Chapter 20: "God Loves Everyone, So Nothing Else Matters"

Genuine Love, Wrong Conclusion

Picture a packed conference hall. The lights dim, and a woman steps to the microphone to share her near-death experience. Her voice is calm but full of feeling. She tells the room how, during a cardiac arrest, she felt herself lifted out of her body and carried into a light so warm and welcoming that she has never been the same. Then she says the line that always brings the loudest applause: "I felt love unlike anything I've ever known. It was total. It accepted me completely. After that, I cannot believe that God would send anyone to hell. I know now that all of us are saved, no matter what we believe."

The audience claps. A few people wipe tears. And many of the Christians in that room walk away unsettled in a way they cannot quite explain. Something about her story is beautiful. Something about her conclusion is wrong. But which is which? That is the question this chapter is going to answer.

This pattern is, in my judgment, the single most common false inference drawn from genuine NDE encounters. The experiencer feels overwhelming divine love, and from that real experience draws a conclusion that does not actually follow: that judgment is a misunderstanding, that faith in Christ is unnecessary, that all paths lead home, that "God loves everyone, so nothing else matters."¹ The love is real. The conclusion is a non sequitur.

So here is the thesis of this chapter, plain and simple: a true encounter with the love of God does not — cannot — entail the abolition of judgment, the cancellation of repentance, or the dissolution of Christ's unique saving role. The premise (overwhelming divine love) and the conclusion (no hell, universal salvation, faith unnecessary) are not logically connected. They only feel connected because of how the experience washes over a person and overwhelms whatever theology they walked in with.

God Is Love — and God Judges. Both Are True.

The reason the universalist inference feels so powerful is that part of it is dead right. Any genuine encounter with God really is an encounter with love, because God is love. That is not a sentimental slogan. It is a flat biblical statement: "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8). And again two paragraphs later: "God is love" (1 John 4:16). Steve Miller, summarizing the biblical witness, observes that love is not just a trait God displays but part of His very essence.²

So when an NDEr returns and tells you that what they experienced was love beyond anything earthly — love that knew them completely and welcomed them anyway — there is no reason for the Christian to be suspicious of the love itself. Jeffrey Long's analysis of hundreds of NDE accounts shows the experience of overwhelming love to be one of the most consistent features of the phenomenon, described again and again in language of grace, acceptance, and unconditional welcome.³ John Burke, surveying these same accounts, points out that NDErs are encountering exactly the God the Bible describes — a God of personal, knowing love, who has been telling us all along what His heart toward us is like.⁴

So far, so good. The trouble starts when the NDEr — or, more often, the NDE community that interprets the experience for them afterward — takes that real encounter and reasons like this: "If God is this loving, then He cannot be a God who judges. Therefore there is no hell. Therefore no one needs Christ. Therefore all religions are different paths up the same mountain." That whole chain of reasoning has slipped its rails somewhere. Let me show you where.

First, God's love does not cancel moral accountability — and the same Bible that tells us God is love tells us so loudly. The same apostle John who wrote "God is love" also wrote that "whoever does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light" (John 3:20), and that "whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him" (John 3:36). John saw no contradiction between divine love and divine wrath. They are not opposite poles. They cohere in the one God.

Second — and this point should land like a hammer — the most loving figure in the entire Bible is also the figure who spoke most often and most vividly about final judgment. That figure is Jesus. The same Jesus who took children into His arms also taught about a fire that does not go out (Mark 9:43–48). The same Jesus who wept at Lazarus's tomb described a final separation of sheep from goats with destinies as different as eternal life and eternal punishment (Matthew 25:31–46). A "Jesus" who is loving but who never speaks of judgment is not the biblical Jesus. He is a smaller figure, easier to manage, who has been edited down to fit a different theology.

Third, the biblical picture of the afterlife really does include both paradise and a place of conscious distress for the unsaved dead — what Scripture calls Hades. We will look at this carefully in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to say that the New Testament is not coy about it: there is a real waiting place of comfort for the redeemed, and a real waiting place of distress for those who have refused God, and they are separated. Judgment is not a leftover from a more primitive era; it is woven into the way the New Testament talks about life after death.

Fourth — and this is the one that quietly undoes the whole inference — God's love does not bypass the need for faith and repentance. It motivates the gracious provision of salvation in Christ. Read John 3:16 carefully and slowly: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." Love is the reason God gave the Son. The believing is still the door. The verse does not say "God so loved the world that perishing was abolished." It says God so loved the world that He provided the way out of perishing — through His Son, received by faith. Love is the engine of the gospel. It is not a substitute for the gospel.

