Where did you ever get that idea? Enoch and Elijah have yet to die, but they will in the fullness of time:
"And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: " (Heb. 9:27 AV).So much for Enoch and Elijah.
"And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. . . . And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them" (Rev. 11:3,7 AV)
About the "firstfruits" you are referring to, you are in error that you think it is plural:
"But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruitsGreek singular of them that slept. . . . But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruitsGreek singular; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming" (1 Cor. 15:20,23 AV).Without argument, Jesus of Nazareth is the only human whose body has been resurrected as a spiritual body of flesh and bone. At the present time, He is the only human present in God's Heaven, at the Father's right hand. This does not include Enoch or Elijah. They have not died physically, so they cannot yet be resurrected from the dead ones. The idea of Jesus' surrogate birth mother, Mary, being with him in Heaven physically is a figment of the Roman Catholic imaginative dogma. It is not so, and has no scriptural support.
Your opinion will have to take a back seat to that of the Holy Spirit as recorded in the Scriptures.
These "near-death" experiences are very much open to question. The control group would be humans that have never heard of The God or His Christ of the Bible previously, but have experienced such events, then returning to life and reporting that they have seen and heard God or Jesus in their temporary loss of animation.
I have never heard of such. Have you?
I haven’t heard about such persons that you would wish as part of a control group in terms of understanding NDE’s. There do seem to be cases though of living persons who never knew the gospel being introduced to it by angels
or even Christ himself. One such person who was a Muslim, I think in Syria, who received a nightly visitor who told him to transcribe words he would give him into a notebook. The Syrian in question stated there was something very compelling about the personality of his visitor who came to see him over a week or so. He was told to see a certain foreign person known to be a believer and present to him the notebook. It was the gospel of John when the translation was done. The Muslim in question had never been exposed to Christianity(though he was certainly one after that whole experience).
A personal friend and Gideon in NY state tells me of story of a murderer imprisoned at Rykers who was illiterate and thought to be semi retarded who was known to be violent and explosive. In solitary he began receiving a nightly visitor that he called “the dude”. He was taught by this visitor to read entirely from the Bible(a Gideon Bible; how it got into solitary no one knew) that officials stated seemed to have appeared out of no where as well. The behavior of the prisoner changed as well and he was no longer violent and explosive and in need of meds. The prisoner had changed so much that he was allowed under certain conditions to tell his story to various groups in and around NY City. He’d tell his story about “the dude” and how he learned to read, how he came every night to his cell, about how the guards had never seen the dude but they they knew something remarkable was happening with this prisoner. The prisoner would then finish his testimony and on his own, return back to the prison on his own recognizance. He was questioned by various folks about this “visitor” but the prisoner would only refer to the visitor as “the dude”! This was a direct work of God leaving the prisoner literate, and saved.
I do believe there may be authenticity of NDE’s of those that after they had had one, were noted to have become converted to Christ and were leading lives or repentance afterword. Some said they saw hell even but Christ had met with them on the brink and they were saved “by the skin of their teeth”. Such stories convince me of the truth of the verse...”He was not willing that any should perish but have everlasting life!”
But I do concur(I suppose not that such concurrence matters to you, and not trying to be snarky, just accepting my own low status in life) that a control study of those who had never heard the gospel should be done of the NDE’s that are reported in that group.
God doesn’t like unjust weights and measures....he wants us to weigh what is observed as truth against that which might be observed as false. If there are no recorded accounts of NDE’s that mention Christ from a group of folks never exposed to Christ would tell us that NDE’s may be personal to only our individual experiences, being also culturally colored during our fading perceptions upon the twilight of our lives.
No recorded NDE’s from a culture that doesn’t have Christian influences that do have a Christ component in them would tell us that NDE’s are a real thing after all and they would tell us of the work of the Holy Spirit even in societies closed to God’s open works.