Before we learn to spot what is wrong, we must see clearly what is right.
Let me say something plainly, right at the start. This book is about discernment. It is not a hit piece on near-death experiences. Before I ask you to spot the cracks in a problematic NDE, I want you to see the bigger picture. Most NDEs are real. Most deathbed experiences are real. Most of the people telling these stories are honest people describing something that genuinely happened to them. And in the majority of cases, what happened was a real meeting with a realm beyond the material world.
If we miss this baseline at the start, the rest of the book will train us to be paranoid when we should be discerning. Paranoia and discernment are not the same thing. A paranoid Christian sees a demon behind every NDE. A discerning Christian sees most NDEs for what they are — genuine spiritual experiences — and recognizes the smaller subset that needs careful evaluation. The goal of this chapter is to set the dial in the right place before we go further.
Imagine teaching someone to spot counterfeit hundred-dollar bills. The first thing the trainer does is show them real money. Lots of it. They learn the feel of the paper, the look of the ink, the watermarks, the security strip. Only after they know what real currency looks like does the trainer pull out the fakes. If the training started with the fakes, the trainee would learn to suspect everything — including the real bills.
Discernment about NDEs and DBEs works the same way. Before we can spot the corrupted, the counterfeit, and the fabricated, we need to see clearly what the genuine looks like. And we need to know that the genuine is the rule, not the exception. If a Christian friend or family member shares an NDE with us, our first response should be openness, not suspicion.
The biblical command to "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1) does not mean assuming every spiritual claim is false. It means examining each claim against Scripture. Most claims, examined honestly, will pass the test. A small but real percentage will not. Discernment lets us tell the difference.
This baseline also protects us from a kind of pride. Wholesale dismissal of NDEs is not actually humble. It quietly assumes that we know better than the dying grandmother, the cardiac patient, and the dozens of careful Christian researchers who have spent careers studying this phenomenon. Taking the baseline seriously means trusting the testimony of ordinary believers about what happened to them on the edge of death.1
The case for taking most NDEs as real spiritual experiences does not rest on one argument. It comes in layers. Each layer adds weight. Together they form a strong cumulative case. I will sketch five of these layers in this chapter. Several of them get fuller treatment in later chapters; here I want you to see the shape of the whole.
The strongest layer is what researchers call "veridical" NDEs. The word veridical just means "truth-telling" — cases where the NDEr reports details they could not possibly have known through normal sensory means, and those details are later verified.
The most famous case is Pam Reynolds. Pam was being operated on for a giant aneurysm at the base of her brain. To make the surgery possible, her body was cooled to about 60 degrees, her heart was stopped, the blood was drained from her head, and her brain was monitored as completely flatline. By every medical measure available, she was as close to dead as a patient can be. During this state — with molded speakers in both ears that completely blocked physical hearing — she reported seeing the bone saw the surgeon used and overhearing a specific conversation between the cardiac surgeon and the neurosurgeon about her femoral artery being too small for the standard cannula. The surgical record, dictated independently afterward, confirmed that conversation almost word for word.2
Or take Maria, the patient described by social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp in Seattle. Maria suffered a severe heart attack and during her resuscitation reported leaving her body, traveling outside the hospital, and seeing a single tennis shoe on a third-floor window ledge — a left-footed man's shoe, dark blue, with a wear mark over the little toe and a shoelace tucked under the heel. Sharp checked the windows. The shoe was there, exactly as Maria described, in a place she had no way of seeing from her hospital bed.3
These are not isolated stories. Researcher Janice Holden examined ninety-three NDE patients who reported verifiable observations made while clinically unconscious. Of those out-of-body observations, ninety-two percent were completely accurate, six percent contained some error, and only one percent was completely wrong.4 A 2001 study published in The Lancet documented a cardiac patient who, while in a deep coma during CPR, accurately reported a nurse removing his upper dentures and placing them in the sliding drawer of a particular crash cart.5 Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper's Mindsight study found congenitally blind people — people who had never seen colors, faces, or shapes in their lives — reporting accurate visual perceptions during their NDEs.
