//These are Matthew’s words, and it seemed to be an understanding shared by Paul and others. The Gospel must be preached to the ends of the earth before Jesus comes back. Matthew, in telling us what to expect before the Lord’s return, lists only one “sign of the times” for us to anticipate: the completion of this world mission. We’ve even made up a name for this evangelism … we call it the “Great Commission.” 

Paul seemed to consider himself the primary evangelist in this movement, concerned that he had little time to accomplish the task before Jesus arrived, and was on his way to Spain, the very end of the earth, to complete this purpose before his plans were finally derailed in Rome, where he would presumably spend the rest of his life. 

Whether or not Paul himself felt satisfied with his success, later biblical writers would agree that Paul properly fulfilled his commission. The author of Colossians would write, Every creature under heaven has heard the Word, and all over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing.

The book of Titus would affirm that Paul succeeded in his mission: For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, and as such the time had come, and they sought that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the Great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.

The book of Timothy also affirms that Paul’s world mission has come to a close, and now the end would arrive quickly.

But life goes on. I guess the world turned out to be a little bigger than they thought.

//Ever wonder where the four corners of the earth hide? It’s a little hard to find a corner on a sphere. Even if we grant that Bible writers imagined a flat earth, they never imagined it to be square! Take this verse in Isaiah 40:22, speaking of God:

He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

Thus, God chooses a vantage point above a circular earth, where he can keep an eye on all its inhabitants. He stretches the heavens over the earth like a tent, protecting a flat surface. This matches the description in Genesis of a flat earth, covered by a dome of sorts. The sun and the moon ride tracks daily across the underside of the dome. Yes, the Bible often assumes a flat earth. But where are its corners?

Let me ask you this. When you hear the phrase today, do you imagine corners on the earth? Of course not. It’s a figure of speech, meaning from all over the globe. It was a figure of speech in Bible days as well (see Ezekiel 7:2 and Isaiah 11:12) where it came to mean from all over the flat circle of the earth. Tell any ancient Hebrew that the earth is square, and he’ll laugh you to scorn. You don’t see any corner edges in the sky dome, do you? 

Moreover, the Hebrew word Kaneph is better translated as “edge” or “extremity” than “corner,” for which more precise Hebrew words exist if the writers really meant corner. And “four” in today’s verse surely refers to the four directions, North, South, East, and West, as attested by its reference to the four winds. There is no insinuation that the land has four sides. In fact, anyone can see that the creation continues on beyond the edge of the land, and can feel the winds originating from over the water beyond the land’s edge.

★★★★

Before I begin this review, I should explain my interest in NDE’s from a religious viewpoint. It’s not just that they hint of a possible afterlife, because I honestly don’t know what to make of that. It’s that they dig down below the surface of religion to what Atwater labels a “core experience.” Says Atwater,

“The core truth or root of all religions and all sacred traditions is virtually the same throughout the world and always has been. It is the spiritual. It is that personal experience of Source/Deity/Allah/God. The majority of near-death experiencers glimpse that core truth in a moment of self-surrender they neither understood nor were prepared for, and they are forever changed.” (p. 104)

Atwater is not a scientist, and doesn’t approach her research from that direction. No double-blind studies with a control group. But she has logged 43 years of research, involving nearly 7,000 people. She explains,

“I am an observer and analyst who specializes in fieldwork … My protocol is that of a police investigator. I cross-check my findings with different people in different parts of our country at different times.” (p. 238)

By the way, I’m an outsider. An estimated one in twenty people remember a near-death experience, and Atwater has enjoyed three herself. But No NDE for me, even though I should qualify, having drowned once. I’m still peeved that I got nothing out of that. 

Atwater’s new book is not as much about the experiences themselves as it is about the profound affect they have on those who survive them. People are changed by this brush with the divine, whether we label it a religious experience or not. I do enjoy when Atwater lets the experiencers speak for themselves, leaving it up to us to make sense of the mysteries. When she jumps in, speaking in her exotic language, using phrases like “electromagnetic spectrum,” I tend to lose focus. I’m a newbie to the paranormal, sorry.

This is a world where animals often speak and angels often fly on wings. I say “often,” because different people, with different backgrounds, have different experiences. Hell is only hot and fiery if you’re a Christian fundamentalist. Most others recalled hellish NDE’s as cold and clammy. Dark tunnels often connect this world to the next, but they didn’t used to. Tunnels with a light at the end were quite rare in NDE’s before Robert Moody’s book Life After Life became a bestseller, and the public began to fixate on tunnels. Too bad; everybody loves afterlife tunnels and the explanations they provide for wormholes, time travel, and shamanic visions.  

But one commonality in these experiences is that they are life-altering, and for that reason alone, the rest of us should not ignore what we can’t explain. What these people experience will probably never be a part of our worldview—most of us are trapped in a reality wrapped around matter—but  NDE experiencers’ connection often remains after the event, like a window left open to the supernatural. They are suddenly changed. Experiencers begin to remember the future before it happens, see auras of energy, see dead people. Atwater helps experiencers adapt back to a world that has become foreign, and helps the rest of us adapt to experiencers who have been radically changed. This is no trivial issue; 21% of experiencers in Atwater’s research attempted suicide afterward. 75% divorced. Both spouses usually voiced the same complaint: “I don’t know that person anymore.” The vast majority return from their experiences convinced that there is a “plan” for life, yet two-thirds leave organized religion, or never have a religious commitment to begin with.

