Chapter 13
When Your Loved One Was Not a Believer:
Hope and Postmortem Opportunity

Margaret came to see me on a Tuesday afternoon in late September. She was sixty-three years old. Her brother David had died six weeks earlier of a heart attack, sitting in his easy chair watching a football game. He was sixty-seven. They had been close in the way that siblings sometimes are after their parents die — each the other's last remaining witness to a whole childhood.

She sat in the chair across from my desk with her hands folded in her lap and said, very quietly, "Pastor, I need to tell you something, and I need you to tell me the truth. I haven't slept more than two hours at a stretch since David died. I keep opening my Bible and putting it down. I can't read it. Every time I open it I feel condemned for being comforted while my brother is — " she stopped. She couldn't say the word. She looked up at me. "While he is where I think he must be."

"Tell me about David," I said.

And she did. She told me that David was the funny one, the kind one. He was the brother who remembered every birthday. He sent her flowers when her husband died. He drove four hours in a snowstorm the night she called him crying about a diagnosis. He was, she said, "a better Christian than I am, except he wasn't a Christian at all."

David had gone to church until he was twelve. Then something happened — Margaret was never sure what — and he stopped going, and he did not go back. He told Margaret once, when she tried to talk to him about Jesus, that he had "tried it, and it didn't work." He was not hostile. He was not angry. He just was not interested. She had prayed for him for fifty years. She had sent him books he did not read. She had talked with him late at night on the phone about a hundred things, but never again about Jesus, because the one time she tried in their adult years, he had been so gently, firmly shut that she had never tried again.

And now he was gone. Gone with no deathbed profession. Gone with no last-minute phone call. Gone without, as Margaret put it, "saying the prayer."

"Pastor," she said — and here her voice caught — "I have been going to church my whole life. I know what the Bible says. I know Jesus is the only way. I believe that. I believe it with my whole heart. But if that means David is in hell right now, being tortured, forever, because he didn't say a prayer that I was never able to get him to say, I don't know how to keep believing. I love Jesus. But I loved my brother too. And I cannot bear this. I cannot bear it."

She began to cry. She had clearly been holding the tears back all week. She cried for a long time. I did not interrupt. When she could speak again, she said, "I need to know. Is there any hope? Any at all? Or am I supposed to just accept this and go on?"

This chapter is for Margaret. It is also for you, if you have lost someone who did not, as far as you know, place their faith in Jesus Christ before they died. It is the chapter this book most needs to exist. And the first thing I want to tell you, dear reader, is this: your question is worth asking. Your grief is real. Your love for that person is not a betrayal of your love for God. And there is more hope, grounded in Scripture itself, than most of us were ever told.

The Grief No One Talks About

In twenty years of pastoral ministry, I have buried a lot of people. I have sat with a lot of grieving families. And I can tell you without hesitation that this — the grief of the Christian who has lost someone they fear is not saved — is one of the most common griefs I encounter, and one of the least pastorally addressed.

Think about what Margaret was carrying. She was grieving her brother. That by itself would have been enough to knock her flat. But layered on top of that grief — thick and suffocating — was a second grief: the conviction that her brother was being actively, consciously tormented in a place called hell, and would be tormented forever, and that nothing anyone could ever do would change this. It was not just that David was dead. It was that David was, in her imagination, worse than dead. He was lost, and he would never be found.

That kind of grief has a name. Pastoral theologians sometimes call it "complicated grief" — grief that does not flow normally because something is blocking it. In Margaret's case, what was blocking her grief was a theological picture. And here is the hard truth most Christian grief books do not tell you: her theological picture may not have been quite right.

I want to be very careful here. I am not going to tell you that everyone is saved. I do not believe that, and Scripture does not teach it.¹ I am not going to tell you that your loved one is certainly in heaven right now. I do not know that. Neither do you. Anyone who tells you they know is telling you what they cannot know. But I am going to tell you that the picture Margaret was carrying — her brother immediately and irrevocably in hell, simply because he had not prayed a certain prayer before his heart stopped — is not the only picture Scripture permits. It may not even be the best one.

Most Christian books on grief, when they reach this question, do one of two things. Either they tell the bereaved what they want to hear ("Don't worry, I'm sure he made peace with God at the end"), or they tell them to stop asking ("God's ways are higher than ours; we must simply trust and not speculate"). The first answer is dishonest. The second is pastorally cruel. It takes a woman like Margaret, who has lived her whole life believing the Bible matters for real questions about real people, and tells her that on this one question — the question of whether her brother is eternally safe or eternally lost — she is to stop asking.

I refuse that counsel. The question of your loved one's eternal welfare is not a question you are forbidden to ask. It is, in fact, the question Scripture itself addresses, in passages many of us have never carefully read. The point of this chapter is to read them together, honestly, and to see what real hope the God of Scripture actually offers you.

