Chapter 19

What to Expect When You Die

A Careful, Honest Picture of What Scripture Teaches and What the Evidence Suggests

An Honest Picture

Ellen asked me a question one afternoon that I had been waiting for. We had spent weeks together by then. We had talked about her husband's cardiac arrest. We had talked about what he saw and felt and how it changed him. But this time her voice dropped a little, and she asked the thing she had been afraid to say out loud.

“What will happen to me?”

Not to her husband. Not to the patients in the studies. To her. When her own heart stops and her own breath runs out, what comes next?

That is the question this whole book has been building toward. And I want to answer it as honestly as I can.

I will not offer you a tourist brochure of heaven. No serious writer can promise exact details about what the next world looks like. But I will not hand you empty words either. Between the clear teaching of Scripture and the careful research we have walked through together, we can say more than most people expect. We can draw an honest picture.

Here is my promise for this chapter. I will tell you what we can say with good confidence, and I will mark it plainly. I will tell you what the evidence suggests but does not prove, and I will mark that too. And I will tell you where the honest answer is “we do not know for sure,” because the Bible and the research both leave some questions open. The line between confidence and humility matters. I do not want to give you false certainty, and I do not want to give you empty comfort. What I want to give you is a grounded hope.¹

The Dying Process

The first thing to say is that dying is often more peaceful than we fear.

Most of us picture death as violent. We imagine gasping for air or crying out in pain. Movies and television have trained us to expect the worst. But the testimony of doctors and nurses who care for the dying, and the accounts of people who came back from the edge, tell a different story.

In Jeffrey Long's large database of near-death experiences, peace and love are among the most commonly reported features. When Long asked thousands of people who had come close to death whether they felt peace, more than three out of four chose the strongest answer: “incredible peace or pleasantness.”² More than half reported incredible joy.³ These are not the feelings of a body in agony. They are the report of a soul being welcomed.

I do not want to overstate this. Not every NDE is peaceful. In my doctoral research, about 80 percent of remembered NDEs were positive, while roughly 20 percent were distressing.⁴ We will look at the sober side of that picture later in this chapter and in Chapter 22. But the weight of the evidence is clear. For most people, the experience of crossing the threshold is marked by calm, not by terror.

Sometimes the peace begins even before the heart stops. Hospice workers and family members have watched the dying turn toward something no one else in the room could see. They call out to people who have already died. They smile. They reach upward. These are called deathbed visions, and they have been reported for centuries across cultures.⁵ We will look at them carefully in Chapter 26, but what matters here is the pattern they reveal. The dying process often starts with comfort, not with dread.

Cardiologist Michael Sabom observed something similar from the clinical side. He found that the peace of the NDE may actually have life-saving implications. Laboratory research has shown that psychological stress increases the risk of fatal heart rhythms, and that moving a stressed subject into a calm state dramatically lowers that risk. Sabom concluded that the serenity of the near-death experience may “calm the heart” to facilitate successful resuscitation. The peace, in other words, is not just a feeling. It may be part of how God sustains the dying person at the threshold.³⁴

Nurses and doctors who work in hospice care tell the same story. Many patients grow calm in their final hours. Some who had been anxious all their lives grow still. The fear that gripped them for months falls away, and what takes its place is not numbness but something closer to anticipation. I have talked with families who were startled by this change. They expected the end to be hard. Instead, it was quiet. Their loved one seemed to be seeing something the rest of the room could not.⁴¹

Bruce Greyson, one of the most respected psychiatric researchers in this field, found that this peace stays with people for the rest of their lives. In a study of more than four hundred NDErs, he and psychologist Marieta Pehlivanova found a clear pattern. Meeting a divine being was associated with greater acceptance of death and less fear of dying. Seeing a brilliant light, feelings of joy, and meeting deceased loved ones all pointed the same direction. The experience left people not reckless about life but deeply unafraid of death.⁴²

This fits what we would expect if Scripture is true. The psalmist did not say, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will be terrified.” He said something very different.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4, ESV)

The valley of the shadow is real. Death is real. But the believer walks through it, not into it. And the Shepherd is present. What the dying report, again and again, is exactly this: a presence, a peace, a sense of being met by someone who loves them.

