Chapter 25

Not Every NDE Is from God — Satan's Hijacking Strategy and the Need for Discernment

I want to begin this chapter with a confession. For most of this book, I have been making a sustained, careful case that near-death experiences are real, that consciousness can survive the death of the brain, and that the great majority of NDEs are remarkably consistent with the teaching of the Bible. I still believe all of that. But I would be a poor guide if I left the impression that every shining face on the other side belongs to a friend, or that every voice claiming to speak for God really does. The Bible itself will not let me say that. And neither, frankly, will the NDE evidence.

The thesis of this chapter is simple, even if living it out is hard. While most NDEs appear to be genuine spiritual experiences consistent with biblical teaching, the Bible warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, and Christians must exercise careful discernment — recognizing that demonic elements can infiltrate, distort, or even hijack otherwise genuine near-death experiences. We are not free to be naive. We are also not free to be dismissive. We are called to test, weigh, and judge — patiently, biblically, and humbly.

The Spiritual World Is Not Uniformly Friendly

Jesus once described two very different visitors to the same flock. "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy," He said. "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). Notice that both figures are spiritual. Both are unseen. Both gain access to the sheep. The difference is not their visibility but their purpose. One is for life. The other is against it.

That is the world we live in. The biblical writers never describe the spiritual realm as a single, undifferentiated cloud of love. They describe a battlefield. There is the Holy Spirit, and there are unclean spirits. There are angels who serve God, and there are angels who fell. There is the still small voice of the LORD, and there are "doctrines of demons" (1 Timothy 4:1). If we expect that the moment a person crosses the veil they enter a zone where deception is impossible, we are not getting that picture from Scripture. We are getting it from somewhere else.

So if God is using NDEs to wake people up to His reality — and I think He is — we should fully expect Satan to try to corrupt that channel.¹ Satan has corrupted prayer through false prayers, prophecy through false prophets, worship through idolatry, and Scripture itself through twisted readings. There is no reason to think NDEs are the one form of revelation he would leave alone.

Satan's Strategy from the Garden to the Present

To understand how the enemy works in the NDE space, it helps to go back to the very first chapter of human deception. Genesis 3 establishes the pattern. God had given Adam and Eve one clear command. Then a serpent appeared in the garden with a small, slippery question: "Did God actually say…?" (Genesis 3:1). He did not deny God outright. He did not tell them God was a fraud. He simply took God's words and bent them — just slightly — until they pointed in a different direction.

Shaun Tabatt, in his book The NDE Conspiracy, argues that this is still Satan's playbook. Satan rarely needs to invent a brand-new lie. He prefers to take what God is doing and twist it just enough to confuse. Tabatt writes that the enemy is "attempting to hijack many of these near-death experiences and related accounts to deceive people and lead them toward anything and everything other than the God revealed in the Bible."² The conspiracy, on Tabatt's reading, is not that NDEs are fake but that some of them are being interfered with.

I find this framework helpful, because it explains something I could never make sense of otherwise. Why are so many NDEs so beautifully Christian — full of love, light, life review, and even Jesus — and yet some of them come back with messages that flatly contradict the Bible? Tabatt's answer is that with NDEs, the enemy does not have to fabricate the whole experience. He only needs to inject a few false elements into a genuine one. A 95% true NDE with 5% demonic distortion can be more dangerous than a 100% counterfeit, because the 95% buys credibility for the 5% lie.

When Demonic Influence Is Explicit: The Bryan Melvin Case

Sometimes the demonic element in an NDE is unmistakable. Tabatt tells the story of his friend Bryan Melvin, a self-described militant atheist who died after contracting cholera. Melvin's experience began in what felt like a familiar landscape — a hill, a valley, a house resembling the home he grew up in — and then a crowd of cheerful people came up the hill to meet him. They smiled. They slapped his back. They welcomed him "to paradise."³

But something was off. Melvin noticed that some of the welcomers were people he knew were not actually dead. One of them appeared as his mother, and he knew his mother was alive. He said so out loud: "You are not my mom. My mom's not dead. You are not dead." At that moment the friendly faces began to morph in front of him. Their eyes turned reptilian — what Melvin describes as "alligator eyes with yellow irises." The whole welcoming committee surrounded him. Melvin started calling on the name and title of Jesus, and the demons could not hold him.⁴

Tabatt makes a sober observation about this story. What if Melvin had been resuscitated before the masks slipped? He would have come back convinced that he had visited heaven and been welcomed by loved ones. He would have spent the rest of his life telling that story — and the next time he died, he would have walked into the same trap with a smile on his face. The deception was already in motion before discernment kicked in.⁵

I want to be careful here. The Bryan Melvin case is dramatic, but I do not think it is typical. Most NDEs do not involve morphing demons. The point is not that we should expect every welcoming committee to be a counterfeit. The point is simply that this can happen, that the Bible warns us it can happen, and that at least one credible NDEr has reported it happening to him. We need a category for that possibility, even if it is not the norm.