Atwater loses me when she delves into her otherworldly explanations for these phenomenon, talking about holograms and power punches and colloidal conditions. When she shifts from paranormal language into scientific explanations, I get at least a glimpse of what she’s talking about, but can’t really relate the explanations to scientific principles other than as vague parallels meant to describe the indescribable. “Superfluidity” doesn’t really explain how out-of-body travelers can go through walls. “Quantum entanglement” has a long way to go before it explains entangled minds. “Multiverses” is a concept I find more than a little disturbing. But these comparisons do help me relate. In many ways, Atwater’s book will feel like home to experiencers but leave outsiders like me still out in the cold. Four stars for the research and fascinating peek into a world that remains a bizarre mystery to the uninitiated.

One final note: Atwater’s opinions about Jesus and the Bible don’t increase her credibility. She should probably have left that to the Jesus scholars. 

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.

//This is a long-standing debate, and while I don’t pretend to have the answer, I will weigh in with my guess after presenting some of the verses Bible readers point to.

1 Samuel 18:1, After David had finished talking with Saul, Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself. (NIV)

1 Samuel 19:1, And Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants, that they should kill David. But Jonathan, Saul’s son, delighted much in David. (RSV)

The ambiguity of these passages is evident. The problem, of course, is that homosexuality is a sin in the Bible. Leviticus 20:13 states this plainly: If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death. This new law was recorded hundreds of years after David lived, and as such, the law could not have impacted its past, but it could have impacted the time in which the scriptures were written down! At the time the stories of David were collated into scripture, a definite anti-gay bias existed, and this may have affected how the stories were presented. The language may have been purposefully toned down.

I promised my own guess, and it’s this: David should not be called gay. As best I can tell, there simply was no clear distinction at the time he lived; no designation of gays or straights, simply a sliding scale of preference, and everybody fell somewhere on that scale. How gay sex grew into such an abomination in the eyes of Israel’s later lawmakers, I don’t know.

//Maybe you can help me with today’s topic. We’re instructed to try the spirits to see if they mesh with God. If they don’t, discard ‘em. But what is God’s spirit like? Here are a couple examples from the Bible:

Galatians 5:22-23, But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.

Judges 15:14-15, and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him … And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.

The latter verse is Samson, of course, a fellow who solved his problems with brawn, and the first verse comes from Paul, whose writings sometimes seem so saturated with brotherly love that it fills me with hope. With these two extremes in mind, what can we conclude about the Spirit of God? Perhaps only this: everybody finds in God whatever spirit they are looking for.

//Oops! That’s not the way it really happened, is it? Isn’t it true that, when the messengers of God brought news that Sarah would conceive and have a child, she laughed in their face? What is Sarah doing here in Hebrews 11, the chapter known as the “honor roll of faith?”

We don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews, and we don’t know why that writer chose to praise Sarah. So radical was this reinterpretation of scripture that many early manuscripts cut the sentences out of the book! Today’s translations, not knowing quite what to do about it, often ignore Sarah and praise Abraham alone. The NIV reads like this, for the very same verse:

By faith Abraham, even though he was past age—and Sarah herself was barren—was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise.

C’mon, guys, give poor Sarah a break. One hasty snicker, and her reputation is ruined forever?

//Shortly after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, they began an effort at ethnic cleansing. You may recall that Ezra demanded all foreign citizens be kicked out of the city, even if they be “wives and children.”

It was during this time that the book of Ruth was written, and it purports to tell a story about the ancestry of David—a rather beautiful story about a young woman named Ruth, from the land of Moab. In this story, Naomi, a Jew, had relocated to Moab because of famine in Judah. There, her son married Ruth, a Moabite. Then he died, as did Naomi’s husband and other son. When the famine ended and Naomi returned to Judah, Ruth accompanied her. 

Back in Judah, the Moabite Ruth won the admiration of a Jewish man named Boaz, and they eventually married. Of this union came a son named Obed, who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David.

The moral of the story? The book of Ruth turns out to be a bit of protest literature. It identifies the Jews’ great King David as a half-breed, precisely the sort of man that, hundreds of years later, the Jews were purging from Jerusalem.

//This verse always makes me chuckle. It’s the funny way John of Patmos inserted an explanation for Satan’s final battle, as if “Gog and Magog” tells us anything at all. It sounds more like a puppet show than a battle.

One clue that’s helpful when reading Revelation: almost everything there can be found in the book of Ezekiel. In this case, John refers to a strange battle scene from Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39. Here, God lures Gog (a leader) and Magog (a group of people) to attack a peaceful people (presumably Israel). Then, God sends a great earthquake, torrents of rain, hailstones, and burning sulfur on Gog and his troops and on the many nations with him. After God devours this army, the Israelites once again “dwell in their land secure and untroubled.” This does sound an awful lot like Revelation, doesn’t it?

Fact is, Jewish writers had already begun trying to explain the Gog and Magog of Ezekiel. For example, the Jewish historian Josephus believed it to be a historical reference to the Scythians. John simply adds his opinion on the matter, suggesting that Ezekiel was writing about a battle yet to come.