Bruce Greyson recounts the words of a woman named Sarah, who died clinically during childbirth and was resuscitated. Years later, she wrote that dying was “beautiful, peaceful, and graceful.” When she was later diagnosed with cancer, she was never afraid. She had already been dead, and she knew what was there. Another NDEr, George, became a hospital social services director and told Greyson he used his own experience to comfort dying patients. “If this is death,” he said, “then I would have to say, ‘Why fear it?’”⁴⁹

The Separation

At some point, the soul leaves the body.

I put it that simply because I believe it is that simple. Not painless, not casual, but real. The Bible teaches that a human being is a body joined to a soul, and that at death the two come apart. The soul goes on. The body returns to the earth. As we saw in Chapter 3, this is what Genesis means when it says that Rachel's soul departed as she was dying (Genesis 35:18). It is what Jesus meant when He told the thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). His body stayed on the cross. He went somewhere. The “He” who went is the soul, the person who is more than flesh and bone.⁷

The separation does not destroy you. That is the first thing to understand. John Cooper, one of the most careful biblical scholars to study this question, put it well. He argued that the biblical picture of human nature is “holistic in life and dualistic at death.” In this life, body and soul form one deeply joined whole. But they can come apart. And when they do, the person survives.⁸ Paul said it plainly: to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:6–8, ESV)

Paul did not call death the end. He called it a change of address. He was so sure of this that he told the Philippians he was torn between staying alive and departing to be with Christ, which he said was “far better” (Philippians 1:23).⁹ Think about that. If death meant ceasing to exist, even for a moment, those words make no sense. If death meant a long, blank sleep, then dying would not be better than staying to help the churches Paul loved. His confidence only works if he expected to be awake and aware and in the presence of Jesus the moment his body died.

And that is exactly what near-death research shows. The very first thing most NDErs report is the sense of leaving their body. They look down at themselves on the hospital bed. They watch the doctors working. They hear conversations from the hallway. In Jeffrey Long's database, 74.9 percent of NDErs said they experienced a separation of consciousness from their body. And remarkably, 74.4 percent reported being more conscious and alert during the experience than in ordinary waking life.¹⁰

My own doctoral research confirmed this pattern. In more than a thousand cases, patients described things they could not have known from their physical position. Those descriptions later checked out as accurate.⁴³

Sabom spent years considering what these out-of-body accounts mean medically and theologically. He came to a careful conclusion. The near-death experience, he wrote, seems to occur while the soul is separating from the body in the dying process. Death, he argued, is best understood as a process, not as a single moment. He pointed to Genesis 35:18–19, where Rachel's death was said to occur “as her soul was departing”—not when it departed, but as it departed. The Hebrew word implies a gradual departure, not a sudden switch. During this dying process, Sabom suggested, a brief in-between state may exist where the soul is separating from the body but has not yet fully departed. If the soul returns, the person revives. If it continues to depart, death occurs.⁴⁴

I want to pause here and answer a fair objection. Some people point out that a near-death experience is not the same as death. The person came back. They were near death, not beyond it. So how can we say that NDEs tell us what actual death is like?

This is a good question. Cardiologist Michael Sabom wrestled with it for years. He had always been careful to call these near-death experiences, not after-death experiences. Then he studied the case of Pam Reynolds.¹¹ During her surgery, her heart was stopped, her body was cooled to 60 degrees, the blood was drained from her brain, and every monitor showed flat lines. By every medical measure, she was dead. And she came back with verified details of what happened while she was gone.

Here is what I think we can say honestly. We know from cases like this that consciousness survives even the most extreme shutdowns of the body. We know from Scripture that the soul departs the body at death. Whether an NDE gives us a full view of the other side or only a glimpse from the doorway, the fact that the soul stays awake when the body stops is no longer just a doctrine. It is supported by evidence.

