“Where is Heaven?” was published in the UnitedEvangelical, January 30, 1976, pp 5-7.

Where Is Heaven?

Robert C. Newman

After one of the early Russian astronauts returned fromorbit around the earth, he remarked that he was satisfied that God does not exist,since he had not seen Him while travelling in the heavens!  Absurd as it sounds, this sort of scoffis not rare. Theologically liberalworks on the Bible commonly teach that the Bible’s picture of heaven is somesort of “attic” up above the solid sky.

Just what does the Bible have to say about the location ofheaven? To answer this question,we must first distinguish which heaven we are talking about.  For instance, 2 Cor 12:2 speaks of a“third heaven,” which apparently means the place of God’s dwelling orpresence. The other two heavensimplied by this phrase appear, after some study, to refer to the air oratmosphere, as the Bible often speaks of “birds of heaven,” and what we now call outer space, as Scripture refersto the “stars of heaven.” Thus, ina religious context, it is the “third heaven,” or abode of God, that is usuallymeant by “heaven.”

So, what we would like to know is the location of God’sspecial dwelling place. There are,of course, many Scriptures which speak of it as being “up,” from which,naturally enough, most people have assumed it is up in the sky somewhere.  As astronomers have looked further andfurther out into space, such people have been forced to move heaven further andfurther away, or to hide it in certain dark nebulae. But is this really the Scriptural view?

How far up is heaven? References about travelling to heaven do not indicate that anysubstantial distance is involved. When Jacob sees the ladder reaching into heaven, he recognizes Godstanding at the top. Since God’sappearances in human form are also in human size, this implies that the top ofthe ladder is not very far away, surely much less than a mile.  So likewise in regard to the ascensionof our Lord, we see that Jesus is only taken up into a cloud when Hedisappears.

Only one passage would seem to speak of travel to heavengoing beyond the stars, Isaiah 14:13. Yet careful examination of this passage reveals that the king of Babylonis compared to the “morning star” Venus (improperly translated as a personalname, Lucifer). Thus the remarkthat the king will exalt his throne above the stars only compares his pride to the fact that the planetVenus really is exalted in brightness above the other stars. There is here no Scripture warrant for any great distance to heaven.

But is heaven always “up” in the Bible?  Several passages speak of an unseenworld all around us, as for example in 2 Kings 6:17, where Elisha’s servant isallowed to see that he and the prophet are protected from they Syrian army by agreat company of horses and fiery chariots surrounding the city.  Such invisible angelic beings arefrequently called the “armies of heaven,” which certainly could mean that theresphere of activity, the invisible world around us, is heaven.

Even more to the point, however, is the Biblical descriptionof God’s appearance to Israel at Mt. Sinai. In Nehemiah 9:13, God is represented as having come downupon the mountain and yet as having spoken from heaven.  Similarly, Deuteronomy 4:35 says:

Out of heaven he made the to hear his voice … and uponearth he shewed thee his great fire; andthou heardest his words out of the midst of the fire.

Both of these passages seem to say that heaven is upon Mt.Sinai at the time of these events.

The same impression is given by the direct account of theseevent related in Exodus 20:21-22:

And the people stood afar off:  and Moses drew near unto the thickdarkness where God was. And the LORD said to Moses, Thus shallyou say to the children of Israel: Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.

It thus appears from Scripture that heaven, in the sense ofGod’s special dwelling place, is all around us, although for some reason wecannot see it unless God chooses to reveal it. Such a picture is very fruitful in helping us ot understanda number of puzzling passages related to visions of heaven, the appearance ofpeculiar clouds, Jesus’ entrance into a closed room after His resurrection, the“rolling up” of the sky at the Last Judgment, and so forth.  It should also give us a renewedappreciation of the nearness of God and of His watchful care over those who aredepending on Him.

How may be understand the connection between our visibleworld and heaven? This is a matteron which we can only speculate. One sugestion has been given in the Moody Science Film Facts of Faith, where it is proposed that the forces of our world(which would involve all our senses) do not interact with those of heaven.  However, I personally prefer a pictureinvolving multi-dimensional spaces. Let me attempt to describe my suggestion.