You cannot explain these cases by saying the brain was hallucinating. Hallucinations do not retrieve accurate information from outside the room. Something real is happening.
If NDEs were simply what the dying brain expects, we would predict cultural diversity in their content. A Hindu's brain should produce a Hindu NDE. A Christian's brain should produce a Christian NDE. The content should follow the expectation.
That is not what we find. The core features of NDEs — the sense of leaving the body, the awareness of being in another realm, the encounter with light, the encounter with deceased loved ones, the sense of overwhelming love — show up across cultures, religions, and time periods with remarkable consistency. Jeffrey Long compared seventy-nine non-English NDEs with five hundred eighty-three English NDEs and found that "all thirty-three NDE elements were present in both groups."6 J. Steve Miller surveyed fifty-eight non-Western, non-Christian NDEs and likewise failed to find a pattern of non-Christian content overriding the core features.7 The consistency of the core, paired with cultural variation only in surface details, is exactly what we would expect if NDEs are tapping into a real shared phenomenon.
Skeptics have proposed many natural explanations for NDEs over the years: low oxygen levels in the brain (anoxia), the release of natural psychedelic chemicals (DMT), temporal lobe seizures, REM sleep intrusion, and a handful of others. Each theory is plausible at first glance. None of them survives careful examination.
This chapter is not the place to walk through every counterargument — that work belongs to apologetic books on NDEs as evidence for the afterlife. After reviewing the research, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel concluded that purely physical and psychological factors "fail to explain the experience of an enhanced consciousness, with lucid thoughts, emotions, memories from earliest childhood, visions of the future, and the possibility of perception from a position outside and above the body."8 Miller, in his earlier book on NDEs, surveyed proposed naturalistic explanations and likewise found them wanting.9 Bruce Greyson, the dean of academic NDE researchers, has come to the careful conclusion that current evidence is consistent with "continued functioning of the mind independent of the brain."10
The veridical cases especially defeat the brain-based theories. A theory that explains the rush of feelings does not begin to explain the tennis shoe on the ledge.
If NDEs were primarily demonic deceptions, you would expect them to lead people away from Christ. They do the opposite. The pattern is that NDEs lead unbelievers toward Christian faith and lead believers to deeper love for Christ, deeper prayer, and deeper involvement in the church.
Michael Sabom, the cardiologist who led the rigorous Atlanta Study, designed his research to compare conservative Christians, liberal Christians, "God-believers" who were not Christian, and atheists. He found that NDEs "consistently deepened" the intrinsic faith of Christian experiencers. The post-NDE Hoge score for the Christian NDE group was significantly higher than for non-NDE Christian cardiac patients.11 Far from undermining biblical Christianity, NDEs in his sample tended to reinforce it.
The familiar testimonies tell the same story. Howard Storm went from atheist philosophy professor to Christian pastor after a distressing NDE in which he cried out to Jesus and was rescued. Don Piper returned from his NDE with deepened evangelical faith. Ian McCormack, stung by box jellyfish and clinically dead for fifteen minutes, became a missionary. Mary Neal, Dean Braxton, Jim Woodford — the list is long, and the trajectory is consistent. If a deceiving spirit is behind these experiences, it has a remarkable habit of producing converts to Jesus.
Chapter 13 will treat Jesus's prominence in NDEs in detail. Here I just want to give you the high-altitude statistic so you can feel its weight.
J. Steve Miller designed an elegant study. He went to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) website — the largest collection of NDE accounts in the world, with over five thousand entries from many languages and many religious backgrounds. To avoid cherry-picking, he took accounts in the order they were submitted. Out of one hundred consecutive accounts, eighteen percent claimed to see Jesus. Out of more than five thousand cases worldwide, only three reported seeing Krishna and only two reported seeing Buddha. Of eighty self-identified Muslims, none reported seeing Muhammad. Even the three Hindu cases that reported Krishna also reported Jesus.12
Pause and let that sink in. In a global, multi-religious, unfiltered sample, Jesus is overwhelmingly the named figure when NDErs name a divine person at all. Miller also found that out of the same one hundred consecutive cases, only seven contained anything even vaguely against Christian belief, and only three actually contradicted Christian doctrine.13 The popular impression that NDEs teach New Age universalism is not what the research actually shows. The research shows the opposite — strong compatibility with mainstream biblical themes and surprising specificity to the Lord Jesus Christ.
