Scripture speaks clearly about judgment. You cannot read the Bible with any attention and miss this. Judgment is not an invention of grumpy medieval theologians. It is in the Torah, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation. It is threaded into the story from Genesis to Revelation.
Here is a fact that tends to startle people: the most loving figure in history, Jesus of Nazareth, spoke about hell and judgment more than anyone else in the Bible. He warned of Gehenna — a word for final judgment — in Mark 9:43–48:
"And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire."
The word translated "hell" is γέεννα (geenna), Gehenna, referring to the final place of judgment after the last day.7 Jesus used this word repeatedly. He warned of weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12, 13:42, 22:13, 24:51, 25:30). He told the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), in which the rich man suffers conscious torment in Hades. He spoke of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31–46, where the Son of Man separates the nations into two destinies.
I want to be very careful here. My own working position — and I will come back to this below — is that the final state of the finally unrepentant may be annihilation rather than eternal conscious torment, and that God may extend opportunities for salvation beyond death. Those are live questions among faithful Christian scholars. But whatever one's view on the precise nature of final judgment, the fact of final judgment is unavoidable in Jesus's teaching. A "Jesus" who never warns of judgment is not the Jesus of the four gospels.
Jesus is not alone in this. Paul preached to the Athenians that God "has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed" (Acts 17:31). The author of Hebrews wrote, "It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). The book of Revelation describes a great white throne judgment (Revelation 20:11–15). The Old Testament is full of God's judgment on the nations and on persistent evil. There is simply no way to remove judgment from Scripture without removing most of Scripture.
Cooper, in his careful study of biblical anthropology, notes that the Bible consistently assumes the reality of final accountability before God — an accountability that makes sense only if human beings are genuinely responsible agents whose moral choices really matter.8 The biblical picture is that each person will stand before God and give an account. No amount of love language in Scripture softens that reality. The two sit together throughout the Bible, held in what Farris calls the dynamic tension of God's mercy and God's justice.9
Here is the key insight: in biblical theology, love and judgment are not opposites. They belong together. Think of it this way. If a judge loved the victims of a murderer, would he simply let the murderer go free with a hug and a reassuring word? Of course not. A loving judge hates the crime precisely because he loves the victims. Love requires justice. A God who never judged evil would be a God who never protected the innocent, never stood against wickedness, never cared about what human beings did to each other. Such a God would not be loving. He would be indifferent.
The biblical God is not indifferent. He sees every sparrow that falls (Matthew 10:29). He knows every injustice ever done. He hears every cry of the oppressed. And because He is love, He will one day set all things right — which means some things that are currently wrong will be judged. To wish away judgment is, at bottom, to wish away justice. And to wish away justice is to wish away the only hope the victims of evil have.
The cross, not the absence of judgment, is the ultimate display of God's love. At Calvary, God's love for sinners and God's judgment against sin meet in the same event: the Son bears the judgment, and sinners are welcomed into mercy through faith in Him. Strip out the judgment, and you have stripped out the love.
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If the logic is as weak as I have described, why do so many NDErs fall into it? This is a real question. These are not stupid people. Many of them are sincere. Many became kinder, more generous, more loving after their experiences. Why do so many end up concluding something like "God loves everyone, so nothing else matters" when that conclusion does not actually follow from what they experienced?
I think there are at least five contributing factors. Understanding them will help us respond to NDErs with both clarity and compassion.
NDErs consistently describe the love they encounter as the most real, most intense, most total experience of their entire lives. Words fail them. They compare earthly love to a drop in the ocean compared to what they felt.10 This is not an exaggeration. It is a genuine encounter with something truly overwhelming.
When something overwhelms your previous categories, it is very natural to conclude that your previous categories were wrong. If you grew up thinking of God as a grumpy cosmic referee ready to call fouls on every move you make, and then you experienced being unconditionally loved and accepted, it is perfectly understandable that you would say, "Everything I used to think about God was wrong." The problem is that "everything I used to think about God" included both false beliefs (God is grumpy and petty) and true beliefs (God is holy and will judge sin). In rejecting the false, the NDEr often rejects the true too.
Here is a point that gets missed so often it is worth stating loudly. An NDE is a half-time visit, not the final whistle. Jesus's welcome to an NDEr who will soon return to earthly life is not the same as Jesus's final welcome (or non-welcome) to a person who has died and stands before Him on the last day. Miller makes this point powerfully: when Jesus was on earth, He was kind to sinners — to the Samaritan woman, to Zacchaeus, to the tax collectors and prostitutes He shared meals with — because the door of grace was still open to them.11 That same door is still open to the NDEr, who is being sent back.
NDErs tend to collapse this distinction. They assume that the Jesus they met — warm, welcoming, loving them despite their sin — is the same Jesus they would have met if their journey had been permanent rather than temporary. But that assumption skips a step. Scripture is clear that there is a final judgment at which Christ will be both mercy to those who trust Him and righteous judge to those who persist in rejecting Him (Revelation 19:11–16). The warmth toward an NDEr who still has life ahead does not tell us what the final encounter looks like for a person who has finally and definitively turned away.
Many NDErs come into their experiences carrying distorted pictures of God — pictures they absorbed from harsh churches, abusive parents, angry grandfathers, or pop-culture caricatures. They imagined God as a cosmic policeman, a disappointed judge, a stern schoolmaster. When they encountered the real God, the contrast was so sharp that they swung all the way to the other extreme: "God never gets angry. God never judges. God accepts everything."
