Have you ever noticed how time plays tricks on you? A two-hour movie that grabs your attention flies by in what feels like minutes. A boring lecture that lasts only thirty minutes drags on like it will never end. Time, as we experience it, is slippery. But what near-death experiencers report about time is something far stranger — and far more interesting — than a good movie making the clock seem to speed up. NDErs consistently describe a world where time as we know it simply does not exist. Clocks are meaningless. Minutes and hours have no application. Past, present, and future blur together or collapse into a single, breathtaking moment that seems to contain everything.

This is one of the most puzzling — and least discussed — aspects of near-death experiences. Researchers spend a great deal of time analyzing the being of light, the life review, encounters with deceased relatives, and heavenly landscapes. And rightly so — these are powerful and important elements. But the radical alteration of time perception that NDErs describe is just as consistent, just as cross-cultural, and just as theologically significant as any of these. And I believe it deserves careful attention, because what NDErs tell us about time has profound implications for how we understand eternity, God's relationship to time, the nature of the soul, and even the intermediate state between death and the resurrection.

In this chapter, we will explore what NDErs actually report about their experience of time. We will look at the research data, examine specific accounts, and then turn to the Bible to see what Scripture says about time and eternity. I think you will find that the NDE evidence and the biblical evidence point in the same remarkable direction — toward a God who is not imprisoned by clocks and calendars, and toward an afterlife where the limitations of earthly time fall away like chains.

What NDErs Report About Time

When we examine the NDE research literature, four distinct patterns of altered time perception emerge. These are not random or contradictory — they are four facets of the same underlying reality. NDErs describe a realm where time is fundamentally different from anything we experience on earth. Let us look at each pattern in turn.

Time Ceases to Exist

The most common report is the simplest: time stops. Many NDErs say that in the transcendent realm, there was no sense of time passing at all. They describe what we might call an "eternal now" — a state where everything simply is, without any sense of before or after, without any feeling of duration, without any awareness that seconds or minutes or hours are ticking by. Jeffrey Long, the medical oncologist who founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) and conducted the largest systematic study of NDEs to date, reports striking statistics on this. In response to the NDERF survey question "Did you have any sense of altered space or time?", 60.5 percent of NDErs responded yes.¹ That is a remarkable number. More than six out of ten people who had NDEs reported that their experience of space or time was radically altered.

Long's survey also asked a more focused question: "Did time seem to speed up?" To that question, 33 percent of NDErs answered, "Everything seemed to be happening all at once."² Think about that. One in three NDErs did not merely say that time felt faster or slower. They said that everything was happening simultaneously. Past, present, and future were not lined up in a row like beads on a string. They were all present at once. This is not the kind of thing you would expect from oxygen deprivation or random neural firing. This is a consistent, specific, unusual report that defies easy naturalistic explanation.

One NDEr, whose experience was triggered by a motorcycle accident, described it this way: "No speed or slow or time! Only 'being.' I can see everything around me but don't feel any pain or stress. Everything is heightened and accelerated into pure light energy, with no sense of space or time. I'm more alive than I've ever felt before. No words can describe this transformation."³ Notice several things here. The experiencer did not say time felt weird. He said there was no time. And yet he did not feel disoriented or confused. He felt more alive, more aware, more present than ever before. The absence of time was not emptiness. It was fullness.

Time Compresses

The second pattern is compression. NDErs report that vast amounts of experience are packed into tiny slivers of earthly time. The most dramatic example of this is the life review — explored in depth in Chapter 15. As we discussed there, NDErs re-experience their entire life, from birth to the moment of the NDE, in vivid, three-dimensional detail. They feel every emotion, see every scene, and experience the impact of their actions on every person they ever affected. This is not a quick highlights reel. It is everything. And yet it happens in what feels like an instant.

The Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who conducted one of the most rigorous prospective studies of NDEs ever performed, noted something remarkable about this. Patients who experienced a life review during cardiac arrest could describe what they saw for days afterward — filling hours of interview time with detailed descriptions of events from their entire lifetime. And yet the cardiac arrest itself lasted only minutes.⁴ How do you fit an entire lifetime of experience — a lifetime that takes days to describe — into a few minutes of clinical death? The answer, according to the NDErs themselves, is simple: time works differently on the other side.

One NDEr whose experience followed severe blood loss during childbirth described the compression vividly: "I focused on watching an immense, clear TV screen that was in front of me. It showed images of everything that had ever happened in my life — my entire life in pictures. And with each picture, I re-experienced the feelings that I had felt at the time it had happened. And this was happening all at the same time! I could see my life in picture form and feel the emotion or the lesson all in unison."⁵ Notice her emphasis: "all at the same time." Not one event after another, like flipping through a photo album. All of it — simultaneously. This is time compression of a kind that defies anything we experience on earth.

And it is not just the life review. NDErs frequently report receiving vast amounts of knowledge instantaneously. Some describe feeling as though they understood everything — the structure of the universe, the meaning of life, the answers to every question they had ever asked — all communicated in a single moment. John Burke, in his extensive research, documents numerous cases where NDErs received complex information not through lengthy explanations but through instantaneous transmission — as though an entire library of knowledge was downloaded into their minds in a flash.⁶

Instantaneous Knowledge and Communication

Closely related to time compression is a phenomenon that many NDErs find even more astonishing: instantaneous knowledge transfer. On earth, we learn things slowly. We read books one page at a time. We listen to lectures one sentence at a time. We process information sequentially, because our brains can only handle a limited bandwidth of incoming data. But NDErs consistently report that in the transcendent realm, knowledge is not communicated sequentially. It is communicated all at once — as though entire libraries of information are downloaded into the mind in a single moment.

One NDEr in Long's study described it this way: the moment a question formed in her mind, the answer was already there — not as words she had to process, but as complete understanding that was simply present. There was no gap between asking and knowing. This is a radically different kind of cognition from what we experience on earth, and it strongly suggests that the disembodied consciousness operates at a fundamentally different temporal speed than the embodied brain.⁴⁴

Howard Storm described a similar phenomenon during his NDE. When Jesus spoke to him, the communication was not verbal in the ordinary sense. He described it as "speaking inside my mind," with information arriving at a speed that could only be imagined. Questions were answered before he even finished formulating them.⁴⁵ This is not the language of someone describing a confused hallucination. It is the language of someone who encountered a mode of communication that operates outside the constraints of sequential, clock-bound processing.

