Chapter 23

Revelation and Eschatology

Time, the Age to Come, and God's Eternal Future

"Behold, I am coming soon… I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
— Revelation 22:12–13

The Last Chapter of the Story

Every good story has an ending. And the story God is telling — the great story that began "In the beginning" and runs through creation, fall, covenant, exodus, exile, incarnation, cross, and resurrection — is no exception. It has an ending too. Only this ending is different. It is not the kind of ending that closes a book and puts it back on the shelf. It is the kind of ending that opens a door. It is the ending that is really a beginning: the dawn of a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, a wedding feast that never stops, a city whose gates are never shut, a river of life whose current never slows, a tree of life whose fruit never fails.

This chapter is about that ending. Or rather, that beginning. It is about what the Bible — especially the book of Revelation — teaches us about the future God has in store for His people. And more specifically, it is about what that future teaches us about God Himself. Because the future God has planned is not merely information about what will happen to us. It is a window into the very nature of the God who planned it. When we look at Revelation's vision of the age to come, we see something deeply revealing about God's relationship to time.

Here is the thesis of this chapter, stated simply: The Bible's eschatological hope — the return of Christ, the resurrection, the final judgment, the new creation — presupposes a God who acts within a temporal future that has not yet arrived. It presupposes a God who genuinely moves from "not yet" to "now," a God whose own life involves real sequence and real succession, a God for whom the future is really future. And the life of the age to come, far from being a timeless, motionless eternity, will itself be a life rich with time — glorified, transformed, freed from decay, but still temporal in the deep sense of involving sequence, experience, relationship, and growth.

This thesis cuts against a very old and very influential way of thinking. For many centuries, Christian theologians — under the heavy influence of Greek philosophy — assumed that the Bible's eschatological hope was a hope for escape from time. On this older picture, the goal of salvation was to be lifted out of the flux and flow of temporal existence and deposited in a changeless, motionless, timeless "eternal now." Heaven was pictured as a kind of frozen perfection, a single eternal moment in which nothing ever happens because nothing ever needs to happen. Everything is already complete. Everything is already there.¹

I want to argue that this picture is deeply mistaken — and that when we read Revelation and the New Testament's eschatological passages on their own terms, without that Greek philosophical lens, we find a very different picture. We find a living, moving, relational God who is still doing things. We find a people whose future includes real activity, real worship, real growth, real relationships, real joy that unfolds over time. We find a new creation that is not an exit from time but a healing of time — time finally set free from its bondage to decay, its bondage to sin, its bondage to the shadow of death.

Before we dive in, one reminder. This chapter is part of a larger book arguing for what I have called "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access" — the view that God genuinely experiences real sequence (He does one thing after another), but is not locked into the creaturely "now" the way we are (He can also access the past and the future). Everything I argue here is consistent with that larger position. The eschatological passages of Scripture provide some of the strongest biblical evidence that God is genuinely temporal. They also provide important clues about what glorified, redeemed, resurrection life will be like. And they prompt one of the deepest questions a Christian can ask: what will it be like to live forever with a God who Himself lives in time?

Why Eschatology Changes Everything

Let me begin by explaining why this topic matters so much. Some readers might think, "I understand why it matters whether God acts in creation, or whether He responds to prayer, or whether the Incarnation is a real entry into human history. But eschatology? That's about the end of things. Why does it matter for the question of God's relationship to time?"

The answer is that eschatology is actually one of the most decisive test cases for the whole question. Here's why. The question of whether God is timeless or temporal is really a question about whether God's life involves real "before" and "after." Does God have a future that is genuinely not-yet? Does He move from an earlier state to a later state? Does He do something today that He has not yet done, and something tomorrow that He has not yet begun?

A timeless God, by definition, cannot have these things. On the classical timeless view, God exists in a single eternal moment — an eternal "now" in which all His knowledge, all His willing, all His acting is somehow present at once. There is no "before creation" and "after creation" in God's own life. There is no "now" that is different from "then." There is no waiting, no anticipating, no arriving. The second coming of Christ, from God's perspective, is not really future — it is simply one moment among all moments, eternally present to Him in a single comprehensive act of divine knowing.²

But the Bible does not talk about the future this way. And Revelation — the book most directly about the future — does not talk about it this way at all. Instead, Revelation talks about the future as something that is genuinely coming, something that is not yet here, something toward which God Himself is moving. "Behold, I am coming soon," the risen Christ declares (Rev 22:7, 12, 20). "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" (Rev 11:15). "Behold, I am making all things new" (Rev 21:5). These are not statements about a static, eternal present. They are statements about a future that is genuinely future — for us and for God.

So the question is this: if the Bible's eschatological hope involves a future that is genuinely future even for God, then divine timelessness is false. And if divine timelessness is false, then the whole edifice of classical theism — built on the foundations of timelessness, strict immutability, and strong simplicity — begins to crack. This is why eschatology is a decisive test case. If God is really going to do something new when Christ returns, if God is really going to gather His people, wipe away every tear, make all things new, then God is temporal. Period. There is no way around it.

The great philosopher and theologian R. T. Mullins, whose work I draw on throughout this book, makes exactly this point. Mullins notes that confusions about time and eternity have caused real theological damage, especially in the area of eschatology. Sometimes, he observes, theologians make "bizarre claims" — like the claim that God is trying to save us from time, or help us overcome time.³ But a proper understanding of time shows why this is simply incoherent. If a temporal creature were somehow "pulled out of time," she would still have a part of her life after her previous mode of existence — which means she has not really escaped time. She has just entered a different temporal mode. Whatever salvation is, it is not the destruction of temporality itself.