What Scripture Actually Teaches — And Where It Is Silent

Let me start by being as honest as I know how to be. When I open the New Testament, I find some things taught with great clarity, and some things left unaddressed or only partly addressed. It is crucial for your grief — and for mine — that we do not confuse the two categories.

Scripture is clear that salvation is through Jesus Christ alone. Jesus says plainly, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Peter says, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Paul writes, "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). I believe every word of that. So does any faithful Christian. Your loved one, if they are saved, will be saved through Jesus and only through Jesus.²

Scripture is clear that not all will finally be saved. Jesus spoke of a narrow gate and a wide gate, and He said many enter the wide one (Matthew 7:13–14). Revelation speaks of a final judgment and a lake of fire (Revelation 20:15). I do not believe in a casual universalism that collapses judgment altogether. The Bible does not teach it.³

But here is what Scripture is much less clear about: when, exactly, the opportunity to respond in faith comes to an end. Most of us were taught, in various ways, that the moment of physical death is an absolute cut-off — that after a person breathes their last, the door is closed forever, and whatever state their soul is in at that moment is the state it will be in for all eternity. That is the picture many of us inherited. But when I sit down and ask, "Which specific Scripture teaches that the opportunity to receive Christ absolutely ends at the last breath?" — I find the answer surprising.

The one verse most often cited for this position is Hebrews 9:27: "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment." That verse is sometimes read as a cosmic buzzer: die, and immediately the verdict is sealed. But read it again carefully. The verse says that every person dies once, and after death there is judgment. It does not say the judgment happens five seconds after death. It does not say there is no opportunity between death and judgment. It simply establishes the basic sequence: life, death, judgment.⁴ When exactly the judgment occurs, and what happens between death and that judgment, the verse does not settle.

In fact, the New Testament itself suggests that the judgment referred to in Hebrews 9:27 is the final judgment at the end of all history, not a private verdict delivered in the first moment after someone's heart stops. Revelation 20:11–15 depicts this final judgment as a corporate event after the resurrection of the dead. Between physical death and that final judgment lies what the Church has always called the intermediate state — a conscious continuation of personal existence, but one that is not yet the final state.⁵ The judgment is real. The judgment is coming. But the timeline is not as airtight as many of us were taught.

I am not playing word games with a grieving sister. I am telling you what honest exegesis reveals. Scripture is less ironclad on the "door slams shut at death" view than most of us were led to believe. And when we realize that, other passages — passages most pastors have not been taught to preach — begin to speak with surprising force.

Postmortem Opportunity: A Careful Definition

The theological term for what I am about to describe is postmortem opportunity — literally, opportunity after death. Let me define it with great care, because precision here matters.

Postmortem opportunity is the view that God's offer of salvation through Jesus Christ does not come to a final, irrevocable end at the moment of physical death. It holds that God continues to love and pursue the unsaved after death with the same love He showed them during their earthly lives. It holds that every person who has not had a clear, genuine, unclouded opportunity to respond to the real Jesus will have such an opportunity — at some point during the dying process itself, during the intermediate state, or at the final judgment — and will be given a genuine chance to respond in faith.⁶

Notice what this view does not say. It does not say everyone is saved. It does not say faith in Christ is optional. It does not say the gospel proclaimed in this life is less urgent. It does not say anyone "earns" a second chance. What it says, and what it says only, is this: the door is not slammed shut by the mere fact of biological death. The window in which a sinner can turn to Christ does not close simply because the heart stops beating.

Why would we think this? Two reasons: the specific texts of Scripture that point toward it, and the character of God as Scripture reveals it. Let us look at both.

The Biblical Case for Postmortem Opportunity

1 Peter 3:18–22 and 4:6 — Christ Preaching to the Dead

The most important text here is 1 Peter 3:18–22, followed by 1 Peter 4:6. These are strange verses. Most pastors I know find them difficult and would rather skip them. But they deserve our careful attention, because they say something we are not used to hearing.

Read those verses again slowly. Peter says that between His death and resurrection, Jesus "went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison." He says "the gospel was preached even to those who are dead." What on earth does that mean?

I want to be fair. Scholars have read these verses in several ways. Some say the "spirits in prison" are fallen angels, not humans.⁷ Some say the preaching happened through Noah in his own day, not through Christ between His death and resurrection. These readings exist, and honest pastors have held them, and I am not going to pretend the passage is uncontested. But the most natural reading — the reading most common in the first several centuries of the Church — is that Jesus Christ, between His death and resurrection, entered the realm of the dead and preached good news to human beings who had died without hearing it.⁸

This is not a fringe idea. It is the reason the Apostles' Creed says Jesus "descended to the dead" (in Latin, descendit ad inferos). That phrase has been recited by Christians for over a thousand years.⁹ The New Testament scholar John Cooper, writing on this passage, notes that it is "a live possibility, defended by a number of scholars" that these are human spirits during the intermediate state and that Christ went to them to preach.¹⁰ Cooper himself is cautious — he calls the passage obscure — but the fact that a careful, orthodox, evangelical scholar takes this reading seriously is telling.

