To the person who send me a link to Scott Drummond’s NDE video:

Thanks for sending me the video of Scott Drummond’s near death experience. His story is fascinating, especially the part where he describes the things he saw and the peace he felt.  I loved the description of the beauty he saw. I share your belief that in the end, all human beings will be restored to union with God and enjoy an eternal state of bliss with him, however, this video creates a concern for me that I want to share with you.

The thing that concerns me most is that people will get the wrong idea of what the soul experiences the moment after death. Now it is true that Scott did not actually die, so perhaps what he was getting was a foretaste of the goodness of the next life. Nonetheless, there are issues about our lives and what we will face when we cross over at the moment of death that are not discussed here.

To die is to enter immediately into the presence of Christ. It is to be with the One who said that He is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  It is to be with Him in the most intimate way possible. There is no place called “hell” which is separate from God. That is one of many  Roman Catholic myths, like their ideas of Purgatory and Indulgences to pay  your way out of Purgatory.  No, this is far worse. You see, all the falsehoods we have created for ourselves will be stripped away in an instant as we stand in the presence of the One who is Truth. We will see everything we have ever done, not in the  manner we fancy (i.e. we all think we are basically wonderful people who deserve heaven) but rather in the truth of every action we have ever done.  Were our lives lived in love or selfishness?   Such a sudden self-revelation is where things will become most uncomfortable for us.  Scott spoke of seeing the things he had done and he realized that he was living his life for Scott and not for others. Every human being who has ever lived will suffer some amount of remorse and repentance over the deeds we have done. I guess I wish that Scott had spoken more about repentance and urged people to really consider how they are living. There will be no getting around this time of judgment, no getting a pass on facing up to the deeds we did in life.  The light of Christ’s truth is brought to bear on the dark deeds in our lives. My fear is that people will gladly hear the first part of Scott’s experience, the beauty, and not heed the second part, where he confesses to his need to change his life.

I had a somewhat similar experience of enlightenment in a very, very small way thirteen years ago when I went to the Monastery of the Holy  Trinity in Butler, Pennsylvania to see if I should become a monk.  Karen had died the year before and with the kids all grown,  I was urged by friends to try out the life and see if I felt called to it. On the last nightof my stay, I had a deep interior illumination in which in my mind’s eye, I saw the many years that Karen and I had grown apart. I saw her sitting on the couch in our living room, alone, sick (dying actually), and lonely.  I saw myself doing what I did every night, going downstairs to my basement room and fooling around on my computer. In other words, living for and pleasing myself.  A deep realization of how mean and selfish I was enveloped me. I instantly knew that I showed no love to her at all.  I could have gone upstairs and just sat with her to keep her company, but in my deep selfishness, I only thought about me. Love would have cared for her. I cared only for me.

You cannot imagine, and I cannot explain to you in a way to make you or anyone else understand, the fire that entered my very being as the truth entered my soul and drove out all the false ideas of myself I had nurtured for so many years. Yes, fire is a good word. That is exactly what it felt like.  It was a burning, stinging, crushing weight of guilt and sorrow for what I had failed to do. I wanted it to end and it wouldn’t. It just kept getting more and more intense as the full weight of my guilt, my selfishness, my utter lack of kindness and love to another human being was revealed to me. It was the most horrible night I have ever had, a night of weeping and begging God to forgive me.

It was ….. hell.

This is exactly what hell is. Early Christian Fathers such as St. Isaac of Syria say the same thing:

For some, perhaps many, the return of Christ Jesus in glory will ignite a gehennic conflagration in the depth of their souls. Imprisoned in their egoism and malice, they will hate the Son and with all their might will attempt to extinguish the love born in their hearts. And so they will burn. They will know the torment of hell, a torment of love, guilt, and self-condemnation. Guiding Bulgakov’s reflections here are the homilies of St Isaac the Syrian, which he knew in Russian translation. He refers to the following passage several times: 

“I say that those tormented in gehenna are struck by the scourge of love. And how bitter and cruel is this agony of love, for, feeling that they have sinned against love, they experience a torment that is greater than any other. The affliction that strikes the heart because of the sin against love is more terrible than any possible punishment. It is wrong to think that gehenna are deprived of God’s love. Love is produced by knowledge of the truth, which (everyone is in agreement about this) is given to all in general. But by its power love affects human beings in a twofold manner: It torments sinners, as even here a friend sometimes causes one to suffer, and it gladdens those who have carried out their duty. And so, in my opinion, the torment of gehenna consists in repentance. Love fills with its joys the souls of the children on high.” (St. Isaac of Syria, Quoted in Bride, p. 466; emphasis mine) [1]

Even worse will it be for those who are not just stupidly evil, as I was, acting in ignorance of the truth, but those who run to embrace evil, especially after they have been rebuked for their behavior over and over again. I mention this because an awful lot of people will gladly embrace the idea of an all-accepting God and not feel a need for change in their lives. Let me see if I can make this clearer by speaking of people we know.