This phenomenon of instantaneous knowledge is theologically significant for at least two reasons. First, it aligns with the biblical picture of God as omniscient — as one who "knows all things" (1 John 3:20) and to whom "no creature is hidden" (Hebrews 4:13). If NDErs are entering God's presence, then the instantaneous availability of knowledge makes sense — they are briefly accessing the awareness of a being who holds all knowledge simultaneously. Second, it confirms what Paul anticipated about the heavenly realm: "Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Paul expected our mode of knowing to be transformed — from partial and sequential to full and immediate. NDErs report exactly this transformation.

Time Expands

The third pattern runs in the opposite direction. While time compresses in some aspects of the NDE, it expands in others. Brief periods of clinical death — lasting only minutes by the clock — are experienced as vastly longer periods. Some NDErs report feeling they were on the other side for hours, days, or even what felt like an eternity, only to learn when they were resuscitated that they had been clinically dead for three or four minutes.

Howard Storm's NDE, which we have referenced in earlier chapters, is a powerful example. Storm was a committed atheist art professor who experienced a deeply distressing NDE during a medical emergency. His experience — which included being attacked by malevolent beings, crying out to Jesus, and being rescued into a place of overwhelming light and love — felt as though it lasted for hours. The actual period of clinical crisis was much shorter.⁷ Many other NDErs report the same mismatch. The clock says minutes. The experience says hours, days, or longer.

Crystal McVea, whose NDE is documented in Burke's Imagine Heaven, described this contrast memorably. She said, "Everything happened at once — yet with no sense of rush or urgency. In heaven, there are no minutes or hours or days . . . no such thing as 'time.'"⁸ There is a paradox here that is worth noticing. Time both compresses and expands simultaneously. Everything happens at once, and yet nothing feels rushed. You have all the time in the world — literally — and yet there is no "time" at all. This is not confusion. This is a different kind of temporal experience altogether.

Time Becomes Irrelevant

The fourth pattern takes the experience one step further. Many NDErs do not just say that time stopped, or that it compressed or expanded. They say that the concept of time simply does not apply. Time is a category that has no meaning in the transcendent realm. Past, present, and future seem to collapse or become simultaneously accessible. The very framework of "before" and "after" — which shapes everything in our earthly existence — simply dissolves.

One NDEr from Long's research, whose experience was triggered by an overdose of anesthesia, put it with startling clarity: "I felt perfect infinite timelessness — I knew everything that had ever existed in the universe, and everything that ever will exist. Time is an illusion, just like our skin and bones and senses. Our carbon-based senses perceive carbon-based reality, but it's really a spectacular illusion! My true nature was one with all. No time, just right now."⁹

Now, I want to pause here and be honest with you. Some of what this particular NDEr says requires careful discernment. The statement "my true nature was one with all" leans toward pantheism — the idea that everything is God and God is everything — which is not consistent with the biblical worldview. As we discuss in Chapter 26, the experience of an NDE can be genuine while the interpretation the NDEr gives is mistaken. A person can genuinely encounter God's timeless realm and then describe it using New Age language because that is the framework available to them. We must always distinguish what the person experienced from how they interpret it.¹⁰

But here is what matters for our purposes: the raw experience of timelessness — of "no time, just right now" — is reported consistently across cultures, religions, and backgrounds. It does not depend on what the NDEr believed before the experience. Christians, atheists, Hindus, Muslims, and people with no religious background at all describe the same phenomenon. This cross-cultural consistency is striking, and it strongly suggests that NDErs are encountering a genuine feature of the transcendent realm, not merely projecting their cultural expectations.

Several NDERF respondents captured this in other ways. One described it as "both time and space in earth stopped completely. Simultaneously, 'the time and the space' on the other side was completely alive, evident, and real."¹¹ Another said: "While I was in the light, I had . . . no sense of time as I know it here on Earth. In other words, no sense of the serial nature of time . . . past, present, or future. All times (past, present, and future) were experienced at every moment in time while I was in the light."¹²

This last account is especially striking. "All times were experienced at every moment." This is not a muddled description from a confused brain. It is a precise report of a fundamentally different kind of temporal experience — one where the past is not gone and the future has not yet arrived, but where all of it is somehow present and accessible at once.

The Research Data: How Consistent Is This?

Before we turn to the theological significance, let us take a moment to appreciate just how consistent these reports are. In NDE research, we look for patterns — elements that appear across many cases, across different cultures, across different researchers, and across different time periods. The more consistent a pattern is, the harder it is to explain as a mere hallucination or cultural construction. And the altered experience of time is one of the most consistent elements of the NDE.

Long's NDERF data shows that altered time perception is reported by over 60 percent of NDErs.¹³ That makes it one of the most common features of the NDE — more common than the tunnel (32.4 percent), encountering deceased persons (25.2 percent), or the life review (21.8 percent).¹⁴ Think about that. We spend far more time discussing tunnels and deceased relatives than we do discussing altered time perception, and yet altered time is reported far more frequently. It deserves more attention than it has received.

Van Lommel's prospective study of 344 cardiac arrest survivors in the Netherlands found similar results. Among those who reported NDEs, altered time perception was a core feature, with patients consistently describing the experience as taking place outside of normal time.¹⁵ Michael Sabom's Atlanta Study of NDErs who were conservative Christians found that these Christians described the same temporal alterations as non-religious NDErs — the experience transcended theological expectations.¹⁶

Raymond Moody, who coined the term "near-death experience" in 1975, noted the temporal element from the very beginning of NDE research. In Life After Life, Moody observed that NDErs frequently struggled to describe their experience precisely because time, as they normally understood it, did not apply. They would say things like "It could have been five minutes or five thousand years" or "Time just didn't exist there."¹⁷

Kenneth Ring, one of the pioneers of academic NDE research, found that altered time perception was among the "core features" of the NDE — present across virtually all deep experiences regardless of the experiencer's cultural or religious background.¹⁸ And J. Steve Miller, in his systematic study of non-Western, non-Christian NDEs, observed that temporal alterations were just as common outside Western culture as within it — further undermining the suggestion that this is a culturally constructed phenomenon.¹⁹

Why Naturalistic Explanations Fall Short

Skeptics have offered naturalistic explanations for NDEs, and we address these comprehensively in Appendix B. But it is worth briefly noting why the most popular naturalistic explanations struggle specifically with the time element.

