Chapter 14

Encountering Jesus

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28 (ESV)

A. The Question on the Table

A man lay dying of pneumonia. His heart stopped. Nurses rushed in, and the crash cart followed. Minutes later he opened his eyes, looked at his wife, and said five words she would never forget: “I saw Him. He is real.”

He was not speaking in code. He was not saying he had seen a warm glow and guessed at its name. He said he saw Jesus. He said Jesus was kind. Warm. Gentle. Loving. And he said that nothing anyone could tell him would make him doubt it.¹

Reports like his show up more often than most people expect. In the previous chapter we met the being of light, the radiant figure at the center of so many near-death experiences. We asked the hard question: who is it? We noted the Bible’s warning that not every light is Christ. And we set a few early markers for telling the difference.

This chapter builds the positive case. It picks up where Chapter 13 left off and asks two questions that deserve careful answers.

First, is the figure that NDErs identify as Jesus really Him? What markers show up in these reports that match the Jesus of Scripture?

Second, why is He so kind? If Jesus truly meets people at the edge of death, why does He greet the undeserving with open arms instead of a verdict? Does that kindness mean everyone is saved? Or does it mean something else?

These are not small questions. If roughly one in five people who come close to death reports meeting Jesus, then the church owes these reports more than silence.² And if something in these encounters echoes the Jesus we actually meet in the Gospels, that echo deserves to be heard.

Let me lay out the evidence. Then we can weigh it together.

B. The Evidence in Front of Us

The first thing that strikes you about Jesus in NDE research is how often He shows up.

Researcher J. Steve Miller set out to study the content of near-death experiences on the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) website, the largest database of NDE reports in the world. He was looking for something else entirely. He wanted to know how often NDEs taught things that contradicted the Bible, things like reincarnation or New Age spirituality. What he found instead caught him off guard.³

Out of 141 consecutive NDE reports on the NDERF site, 28 mentioned Jesus. That is 20 percent, or one in every five.⁴ After removing cases with clear red flags (drug-related experiences, signs of mental illness, people selling books), he was left with 100 solid cases. Of those, 18 percent still reported seeing Jesus.⁵

Miller was not the first to notice this. A smaller pilot study of 62 recent NDERF cases found 13 percent reporting Jesus. That included the only Jewish person in the sample.⁷ Cardiologist Michael Sabom found even higher numbers in his Atlanta Study. Among conservative Christians, 36 percent reported seeing “Jesus” or “Lord.” Among liberal Christians, the figure was 31 percent.⁸

Now compare that with every other named religious figure. In my doctoral research, I analyzed 5,278 near-death experiences. About 20 percent involved Jesus. Fewer than 1 percent involved any other named deity.⁹ Miller found the same pattern. When he searched the NDERF database for reports of Krishna, the central figure of Hinduism, he found fewer than one in a thousand.¹⁰ Among 33 self-identified Hindu NDErs, only four mentioned Hindu deities at all. Those four also mentioned Jesus.¹¹

These numbers do not by themselves prove anything. But they do set a clear question on the table. If NDEs were simply a mirror of whatever the dying person already believed, you would expect Hindus to see Krishna at roughly the same rate that Christians see Jesus. They do not. Not even close. Something else is going on.

This chapter has two jobs. First, I want to show you the markers that set a genuine encounter with the biblical Christ apart from a vague spiritual feeling. Second, I want to walk through the Gospels with you and show that the Jesus who meets people at the edge of death acts exactly the way the real Jesus has always acted.

C. The Heart of the Case

1. The Surprising Frequency of Jesus

When I began my doctoral research, I expected Jesus to be a minor presence in the NDE data. He was not.