Quoting George Ladd, the great evangelical biblical scholar, Mullins writes: "Biblically, eternity is unending time. The future life has its setting in a new redeemed earth (Rom. 8:21; II Pet. 3:13) with resurrection bodies in the age to come. It is not deliverance from the realm of time and space but from sin and corruption. Rev. 10:6 does not mean that time is to end."⁴ This is exactly right. The Bible's concern is with the end of the age of evil and the beginning of God's everlasting kingdom, not with the annihilation of time itself.

With that framework in place, let's turn to the specific passages.

Revelation 1:8 — "Who Is, Who Was, and Who Is to Come"

We begin at the beginning. The opening chapter of Revelation contains one of the most striking self-descriptions of God in all of Scripture. In fact, it contains the same description twice, in slightly different forms (Rev 1:4 and 1:8). Here is Revelation 1:8, which gives us the fuller version:

"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty." (Rev 1:8, ESV)

Pause for a moment and notice what this verse actually says. God calls Himself "the Alpha and the Omega" — the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet, which I will come back to in a moment. Then God identifies Himself with a triple formula: the one who is, who was, and who is to come. Three time-references, all temporal: present, past, and future. Then the divine title: the Almighty (Pantokratōr, Παντοκράτωρ).

Here is a fascinating thing about this formula. It is unique to Revelation. You will not find this threefold "was / is / is to come" phrase in Jewish or Christian texts before the book of Revelation. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament. It does not occur in the Old Testament or the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is, so far as we can tell, an innovation of the seer John.⁵

Why does that matter? Because the author of Revelation was writing in a world where an alternative formula was already available. In Greek-speaking Jewish circles, the phrase "the One who is" (ho ōn, ὁ ὤν) was commonly used to refer to God. This phrase — which shows up in the Septuagint translation of Exodus 3:14 and in many Greco-Jewish texts — was sometimes given a timeless interpretation. The Platonists especially liked to read "the One who is" as indicating a timeless, changeless, eternal present.⁶

But John does not use that formula. He modifies it. He takes the phrase "the One who is" and he adds "who was" and "who is to come." That changes everything. If John had wanted to portray God as existing in a timeless eternal now, he had the language ready-made to do so. The "timeless 'is'" was a recognized philosophical and theological possibility. John could have written it. He chose not to.

Instead, he wrote a formula that deliberately stretches across past, present, and future. As Mullins puts it, citing the commentator David E. Aune: "The author of Revelation seems to have a particular purpose in speaking of God as the one who 'was, is, and is to come.' It is not an unreasonable interpretation to say that the author wishes to emphasize that this God has a past. Even further, this God has made promises about the future."⁷ This is an A-theoretic formula if ever there was one. It locates God as an active subject in the ongoing drama of history: yesterday He was acting, today He is acting, tomorrow He will still be acting.

The Atemporalist Counter-Move

Now, atemporalists — defenders of divine timelessness — have not simply ignored this passage. They have a response, and it is worth taking seriously. The seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Francis Turretin argued that Revelation 1:8 (and its companion verses) should be read anthropopathically.⁸ "Anthropopathic" is a fancy word for "attributing human feelings or experiences to God as a figure of speech." Turretin's claim, in effect, is this: when God talks about "was" and "is to come" in Revelation, He is speaking in a human, temporal way to accommodate our limited understanding. But in reality, God exists in a timeless eternal present, and the past/future language is just a way of making contact with our temporal minds.

This is a clever move, but I do not think it works. Let me explain why.

First, it is circular. If Revelation 1:8 is supposed to prove divine timelessness, it cannot be made consistent with timelessness only by being read anthropopathically. You have to already believe in divine timelessness before you are motivated to re-read the text this way. As Mullins puts the point: "A proof-text is of little use if one must explain away what it actually says."⁹ Atemporalists sometimes appeal to Revelation 1:8 as support for their view. But they can only do that by stripping the verse of its most obvious meaning and substituting a timeless reading that the verse itself does not provide.

Second, the anthropopathic reading misses what is most striking about this passage. As I noted above, John deliberately modified the available Greco-Jewish language. He had a "timeless 'is'" at his disposal, and he chose not to use it. Instead, he constructed a new, unique, deliberately temporal formula. If Turretin's reading were correct — if this were just an anthropopathic concession — we would expect John to have used the standard "the One who is" formula. He did not. That choice is meaningful.

Third, the anthropopathic reading ignores the rhetorical function of the passage. Revelation is addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor (Rev 1:4, 11), churches that were facing persecution, temptation to compromise, spiritual fatigue, and the prospect of violent death. Into that situation, the risen Christ speaks — and one of the very first things He says is that God is "the one who is and who was and who is to come." What is the pastoral force of that? It is the assurance that the God who was faithful in the past is present now and will still be acting in the future. The God who brought Israel out of Egypt, the God who raised Jesus from the dead — that same God is with you now, and He is coming to you in the future. If the "was" and "is to come" are just timeless-eternal-now in disguise, the whole rhetorical force collapses. You cannot draw comfort from the promise that God will act if "will" really means "timelessly does." The promise works because the future is really future.¹⁰

So Revelation 1:8 gives us a strongly temporal portrait of God. God has a past. God has a present. God has a future. These are not three ways of saying the same timeless thing. They are three moments of a single, ongoing divine life.

