If you have heard or read about Near Death Experiences (NDE), you are most likely aware of how people experience a beautiful environment of love, deceased loved ones, enchanting music and unparalleled peace. These experiences are common, and they are commonly reported by those who experience them.
What is not so commonly reported is the experience of darkness, pain, fear and frightening beings. The people who do report them never want to return. They claim to experience Hell.
If you have been following this blog, I make a technical distinction between the place of the damned before Judgment Day and the place of ultimate separation from God after Judgment Day. I prefer to call the post-Judgment Day destination Hell. The Bible uses the words “Sheol” or “Hades” to describe what one would experience now. These people experienced Sheol, and didn’t like it.
The very fact that some experience Sheol casts a question mark on the experience of those who come back to life and report that they experienced a place of unconditional salvation for all. We will address this in my next blog entry. Also to be questioned is the prevalence of a Heavenly experience in the research of NDEs. It makes sense that people don’t want to report that they went to Sheol. In fact, the experience is so negative that it makes sense that people may block it out of their own memory.
Jesus says in my least favorite Bible passage:
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life and, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13-14)
This passage emphasizes the necessity of Jesus to a positive eternal outcome. He is the narrow gate (John 14:6) It also suggests that the prevailing experience of people should be of Sheol.
How do people describe their experience of Sheol? Here are some excerpts from the book, To Hell and Back:
The darkness of Hell is so intense that it seems to have a pressure per square inch. It is an extremely black, dismal, desolate, heavy, pressurized type of darkness. It gives the individual a crushing, despondent feeling of lonliness.
The heat is a dry, dehydrating type. Your eyeballs are so dry they feel like red hot coals in their sockets. Your tongue and lips are parched and cracked with the intense heat. The breath from your nostrils as well as the air you breathe feels like a blast from a furnace. The exterior of your body feels as though it were enchased within a white hot stove..
The agony and loneliness of Hell cannot be expressed clearly enough for proper understanding to the human soul; it has to be experienced.
Actually, I’ll pass. People do experience others being there. They even recognize some, but there is no positive relationships. Sheol seems to have a landscape, and according to the Bible story of Lazarus and the Rich Man, is divided into at least two sections by some sort of “chasm”. The one side being where the Old Testament righteous lived comfortably until Christ’s victory on the cross.
It is interesting to note that those who experience Sheol describe it in physical terms, as if they had a body. Our body is a proper part of this universe. It doesn’t go with someone to Sheol, but that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t have a body that is a part of Sheol.
The NDEs of Sheol that many people have is warning to us all. Even Bible believing Christians want to dismiss the existence of eternal judgment, and some do. The experience of those who go briefly to Sheol tells us that reading about it is as close as we want to be. It should be taken seriously.
afterdeathsite 