This is what I would call overcorrection. The NDEr was right to reject the distorted picture. But they overcorrected. They did not just move from "God is only wrath" to "God is love and judge." They moved all the way to "God is only love, never judge." The swing of the pendulum went too far. Miller points out that the God NDErs encounter is consistent with the biblical God of John 3:16 — but that does not mean every inference the NDEr draws is consistent with the Bible.12 The encounter was right. Some of the conclusions were overreactions to prior damage.
Once an NDEr starts looking for answers, where do they go? In the early days, they probably pick up books by Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, Jeffrey Long, or any of the dozens of popular NDE authors. They might attend an IANDS conference. They might join an online group. They might search YouTube. Almost all of these sources share a common theological orientation: pluralistic, universalist, spiritual-but-not-religious.
Sabom documented this pattern carefully in Light and Death. He noticed, to his alarm, that much of the research by Ring, Margot Grey, Chuck Flynn, Phyllis Atwater, and Cherie Sutherland drew on overlapping samples — largely members of IANDS — whose religious views were not representative of the general public.13 The "shift toward spiritual universalism" these researchers reported was, in large part, the worldview of the communities they were sampling from — not the direct result of NDEs.14 Sabom's Atlanta Study, conducted outside that circle, found no such universalist shift. Instead, his subjects showed strengthened traditional religious commitment.15
What Sabom's findings suggest is revealing. An NDEr who joins the IANDS-style community is socialized into a particular way of interpreting their experience — one that leans universalist and non-doctrinal. An NDEr who stays in a solid Christian community is socialized into a biblical reading of their experience. The raw experience, in both cases, was probably similar. The framework grew afterward.
I offer this fifth factor carefully, because I do not want to slide into paranoia. Not every wrong conclusion is the work of the devil. Often, as we have just seen, there are plenty of ordinary human reasons why a person ends up in the wrong place theologically.
But Scripture does teach that Satan is interested in undermining the gospel. He is described as a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). He disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). His signature strategy is not crude horror. It is subtle distortion — taking something true and bending it just enough to lead people astray. Tabatt, drawing on this biblical framework, argues that a genuine encounter with God's love that gets twisted into "therefore the cross was unnecessary" would be exactly the kind of victory the enemy would aim for: real encounter, corrupted conclusion, influence spread to thousands.16
Whether we are talking about spiritual interference or simply human error (and I think often we are talking about human error), the result is the same: the encounter was right; the inference was wrong. Let us keep our focus there.
Not every NDEr who drifts into "God loves everyone, so nothing else matters" is demonically deceived. Most are sincere. Most are trying to make sense of an overwhelming experience with the theological tools they have. We respond with compassion and correction, not with accusation.
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Let us work through four specific arguments that NDErs and NDE teachers offer when moving from the experience of love to the denial of judgment. Each argument has some surface appeal. Each fails on closer inspection.
This is the most common form of the argument, and it is the most intuitive. If a loving father would not throw his children into fire, how much less a loving God?
The argument has a hidden assumption: that hell is something God does to people against their will, like a human tyrant throwing victims into a dungeon. If that were the biblical picture, the argument would be strong. But that is not the biblical picture.
In Scripture, hell — or whatever the final negative outcome is called — is better understood as the ratification of persistent human rejection of God. People are not swept into judgment against their wishes. They persist in turning away from the God who keeps calling to them, and at the last, God honors their choice. C. S. Lewis captured this in his well-known formulation about two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God at last says, "thy will be done."17
God's love does not run out. What runs out is a life lived in persistent rejection of that love. Revelation 22:17 issues the final invitation: "Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price." The hand is still extended. But a person who persistently refuses the gift cannot then complain that they did not receive it.
This framing matters, because it dissolves the supposed conflict between love and judgment. A loving God does not override human freedom to force universal salvation. He honors the image-bearer's agency, even when that agency is tragically misused. Judgment, on this view, is not God's failure to love. It is God's refusal to coerce.
The word unconditional is doing a lot of work here, and we have to examine it carefully. When NDErs describe the love they experienced as unconditional, they usually mean something like: "It was not based on anything I earned. It accepted me despite my sins. I did not have to qualify for it."
All of that is beautifully consistent with biblical teaching. Agape love, as we saw, is not conditional on the beloved's worthiness. Paul writes, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The grace that saves us is not earned. It is a gift.
But unconditional does not mean without consequences or without direction. A mother's love for her drug-addicted son may be unconditional — she will never stop loving him — and yet she may still refuse to give him money for his next hit, insist on rehab, or lock him out of the house to protect herself and her other children. Unconditional love is not the same as unconditional approval of the beloved's choices.
God's unconditional love for every human does not mean unconditional approval of every human's choices. It does not mean that the consequences of rejecting Him evaporate because He loves. It does not mean there is no path and no response required. It means His love is not withdrawn based on our worthiness — which is very good news for sinners who otherwise would have no hope. But unconditional love and final accountability are compatible. They have to be, or the word love becomes meaningless — simply another word for moral indifference.
This one sounds like a truism, but it is actually a very strong philosophical claim about the nature of love. Examined closely, it falls apart.
