A Ramble about NDEs

      Recently, I've been watching Near Death Experience compilations from a YouTube channel called "Love Covered Life." The gal who runs it tends to be more progressive, if not outright New Age, but I respect her intentions and her Bible knowledge. These compilations are clips from interviews she's done with folks who have had a near death experience and can remember what happened. None of them know or have ever met each other to my knowledge. But the reason why she put together these compilations of clips was to demonstrate the consistency of their experiences, all of which had been tailored to the individual, yet all of which shared remarkably the same features regardless of who was experiencing it, what age they were at the time, or what their background was. All experienced a "life review" through the eyes of the people they interacted with. All experienced God in roughly the same way, as pure and indescribably love and light. Most experienced meeting Jesus and conversing with Him, regardless of their denominational or religious background, and at least one experienced hell before being rescued from it by crying out to Jesus (this last one I have seen his entire interview).
      "In the mouth of two or three witnesses let everything be established" is what the Scriptures say. There were roughly five to ten people represented in these compilations of interviews. And, as I mentioned before, they did not know each other and had never met each other. It is for these two reasons that, I believe, these accounts cannot just be dismissed.
      What strikes me most about these accounts, which I cannot ignore, is how much their descriptions of God and creation's relationship to Him during their experiences coincide with what I have written over the last several years, even though I have only just seen them (I did see Howard Storm's interview before I left California, but that was the only one). What I wrote came from prayer, study, and my own personal experiences with Him. What also strikes me is how much the Spirit within me agrees and refuses to let me argue with them, but rather gets me to see and hear past the surface words to the commonalities of what they're describing.
      These people weren't theologians. The majority of them that I observed had no axe to grind. They were just ordinary, random people observing and trying to describe what they saw and heard according to how they understood and perceived it. But what they saw and heard profoundly changed them and their beliefs from the time they died to the time they woke up again. The aforementioned Howard Storm, who was the one who initially had a hellish experience before being rescued, was an atheist professor visiting Paris at the time. He is now a UCC pastor and has been for the last thirty years.
      One might say, from a conservative Christian perspective, that God will never contradict His word. And yet in His word He very much does contradict what He has previously said when the need has arisen. One glaring example is Peter's vision of the sheet with the unclean animals on it. Peter knew God had commanded in the Torah not to eat them, and yet here he was being commanded by God to kill and eat them as a metaphor for including the Gentiles into the Church. Jesus' contradictions of Sabbath keeping, one of the Ten Commandments itself, were legendary. So, where these accounts might seem to contradict at least traditional theology if not His actual word directly, I think this must be kept in mind as well as taking the accounts themselves with a grain of salt, discerning what is being embellished and what is not. And where the account descriptions become nearly identical is where I sit up and pay attention. Where they start matching the conclusions I've already been led to is where my attention becomes like a hawk's.
      Like it or not, these experiences are data, and potentially valuable data once the personal inconsistencies are sifted out. And for that reason, I don't think they can just be dismissed. Theology as a science, like any science, must continually evolve in its understanding as more data about its subject is acquired. As you get to know a person, either previously held misconceptions about that person are changed or you become disillusioned. Where God is concerned, either you allow Him to change your misconceptions about Him, or, stubbornly holding on to them, you make those misconception an idol, and refuse to know the real Person in favor of a God of your own creation.