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It's Live in the Bream with the host of Fox News Sunday, Shannon Bream. All right, this week on Live in the Bream, a fascinating book and author. I cannot wait for this conversation. If you know anything about his books...
He is the bestselling author of Imagine Heaven, which has now sold more than a million copies. So he's spent some time on the New York Times bestseller list, and he's there again with a new book, Imagine the God of Heaven. Longtime pastor, speaker, author, John Burke, thank you for joining us on Live in the Marine. Thanks so much for having me on the show, Shannon.
There's so many things I love about your story and about this book in particular and Imagine Heaven. But let's start at the beginning because you were a former sort of agnostic. You were an engineer, a very logical thinker, probably not spending a whole lot of time thinking about near-death experiences or heaven. But then your father was dying from cancer and someone pointed you in the direction of these stories. How did that happen? What did it trigger for you?
Yeah, I actually saw the book that someone had given him and it was the very first research on near-death experiences that that coined the term near-death experience, which for those who don't know that's that's I studied mainly people who have clinically died their heart stopped beating. They have no brainwaves.
And and yet they come back talking about a life more real than this one in a place more beautiful than this one. And in many cases, in the presence of this God of light and love who is personal. And anyway, I picked this up and I start reading it. And I was an agnostic at the time, you know, thought Jesus was a legend. And there probably is no God because nobody had answers for me. And I am very analytical. I want I want to know, well, how do you know?
And I read it in one night and I said, oh, my gosh, like this could be evidence. And I wasn't convinced. I was still skeptical, but I but it opened my mind. And I started studying the Bible. I started studying other religions. I was trying to figure it all out.
And anyway, yeah, over time I did. I went from a career in engineering into ministry. But over the last 35 years, I've studied well over a thousand of these near-death experiences. And my curiosity has always been around showing how the commonalities of these experiences align with what God's been revealing through the scriptures all along.
And the thing is, and I want to get into some of the specific stories from your new book, but what you found is a lot of times across cultures, across different religions or people who have no faith or no religious faith, they often describe very similar accounts of what they experienced when they had these near-death experiences. You and I talked a little bit before we began recording about, I have a relative who died a couple years ago. She knew she was dying.
and she was younger and had an aggressive cancer and she was a christian she had faith in all the promises of the bible but i know when you're confronted with death you really have to dig into things and your faith she loved your book imagine heaven to the point where it gave her an excitement about going to heaven about the relief that would be there the overwhelming love
the technicolor beauty that we find hard to have words to describe here on earth. It was such an encouragement to her that she shared it with everybody and called people together to say, listen, I've been digging into these near-death experiences. This book has given me
A hope and joy about knowing my life here on earth is going to be over. But there is something else that I firmly believe in and know that I'm going to spend eternity with God. I mean, that's really powerful that you can put into books that kind of hope for people.
Well, and it is that and it's nothing new. And that's what I'm trying to show. It's it's exactly what God has been telling us through the Bible all along. But I found that people don't have a very good imagination when it comes to the life to come.
They somehow think it's going to be less real than this life when what near-death experiencers that I've interviewed tell me is the opposite. They say, no, this is like the shadow. That's like the real thing. And I use an analogy that, you know, imagine if we're living this three-dimensional experience on a flat black and white two-dimensional painting in your living room.
And so you only have up and down and side to side. You don't even have the third dimension of in or out, and you only have black and white. Death means separation. So at death, your two-dimensional self is peeled off that painting, brought out into this three-dimensional room that was always there. Your life was contained within it, but you couldn't even imagine it because it was in a dimension beyond yours.
And then imagine experiencing three dimensions of color, but being pressed back into life in the two-dimensional black and white world and having to describe three dimensions of color in two-dimensional black and white terms. That's what these people are trying to do. And so what I'm trying to show is that the Bible has been telling us what the life to come is going to be like. I mean, Jesus talked about it a lot. It's going to be life.
more experience of life than this one has been. And God is more wonderful. You know, that's really what I'm trying to do in the new book. In the new book, I interviewed 70 people from every continent, and they are consistently experiencing the same God. And he's the God of the Bible.
I believe that really that God in our day is raising up these testimonies to show he's always been the God of all nations. There's only one.
And all the way back in Genesis 12, he said he raised up Abraham and Sarah to bless all the nations, right? And that's the story of the prophets, that he's going to send a Messiah who is going to be the Savior of the whole world, all nations. And then at the very last book in Revelation, John is taken to heaven. And in Revelation 7, he sees people from every nation, tribe, nation.
people, group, and language there around the throne of God, worshiping God. So this story is not new. It's not new to NDEs, to near-death experiences. But what I believe God is doing is he's putting color on the black and white words of scripture. Because when you read what the scripture says about the character of God, and that's what I'm really trying to show
in this new book, Imagine the God of Heaven, that, you know, this has been God's story and his heart and his love for every person. But we all put God in a box, you know, and those of us who know Jesus, we think we know God, but the truth is all of us, we put God in a box because we're three-dimensional creatures. We're finite and God's not limited. And so,
I'm trying to help people stretch their imagination to see that God is far more beautiful and mysterious and glorious and powerful and sovereign in control than we've ever imagined. But he's also far more relatable and personable and even humorous and fun. No one gets you more. No person on earth understands you better or is more for you.