Consider the moral universe the argument describes. In this universe, God loves everyone so much that He never judges anyone — not Hitler, not Stalin, not Pol Pot, not the rapist, not the child abuser, not the oppressor of the poor. Everyone gets the same destiny. No one is ever held accountable. Every life ends with the same pat on the head, regardless of whether you spent it serving others or torturing them.
Is that a loving universe? Only if we forget the victims. The child murdered by a human trafficker is not helped by a God who loves the trafficker so much that no accountability is ever required. The woman whose life was ruined by domestic abuse is not helped by a God who dismisses her suffering because "love is all that matters." The genocide survivor is not helped by a God who gives the genocidaire the same warm welcome as the faithful peacemaker.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said that grace without cost, grace without the cross, is cheap grace — not real grace at all.18 The same logic applies here. Love without any possibility of judgment is not true love. It is moral indifference dressed up in a nice word. True love cares about injustice. True love stands against evil. True love honors the image of God in the victim by refusing to treat what happened to them as though it did not matter.
So, far from contradicting love, judgment is a necessary expression of love. A God who never judged would not be more loving than the biblical God. He would be less. He would be a distant deity who shrugs at evil and treats the victims' cries as background noise.
This argument concedes that Scripture contains judgment language but dismisses it as cultural baggage. The NDEr claims that their experience gives them access to the "real" God, who stands behind the Bible rather than being bound by it.
There are several problems with this move. First, it cannot be limited to the judgment passages. Once you start rejecting Scripture based on your experience, you have given up the Bible as a reliable guide altogether. Your own experience becomes the final authority. But experiences can be deceived. Experiences can be misinterpreted. That is the whole reason a discernment book like this one is needed.
Second, the figure who speaks most often of judgment in Scripture is Jesus Himself. If the NDEr claims to have met Jesus in their NDE, and the Jesus they met contradicts the Jesus of the gospels, something is wrong. Sabom raises this issue sharply in his discussion of Betty Eadie and George Ritchie. Their NDE "Jesus" made theological pronouncements that directly contradicted biblical teaching — about sin, about the church, about pre-existence of souls. Sabom concludes that their "Jesus" cannot be the historical Jesus of Scripture, because the biblical Christ never contradicts Himself.19
Third, this argument makes NDEs a higher authority than Scripture. But Scripture itself calls us to test the spirits and try the prophets (1 John 4:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:21). We are not supposed to accept every spiritual experience at face value, even our own. If an experience produces a "Jesus" who contradicts the biblical Jesus, the problem is with the experience's interpretation, not with the Bible.
Fourth, the argument usually rests on a caricature. When people say the Bible's judgment passages are "cultural," they often mean "harsh" or "primitive." But the Bible's judgment is not arbitrary cruelty. It is deeply moral and tied to real harm done to real people. To dismiss it as cultural accommodation is to dismiss the cries of the oppressed that run all through Scripture. Judgment in the Bible is not the opposite of love. It is the vindication of love for the oppressed.
When an NDEr's "Jesus" teaches things that directly contradict the Jesus of the gospels — that sin is an illusion, that no one will be held accountable, that faith in Christ is one path among many — that is a red flag worth taking seriously. The experience may still have had genuine elements, but the specific content being attributed to "Jesus" needs to be tested against Scripture.
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Let us look at a few specific cases where this pattern shows up in well-known NDE literature. My aim is not to attack anyone personally, but to show the pattern clearly, using the NDEr's own published words, so that the reader can recognize it in other places.
Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon whose 2012 book Proof of Heaven became a runaway bestseller. He reports that during a week-long coma caused by bacterial meningitis, he had a vivid experience of another realm, met a loving presence, and returned transformed.
The core experience Alexander describes includes many elements that Christians can affirm: an overwhelming sense of love, a beautiful realm beyond words, and the conviction that consciousness survives bodily death. If this were all he reported, there would be little to discuss.
However, Alexander also reports being given three specific messages he is supposed to share with the world. Two of them are unobjectionable: "You are loved and cherished," and "You have nothing to fear." But the third — "There is nothing you can do wrong" — is theologically and morally problematic.20 Tabatt quotes theologian Greg Boyd responding to this message: if a divine being actually communicated that there is no such thing as sin or evil, then — given how flatly that contradicts Scripture and basic moral reality — we would have strong grounds to think the communicating being was not from God.21
Donald Whitney, in his review cited by Tabatt, summarizes the book's larger theological problems: Jesus is effectively absent and treated as non-essential; everyone seems headed to heaven regardless of anything; and the message of the Bible about sin, salvation, and the need for a Savior is implicitly denied.22 The result, Whitney notes, is that accepting Alexander's account uncritically undermines the reliability of the Bible itself.23
Here is the point for our chapter: Alexander's book is a high-profile example of the exact pattern we are examining. The experience — a real encounter with something beyond ordinary consciousness, including a sense of love and beauty — may well have contained genuine elements. But the theological conclusions drawn from it go directly against Scripture. "You are loved" is biblical. "There is nothing you can do wrong" is not. The NDEr did not invent his experience. But the inferences he drew do not hold.
Anita Moorjani's 2012 book Dying to Be Me describes her NDE during terminal cancer. Her account includes many biblically recognizable elements — overwhelming love, clarity, the sense that another realm is more real than this one, and a remarkable physical recovery.