The professional NDE literature had not made much of Him. Researchers tended to fold Jesus sightings into broader categories like “encountered sentient beings” or “saw spiritual figures.” The result was that the frequency of Jesus went unmeasured and unreported for decades.¹²

Miller put his finger on the reason. Earlier researchers were not trying to hide anything. But by lumping Jesus in with angels, deceased relatives, and unnamed figures, they made Him invisible in the data. Miller noticed the pattern only because his study had a different aim. He was counting anti-Christian content, and Jesus kept turning up instead.¹³

Researcher Kenneth Ring once suggested that NDErs were simply seeing a generic being of light and calling it Jesus because of their religious background. But Miller found something different. The people who reported Jesus did not say, “I saw a light and I assumed it was Jesus.” They said, “I saw Jesus. I knew it was Him.” They described a distinct person, not a vague glow. Some recognized His face. Others knew Him the way you know a close friend without needing a name tag. A formal introduction would have been beside the point.¹⁴

That distinction matters. If people were projecting their beliefs onto a shapeless light, we would expect the reports to sound uncertain. They do not. They sound like recognition.

And the frequency held across studies. Miller found 18 to 20 percent. A pilot study found 13 percent. Sabom found 31 to 36 percent among Christians. My own research confirmed the 20 percent figure across a much larger sample.¹⁶ The number is consistent, and it is not small.

2. The Identifiers

Frequency alone does not tell us whether these encounters are genuine. A lot of people could be mistaken. So the next question is: what marks an encounter as the biblical Christ, and not just a comforting figure the brain produced?

When I studied these reports, several identifiers kept appearing. They showed up independently, in accounts from people who did not know each other and had not read the same books. Let me name four.

The wounds. A striking number of NDErs describe seeing the marks of the crucifixion on Jesus’ hands. One person reported: “When I got to the other end I actually saw Christ! He was smiling and standing with His arms open like He was going to hug me. His hands still carried the marks of the cross.” Another said: “There was Christ and he was standing with a very white robe. And as I got closer and closer I tried to detect everything in order to convince myself that this was indeed Christ waiting on me. And I looked at his hands and there were the scars where the nails had gone through.”¹⁷

These descriptions echo what Thomas saw in the upper room. The risen Jesus did not hide His wounds. He showed them. “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side” (John 20:27, ESV). The wounds were proof. They identified Him as the One who had been crucified and had risen. When NDErs report the same marks, the parallel is hard to miss.

Immediate recognition. Most NDErs who see Jesus do not need someone to tell them who He is. They know. As one person put it, “He was Jesus Christ of Nazareth. I knew Him without an introduction. I instantly knew who He was.”¹⁸ This is the same kind of recognition the disciples showed after the resurrection. Mary Magdalene did not know Him at first. But when He said her name, she knew (John 20:16). Recognition came from the inside out.

A holiness joined to tenderness. NDErs consistently describe a figure who is overwhelmingly loving but also holy. They feel fully known, including their failures, yet fully accepted. This is not the sentimental warmth of a greeting card. It carries weight. Many people weep when they describe it, even years later. One man said, “Jesus was really there. He was kind, warm, gentle, loving, and he cared about me. He received me. He is REAL.”¹⁹

Lasting fruit. A genuine encounter with the biblical Christ changes people. It does not leave them confused or drawn to the occult. It draws them toward prayer, Scripture, service, and love. I will say more about this in the fifth move below. For now, note that the fruit test is one of the strongest identifiers Jesus Himself gave us: “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16, ESV).

3. Why a Loving Welcome Fits the Real Jesus

Some Christians hear these reports and hesitate. “If Jesus really met that person,” they ask, “why was He so kind? That person was not even a believer. Shouldn’t there have been a rebuke, or at least a warning?”

I understand the worry. But I think it fades once you open the Gospels.

The Jesus we meet in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was fiercely kind to broken people. He was harsh toward one group only: the self-righteous, the religious leaders who used God’s law as a weapon. Everyone else got tenderness.

Think of the woman who crashed a dinner party to wash His feet with her tears and dry them with her hair (Luke 7:36–50). The host was horrified. If Jesus were really a prophet, he thought, He would know what kind of woman she was. But Jesus knew. And He received her anyway. He told her that her sins were forgiven. He told her to go in peace.