Why NDErs Slide Into the Wrong Inference

If the inference does not follow logically, why does it appear so often in NDE literature? It is not because experiencers are dishonest. Most are sincere. There are several reasons it happens, and naming them gently helps us understand the people we are listening to.

The experience is genuinely overwhelming. The love a person feels in a real NDE is, by their own account, more total than anything in earthly life. It overruns the categories they brought into the experience. If their prior theology was thin, half-formed, or shaped mostly by frightening images of God, the love they encounter simply blows the old framework apart. They reach for whatever words they have to describe it, and the words they reach for are often the only ones their culture supplies — words like "all-accepting" and "no judgment."

The NDE is temporary, not final. This one is rarely noticed but matters enormously. The person having the NDE is not yet at the final judgment. They are at a halftime moment. They are going back. Jesus's posture toward someone whose earthly life is not over — someone who still has time to repent, to believe, to live differently — is exactly the posture of welcome the New Testament records of His ministry on earth. He did not lead with hellfire when the Samaritan woman met Him at the well (John 4). He led with grace. Steve Miller has pressed this point well: NDErs are at a moment in their story that corresponds to Jesus's earthly ministry, not to the final judgment, and we should expect God to deal with them accordingly.⁵ What we cannot do, however, is collapse Christ's loving welcome to a returning NDEr into His final posture toward someone who has, after a whole life, finally and definitively refused Him. Those are two different moments.

The experiencer's prior theology was distorted. Many NDErs walk into the experience holding a picture of God as a cosmic punisher, a divine accountant looking for excuses to send people away. When they meet the real God — kind, knowing, welcoming — the contrast is so sharp that they often swing to the opposite extreme. "God is not the angry judge I thought He was, so He must not be a judge at all." That swing is understandable. It is also wrong. The corrective is not to put the angry-judge picture back in place. It is to learn the biblical picture, in which holiness and love are one harmonious thing in the same God.

The NDE community teaches them to interpret it this way. Once an experiencer goes looking for help making sense of what happened, the community they encounter is overwhelmingly committed to a universalist reading. The conferences, the bestselling memoirs, the YouTube channels, the discussion groups — most of it teaches some version of "all paths lead to the same Light." A new NDEr without a strong biblical anchor is often handed an interpretive frame within months that explains their experience for them. Sabom watched this dynamic unfold for decades and grew increasingly troubled by how much of NDE discourse pushed people away from particular Christian faith and toward a vague universal spirituality — even though, in his own clinical practice, he was finding the opposite pattern: NDEs that deepened the patient's existing Christian commitment when given a chance to.⁶

The enemy has every reason to encourage the inference. I do not say this to be paranoid. I say it because the New Testament is sober about it. If a real encounter with the love of God can be twisted, by the time the book gets written, into a teaching that undermines the very gospel that love made possible, the enemy of souls has scored a real victory. Tabatt makes this point repeatedly: the dark side of the NDE phenomenon is rarely about counterfeiting the love itself; it is about hijacking the interpretation so the experiencer's testimony ends up working against the cross instead of pointing to it.⁷

Four Arguments You Will Hear — and How to Answer Them

Once you start listening for it, you will hear four arguments over and over again. Here they are, with what I think are the strongest responses.

"If God really loved everyone, He wouldn't send anyone to hell."

This argument assumes that genuine love is incompatible with allowing a person to choose, finally and definitively, to reject the Lover. Scripture pictures things differently. People are not arbitrarily flung into hell by a reluctant God. They go there, in the biblical telling, by a long road of rejection of the God who loved them all the way. C. S. Lewis's famous line in The Great Divorce captures it about as well as anything ever has: in the end there are those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God finally says, "Thy will be done."⁸ Love that respects the beloved's freedom is not less love. It is more.

"I felt unconditional love. Unconditional love cannot include judgment."

The word "unconditional" is doing a lot of work here, and not all of it honest. God's love really is unconditional in this sense: He does not love us because we have earned it. He does not love us more on our good days than our bad ones. He loves us before we love Him. But unconditional love does not mean unconditional approval of our behavior, unconditional release from the consequences of persistent evil, or unconditional salvation that bypasses faith. The mother who loves her child unconditionally still disciplines that child; she would not be loving if she did not. The God who loves us unconditionally does not therefore give a free pass to everything we do. He loves us toward something — toward truth, toward holiness, toward Himself.

"If God condemned anyone, He would not be loving."

Read across the whole Bible, and the picture is exactly the opposite. God judges because He loves. He judges injustice because He loves the victims. He judges idolatry because He loves the truth. He judges persistent rejection of Himself because that rejection is the slow suicide of the soul. A God who never judged would not be the biblical God of love. He would be a kind of cosmic life coach who never says no — the therapeutic deity of contemporary Western feeling, dressed up in religious language. The Bible's God is hotter and holier than that, and far more loving.

