Journalist and Christian apologist Lee Strobel says it is, and he provided his reasons last weekend in a sermon titled “The Case for Heaven.” He shared his research on this topic at First Baptist Dallas last Sunday.
According to Strobel, the most important thing in the world is what is going to happen when we close our eyes for the last time on this earth,.
“When we die physically, our soul separates from our physical body and continues to live on; for those of us who are followers of God, live on in His presence; if we're not, live on apart from Him in Hades,” says Strobel.
He approached the question the same way he approached his faith in his bestselling book "The Case for Christ." Strobel says that he started with so-called near-death experiences. By this, he means people who were clinically dead — no heart, no brainwaves, no respiration — who later reported that they were aware the whole time after they were healed.
“Frankly, I was skeptical at first. This sounded kind of New Age-y to me until – you know what I found out? There are 900 scholarly articles published in scientific and medical journals over the last 50 years on the topic of near-death experiences,” states Strobel.
More than 90% of the stories share consistencies that make the phenomenon irrefutable to Strobel. As he said, these clinically dead people should not have been able to see or hear what they did unless they had a genuine out of body experience, otherwise the soul separated form the body.
Next, he looked at the testimony of the only man who actually died and rose again.
“Jesus claimed that He was the Son of God, but He backed up that claim by returning from the dead. And so, He experienced the afterlife, but He also created the afterlife as being God,” says Strobel.
His conclusion: Heaven is a real place, but only for those that have put their faith in Christ. He says that's ultimately important because Hell is a real place too.