The Greek Grammar

One more note on this passage, and then we move on. The Greek of Revelation 1:8 is grammatically strange in a way that makes its temporal character even more obvious. The phrase "who is and who was and who is to come" in Greek is ho ōn kai ho ēn kai ho erchomenos (ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος). The middle term — ho ēn, "the one who was" — is grammatically awkward. Greek does not normally use the definite article ho with a finite verb like ēn ("was"). You would expect a participle. But John deliberately uses this odd construction, probably to emphasize the temporal reference while also preserving the quasi-name-like quality of the formula.¹¹

Even more interesting is the final term: ho erchomenos, "the one who is coming." This is a present participle of the verb erchomai (ἔρχομαι), "to come." It does not simply mean "who will be" as an abstract future existence. It means "the one who is on His way," "the one who is coming." This is active, forward-motion language. God is not just future; God is coming. He is on the move. He is en route. That is not a timeless eternal now. That is a God in motion — a God moving toward the great climax of history.

I find this language powerful. In a world full of gods who were imagined as distant, removed, uninvolved, John's God is pictured as the One who is on His way. He was there. He is here. And He is coming. History is not running down; history is running toward something. And the God who is its author is moving through it alongside His people.

Revelation 22:12–13 — Alpha and Omega, First and Last

We turn now to the closing chapter of Revelation, where we get an even more comprehensive version of this self-identification of God. Here is Revelation 22:12–13:

"Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay everyone for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." (Rev 22:12–13, ESV)

These are the words of the risen Christ — the Lamb who was slain and now lives forever. Notice how the temporal dimension is piled on. Christ says: "I am coming" (erchomai). Soon. Bringing recompense. The language is future-oriented, active, dynamic. Then: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." Three parallel phrases, all of which use temporal or sequential imagery.

Let me take each one in turn.

Alpha and Omega

The first phrase — "Alpha and Omega" — uses the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Alpha (Α, α) is the first letter; Omega (Ω, ω) is the last. So when God (or Christ) calls Himself the Alpha and the Omega, He is saying something like: I am the "A" and the "Z" of reality. I am the one with whom everything begins, and I am the one with whom everything ends.

Atemporalists sometimes read this phrase as a claim of timeless transcendence over the beginning and end of time. On this reading, God is "Alpha and Omega" in the sense that He comprehends both beginning and end in a single, timeless grasp — He sees them both at once, because from His perspective there is no real "before" and "after."¹²

But is that really the most natural reading of the phrase? I don't think so. The imagery of first and last letters is inherently sequential. An alphabet is an ordered list. There is a real "before and after" between Alpha and Omega. Alpha comes first; Omega comes last. They are not simultaneous. They are the two ends of a sequence. To say God is "the Alpha and the Omega" is not to say God transcends sequence, but that God encompasses sequence — that He is there at the start, He is there at the finish, and He is there at every point in between.

Notice also how the phrase is glossed. "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." The parallel phrases — "first and last," "beginning and end" — are temporal terms. A beginning is the start of something. An end is the conclusion of something. These words require a temporal framework to make sense. A truly timeless being, with no sequence in His life, is not the "beginning" and "end" of anything — because beginnings and ends presuppose the very sequence that timelessness denies.

There is also an important Old Testament background here. Isaiah repeatedly presents the LORD as "the first and the last" (Isa 41:4; 44:6; 48:12). In those passages, God's status as first and last is explicitly tied to His ability to act in history — to declare things before they happen, to bring about what He has foretold, to accomplish His purposes across the generations. The "first and last" language in Isaiah is A-theoretic language. It is about God's sovereign action across real time. When Revelation picks up this language and applies it to the risen Christ (which is a stunning claim of deity), it is presenting Christ as the one who acts sovereignly across the whole sweep of history — from creation through consummation.¹³

"Bringing My Recompense With Me"

Before we leave Revelation 22:12, notice the middle clause: "I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay everyone for what he has done." This is a future action — a judgment that has not yet occurred. Christ is coming to do something: repay each person according to their works. On the timeless view, this future judgment is already eternally present to God. There is no real "not-yet" about it.

But that is not how Revelation talks. Revelation talks about judgment as something coming. Something on its way. Something for which the martyrs under the altar are still waiting (Rev 6:9–11, though that passage is owned by Chapter 34, and there we will see the cries of "How long, O Lord?" — another strongly temporal indicator). The whole book is shot through with a sense of unfinished business. God has not yet finished what He is doing. There is still judgment to come. There is still a great assize at which every knee will bow. There is still a new creation to be unveiled. If any of that is truly not yet, then God Himself has a genuine future.

Acts 1:11 — The Second Coming as Genuinely Future

Let me now step back from Revelation for a moment and look at a passage from Luke's second book, Acts. When Jesus ascends to the Father forty days after His resurrection, the disciples are left staring up into the sky. Then two angelic messengers appear and say this:

"Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." (Acts 1:11, ESV)

This verse has been the cornerstone of the Christian doctrine of the Second Coming (the Parousia, παρουσία) for two thousand years. And notice how it is phrased. The Jesus who was taken up — past tense. Into heaven — particular location. Will come — future tense. In the same way as you saw him go — physical, bodily, visible. Every single one of these elements is temporally indexed. The ascension happened at a specific time in the past. The second coming will happen at a specific time in the future. The manner of the return will parallel the manner of the departure — which implies that we can meaningfully compare the two events, which we can only do if they are both genuine temporal events.

Now, for someone who believes God is timeless, there is always the option of saying: "Well, from God's perspective, the Second Coming is not really future — God sees it eternally as timelessly present. Only from our creaturely perspective is it future." But this strikes me as a very strange thing to say in light of Acts 1:11. The angels do not say, "Don't worry, from God's perspective, Christ is eternally present in the return." They say, "He will come." Future tense. And they clearly intend this to comfort the disciples — who are themselves temporal creatures, yes, but who are also being told about a real, objective, upcoming event that God Himself is going to bring about.