Read with 1 Peter 4:6 — "the gospel was preached even to those who are dead" — the passage becomes harder to dismiss. Peter is using language that cannot easily be squeezed into "the gospel was preached to people who are now dead but who were alive when they heard it." The natural flow of the Greek is that the gospel was preached to people who were dead at the time of the preaching.¹¹ That is a stunning claim. It is the claim that the gospel reaches into the realm of the dead.

Early readers of 1 Peter did not find this claim scandalous. They found it natural. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century — within living memory of Peter's disciples — simply assumed that Christ went to the dead and preached to them. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing later in the second century, did the same. The Shepherd of Hermas, a widely read early Christian text, presupposed the pattern as well.³⁹ It was only later, as Western theology tightened its grip on the idea of a single moment of irreversible verdict at death, that the postmortem-preaching reading was marginalized. The earliest Christians seem to have had an imagination more capacious than ours — an imagination in which the Son of God, having died, did not sit idle on Holy Saturday but went where the dead were and proclaimed His victory there.

For a grieving sister like Margaret — or for you — this matters enormously. If Christ Himself preached the gospel to the dead, then Christ's reach is not bounded by human mortality. The news of the Savior is not a news bulletin that stops broadcasting at the moment of a heart attack. And if that was true on Holy Saturday, then some form of the same principle may well remain operative now — that Christ, exalted and ruling over the dead as well as the living, continues to make Himself known to those who have passed from earthly life without a clear hearing of His name.

Ephesians 4:8–10 — The Descent

A second passage reinforces the picture. Paul writes in Ephesians 4:8–10 that Christ "ascended on high" and first "descended into the lower regions, the earth." The grammar is debated, but the tradition has often read this as referring to Christ's descent into the realm of the dead — the same descent the Apostles' Creed confesses.¹² Coupled with Peter's claim that Christ "proclaimed" to the spirits in prison, the picture comes into view: Christ's redemptive reach extends beyond the boundary of death itself.

Notice the movement Paul describes. Christ descended, and then He ascended. The ascent is the glory we usually preach — the victorious return to the right hand of the Father. But we often rush past the descent. Paul makes it part of the triumph. Christ went low, all the way low, into the realm of the dead; and then He rose and ascended to fill all things. That descent was not a detour. It was part of the way Christ became "Lord of all." And if Christ's lordship was won in part by going into the place of the dead, then the place of the dead is under His lordship still. No one is "too far" for Him to reach there.

Romans 14:9 — Lord of the Dead and the Living

Paul writes in Romans 14:9, "For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living." Think about what this verse says. Christ died not only to be Lord of the living. He died to be Lord of the dead — of those who have already passed out of earthly life. If Christ is the Lord of the dead — and Paul says He is — then His lordship is not merely the lordship of a judge who has finished His deliberations. It is the ongoing lordship of a living Savior over those who have gone before.¹³ What does a Savior do as Lord over the dead? Does He simply punish? Or does He continue to save those who will yet turn to Him?

This is not a minor point in Romans. Paul is writing about how Christians relate to each other over matters of conscience, and his underlying logic is that Christ owns us all — in life and in death. "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8). The deeper implication is that Christ's ownership, Christ's lordship, Christ's care does not end at the grave. He purchased the living and the dead. Both remain His. And what the risen Lord does with what is His is never finally to abandon it.

The Character of God

And then there is the argument from the character of God Himself, which for me may be the most powerful of all. The Bible says:

Consider what these verses say about God's heart. God is love. God desires all to be saved. God is not willing that any should perish. These are not throwaway lines. These are direct statements about what God wants for every human being He has made, including the one you are grieving.

Now think about what it would mean if the traditional view were right — that the moment your loved one stopped breathing, God's love and desire for their salvation simply switched off, like a light. God, who had loved them faithfully their whole lives, who had pursued them through every sunrise and every act of kindness they ever received, who had sent His Son to die for them, would suddenly stop loving them. The pursuit would end mid-stride, because their heart stopped. Can you make that picture fit with "God is love"?¹⁴

I cannot. And neither could some of the most careful theologians in the history of the Church. The evangelical philosopher Jerry Walls has argued at length that if God is the God Scripture says He is, then He cannot simply stop loving people at the moment of death; His pursuit of their salvation must be bounded only by their final, considered, fully informed rejection of Him — not by a biological event.¹⁵ James Beilby, an evangelical theologian at Bethel University, develops this case in detail in his book Postmortem Opportunity, arguing that the evangelical doctrine of God's universal salvific will requires some version of this view if it is to mean anything substantial at all.¹⁶

What Beilby and Walls and others are saying is not, "God owes everybody a second chance." They are saying, "The God the Bible reveals does not quit loving people when their heart stops. That is not the kind of God He is."