But Moorjani's theological framework is explicitly monist and Hindu-influenced. She teaches that "we are all God," that every path leads to the same destination, and that the very concept of sin is a misunderstanding. Her subsequent teaching career has drawn heavily on this universalist-monist interpretation of her experience.24
The experience-interpretation distinction is crucial here. Moorjani's experience of love and expanded awareness is real to her. But the claim that "we are all God" is not something the experience itself demonstrates. It is a framework imposed on the experience, consistent with her prior Hindu-leaning background and the New Age community she joined afterward. A Christian reader can, in principle, affirm that she encountered something real while rejecting the monist framework as a category mistake.
Raymond Moody's 1975 book Life After Life coined the term "near-death experience" and helped open up the field. His early work was empirically careful and made fairly modest theological claims.25 Over the decades, however, Moody's theological framing has drifted. He has developed interests in shared death experiences, past-life regression, and spiritual-but-not-religious syncretism.
Moody is interesting because he shows the pattern on a different timescale. He did not draw the universalist inference instantly. He drifted into it over decades of moving in certain circles, reading certain authors, and shaping his work in certain directions. His case is a reminder that the "God loves everyone, so nothing else matters" framework is not always an immediate NDE takeaway. Sometimes it develops slowly through the social and intellectual environment the NDEr or researcher inhabits over time.
Kenneth Ring is another major NDE researcher whose career illustrates the pattern. His early research was valuable. But in Heading Toward Omega, Ring moved from research to theology, proposing that NDEs were moving humanity toward a new planetary consciousness — a framework more indebted to New Age thinking than to biblical Christianity.26 Sabom describes how Ring's religious beliefs inventory explicitly measured whether NDEs moved people away from "more conventional (Christian) religious orientation," and how Ring concluded that the value of NDEs lay in the "kind of spiritual growth" they produced — namely, a shift toward Eastern religions and spiritual universalism.27
Sabom's critique is devastating. He shows that Ring's conclusions depended heavily on IANDS samples that were not representative of NDErs as a whole, and that Ring himself admitted the sample problem in passing.28 The "universalist outcome" of NDEs was, in significant part, an artifact of the community Ring was sampling from. When Sabom studied NDErs outside that community, he found no such universalist shift — he found strengthened traditional religious commitment instead.29
Sabom's Atlanta Study, which drew on NDErs outside the IANDS network, found that NDEs typically strengthened rather than weakened traditional religious faith. Church attendance increased. Biblical belief increased. The "shift to universalism" reported by other researchers appears to have been largely a feature of the community they sampled, not of the NDE itself.30
This is hugely important for our chapter. The "God loves everyone, so nothing else matters" conclusion is not a natural, universal takeaway from NDEs. It is a specific theological interpretation that tends to emerge when NDErs are socialized into a particular kind of interpretive community. NDErs who stay in biblically grounded communities tend to draw very different conclusions.
It is worth pausing to highlight something the NDE literature often glosses over: a great many NDErs who experienced overwhelming divine love did not conclude that nothing else mattered. They came back more committed to Christ, more convinced of the reality of judgment, more urgent about sharing the gospel, more devoted to the church. Their testimonies are the strongest empirical disproof of the claim that intense love encounters must produce universalist conclusions.
Howard Storm is perhaps the most famous example. An atheist art professor when he suffered a medical emergency, Storm had a terrifying initial NDE that took him into darkness surrounded by tormenting beings. In desperation, he called out to Jesus — a name he barely believed in — and Jesus came. Storm then experienced the overwhelming love that so many NDErs describe. His response was not to soften the Bible's warnings. It was the opposite. Storm returned convinced of the reality of heaven, the reality of hell as a trajectory one can find oneself on, and the absolute necessity of calling on Christ. He eventually left his academic career and became a United Church of Christ pastor. His book My Descent into Death testifies to all of this.39 Storm's case shows that overwhelming love, received in a biblical frame, produces not "nothing else matters" but "everything matters more than I ever knew."
Don Piper, a Baptist pastor, had an NDE after a car accident in 1989. His account in 90 Minutes in Heaven describes overwhelming worship, dazzling light, reunion with loved ones, and profound love — all the hallmarks of the positive NDE. But Piper's conclusions are thoroughly evangelical. He does not teach universalism. He does not suggest that nothing else matters. He returned committed to preach the gospel of Christ, to warn people about eternity, and to invite them into faith.40
Ian McCormack, a New Zealand surfer stung by box jellyfish in Mauritius, reports an NDE that began in terrifying darkness and became a profound encounter with the Lord. McCormack came back a Christian preacher, not a universalist. He tours the world warning people about the reality of judgment and pleading with them to trust Christ.41 Dean Braxton, who had an NDE after cardiac arrest, likewise returned with a strong evangelical conviction rather than a universalist one. Randy Kay, whose NDE Tabatt discusses, reports that he was shown in his experience that the Bible he had been taught was "absolutely true" — not that the Bible's teaching about judgment and salvation was to be softened.42
Burke's Imagine Heaven is a kind of anthology of this counter-pattern. Burke, a pastor, compiled dozens of NDE accounts that strongly align with biblical teaching, including accounts where the NDEr experienced overwhelming love and returned with renewed Christian conviction. Burke's argument, throughout the book, is that the best NDE accounts corroborate rather than contradict Scripture.43 The love encounters he documents do not lead his subjects to universalism. They lead them to a deeper love of Christ, a deeper conviction about eternity, and a deeper urgency about how earthly life is lived.
