“When we’ve been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.”
It seems to me the author is suggesting some posthuman future for humanity.
He is. He’s saying that heaven is eternal, and even after 10,000 years in heaven, we’ll have no less time to praise God than when we started.
I don’t have my Methodist hymnal handy right now but I believe the first line is “When we’ve been there ten thousand years”. There being heaven which is eternal as Captain Amazing points out.
According to this site, the original line was “a thousand years”.
Ah yes “there” does change the meaning. I thought the here was of course on Earth.
Well, technically, in Revelation 20-22, Heaven does come to a new/renewed Earth, so both would fit.
I have also heard it “When we’ve been dead ten thousand years…”
That’s right up there with my favorite verses of any song. And yeah, with the “there” it means heaven is forever.
Frankly, that’s horrible. We’ll finally be truly alive!
John Newton did not write that verse. It was borrowed from “Jerusalem, My Happy Home” by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the version she wrote down in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
That verse was the occasion for my epiphany. I was a grade school kid and heard that and said to my self that must be the most boring experience imaginable. I will have not part of Christianity.
I won’t take it to the Pit of GD, but I always though this was one of the most facile and hilarious reasonings I’ve ever heard. I’ve never even found a serious atheist which actually adhered to it. It’s possibly individative of absurdly limited imagination, which cannot even remotely comprehend something different than its received experience. C’est la vie.
Not that I meant to specifically mock or insult you, love. I just find humanity’s foibles hilarious. You decide you can’t imagine that this trange substance called “marinara” is not only better but fundamentally different than watery tomato soup, and therefore pasta must be an impossible dream. 
Ah, but mankind so often does this. We are mostly bound to our limited expereince, and to step beyond even in the slightest ways are what make Newtons, Darwins, Archimedes’s (Archimedi? Archimedes?), and the Saints.
Being a literal 9 year old, I took that verse to mean that we’d only get 20,000 years in Heaven. Being there 10k years, then having no less days etc etc.
I think metaphor wasn’t taught in Language Arts until I was 13.
It’s not a metaphor; you just didn’t follow the logic. After 10,000 years, we’ve “no less days” left then when we’d started. If we were only going to have 20,000 years, or any finite number of years, we’d have 10,000 years fewer at that point.
Since after 10,000 years the number of days left to us has not dwindled, we’re in for eternity.
Shouldn’t is be “no fewer days to sing God’s praise”? That’s gonna bug me now.
“Fewer” wouldn’t scan – poetic license wins. Express checkout signs don’t have that excuse or get a pass. 
What they were trying to say was said much better by Mssrs. Gaiman and Pratchett in Good Omens:
THAT is what the verse means.
TLDR
Your loss.
It’s metaphorical, an attempt to frame eternity in words the listeners could wrap their brains around. I doubt that many of the Elect will mark off the days on their bedroom walls. :rolleyes
I gotta read that book. Assuming neither author has pissed me off with their earlier works. Which, unfortunately, they have. 
Actually that passage encapsulates why I don’t like most of TP’s ouevre.