Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You

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It's impossible not to be pulled in by the uplifting and joyful tone and Burke's overwhelming excitement about just how great heaven is going to be. Burke is an engineer and a former skeptic and he seems to have written this book with the skeptic in mind, meaning he answered a lot of my (skeptical) questions without seeming defensive (the whole church experience there seems very skeptic friendly, actually).

Each of these stories are set beside the many verses throughout scripture that talk about Heaven and also the author’s own thoughts about what we could possibly expect to experience there. We live far apart (about 700 miles) and I am disabled and unable to travel that distance without a lot of pain. The author goes with the assumption that because these people saw something, therefore it must be believed. I could see her in perfect health, with all the music which she loved so much and envisioning what she was probably seeing and doing, gave me a peace about her death that I don't think I would have had if I hadn't read this book. We are Born Again Christians, my dad was a pastor for many decades before he had a stroke and couldn't preach any more so we believe in Heaven and Hell.

So Burke is not checking his sources for truthfulness, but he is checking for scriptural conformity.

He knew there were colors everywhere, but he couldn’t distinguish what shade they were since he’d been born blind. Brad Barrows, whose heart stopped due to severe pneumonia, said that in heaven, he was no longer visually impaired, and the first thing he saw was a massive field with indescribable brightness.We have two great booklets key to your running of the mission, available in Resources once you Log In. I think he does a good job of presenting the data/findings in an unbiased way, and he makes it very clear when he is speculating. John Burke's Imagine Heaven masterfully combines the surprisingly large amount of 'data' from interviews with people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) with 'data' from the Scriptures to create a remarkably believable picture of what life after death will be like. The fact that most of the testimonies the author used were from children and professional people helped to convince me. van Pommel’s study, he notes that individuals of different backgrounds and ages claim to have had very comparable NDEs.

Burke claims that no NDErs ever mentioned reincarnation, which I know can't be true because I've just finished an entire book about a Jewish woman who died and came back convinced of reincarnation: Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All.It is the first book I have read on the subject that attempts to reconcile some of the more well documented NDE experiences/books with what the Bible says about Heaven. It really does come down to the way Jesus simplified it for his followers: Love God and love people. Many Christians see NDEs as such, but contrary to their belief, these experiences are actually aligned with what is said in the scriptures. He also does a good job of at least touching on the Hell NDE and the different versions of that event. Since then, he has created many resources to share these insights and how they corelate to how heaven is described in the Bible.

Readers not only get a twisted, unbiblical picture of heaven; they also imbibe a subjective, superstitious, shallow brand of spirituality. In Imagine Heaven, he compares more than one hundred gripping stories of near-death experiences (NDEs) to what Scripture says about our biggest questions of Heaven: Will I be myself? It’s easy to “judge not” the hearts of those around us, while forgetting (or not even knowing) the gravity of the unending misery that awaits those who refuse to accept the free gift of salvation.

Look, I know the title is 'Imagine Heaven', but I was just not prepared for how often John Burke was going to exhort me to imagine heaven! I have always been fascinated with stories about people going to heaven and have several books written by people who died and went to heaven but this book is the piesta resistance as it it brings lots and lots of experiences of Heaven all together in one volume.