To do this we need to look briefly at geometry, that ratherodd branch of mathematics which most of us learned in high school in a formvirtually unchanged since the time of the ancience Greeks.  During the nineteenth century, however,several mathematicians made some important “mental experiments” withgeometry. Noting that theparallelism postulate of Euclid (given a line, and a point not on that line,there is one and only one line whichcan be drawn through that point parallel to the given line) did not seem to benecessary, the German Wilhelm Riemann substituted the postulate that no such parallel line could be drawn.  Surprisingly enough, the resultinggeometry turned out to be practical! It is the geometry for a curved space such as (in two dimensions) thesurface of a sphere, whereas Euclid’s geometry in two dimensions is that of aflat surface.

The Russian Nikolai Lowachevsky, on the other hand, proposedthat more than one such parallel line couldbe drawn. As a result, hedesicovered the geometry of another sort of curved spece, which in twodimensions looks foughly like the surface of a riding saddle. Meanwhile, other mathematiciansexpanded the scope of geometry to study spaces have more than merely threespatial dimensions.

Early in this [20^th] century the physicist AlbertEinstein discovered that these strange ideas about multi-dimensional curvedspace actually seemed to apply to our own universe – that ourthree-dimensional space is actually “bent” in the presence of gravity.  His ideas were presented in his GeneralTheory of Relativity.

Now even mathematicians (not to mention laymen!) have a hardtime visualizing a three-dimensional space being curved (since it is necessaryto imagine some fourth spatial dimension or direction into which to bendit). So to illustrate someproperties of such a space, it is necessary to “retreat” to a two-dimensionalspace in order to visualize what is going on. Imagine then, a flat sheet of paper.  It is a two-dimensional space, and itsgeometry satisfies Euclid’s parallelism postulate. But if it were bent (some stretching and crumpling will alsobe necessary) to form part of the surface of a sphere, it would no longersatisfy this postulate.

Now let us imagine two-dimensional people living in this flatsurface. They cannot see out ofthe surface but only within it, just as our senses are limited to the threedimensions in which we live. If athree-dimensional object (say a sphere) were to visit this three-dimensionalspace, the two-dimensional people would be terrified, just as we would by avisit from one inhabiting four dimensions. For instance, the sphere entering the two-dimensional spacewould look like a circle (the intersection of the sphere with the plane), butit would be able to change size by moving perpendicular to the plane, and itcould also enter the two-dimensional space at any point (seeming to appear fromnowhere) by moving parallel to the plane while not in it.  In just the same way, afour-dimensional “sphere” could enter our three-dimensional space and appear tous as an ordinary sphere (but variable in sixe!), yet it could show up anywherein our space without having passed through any other part of our visible space.

It seems to me that the appearance of Jesus to His discipleson Easter Sunday evening might have been something like this.  The doors are locked, but Jesus issuddenly in their midst! There isno statement that He came through way, floor or ceiling, yet He is seen andtouched by them and He eats food in their presence. We can imagine our resurrected Lord as one who is no longerrestricted to our three-dimensional space. Instead He can now move in a fourth direction into which wecan neiter move nor point, and which we can scarcely imagine.  But He, by moving perhaps only afraction of an inch in this fourth direction, may enter or leave our space atwill.

Likewise, then, we gain a terrifying picture of the realityof the Last Judgment when (perhaps) all mankind is moved a thousandth of aninch in this forth direction so that “heaven and earth flee away and no placeis found for them” (Revelation 20:11) and we stand in the presence of GodAlmighty to answer for our every act and thought.

No doubt, several of the above paragraphs are speculation,and further investigation may prove them inaccurate. Yet even such guesses show us that the Scriptures are not tobe dismissed as merely the gropings of primitive men, but they are consistentwith the latest results of modern science and mathematics.  Our God is the One who really exists,and He will do all that He has promised us in His word.