Tuesday, July 15, 2025
For the last several weeks we’ve examined the topic of near-death experiences and asked whether there is any proof that those experiences are true. We have looked at: 1) verifiable observations made while dead, 2) the blind seeing while dead, 3) talking with deceased loved ones and bringing back messages from them, and 4) living people who see supernatural events as their loved ones approach death.
Today, I offer a fifth proof – 5) dramatic life changes in those returning from near-death experiences. One of the most compelling of these is the story of George Rodonaia. George was a Russian scientists who made numerous scientific discoveries that undermined the communist government of Russia. Therefore, the KGB ordered him murdered. George says that he was hit by a car which then backed up to hit him again.
His body was taken to the morgue, where it was placed in a freezer to keep it from decaying until an autopsy could be performed. After three days, he was removed from the freezer and the mortician began to make an incision into his stomach, at which point George opened his eyes. Either he had come back from the dead or hadn’t been completely dead to begin with.
George had been an atheist, which was the default position in the Soviet Union. However, during those three days in the freezer, he began to feel as if he was made of darkness and that an unpleasant and burning light was shining into that darkness.
After this experience, George began to study spirituality and eventually went on to become an ordained priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church. After immigrating to the United States, he served as pastor to St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Baytown, Texas. His worldview had entirely changed. Before his near-death experience he had been certain there was no afterlife and that death was the end of everything. After his near-death experience, he became so sure of life after death that he not only converted himself but began to teach others how they could know Christ.
How can we explain this change other than by saying, “Yes, he experienced something real, and yes, that experience changed him?” Paul the apostle said it like this in Philippians 3:10, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection [thereby] becoming like him … and so, somehow, to attain the resurrection from the dead.”