Think of Zacchaeus, the tax collector who cheated his neighbors for a living. Jesus did not give him a lecture. He invited Himself to dinner (Luke 19:1–10). Think of the woman caught in adultery, dragged before Him by men who wanted Him to condemn her. “Neither do I condemn you,” He said. “Go, and from now on sin no more” (John 8:11, ESV). He did not ignore her sin. But He led with love.

Think of His words in the very passage that opens this chapter: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, ESV). He did not say, “Come to me, all who have earned it.” He said, “Come to me, all who are tired.” That is an open invitation. It is wide enough for a dying person who has never set foot inside a church.

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” — Luke 19:10 (ESV)

So when NDErs describe a Jesus who greets them with warmth rather than anger, I am not surprised. That is exactly the Jesus of the Gospels. He did not wait for people to clean themselves up before He loved them. He loved them first, and that love became the reason they changed.

If anything, a Jesus who greeted a dying person with cold distance would be harder to square with Scripture than a Jesus who opened His arms.

4. Why a Loving NDE Is Not a Verdict of Final Salvation

But here is where we need to be careful. A warm welcome at the edge of death is not the same thing as a final verdict of salvation. These are two different things, and mixing them up leads to confusion.

An NDE is not the person’s final death. By definition, the person comes back. They were sent back, or they chose to return, or they were pulled back by medical intervention. Whatever happened on the other side, it was not the last chapter of their story. It was a glimpse, not a destination.

Think of it this way. If a doctor walks into a waiting room and gently takes a patient’s hand, that does not mean the diagnosis is good. It means the doctor is kind. Jesus meeting someone at the threshold of death with love does not mean that person is saved, settled, and done. It means Jesus is who the Bible says He is: compassionate, patient, and unwilling that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9).

Luke 6:35 says that God “is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.” Kindness is part of His character. It is how He draws people to repentance (Romans 2:4). A loving NDE encounter fits that pattern perfectly. Jesus is being Himself. He is not issuing a pardon. He is issuing an invitation.

The Bible is clear that a final judgment is coming. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10, ESV). That judgment has not happened yet for anyone who comes back from an NDE. The welcome they received was real. But it was a welcome at the door, not a seat at the final table. Chapter 22 will look more closely at the difference between the intermediate state and the final judgment.

I hold the final destiny of the lost with an open hand (see Chapter 19). But whatever one believes about the end, the point here is simpler. A loving encounter with Jesus during an NDE does not settle the question of where that person ends up. It reveals who Jesus is. And who He is, according to the Gospels, is someone who leads with love.

5. Changed Lives

The last identifier is also the hardest to fake: lasting change.

When someone encounters the biblical Jesus during an NDE, something happens to them afterward. They do not come back the same. And the direction of the change is telling.

Sabom’s Atlanta Study tracked this carefully. He wanted to know whether NDEs pushed people away from traditional Christianity and toward vague, New Age spirituality. The media had been saying so for years. But when he sat down with his patients and measured the actual changes, the picture looked very different.²⁰

Of the NDErs in his study who changed their religious affiliation after their experience, every single one moved toward a more conservative Christian belief. Not one moved away from it.²¹ NDEs appeared to strengthen belief in God, deepen prayer life, increase church attendance, and increase concern for others. Sabom concluded that NDEs “significantly bolster one’s intrinsic faith, meaning in life, capacity for love, and involvement in family.”²²

Researcher Penny Sartori found the same thing in a hospital study in the UK. Her NDE patients showed a consistent pattern of deeper religious engagement afterward.²³

Sabom tells the story of Darrell Pell, a patient who coded ten times in a single week and encountered a spiritual being he identified as Jesus. After his heart transplant, Darrell joined a church on Easter Sunday. He began visiting prisons, counseling teenagers, and talking about Jesus at motorcycle rallies. He named his Harley Davidson “Second Chance” and had it painted in white cursive outlined in blood red. Sabom observed that on the day Christians celebrate the resurrection, Darrell marked his own rebirth.²⁴