And for the believer, the separation need not be feared. It is a passage, not a cliff.

I sometimes hear people say, “But what if it hurts?” What if the moment of separation itself is painful? What if the soul tears away from the body the way a bandage tears from skin?

Nothing in Scripture or in the research suggests this. The dying do not describe the separation as painful. They describe it as effortless. One moment they are in their body, the next moment they are above it, watching. NDErs often say they felt lighter, freer, and more fully themselves than they had ever felt in their physical bodies. The separation is not a wound. It is more like a release.³⁸

Sam Parnia, who has led the largest hospital studies of cardiac-arrest awareness, found the same pattern. His patients reported that their selfhood and consciousness felt entirely separate from their body, and that this realization came with peace, not panic. One woman who survived a violent assault said she felt “strangely happy” while watching from above, with no pain, no fear, and no concern. Another survivor put it simply: “I was still alive, but I didn't have my body. I know for a fact that I am, that I exist.” The self that survives is not a fragment. It is the whole person, minus the weight.⁴⁵

The Encounter

After the separation comes what many NDErs describe as the most important moment of the whole experience. They meet someone.

The reports vary in their details. Some describe a brilliant light that radiates love and warmth. Others describe a figure they recognize instantly as Christ. Still others see deceased family members or radiant beings they understand to be angels. But the common thread is an encounter with a presence that is powerful, personal, and overwhelmingly loving.¹²

Long's research produced a striking finding about this encounter. When his survey asked NDErs directly whether they had encountered any awareness that God or a supreme being exists, 45.5 percent said yes, and virtually none said they had encountered awareness that God does not exist. That percentage is remarkable. Awareness of God during an NDE is more common than the tunnel, more common than meeting deceased loved ones, and more common than the life review. Long himself was surprised. No prior NDE study had reported such high numbers.⁴⁶

In my own research, about 20 percent of NDEs included a recognizable encounter with Jesus. That number is striking for two reasons. First, it is far higher than the percentage involving any other named religious figure. Less than 1 percent of the cases I studied involved any other named deity.¹³ Even people who practiced other faiths and expected to see their own tradition's god typically met “light and love” instead. Second, the encounters with Jesus were remarkably consistent in their character. He was described as warm, welcoming, and kind. He did not condemn. He did not lecture. He received people with open arms.

I know this raises a question. If Jesus is loving and welcoming in these encounters, does that mean there is no judgment? Does His kindness prove that everyone gets a pass?

No. And this is an important place to think clearly. As we explored in Chapter 14, an NDE is not the person's final death. They are being sent back. Jesus was consistently compassionate toward sinners in the Gospels, with the notable exception of the self-righteous. His warmth toward an NDEr is exactly what His character would predict. It does not prove that final judgment is unreal. It shows that the Jesus of the Bible and the Jesus of these encounters act the same way.¹⁴

J. Steve Miller, who has done some of the most careful work on how NDE reports compare to Scripture, found that this picture holds up under study. The NDEs do not teach that judgment is abolished. They simply show a Savior who meets people with love before they are ready to stand before the bench. Miller concluded that there is very little in the best NDE research that contradicts Christian teaching. Rather, the reports confirm the big themes: God is real, the afterlife is real, love is the highest priority, and Jesus is present.¹⁵

What can we say, then, about the encounter? For the believer in Christ, the evidence and the Scripture point in the same direction. The first thing you meet on the other side of death will not be darkness or silence. It will be a person. And for those who belong to Him, there is good reason to believe that person is Jesus.

I want to meet another fair objection here. Some critics say this is all too speculative. They argue that we cannot build a picture of what death is like from a few thousand reports, many of which were collected under less-than-perfect conditions. The cases are old, the memories are shaped by culture, and the whole field is soft.