"The judgment passages are ancient cultural baggage. The real God is the one I met."

This last argument is the one that gives the game away. To make it stick, the experiencer has to sideline most of what Jesus said. The hell sayings in the Gospels are not from Paul or some later council. They are from Jesus's own lips, in red letters. If the "Jesus" of the NDE softens or contradicts what the Gospels' Jesus taught, the question is no longer whether the NDE is real. The question is whether the being encountered is who they claim to be — a question we treated in Chapter 14, and one Tabatt and others have raised pointedly about specific high-profile accounts where the figure of light explicitly deletes the categories of sin and judgment.⁹

A Word on My Own Position — Carefully

Some of you reading this know that my own working position differs from traditional eternal conscious torment. I lean toward conditional immortality (the view that the finally unrepentant are not kept alive forever in torment but ultimately cease to exist), and I am open to the possibility that God's gracious invitation extends past death itself before final judgment.¹⁰ I think these positions are worth taking seriously, and I argue for them elsewhere. They do not, however, support the NDE universalist inference — and it would be dishonest of me not to say plainly why.

Conditional immortality still affirms that final judgment is real, that persistent and final rejection of Christ ends in what Scripture calls the second death, and that faith in Jesus Christ remains the means of salvation. Postmortem opportunity, on the views I find biblically defensible, still holds that the invitation must be received, not that it is automatically applied. Christ remains the only Mediator. The cross remains the only ground. The response of faith remains real and necessary. None of these views collapses into "everyone is fine, regardless of belief."

So even on my more hopeful framework, the NDEr's conclusion does not survive. The love is real. The response to love still matters. Faith in Christ still saves. Refusal of Christ still has eternal consequences — whether those consequences are eternal conscious torment, or annihilation, or something we cannot yet see clearly. The space between traditional eternal conscious torment and full universalism is real, and worth careful thought, but the move from "I felt love" to "therefore everyone is automatically saved regardless of faith" leaps over the entire conversation. It is not a position. It is a non sequitur. I cannot tighten the argument by being more hopeful than I already am.

Walking With the NDEr Who Has Drawn the Wrong Conclusion

Most NDErs who have moved toward universalism are not malicious. They have run face-first into the love of God and are trying to make sense of it with whatever tools their world supplied. Many of them are still your neighbors, your relatives, your fellow churchgoers. The pastoral question is not whether to confront them. It is how.

The pattern that I have seen work goes something like this. First, do not deny the experience. The love they felt may well have been a real glimpse of the heart of God, and starting by attacking it shuts the door before it has opened. Second, gently introduce the experience-interpretation distinction we developed in Chapter 9: the experience may be from God; the conclusion drawn afterward is the experiencer's own theology, and theology can be revisited. Third, walk them slowly through what Jesus actually said about love and judgment, side by side, in His own words. Fourth, be patient. Sabom's clinical work suggests that, given time and the right Christian community, the deepening pull of an NDE often runs toward the historic faith rather than away from it.¹¹ But a person whose theological framework has been built around a few overpowering minutes does not rebuild it in a single afternoon. We rebuild it the way they built it: slowly, in love, with truth.

Where Love and Judgment Meet

If we want to see, in one place, how the love and the judgment of God actually fit together, we do not have to look far. They meet at the cross.

The cross is the answer to the universalist inference, and it is the only answer big enough. At the cross, God's love for sinners and God's judgment on sin are not in tension — they are both fulfilled in the same event, on the same hill, by the same broken body. The Son bears the judgment. Sinners are loved into salvation by faith in Him. This is why Paul could say, with no contradiction, that the cross shows us both the kindness of God (Romans 5:8) and the wrath of God against sin (Romans 3:25–26). They cohere there, in the bleeding hands of the Beloved.

An NDE encounter with divine love is, at best, a glimpse of the love that drove God to send His Son. It is not a revelation that the Son's mission was unnecessary. It is not a notice that judgment has been quietly cancelled. It is not a memo that all paths are now equal. It is, if it is real, a brief brush with the very love that bled. When that love is received rightly, it sends the experiencer running not toward a vague universal spirituality but toward the particular Jesus who loved them enough to die for them.

So here, finally, is what I would whisper to that woman at the conference, if she would let me sit with her over coffee long enough to hear me. The love you felt was probably real. Receive it. Believe it. Let it warm the rest of your life. But do not throw away the cross to keep the love. The love came through the cross. The cross is the love. And the One you met — if it really was Him — is calling you not to a teaching that nothing else matters. He is calling you, by name, to Himself.