When Demonic Influence Is Subtle: The More Dangerous Form

Open warfare is one thing. Camouflage is another. And honestly, I think the subtle form of demonic interference is the more dangerous one, because it does not announce itself. It can be hidden inside a beautiful, life-changing, even genuinely divine encounter.

Consider how this might work. A person genuinely meets God. The love is real. The light is real. The peace is real. But at some point in the experience a "message" gets delivered — "all paths lead here," or "you have lived many lives before," or "there is no judgment," or "you yourself are God." The core experience may be authentic. The theological content has been spliced in by a deceiving source. And because the love felt so unmistakably real (because the love was real), the experiencer trusts the package as a whole.⁶

Tabatt highlights another, even quieter pattern. He confesses, "I'm always nervous about NDE accounts where beings, especially those that the experiencer believes to be God, is vague and nondescript. If the being claiming to be God in the experience isn't readily identifying itself, I find it suspect."⁷ Why? Because the God of the Bible is forever introducing Himself. He says His name to Moses. He sends Jesus, the visible image of the invisible God. He is, in Tabatt's words, a God who "constantly goes out of His way to reveal Himself." A foggy, refusing-to-be-named "presence" that radiates feel-good energy is not yet anyone in particular. And a being who refuses to identify itself in our world is usually a being that has reasons for staying anonymous.

I want to handle this with care. There are NDErs whose theological vocabulary is small, who genuinely meet God but do not have the religious training to name what they have seen. That is a different problem, and I will treat it more fully in Chapter 26, where I work out the distinction between the experience and the experiencer's interpretation. The case I am making here is narrower. When the being itself is evasive — when "God" will not be pinned down, will not be confessed in personal terms, and seems to dissolve into a pleasant blur — that is a marker we should not ignore.

Markers of Demonic Influence in an NDE

So how do we recognize when something is off? Drawing from Tabatt's discussion, from Miller's analysis, and from older Christian writers on the discerning of spirits, I would suggest five practical markers. None of them is foolproof on its own. Together they form a useful screen.⁸

(1) Teaching that contradicts Scripture. If the message brought back from an NDE includes reincarnation ("you have lived many lives before"), pantheism ("you are God, everyone is God"), or universalism in its absolute form ("everyone goes to heaven no matter what"), or if it sidelines Jesus as one teacher among many, the message is incompatible with the Bible. The experience may still have had genuine elements, but that piece of teaching did not come from the God of Scripture.

(2) A divine being who refuses to be named. As mentioned above, the God of the Bible is a self-revealing God. A being who is permanently vague, who answers questions about its identity with riddles, or who insists on being called only "the Light" or "Source" without ever speaking the name of Jesus, deserves a second look.⁹

(3) Promotion of occult practices. If the experiencer comes back convinced that they should now consult mediums, channel spirits, develop psychic powers, contact the dead, or learn astral projection, that is a major flag. The Bible's prohibition of these practices is not arbitrary; it is protective (Deuteronomy 18:10–12). I will return to this terrain more fully in Chapter 28.

(4) Pride and self-exaltation. Genuine encounters with God in Scripture tend to humble people. Isaiah cries, "Woe is me!" Peter falls at Jesus' knees and asks Him to leave. When an NDEr returns convinced that they have been chosen as a special prophet, given secret knowledge unavailable to ordinary believers, or appointed to correct the church, something has gone sideways.

(5) Lasting confusion, fear, or moral decline. Jesus said, "You will recognize them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16). I will develop the fruit test in detail in Chapter 29. Here it is enough to say that good fruit and bad fruit are not the same thing, and they tend to show themselves over time.

The Biblical Basis for Discernment

I want to slow down and look at four passages that ground all of this. They are the load-bearing beams of the Christian doctrine of spiritual discernment. Any framework for evaluating NDEs has to be built on top of them.

The Greek verb here is dokimazete (δοκιμάζετε). It is the word a metalsmith uses for assaying gold — testing whether a sample is the real thing or a clever counterfeit. John writes this command in the imperative mood. It is not a suggestion. The default Christian posture toward spiritual experience is not skepticism, but it is not credulity either. It is testing. And John assumes that some spirits will pass and some will fail.¹⁰

The verb Paul uses is metaschēmatizetai (μετασχηματίζεται), which means to alter one's outward appearance, to put on a different form. Paul is not saying Satan can become good. He is saying Satan can look good. Light, love, and beauty can all be counterfeited. This single verse explodes the idea that "if it felt loving, it must have been God." Feelings are real, but feelings are not the test. The test is content and fruit.