I understand this concern. And I agree that caution is needed. But the objection does not do justice to the strength of the evidence. When I scored more than five thousand cases in my doctoral research, the pattern was not vague. Core NDE features stayed consistent across seven decades and across cultures. The stronger the medical documentation, the more detailed and accurate the reports became, not less.³⁵ This is not what we would expect if NDEs were just dreams or cultural imagination. It is what we would expect if the soul is real and if God meets it at the doorway of death.

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. (John 14:1–3, ESV)

The Intermediate State

After the separation and the encounter, what comes next? Where does the soul go?

The short answer, from Scripture, is that the believer is with Christ. Paul said it directly: to depart this life is to be “with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). Jesus told the dying thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The writer of Hebrews speaks of “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” gathered in the presence of God (Hebrews 12:23). These are not future hopes. They are present realities. The dead in Christ are alive, aware, and in His company right now.¹⁶

We explored this in depth in Chapter 4, so I will not repeat the full case here. But I do want to say clearly what the intermediate state is and what it is not.

It is not heaven in its final form. The believer who dies today enters what theologians call the intermediate state. They are with Christ, yes. They are conscious, yes. But they do not yet have their new, resurrected body. That waits for the final resurrection, when Christ returns. As Cooper put it, the soul after death is in a real but “incomplete” condition. It is alive and at peace, but it is waiting for something better still.¹⁷

This matters because some people think dualism means we do not need the body. That is not the Christian hope. The Christian hope is not a soul floating forever in a cloud. It is a real body, raised and made new, joined again to the soul it was separated from. Paul said the perishable will put on the imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:53). The intermediate state is the waiting room, not the final home.

But what a waiting room it is. To be “with Christ” is not to be lonely or lost. The believer is in the best company in the universe. Paul called it “far better” than the best this life has to offer. The souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11 are awake, speaking, and asking questions. They are aware of what is happening. They are dressed in white robes. They are told to rest a little longer. They are not sleeping. They are not extinct. They are alive and known and cared for.¹⁸

The intermediate state also helps us understand what near-death experiences show. Most positive NDEs describe exactly the kind of picture the Bible paints: a conscious person, freed from the body, entering a place of light and love and recognition. Long's survey found that 42.1 percent of NDErs reported visiting beautiful or distinctive locations, and 51 percent said they entered “a clearly mystical or unearthly realm.” Their descriptions were strikingly consistent. They reported vivid colors that do not exist on earth, landscapes of extraordinary beauty, and a sense of being in a place more real than anything they had known in their physical lives.⁵⁰ The features are not a perfect match for every doctrine. NDEs are partial glimpses, not theological textbooks. But the core of what people report matches the core of what Scripture promises. The soul survives. It is aware. It is met by Someone.

This should give comfort to the grieving. If you have lost someone you love, someone who trusted in Christ, the Bible and the evidence together say the same thing. Your loved one is not gone. They are not floating in a void. They are not asleep. They are alive, awake, and in the presence of a Savior who knows them by name. The separation is real. The grief is real. But it is a temporary separation, not a permanent one. The day is coming when the body will be raised and soul and body will be joined again.³⁶

The Sober Side

I cannot finish this picture without telling you the hard part. Not everyone who dies steps into light.

The Bible is clear that judgment is real. The writer of Hebrews says, “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Jesus told the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in which the rich man found himself in Hades, in torment, while Lazarus rested in comfort at Abraham's side (Luke 16:19–31). The two were separated by a great chasm. The rich man was conscious. He remembered his life. He begged for relief.²⁰

The NDE evidence confirms this pattern. About one in five remembered NDEs is distressing. Some describe a void of darkness and loneliness. Others describe terrifying figures or a sense of being trapped. Still others describe an experience that begins with peace but turns into something frightening. These are not pleasant to read about, and I will not treat them lightly. We look at them carefully in Chapter 22.²¹

What I want to say here is that the comfort of this chapter is not cheap comfort. It is not a blanket promise that everyone who dies will be fine. The Bible does not say that. The evidence does not say that. There is a sober side to death, and honesty requires facing it.