The Historical Case: Not a Novelty

I want to slow down here, because I can imagine a worry forming in your mind. You may be thinking, "This sounds new. This sounds like something modern evangelicals invented because we have gone soft on hell." I understand the worry. And I want to address it directly.

Postmortem opportunity is not a modern invention. It is, in fact, one of the older positions in the history of Christian theology. Several of the most important Church Fathers — the men who wrote the early creeds and defended the faith against heresy in the first centuries — taught some form of it.

Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215 A.D.) taught that Christ's preaching to the dead in 1 Peter 3 was real preaching — that God's redemptive reach extended into the afterlife for those who had not heard in this life.¹⁷ Origen (ca. 185–254), the greatest biblical scholar of the early Church, held something similar, though his views were broader and more speculative. Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–395), one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers whose teaching shaped the Council of Constantinople's definition of the Trinity, taught that God's salvific work continues postmortem. Gregory Nazianzen (ca. 329–389) and a number of other Eastern Fathers held related positions. These were not fringe figures. These were the theologians whose work shaped the creeds you recite on Sunday morning.¹⁸

And the Apostles' Creed itself — the oldest baptismal creed of the Church, recited every week in churches around the world — confesses that Christ "descended to the dead." That line is not decorative. It is a summary of the belief that the saving work of Christ extended past the grave.¹⁹

In our own day, a significant number of careful evangelical scholars have defended postmortem opportunity — not liberal scholars, but men and women committed to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. James Beilby (Bethel University) wrote the definitive evangelical treatment in Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Destiny of the Unevangelized.²⁰ Stephen Jonathan defended it in Grace Beyond the Grave.²¹ Jerry Walls, professor of philosophy at Houston Christian University, has argued for it in Does God Love Everyone?²² Clark Pinnock developed the view in A Wideness in God's Mercy.²³ Gabriel Fackre laid out a careful evangelical case in What About Those Who Have Never Heard?²⁴ Donald Bloesch, George Lindbeck, John Sanders, and Terrance Tiessen have all engaged the question with substantial seriousness.²⁵

This matters because many pastors, unfamiliar with this stream of the tradition, will tell a grieving parishioner, "I've never heard of this." They may even warn the parishioner away from it. I want you to know that unfamiliarity is not an argument. The view is ancient. It is biblically serious. And a significant minority of careful evangelical theologians, right now, hold it.

What This Hope Does NOT Mean

Before I tell you what postmortem opportunity means for your grief, I must tell you what it does not mean. Clarity here is essential, because this hope is easily misheard.

It does not mean universalism. Universalism is the view that all people will, in the end, certainly be saved. Postmortem opportunity does not teach that. It teaches that the opportunity to respond to Christ continues beyond physical death — but it does not teach that everyone who is given that opportunity will say yes. Some may finally, fully, and irrevocably reject Christ. Scripture's warnings of final loss remain.²⁶

It does not mean faith is optional. Salvation is still through personal faith in Jesus Christ alone. No one is saved apart from a genuine response of faith to the real Jesus. Postmortem opportunity simply holds that the window for such a response is not arbitrarily slammed shut by biology.

It does not mean the gospel in this life is less urgent. In fact, quite the opposite. If anything, postmortem opportunity reveals the depth of God's commitment to every human being's hearing of the gospel. God is so committed that He does not quit even when death interrupts. We should be that committed in our witness now.

It does not mean anyone "earns" a second chance. Grace is not earned at any moment — not in this life, not after death, not ever. What postmortem opportunity means is that grace, which never could be earned, is not arbitrarily cut off by biological death. God's grace continues to reach out because God's grace is what God is.

It does not mean that every NDE or deathbed vision you hear about is evidence of universal salvation. We will see in a moment that some near-death experiences suggest a pattern consistent with this hope. But no single experience proves everything, and Scripture remains the final authority.

What This Hope DOES Mean for You

Now: what does this mean for Margaret? What does it mean for you?

It means this. Your brother, your husband, your mother, your father, your son — whoever you are grieving — did not pass out of existence, and they did not pass out of the reach of God's love. They encountered, or will encounter, the real Jesus. Not a distorted image. Not a cartoon figure drawn by angry preachers or wounded parents. The real Jesus. The same Jesus whose eyes look on sin with grief but on sinners with love. The same Jesus who wept over Jerusalem. The same Jesus who, from the cross itself, said of the men driving the nails, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).

Whatever kept your loved one from faith in this life — whether it was hypocrisy they saw in the church, or intellectual objections they could never get past, or wounds from a religious parent that made the name of Jesus feel unsafe, or simple distraction, or suffering that made God seem absent — those obstacles will not follow them into the presence of the real Christ. They will stand before Him stripped of every lie and distortion. They will see Him as He is.

And then — this is what I most want you to hear — they will have a real opportunity to respond. Not a rigged choice. A real one. If they respond in faith, they are saved through Christ. If they, seeing the real Jesus fully and clearly, nonetheless finally reject Him, then Scripture's warnings stand, and their final state is theirs. But the God who loved them on earth did not stop loving at the grave. Their final destiny is in the hands of a just and merciful God whose love does not fail.

