Rabbi Encounters Heaven’s Throne, Still Feels the Heat from the Throne Room
My health has always been good, but my doctor misdiagnosed me with a thyroid condition.
She prescribed a medication incorrectly where I consumed seven and a half months’ worth of medication in 29 days when I did not need it to begin with. Looking back, I can see that within three to four days, my body began to manifest what doctors call an inner storm. It was a tremendous amount of tension, pressure, and pain. My body felt like a furnace. I thought it was spiritual. Quite frankly, I thought it was part of the manifestation of my profound experience in Israel. I kept telling myself this was spiritual, that it couldn’t be physical because I was healthy. This went on every single night for a month and half.
Everything was building up to one night in September. This was the most difficult night out of the entire month and I was feeling the symptoms of a cardiac arrest. You know: pain in the shoulder, pain in the arm, pain in the chest. Instead of telling my wife what was happening, I went downstairs at 3:00 a.m., thinking I was going to rest and believing that it would go away. Unfortunately, it did not. I got downstairs, laid down, and in short order my heart just stopped. And that was it. My soul jumped out of my body and my spirit began to rise in the room. My body was lying horizontally at that point, and from a height above, I was able to see my lifeless body on the couch.
Stories of Heaven and the Afterlife
Randy Kay & Shaun Tabatt
I saw a bit into the future. I saw Bonnie and my children planning my funeral and I saw the grief and the sorrow on them. It was not even momentary. It was the only time something like that entered my being: that I was aware of this and a powerful angel. It felt like I was just brought into an emergency room and I was lying on an operating table and the doctors were working on me, but this angel was moving his hand over me. I had this sense that he was ministering to my soul. I did not know what that meant at that point in my life. It only had meaning 15 months later when I began to understand something. And in that place, I saw a white light, a cone-shaped cylindrical light up and to the right side of me, which I knew was Heaven. There was a brightness at the end of it.
And in no time, I was before the throne of God. When I share about the life and death aspect of it, it is hard for me to talk about it because I feel in that moment, the fragility of my physical life, the tearing between the mortal and the immortal. I feel like my chest can just collapse inside because I can relive that moment of when it happened and now understand what it really meant. So the Lord brought me into the heavenlies. I was before the throne and it was surrounded by a ring of impenetrable fire ripples, like ripples of fire that were inconceivable in terms of their depth. It could not be penetrated really. And I was on my face at that point.
In that immediate moment, I realized my circle of life had ended. I knew it when my soul began to step out of my body. There was an awareness and understanding in that split second.
I share in my book, A Rabbi’s Journey to Heaven, that I was incapable of handling the brightness of the glory of the fire of God and God’s presence. In my opinion it was because I was not meant to stay there. For the redeemed who are staying there, it is different. However, my eyes were not able to absorb the fullness of the fire. My eyes felt heat and I was down prostrate before the Lord. My mind had no other thoughts. The only thing I could think about was that I was in the presence of God Himself, in the presence of the glory.
It was the absolute purity, glory, and the nature of who God is. I did not interpret it as a refining fire in Heaven. Everything there is refined and perfect. Everything is in the state of the way He created it and has never changed. I do not even know if there is an adequate word in the English language to properly express how much it was beyond perfection. I believe that it is the fire, the purity, the heat, the absolute refinement of what refinement is. For example, in my years in the gold business, I worked for many years in a gold refinery, so I know how to refine gold. I have handled gold bars coming in, melted them down, and understand how it comes to its perfect purity and so forth. So I understand that aspect of refinement, but the refining fire and the gold, if you will, of Heaven are beyond purity, of whatever we think it is—it’s beyond 99.9 percent. The reverential fear that is around is so profoundly deep and beyond what we could comprehend that we could not handle it in the natural world.
From there, I when from being in the Throne Room of Heaven back in my body. There was a period of time when I didn’t feel that I was ever fully back. The separation that I feel, a detachment from the mortal realm that I carry with me—there’s always a sense of immortality on my shoulders, if you will. The experience of the freedom when the soul is set free must be like what a bird feels when it leaves the nest for the first time, feeling the wind under its wings for the first time. That freedom, that sense has never left me. And there are times when, to be frank about it, I say, “Lord, I cannot do this anymore because You are detached.”
There is a learning how to live with that. And at the same time, I do not want it to change, not for the sake of the experience; no, I do not want it to change, because I want to live in the state, when even Jesus said, that we are in this world but we are not of it. There is such an amazing peace and presence of God. And when I came back, in those moments I saw my wife’s face and I saw what would be. It has taken her this long to forgive me for not calling 911. I just did not think about. I just did not make the connection. I ignored all the signs. I do not know how you feel, Randy, but sometimes I feel like I am an ant on the earth. I take my morning walks. I write about this, and I enjoy God and everything He does, but I can feel like I am one man on the entire planet.
I believe that the Lord, through a doctor’s error, gave me my life back, but He could have said, “No, I am not giving you your life back.” Then I would not be here. But I believe that there is an assignment that comes to us. It is part of the call, part of the responsibility. Now I live differently. I eat differently. I live slower. I live life more as an observer. And I will also say, and I do not mind saying it because I write about it, that it has taken some time for my children and my wife to adjust to it because I am a different person. So I am adjusting with measured steps and learning how to balance it all. When He brought me back, I like to say He did not put me back together the same way. He gave me some keys that are the absolute assignment of my life. I am more connected now to my spiritual being than ever before. Sometimes I can still see from above certain things. There is daylight between the body, soul and spirit for me. I live each day with a realistic, tangible awareness of the three.
And in my first three days back, the Lord said, “I am going to put you in two books.” Ezekiel and Psalms have to do with the calling of God to the Jewish people. I was in those two books for two years. Who does that? I mean, of the 66 books of the Bible, I was in two, and the Lord says, “I am going to put you in the book of Psalms and you are going to eat from that book.” And then the Lord opened understanding that the book of Psalms is truly the handbook of the soul. If anybody wants to know about the relationship between the soul and the spirit, it is only in the book of Psalms, over 50 verses. Oh, my soul, why are you downcast? It is like the second person, right? Randy, why are you so troubled? The psalmist speaks to his soul that way. Oh, my soul, come and worship the Lord. And it begins to unfold. The important relationship that we have in the spirit governing the soul is that the soul constantly comes into submission. But it is beyond that too. The book of Psalms is the handbook of God’s glory. There we learn how to give magnification and enlargement to Him.
1 in 10 people has had a near-death experience.
Do these NDEs reveal the heaven and hell we read about in the Bible?
All of us long to know with absolute certainty what happens after we die. Popular authors and podcasters Randy Kay and Shaun Tabatt are on a mission to have pointed conversations with people who died and spent time on the other side.
Randy and Shaun personally selected these firsthand accounts of the afterlife from the most popular episodes of their 2 Christian Dudes podcast. These conversations include:
Ian McCormack - Stung By 5 Jellyfish and Encountered Jesus in Heaven
Bryan Melvin - Died from Cholera and Encountered Adolph Hitler in Hell
Heidi Barr - Crushed in a Horse-Riding Accident and Encountered Jesus in Heaven
Messianic Rabbi Felix Halpern - Died and Encountered the Fire of God’s Glory in Heaven’s Throne Room
Each of these encounters will leave you hungry to discover more of the God who is actively engaged in every moment of your life, both now and throughout eternity!