Notice what Paul does here. He does not say, "If a being from outside this world appears to you, automatically accept what it says." He says exactly the opposite. Even if the being looks like an angel, even if it shines and glows and feels heavenly, if its message contradicts the gospel, reject the message. This is one of the most direct applications of biblical discernment to anything that calls itself a heavenly visitor — including, in our day, a being of light in an NDE.¹¹

Finally, Deuteronomy 13:1–5 gives the Old Testament version of the same logic. If a prophet performs signs and wonders but tells the people, "Let us go after other gods," he is to be rejected. The signs do not validate the source. The message does. This is exactly why NDEs cannot stand on their own as authority. A vivid experience, even a verified one, does not prove that everything said inside it was true. The content has to be tested against the rest of God's Word. I will develop this Scripture-based testing more fully in Chapter 29.

The Middle Way — Neither Gullible nor Dismissive

Robertson McQuilkin, the late evangelical theologian, said something I think about often: "It's easier to go to a consistent extreme than to stay in the center of biblical tension." Steve Miller quotes this line in the context of the NDE debate, and I think it lands.¹²

There are two extremes a Christian can fall into when handling NDEs. The first is naive acceptance — believing every NDE in every detail, treating every account as if it were Scripture. The second is reflexive rejection — slamming the door on the whole field as if every report were either fraud or demon. Both are easier than the third option, which is patient, case-by-case discernment.

I have come to believe that both extremes fail the people they are trying to serve. Naive acceptance fails the dying grandmother who needs to be told that her vision of Jesus really might have been Him. Reflexive rejection fails the same grandmother by telling her that what she saw was nothing, or worse, the work of demons. Neither one is the Bible's way. The Bible's way is to test, weigh, and decide — and to be willing to come to different conclusions about different cases.¹³

Michael Sabom, the cardiologist whose Atlanta Study has shaped so much of this book, modeled this middle way well. He is a committed evangelical, an ordained PCA elder, and a careful researcher. In Light and Death, he refuses both shortcuts. He insists that NDEs must be evaluated in the light of biblical truth, not the other way around — but he also refuses to throw out the data wholesale. The Bible is the rule. The NDE is the witness being examined.¹⁴

The Adjacent Doorways: A Look Ahead

Before closing, I want to flag one more thing Tabatt emphasizes, because it will become important in Chapter 28. Around the world of NDEs there are several adjacent doorways through which the enemy works overtime — psychics, mediums, past-life regression therapists, alien contact movements, and "spirit guide" channels.¹⁵ When grieving people come looking for hope after losing a loved one, these doorways are often the first ones offered to them, dressed up in spiritual language. The biblical witness against necromancy and divination is not prudish; it is pastoral. Those doorways are open, and what comes through them is not always what it claims to be.

I am not raising this to scare anyone. I raise it because the discernment we practice with NDEs is the same discernment we need with everything that surrounds them. NDEs do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in a culture saturated with spiritual messaging from every direction, much of it perfectly fine, some of it not. Christians do not get to opt out of evaluating the difference.

Conclusion: A Loving, Cautious Engagement

So let me bring the threads together. I am still convinced, on the evidence, that the great majority of NDEs are real spiritual experiences and that they overwhelmingly bear witness to a personal God of love who looks remarkably like the God of the Bible. Nothing in this chapter walks any of that back. What this chapter adds is a needed second voice — the voice of biblical caution.

The Bible insists that there is a real adversary who imitates the real God. He has been doing it since the garden. He is not above hijacking even genuinely good things to do it. To pretend otherwise is to pretend that we live in a different Bible than the one we actually have. But to flip the other direction, to look at the rich evidence for genuine encounters with Christ in NDEs and call them all demonic, is to insult the Holy Spirit and break the hearts of believers whose dying grandmothers truly did see Jesus.

The path forward is harder than either extreme. We listen. We weigh. We compare to Scripture. We watch the fruit. We affirm what is good. We name what is off. We pray for wisdom. And, most of all, we remember that the same Lord who said "test the spirits" also said, "Do not quench the Spirit; do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:19–21). That is the spirit in which I have tried to write this book, and it is the spirit in which I would urge any Christian to engage the NDE phenomenon: open-eyed, open-hearted, and tethered tightly to the Word.

In the next chapter we turn to a closely related but distinct question. What do we do when an experience itself looks genuine, but the experiencer comes back with theological conclusions that simply do not follow from what they actually saw? That distinction — between the experience and its interpretation — is one of the most important tools we have for engaging NDE accounts honestly. It is where we go next.