What all of these cases show is the crucial role of framework. The same overwhelming love encounter can be received into a biblical framework and deepen Christian faith, or into a universalist framework and produce the "nothing else matters" inference. The experience does not dictate the inference. The framework, for better or worse, shapes the reading of the experience.
Every time we hear of a Howard Storm, a Don Piper, an Ian McCormack, or a Dean Braxton, we are hearing an experiential disproof of the claim that NDE love must produce universalist conclusions. These men experienced love every bit as intense as any NDEr. Their responses show that, received into the right frame, such love drives one deeper into Christ rather than away from Him.
· · ·
I want to address my own theological position openly here, because readers who know my work may wonder how this chapter fits with it. My working position, arrived at through much study and no small amount of wrestling, is a form of conditional immortality — the view that the final fate of the finally unrepentant is not eternal conscious torment but rather the second death, the cessation of existence. I also hold open the possibility of postmortem opportunity for salvation — that the God who is rich in mercy may extend His invitation beyond the moment of physical death for those who never had a clear opportunity to respond in this life.
These are not the majority Christian positions historically, and I hold them with humility and openness to correction. I recognize that faithful Christian scholars disagree, and I respect the traditional view even where I am not currently persuaded by it.
But I want to be very clear: my position does not support the NDE universalist inference. Not at all. Let me explain why.
Conditional immortality is not universalism. It is a different view of what final judgment looks like for the finally unrepentant — but it absolutely affirms that such a judgment is real. On the conditionalist view, those who persistently reject God are not welcomed into everlasting life; they perish, in accord with the language of John 3:16 ("should not perish but have eternal life") and numerous other passages. The second death of Revelation 20:14 is real.
Conditionalism, if anything, takes seriously the language of destruction, perishing, and death that is scattered throughout the New Testament.31 Those are not soft words. They are the language of final loss, and they imply a real judgment at the end of things.
So when an NDEr says, "Because I felt love, there is no hell," a conditionalist is not free to agree. A conditionalist says: final judgment is real, but the nature of that judgment is perhaps different from the traditional picture of eternal conscious torment. The reality of judgment is preserved; the duration is understood differently.
Likewise, the possibility of postmortem opportunity for salvation — which I hold open — is not the same as universal salvation. Postmortem opportunity says that God may extend the offer of the gospel beyond the moment of death, particularly for those who in this life never heard a clear presentation of Christ, or heard only distortions. But that offer must still be accepted. Faith must still be exercised. The cross of Christ remains the only basis on which any person is saved. Miller puts this well when he notes that even if God gives some people a clearer view of the gospel in their NDE or deathbed experience, those who encounter Jesus are still called to respond to Him — to call upon Him, to turn toward Him, to trust Him.32
Universalism, by contrast, says that all people will in fact be saved, regardless of response. That is not the same claim. Postmortem opportunity says, "The offer may extend beyond death for some." Universalism says, "The offer will be accepted by all." These are logically distinct. One can hold the first without holding the second.
So even if the reader adopts the most hopeful evangelical framework — conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity — the NDE inference "God loves, therefore nothing else matters" does not follow. On this framework:
(a) Final judgment is real, though perhaps different in nature than the traditional view.
(b) Persistent rejection of Christ ends in the second death, not in automatic salvation.
(c) Faith in Jesus Christ as Savior remains the means of salvation, even if the window for that faith may extend further than some traditions teach.
(d) The cross remains the only basis of mercy.
In short: my hopeful framework is more generous than many, but it is not universalism. And it definitely is not "God loves, so nothing else matters." Even on the most hopeful reading, what you do with Christ still matters. Your response still matters. The love is real, yes. But the response to love is also real. Love is not an eraser that erases all other realities. It is the ground of a relationship — and relationships require both parties.
This book does not settle the question of conditional immortality versus eternal conscious torment versus universal reconciliation. Those are live questions among faithful Christians. What the book does insist on is this: on any of the mainstream evangelical frameworks — traditional ECT, conditionalism, or even some forms of hopeful inclusivism — the NDE universalist conclusion does not follow. "God is love" is compatible with many views. "Nothing else matters" is compatible with none of them.
· · ·
Once an NDEr concludes that everyone goes to heaven, they often go hunting for Bible verses to support the view. This is usually done in good faith. They want their experience to be consistent with Scripture. They want their new conviction to be biblical. So they find a handful of verses and lean hard on them. Let me briefly address the four most common ones. A full treatment would take a book of its own, but a short orientation will help the reader think about these texts more carefully.
"[God] desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:3–4). Universalist readers (and many NDErs) take this as a promise that all will in fact be saved. But the verse does not say that. It says God desires it. Scripture repeatedly shows that what God desires and what actually happens are not always the same. God desires obedience (1 Samuel 15:22), yet people disobey. God desires that no one perish (2 Peter 3:9), yet the biblical witness is that some do. The distinction between God's revealed will (what He wants) and what actually comes to pass through human response is a basic feature of biblical theology.44 The verse assures us that God is not stingy. It does not teach that His desire overrides human response.
"The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). This verse is often cited as proof that hell cannot exist, because God does not want anyone to perish. But the verse itself presupposes the opposite. God's patience is described precisely because some are currently on a path to perishing, and He is holding back judgment to give more time for repentance. The verse assumes the possibility of perishing; it expresses God's loving desire that people repent before that happens.