Bruce Greyson, one of the most careful NDE researchers in the field, confirmed this pattern across hundreds of cases. Ninety percent of the experiencers he studied said their attitudes and beliefs had changed as a result of their NDEs. More than half said the effects continued to grow stronger over time. And when Greyson followed up with the same people twenty years later, the changes had not faded. They were virtually identical to what had been reported two decades before.²⁵

Researcher P. M. H. Atwater documented the case of a man named Haisley who encountered Jesus during a near-death-like experience. Before the encounter, Haisley had “no interest” in biblical matters. Afterward, he was so transformed that friends hardly recognized him. He began expounding on Scripture with a depth that amazed theologians, despite never having read the Bible before his experience.²⁶

This is not the profile of a satanic deception. As Miller wryly observed, if these encounters were a scheme of the devil, it was a spectacularly bad one. “When people come near death,” he imagined Satan telling his forces, “let’s give them a deluding vision which causes them to connect more closely with their churches, love God more dearly, pray more regularly and love people more fervently.”²⁷

Jesus gave us the test Himself. “By their fruit you will recognize them,” He said. “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:16, 18, ESV). If the fruit of these encounters is deeper prayer, stronger faith, greater love for others, and a closer walk with Christ, then the tree looks very much like a good one.

Not every NDE produces this kind of fruit, of course. Some people come back confused. Some draw conclusions that contradict Scripture. Chapter 21 will deal with those cases honestly. But when a person meets someone they identify as Jesus, and the result is a life marked by deeper faith, humility, prayer, and love for others, the pattern is consistent with a genuine encounter with the Christ of the Bible.

D. What the Researchers and Scholars Say

The scholarly conversation about Jesus in NDEs has been slow to develop. For decades, the leading researchers did not single Jesus out for study. But the voices that have weighed in tell a consistent story.

J. Steve Miller is the most important voice on this subject. His systematic study of NDERF cases produced the first reliable count of Jesus encounters, and his follow-up study of Hindu NDEs gave us the comparison data that makes the frequency so striking. Miller concluded that earlier researchers had not been hiding Jesus from the data. They simply had not been looking for Him. Once you look, He is hard to miss.²⁹

Miller also collected more than eighty cases of Jesus encounters from the published NDE literature. His sources included Barbara Rommer, Michael Sabom, Raymond Moody, Bruce Greyson, Nancy Evans Bush, Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, Melvin Morse, Penny Sartori, Pim van Lommel, and Jeffrey Long.³⁰ The cases came from adults and children, from different denominations, and from people with no religious background. The pattern held across all of them.

Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick documented cases in which people described Jesus coming toward them with outstretched arms. The details matched across independent accounts.³¹ Physician Melvin Morse recorded a nine-year-old girl who drowned and described meeting three separate figures: a guardian angel, the Heavenly Father, and Jesus. She did not see a vague light. She distinguished three persons.³²

Michael Sabom brought the question to a sharper point in his Atlanta Study. As a cardiologist whose own faith deepened through years of NDE research, Sabom was determined to measure whether NDEs strengthened or weakened Christian belief. In Light and Death he described his own journey. His “love of Scripture has grown,” he wrote, and his “walk with the Lord has deepened.” He resolved to “reconsider the near-death experience and extend the discussion to include the One whom I had left out before—Jesus Christ.”³³

Sabom took care to separate traditional Christians from cultural Christians in his study, a step most researchers had skipped. He found that Jesus appeared at a higher rate among his patients than in the general NDERF database. Of 47 near-death experiencers, 92 percent showed no essential change in doctrinal category. The four who did change all moved toward more conservative Christian belief, not away from it. Church attendance increased across every group—conservative Christians, liberal Christians, and God-believers alike.³⁴

