One reason people believe that the soul or spirit goes on living after a person dies is because of what is referred to as “near death” experiences. In these experiences, people who have clinically “died,” or been close to death, have seen what they report as the afterlife. There are a number of explanations why this could happen, and near-death visions can come from God, demons, or our own minds.
God can and does raise the dead, and although there is no record of a “near death” experience in the Bible, it is possible that a person would die and God both raise him from the dead and give him a vision of part of our glorious future life. God has given people visions of the life to come. Abraham, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Paul, and John are some of the people who were given extraordinary information or visions about the future life. So, it is quite possible that some of the people who have had “near death experiences” have had God-given visions of the next life to help them and others overcome their fear of dying and encourage them concerning the Hope. The mistake these people make is that they assume they would go to this future place right away. But the vision of God never promises that. The vision John had of the future that he wrote in the book of Revelation seemed very real to him, but he did not experience it the moment he died, John is dead and his vision is still future.
Another reason people could have “near death” experiences is due to demonic visions. Demons can give people hallucinations and visions, and it makes perfect sense that they would do that as part of their overall agenda to promote that people are not actually dead when they die. Also, part of the Devil’s agenda is to make God seem cruel and thus cause people to misunderstand God, or be afraid of Him, or even ignore the things of God altogether. Some of the more terrifying visions of hell that some people claim to have seen clearly contradict the loving nature of God. The Bible describes Gehenna as a lake of fire into which the unsaved are thrown and then burn up, not as a multi-level torture chamber.
Still another reason some people have “near death” experiences is simply due to how the mind works. We are all familiar with the “dream-like” state that can occur to a person just before they fall asleep or just when they are waking up, at which time the mind can blend thoughts and dreams, and thought-images can seem very real and yet not be.
Most people have ideas about the next life that have been implanted in their minds from their religion or movies, books, or just the culture they live in, and it is reasonable that many times these would surface if the body was close to death or the mind thought death was imminent. We have instruments that can measure the activity of life in a person, the electricity the body produces, brain wave activity, etc., but no scientist would say that our instruments are sensitive enough to pick up the exact moment of death—they are not that sensitive. So, a third cause of “near death” experiences is simply the mind imagining those things at a time when it is not fully capable of separating fact from fiction, imagination from reality.
It is also important to note that not one person in the Bible who was raised from the dead said anything about the afterlife. This includes people who had been dead for hours or days such as the Shunammite woman’s son (2 Kings 4:35), the man from Nain (Luke 7:15), the synagogue leader’s daughter (Mark 5:42), or Lazarus, who had been dead four days (John 11:39, 44). If they experienced anything good or bad after they died, it surely seems they would have talked about it. The fact that they did not talk about what they experienced, combined with the fact that no one asked them about it, is good biblical evidence that nothing happens in death—no thoughts or experiences—there is just the absence of life (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
Living as a Christian in this World 