Consider the parallel with human friendship. Suppose I tell my friend, "I will come to your house tomorrow." My friend expects me tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, I show up. This is how promises work. If I secretly believed that "tomorrow" was not really future for me — that from some higher vantage point, my "coming tomorrow" was already eternally actual — then my promise would be strange. The promise presupposes that there is a real between my making the promise now and my keeping it later. Something is going to happen that is not-yet happening. And my coming is the act that will bridge that gap.

The biblical promise of the Second Coming works the same way. Christ promised to come back. He has not yet come back. When He comes back, He will be doing something He is not now doing. That is what it means for the Second Coming to be a coming. You cannot strip that temporal structure away without destroying the promise.

R. T. Mullins has spent considerable attention on a view called "eschatological presentism" (EP), developed by James Turner, which tries to combine presentism with a particular view of the general resurrection.¹⁴ I will not go into all the details of Turner's proposal here (that is more the province of Chapter 24), but one of Mullins's critiques is directly relevant. On Turner's view, the moment of the general resurrection — call it t^Ω — is supposed to co-exist with earlier moments in a kind of "compound present." Mullins points out the oddity of this: "It is puzzling to figure out how t^Ω can properly be called the second coming of Christ when Christ has not yet come the first time."¹⁵

That is exactly right. A "second" coming presupposes a "first" coming that is prior to it. The whole doctrine of the Parousia is temporally structured: first coming (Incarnation), second coming (consummation). The first comes before the second. And this is not just a creaturely appearance. The Incarnation happened in real history at a real point in time. The Second Coming will happen in real history at a real point in time. God the Son participated in the first event and will participate in the second event. These are not timeless abstractions. They are temporally structured divine acts. And they require a God who is Himself active in real time.

Revelation 21:1–5 — The New Creation as Future Divine Act

Now we come to what is arguably the most majestic passage in the entire New Testament. Revelation 21:1–5 is John's vision of the new heaven and the new earth — the culminating act of God's redemptive work. Let me quote the whole passage:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."

And he who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true." (Rev 21:1–5, ESV)

Every word of this passage is saturated with temporal language. Let me draw out several key observations.

"The First Heaven and the First Earth Had Passed Away"

The first thing to notice is the sequencing. The new heaven and new earth come after the passing away of the first heaven and first earth. The Greek phrase is apēlthan (ἀπῆλθαν) — a simple aorist of "to go away" or "to pass away." The first creation has passed; the second creation has come. The Greek word for "new" here is kainos (καινός), which generally means "new in quality" or "new in kind," as opposed to neos (νέος), which usually means "new in time." So the new creation is not just chronologically newer; it is qualitatively different, transformed, glorified.¹⁶

But note that the qualitative newness does not cancel out the chronological sequence. There is still a before and an after. The old has passed; the new has come. And this transition is an event — something that happens, something that occurs at a particular moment in the great drama of redemption. If God were truly timeless, there would be no "first heaven and first earth has passed away." From God's perspective, all moments would be equally present — the old and the new would simply exist together in a timeless eternity. But that is not how Revelation describes it. There is a real transition, a real passing away, a real coming into being.

"Behold, I Am Making All Things New"

This is perhaps the single most important clause for our argument. In Revelation 21:5, God Himself speaks from the throne: Idou kaina poiō panta (ἰδοὺ καινὰ ποιῶ πάντα). "Behold, I am making all things new."

The verb poiō (ποιῶ) is in the present tense — "I am making." It is not past tense ("I have made"). It is not a timeless present ("I eternally make"). It is a dynamic, ongoing present: "I am in the process of making all things new, right now." This is divine action in progress.

Now, one might try to take poiō as a timeless present — as if God were saying, "I timelessly make all things new." But that reading does serious violence to the passage. The whole context is the sequence of old creation passing away and new creation coming down. God is speaking at a specific moment within that sequence, declaring what He is currently doing. The "making new" is not a timeless divine property; it is a divine activity that is actually happening in the unfolding of redemptive history.

And this leads to a profound point about divine temporality. The new creation is not yet complete. We are told it is coming down from heaven (v. 2). God is making it (v. 5). But it has not fully arrived. We live in a "now but not yet" — a period where the old creation is passing and the new has begun to come, but the final consummation is still ahead. From our vantage point, the new creation is future. And from God's vantage point (since the "making new" is a real act He is performing), there is genuinely still work to do.

"He Will Wipe Away Every Tear"

Verse 4 piles future tense upon future tense. "He will dwell with them… He will wipe away every tear… death shall be no more… there shall be no more mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." The Greek uses a series of future-tense verbs: skēnōsei ("he will tabernacle"), esontai ("they will be"), exaleipsei ("he will wipe away"), estai ("there will be").

Every one of these is a promise about what God will do. He will dwell. He will wipe. He will remove. These are divine actions that have not yet taken place. They lie in the future. And they are actions — which means they involve agency, intention, and execution. A timeless being who exists in a single changeless moment cannot perform actions in the ordinary sense, because actions have temporal structure (a beginning, a middle, an end). The whole picture of Revelation 21 is of a God who is actively doing something, moving toward a goal, bringing about a future state that is not yet fully present.

And there is something even more tender here. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes." That is not the act of a distant, timeless monarch. That is the gesture of a God who has come close — close enough to bend down, close enough to touch a wet cheek, close enough to do something that requires real presence and real engagement. This is the God of Revelation: a God who wipes tears.