You do not know the outcome. I do not know the outcome. Nobody knows the outcome except God. But here is the truth you can rest in tonight: you know the Judge. And the Judge is love.

The Convergence of NDE Evidence

I want to pause here and tell you about a convergent line of evidence that, while it cannot settle the theological question, is striking when it is laid alongside the biblical argument.

Over the last fifty years, researchers have collected tens of thousands of near-death experiences. We looked at the phenomenon in a primer way in Chapter 4. Here I want to focus on one specific pattern within that research: the encounter of non-Christians — including atheists, agnostics, and people hostile to Christianity — with a being they later identify as Jesus Christ.

This pattern is not rare. Dr. Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist and the founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, has documented hundreds of such cases.²⁷ John Burke, in Imagine Heaven, narrates several in detail.²⁸ J. Steve Miller, whose careful research has examined the compatibility of these experiences with historic Christian teaching, notes that the presence of Jesus in NDEs is — across Christian and non-Christian experiencers alike — remarkably consistent.²⁹

Consider Ian McCormack. A young New Zealander who by his own account had become "almost a devout atheist," McCormack was stung by a school of box jellyfish while diving off Mauritius in 1982. One sting is lethal. He received four. In the ambulance, dying, he remembered something his Christian mother had said years before: that if he ever cried out to God, God would hear him. From hell — and he describes his initial experience in terms of darkness, malevolent voices, terror — he cried out. He says a brilliant light drew him out of the darkness. He met Jesus. He lived. He became a Christian pastor.³⁰

Consider Crystal McVea, a woman who had been raised in church but had drifted away and considered herself at best a non-practicing believer. During a surgical complication she had an NDE in which, by her account, she encountered Jesus directly and was radically transformed. Her life afterward was not a quiet return to normal. It was a redirection.³¹

These are not scientific proofs of postmortem opportunity. I will not overstate. No NDE, by itself, proves any particular theological doctrine. But what these cases do is offer convergent evidence. The biblical case says: Christ's saving reach extends past death. The research evidence shows: a significant number of people, at the threshold of death, encounter the real Christ — sometimes for the first time, sometimes in utterly unexpected ways, often when they are not looking for Him at all.³² The two lines of evidence are not the same, but they point in the same direction.

Howard Storm: The Case That Changes How You Think

Of all the NDE accounts I have read over the years, none has affected me pastorally like Howard Storm's. I want to share it with you, carefully and without embellishment, because it illustrates a pattern that matters for your grief.

Howard Storm was a tenured professor and chairman of the art department at Northern Kentucky University. By his own description, he was an atheist who scorned religion as intellectually beneath serious people. In 1985, during a trip to Paris, he suffered a perforated duodenum. Because of hospital scheduling issues, surgery was delayed. For hours he lay in agony, expecting to die. He says goodbye to his wife. He closed his eyes, expecting oblivion.

What happened next was not oblivion. He found himself, by his own account, standing beside his body — fully alert, more alert than he had been in life. When he could not get his wife's attention, he slowly realized he had died.³³

And then something went terribly wrong. He heard voices calling to him, beckoning him to follow. When he did, he ended up in darkness, surrounded by beings who became progressively more hostile. What he describes next is genuinely harrowing — an attack by these beings, systematic and cruel and sadistic. I will not recount the details. Storm himself has said he has spent years trying not to remember them.³⁴ He found himself broken on the ground of this dark place, convinced that he belonged there because of the life he had lived — self-absorbed, ambitious, proud, indifferent to the people around him.

And this is where the story becomes important for Margaret, and for you. As Storm lay there in despair, a few words from a song he had not heard since childhood came into his head. Three words: Jesus loves me. That was all he could remember. And it did something. He describes it this way:

I wanted it to be true that Jesus loved me. . . . I yelled into the darkness, "Jesus, save me!" I have never meant anything more strongly in my life.³⁵

What happened next, in his own words, was a light that began as a tiny speck and grew — "brighter than the sun." Out of the light came arms that reached down and picked him up. The presence held him, he says, as a parent holds a child. He began to weep uncontrollably. He felt himself healed of the wounds the beings had inflicted. And he experienced a love "far beyond words," a love that, he said later, "if I took all my experience of love in my entire life and could condense it into a moment, it still wouldn't begin to measure up to the intensity of this love."³⁶

Howard Storm survived the medical emergency. He returned to his body. He eventually left his tenured academic position and became a United Methodist pastor. His life did not slowly drift Christward. It was reoriented in a moment.