Jeffrey Long, founder of the NDERF database, brought the largest dataset to bear on these questions. His “God Study” examined more than a thousand NDErs and found something that cuts against the projection theory. Using chi-square statistics, Long showed that there was no significant difference in religious background between NDErs who did and NDErs who did not encounter God. Conservative Christians were not more likely to encounter God than liberals or moderates. If encounters with the divine were simply a projection of prior beliefs, you would expect the most devout to report them most often. They did not.³⁵

Long also documented the lasting impact of these encounters. Among NDErs who encountered God, the shift in the importance of their spiritual life was dramatic. Before their NDEs, only 29 of 133 rated their religious life as “greatly important.” After their NDEs, that number rose to 110. That is not a subtle change. It is a reversal.³⁵

John Burke, pastor and author of Imagine Heaven, compared hundreds of NDE accounts. He found that descriptions of Jesus matched each other in ways the experiencers could not have coordinated. His method was not a controlled study. But it points to a single, real person rather than a projection that shifts from one mind to the next.³⁶

Bruce Greyson, the psychiatrist who has studied NDEs longer than almost anyone alive, noted that about a third of experiencers who met a divine being identified that being as Jesus. He documented Julia, a woman raised Baptist, who met Jesus during a heart attack at fifty-three. “I saw Jesus first,” she said. “He had blue eyes and was smiling. He held out His hand to me.” He also documented Darcy, who came from a pagan background. She encountered God and Jesus in her NDE and reported that the experience dramatically changed her life.³⁷

No researcher I am aware of has argued that the frequency of Jesus in NDE data can be explained by chance or cultural expectation alone. The numbers are too high, the comparison with other deities too stark, and the cross-cultural reports too consistent. Scholars disagree about what it means. But the data itself is clear.³⁸

E. Counter-Objections

Objection 1: People Simply See the Figure They Were Raised to Expect

This is the most common objection, and at first glance it sounds reasonable. Christians see Jesus. Hindus see Krishna. Muslims see Muhammad. Everyone projects their own beliefs onto a vague spiritual experience.

But the data does not support this. As we have seen, Hindus do not see Krishna at anything close to the rate that Christians see Jesus. Miller found fewer than one in a thousand NDERF reports mentioning Krishna. Among 33 Hindu NDErs, only four mentioned Hindu deities, and those four also mentioned Jesus.³⁹ In my doctoral research, fewer than 1 percent of NDEs involved any named deity other than Jesus.⁴⁰

Then there are the cases of non-Christians who see Jesus. A four-year-old Chinese boy, from a family with no contact with Christians, was pronounced dead after a drowning accident. He came back and told his mother about a man who pulled him out of the water. When she asked who it was, he said, “Don’t you know? It’s Jesus.”⁴¹ Jewish NDErs have reported the same. One man, after a cardiac arrest, said: “I was raised Jewish and am Jewish, and I don’t believe in Jesus like the Catholics do. But now I believe in Jesus for Jesus.”⁴²

A Jewish woman who hemorrhaged during labor saw a man in a long robe and identified Him as Jesus. She later joined her husband’s church.⁴³

These cases are not common enough to build a statistical argument. But they are common enough to break the projection theory. If a Chinese child and a Jewish man both see Jesus when they have no reason to expect Him, something other than cultural expectation is at work.

Objection 2: A Demon Could Impersonate Jesus

This objection deserves respect. The Bible warns that Satan can appear as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), and Chapter 20 will take demonic deception seriously. So yes, in principle, a dark being could pretend to be Jesus.

But the identifiers matter here. A counterfeit that bears the marks of the crucifixion, radiates a holiness that drives people toward Scripture and prayer, and produces lasting fruit of deeper Christian faith is a very strange counterfeit. It would be like a con artist who breaks into your house and cleans it, feeds your family, and leads your children to church. At some point you have to ask whether the label “con artist” still fits.

