The Sean McDowell Show

Randy Kay was a biotech CEO and a self-described skeptic who didn't believe in near-death experiences until he flatlined for 30 minutes in 2005 and, in his telling, found himself face to face with Jesus. Now he's collected 140 NDE accounts he says he's vetted more rigorously than any single volume before. Today, I asked the obvious question: does the evidence actually stack up?
READ: Heaven Encounters: 140 Near-Death Experiences Revealing the Afterlife by Randy Kay (https://amzn.to/4x1azpF)
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CHAPTERS 00:00 – "I was cheek to cheek with Jesus" 00:36 – Is heaven real? Meet Randy Kay 01:50 – The near-death experience: septic shock and seven blood clots 03:15 – What Kay says he saw and heard 05:22 – "How do you know it wasn't a dream?" 07:47 – The cost of going public after 14 years of silence 11:49 – Why Christians can be the hardest audience 14:11 – How the book vets 140 accounts 19:32 – What "verifying" an account does and doesn't mean 22:43 – What would signal a story is fabricated 27:05 – Reincarnation, universalism, and hellish NDEs 31:06 – The "core" features of a near-death experience 34:46 – Case: Mike Olson and the lung donor 42:19 – Case: Dean Braxton's 1 hour 45 minutes 45:14 – Case: Jeffrey Porter, the atheist 53:08 – Case: Lisa — a hellish NDE and a rescue 56:38 – The life review and what it implies 59:17 – Randy's own life review: a dying boy's prayer 1:04:23 – NDEs as a second chance 1:04:50 – Answering the skeptic 1:13:49 – Where to find Randy's work
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Giants. A divine council. Demons and the Nephilim. Michael Heiser made the Bible's strangest passages impossible to ignore and sold hundreds of thousands of books doing it. So what does one of the world's leading spiritual-warfare scholars actually think of his work? Dr. Clint Arnold joins me today to say where Heiser gets it right, and where he pushes back.
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CHAPTERS 00:00 – Why Heiser captivated so many 00:35 – Who is Michael Heiser? Who is Clint Arnold? 02:45 – What makes Heiser's work unique 05:59 – Where Arnold agrees with Heiser 09:35 – The premise of The Unseen Realm: recovering a supernatural worldview 11:12 – Psalm 82, Job 38, and the divine council 14:01 – What "Elohim" actually means 15:21 – Isn't this just polytheism? 18:33 – Genesis 1:26 — "Let us make man" 21:47 – The Deuteronomy 32 worldview and cosmic geography 24:01 – David, Goliath, and the gods behind the idols 26:24 – Bashan, Caesarea Philippi, and "portals" 28:58 – Paul's theology of the unseen world (Ephesians 6) 32:14 – Does this change our spiritual warfare today? 32:32 – Peter Wagner and "strategic-level" spiritual warfare 34:12 – Why Arnold rejects targeting territorial spirits 38:24 – Command vs. prayer — and reprisal in the spirit realm 40:53 – The big disagreement: where do demons come from? 42:46 – The traditional view: a primordial angelic fall 45:59 – Genesis 6 and the sons of God 48:05 – How much weight should 1 Enoch carry? 50:53 – No exorcism in the Old Testament? 53:33 – Luke 10 and "I saw Satan fall like lightning" 56:14 – Arnold's one big addition to Heiser 58:16 – Should you read Heiser? 59:04 – Spiritual warfare at Talbot
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Talbot New Testament scholar Dr. Alan Hultberg joins Sean McDowell to sort out what Scripture says, walk through the three major views, and ask the question everyone wants answered: are we close? Hultberg starts by clearing away the "Left Behind" imagery most of us absorbed from movies and kids' Bible storybooks, then lays out the three positions evangelicals actually debate explaining what separates them, how each handles the tribulation, Israel, and the timing of Christ's return. CHECK OUT: Logos Bible 60 Day Free Trial (https://logos.com/mcdowell)
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CHAPTERS 00:00 – The pop-culture rapture vs. the Bible 00:45 – Meet Dr. Alan Hultberg 01:06 – What is the rapture? (1 Thessalonians 4) 02:08 – Common misconceptions 04:15 – Is there even a debate that a rapture happens? 06:20 – View 1: Pre-tribulation 09:37 – Pre-trib, dispensationalism, and Israel 11:18 – Whatever happened to mid-tribulation? 11:41 – View 2: Pre-wrath 16:13 – Imminence: can there be signs? 18:32 – View 3: Post-tribulation 20:38 – How each view handles Israel 23:55 – The view Hultberg holds — and why 30:19 – The rapture through church history 33:48 – Where scholars land today 35:06 – Piecing together the whole end-times sequence 46:03 – "Newspaper in one hand, Bible in the other"? 48:33 – Signs and imminence, together 51:02 – Where to go deeper 52:42 – Closing thoughts

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Can we actually know Jesus is coming back or is this just a matter of blind faith? In this conversation, bestselling author and pastor John Bevere joins me to talk about his new book The King Is Coming. John makes for why Christians can have confidence that Jesus is returning, why he sees Israel's reestablishment in 1948 and the recapture of Jerusalem in 1967 as escatologically significant, his reading of the Hosea 6 timeline, his view on the rapture and the tribulation, and why he believes we're living in the generation that may see Christ's return. 00:00 Intro and the central question 01:51 Why John avoided this topic for four decades 06:33 How could a modern person believe Jesus returns in the clouds? 12:09 Have previous generations been wrong, and what makes this one different? 19:23 The biblical framework for John's view on the season of Christ's return 25:13 What the end-times sequence looks like — apostasy, revival, rapture, tribulation 28:30 The case for the pre-tribulation rapture 35:18 Why John waited 42 years to teach on this 41:42 Pastoral application — the wedding garment and being ready 49:48 Speculation on AI and end-times scenarios (conjecture) 55:21 Why the book has resonated with so many leaders
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Children who have near-death experiences make for unusually strong evidence and almost nobody has studied them. In this conversation, near-death experience researcher Dr. Steve Miller returns to walk through what we actually know about children and NDEs. We get into the case from Dr. Melvin Morse's peer-reviewed work (the drowned girl who came back describing exactly what her family was wearing and doing at home), the documented patterns from Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's cross-cultural research, the children Dr. Diane Komp watched die at Yale that turned her from atheism to faith, and a few accounts from Steve's own circle of people he knows and trusts.
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