I tell you this story for one reason. Storm's pattern — despair, a cry for Jesus, a response from Christ, rescue, transformation — is a pattern the research sees again and again in the most extreme cases. It is, in a sense, a vivid picture of what the Christian tradition has always called metanoia (Greek: μετάνοια, meaning repentance or, more literally, "a changing of mind"). And here is the critical pastoral point: Jesus met Howard Storm in a place most of us would have said Jesus could not reach. Storm was not in church. Storm was not praying in any traditional sense. Storm was an atheist professor in the middle of what he could only describe as a taste of hell. And even there, Christ was available to him the moment he cried out.

I am not going to build a doctrine out of a single NDE. But I am going to tell you what Storm's account, alongside many others like it, has done for me pastorally. It has made me far more hesitant to declare that the moment of death is the moment the door closes. It has made me far more ready to believe what the character of God already told me: that the Jesus who sought the lost sheep in the Gospels has not stopped seeking them. He is still the Shepherd. He still goes where the sheep is.

A Word to the One Who Is Reading This Through Tears

I want to speak directly to you now, because I have been talking theology, and I do not want you to miss the pastoral point.

You have, perhaps, been carrying an image in your head since your loved one died. The image is this: they are in hell. They are conscious. They are in torment. They are in torment forever. Nothing will ever change this. And — this is the knife in your heart — they are there because they did not do something, did not say something, did not believe something, and now it is too late. You, meanwhile, are alive and can still say the right things, can still believe the right things, and so you will go to heaven. And every time you smile or laugh or accept comfort, you are betraying them, because while you are comforted, they are burning.

I want to gently, firmly, honestly tell you: this image may well not be true. Much of what we are certain about in this area, we are certain about with less warrant than we think. Scripture does not require us to picture your loved one being consciously tortured forever for failing to pray a specific prayer. That picture is not taught by the texts as clearly as you may have been led to believe. Many serious Christians — thoughtful, Bible-believing Christians — do not believe that picture is the right one. They hold other views that are faithful to Scripture and more consistent with the God we meet in Jesus Christ.³⁷

What I can say to you, with genuine pastoral confidence, is this: your loved one is in the hands of the God who is love. Whatever is happening to them now is happening under the care of the One who wept at Lazarus's tomb, who welcomed the thief on the cross, who said from the cross itself, "Father, forgive them." That God is not somebody else now. That God is the same today. He is holding your loved one now.

You do not know what they decided when they met Him. You do not know whether they are even past that decision yet. What you know is that He met them, is meeting them, or will meet them — and He meets no one with coldness. He meets no one with indifference. He meets them with the same love that drove Him to the cross in the first place. Your loved one is in His hands. Those hands have holes in them, because of your loved one.

You do not need to sentence your brother yourself tonight. You do not need to imagine him burning. You can entrust him — really, genuinely, without pretending — to the God you have trusted your whole life. That God has not changed just because your brother's heart stopped.

What to Do With This Hope

You may be wondering: so what? What do I do with this?

First: you can grieve without the burden of having sentenced them yourself. Many grieving Christians carry a crushing weight of self-blame: I should have said more. I should have prayed harder. I should have witnessed better. This weight can be paralyzing. The hope we have discussed does not eliminate your responsibility to witness — we should all witness, as God gives us words. But it does lift from your shoulders the belief that your loved one's eternal destiny was in your hands and that you dropped them. That was never yours to hold in the first place. Their destiny is in God's hands. It always was.

Second: you can keep praying. Prayer is not bound by time. Some Christian traditions — including many in the Eastern Church and in parts of the Anglican and Lutheran traditions — have always understood prayer for the dead not as earning salvation for them (it cannot do that) but as continuing love offered up to God on their behalf. This is not a doctrine I will press on you, but I want you to know that many serious Christians continue to pray for those they have lost, and that this practice has a long and respectable Christian pedigree.³⁸ If praying for your brother is a way of continuing to love him in God's presence, you have biblical and historical company.

Third: you can trust the God of love. This may be the hardest thing of all. You have been taught, perhaps all your life, that trusting God is what you do about your own soul. But here you are being asked to trust Him with somebody you love more than yourself, in a region you cannot see, with an outcome you will not know in this life. That is a different kind of trust. It is the trust Abraham was asked to exercise when he took Isaac up the mountain. It is the trust Mary was asked to exercise when she let them lay her son in the tomb. It is the trust of letting go, in the dark, into the hands that have never yet failed.

Fourth, and gently: you can let go of the picture that has haunted you. I know that sounds simple. I know it is not. Many of us have carried a specific, vivid mental image of hell — drawn from sermons, from art, from fear, from childhood warnings — and we have placed our loved one in the middle of that image. That image, whether or not something like it is biblically warranted for those who finally reject Christ, is not the only picture Scripture permits, and it is certainly not the picture Scripture requires you to hold for a specific person you loved. Entrusting your loved one to God is partly a matter of refusing to project that image onto them. You do not know they are there. Put the picture down.