The oxygen deprivation hypothesis — the idea that NDEs are caused by the brain being starved of oxygen — would predict confused, fragmented, disoriented experiences. Oxygen-deprived brains do not produce orderly, structured experiences with consistent features. And they certainly do not produce the paradox of time simultaneously compressing and expanding. Confusion about time — "I'm not sure how long that lasted" — would be expected. But detailed, consistent reports of a qualitatively different temporal experience — "everything happened at once" — is not what oxygen deprivation produces.²⁰

The dying brain hypothesis — which proposes that NDEs are a final surge of brain activity before death — has a similar problem. A dying brain might produce hallucinations, but hallucinations are typically dreamlike, chaotic, and fragmented. They do not produce consistent, structured temporal alterations across millions of experiencers. And crucially, the dying brain theory cannot explain why NDErs describe time as more real and more ordered on the other side, not less. As we discussed in Chapter 6 on veridical NDEs, the evidence strongly suggests that consciousness expands during NDEs rather than deteriorating — which is the opposite of what a dying brain should produce.

The REM intrusion hypothesis — the idea that NDEs are a kind of waking dream — also struggles here. Dreams do sometimes involve distorted time perception. But dream time is typically fuzzy, vague, and inconsistent. NDErs describe their temporal experience with remarkable precision and consistency: "everything at once," "no time, just right now," "infinite timelessness." This is not dream language. This is the language of contact with a genuinely different reality.

I believe the simplest and most parsimonious explanation for the NDE time data is the one that NDErs themselves give: they encountered a realm where time operates fundamentally differently from our earthly experience. And when we turn to the Bible, we find that this is exactly what Scripture leads us to expect.

What the Bible Says About Time and Eternity

One of the most remarkable things about the NDE time data is how well it aligns with what Scripture teaches about God's relationship to time and the nature of eternity. The Bible does not describe eternity as merely "time going on forever" — an endless extension of the clock's ticking. Instead, Scripture consistently describes a qualitatively different mode of temporal existence — one where the limitations of our earthly, linear, one-moment-at-a-time experience of time simply do not apply.

Psalm 90:4 — A Thousand Years as Yesterday

This is a stunning statement. A thousand years — which to us feels like an incomprehensibly long time — is to God like a single day that has already passed. Or even more dramatically, like a "watch in the night" — a shift of only a few hours. The Hebrew word used here for "in your sight" is be'enekha (בְּעֵינֶיךָ), literally "in your eyes" — meaning from God's perspective, from God's way of seeing and experiencing reality, a thousand years are as nothing.²¹

This is not a throwaway piece of poetry. Moses is making a profound theological claim about the nature of God's temporal experience. God does not experience time the way we do. What feels to us like an agonizingly long stretch of history is, from God's vantage point, as brief as an afternoon. This is not because God is unaware of what happens during those thousand years. It is because God's temporal experience is qualitatively different from ours — more expansive, more comprehensive, more able to hold vast stretches of time in a single glance.

And this is precisely what NDErs describe. The life review covers decades of earthly life in what feels like an instant. Information that would take years to communicate is transferred in a single moment. Time compresses, not because anything is lost, but because the mode of perception is radically more powerful than what our brains normally allow.

2 Peter 3:8 — One Day as a Thousand Years

Notice that Peter's statement works in both directions. A thousand years can feel like a day — that is time compression. But a single day can also feel like a thousand years — that is time expansion. Both directions are present. Both are real. And this is exactly what NDErs report: time simultaneously compresses and expands. An entire lifetime reviewed in a flash. A few minutes of clinical death experienced as hours or an eternity.

The Greek word translated "with the Lord" is para kyriō (παρὰ κυρίῳ), which carries the sense of "in the presence of" or "from the standpoint of" the Lord.²² Peter is not making a vague metaphor. He is describing God's actual temporal experience — and by extension, the temporal character of the realm where God dwells. In God's presence, time operates differently. It is not bound by the rigid one-second-per-second linearity that governs our earthly clocks.

This matches the NDE data remarkably well. NDErs who enter the presence of the being of light — whom many identify as God or Jesus, as we explored in Chapters 12 and 13 — immediately experience this radical shift in time perception. It is as though entering God's presence means entering God's time — a realm where "one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

Revelation 10:6 — "There Should Be No More Delay"

The older King James Version translated this passage as "there should be time no longer" (chronos ouketi estai, χρόνος οὐκέτι ἔσται). While most modern translations correctly render this as "no more delay" — referring to the completion of God's purposes — the Greek word chronos (χρόνος) does literally mean "time." The ambiguity is itself suggestive. There is a sense in which God's ultimate purposes will bring about a transformation of time itself — a new mode of temporal existence in the new creation.²³

The New Testament uses two Greek words for time that are relevant here. Chronos (χρόνος) refers to chronological, measurable, sequential time — the kind of time our clocks track. Kairos (καιρός) refers to a divinely appointed moment, an opportune time, a point of special significance. The NDE experience of time seems to move from chronos — the ticking of the clock — into something more like kairos — a moment of divine encounter where every instant is pregnant with significance and meaning.²⁴

Ecclesiastes 3:11 — Eternity in the Human Heart

The Hebrew word here translated "eternity" is olam (עוֹלָם), which carries the sense of perpetual duration, the distant past or future, or the entirety of time. God has placed something in the human heart — a longing for, a sense of, an orientation toward — eternity. We are not merely temporal creatures. We have a built-in awareness that there is more to time than what our clocks measure. We ache for permanence. We intuit that the present moment, while real, is not all there is.

And yet, Solomon adds, we "cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." We sense eternity but cannot grasp it — at least not from within our ordinary earthly experience. We are creatures caught between the temporal and the eternal, aware of both but fully at home in neither.

NDEs may represent a moment when this tension is temporarily resolved. For a brief period, the NDEr is lifted out of chronos and given access to the olam that God placed in their heart. They experience — directly, vividly, unforgettably — the eternity that they had always sensed but could never fully access from within the body. And when they return, they bring with them a transformed relationship to time — a deeper awareness that eternity is real, that the clock is not the final word, and that the olam in their hearts was pointing at something true all along.⁴⁶

Isaiah 57:15 — The One Who Inhabits Eternity

The prophet Isaiah provides another remarkable description of God's relationship to time:

The phrase "inhabits eternity" uses the Hebrew shoken ad (שֹׁכֵן עַד) — God dwells in eternity. Eternity is not just an attribute of God; it is his dwelling place, his natural habitat. And yet this same God who inhabits eternity also dwells "with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit." He bridges the gap between the eternal and the temporal. He reaches down from his timeless dwelling and enters the broken moments of human experience.⁴⁷

This is precisely what NDErs describe. They encounter a being — whom many identify as Jesus — who radiates timelessness and eternal presence, and yet who is intimately, warmly, personally engaged with them in their specific moment of crisis. He inhabits eternity, and yet he is right there with them. The NDE experience of time is an experiential encounter with the reality Isaiah described twenty-seven centuries ago.