Notice also the call to repentance. The verse does not say "that all will be saved automatically." It says "that all should reach repentance" — which presupposes a response. God's desire for universal repentance does not guarantee universal repentance. It is a desire, beautifully expressed, that God's patience gives more room for.
"Through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross" (Colossians 1:20). Some read this as teaching that all persons will ultimately be saved. But the passage is about the cosmic scope of Christ's reconciling work — restoring the whole created order that was disrupted by the fall. The "all things" refers to the entirety of the cosmos, not to a guaranteed salvation for every person regardless of response.45
Consider also Colossians 1:23, just three verses later, where Paul says the reconciliation is effective for believers "if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast." If Paul thought all people were automatically reconciled through Christ's work regardless of response, the warning about continuing in the faith would make no sense. Colossians 1:20 teaches that Christ is the cosmic reconciler. It does not teach that everyone is reconciled whether or not they trust Him.
"For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). Again, this is often cited as proof that all people will be saved. But the context in 1 Corinthians 15 is the resurrection. Paul's point is that resurrection comes through Christ just as death came through Adam. Universal resurrection does not equal universal salvation; Scripture consistently teaches that all are raised, but some to life and some to judgment (John 5:28–29; Daniel 12:2). The "all" in verse 22 refers to those who are "in Christ" — paralleling those who are "in Adam" — not a guarantee that every person is in Christ regardless of response.46
These proof texts share a common feature: they are all beautiful verses that celebrate the wideness of God's love and the cosmic scope of Christ's work. Every one of them is a warm, hopeful passage. And every one of them is embedded in a larger biblical context that assumes, alongside the wideness of love, the reality of final judgment and the necessity of faith. When the verses are plucked from their context and made to stand alone, they can be made to say something Scripture as a whole does not say. In context, they say what the rest of Scripture says: God's love is immense, His offer of salvation is cosmic in scope, and response to Christ is the means by which His saving work is applied.
When an NDEr or NDE teacher cites these verses as proof that "God loves everyone, so nothing else matters," the right response is usually not a confrontation but a patient walking-through of the context. The verses are true. What the NDEr is reading into them is not. The love is real; the automatic universal application is not what Scripture actually teaches.
Proof-texting for universal salvation typically involves lifting verses about the wideness of God's love out of contexts that also stress response, faith, and repentance. The remedy is not to abandon the verses but to read them alongside their neighbors. A universalist reading of John 3:16 has to ignore the rest of John 3 — the very next verses speak of perishing, judgment, and condemnation.
How do we respond, then, when we encounter an NDEr who has drawn the universalist inference from a genuine experience of love? This is not an abstract question. It is a pastoral one. Many of us have friends, family members, or church members who have had NDEs and now talk like universalists. How do we love them well?
Let me suggest a few principles.
The first move in any conversation with an NDEr should be to honor what they experienced. Do not lead with correction. Do not jump in with theology. Listen. Ask questions. Take the experience seriously. If they felt overwhelmingly loved, rejoice with them. If they encountered something breathtaking, honor that. The love they met was likely real. Treating it as real is not compromising your theology. It is honoring the God who, I believe, actually met them.
Only after the experience has been heard and honored should the question of interpretation come into view. Even then, approach it gently. You are not in an argument. You are in a relationship. The goal is not to win. The goal is to help them see the fullness of what they encountered.
Explicitly name the difference. "What you experienced and what you conclude from it are two different things. I believe what you experienced. I want to think carefully with you about what it all means."
This framing does two helpful things. First, it takes pressure off the NDEr. They do not have to defend their experience. It is theirs. Nobody is attacking it. Second, it opens space for theological reflection. You can discuss inferences without discussing whether the experience was real. That usually produces much better conversations than debating whether the NDE "actually happened."
The deepest answer to the NDEr's universalist inference is not a Bible verse about hell. It is the cross. When someone says, "God loves me, so nothing else matters," the right response is to ask, "Then why the cross? Why would the God of love go through such a terrible death if our sin did not matter? Why would He suffer if all would be well regardless?"
The cross is the single most powerful proof that God takes sin seriously and loves sinners with infinite depth. The two truths hold together at Calvary. A God who did not take sin seriously would never have sent His Son to die. A God who did not love sinners would not have sent His Son to die. Both truths are displayed in the same event.
Point the NDEr back to the cross. The love they encountered is the love that moved God to send His Son. It is not a love that makes the cross unnecessary. It is the love that explains the cross.
NDErs rarely change their theology overnight. The experience they had reshaped them profoundly. Asking them to revisit the conclusions they built around that reshaping is asking for a significant intellectual and emotional reworking. Give them time. Walk with them. Pray for them. Trust that the same God who met them in their experience is also at work in their ongoing formation.
Miller notes that many NDErs land, over time, in a surprisingly biblical place once they stay in community with serious Christians and continue to reflect.33 The initial framing — "nothing else matters" — often softens as they read Scripture more deeply, as they think through the cross, as they face the realities of a fallen world. The inference is usually a first-draft reaction, not a final conviction. Give them room to grow.
One of the worst pastoral moves is to say to an NDEr, "Your experience was not real. It was your brain. It was the devil. Forget about it." This is rarely true, pastorally damaging, and theologically careless. If the experience was genuine — and as Miller and Burke both argue, the majority of NDE-reported love encounters are strikingly consistent with biblical descriptions of God's character34 — then denying it drives the NDEr away from the very faith you are trying to commend to them.