Revelation 22:2 — Fruit "Each Month" in the Age to Come

Now we turn to perhaps the most surprising evidence for temporality in the age to come. Here is Revelation 22:1–2:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. (Rev 22:1–2, ESV)

Did you catch that? The tree of life "yielding its fruit each month" (kata mēna hekaston, κατὰ μῆνα ἕκαστον). Monthly. In the new creation.

Think about what this means. The author of Revelation, in describing the consummation of God's redemptive work — the final, eternal state of the redeemed — uses temporal language. Not just any temporal language, but periodic, cyclical, measured time. "Each month." That presupposes months. Which presupposes a cycle of time. Which presupposes genuine temporal sequence in the age to come.

This is a devastating piece of evidence for the view that the eternal state will be timeless. How could the tree of life bear its fruit each month if there are no months in the new creation? How could there be twelve different fruits, yielded in succession, if there is no succession? The text is painting a picture of rich, varied, ongoing temporal life. The new creation has rhythms. It has cycles. It has new fruit every month. The saints, presumably, are able to enjoy one variety this month, another variety next month — an unending unfolding of God's creative goodness over time.

Some have tried to read this symbolically — "each month" just means "always," "continually," "abundantly." And there is no question that Revelation is full of symbolism. But the symbolic reading faces a serious question: what would the symbol represent if not a genuinely temporal reality? If the new creation is really timeless, then the image of monthly fruit is misleading. It suggests periodicity where none exists. It suggests variation where everything is uniform. It suggests growth where nothing grows. A symbol is supposed to communicate something true. If the new creation is timeless, "monthly fruit" communicates something false.

I think the better reading is that "each month" is telling us something real about the new creation. The redeemed will live in a glorified time — a time free from decay, free from the "tyranny of the arrow" that makes our time so often feel oppressive. But it will still be time. There will still be before and after. There will still be growth. There will still be newness. The tree of life will still bear fruit month after month, year after year, age after age — not because the new creation is boring and repetitive, but because it is abundant, fresh, ever-renewing.

Paired with Revelation 22:2 is Revelation 22:5: "And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever" (eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn, εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων). "Forever and ever" is literally "unto the ages of the ages" — a temporal phrase, not a timeless one. The reign of the redeemed is an unending temporal reign, not a timeless frozen state.¹⁷

So the age to come is not a motionless eternity. It is a glorified, unending, temporal life with God.

Does Revelation 10:6 Say Time Will End?

At this point some reader may object: "But doesn't Revelation 10:6 say that time will end? Doesn't the angel declare that 'there shall be time no longer'?" This is a very old reading, based on the King James Version's rendering of the verse. It is worth addressing head-on.

Here is the verse in the KJV:

"And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer." (Rev 10:6, KJV)

And here it is in the ESV:

"and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there would be no more delay." (Rev 10:6, ESV)

Do you see the difference? The KJV says "there should be time no longer." The ESV says "there would be no more delay." These are very different claims. The KJV reading has often been taken (especially by those influenced by timeless-eternity theology) to mean that at some point time itself is going to stop — that in the eschaton, there will be no more time, only timeless eternity.

But this is not what the Greek says. The Greek is hoti chronos ouketi estai (ὅτι χρόνος οὐκέτι ἔσται). Literally: "that time/delay will no longer be." The key word is chronos (χρόνος), which usually means "time" in the sense of duration — but in certain contexts can mean "a period of waiting" or "a delay."¹⁸

The context of Revelation 10 makes it very clear which meaning applies. The chapter is about a mighty angel announcing that God's great plan is about to move into its final phase. The martyrs have been crying out "How long, O Lord?" (Rev 6:10). The saints have been waiting for vindication. The wicked have been flourishing. And now the angel declares: the waiting is over. There will be no more delay. The time of God's patience, the period during which judgment has been held back, is coming to a close. The seventh trumpet is about to sound, and the mystery of God will be fulfilled (Rev 10:7).

This reading is confirmed by virtually every modern translation. As Mullins notes, the KJV translation of "time shall be no more" is unfortunate and obscures the meaning; modern translations correctly render it as "no more delay" (NIV, ESV), "there should be delay no longer" (NKJV), or "you won't have to wait any longer" (CEV).¹⁹ The verse is not about the end of time itself; it is about the end of the waiting for God's final act.

George Ladd puts it with his usual clarity: "Biblically, eternity is unending time. The future life has its setting in a new redeemed earth (Rom. 8:21; II Pet. 3:13) with resurrection bodies in the age to come. It is not deliverance from the realm of time and space but from sin and corruption. Rev. 10:6 does not mean that time is to end."²⁰

A Closer Look at the Atemporalist Objection

Let me pause here and try to state, as fairly and strongly as I can, the atemporalist's response to everything I have said so far. If I have been presenting a one-sided case, this would be the time to correct that.

An atemporalist, such as Paul Helm, would not be persuaded by any of this — at least not immediately.²¹ Here is how the atemporalist might respond:

"Yes, the Bible uses temporal language. We grant that. The Bible uses temporal language when it describes God's creating, speaking, acting, becoming incarnate, returning at the end. But this language is accommodation. God condescends to speak in human categories because human beings are temporal. That does not mean God Himself is temporal in His own being. God's eternal life is a timeless, changeless, perfect plenitude of being — a life in which all that He is and all that He does is fully present in a single eternal 'now.' When Scripture speaks of God 'coming,' 'making,' 'wiping tears,' it is describing how we experience God's actions, not how God experiences them in His own divine life."