Fifth: if you can, let yourself be comforted. This is perhaps the strangest counsel of all, because comfort can feel like betrayal when we fear our loved one is suffering. But listen to me: the God who is love does not want you to suffer as a substitute for them. The love you feel for them is real; that love is never wasted. But a life of self-imposed misery does not help them. If God chooses to give you a Tuesday afternoon of peace, or a sudden burst of laughter at a memory, or a dream that feels like grace, receive those gifts. God does not give such gifts cheaply. They are not signs that you have forgotten your loved one. They are signs that God has not forgotten you.

Margaret's Tomorrow Morning

I want to close this chapter with Margaret, who sat in my office six weeks after her brother's death.

When we finished talking that afternoon, I did not say everything I have said to you here. There would be time for that. What I said was simpler. I said, "Margaret, we do not know what happened when David stood before Jesus. We do not know that he is lost. The God you have trusted your whole life is the same God who held David while David was alive. That God did not stop loving David at the moment David's heart stopped. David is in His hands tonight. You can go home and sleep."

She did. Not all at once. The grief was still there. The uncertainty was still there. The ache of missing her brother was still there. All of that remained. But the particular horror — the image of David consciously burning while she was supposed to smile and go on — lifted. Enough for her to sleep. Enough for her to open her Bible without feeling condemned for being comforted.

A few weeks later she called me. She said, "I had a dream about David. He was just sitting at the kitchen table. He looked at me and smiled, and then he was gone. I don't know if that was anything or nothing. But I woke up and I felt at peace."

I do not know what her dream was. Dreams are not authoritative. Dreams are not Scripture. Dreams can be anything. But I will tell you what I told her: God is not stingy with comfort. He gives good gifts to His children. If He chose to give Margaret a small, quiet grace in the form of a dream, I am not going to explain it away. I am going to thank Him for being kind.

And I am going to pass that kindness on to you. If you have lost someone whose faith was not clear to you, the God who met Margaret tonight can meet you. He has not changed. His heart has not closed. The hope we have discussed is real, and it is the same hope He has been offering grieving sisters and brothers since the beginning. He is holding your loved one. He is holding you. Entrust them both to Him. You can sleep tonight.

For Your Reflection

These questions are not meant as a test. They are meant as a quiet invitation to sit with your grief and your hope. Take them slowly. You do not have to answer them all, and you do not have to answer any of them today.

1. Who are you grieving as you read this chapter? Let yourself name them clearly — first name, their relationship to you, one thing you loved most about them.

2. What picture of your loved one's eternal state have you been carrying? Where did that picture come from — a sermon you heard, a tract you read, a childhood Sunday school lesson, a fear you have never spoken aloud?

3. Are there parts of this chapter that trouble you? That comfort you? That you want to set aside and think about for a longer time?

4. What do you know about your loved one's honest encounter with the real Jesus? Not the distorted version they may have rejected, but the real Christ — the one who welcomed sinners and wept at tombs? Is it possible they never really met Him in this life?

5. Can you imagine entrusting your loved one, tonight, to the God who is love? Not solving the question. Not getting certainty. Just entrusting. What would it feel like to set them into His hands and leave them there?

6. Is there a prayer you have been afraid to pray for your loved one since they died? Consider bringing it to God simply and honestly. He can hold it.

7. If the God who is love is the God whose hands hold your loved one, what might it be right for you to do tomorrow morning?

For Pastors and Caregivers

Key pastoral observations. This scenario is extraordinarily common and extraordinarily mishandled. In my experience, a majority of grieving Christians who sit in front of a pastor within the first few months of a loss fall into one of three categories: (1) the loved one was a clear believer and the family needs comfort; (2) the loved one was clearly hostile to the faith and the family needs permission to grieve; (3) the loved one's faith was unclear, ambiguous, or explicitly absent, and the family is wrestling with fear about their eternal state. This third category is the largest in most congregations, and it is the one most pastors are least trained to address well.

Watch for the signs. The bereaved may not articulate the fear directly. They may say they are "struggling with sleep" or "having trouble reading the Bible" or "angry at God" without ever naming the underlying worry: I think my loved one is in hell. A gentle, open question — "When you lie awake at night, what is the thought that is loudest in your head about your loved one?" — will often surface this fear, if you ask patiently and then sit in the silence.

What to say. Here are specific sentences you can use, adapted to the situation:

"We do not know what happened in your father's final moments, or what has happened since. But we do know that the God who loved him while he was alive did not stop loving him when he stopped breathing. The One who pursued him for eighty years on earth is not the kind of God who quits."

"I cannot tell you your brother is saved. I wish I could. But I also cannot tell you he is lost, and I will not pretend to know what I do not know. What I can tell you is that he is in the hands of a just and merciful God. Those hands are very good hands."

"The traditional picture of hell as eternal conscious torment is not the only view faithful Christians have held, and the picture of an instant irrevocable door-slam at the moment of death is not as clearly taught in Scripture as we were sometimes told. Your grief does not have to carry the weight you have been trying to carry."

"You did not sentence her. Her destiny was never yours to hold. It is God's."

"You can keep loving him. You can keep praying for him, if that helps. Prayer is not bound by time in the way we are."