When we shift from near-death experiences to deathbed experiences, the evidence becomes, if anything, even cleaner. Several reasons.
Universality and cross-cultural documentation. DBEs have been recorded in every culture and time period for which we have records. William Barrett documented them in 1926. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson did a major cross-cultural study in 1977. Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick documented them in modern UK hospice care. Christopher Kerr has documented them in Buffalo. Miller's multicultural dissertation work confirms the same patterns.14 The phenomenon is not new and it is not regional.
Witnessed consistency. Unlike NDEs, which often happen with no one watching the inner experience, DBEs frequently happen in front of family members and hospice workers. Witnesses cannot read the dying person's perception, but they can verify the behavior. They watch their loved one look at a specific spot in the room, smile, address an unseen presence by name, reach upward, and respond as if greeting deceased relatives. The behavior reports come from many independent witnesses across many decades and cultures, and they line up.
The dying have no career incentive. Most DBErs die within hours or days of their experience. They will not write a book. They will not tour the conference circuit. They will not monetize the moment. Their reports are made in real time, to family, with no apparent motivation beyond honest communication.
Theological cleanness. Most DBE content is simple and biblically coherent: deceased Christian loved ones are with the Lord; angels come for the dying; Jesus appears; peace settles over the transition. The universalist, reincarnationist, occult, and alien-contact themes that show up sometimes in NDE literature are almost entirely absent from DBE reports. The dying grandmother who sees Jesus is not building a cosmology. She is simply telling you what she sees.
A seven-year-old girl, dying of leukemia, mustered her last energy to sit up in her hospital bed and tell her mother: "The angels — they're so beautiful! Mommy, can you see them? Do you hear their singing? I've never heard such beautiful singing!" Then she lay back and died. Her parents, far from doubting, received it as a precious gift. A child with no theological agenda, no platform, no incentive — simply reporting what she saw. This is the texture of most DBEs.15
Terminal lucidity. One of the most striking pieces of evidence for DBEs as genuine perceptions is the phenomenon called terminal lucidity. Patients with advanced dementia or Alzheimer's — patients whose brains have been physically deteriorated for years and who can no longer recognize their own children — sometimes become fully, clearly lucid in the hours before death. They speak. They recognize family. They thank caregivers. They say goodbye. They sometimes report seeing presences that no one else can see. Then they die.16 One large literature review by Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson collected eighty-three documented cases. A nursing home survey found seventy percent of staff had personally witnessed it. Alexander Batthyany's preliminary nursing study found terminal lucidity in over ten percent of observed deaths.17
Terminal lucidity is the kind of evidence that should haunt strict materialism. If the mind is simply what the brain does, then a brain physically destroyed by dementia should not produce sudden, integrated, emotionally appropriate, fully verbal, personally recognizable communication minutes before death. Yet it happens, and it happens often enough to have a name. It fits much more naturally with what John Cooper has called holistic dualism — the biblical view that the soul, while normally working through the body, is not reducible to the body and can function as the brain fails.18
· · ·
Now I want to share, carefully, the working estimates that anchor this book. Based on my own dissertation research and on extensive engagement with the scholarly literature, my best judgment is this:
Approximately seventy-five percent of reported NDEs lack clearly unbiblical elements and appear to be genuine spiritual experiences. About twenty-five percent contain elements ranging from mild theological corruption, to serious unbiblical teaching, to (rarely) apparent demonic deception, to (rarely) outright fabrication.
Approximately ninety-five percent of reported DBEs are genuine. About five percent involve theological concerns or possible misperception.