The fruit test applies. “A bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:18). If the result of an encounter is a deepened love for Christ, increased prayer, and sacrificial service, then calling that encounter demonic runs into Jesus’ own teaching. That does not mean every claimed encounter with Jesus is genuine. Some may be.⁴⁴ Chapter 23 will give you a full set of tools for telling the difference. But the blanket claim that all NDE encounters with Jesus are demonic proves too much. It would require the devil to produce exactly the fruit that Jesus said he cannot produce.

Objection 3: Does His Universal Kindness Prove Universalism?

If Jesus is kind to everyone He meets at the edge of death, including people who were not believers, does that mean everyone will be saved in the end?

No. Or at least, not on the basis of NDEs alone.

As I said above, an NDE is not the final judgment. The person comes back. Whatever they experienced was a glimpse, not a settled destination. Jesus’ kindness during an NDE reveals His character. It does not reveal the person’s final status before God.

I will be honest. I lean toward the hope that God’s love will, in the end, win every heart through Christ. I hold that hope carefully. I also hold conditional immortality (the view that those who finally reject God cease to exist rather than suffer forever) as a live and respectable alternative. I firmly reject eternal conscious torment. But I do not rest any of those views on NDEs. They rest on Scripture, and honest Christians disagree about them. What I can say is that Jesus’ compassion toward an NDEr who is not yet a believer is perfectly consistent with the character of the God who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:45, ESV). It tells us something true about Him. It does not tell us the end of every person’s story.⁴⁵

Objection 4: If Jesus Appears, Why Doesn’t He Preach the Gospel?

Some readers may wonder why Jesus does not use the NDE to deliver a clear gospel message: “Repent and believe.” Instead, He seems to communicate love, warmth, and sometimes a choice about returning.

I think the answer is simpler than we make it. Jesus does preach in these encounters. He preaches with His presence. His wounds say, “I died for you.” His open arms say, “You are welcome.” His holiness says, “I am not like you, and I love you anyway.” Miller suggested that NDEs function more like general revelation than like a sermon. Just as the heavens declare the glory of God without delivering a theology lecture (Psalm 19:1), an NDE encounter with Jesus invites a person to seek, to believe, and to follow, without laying out a systematic doctrine.⁴⁶

And often the encounter does exactly that. People come back hungry for the Bible. They want to know who this person was. They start going to church. They ask questions they never asked before. The encounter opens a door. What they do with it is the rest of their story.

F. Conclusion and Pastoral Application

Here is what the evidence shows.

Jesus appears in near-death experiences at a rate that cannot be explained by chance, culture, or projection. About one in five NDErs reports meeting Him. Fewer than one in a hundred reports any other named deity. Even people who do not expect Him sometimes encounter Him.

The encounters carry consistent identifiers: the wounds of the cross, immediate recognition, a presence that is both holy and tender, and lasting fruit that looks like the Christian life at its best. The scholarly data supports the frequency. The Gospel accounts explain the character. And the fruit test that Jesus Himself taught lines up with what researchers actually observe in the lives of experiencers.

None of this replaces Scripture. It never could. An NDE is not a new Bible. But it may be real-world evidence that confirms what the Bible has always said. Jesus is alive. He is kind. And He meets people at the threshold of death with the same love He showed to tax collectors and sinners on the dusty roads of Galilee.

If you have lost someone you love and you wonder whether they saw Him at the end, I cannot tell you for certain. I can tell you that many people do. And I can tell you that the Jesus they describe sounds very much like the One we meet in Scripture: arms open, wounds visible, love in His eyes, and not a trace of the cruelty that the world sometimes teaches people to expect from God.

If you are facing your own death and you are afraid, let me say this plainly: the Jesus of these reports is the Jesus of the Gospels. And the Jesus of the Gospels said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6, ESV). He also said, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). That invitation stands. It stood in the first century. It stands now. And it seems to stand at the very edge of death.

Take the comfort. Hold the caution. Test every experience by His Word. And trust that the One who made you, body and soul, will not lose you when the body lets go.