There is a small misdescription of heaven that has slipped into a lot of Christian language about the new creation. We say that in eternity we will be unlimited — limitless time, limitless resources, limitless capacity. The phrase is well-meant. But in that exact picture we hand the screen its most useful counterfeit. Limitlessness is what the screen offers. If heaven is limitlessness, then anything that hints at limitlessness will start to feel eternal-ish. A discernment app for the use of technology has to deal with this directly, or the diagnostic does not work.
What Eternal Life Is Not
The first move is to take back the word limitless from the place where it does not belong.
The new creation is not the transcendence of creaturely existence. The decisive evidence is the resurrected body of Jesus. He has not become formless light or a disembodied spirit. He is still a body — eating fish, showing wounds, walking to Emmaus on legs. The bodies of those raised with him will be like his (1 Jn 3:2). Glorified, transformed, incorruptible — and still bodies.
This is the steady witness of Scripture against gnostic temptations the church has fallen into more than once. Heaven is not escape from matter. It is matter purified. We do not become God. We do not acquire omniscience, omnipresence, or self-existent power. We remain creatures — and that is good news, not the small print at the bottom.
The image-bearers stay image-bearers. The made things stay made things. The new Jerusalem is built out of the glory of nations (Rev 21:24–26) — human glory, human making, human culture, brought into the city rather than abolished outside its walls. The future is not less embodied than now; it is more.
What Eternal Life Is
Jesus himself defines the term, and the definition is relational, not quantitative.
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Eternal life is knowing the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Not "endless duration of any contents." Not "removal of all constraint." Knowing — in the biblical, covenantal, intimate sense of that verb. Eternal life is this knowing. The temporal endlessness is real, but it is the consequence, not the substance.
Paul's word for what the church is presently is betrothed. The wedding is still to come. Revelation describes the consummation as a marriage supper — a meal, eaten, by embodied persons, with a bridegroom they can see.
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The face is the point. Presence, recognition, mutual seeing — this is the shape of the end. They will see his face. This is what eternal life is for.
What Is Actually Missing in the New Creation
If the new creation is not the abolition of creaturely limits, what is abolished? Scripture is consistent here.
Three things are missing from the new earth that are present in this one. The first is futility. Paul writes that the creation was "subjected to futility" because of the fall — and the language is precise. Work becomes useless. Hands ache without harvest. Plans dissolve. Genesis 3 puts thorns into the field; Romans 8 names what those thorns are theologically: a creation that does not yield itself to image-bearers as it was meant to.
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The new creation is free from futility. The work you do in it actually lands. Not because you have become limitless, but because the curse no longer falls between your effort and its end.
The second is scarcity-anxiety. Genesis 3 puts you outside the garden, east of Eden, sweat on your brow, and that physical scarcity bears with it a deeper one — the gnawing fear that there will not be enough. The new creation has rivers and fruit and feasting and bread that does not run out. Not because limits have been abolished — the river still flows in a course, the fruit ripens in season (Rev 22:2) — but because the anxiety of scarcity is gone. There is enough. There will always be enough. You can stop hoarding.
The third is the curse itself — every weight that fell on the garden the day the gate closed.
What is not missing, in any of the New Testament's descriptions of the new earth, is bodies, time, place, work, conversation, food, light, naming, gathering, beauty, or limits. Every created good remains, restored. The list of what stays is so much longer than the list of what goes.
The One Defensible Sense of "Limitless"
There is, however, a Christian sense in which "limitless" is the right word — not for what we will become, but for what we will know.
The early church called this epektasis. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Life of Moses, took the verse where Moses asks to see God's glory (Ex 33:18) and noticed something. Moses is granted what no one else is granted — and yet the granting does not end the asking. Moses presses on. He always presses on. Gregory generalizes from there. God is infinite. The creature beholding him is finite. The creature is therefore forever finding new depth, new beauty, new self-giving in the God being beheld. Not because the creature has become limitless, but because the object has no end.
Paul says the same thing differently:
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The breadth, length, height, depth. Comprehended with all the saints — corporately, slowly, over time. The God who has no end is being known by the saints who do.
So the defensible "limitless" of eternal life is not the abolition of our limits — it is the inexhaustibility of his. We will never reach the bottom of him. The "forever" of eternal life is forever for that.
Paul puts the goal of all things in a single phrase that is meant to be sung:
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God all in all. The point is not us. The point is him, present in everything, known by everything that is. We are part of that "all" — not its peak.
Why This Matters Here
This is not a side correction. The screen's signature offer is exactly the misdescription of heaven that this section is correcting. Limitless information. Limitless connection. Limitless options. Limitless presence. Each is a small offer of our transcending creatureliness rather than of God's being unending. Each is therefore, on inspection, the wrong limitlessness.
The diagnostic move is to ask of any technology that whispers limitless: limitless in whose sense? If the offer is "you become unlimited" — more places at once, more conversations than a body can hold, more information than a person can metabolize — the offer is the counterfeit. If, by some grace, the use opens a deeper finding of the unending God — a quiet that lets you sit with one Psalm longer than you usually would, a connection that points beyond itself to embodied gathering, beauty that lifts your eyes — the use is participating in the right limitlessness.
The screen will rarely be the second on its own. It will sometimes be the second when it is held in a community, in a body, in a rule of life that keeps the screen subordinate to the One who is the actual object of every true limitless.
Go Deeper
- Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses — the patristic source for epektasis. The soul stretching forever further into the infinite God.
- C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory — heaven not as escape from creaturely life but as its glorification.
- N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope — what new creation actually is, recovered from centuries of spiritualized substitutes.
- Scripture — Jn 17:3; Rom 8:18–23; 1 Cor 13:12; 1 Cor 15:28; Eph 3:18–19; Rev 21:24–26; Rev 22:4.
- Related — Foreshadowing, the framework pillar where this correction does its diagnostic work.