God as Creator of Time

The Bible is unique among ancient religious texts in presenting God as the creator of time itself. Genesis 1:1 says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The very word "beginning" (bereshit, בְּרֵאשִׁית) implies that time itself had a starting point — and that God existed before that starting point. God is not inside time, trapped by its constraints. He created time the same way a painter creates a canvas. He can work within it, but he is not confined to it.²⁵

This is profoundly relevant for understanding the NDE time data. If God created time, then the realm where God dwells is not governed by the same temporal rules as the physical universe. When NDErs report entering a realm where time ceases to exist or operates radically differently, they may be entering the realm of the Creator of time — a realm that is "outside" or "beyond" the temporal structure of our physical world.

As Burke puts it in Imagine Heaven, the Genesis account is "the only creation story among the world's religions where God creates time — creates ex nihilo, from outside of our time 'out of nothing.'"²⁶ If this is true — and I believe it is — then the consistent NDE report of a realm where time is fundamentally different is exactly what we should expect. NDErs are stepping out of the created temporal order and getting a glimpse of the Creator's realm.

Hebrews 1:10–12 — "You Remain the Same, and Your Years Will Have No End"

Creation ages, wears out, and changes. But God does not. His "years" do not end — and I would suggest the word "years" here is an accommodation to our human understanding. God does not experience "years" the way we do. He experiences a fullness of temporal existence that our word "years" can only approximate. NDErs, when they describe the being of light as radiating a sense of eternal presence, of having always existed and always existing, are encountering this biblical reality firsthand.

God and Time — The Author's Theological Position

At this point, I want to be transparent about my own theological convictions on this topic, because they shape how I interpret both the biblical evidence and the NDE data. In a companion study, The God Beyond the Clock: A Biblical and Theological Case for Dynamic Divine Temporality, I argue for a position I call "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access."²⁷ Let me explain what that means in plain language.

Throughout Christian history, theologians have debated whether God is "timeless" (existing entirely outside of time, experiencing no "before" and "after") or "temporal" (existing within time, experiencing events in sequence). The classical view, influenced by Greek philosophy — especially Plato and Boethius — holds that God is strictly timeless. He sees all of history in a single eternal "now." He does not wait for anything, anticipate anything, or remember anything, because waiting, anticipating, and remembering all require the passage of time.

I have significant problems with strict timelessness — mostly because the God of the Bible clearly acts in time. He creates, responds, waits, plans, and intervenes. He enters into genuine relationships with creatures who exist in time. He became incarnate in Jesus Christ — the Word became flesh and dwelt among us at a specific point in history (John 1:14). A strictly timeless God would have difficulty entering into these genuinely temporal relationships.

But I also do not believe God is fully trapped inside time the way we are. The biblical evidence — Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8, God's knowledge of the future — suggests that God has a relationship to time that is qualitatively different from ours. He can enter into temporal sequence. He can genuinely experience "before" and "after." But he is not limited by these categories the way we are. He can also transcend time, access any point in time, and hold all of temporal history in a single comprehensive awareness.

This is what I mean by "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access." God is genuinely temporal — he enters time, interacts in time, experiences time — but he also transcends time. He is not imprisoned by the clock. Time is real for God, but it is not binding. Sequence exists, but it is not limiting.²⁸

Why does this matter for NDEs? Because the NDE reports of altered time perception may reflect contact with precisely this kind of realm — a realm where time is real but not binding, where sequence exists but is not limiting, where eternity is not merely "time going on forever" but a qualitatively different mode of temporal experience. NDErs are not entering a timeless void. They are entering a realm where time is richer, fuller, and more expansive than anything our earthly clocks can measure.

Time, Dualism, and the Soul Unbound

The NDE time data also has profound implications for the debate between substance dualism and physicalism — a debate we have explored in depth in Chapter 5 and which is the central philosophical concern of this book. The connection is straightforward but powerful, and it reinforces the case for the immaterial soul.

If physicalism is true — if the mind is nothing more than the activity of the physical brain — then all our mental experiences, including our experience of time, are entirely produced by and dependent on neural processes. The brain processes information at a certain speed. It generates experiences in a certain temporal sequence. It operates within the constraints of the physical laws that govern neural activity. A physicalist brain cannot escape the temporal constraints of its own hardware any more than a computer can process data faster than its processor allows.

But NDE time reports describe exactly this: consciousness operating outside the temporal constraints of the brain. The life review covers an entire lifetime in a single moment — something no brain, operating at its normal processing speed, could possibly accomplish. Complex information is received instantaneously — not through the slow, sequential process of neural computation, but all at once, as though downloaded from a source that operates at a fundamentally different speed. Brief periods of clinical death are experienced as vastly longer periods — meaning that subjective experience is expanding far beyond what the brain's temporal architecture should allow.

This is consistent with substance dualism — the view that the soul is a genuine, immaterial entity that is distinct from the body and can function independently of it. As we argued in Chapter 5, the Bible teaches that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul — that we are, in the language of Genesis 2:7, dust breathed into life by God's own neshamah (נְשָׁמָה). When the soul is separated from the brain at death, it is freed from the brain's temporal constraints. It can perceive without the bottleneck of neural processing. It can experience without the limitations of synaptic speed. It enters a mode of temporal experience that is not better described as "faster" but as different — a mode that our physical brains simply cannot replicate.²⁹

As I have argued elsewhere, this is one of the most powerful — and most underappreciated — evidences that the soul is real and distinct from the body. Time compression, time expansion, and the experience of "everything at once" are precisely what we would expect if an immaterial soul, temporarily freed from its physical housing, encounters a realm that is not governed by the temporal rules of the physical universe. They are not what we would expect from a dying brain struggling through its final moments of neural activity.

Burke's Multi-Dimensional Time

John Burke, in Imagine Heaven, offers a creative and thought-provoking framework for understanding how time might work in the heavenly realm. Drawing on the work of astrophysicist Hugh Ross, Burke suggests that our earthly experience of time is one-dimensional — we experience events in a single, linear sequence, like beads on a string. One event follows another, and once a moment passes, it is gone. Time is an enemy because there is never enough of it for the moments we treasure.