What NOT to say.

"I'm sure he made peace with God at the end." Do not say this unless you have real evidence. It is kind in intent but dishonest in substance, and it can do long-term damage to the bereaved when they later realize you were guessing on something this weighty.

"He's definitely in hell." Even if you hold a traditional view of hell, you cannot know this about an individual, and pronouncing it on a grieving family member is pastorally catastrophic. Do not do it.

"God's ways are higher than ours, so we must not ask." This is often delivered with piety and received as abandonment. It tells the grieving person that their deepest question is illegitimate. It is not. Scripture itself addresses it, even if imperfectly. Sit with the question rather than closing it.

"At least they had a good life." This minimizes. The worry is eternal, not temporal. A good temporal life does not answer the question.

"Think about it this way: you'll see them again someday." Without grounding, this is bypass. Do the theological work with them before offering the comfort.

Questions to ask. These can help the bereaved put words to what they are carrying.

"Tell me about your loved one. Who was he? What was he like?" This simple invitation often unlocks the grief that has been walled off.

"When you think about where your loved one is right now, what picture comes to your mind? And where did that picture come from?" The second question matters. Many fears are inherited, not thought through.

"What would it mean for you if your loved one was in the hands of a God whose love did not quit at the moment of death?"

"Is there something about your loved one you feel guilty for — something you think you should have said or done or prayed?" Self-blame is a major component of this grief; surfacing it is half the work.

"When you pray for your loved one now — if you do — what are you saying to God?"

Watch-outs and cautions. Several landmines are worth naming.

First, some pastors and Christian friends will actively work against the hope you are offering. They may quote Hebrews 9:27 with great confidence, declare the case closed, and accuse you of going soft on hell. Do not get drawn into polemic with them in front of the grieving. Your job is pastoral, not forensic. Let the theological conversation happen elsewhere. Stay with the bereaved.

Second, do not overpromise. Postmortem opportunity is hope, not guarantee. If you tip into universalism — "I'm sure he's saved, everyone ends up okay" — you will misrepresent the view you are offering and the Scripture that warrants it. Stay precise.

Third, be sensitive to the family's theological tradition. A family from a tradition that teaches a strict moment-of-death cutoff will hear postmortem opportunity as unfamiliar, even alarming. You may need to introduce it gently, perhaps by framing it as "a stream of Christian teaching that Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa held" rather than as a radical new idea. The pastoral goal is comfort, not theological conversion.

Fourth, be aware of your own comfort level with this material. If you have never been exposed to postmortem opportunity, read Beilby's Postmortem Opportunity before you need it in a pastoral setting. Do not wing it. This is tender ground, and the bereaved deserve a shepherd who has done the reading.

Fifth, do not confuse this hope with presumption about NDEs. Some experiencers will claim things about salvation that outrun Scripture. The chapter has drawn on NDE research carefully, as convergent evidence, not as authority. Keep Scripture as the final authority in your pastoral work.

Next steps. With the bereaved in the situation this chapter addresses, consider the following.

Offer to meet again in two weeks. This material needs time to settle, and the grief will surface new questions. Do not expect one conversation to carry the whole weight.

If the bereaved wants further reading, point them to James Beilby's Postmortem Opportunity for the most careful evangelical treatment, or to Jerry Walls's Does God Love Everyone? for a more accessible treatment. Howard Storm's My Descent into Death may also serve, with the caveat that it is personal narrative, not theology.

Consider connecting them to another member of the congregation who has walked this path — someone who has grieved a loved one whose faith was uncertain and who has found a settled place. Shared grief, carefully arranged, can do what a pastor alone cannot.

Finally, consider whether the congregation as a whole would benefit from a sermon or small-group study on this question. Many in your pews are carrying this grief silently. Addressing it corporately relieves burdens you do not know are there.

For Further Reading

James Beilby. Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Destiny of the Unevangelized (IVP Academic, 2021). The definitive evangelical treatment. Beilby, an evangelical theologian at Bethel University, lays out the biblical, historical, and theological case with exceptional care. If you read only one book on this topic, read this one.

Stephen Jonathan. Grace Beyond the Grave (Wipf & Stock, 2014). A careful, accessible defense of postmortem opportunity that engages fairly with the traditional view. Shorter and less technical than Beilby.

Jerry Walls. Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism (Cascade, 2016). Walls, a philosopher, makes the case from the character of God. Accessible and pastoral in tone, though from a particular theological angle.

Howard Storm. My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (Doubleday, 2005). Storm's first-person account of the distressing NDE that led to his conversion and eventual ministry. Narrative, not theology; handle as testimony.

John Burke. Imagine Heaven (Baker, 2015). Helpful for the convergent NDE evidence. Burke engages dozens of accounts with biblical framing, including Storm and McCormack.

Clark Pinnock. A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Zondervan, 1992). An older but still valuable treatment of the scope of God's saving purposes.