The much wiser path is the one the apostle Paul modeled at Athens. Paul did not tell the Athenians their religious instincts were worthless. He affirmed what was true — their sense that divine reality existed — and then redirected them to the living God revealed in Christ (Acts 17:22–31). Do the same with NDErs. Honor what was true. Redirect toward what is fuller.
When an NDEr shares a love encounter with you, your first job is not to correct their theology. It is to be a safe person. Only in the soil of safety can theological conversation eventually take root. Rush the conversation, and you lose the relationship. Honor the experience, and the door to deeper conversation stays open for years.
· · ·
I want to linger for a moment on something hopeful. The love NDErs describe, when examined carefully, is remarkably consistent with the biblical picture of God. This is not accidental. If the experience is genuine, we should expect it.
Miller's extensive survey of NDE love reports found the following patterns: the love is overwhelming, unconditional, total, and personal; it accepts the whole person while being aware of their faults; it communicates a sense of being "home"; it produces lasting changes in the experiencer toward greater love of others; it consistently comes through the person or presence of a being of light often identified as Jesus.35
Now compare that with Scripture. God's love is overwhelming (Ephesians 3:18–19). It is unconditional in the sense that it is not earned (Romans 5:8). It is total and personal (Psalm 139). It accepts the whole person while addressing sin (John 4 — the Samaritan woman). It produces a sense of being home (John 14:2–3). It transforms the loved one toward love of others (1 John 4:19–21). And it flows through Christ (John 1:14, 17).
The fit, as Miller says, is striking. If NDEs were random products of dying brains, we would expect experiences to reflect the prior beliefs and expectations of the experiencers — which would produce chaotic diversity. But NDEs show striking convergence on a description of God that matches the biblical God remarkably well.36 That convergence is evidence that the experiences are, in the majority of cases, genuine encounters with the real God.
So when an NDEr describes being loved beyond words, my default is to believe them. I think they met the Lord. I think the love they describe is the love that moved God to send His Son. What I dispute is not the encounter. I dispute the inference that the encounter cancels out everything else the Bible teaches about God, sin, salvation, and the need for response. The encounter and the inference are not the same thing.
Let us zoom out and look at the big picture of biblical love. I think when we see it in its fullness, the "God loves, so nothing else matters" inference will look obviously inadequate — not because it says too much about love, but because it says too little.
The Bible says God chose a people. He chose Abraham. He chose Israel. He chooses His church. Biblical love is not undifferentiated warmth diffused equally across all things. It is personal, particular, committed love. God loves all people (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9), but He also enters into covenant with specific people. Love, on the biblical view, is relational — and relationships are specific.
The Bible repeatedly shows God's love taking the form of confrontation. The prophets were sent not because God hated Israel, but because He loved Israel. Their hard words were love words. Jesus wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44), not with sentimentality, but with prophetic grief that called for repentance. Love that never confronts is not love. It is enablement.
Biblical love is never forced. God pursues, but He does not coerce. He offers, but He does not override. Every invitation in Scripture presumes that the one invited can either accept or refuse — otherwise it is not an invitation. Love that requires no response is not love. It is control. And God does not control us into salvation. He loves us toward it.
The supreme revelation of biblical love is sacrificial: "Greater love has no one than this: that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). The cross is not an embarrassment to be explained away. It is the heart of love revealed. Any theology of love that skips the cross — that says "God loves, so nothing else matters, not even the cross" — has missed the whole point.
Finally, biblical love transforms. It is not a static affirmation. It is a living force that makes the beloved into something new. Paul prays that his readers would be "rooted and grounded in love" so that they might be "filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:17–19). Love is the ground of transformation, not the replacement of it.
If the NDEr who encounters overwhelming divine love responds with growth, repentance, transformation, deeper love of neighbor, and a stronger hold on Christ — then the love encountered has produced what biblical love produces. If instead the NDEr responds with "therefore I do not need Christ, I do not need repentance, I do not need anything to change" — then something has gone wrong between the encounter and the response. The love was real. The response is at odds with what real love produces.
· · ·
Several other chapters in this book touch closely on the themes developed here. I mention them briefly so the reader can follow related threads.
Chapter 17 develops the general framework for hybrid NDE experiences — real core, corrupted elements — of which the pattern in this chapter is a key example. Chapter 18 examines how the interpretive lens of the experiencer shapes the meaning they draw from the raw encounter; that dynamic is central to what we have examined here. Chapter 19 addresses how a being of light may be genuine in some sense without being the historical Jesus; that chapter's concerns intersect with Argument 4 in the present chapter. Chapter 22 addresses the puzzling cases where an NDEr's theology directly contradicts the content of their own reported experience. And Chapter 25 addresses the "all religions are equal" theme in NDE literature, which is a close cousin of the "God loves everyone, so nothing else matters" pattern.
Readers who want to pursue the broader question of final judgment — what happens at the last day, whether the traditional ECT view or conditionalism or hopeful inclusivism best captures the biblical teaching — will find the present book deliberately restrained on that question. This chapter argues that the NDE universalist inference fails on any of the mainstream evangelical views. That is a modest enough claim that it can be made without settling the eschatological debate. For the author's full treatment of those larger questions, readers can consult other works; for this book's purposes, discernment of NDE claims does not require a settled verdict on every question of last things.
