Pastor and author John Burke has studied and researched over 1,000 accounts of near-death experiences, but has not always believed in the supernatural.
Burke is the author of “Imagine God in Heaven: Experiences of Dying, God’s Revelation, and the Love You Always Wanted”, but he was once an agnostic of faith.
“I studied engineering and worked as an engineer,” he told Jen Lilly and Billy Hallowell “on the Supernatural Podcast.” “So my mind has always worked that way. I’m skeptical. “How do you know? Do you have any evidence? Why does that make sense?”
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Burke continued, “And no one could really answer my questions. So I just decided: “Jesus is probably a good man who has become a legend and a god. You just can’t know. There is no evidence.”
However, when Burke’s dad was almost dying of cancer decades ago, he began to learn about near death experiences (NDE), a scenario where he was clinically dead and had no heartbeat or brain activity, but still reported consciousness. He first ran into problems when his father was reading a book about it.
“I saw this book on his bedside table and I’ll pick it up, and I’m just interested,” he said. “I started reading it, and I couldn’t put it down, and at the end I said, ‘Oh, this might be the proof I was looking for.’ ”
This book helped him open his mind and led him to read and study the Bible.
“A little over a year later, for other reasons, I became faith in Christ because of a fulfilling historical prophecy that I had never actually known in history,” Burke said.
As he learned, he discovered, from his point of view the belief that NDES line up with what is found in the Bible. And since the late 1980s, he has studied “1,500 cases of clinical death, resuscitation and resuscitation.”
The commonality between these stories surprised him – he believes he is in line with the Bible. Surprisingly, he said he reports that over 5% of the population has NDE.
It helped me to explore the commonality of these stories and see people come back and announce verifiable facts and be certain it was true. One such story was a woman in a clinically dead hospital, who later reported absolute wild conditions.
“She passes through the hospital ceiling and notifies you. There is a ceiling in the room where resuscitation is taking place, and you notice the stickers on the top of the ceiling fan,” Burke said. “This was in the 90s when they still had ceiling fans in the hospital.”
He continued, “And she came and she’s so excited to tell the doctor and nurse about this incredible experience, and they said, ‘Yeah, you’re fantastic,’ she got one nurse and said, ‘Look, you did this, the nurse knew, you were Comatose.
She also instructed staff to retrieve the ladder and inspect the top of the ceiling fan to see if there was a red sticker.
“Of course, she got the ladder and checked it out,” Burke said.
Burke documented many testimonies and experiences in “Imagination of Heavenly God” and his previous book, Imagination of Heaven. And while he continued to become a pastor and follower, he provided an important warning: “I am not saying everything that every person who has experienced death says.”
“That’s because these people really have multidimensional experiences,” he said. “And so, they have to interpret something that they are going through.”
He said the complexity of these NDEs must be understood.
However, according to Burke, past studies have found some notable accuracy in experiences spoken by people who claim to have NDEs. In one study cited by several studies, 92% of observations were found to be “completely accurate” and 6% were “almost accurate.”
“It’s incredible,” Burke said of these statistics. “So, as a skeptical engineer, I think, “OK, this is based on our reality. This is not hallucination.”
One other persuasive factor surrounding NDE is the fact that blind reports can be seen to have ndes.
“It’s daunting because they report the same things as those who have been seen,” Burke said.
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