"On this view, Revelation's eschatological language is a vivid, pastorally effective description of how God's timeless eternal action impinges on our temporal existence. From God's side, everything is one eternal act. From our side, that one eternal act manifests in history as creation, redemption, consummation, etc. Thus, temporality is real for creatures and illusory for God."

This is a serious position, and it has been held by some of the greatest minds in the Christian tradition — Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, and in the contemporary period, Helm and Brian Leftow. It should not be dismissed. But I am not persuaded by it, and here is why.

First, the accommodation argument works only up to a point. Yes, Scripture accommodates human limitations. But there is a difference between saying something in human language (which Scripture always does) and saying something that is positively false (which Scripture never does). If God is really timeless, and Revelation says things that presuppose God's temporal activity, then Revelation is not merely simplifying — it is misleading. We have every right to ask: at what point does accommodation become misrepresentation?

Second, the accommodation argument was typically applied in the early tradition to more obviously anthropomorphic descriptions — God's "hand," God's "face," God's "anger," and so on. Nobody thinks God literally has a hand. But "God is coming" is different in kind. It is not a body part; it is a mode of action. And the whole narrative structure of redemptive history depends on God's coming being a real event — not a metaphor, not a figure of speech, but an actual divine act that will take place.

Third, the accommodation argument runs into particular trouble with the Incarnation (which I treat in depth in Chapter 27). If God the Son literally became incarnate, was literally born, literally grew, literally died, literally rose — then there is no sense in which these events are "merely" temporal from our side. The Son of God participated in them. They are divine events. And they have a temporal structure that cannot be dissolved into a timeless eternal now without destroying the Gospel itself.²²

Fourth, and most importantly, the accommodation reading does not just have to handle a few isolated verses. It has to handle the entire narrative shape of the biblical story. Scripture presents God as creating, calling Abraham, delivering Israel, sending prophets, sending His Son, pouring out the Spirit, gathering a church, and returning to make all things new. This is a temporal narrative in its very bones. You cannot remove the temporality without destroying the narrative. And if God is the main character of this narrative — if the story is literally about what God does — then God's own life is entangled with the temporality of the story. To say otherwise is to turn the narrative into a mere creaturely projection, and in doing so, to abandon the plain sense of Scripture.

So while I respect the atemporalist's reading, I do not find it compelling. The most natural reading of Revelation, and of the whole Bible, is that God acts in real time, has a real future, and is moving toward a real eschaton. And that eschaton itself — the age to come — is also temporal, though transformed.

What Will the Age to Come Be Like?

We come now to one of the most wonderful questions a Christian can ask: what will the age to come actually be like?

Scripture gives us real clues, though it does not give us full details. And I want to argue that when we take those clues seriously, we see a picture of eternity that is much better than the "timeless eternal now" picture that has dominated much of Christian imagination.

The Resurrection Body Presupposes Time

Start with the resurrection body. In 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul teaches that believers will be raised with glorified, spiritual, imperishable bodies — not disembodied souls floating in timeless bliss. The resurrection body is a body. And bodies, by their nature, are temporal. A body is something that moves, acts, relates, interacts. A body breathes, sees, touches, speaks. All of these are temporally structured activities.

C. S. Lewis — whom I cite not as an authority on philosophy of time but as a wise Christian thinker who grasped the issue intuitively — wrote: "I certainly believe that to be God is to enjoy an infinite present where nothing has passed away and nothing is still to come. Does it follow that we can say the same of saints and angels? To make the life of the blessed dead strictly timeless is inconsistent with the resurrection of the body."²³ Lewis here grants what I would dispute — that God enjoys an "infinite present" — but he rightly sees that the resurrection of the body rules out a strictly timeless existence for the redeemed. A bodily existence is a temporal existence. If we are raised bodily (and we are), we will be raised temporally.

Worship Is Temporal

Next, consider worship. Revelation is filled with scenes of heavenly worship. In Revelation 4:8, the four living creatures "day and night they never cease to say, 'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!'" Note the temporal structure: day and night, never cease, and even in the worship itself — "who was and is and is to come." The worship of heaven is a continuous, ongoing activity. It has duration. It flows.

In Revelation 5, the new song of the redeemed is sung before the throne. Singing is temporal — it unfolds note by note, word by word. There is no such thing as a "timeless song." The very nature of music presupposes sequence.²⁴ So if the redeemed will sing in heaven, they will sing in time. They will experience music as a temporal flow, a stretching out of melody over duration, a coming together of voices in harmony — all of which require time.

Growth and Learning in the Age to Come

Here is a question I love to think about: will the redeemed continue to grow in the age to come?

I believe the answer is yes. God is infinite. His riches of grace, wisdom, beauty, and love are inexhaustible. And we, as finite creatures, can never fully grasp the infinite in a single moment. So for us to experience God deeply in the age to come, we will need time — endless time — to explore, to learn, to grow, to discover new dimensions of His glory.

Ephesians 2:7 points in this direction: "so that in the coming ages [en tois aiōsin tois eperchomenois, ἐν τοῖς αἰῶσιν τοῖς ἐπερχομένοις] he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." Notice the plural: "the coming ages." The age to come is not a single frozen moment. It is a succession of ages in which God will progressively show us more and more of His grace. That is a temporally structured eternity.

Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan theologian, wrote beautifully about this. He argued that the saints in heaven will have eternity to grow in their knowledge and enjoyment of God. The redeemed will never be static; they will be forever discovering new depths in God. This is not because God is changing, but because the saints are finite and God is infinite, and finite minds can approach infinite glory only asymptotically — always drawing nearer, never fully arriving.²⁵

Relationships in the Age to Come

Consider also the nature of relationships. The New Testament pictures the age to come as a time of rich relational life. We will know one another (1 Cor 13:12 — "then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known"). We will be part of the bride of Christ (Rev 19:7–9). We will sit down at a great wedding feast (Rev 19:9; Matt 26:29). We will reign with Christ (Rev 22:5; 2 Tim 2:12).

Every one of these relational realities presupposes temporality. To "know" another person is a temporally extended activity — you come to know them over time, and your knowing continues over time. To feast is a temporal activity. To reign is a temporal activity. Relationships are, by their very nature, temporally structured — they have histories, they have presents, they have futures. A "timeless relationship" is not a relationship at all; it is a static juxtaposition.

A Different Kind of Time

So the age to come will be temporal. But I want to be careful here. It will not be temporal in exactly the same way our present age is temporal. Our present time is marked by entropy, decay, loss, and the shadow of death. Time in our present experience has an arrow — an irreversible forward motion in which things deteriorate, memories fade, opportunities pass, and we run out of days. That is a fallen time. That is time under the curse.

The time of the age to come will be different. It will still involve sequence, succession, experience, and relationship. But it will be time healed, time redeemed, time transfigured. There will be no decay (for everything will be imperishable, 1 Cor 15:42). There will be no regret (for every tear will be wiped away, Rev 21:4). There will be no loss (for nothing good will ever be lost again). There will be no running out of time (for we will have an eternity ahead of us). The anxiety that shadows our experience of time — the sense of time slipping away, of opportunities missed, of death creeping closer — will be gone.

In its place will be a time of pure gift. Every moment will be full. Every moment will be rich. Every moment will open onto the next in an unending unfolding of God's love. Like the best moments of our present life — the moments when we are truly present, truly loved, truly alive — the age to come will be those moments drawn out forever, deepened, purified, and given to us without end.

I find this picture of the age to come far more biblical, and far more beautiful, than the older picture of a timeless eternal now. The timeless picture has always struck me as more like a photograph than a living life — a single frozen instant, no matter how perfect, that never changes. But the Bible's picture of eternity is more like a living river — always flowing, always fresh, always bringing new joy, while never ceasing to be the same river in which we drink forever.

Eschatology and the Intermediate State

A word now about the connection to the intermediate state — the condition of believers between death and resurrection. This topic is treated in depth in Chapter 34, so I will be brief here. But a few connections are worth making.

The New Testament teaches that believers who die do not simply cease to exist until the resurrection. They are consciously present with the Lord. Jesus tells the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). Paul says "to be away from the body" is "to be at home with the Lord" (2 Cor 5:8). In Revelation 6:9–11, the souls of the martyrs are "under the altar," crying out "How long, O Sovereign Lord?" They are given white robes and told to "rest a little longer."

Two things stand out here. First, the intermediate state is a conscious state. The departed saints are aware. They are not in a kind of soul-sleep. They can cry out, they can be addressed, they can be given garments, they can wait. Second, the intermediate state is a temporal state. The saints wait. They cry out "How long?" They are told to "rest a little longer" (chronon mikron, χρόνον μικρόν — "a little time"). They are looking forward to a future vindication that has not yet come.

This strongly suggests that the saints in the intermediate state experience a form of temporal existence. Their time may be qualitatively different from our time — perhaps different in a way that the phenomena reported in near-death experiences (cross-reference Chapter 33) may partly illuminate. But it is still time. They are aware of sequence. They are aware of waiting. They are aware that something is "not yet."

This coheres with everything I have been arguing about the age to come. The whole Christian story, from death through intermediate state through resurrection and into the new creation, is a temporally structured story. At no point do the redeemed enter a strictly timeless existence. They enter different kinds of temporal existence — body then soul-separated-from-body then resurrected-body — but it is temporal existence throughout.

And this has implications for how we think about God's relationship to His people in each phase. God is present to the saints in the intermediate state — hearing their cries, giving them robes, telling them to wait. That presence is a temporal presence. God is present to the resurrected saints in the new creation — dwelling with them, wiping their tears, being their light. That presence is a temporal presence. God does not relate to His people by retreating into a timeless eternity and then somehow "dropping" His relationship onto our temporal lives. He relates to His people in time, as a temporal Being Himself.

Eschatology and Near-Death Experiences

A brief word also on near-death experiences (NDEs), which I treat in depth in Chapter 33. One of the most striking features of NDE reports is the way NDErs describe time. Many of them report that in their out-of-body experience, time seemed to work differently — sometimes events felt simultaneous rather than sequential, sometimes a life-review compressed decades of memory into a few subjective minutes, sometimes the experience seemed to exist "outside" of ordinary clock-time altogether.²⁶

I do not want to overreach here. NDEs do not prove any particular theory of divine or post-mortem time. But they do something suggestive. They suggest that temporal experience can be qualitatively different from what we now take for granted — different while still being temporal. The NDE data points toward a kind of "rich time" in which sequence is real but not identical to measured clock-time, and in which the phenomenal experience of time can be stretched, compressed, or even apparently layered in ways that our physically embodied experience rarely allows.

This is analogically useful for thinking about God's relationship to time (as I argue in my overall position) and for thinking about the age to come. If NDErs — who are only briefly in a modified state — can experience time in radically different ways, we should not assume that resurrected saints in the new creation will experience time exactly as we do now. It may be that the redeemed will have some measure of what the NDErs have reported: a time in which sequence is real but not oppressive, in which moments are fuller than we can now imagine, in which there is genuine before and after but without the pain of passing. That would be consistent with everything the Bible says about the age to come.