At the same time, I want to be careful about something. The distressing NDEs I studied appear to match what the Bible calls Hades, the intermediate realm of the dead, not what it calls Gehenna, the final judgment. As we saw in Chapter 18, those are not the same place. Hades is a waiting room. Gehenna is the courtroom's sentence. A distressing NDE may show us the doorway to Hades, but it does not show us the final state of anyone. No one in an NDE has died their final death. They have been at the threshold, not beyond it.²²

The sober side is important for another reason. Some readers may have heard about NDEs that promote strange teachings: that all religions are the same, that there is no judgment, that sin does not matter. Those teachings are real, and they show up in about one in ten NDE reports in my research.²³ They must be tested. Not every experience, even a genuine one, carries a trustworthy message. Real encounters can be wrapped in false interpretations. A being of light can be something other than Christ. These dangers are the subject of Chapter 20 and Chapter 21, and I encourage you to read them before you settle on any view.

Comfort and caution belong together. A faith that offers only comfort without warning is a faith that has stopped reading its Bible. But a faith that offers only warning without comfort has forgotten the Shepherd.

The Open Questions, Held Lightly

I have tried to be honest throughout this book about what we know and what we do not. This section is where that honesty matters most.

What Exactly Will We Experience?

The Bible tells us that the believer will be with Christ. It tells us that the intermediate state is conscious and personal. But it does not give us a detailed map of the journey. Will there be a tunnel? Will there be a life review? Will we see our loved ones immediately, or only at the resurrection?

I do not know. Neither does anyone else. NDEs offer suggestive clues, but they are partial glimpses from people who came back. The full experience of death may be different in ways we cannot yet see. This is a place to hold things loosely. The core promise is solid: to be away from the body is to be home with the Lord. The details around that core are less certain.²⁴

The Perimortem Question

A related question is whether what NDErs report happens at the moment of dying (perimortem) or after the person has crossed into the next world (postmortem). This matters because if NDEs are only perimortem, they tell us about the threshold but not about the room beyond it. If they are postmortem, they may tell us something real about the intermediate state itself.

I lean toward a mixed answer. The early stages of an NDE, the out-of-body experience and the tunnel, are probably perimortem. They happen as the body shuts down and the soul begins to separate. But the later stages, the encounter with light, the meeting with deceased relatives, the conversations with Jesus, may cross the line into the postmortem. Cases like Pam Reynolds, where the brain was completely silent and the blood had been drained from her head, suggest that consciousness can function even when the body is, by every measure, dead. If the soul is real, then there is no reason to think it stops working at the point of clinical death. It may begin a new kind of life.²⁵

But I hold this lightly. The research cannot settle it with certainty. What matters for the reader is this: whether the NDE shows us the doorway or the first room, it shows us that the soul survives. That is the point.

The Final State of the Lost

The hardest open question is what finally happens to people who never repent. I want to be straight with you about where I stand, and fair to views I do not hold.

Christians have held three main positions on this. The traditional view, often called eternal conscious torment, teaches that the lost suffer forever in hell. This view has deep roots in church history, and many good Christians hold it today. The conditional immortality view, sometimes called annihilationism, teaches that the lost are ultimately destroyed after judgment. God does not keep them alive to suffer endlessly. He brings them to an end. Edward Fudge, among others, has argued this case with careful attention to the biblical text.²⁶ The third view, which I will call a Christ-centered biblical universalism, holds the hope that God will, through Christ, eventually win every human heart. Not by force, not by setting aside the cross, and not by saying that sin does not matter. But by the relentless, patient love of a God who does not give up.²⁷

I want to be honest. My own leaning is toward the third view, a conservative and Christ-centered hope that the love of God may finally reach everyone. But I hold this with an open hand. I find conditional immortality a live and respectable option, and I would rather be wrong toward mercy than toward cruelty. What I reject is the traditional picture of eternal conscious torment, which I cannot reconcile with the character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.²⁸

Here is the important thing. This book does not depend on your answer to this question. Its load-bearing claims stand on any of these views. We are body and soul. The soul survives death. The dying often glimpse the next world. Those glimpses must be tested by Scripture. Whether you hold to eternal torment, to conditional immortality, or to the hope of final restoration, these four claims still stand. The comfort and the caution of this book do not change with your eschatology.²⁹

Comfort Grounded in God’s Character

I want to end this chapter the way I end most of my conversations with people who are afraid of death. Not with a list of evidence. Not with a proof text. But with a person.

