John Burke, a pastor and author who has studied and examined more than 1,000 accounts of near-death experiences, wasn’t always a believer in the supernatural.
Burke is the author of “Imagine the God of Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Revelation, and the Love You’ve Always Wanted,” but he was once an agnostic skeptical of faith.
“I ended up studying engineering and working as an engineer,” he told Jen Lilley and Billy Hallowell on the “Into the Supernatural Podcast.” “So my mind has always worked like that. Like, skeptical — ‘How do you know? Is there any evidence? Why does that make sense?’”
Burke continued, “And nobody could really answer my question. So I just decided: ‘Jesus is probably a good man who turned legend and God, you just can’t know. There’s no evidence.’”
But when Burke’s dad was dying of cancer decades ago, he started learning about near-death experiences (NDEs) — scenarios in which people clinically die and have no heartbeat or brain activity yet report consciousness. He first encountered the issue when his father was reading a book about it.
“I saw this book on his bedside table, and I pick it up, and I just am curious,” he said. “I start reading it and I couldn’t put it down. And, at the end, I said, ‘Oh my gosh, like, this might be the evidence I’ve been looking for.’”
The book helped open up his mind, leading him to read and study the Bible.
“After a year or so, for other reasons, actually for fulfilled prophecy in history that I didn’t know was there either, I came to faith in Christ,” Burke said, noting he felt driven to keep studying Scripture and learning:
As he learned, he discovered, from his perspective, the belief that NDEs line up with what’s in the Bible. And since the late 1980s, he’s studied nearly “1,500 cases of clinical death and resuscitation.”
The commonalities among these stories have stunned him — reports he believes line up with Scripture. Remarkably, he said, upwards of 5% of the population has reported having NDEs.
Exploring the commonalities in these stories and seeing people come back and announce verifiable facts helped convince Burke it was real. One such story involved a hospitalized woman who was clinically dead and yet later reported an absolutely wild situation.
“She passes through the ceiling of the hospital and notices … the ceiling of the room where the resuscitation is taking place and notices a sticker on the top side of the ceiling fan,” Burke said. “This is in the 90s, when they still had ceiling fans in hospitals.”
He continued, “And she comes to, and she’s so excited trying to tell the doctors and nurses about this incredible experience, and meeting God, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, you’re hallucinating,’ and she gets one nurse and says, ‘Look, you did this and said this, and … the nurse knew, ‘Wait, you were comatose. You couldn’t have known that you didn’t have any heartbeat or brainwaves.’”
She also instructed the staff to retrieve a ladder and inspect the top of the ceiling fan to see if there was a red sticker.
“Sure enough, she got the ladder and it checked out,” Burke said, noting the sticker was there just as the woman had recounted.
Burke has documented many testimonials and experiences in “Imagine the God of Heaven” and his previous book “Imagine Heaven.” And while he went on to become a pastor and believer, he offered an important caveat: “I do not believe everything every near-death experiencer says.”
“That’s because these people are having an experience that’s truly multidimensional,” he said. “And, so, they’re having to interpret somewhat what they’re experiencing.”
The complexity of these NDEs, he said, must be understood, as people are having to explain sights, sounds, and experiences they likely don’t have the vocabulary and experience to explore.
Yet past research, according to Burke, has found some remarkable accuracies in the experiences recounted by those claiming to have had NDEs. One study the preacher cited found 92% of observations were “completely accurate,” with 6% “mostly accurate.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Burke said of these statistics. “So, as a skeptical engineer, I was like, ‘OK, this is grounded in our reality. This this is not hallucination.”
One of the other compelling factors surrounding NDEs is the fact that people born blind report being able to see when they have NDEs
“That’s mind-boggling because they report all the same things as sighted people,” Burke said.
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