I regret to inform you, dear reader, that heaven tourism is back. The genre possibly never went away entirely, but it did at least disappear from the bestseller lists for several years. Sadly, it has returned in Gabe Poirot’s 18 Days in Heaven, which was one of the bestselling Christian books last month and even made its way to the New York Times list of bestsellers—a feat most authors can only dream of. Out of sheer magnanimity (and perhaps a morbid sense of curiosity), I read it so you don’t have to.
Before I tell you what it’s all about, here’s a brief history of heaven tourism. Don Piper kicked off the genre in 2004 with 90 Minutes in Heaven, and it proved a surprise hit that quickly dominated the sales charts, eventually tallying upwards of 8 million copies sold. Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is for Real followed in 2010 with over 10 million copies sold. That same year brought Kevin and Alex Malarkey’s The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, which sold more than a million copies before Alex recanted his story and the publisher pulled it. The genre went on to deliver many more heaven books and a handful of less-popular hell books like Bill Wiese’s 23 Minutes in Hell, though none ever reached the same heights as the first few—no pun intended. My contribution to the genre was little more than reviewing several of the books and coining the snarky phrase “heaven tourism,” which, much to my delight, soon caught on.
The genre inevitably ran its course, but has now returned in Gabe Poirot’s 18 Days in Heaven: I Left My Body. I Met Jesus. What He Told Me Will Alter Your Eternity. Sadly, but not surprisingly, it is just as bad as its predecessors, mixing truth with errors and documented facts with spurious speculations until it is as confusing and unreliable as any of them.
18 Days in Heaven follows the standard pattern by beginning with an account of a terrible accident—in this case, a head injury that resulted from a skateboarding mishap. Poirot, a young evangelist with a sizable YouTube following, was rendered comatose and remained hovering between life and death for 18 days. But while his body was inert, his soul was transported to heaven, where it experienced heavenly wonders, not the least of which was spending time with Jesus.
What did he see and experience there? Many things, of course, some of which he is able to describe and many of which he insists he cannot, either because God told him not to or because they defy description.
What can he describe? Jesus’s eyes, in which “I saw all the colors that had ever existed or could exist, all in one. He was the deepest ocean of liquid love that had no end. A spectrum of intensity that only increased the longer I stared. His eyebrows, hair, jawline, arms, chest, heart, stature, ears, forehead, eyelashes, teeth, mouth, skin, and complexion all said the same thing: I love you, I love you, I love you.”
He describes Jesus’s scars which “were like an ocean that had no floor,” and had the name “Gabriel” written immediately above them. He learned from them that Jesus has completely and eternally forgotten his sins so that he could no longer remember them even if he wanted to.
He smelled Jesus and observed that his “fragrance wasn’t like the humidity of the Florida Everglades. No, this was something eternal—an everlasting fountain of fire, not just surrounding me but burning into me. Wrapping around me like a robe, like a living garment of pure, unending presence. It felt burning hot and freezing cold at the same time.”
He heard Jesus say many words and noted that his “words were not just a separate entity that He ‘released.’ They were like the sharpest spears that went right into the core of my very being. But these spears were not separate from Him—they were Him.”
Poirot even saw his own conception: “The light from Father God united with the earthly seed from my father and the egg of my mother in that moment, and I began my existence on earth. I was not born just on earth. I was born from the heart of the Father. As a spirit, I came from the Father of spirits.”
And so it goes, through 30 chaotic but blessedly short chapters.
You might be tempted to think that 18 days in heaven would provide a man with profound and original insights into the nature of God and man. He might return with fresh theological knowledge or deep revelations about God’s purposes in this world or his acts throughout history. But you would be mistaken, for Poirot offers nothing of the sort.
You might be tempted to think that 18 days in heaven would provide a man with profound and original insights into the nature of God and man. But you would be mistaken.
For example, one of the great theological questions concerns the presence of evil in this world despite God having the ability to stop it. What did Poirot learn about this? He learned that God took a great risk by giving humanity complete free will and leaving them to their own devices, even forgoing his sovereignty over human affairs.
This was why it was so risky for Love to create these creatures who could be just like Him—because they would have the full ability to choose to never be with Him ever again. This free will was so powerful, in fact, that He set a boundary at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as a safeguard against our own downfall. While I was in heaven, I encountered the Jesus who desired relationship above all else.