The deepest comfort I can offer you is not that Pam Reynolds saw her grandmother. It is not that 30.7 percent of the cases in my study showed strong evidence that the soul was working apart from the body.³⁰ It is not even the promise of Paul, though that promise is solid and true. The deepest comfort is the character of the God who made you.

You are not an accident of chemistry. You are a creature made in the image of God, body and soul (Genesis 1:27; 2:7). God did not give you a soul as an afterthought. He breathed life into you. And the God who breathed you into being does not abandon what He has made.

When Jesus stood outside the tomb of Lazarus, He wept (John 11:35). He was not weeping because Lazarus was gone forever. He knew what He was about to do. He wept because death was not supposed to happen. Death is the enemy. It is the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). And the whole story of Scripture is the story of a God who entered His own creation, took on a human body and a human soul, lived a human life, died a human death, and then rose from the grave to destroy death from the inside.³¹

This is not abstract theology. It is the anchor of everything I have written in this book. The reason the soul survives is not just because it is made of some special substance. The soul survives because God holds it. Paul named the worst enemies he could think of: death, life, angels, rulers, things present, things to come, height, depth, and anything else in all creation. None of them, he said, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38–39).³²

I have sat with families in hospital rooms. I have held the hand of a dying person. I have watched the monitors go flat. And I can tell you that the single most important thing I have ever said in those moments is this: God has not left the room. The God who breathed life into your loved one is the same God who will receive their soul. The Shepherd does not drop His sheep at the edge of the pasture.³⁷

That is what grounds us. Not a theory. Not a feeling. A person. The God who made us body and soul, who joined Himself to our nature in the incarnation, who died and rose to defeat death from the inside, and who promises to come again and raise the dead. This God is not distant from the dying. He is closer than breath.

What can you expect when you die?

If you belong to Christ, you can expect to be met. The evidence points to it. The Bible promises it. The Shepherd does not leave His sheep at the border of the valley. He walks through it with them.

You can expect to be awake and aware. You will not float in nothing. You will not sleep for ages. You will be present, conscious, and in the best company you have ever known.

You can expect to be loved. Not with a vague, impersonal warmth, but with the specific, personal love of a Savior who knows your name, who gave His life for you, and who promised to come back for you.

And you can expect that this is not the end. The intermediate state is a waiting room, not a final home. The soul that survives is waiting for a body that will be raised, changed, and made new. The Christian hope is not escape from the body but reunion with it, in glory.

I want to be clear about this because it matters. Some people hear about the soul surviving death and think the body must not matter. That is not the biblical picture. God made us body and soul, and He intends to restore both. The resurrection is not a nice thought tacked onto the end of the story. It is the climax. Paul said the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:52). The body that was buried in weakness will be raised in power. The body that was buried in dishonor will be raised in glory.³⁹

So the soul that survives death is not settling for less. It is waiting for more. And the One it waits with is the same One who rose from the dead Himself, in a body that could eat fish and walk through walls. He is the guarantee that the rest of us will follow.⁴⁰

For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” (1 Corinthians 15:53–54, ESV)

That is the picture. Not a guess. Not a fantasy. A grounded hope, built on the character of the God who meets us at the edge of life. And it is enough.

Ellen asked me what will happen to her when she dies. I told her the truth. I told her she will be met. She will be known. She will be loved. And the One who meets her will be the same One who met her husband, the same One who kept His promise to the thief on the cross, the same One who wept at the tomb and then called the dead man out by name.³³

She smiled. Not because every question was answered. But because she knew whose hands were holding her.