Think of Hugh Hefner. This is a man who lived his whole life in pursuit of one thing – fornicating with as many women as he could get between the sheets of his bed. Fornication was his whole life. It was the passion that consumed his thinking and desires daily. One day *BOOM* in a second of time he is gone. His soul goes to stand before Christ, still lusting after fornication.  In the presence of Jesus, he is offered the love of God, but because that love is not what he desires, it feels like a burning to him. In addition, he is made to see the reality of what he was his whole life. He intimately knows the truth — he abused women. There was no “love” to what he did. He was not some wonderful pioneer of sexual freedom. He was not a noble liberator of humanity, releasing them from the bonds of  puritanical slavery. He abused women, and  was responsible for millions of divorces, acts of adultery, the spread of venereal diseases, etc. Now, instead of lying to himself and fancying himself some great defender of “freedom,” he has come to know the truth, the full weight of what he has done to people. I am telling you that with all my heart,  I believe he is still going through the nightmare of the hell that he created for himself.  He is crying out for it to end but it will not end until the full measure of his sins is paid for by his acts of contrition and repentance before the God who is love.  Jesus said that the payment for our sins is not ended until every last farthing is paid in what we owe. (Matthew 5:26) 

The lust Hefner has will burn in him and not find satisfaction. It will continue to burn him until brought to an end by the cleansing fire of God’s love.  Then he will be free to love God, to be what he was created to be. But while he is going through that cleansing, it will be a torment to him that we cannot even begin to imagine.  The same is true with John D. Rockefeller, whose lust for money was insatiable. Every tyrant who every lived and killed millions in their lust for power and control is still suffering. I don’t know in what form it is taking, but the recently deceased Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being made to feel the full weight of the suffering of millions of unborn children that she condemned to death by not opposing abortion.  People need to hear the good news that God is love, but they also need a clear presentation of what both Jesus and St. Paul said – we will be repaid according to the deeds we have done in this life, whether good or evil.

We were created to become gods. [2] We were created to have union with God in love.  But for a soul that is filled with greed, lust, and selfishness, this is impossible. Love is a total self-giving to the other.  It is incompatible with selfishness, thus coming into the presence of pure, self-giving love is like running an AC electrical current through a DC motor. Have you ever seen what that does? The motor is tormented by a current it is not made to handle.  Sparks start flying, it smokes, things melt inside it. It would have to be rewired to accept AC current.  This is what hell in next life is all about – rewiring us to receive God’s love if we haven’t done it here in this life through repentance and embracing Christ in His  Church. There is no escaping it.  We will all be in the presence of  Christ our God.  For those who have repented in this life, it will be bliss.  For those who have ignored  Christ,  turned from His Church, defied His commandments, and practiced selfishness, it will be hell.  And it will be hell for as long as it takes for them to be cleansed of all that selfishness and turn to  Christ in repentance. For some, it is going to be a long, long, very long time.

The Good News for them….and for us….is that God is love – and He will not quit seeking until all His children are safely Home, even the most rebellious and wicked of them.

True Universalism deals with the fact that we must be changed in this life to be made fit to enjoy the next life. True Universalism has no fluffy idea of dying and then just waltzing into a life of sheer joy. That ‘s the image I got out of the video. Embracing sin changes our very being.  The Christian life is about working to make ourselves different. It is about becoming like Christ so that when we stand before Him, His embrace of love will blesss us because we are like Him.  NDE stories never seem to mention this factor.  Everyone “sees the light” and enjoys happiness, yet there is no mention of how we must be changed in this life to enjoy the next.  That’s a concern for me because it fails to deal with our fallen condition and the need to be changed. And such thinking encourages people to be spiritually lazy and morally selfish.  Not a good thing.

Here’s a challenge for all of us to determine just how far we have to go:  are we praying for our enemies with tears over their condition and the suffering they are building up for themselves in the next life?  As a Christian, am I praying daily for all the Democrat politicans who have made no secret of their desire to close churches, throw Christians in jail, and enact policies which will ensure our persecution and even death? 

Jesus did. [3]

[1]    https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/09/19/hell-as-universal-purgatory-2/

[2]   “God became man so that man might become god.” St. Athanasius in De Incarnatione Verbi Dei

[3]    Luke 19:41  And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it,

         Luke 23:34  Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.