But what if heaven affords a second dimension of time? In this model, at each point along earth's timeline, there would be another "timeline" running perpendicular to it — meaning you could spend as much time as you wanted experiencing any single moment without being carried forward by the relentless march of chronological time. Nothing would ever be rushed. Every moment could be savored fully.³⁰

Burke goes further, drawing on Ross's suggestion that heaven might afford three dimensions of time. In this model, all the two-dimensional "vertical" timelines extending from each point on earth's one-dimensional timeline would converge at a single point — much like the longitudinal lines on a globe converge at the North Pole. This would mean that one could potentially experience the past, present, and future of earthly time at a single point in this third dimension of time.³¹

Now, I want to be careful here. This is speculative — Burke himself acknowledges this. We cannot know for certain how many dimensions of time exist in the heavenly realm. But the model is suggestive, because it provides a conceptual framework for understanding NDE reports that would otherwise seem contradictory. How can everything happen at once and yet nothing feel rushed? How can a lifetime be reviewed in an instant and yet feel fully experienced? How can the past, present, and future all be simultaneously accessible? Multi-dimensional time provides at least a plausible framework — even if it remains speculative.

As Burke notes, God "declared, 'I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End'" (Revelation 21:6). God is infinite, unbound by any dimensions of time, since he created time. But that does not mean he cannot act within lower dimensions of time — or that his creatures cannot, in his presence, experience time in richer and more expansive ways.³²

Time and the Intermediate State

The NDE time data has one more profound implication that I want to highlight, and it concerns the intermediate state — the period between a believer's death and the future resurrection. This topic is treated in full in Chapter 20, but the time dimension is important enough to address briefly here, because it resolves a question that has troubled Christians for centuries.

If someone died in AD 100 and the resurrection has not yet occurred, that person has been "waiting" for over nineteen hundred years. That sounds like an agonizingly long time. Some Christians have found this troubling enough to embrace "soul sleep" — the idea that the dead are unconscious between death and resurrection, so they do not experience the wait. Others have been drawn to immediate resurrection theories — the idea that each person is resurrected at the moment of death, so there is no intermediate state at all.

But what if the question itself is based on a false assumption? What if it assumes that the dead experience time the way we do — linearly, one second at a time, with each century dragging past like a century? The NDE evidence strongly suggests otherwise. If time in the transcendent realm operates radically differently — if a thousand years really is like a day in God's presence, as both Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 declare — then the "wait" between death and resurrection may not feel like a wait at all.

John Cooper, in his careful treatment of this question in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, addresses the time-eternity objection that some theologians have raised against the intermediate state. Some scholars argue that when we die, we enter "eternity" — a timeless state — and therefore the question of "how long" the intermediate state lasts is meaningless. Cooper responds carefully. He notes that this objection, if pushed too far, actually undermines itself. If the second coming of Christ and the renewal of creation are future events in earthly history — as the New Testament clearly teaches — then there is a temporal interval between a person's death and the resurrection, even if that interval is not experienced as linear time by the departed soul.³³

Cooper also raises a powerful philosophical point: even if God is timeless, why should we think that we become timeless when we die? Are we not essentially temporal beings? Can non-physical beings experience no memory, no communication, no anticipation? But memory, communication, and anticipation all require some form of temporal succession — some sense of "before" and "after."³⁴

I think Cooper is right. The intermediate state is not timeless in the strict sense. The departed soul is not frozen in a static "now" with no experience of succession at all. Scripture describes the dead as conscious, communicative, and awaiting future events — the souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11 cry out, "How long, O Lord?" and are told to "rest a little longer." That language implies temporal awareness — they experience the passage of time, they ask about duration, and they are told to wait.³⁵

But — and this is the crucial point — the NDE evidence suggests that time in the intermediate state is experienced very differently from earthly time. Not timelessly, but differently. A person who dies in AD 100 and a person who dies in AD 2025 may both experience the intermediate state as rich, full, and deeply satisfying — without the agonizing sense of centuries dragging by. The "wait" may feel like moments, or like a timeless fullness, or like something for which we have no earthly category at all. The question "How can the dead wait thousands of years for the resurrection?" may simply be based on a misunderstanding of how time works in God's presence.³⁶

Counterarguments and Responses

Fair-minded engagement requires that we consider the objections that skeptics and critics would raise against the arguments of this chapter. Let me address the most important ones.

Objection 1: "Altered time perception is just a symptom of brain dysfunction."

This is the most common objection, and at first glance it seems reasonable. We know that certain drugs, seizures, and neurological conditions can produce distorted time perception. Couldn't NDEs be just another case of the brain malfunctioning?

The response is threefold. First, drug-induced and seizure-induced time distortions are typically vague, confused, and unstructured. They do not produce the specific, consistent, detailed reports that NDErs give — "everything at once," "perfect infinite timelessness," "all times experienced at every moment." Brain dysfunction produces fuzzy time perception. NDEs produce precise and paradoxical time perception. These are not the same thing.

Second, the temporal alterations in NDEs are accompanied by enhanced cognitive function, not diminished function. NDErs report thinking more clearly, perceiving more vividly, and understanding more deeply than they ever did while alive. This is the opposite of brain dysfunction, which degrades cognitive performance.³⁷

Third, and most powerfully, the NDE time data is accompanied by veridical elements — verified information that the NDEr could not have known through normal means. As we demonstrated in Chapter 6, NDErs have accurately described events occurring in distant rooms, reported details of their own resuscitation procedures, and provided information that was later confirmed as accurate. These veridical elements cannot be produced by brain dysfunction. And they occur within the same experience that produces the altered time perception. If the experience is real enough to produce verified information, then the temporal alterations reported within that same experience deserve to be taken seriously as genuine features of whatever realm the NDEr encountered.

Objection 2: "NDErs are just bad at estimating time."

This objection reduces the NDE time data to a simple matter of poor time estimation. We all know that people are bad at judging how much time has passed — especially during stressful or unusual events. Maybe NDErs just lost track of time.

But this objection does not take the data seriously. NDErs are not saying, "I'm not sure how long it lasted." They are saying, "Time did not exist." They are describing a qualitatively different experience, not a quantitative misjudgment. And the descriptions are remarkably specific and consistent across thousands of cases, cultures, and time periods. Poor time estimation produces vague guesses. NDErs produce detailed, convergent descriptions of a reality where the concept of time simply does not apply.

Objection 3: "The biblical passages about time are metaphorical."

Some readers might object that Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 are merely poetic metaphors — not literal descriptions of God's temporal experience. If a poet says "time flies when you're having fun," we do not conclude that the laws of physics change during enjoyable activities. Why treat the biblical passages as anything more than poetry?

