People wonder what age believers will be in Heaven. If you die as a child, will you be a child in eternity? If you die of old age, will you be old in Heaven?

The Bible doesn’t answer these questions with clarity. So the most respectful answer, in my opinion, is “We don’t know.”

The Bible does teach that the resurrected bodies of believers will be glorious–unimaginably glorious. The Biblical analogy actually compares the upgrade to be as amazing as a seed growing into a plant. If this glory is so great, we can safely reason that we need not worry about being decrepit or disfigured or anything less than the fullness God has planned for us (see 1 Corinthians 15).

Whatever our heavenly ages, I believe we’ll be able to recognize one another. Jesus, after he was raised from the dead was recognized by his followers–sometimes not immediately, but always once he had revealed himself.

Lewis very briefly riffs on this idea of Heavenly ages at the end of The Silver Chair. The King Caspian has died, and he transforms before their eyes from an old man back into his youth. Yet, they still weren’t sure what his age was–age is far less relevant when you’re in eternity.

Lewis’s comment is insightful for a second reason–that even in this life, age isn’t as relevant as we think it is when it comes to spiritual maturity. This is a recurrent theme throughout Lewis’s writings–a theme that we find in the Bible when Jesus commends the faith of children, and rebukes the hard-heartedness of grownups.

And the dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to grey, and from grey to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles were smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leaped up and stood before them–a very young man, or a boy. (But Jill couldn’t say which, because of people having no particular ages in Aslan’s country. Even in this world, of course, it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.)

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 212.