Tag: Eternity

Time and Eternity

I recently stumbled across an article with this title, “Scientists Create a State of Matter that Has Time in Two Dimensions.” In the common experience of our universe everything can be described by three spatial dimensions and the fourth is time. What would be described in that article would certainly bend the mind as most quantum mechanics does. I read only a short distance into the article before giving up. Their observation was that a second dimension of time was “borrowed” from another spatial set of dimensions “that did not exist”. I’m not sure how you arrive at that conclusion.

I share this brief synopsis to introduce the idea that time is not as straight forward as we might think. It seems to be something definitely tied to creation. It does not transcend creation. One fallacy that I have seen in some theological thinking is that we will transcend creation and time at our death. For instance, one common view is that when we die, we move forward directly to Judgment Day because we transcend time. Revelation 6:9-11 puts a hole in that theory:

9 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. 10 They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” 11 Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.

Revelation 6:9-11 (ESV)

Here people who have been martyred, so they are definitely dead, are asking how long it will take to get to Judgment Day. They are asking a time question. They are told to wait (a time answer). Nobody is transcending anything.

I do believe in the possibility of transcending all time, space, and physical laws. That is what God does. He is the Creator of all of these things and is “outside” of the constrains of time-space. People do not become like God in this regard. This may explain why to God a “day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.”

In the study of our universe, it was theorized and later proved that time changes as you approach the speed of light. From our experience it would seem like time is a constant. Would time remain the same if you moved into a different time-space continuum? This is what I theorize happens when we die. Heaven isn’t a distant part of our universe. It is a parallel universe that does exist. The passage of time there and the passage of time here may not be in lockstep. What would this mean for our experience? I’m not sure. I believe that post-Judgment Day we will have a resurrected body that will be movable from this renewed universe to a renewed Heaven. The Bible hints that we have an eternal inheritance in both. If time doesn’t move the same in both, that might lead to an interesting experience.

The final “time” topic I have is that of the word “eternal” itself. Is eternal a straight-line unending stream of experience? In the description of the new Earth in Isaiah 65 the length of our existence is compared to the lifespan of a tree. It doesn’t seem unending there. This dissonance with later revelations which use the word “eternal”, could be attributed to the limited revelation given to Isaiah who lives before Jesus’ victory.

God certainly had at least the ability to know that Jesus would succeed in His mission to atone for the sins of the world. He might just be not letting on to Isaiah that a place in Heaven was in the future for redeemed humans and that life in the New Earth was more than long but rather eternal. It also might be true that we just don’t know what it is like to transcend time as God does.

While I expect the meaning of “eternal” might be more complex than our minds can comprehend, I think the message is that our existence will be pleasingly unending. We will not return to beginning as some views in Eastern religions suggest.

While eternal joy sounds great, eternal suffering and damnation is another story. The Bible definitely portrays a majority being damned. It does not leave room for a damnation that consumes a being and leaves them non-existent. I suppose a possibility is that the experience of time might be vastly different in the time-space of Hell. This might mitigate the horror in some way.

With our limited experience and our limited revelation, there are more questions than answers. It is a topic that challenges the mind and leaves room for our imagination. We can be certain that whatever we experience, because of Christ, it will be good.

We Will Be Made Multi-Dimensional?

No doubt God has some pleasant surprises for us in the eternity He has planned.  Some of these things are kept as surprises because we wouldn’t understand them if He did tell us ahead of time.  What I am writing about in this entry is possibility one such surprise.  I will admit that it is speculation based on very little data, but it still is consistent with Scripture and mentally graspable.  At least I hope you get it.

It confounds many people that the Bible talks about Heaven and a New Earth.  Why would one want a New Earth if we have Heaven?  The tendency is to conflate the two, though this is clearly wrong.  Both are distinct.

What if it where possible to move freely between Heaven, with unique and glorious qualities of its own; and a New Earth, for that matter a New Universe, made perfectly as God intended it from the beginning and now being the official dwelling place of God?  In other words, it would not be one or the other but both.

Part of understanding this idea is having a concept of where Heaven is in the first place.  Is Heaven just far out in the time and space dimensions we know?  I doubt it.  The Bible just describes Heaven as being “up”.  It doesn’t really say where it is.  With a little more sophistication about how reality is structured, other possibilities for the location of Heaven come to light.

With the study of the bizarre behavior of particles at the atomic (quantum) level, the theory that there may be other dimensions has come to light.  Our experience only accounts for three physical dimensions and one time dimension.  With these we can locate any point that has ever existed, or so it seems.  Quantum mechanics suggests that there may be other dimensions that we are currently unable to access with our senses or our instruments. (Do not confuse this with the baseless theory of the “multiverse”)

Could Heaven, Hell, Sheol, the Abyss and who knows what else exist in other dimensions, and the only current way of accessing them is through our death?  I think it is more than possible, but rather likely.  Consider the Biblical account of the movement of angels.  They properly exist in Heaven.  That is their habitat.  But for God’s purposes they also seem to be able to access Earth.  Consider also the account of Satan’s expulsion from Heaven in Revelation 12.  Previously, he had access to Heaven and Earth.  After his expulsion, he only could access Earth (or this universe).  Perhaps the travel between Heaven and Earth is a matter of movement along the dimensions we already experience, but it seems more likely to me that Heaven is from outside of these dimensions.

That is a long explanation to get to my point.  It seems that we can have, through Jesus, a place in Heaven with a heavenly body.  At the point of Christ’s visible return, there is the resurrection of an earthly body and the creation of new dwelling place for us–a new Earth.  Do we just lose Heaven and the heavenly body or do we gain a resurrected body and a New Earth?  2 Corinthians 5:1 says:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with human hands, eternal in the heavens.

This is referring to our heavenly body.  Or to say it another way, the body that we will have in the dimensional space where Heaven exists.  We will have it eternally.

So what will we be?  We will be beings who can enjoy a perfected earth-like planet with a resurrected body that has new capabilities, and we will have the capacity to move to the Heavenly plane and enjoy the significantly different realm of a new Heaven.

That doesn’t sound boring to me.