You responded to a reader that Tribulation people who died from other causes than martyrdom and went to heaven would be asked to “wait a little longer” for deaths to be avenged. I thought, “if there is no time, what does waiting a little longer feel like?” In fact, both my parents are now with God and do they have any concept of time on earth? I thought once we arrived in the New Jerusalem, time was no longer apparent and the time between being saved and dying (my Dad died in 1995) and our arrival, say 40 or 50 years later, would be non existent. How does one understand this?
It’s the spirits of martyrs who are told to wait a little longer in Rev. 6:11. I didn’t mean to include the spirits of those who will die of other causes. But either way, I believe God was speaking of time as it will apply to the people on Earth in this verse. We don’t know how spirits relate to time, whether there is none, or whether time exists in their awareness but no longer governs them.
But we do know that when we enter the New Jerusalem it will be as physical beings in resurrected bodies. How we’ll relate to time in that situation is one of the questions we’ll have to answer for ourselves when we get there.
I personally believe that we’ll have an awareness of time but will not be governed by it the way we are now. Currently we can only look back and can only move forward, but in our resurrected bodies I believe those restrictions will be removed and we’ll have full use of the time dimension.