I agree that these passages contain poetic and metaphorical elements. But good metaphors point to real truths. When Moses says that a thousand years are like yesterday in God's sight, he is not making a casual remark. He is grounding a theological argument: because God's experience of time is radically different from ours, we should trust his purposes even when they seem agonizingly slow from our perspective. The metaphor works precisely because it points to a real difference in God's temporal experience.

And the NDE data provides independent empirical confirmation that the metaphor is pointing at something real. NDErs — many of whom have never read these passages — describe the same phenomenon that Moses and Peter described. The convergence is striking and lends weight to the view that these passages, while poetic, are describing genuine features of divine reality.³⁸

Objection 4: "If time is so different on the other side, how can the intermediate state be meaningful?"

This is a thoughtful theological objection. If time in the intermediate state is so different from earthly time, does the intermediate state have any real duration? Is it even a genuine "state" at all? Some theologians — notably those who favor immediate resurrection theories — have used the time-eternity distinction to argue that there is no intermediate state. If time collapses at death, then death and resurrection are simultaneous.

Cooper addresses this objection effectively. He points out that the New Testament clearly expects Christ's return and the resurrection to be future events in earthly history — not realities already actual in some "eternal now." If the last things are historically future, then the question of the meantime has not been avoided. There is an intermediate state, even if time within it is experienced differently. Furthermore, as Cooper notes, the idea that we become timeless at death raises more questions than it answers: can non-physical beings experience no memory, no communication, no hope? All of these require some form of temporal succession.³⁹

I believe the best answer is the one suggested by both the biblical evidence and the NDE data: the intermediate state involves a genuine temporal experience — but one that is qualitatively different from earthly linear time. The soul is not frozen in a timeless void, nor is it ticking through the centuries one second at a time. It exists in a mode of temporal richness that our earthly categories can only approximate.

NDErs on Returning to Time

One of the most poignant aspects of the NDE time data is what happens when NDErs return to their bodies. Having tasted a realm where time is no enemy, where nothing is rushed, where every moment is full — they find themselves back in a world governed by clocks and calendars and deadlines. And it is jarring.

Many NDErs describe the return as deeply disorienting. Not just because they have to come back from a place of overwhelming peace and love, but because they have to readjust to the relentless, one-way march of linear time. After experiencing "everything at once," going back to "one thing after another" feels like a demotion — like being forced back into a narrow tunnel after standing in an open field.

Some NDErs have described this readjustment as one of the hardest parts of the entire experience. The peace, the love, the light — those are devastating to leave behind. But the temporal shift adds another layer of loss. In the transcendent realm, you could savor each moment without the next one crowding in. You could hold an entire lifetime in your awareness at once. You could communicate instantaneously, understand completely, and experience without any sensation of time pressure. Returning to the earthly experience of time — where you can only think one thought at a time, where moments slip away as fast as they arrive, where the clock is always ticking — feels like a profound diminishment.

Dr. Richard Eby, whose NDE is documented in Burke's research, described the experience of heavenly time with wonder: "Instantly the sense of timelessness made all hurry foolish." He noted that communication was instantaneous — "He was speaking inside my mind and I was answering with a rapidity that can only be imagined. If I asked a question, He had the answer ready before I even asked it."⁴⁰ Imagine communicating with God at that speed. No waiting. No misunderstanding. No struggling to find the right words. Every question answered before it is even formed. That is what it means to communicate outside the constraints of linear time.

Burke captures the implications beautifully: "Imagine how wonderful it will feel — never rushed, never hurried, never late, plenty of time to laugh, plenty of time to create, plenty of time to explore God's universe."⁴¹ This is not wishful thinking. This is the consistent testimony of people who have briefly tasted the reality of God's temporal realm — and who have come back changed by the encounter.

Several other NDErs from the NDERF database describe the contrast between heavenly and earthly time in ways that reinforce this point. One wrote that upon returning, time felt "heavy" — like a weight pressing down on consciousness that had briefly been free of it. Another described it as putting on a pair of shoes that no longer fit after walking barefoot. Still another said it was like being forced to read one word at a time after having been able to read an entire book in a glance. These metaphors are not identical, but they all point to the same underlying reality: earthly linear time is experienced as a constraint — a narrowing of consciousness — by those who have briefly tasted a different temporal mode.⁴⁸

I find this deeply significant for the substance dualism debate that runs through this book. If the mind were merely the brain, then the brain's temporal processing speed would be the only temporal mode available to us. We could not experience anything faster or broader or richer than what neural processing allows. But NDErs consistently report a mode of temporal awareness that far exceeds the brain's capacity — and when they return to the brain's normal processing speed, they notice the difference. They feel the loss. They experience the return to brain-bound time as a reduction, a limitation, a narrowing. This only makes sense if their consciousness was, for a time, operating independently of the brain — in a mode that the brain cannot replicate. And that is precisely what substance dualism predicts.

Time and the Aftereffects of NDEs

It is worth noting that the altered experience of time in NDEs often produces lasting changes in how NDErs relate to time in their daily lives afterward. Many NDErs report that after their experience, they became less anxious about time constraints, more focused on the present moment, and less driven by the hurried pace of modern life. They learned, in a single transformative moment, what contemplatives and mystics have spent lifetimes trying to learn: that the present moment is sacred, that hurry is the enemy of love, and that the relentless pressure of the clock is not the deepest truth about reality.

This is consistent with the broader pattern of NDE aftereffects documented by Long, Ring, van Lommel, and others. NDErs return with decreased materialism, increased compassion, deepened spirituality, and a dramatically reduced fear of death.⁴² The experience of timelessness contributes to all of these changes. When you have tasted eternity, the pressures of earthly time — the deadlines, the aging, the fear of running out of time — lose their grip. You realize that the clock is not the final word. Something deeper, richer, and more expansive lies behind the veil of our earthly time perception.

Kenneth Ring, in Heading Toward Omega, documented that NDErs frequently report a permanently altered relationship to time after their experience. They become more patient with others. They spend less energy worrying about the future. They become more present in their relationships — giving their full attention to the person in front of them rather than mentally racing ahead to the next task. Ring described this as a "slowing down" that many NDErs experience — not a slowing of their productivity, but a deepening of their presence. They move through life with less hurry and more attention.⁴⁹

Michael Sabom's Atlanta Study provides a specifically Christian angle on this aftereffect. Sabom found that NDErs who were conservative Christians before their experience did not abandon their faith after encountering the altered temporal realm. Instead, they reported a deepened faith — including a stronger sense that God's timing is different from ours and a greater patience with God's apparent delays in answering prayer. Having briefly experienced God's temporal perspective, they found it easier to trust that God's "slowness" was not indifference but a fundamentally different way of relating to time.⁵⁰ This is a beautiful illustration of Peter's own point in 2 Peter 3:9: "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance."

