I believe our greatest misunderstanding of eternity comes from seeing it as merely an endless period of time. But Eternity is not time.

Heaven and hell exist outside of and independent of our physical universe of space, time & matter.

Our attempts to describe eternity invariably fail because they are based on time concepts. A bird carries a grain of sand from the shores of America to the shores of Europe and when all the sand has been moved eternity has just begun. An ant walks the same path around a steel ball the size of earth until it is worn into two pieces and so eternity has just begun. We sing, "When we've been there 10,000 years". But these concepts fail because they relate to time & eternity is not time.

Time had a beginning and will have an end. Eternity, by definition, has neither. Eternity simply is.

In eternity we will have different bodies (see 1st Corinthians 15:35-49, especially verse 40, “There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another”). With bodies suited for eternity, surely our sense of awareness will also be different.

Consider that in time remembering things is a challenge. You are made aware of someone’s name but soon forget it. But what if in your eternal body, your awareness of “the past” is equal with your awareness of “the present”? Would you even have a sense of the passage of time if everything you experience remains in your mind with perfect clarity?

With earthly bodies suited only for time, we have no means of sensing the experience of being outside of time. Equipped only with minds that reside in earthly bodies we have no means to even imagine what being outside of time is like.

Did God give us a clue with the name he told Moses to call him in Exodus 3:14? “I Am Who I Am” is our best English equivalent. He does not say “I Am Who I have been” or “I Am Who I will be”, but rather a name which describes a perfectly consistent state of being, of existing.

Something to think about.