And so when you see that that's what the scriptures have said all along, but then you hear through the eyes of these 70 people what that's like to actually be in his presence. It's pretty mind blowing. You know, and that's my goal is really to change people's
heart toward God that they would see, oh, I can trust him. They would fall in love with him and trust him fully.
Yeah, you talk about how in these experiences people will describe being in the presence of an overwhelming light but something very warm.
they're having a conversation with what they understand to be God that nobody's, you know, he's not walking up and saying, hi, I'm God, introducing himself. Like they're in his presence and he is giving them a chance. They're having a conversation. Obviously all these people have come back. Um, and for many of them, you know, there are a lot of us, you just are kind of skeptical. Like, I don't know what to think about these experiences, but many of the people you talk to, um,
These are not people that can profit off the story. If anything, for many of them, they're professionals. It can cost them. I mean, people think they're wacko and they try to tell them to stop telling the story. I mean, they're risking their own credibility. But again, across continents, across cultures, across religion, no religion.
people very much describe these same stories and experiences. One of the stories that is early on in your book, I don't want to give away too much because I haven't finished it, but every story has got so much meat to it. You could just sit there with that story.
but is about a woman who has to have this surgery. It's kind of expedited. She's in there. She describes leaving her body on this journey and how she can tell people, and this is multiple stories are like this. They can tell people what was said in that operating room as they're watching. People they didn't know would be in the operating room. They can identify that they're there, a joke that they told, the instruments that they used.
But this particular woman has a story about a ceiling fan. Tell us what happened.
yeah and shannon you know this is in in chapter two of the book i go into the 10 points of evidence that convinced me when i was skeptical that this isn't just hallucination or endorphins in the brain it's not anoxia you know lack of oxygen it's not a trick the brain's playing and that's because you know and i go through 10 points of evidence but the first is
uh, veretical observations while they're out of their body. They say when they die, they leave their body, but they still have a spiritual body just like Paul talked about, which by the way, I think Paul might've had a near death experience in Acts chapter 14. He was stoned to death in Lystra, dragged out of the city and left for dead. And then he gets back up and he says in, in, in second Corinthians 12, uh,
14 years ago whether i was in my body or out of my body i don't know because we still have a spiritual body i was taken up to heaven and shown and or you know heard and shown things inexpressible and so when people are out of their body initially they can see and hear things that they shouldn't have been able to because again they have no brain waves where is it recording if we're just if all our memories are just you know physical and this one woman
Mary, who was, yeah, she died giving childbirth. She's up above her body. She travels to this place of exquisite beauty. She's in the presence of this God of light and love. She feels forgiveness. She never wants to leave his presence. But he tells her, no, your son is going to live and he needs you. You must go back for him.
And as she's coming back to her body, she passes through the ceiling. Sounds wild, I know, but there are hundreds and hundreds of these studied. And on the top side of the ceiling fan, she sees a red sticker.
She goes back into her body. She's trying to tell the doctors and nurses this crazy wild experience she had. They think she's psychotic. And then she gets one nurse's attention by telling her, here's what you said and here's what you did. And she said, look, I'll prove it to you. Go get a ladder. Look on the top side of the ceiling fan. There's a red sticker and here's what it says on it. And she did. And it all checked out. Now there've been studies done.
There have been studies done of observations by near-death experiencers that can be verified. Dr. Janice Holden did a study and found that of all the observations they make, 92% are completely accurate. Another 6%, most of their observations were accurate. Only 2% were inaccurate. Turned out to be one NDE patient.
And so you're talking incredible, verifiable observations. That's what for me grounded this in our reality. But then, you know, the second thing I go into is when blind people have a near-death experience, they can see and they see the same things and report the same things. You know, like Debbie is one of the stories I have in Imagine the God of Heaven.
She's blind. She had had a seizure and dropped dead on her bathroom floor. She's up above her body and she's seen and she's trying to adjust to it. And her mom comes in. And when she was resuscitated, she was able to tell her mom not only what her mom looked like first time she had seen her, obviously, but also that you were wearing a dark robe. And she said, yeah, I was in my black bathrobe.
