Part II:
Minister saved from hell claims he was granted a glimpse of angels and the future
by Michael H. Brown
When we left off Reverend Howard Storm, a Protestant minister from Ohio, was recounting how, during a brush with death in 1985, he found himself in what he describes as hell. At the time he was an atheist who taught art at North Kentucky University, a cold man who shunned believers and worshipped art as his god.
That changed on June 1, 1985, when his duodenum ruptured while in Paris and after hours of agonizing pain he found himself dead and out of his body [see previous story].
After demonic beings attacked him and tried to lead him to hell, Storm, who later entered a seminary, claims he was saved by a light that was Christ, a light that arrived at great speed. "He spoke in a male voice, and when I say He spoke, I could hear His words and voice in my head and it became apparent to me that He knew any thoughts that I had.
"He tried to comfort me and assure me, because a part of me wanted Him to throw me back down into the cesspool [of hell]. I was so ashamed. He was comforting me and said He had people He wanted me to meet. We were in space. There was no ground or features, somewhere between heaven and hell. Some spheres of brilliance came, people who knew me, and after some talk, they had the record of my life, so I've come to identify them as my guardian angels. They said they wanted to show me my life. At first I thought that would be great fun. We started out as a baby and things were pretty neat -- seeing my mother and father love me and all that, everybody making a fuss over me."
However, says Reverend Storm, he went astray, losing his faith, entering the world of academia, and closing himself to love.
"As my life developed I saw how I had become more withdrawn and saw how God had done really wonderful things for me, like bring a woman in my life to love me and teach me how to love and how I had misused that love and how eventually God had brought children into my life so I could also learn to love by them and how I missed a lot of that and I saw how God had tried to reach out to me through people and things and how I had just blocked all those attempts by God to change or improve my life.
"I knew that what I was doing in my life had really hurt Jesus, had hurt the angels, and it hurt God, because that's not what I had been created for.
"They loved me but hated what I was doing -- the atheism, the blasphemy. Basically I broke all Ten Commandments. I didn't murder anyone, but I certainly murdered people with my heart. And I don't think there's a whole lot of difference.
"From a societal point of view, I was just a regular, normal, healthy American guy leading the good life, which I think is a tremendous indictment on our society.
"When we completed that process the angels asked if I had any questions, and I asked everything I could think to ask. They were extremely good teachers. Historical questions, philosophical questions, religious questions, everything I could think of at the time. When I exhausted everything I could think to ask about, I said, `I'm ready to go to heaven now.' They said, no, you have to go back to the world because you're not fit to go to heaven. We had a big argument and they tried to gently persuade me that I had to come back to the world and try again.
"When I said I was ready to go back, I was back and immediately when I was back the nurse said the doctor had arrived at the hospital for my surgery. [Previously no surgeon had been available.]"
Thus did Storm's encounter with death -- the other side -- end. We have to be cautious of all near-death experiences. As I have said many times, they must be discerned like apparitions. Too often, the people having such an experience (and there are millions) put their own spiritual spin on it, and sometimes this can stray into the New Age.
But often the insights remind us of II Corinthians 12:3 (where Paul mentions a man who was caught up into paradise), and contain profound lessons and images. Where does Reverend Storm see the United States heading?
"They made it very clear to me that God had given this country the greatest blessing of any people in the history of the world. We have more of God's blessing. Everything that we have comes from God. We didn't deserve it, we didn't earn it, but we happen to be the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world. And God gave us all this so that we could be the instruments of God's light in this world, and we are not instruments of light. In other countries people see us as purveyors of exploitation, military might, and pornography. They see us as completely hedonistic and amoral -- we have no morality. People can do whatever they want wherever they want with whatever they want. Our amorality is a cancer on the rest of the world, and God created us to be just the opposite.
"People get mad at me for saying it, but God's very unhappy with what we're doing. When I came back from the experience I was almost out of my mind trying to convert people. God wanted a worldwide conversion thousands of years ago. God pulled out all the stops 2,000 years ago with Jesus. From God's view, that was the definitive moment in human history. And the impact of the prophets and teachers and the Messiah has been a big disappointment to God because people have mostly by and large rejected it. And [I was told that] God wants this conversion. And if we don't get on the program fairly soon, God is going to have to intervene in some ways that from a human point of view are going to seem cataclysmic. God's really tired of what we're doing to one another and the planet and to God's Creation. We were put in this world to be stewards and live in harmony with His creation and one another and we don't realize the important spiritual consequences of what we do when we raise a child in a faithless society. And we're doing it all over the world, not just this country."
Was he shown anything specific?
"I asked how [purification] would come about, and they said it would be simple, that our society is very dependent on a lot of very fragile things -- energy grid, transportation. In each geographical area of the United States people used to be relatively self-sufficient as far as agricultural products. Now, how long would any state survive without the transport of food and energy?
"What would happen is these very complex and delicate grids of our economic system would begin to break down. We've created a society of such cruel and self-centered people that the very nature of civilization would begin to break down. They (the angels) showed me that what would happen is that people would begin robbing the grocery stores, hording goods, and killing one another for gasoline and tires, and as a consequence everything would break down and would end up in chaos."
We've had scares every year -- false alarms. We saw this with Y2K. We saw this recently. But Storm insists that we're not out of the woods, that there will be a purge as God ushers in a new Kingdom during the next 200 years.
How close is that? How close is purification?
"Too close," said Storm. "Way too close. And God doesn't want this to happen. God doesn't want to do it. What God wants is love, hope, faith, and goodness."