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Is there a Death-bed Window into Eternity?

There have always been stories of death-bed agony or ecstasy in the last moments of life. So, when the tract, Kitty in the Window, portrayed a gruesome death scene of a face frozen in horror, one soul winner wrote to Chick Publications with her own story.
She was a pastor’s wife and told how a mother and children received Christ and began attending their church. The husband was violently opposed to the gospel and ordered the pastor off his property. Eventually he prevented his family from attending church.

Later, the family called the pastor to come visit the man who was seriously ill in the hospital, hoping his heart might have been softened. But it wasn’t! He again ordered the pastor away.

As it appeared that the man would surely die, the pastor’s wife called the family to see if she might be more accepted by the man. They agreed to try. She relates what happened:

“The family said yes since he was so sick and probably wouldn’t be mean to me. But when I got there —I watched him die. It was the most awful and frightening thing I had ever seen. He sat up in the bed with his eyes wide open and mouth gaping. His arms flung in the air and he said, “Help me!” The machines then began to buzz, nurses came, and his family was screaming together, ‘He went to hell! Oh, God, he went to hell.’ The nurses closed the man’s eyes and put his hands down to a normal position. As long as I live I will never forget that death.”

Someone has reasoned that modern medicine has changed this so that we rarely see this today. Most people die in hospitals where they are carefully monitored and given sedatives in the last hours, dulling the senses and “allowing a peaceful death.”

But this may be denying us strong evidence of the reality of the hereafter. One Chick Publications staff member, who grew up in Mexico, said that such portrayals of distress, or bliss if they are believers, are common where she lived.

One research file obtained on the internet listed hundreds of deathbed stories, posted at http://www.cuttingedge.org/shaw/. The book is old but the experiences are timeless and descriptions highly detailed. Some are even of famous “infidels.”

Other accounts are of famous believers who displayed great joy at being welcomed by angels or deceased family members.

Part of our witness as believers is to remind people of the long view. Life does not stop at the grave as evolutionist and humanists would have us believe. Satan’s answer to these death-bed experiences is hallucinations of the expiring mind, but man cannot escape the spirit within that whispers otherwise.

And when we hand someone a gospel tract that speaks to that vacuum in the soul, some will respond to Christ’s gift. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing who will respond and who will reject the message. That’s the reason Jesus used the parable of the sower to show the need to spread the gospel seed widely.

Over the centuries, gospel tracts have played a major part in preparing people for revival. Never has there been a more desperate need for revival, than now. More and more missionaries are discovering that if they saturate a community with Chick tracts, they often get sufficient response to start a congregation. One missionary couple has started four churches this way.

Chick Publications has thousands of testimonies on file witnessing to the power of gospel tracts containing the word of God delivered inside an engaging story.

We will all die.

One little tract can be used by the Holy Spirit to turn agony into bliss at that time.

Right now, in almost any church you attend, something occurs that has rarely happened anywhere before the late 20th and early 21st century.

People use more than one Bible.

Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life (2002) set the 21st century stage, using 15 different English translations and justifying it in an Appendix. He wrote, “—I have deliberately used paraphrases in order to help you see God’s truth in new, fresh ways. English-speaking people should thank God that we have so many different versions to use for devotional reading.”

15 different translations help you? You may find two or three synonyms, similar-meaning words, in a language, but 15? You’re going to have interpretations -people’s private commentaries— not translations. Want an example?

In Deuteronomy 23:18 God said, “Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow—” Sounds simple enough. The word “dog” (keleb) is translated “dog” all through the Old Testament. It means “dog,” plain and simple. But in modern versions, you get interpretations like these:

“male prostitute’s earnings” (in various forms, Holman Christian Standard, NIV, NRSV, NLT, NET, Common English Bible)

“the money given to one used for sex purposes in the worship of the gods” (Bible in Basic English)

This isn’t translating. This is interpreting. They placed their opinion into the text, instead of the words God preserved. A true translator won’t let his personal opinions or interpretations stop him from accurately transferring the Bible concept to the target language.

But most of those 15 Bibles don’t just have changed translations. They are also translated from a changed text. As it says in Did the Catholic Church Give Us the Bible?, historically there are two different streams of manuscripts. The northern, preserved, apostolic stream comes from Antioch, where the disciples were called Christians first (Acts 11:26). But the southern, polluted stream seeps out of Alexandria, Egypt, the home of apostate Jewish and Christian-sounding philosophers.

Scholars from the southern stream took out the words of God they disagreed with and inserted words that fit their opinions. And yet most modern Bibles come from that polluted southern stream.

Bible-believers from the northern stream faithfully passed down and accurately translated the original concepts into other languages, without inserting their own private interpretations. So then, these preserved words aligned with God’s standard.

All measuring tapes in the U.S. have to be calibrated against a standard, kept by the National Bureau of Standards. Jesus said His words would not pass away (Matt. 24:35). He left us a standard, so we can test all other “translations” and interpretations.

Remove Acts 8:37, and you take away words that refute infant baptism. Remove “yet” from John 7:8 and Jesus becomes a liar. Remove “without a cause” from Matthew 5:22 and Jesus becomes an angry sinner! See why we need a standard?

An article on Crosswalk.com entitled, “How Do I Find the Right Bible?” ends with the question: “What about you? Which translation of the Bible do you use?” Who cares? Many modern Bible teachers spend so much time talking about using the Bible that they forget the point is to believe the Bible! They can’t all, as one author claimed, “contain the life-giving words of God.”

God’s words do not contradict each other.

People use other Bibles but they do not believe them. How can they? They are constantly changed and disagree with each other in crucial places!

But thank God, we have His holy and preserved words in English, the King James Bible, straight from the northern stream. We can believe every word of our Bible.

It has never been a matter of which Bible we use. What matters is which Bible we believe. Whether we use one Bible or 15 from the southern, polluted stream, filled with men’s interpretations, we will only be deceiving ourselves.