I want to be clear that these are working estimates, not precise statistics. They are not engraved in stone. Honest scholars working with the same data could arrive at slightly different figures. But the rough shape matters even if the exact numbers do not. A reader who approaches NDEs assuming half are fake will be far too suspicious. A reader who assumes every NDE is gospel truth will be far too credulous. The truth is closer to three out of four genuine, one out of four worth careful examination — which means most, but not all, and discernment matters.
Beware of anyone who gives you precise percentages without showing how they arrived at them. The 75% and 95% figures in this book are working estimates from my own research and reading. They aim to set the right posture, not to settle a statistical debate. The point is the shape: most are genuine, a meaningful minority needs evaluation. Whether the precise number is 70% or 80%, the discernment task does not change.
When your ninety-year-old grandmother, in the last hours of her life, looks up smiling and says, "Jesus is here. He's so beautiful," the right response is not to start a discernment audit. The right response is reverence and gratitude. "Grandma, that is beautiful. Jesus really does love you." The baseline tells you that her experience is overwhelmingly likely to be exactly what she says it is.
When your friend comes back from cardiac arrest and tentatively says, "Something happened to me. I think I left my body," the right default is not skepticism. It is openness. "Tell me more. What did you experience?" Friends who shut these conversations down with reflex suspicion often hand the experiencer over to the very communities (the spiritual-but-not-religious, the New Age, the syncretist) that the suspicious Christian most fears.
The exception to this default — the moment when discernment kicks in — is when specific unbiblical elements show up in the report. Reincarnation. Universalism. Communication with the dead as advice for the living. Self-divinity. Counsel against the local church. Those are the markers. When they appear, gentle questions are appropriate. When they do not appear, simple reception is appropriate.
If you have a loved one who has shared an NDE or DBE with you, your first job is not evaluation. It is presence. Listen. Honor the experience. Cry with them if they cry. Worship with them if they worship. Save the careful theological conversation for later — and even then, hold it gently. Most of these experiences are gifts. Treat them like gifts.
A fair question is: if NDEs and DBEs are real, why isn't every report perfect? Why does God allow some of them to be corrupted?
I will not attempt a full theodicy here. But several partial answers are biblical and honest. First, the spiritual realm is not a safety zone. It is populated by beings — some holy, some fallen — and the NDE places people in real contact with that realm. Scripture takes for granted that some spirits lie (1 John 4:1). Second, human beings interpret experiences through prior frameworks. A Hindu NDEr who genuinely encounters love may filter that encounter through Hindu categories and report it in monist terms. The encounter was real; the interpretation was the experiencer's own. This is the experience-interpretation distinction that Chapter 9 develops in detail. Third, God permits genuine tests of discernment. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 explicitly says God uses false signs and wonders to test where our hearts truly lie. Fourth, the corrupted twenty-five percent is not a uniform category. Some cases are demonic. Some are misinterpreted. Some are fabricated. Some are mostly genuine with a few corrupt threads. The causes vary, and discernment is the task of telling them apart.
The baseline is now in place. Most NDEs are real. Most DBEs are real. The first response of the Christian to these experiences should be openness, reverence, and pastoral warmth — not suspicion, paranoia, or dismissal. The biblical command is to test the spirits, not to refuse them.
From here, the book builds. Part II (Chapters 6-10) develops the biblical worldview that makes discernment possible — the reality of the spiritual realm, Satan's strategies, Scripture's authority, the experience-interpretation distinction, and a seven-test framework. Part III (Chapters 11-16) develops the positive marks of a genuine NDE or DBE. Parts IV through VI then turn to the smaller minority that needs careful evaluation. Part VII brings it all home pastorally.
What I want you to carry from this chapter into the rest of the book is the right posture. Most of what you will hear from NDErs and DBErs is true. A small but real percentage is not. Knowing the difference is the work this book is for. But knowing the truth comes first.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Miller, J. Steve. Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2021.
Miller, J. Steve. "Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife: A Multicultural Examination of the Literature." PhD diss., Columbia International University, 2019.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Sabom, Michael. Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.
Tabatt, Shaun. The NDE Conspiracy. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025.
van Lommel, Pim, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich. "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands." The Lancet 358 (December 15, 2001): 2039-2045.