I think this is one of the most practically valuable insights in this entire chapter. For many of us, one of the deepest sources of spiritual frustration is the sense that God is not acting fast enough. We pray for healing, and nothing happens — at least not on our timetable. We wait for answers, and the silence stretches on. We long for the broken things in our lives to be fixed, and the brokenness persists. The NDE time data does not explain away this frustration, but it reframes it. God is not ignoring us. He is not slow. He operates in a temporal mode that is richer and more comprehensive than ours. What feels to us like an agonizing delay may, from God's perspective, be exactly the right pace — a pace governed not by the ticking of our clocks but by the eternal wisdom of a God who inhabits eternity and yet dwells with the lowly and contrite (Isaiah 57:15).

Implications and Conclusions

What are we to make of all this? Let me draw together the threads of this chapter into several concluding observations.

First, the NDE time data is real, consistent, cross-cultural, and well-documented. Over 60 percent of NDErs report altered time perception, making it one of the most common features of the NDE. It takes consistent forms — time stopping, compressing, expanding, or becoming irrelevant — across all cultures and backgrounds. It cannot be easily explained by brain dysfunction, oxygen deprivation, or poor time estimation. It is a core feature of the experience that deserves serious attention.

Second, the NDE time data aligns remarkably well with the biblical teaching that God's temporal experience is qualitatively different from ours. Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8, and the broader biblical picture of God as the Creator of time all point to a reality where time operates fundamentally differently than it does in our physical world. NDErs, most of whom are not theologians, independently report the same reality that Scripture has been teaching for thousands of years.

Third, the NDE time data supports substance dualism — the view that the soul is a genuine, immaterial entity distinct from the body. If the mind were nothing more than the brain, it could not escape the brain's temporal constraints. But NDErs report exactly this: consciousness operating outside the brain's temporal architecture, perceiving entire lifetimes in an instant, experiencing minutes as hours. This is consistent with an immaterial soul that, when separated from the body, is freed from the brain's temporal limitations — and it is deeply inconsistent with physicalism.

Fourth, the NDE time data helps resolve the "long wait" problem of the intermediate state. If time operates differently in the transcendent realm, then the intermediate state need not involve an agonizing experience of waiting for thousands of years. The departed may experience it as rich, full, and brief — or as something our categories simply cannot capture. This supports the conscious intermediate state without requiring soul sleep or immediate resurrection as solutions to the time problem.

Fifth, and finally, the NDE time data gives us a profound glimpse of what eternity will be like. Not endless boredom. Not frozen timelessness. But a rich, full, expanded mode of temporal existence where nothing is rushed, nothing is lost, and every moment is savored in the presence of the God who created time and stands beyond it. As the prophet Isaiah wrote: "And your days of sorrow will end" (Isaiah 60:20). Burke captures the promise: "Imagine that day, when time no longer stands as the enemy, neither magnifying our suffering nor delaying our satisfaction, but peace becomes a constant companion, and time becomes a friend."⁴³

I want to close this chapter with a personal reflection. Of all the aspects of NDE research that I find compelling, the time data is among the most quietly powerful. It does not grab headlines the way veridical NDEs do. It does not produce the kind of dramatic stories that encounters with Jesus or life reviews do. But it runs beneath all of those more visible elements like an underground river. The time data tells us that the realm NDErs encounter is not just different in its content — different people, different scenery — but different in its very structure. It operates on different rules. It has a different architecture. And the architecture matches, with stunning precision, what Scripture has been describing for thousands of years.

For me, this convergence — between ancient biblical testimony and modern empirical observation — is one of the strongest arguments that NDErs are encountering something real. Not a hallucination. Not a cultural construction. Not a dying brain's last gasp. Something genuinely other — a realm where the God who created time invites us, even if only briefly, to taste the freedom of his eternal presence. And if that invitation is real — if NDErs really are stepping, for a moment, into the realm where God dwells — then the promise of Scripture takes on a vividness and an urgency that no earthly clock can measure.

Notes

¹ Jeffrey Long, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), 18. ↩

² Long, God and the Afterlife, 19. ↩

³ Long, God and the Afterlife, 18. This account is from an NDE triggered by a motorcycle accident; NDERF case file. ↩

⁴ Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 31–33. Van Lommel's observation that patients can describe their life reviews for days, despite cardiac arrests lasting only minutes, is one of the most striking pieces of evidence regarding time compression in NDEs. ↩

⁵ Long, God and the Afterlife, 20. This account is from an NDE due to severe blood loss after delivery; NDERF case file. ↩

⁶ John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015), chap. 16, "When Time Is a Friend." ↩

⁷ Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 17–45. Storm's full NDE account includes extended sequences that felt like they lasted hours. ↩

⁸ Crystal McVea and Alex Tresniowski, Waking Up in Heaven (New York: Howard Books, 2013), cited in Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "When Time Is a Friend." ↩

⁹ Long, God and the Afterlife, 19. This account is from an NDE due to overdose of anesthesia; Robyn, NDERF case 6636. ↩

¹⁰ This distinction between experience and interpretation is developed in detail in Chapter 26. See also Shaun Tabatt, The NDE Conspiracy (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025), chap. 3, "Putting the Pieces of the Puzzle Together," where Tabatt specifically addresses the Robyn NDE and notes the pantheistic language as inconsistent with the biblical worldview. ↩

¹¹ "John S's NDE," NDERF.org; cited in Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "When Time Is a Friend." ↩

¹² "Andrew P's NDE," NDERF.org; cited in Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "When Time Is a Friend." ↩

¹³ Long, God and the Afterlife, 18. ↩

¹⁴ Long, God and the Afterlife, 18–20. From the same survey of 420 NDErs: 32.4 percent encountered a tunnel, 25.2 percent met deceased persons, and 21.8 percent had a life review. ↩

¹⁵ Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 127–131. Van Lommel's prospective study, published in The Lancet in 2001, remains one of the gold standards of NDE research methodology. ↩

¹⁶ Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), chap. 8, "Is NDE Content Predictive?" Sabom found that the types of NDEs across religious groups were "surprisingly similar." ↩

