The eternal and lasting hope of the Christian is the return of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. Death, for the Christian, is the blink of the eye. We close our eyes in death and open them to see the face of Jesus the Returning King.

Time ceases at death. The soul is not sleeping in death although death is referred to as sleep throughout scripture. The dead in Christ are not in storage waiting for Resurrection Day. Death is analogous to sleep in that we are unconscious to the passage of time in sleep.

Time is not a fixture of God. Time is a creation of God. He created time when he created matter. He says of himself, “I was, I am, I am to come.” God sits outside of his creation and thus he sits outside of time.

I do not fully understand the physics of time. But I’ve learned enough to know that it can be sped up, slowed down, and turned back on itself. The way I envision death is that we all live on a timeline that begins with our conception and (in our present existence) ends at our death. But something happens to that timeline at death: it leaves its plane and loops to that point in time when Christ returns to raise his chosen ones. We are, in some sense, transported through time to the Resurrection. We fall asleep and awaken in new bodies at the voice of our returning king.

The beauty of this is that, as it is written in the 11th chapter of Hebrews, all of God’s redeemed, from Abel to the last believer on earth are made perfect in our new bodies simultaneously. No one is going on before and waiting impatiently for the redemption of the rest. We close our eyes in death individually and in time; we open our eyes in resurrection simultaneously and in eternity. Awesome!