Again, this is suggestive rather than conclusive. I do not build my argument on NDEs. But they offer a window — dim but real — into how temporality might work in ways other than our current experience. And they remind us that "temporal" does not mean "identical to clock time." The redeemed will live in time. But what time!

Why This Matters for Hope

Let me bring this chapter in for a landing by asking a pastoral question: why does this matter?

It matters, I think, for three related reasons.

First, it matters because the Christian hope is concrete. The Christian hope is not the hope of being absorbed into a timeless divine essence, or of losing individual existence in a great Oversoul, or of entering a frozen eternal now. The Christian hope is the hope of resurrection — of being raised bodily, reunited with loved ones, placed in a real new creation, and living a real, vibrant, temporal life with God forever. That is a hope you can hold onto. That is a hope that fits actual human flesh. That is a hope that the faithful martyrs could cling to as they went to their deaths, knowing that what lay ahead was not a dissolution into timelessness but a real, embodied, temporal resurrection life.

Second, it matters because it preserves the meaning of this life. If the goal of salvation is to be lifted out of time altogether, then our present temporal lives have a kind of metaphysical devaluation. They are just the problematic mode of existence that we need to escape. But if the goal of salvation is temporal life redeemed and healed — if our final state is still a state in time — then our present temporal lives are given dignity. They are preparation for, and continuous with, the life to come. Every moment of faithful service, every act of love, every prayer whispered in desperation, every meal shared in fellowship — these are not merely instrumental. They are the beginning of a life that will continue forever, in time, with God.

As Antje Jackelen observes, quoted by Mullins: "If detemporalization is the goal of life, questions regarding the concrete shaping of life in time lose their urgency."²⁷ Exactly right. If we are just waiting to escape time, then how we live in time does not matter much. But if we are being prepared for unending temporal life with God, then how we live in time matters enormously. The present temporal life is the training ground for the eternal temporal life.

Third, it matters because it preserves the God-with-us quality of our salvation. The God who is coming is the God who was with Israel, who was with Jesus, who is with us now, and who will be with us forever. His coming is not a retreat from relationship into a timeless bliss; it is a deepening of relationship in an unending temporal presence. He will dwell with His people. That dwelling is a relational dwelling. It unfolds over time. It grows over time. It never ends in time.

That is the hope I want. Not an escape. A welcome.

Summary and Conclusion

Let me pull the threads together. In this chapter I have argued that the eschatological vision of the Bible — the return of Christ, the resurrection, the final judgment, the new creation — presupposes a God who acts within a temporal future that has not yet arrived. The main lines of the argument have been these:

(1) Revelation 1:8 presents God as the one "who is and who was and who is to come" — a deliberately temporal threefold formula, unique to Revelation, chosen in preference to a timeless alternative that was available to the author.

(2) Revelation 22:12–13 presents the risen Christ as "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" — language that presupposes sequence and that echoes Isaiah's A-theoretic portrayal of God's sovereign action across history.

(3) Acts 1:11 presents the Second Coming as genuinely future — "this Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." The promise presupposes a real "not-yet" that will become a "now" when Christ returns.

(4) Revelation 21:1–5 presents the new creation as a future divine act: God is "making all things new," which is a present-progressive activity that has not yet been completed, and involves a series of future-tense actions (dwelling with humanity, wiping away tears, removing death, etc.) that are still to come.

(5) Revelation 22:2 presents the eternal state itself as temporal: the tree of life bears fruit "each month," implying ongoing temporal sequence in the new creation. The "forever and ever" of Revelation 22:5 is not timelessness but unending time (eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn).

(6) Revelation 10:6 ("no more delay," not "time shall be no more") does not teach an end of time, despite the misleading KJV translation. The biblical hope is the end of the age of evil and the beginning of the unending kingdom — not the annihilation of temporality itself.

(7) The atemporalist's accommodation response is not compelling. Redemptive history has a temporal shape that cannot be dissolved into a timeless eternal now without destroying the narrative. The Incarnation especially requires genuine divine temporality.

(8) The age to come will be temporal. It will be time healed, glorified, freed from decay — but still time. The resurrection body, the worship of heaven, the growth of the redeemed in the knowledge of God, the relationships of the age to come, the monthly fruit of the tree of life — all presuppose genuine temporal sequence. The redeemed will live in time, but in a time utterly transfigured.

(9) The intermediate state also presupposes temporal experience (cross-reference Chapter 34). NDE data offers suggestive (though not conclusive) analogies for how time can be experienced in qualitatively different ways while remaining temporal (cross-reference Chapter 33).

(10) This picture of eternity matters pastorally: it preserves the concreteness of Christian hope, gives meaning to present temporal life, and preserves the relational, God-with-us quality of our salvation.

What emerges, then, is a picture of a God who is Himself temporal — a God whose life involves real sequence and real succession, who is truly moving toward the consummation of His plan, who will truly come and truly make all things new. And the future He is bringing is not a timeless exit but an unending entrance — into a glorified, healed, temporally rich life with Him.

The Christian story begins with "In the beginning God created." It ends — or rather, opens — with "Behold, I am making all things new." From alpha to omega, the story is temporal. From alpha to omega, the God of the story is temporal. And from alpha to omega, we, His people, are invited to share in His unending temporal life.

The Spirit and the Bride say, "Come." Let the one who hears say, "Come." Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. He who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus (Rev 22:17, 20).

That final "Come" is not a cry into a timeless void. It is a temporal prayer offered to a temporal God who is Himself on the way. And one day, He will arrive.