· · ·
Let me close this chapter with one more reflection. I have been saying throughout that the NDEr's experience may be real while the inference drawn from it may be wrong. That distinction — real experience, wrong inference — is the heart of this chapter. But there is a deeper principle behind it that I want to name plainly.
The deeper principle is this: experience is not revelation. Experience is something that happens to us. Revelation is God's authoritative self-disclosure in Scripture. The two are related — experiences can confirm, deepen, and illuminate revelation — but they are not the same, and experience cannot override revelation.
Scripture insists on its own primacy. Paul writes to the Galatians that even if an angel from heaven preaches a different gospel, it should be rejected (Galatians 1:8). The "angel from heaven" is an astonishing example. Paul says that no supernatural encounter, no matter how impressive, can rewrite the gospel once it has been delivered. The written word of God stands as the final authority. Supernatural experience is to be measured against Scripture, not the other way around.
John's exhortation "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1) — the verse that gives this book its title — flows from the same principle. Spiritual experience is real. Spiritual experience is also testable. Some spirits are from God; some are not. Scripture is the test. The Greek verb δοκιμάζω (dokimazō) behind "test" means to assay, to prove, to examine as one examines silver or gold to determine whether it is genuine.37 Testing does not presume everything is false. It presumes that some things are true and some are not, and that careful evaluation is needed to tell the difference.
When an NDEr elevates their experience above Scripture — "My experience taught me there is no hell, so Scripture must be wrong" — they have reversed the biblical order. They have placed experience above revelation. That reversal is, in a very real sense, the root of the whole pattern I have examined in this chapter. It is not just a logical error (though it is that). It is a move about authority. Who gets the final word — my experience, or God's written Word?
The biblical answer is clear. Experience is a gift. Experience can confirm and deepen what God has revealed. But experience does not rewrite revelation. When the two seem to conflict, the question to ask is not "How do I revise Scripture to fit my experience?" but "How do I understand my experience in light of Scripture?" That reframe changes everything.
The NDEr who encounters love, and then goes to Scripture to understand what that love means, will find their experience confirmed and deepened — and will also find, alongside the love, the cross, the call to repentance, the reality of judgment, and the exclusivity of Christ. All of it goes together in the biblical picture. The NDEr who instead uses their experience to selectively keep the parts of Scripture they like and discard the parts they do not — that NDEr has exchanged revelation for experience. And that exchange, in the long run, impoverishes everyone. Because experience, however profound, cannot tell us the whole truth about God. Only God Himself can do that, and He has done it supremely in Christ and in the Scriptures that testify to Christ.
Experience is real. Experience is valuable. But experience is not revelation. When a spiritual experience seems to contradict what Scripture plainly teaches, the problem is not with Scripture. It is with our interpretation of the experience. The cure is to bring experience back to Scripture and let Scripture be what it has always been — the authoritative Word of God against which all experiences, including NDEs, are measured.
· · ·
I began this chapter with a friend in a coffee shop. Let me end there.
If my friend tells me she was loved beyond words in her NDE, I believe her. I rejoice with her. I thank the God I believe she met. I take her experience as another small piece of evidence that consciousness is not extinguished at death, that the God of the Bible is as loving as Scripture says, and that Christ stands ready to welcome us into what He has prepared. These are good, true, beautiful things. I do not take them away from her.
But when she moves from "I was loved" to "therefore nothing else matters" — when she says religions are all the same, that no one is ever judged, that faith in Christ is unnecessary — I have to gently, patiently, lovingly disagree. Not because I do not believe in love. I do. Not because I think judgment should be the center of the Christian message. I do not. But because the inference does not follow. The love she met was the love of the crucified Christ. That love does not make the cross unnecessary. It is the love that explains the cross.
Love does not erase our need for response. Love does not erase the moral reality of our lives. Love does not erase the difference between Jesus Christ and other spiritual teachers. Love does not erase the ongoing reality of a fallen world and the God-given need for redemption. If anything, love reveals all these realities more clearly. The love of God shows us both our unworthiness and our infinite value. The love of God shows us both the awfulness of sin and the wonder of forgiveness. The love of God shows us both why judgment must be real and why mercy, for those who will receive it, is real too.
The cross is the center of this. At Calvary, love and judgment meet. The Son bears the weight of sin, so that sinners can be welcomed into life. This is not love without judgment. This is not judgment without love. This is love through judgment — love that took sin so seriously it went to the cross to deal with it, and love that reaches sinners so tenderly that it welcomes them home on the basis of that sacrifice.
An NDE encounter with overwhelming divine love is, I believe, a small foretaste of the Father's welcome described by Jesus in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). The Father runs to meet the returning child. The Father embraces. The Father restores. That is real. That is biblical. That is glorious.
But notice what the parable does not say. It does not say the Father's welcome means that sin did not matter. It does not say the younger son's wasted years were fine because love is all that matters. It does not say the older son's self-righteous refusal to come in would have been fine too. The parable ends with the older brother outside, still being pleaded with. His response is still required. The Father's love does not cancel the need for response. The Father's love makes the response possible, and necessary, and precious.
That is where we should land, and where I would hope every NDEr lands too. The love was real. The response still matters. Come home. The door is open. The Father is waiting.
But you do have to come in.
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