Well, then Debbie travels again to this place of exquisite beauty. And what's fascinating is blind people describe this place not unlike Earth, you know, mountains and trees and flowers and forests. But like you said, colors beyond our color spectrum and light that comes out of everything. And the light is not like the sun. It's like life and love and light.
which I point out that Isaiah, the Jewish prophet in Isaiah 60 said that, and Revelation 21, it says there's no sun or moon in heaven because the glory of God is its light, and the nations will walk in that light. And that's what blind people report. Well, where would they have heard that? And then Debbie meets her grandmother on the other side,
Who she had never met in life because her grandmother died when she was an infant. And when she comes back, she's describing to her mom what her grandmother looked like. And her mother said, well, yeah, that's exactly what she looked like. But when she was 30 years old, which is another commonality.
And so you have verifiable observations. You have people who are blind seeing the same things. You have people meeting people on the other side that they didn't know or didn't even know were dead, like little children who meet their siblings who died and were miscarried, but they didn't even know they had a sibling. And then their parents confirm it. So I go through, you know, these 10 points of evidence. That's three.
that say, no, this is something that we should pay attention to. And what I'm trying to do is make sense out of it because I believe God is giving these testimonies all over the globe
for such a time as this you know when else could we hear from people all around the globe like santosh a manufacturing engineer i interviewed who you know he thought he was going to come back as another life form but he said that's not what happened i experienced this brilliant god of light who is love i fell in love with this god and then he takes him to this place i don't have time to get into the whole thing but he santosh perfectly describes to me the
the holy city of God, this high walled city, he said, gorgeous inside mansions, these buildings of other worldly building material. And he's a manufacturing engineer. So he would notice that. And he said, I counted 12 gates. And he said, your eyesight there is, it's like telescopic. It's like you can see for thousands of miles. That's common. That's what they say commonly, which again, I point out is in the Bible.
Revelation 21, John is up on a very high mountain, looking, describing the same city that Santosh described, but he's able to read the names on the foundation stones from far, far away. How?
Well, again, like Paul said, our bodies are buried in weakness, but they're raised in dunamis, in power. And that's what near-death experiencers say. We have not like five senses, but like 50 senses and incredibly heightened senses.
So Santosh describes, you know, he describes this holy city of God. He comes back seeking God and he reads the Bible and says, everything I experienced was in there. And he becomes a follower of Jesus. Another woman, Bibi in Tehran.
She died of a heart attack. She's expecting judgment to come from the Imam Ali. That's what she eyes believe is going to happen. And she's expecting a horrible judgment. And instead, this same God that Santosh describes comes and says to her, I am he who is.
That's she told me it in Farsi, in Persian, and the English guy translated it. I am he who is. But that's exactly what the same God of light said to Moses on Mount Sinai. I am I am he who has always existed. I am the I am.
And so you've got people, I've got another guy in Rwanda, a PhD psychiatrist, Dr. Bell Chung in Hong Kong, a professor in Australia. I mean, all over the globe, they are experiencing and describing the same God. He's not just a force. He's light and love and life, but he knows you intimately.
And what's fascinating is that they say things like, you know, he is the love that I've always wanted. And in his presence, I never wanted to leave. And he knows you so intimately. You get a life review many times. It's a commonality. And because time doesn't work the same way. It's like Peter said in second Peter three, eight to the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. Well, that's what they say.
And they feel this unconditional love, even looking at their life, the good and the bad. They feel this unconditional love and support from God who's trying to help them see. And they come back consistently saying God is love and how we love one another, how we treat one another matters most to him because he shows them the ripple effect from person to person to person of our kind and unkind actions. Yeah.
And don't we all have both? Well, we do. And I was going to say in this book gives us hope that we know that there is a holy God that we believe as Christians. We cannot, you know, connect with him and be in relationship with him alone.
for eternity for the rest of our lives without that intercession of christ the sacrifice of christ and him bridging that gap but these stories about god's presence and how it is loving it is accepting it is wanting as you said to be for us to be cheering for us um there's just so much in this book imagine the god of heaven the previous book imagine heaven both by john burke
This book is subtitled Near-Death Experiences: God's Revelation and the Love You've Always Wanted. So if you're a skeptic, if you're a believer, if you're searching,
I think you will just be wowed by this book and the people of all different backgrounds and faiths. Like I said, no faith, different stories, different professions. Step forward to tell these stories. John, thank you for cataloging them in both of these books. And I can't wait to finish this because every book I find, I mean, every page I find, I'm sort of like gasping with just the beauty and just the miracles of this book. Thank you so much for putting it into the world.
Well, thank you, Shannon. Listen ad-free with the Fox News Podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. The Fox News Rundown. A contrast of perspectives you won't hear anywhere else. Your daily dose of news twice a day. Featuring insight from top newsmakers, reporters, and Fox News contributors. Listen and subscribe now by going to foxnewspodcast.com.