When you understand this, you will know how such evil and horrible things have happened on the earth. It has nothing to do with God’s will—it results from our disobedience and choices to rebel against Love Himself. God is only good and is not responsible for anything evil or broken. God is not in control or causing everything that occurs on the earth. He is a gentleman. That is the Jesus I met.
Theologians have wondered why God created humanity in the first place. Poirot learned it is because God had a relational lack that only humanity could fill.
You must understand just how special you are to the Father. When He decided to create you, He had already created many creatures and planets. He had the wealth and possessions beyond measure, but there was a lack that He desired to fill: Fellowship. Family. He didn’t just want another “servant,” He wanted a son, a daughter. He didn’t just want to speak to someone. He wanted someone He could speak with.
He even learned that God the Father himself formerly ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil:
Father God could not just brush off the fact that Adam and Eve ate from the tree. That was the tree that He would eat from when He would walk and talk and fellowship with them. That was their intimate, special, central place where they fellowshipped together. It was a great and holy place where God would eat from the tree and they would watch and learn of Him, while trusting Him enough to let Him eat, while not eating from it themselves. It was their tithe to God, the only part of the Garden that they could keep and honor solely as the Lord’s. While the entire Garden was amazing, that tree was there as a reminder to keep the center the center and never forget that it was the Lord who had brought them to where they were.
He also learned that humanity has been given seven senses, not five, because “in heaven, all my senses came alive, and I saw this gem from His perspective. God has evenly sprinkled many gems throughout the earth, giving everyone an opportunity to know Him and find Him. The number 7 throughout the Bible means ‘to be full’ or ‘complete.’ … When anyone wakes up to the truth, they will walk in complete soundness and full rest. All seven of their senses will be alive. When I was in heaven, my seven senses were multiplied, and it seemed everything came alive and had such depth, containing so many layers and dimensions. All my senses were complete in Him. My awareness mirrored His. I thought His thoughts and heard His words even before they were spoken.”
Some of this is speculative (e.g., seven senses), and some of it is just plain wrong (e.g., complete free will; God the Father eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; God being relationally incomplete without humanity).
To give credit where credit is due, Poirot does push his readers to turn to the Lord in repentance and faith and insists that salvation can be had only by grace through faith. He quotes huge portions of Scripture, though they are huge enough and often out of context enough that a reader might wonder if he needed to pad his page count. Still, it means there is a substantial core of Scripture in the book. He concludes by instructing the reader to weigh everything against the Bible, “which alone is God’s perfect and final authority.”
But he may regret that, since the book falls far short of Scripture. In fact, it fails every one of the standard heaven tourism tests. It depends upon an unverifiable experience that the Bible never holds up as expected or normative—an experience that could possibly be genuine, but could as easily be hallucinated or fabricated. It depends upon a false authority in which he claims that the reader ought to heed his words because God told him to write them down. Then, even while he insists that Scripture is God’s perfect and final revelation, he does not insist that Scripture is God’s sufficient revelation. Hence, while his account describes a kind of “second blessing” of purpose and sanctification he received by being in God’s unmediated presence in heaven, it offers the reader no means to achieve that, short of a near-death experience. Speaking of which, despite this book and every other entry in the genre depending upon a comparison to Paul’s experience in 2 Corinthians 12, there is no indication that Paul’s experience was related to an accident or injury. It was an experience of sorts, but not a near-death experience. This book is as messy and wrong as every other heaven tourism book.
It is worth pointing out that Poirot’s publisher is Harrison House. There are some publishers that can hardly publish a bad book and some that can hardly publish a good one. Nori Media Group, whose imprints include Harrison House and Destiny Image, falls squarely in the latter category. 18 Days in Heaven is published alongside other works like The Seer’s Devotional: 365 Daily Devotions that Activate and Engage Your Spiritual Senses, Your Language from Heaven: The Life-Changing Power of Praying in Tongues, and Accessing the Realms of Heaven: Prayer, Authority, and the Hidden Order of the Unseen World. Not surprisingly, then, Poirot’s book is influenced by charismatic and Word of Faith theology and, toward the end, begins to outright advocate it. I’m not convinced there is a single book in the entire Nori Media Group that I could recommend, and that includes 18 Days in Heaven.
The reader will finish this book asking the same question that needs to be asked at the end of every book in the genre: Is the author’s experience genuine? But I don’t feel the need to adjudicate that, because it makes no difference to me. If God’s Word is inerrant and authoritative and sufficient, I have no need for books like this and no need to learn from them. Whether he is outright lying or thinks he is telling the truth, there is no reason to read this book, for there is no benefit to be gained from it.
