Will there be time in heaven? It seems on the face of it that time and eternity are conflicting realities, and the natural response to the question for most Christians is likely to be “No-there will be no time in heaven”. My answer has to be both “yes” and “no”.
This post is a sequel to one I titled, “Is Time Speeding Up?” You can find it in the search box above This is a long post: scroll down to subtitles if you wish.
THE END OF TIME?
In the book of Revelation an angel declares, in some Bible versions, that “… there should be time no longer” (Revelation 10:6). This leads some people to think there must be an end to time once Christ returns. However, perhaps a more logical translation of this phrase is seen in the NIV, the ESV and others:
“There will be no more delay!
The angel in Revelation is telling us that it’s time the kingdom was restored to its rightful Lord and Master.
THE BEGINNING
Another seeming confirmation of the idea that time will no longer exist once Christ takes His rightful place on the throne of the earth comes in several statements to the effect that time had a beginning. This fact is included in Paul’s pronouncements:
This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time (2 Timothy 1:9).
A “beginning of time” is strongly indicated in the opening chapter of Genesis, which states that:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).
Evolutionists and atheists struggled with the idea that there was a beginning to the universe for many years, not wishing to affirm the opening verse of the Bible. The prevailing secular philosphy was that the cosmos was eternal. The discovery that it had a beginning put their naturalistic ideas on the defensive, but subsequent hypotheses such as the multiverse began to fight off the problem. In any case, with or without the Big Bang Scripture says that there was indeed a beginning to our universe, and as we saw, the plan of God to send His son to die for our sins was in place before it.
This seems to tell us that time is a feature of the physical universe only, and that time is naturally absent from heaven. At this point I must be clear that according to Scripture (the Bible) God is outside of time and not affected by it at all. He created time as a part of the physical universe that we live in. Time means nothing to God except in relation to human, mortal activity:
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day (2 Peter 3:8).
IS TIME AN ENEMY?
The concept of time having any presence in the heaven we hope by faith to go to is almost abhorrent to us. Isn’t time the thief of life and peace? Doesn’t time bring things to an end, while we know that nothing can have an end in heaven? Not necessarily. Recall that God created the heavens and the earth “in the beginning” described in Genesis chapter one. Once God had created, including the time-space continuum, He called it all “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Now recall also that Adam didn’t fall until Genesis chapter 3. Adam had already lived in time on God’s perfect earth before things went wrong.
Therefore time itself is not our enemy, and it is not born of sin or corruption. Were we not under the Curse, we humans would still be living within certain constraints of time. Even after Adam had sinned, he might have lived forever if God had not prevented that from happening:
And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22).
Therefore, time and eternity are not mutually exclusive. How then, are we to view time? If it is not a creation of sin and death, where does it come from, and what is it for?
TIME, SPACE AND MATTER
Einstein described some incredible discoveries or theories in his papers on Relativism. He reasoned that time is a physical property, and inextricably one with space and matter. You cannot have space without time. You cannot have matter without time. The three go together in a seamless whole, throughout the universe, given that it does behave differently depending on the amount of gravity and on speed of movement. So then, if time is indeed a physical property, Einstein unwittingly confirmed the opening verse of the Bible, in which time, space and matter all came into being at the start of our physical cosmos.
OUR FUTURE
If time is a physical property, what is its consequence in relation to our future, in which we will forever be united with our God? Will it not disappear when our God, who is Spirit, restores His rule? It’s difficult not to be presumptuous here: I have no intention of stating that the following is Truth, or that you should accept it. Instead, this is the way it seems to me.
A PHYSICAL RESSURRECTION
Jesus Christ rose physically from the dead. If you don’t believe that yet, you have greater problems than whether or not time will exist in heaven. Jesus told Thomas, who had doubted Jesus’ literal resurrection, to feel him and so believe that he had physically risen from the dead:
“Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27).
Jesus had risen from the dead in flesh. However, it was flesh which was now free of death and suffering. It was somehow beyond ordinary flesh, as seen in the fact that Christ entered a locked room, disappeared as easily, and ascended into the skies to the amazement of his disciples. Amazingly, Paul stated that we as believers will one day share Christ’s risen nature-though not His authority. While he stated that “flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom of heaven”, he was speaking of our present flesh: he didn’t mean to discount the reality of our future flesh-a glorified body:
As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man (1 Corinthians 15:48-49).
As we’ve seen, Jesus rose bodily. Therefore, according to Paul’s words above, we too will have a glorified but physical form. What then does this say about our question as to the existence of time in heaven? Perhaps you already see what I’m getting at.
A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH
A careful reading of the latter chapters of Revelation reveals that there will be a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 22:1). It seems we will not be formless spirits on some cloud drifting endlessly. We will not be floating in a remote and faraway corner of endless space, but standing on a new earth-God being there with us (verse 3). I personally don’t think we will be confined to the new earth, as beautiful and incredible as it will surely be.
A NEW PHYSICAL CREATION
So let’s recap. Those who have given themselves to Jesus Christ in this world, accepting his gospel, will have glorified physical bodies like Him, and will therefore be at home in both the physical realm and the spiritual. Now here’s the next important thing to note in relation to time.
TIME WITHOUT SUFFERING
A new physical earth with new, physical bodies suggests a new or continued space-time continuum. Just as time was not of death or sin in the beginning when God created all things, so it will not be of death or sin in the new heaven and earth. To us, a thousand years will be as one day, and a day as a thousand years, just as they seem to God now and forever. Time will be of no negative consequence at all. You could possess a watch and it would tick, but you would have no worries about the passing of time. In fact, time will be our friend.
TIME HELPS US
Walk from one end of the room you are in to the other. What happened? During your short journey time passed-perhaps five seconds-and you could not have gone from A to B without it. Similarly, nothing you do, even your thinking, can be done without time. The space you live and move in necessarily contains time. Time is an indispensable component of our reality: so it will be in the new heaven and earth. There you may have the potential to move from one place to another in virtually no time at all, just as Christ entered the room where disciples were, from “heaven”, or you may just feel like strolling through a beautiful forest on the new earth or on one of the beautiful worlds God has created. That stroll, from A to B, will take time to occur. However, that time will have no bad effect on you. You will never be worried about getting tired, or missing a train, or going back to work the next day, or having to pay a bill on time, or changing bodily for the worse with age. These problems will no longer exist.
Alternatively, you may arrange to meet someone at a certain “time” and place. How convenient and pleasurable it will be for two people or hundreds of people to arrive at the same place at the same time.
In conclusion, it’s my conviction that while time will have no negative consequence on us at all, it will be in the background, woven into the movement and the music of the spheres, and behind all we do, think and say.
Fuel for Faith 