¹⁷ Raymond A. Moody Jr., Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon — Survival of Bodily Death (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 46–47. ↩

¹⁸ Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1980), 39–55. Ring's "core experience" model includes temporal alteration as one of the key features. ↩

¹⁹ J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), chap. 2, "Compatibility with Mainstream Biblical Themes." Miller's cross-cultural research found no significant differences in altered time reports between Western and non-Western NDEs. ↩

²⁰ For a comprehensive treatment of naturalistic explanations and their inadequacy, see Appendix B. See also van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 107–135, for a systematic refutation of the oxygen deprivation hypothesis and related naturalistic theories. ↩

²¹ Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), s.v. "עַיִן." The expression be'enekha conveys the idea of perspective or viewpoint — literally "in your eyes." ↩

²² Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., rev. Frederick W. Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. "παρά." The preposition para with the dative indicates proximity, presence, or standpoint — "with the Lord" or "in the Lord's presence." ↩

²³ G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 543–546. Beale discusses the range of meaning for chronos in Revelation 10:6, noting both the "delay" reading and the broader implications for eschatological transformation of temporal experience. ↩

²⁴ Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, abr. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), s.v. "χρόνος" and "καιρός." The distinction between these two Greek time-words illuminates the NDE shift from clock-time to encounter-time. ↩

²⁵ William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 31–38. Craig argues that God exists timelessly without creation and temporally with creation — a view compatible with the NDE evidence. ↩

²⁶ Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "When Time Is a Friend." ↩

²⁷ The companion study The God Beyond the Clock: A Biblical and Theological Case for Dynamic Divine Temporality develops this position in full, engaging with classical theism (Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas), open theism (Pinnock, Sanders, Boyd), and mediating positions (Craig, Helm, Wolterstorff). ↩

²⁸ For a philosopher who has argued compellingly that God is everlasting (enduring through all times) rather than strictly timeless, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, "God Everlasting," in God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob, ed. Clifton Orlebeke and Lewis Smedes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), 181–203. Cooper acknowledges this debate: John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 193–194. ↩

²⁹ For the full case for substance dualism, see Chapter 5. The argument from NDE time data reinforces the arguments from veridical perception (Chapter 6), blind NDErs (Chapter 8), and children's NDEs (Chapter 9). All these lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that consciousness can function independently of the brain. ↩

³⁰ Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "Two-Dimensional Time." Burke draws on astrophysicist Hugh Ross's work in developing this model. ↩

³¹ Hugh Ross, Beyond the Cosmos: The Transdimensionality of God, 3rd ed. (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2017), 107–120. Ross proposes that multiple temporal dimensions could explain both God's transcendence over time and his genuine interaction within it. Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16. ↩

³² Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "Two-Dimensional Time." ↩

³³ Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 192–193. Cooper's argument is that if the second coming and resurrection are future historical events, then the question of the intermediate state's temporal character has not been avoided by appealing to the time-eternity distinction. ↩

³⁴ Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 193–194. Cooper asks pointedly: "Could nonphysical beings experience no boredom, no memory, no communication, and no hope or anticipation? But all these mental states require simultaneity and succession, before and after. They are essentially temporal." ↩

³⁵ The passage from Revelation 6:9–11 is exegeted in detail in Chapter 20, where we examine the biblical evidence for the conscious intermediate state. For our purposes here, the key point is that the departed souls display temporal awareness — they ask "how long?" and are told to "rest a little longer" — suggesting that the intermediate state involves genuine temporal experience, even if that experience differs from earthly time. ↩

³⁶ Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 192. Cooper notes that the time-eternity objection to the intermediate state "might backfire" on its proponents, since the notion of human timelessness at death is itself "quite open to debate." ↩

³⁷ Long, God and the Afterlife, 18–19. Long's data consistently shows that NDErs describe enhanced, not diminished, cognitive function during their experiences. See also van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 19–21. ↩

³⁸ Miller, Is Christianity Compatible?, chap. 2, "Compatibility with Mainstream Biblical Themes." Miller documents numerous points of convergence between NDE reports and biblical teachings, including the altered experience of time. ↩

³⁹ Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 193–194. Cooper's full treatment of the time-eternity objection is found in his chapter on "Problems with the Intermediate State." ↩

⁴⁰ Richard Eby, cited in Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "Heavenly Travel." See also Jesse Duplantis and Ron Lane, Heaven: Close Encounters of the God Kind (Tulsa, OK: Harrison House, 1996), for similar accounts of instantaneous communication in the heavenly realm. ↩

⁴¹ Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "When Time Is a Friend." ↩

⁴² Long, God and the Afterlife, 104–115. See also Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 127–156, for extensive documentation of NDE aftereffects including reduced fear of death, increased spirituality, and decreased materialism. ↩

⁴³ Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16, "When Time Is a Friend." ↩

⁴⁴ Long, God and the Afterlife, 18–19. The phenomenon of instantaneous knowledge transfer is widely reported in the NDERF database and discussed by Long as one of the distinctive features of the NDE cognitive experience. ↩

⁴⁵ Storm, My Descent into Death, 42–44. Storm describes communication with Jesus as occurring "inside my mind" with a rapidity that defied normal temporal constraints. See also Richard Eby's similar description in Burke, Imagine Heaven, chap. 16. ↩

⁴⁶ Tremper Longman III, The Book of Ecclesiastes, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 120–123. Longman discusses the meaning of olam in Ecclesiastes 3:11, noting that it conveys the sense of eternity or perpetual duration planted in the human heart. ↩

⁴⁷ John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 40–66, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 487–490. The expression shoken ad — "inhabits eternity" — describes God's natural dwelling in a temporal mode that transcends creaturely experience. ↩

⁴⁸ These accounts are drawn from the NDERF database (www.nderf.org) and reflect a consistent pattern of NDErs describing the return to the body as a temporal narrowing. See also Long, God and the Afterlife, 18–19, and Ring, Heading Toward Omega, 127–156, for documentation of the lasting impact of altered time perception on NDErs' subsequent lives. ↩

⁴⁹ Ring, Heading Toward Omega, 127–156. Ring's extensive documentation of NDE aftereffects includes specific discussion of altered time perception and its relationship to increased patience, presence, and reduced anxiety about the future. ↩

⁵⁰ Sabom, Light and Death, chap. 8, "Is NDE Content Predictive?" Sabom found that conservative Christians who had NDEs reported deepened faith and a greater trust in God's timing — consistent with having briefly experienced God's radically different temporal perspective. ↩

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Time in NDEs — When Clocks Stop, Eternity Breaks Through, and Everything Changes