August 1, 2001

  • #3 Where Heaven is

    bloomingrose[1]

    WHERE HEAVEN IS

    Heaven is an actual place just as Los Angeles is an actual place. But it's impossible to chart heaven's longitude or latitude because it can't be located geographically even in space. But it's a place where people who have glorified bodies, like Christ's resurrection body, will actually live. After His resurrection Christ could eat, drink, walk, and talk. He could be touched and recognized when He allowed Himself to be. Heaven is a place for real, not ethereal, people.

    A. The Direction - Heaven is up. In 2 Corinthians 12:2 Paul says that he was caught up to the third heaven. Ephesians 4:8-10 points out that when Jesus came to earth, He descended and when He returned to heaven, He ascended. Acts 1 tells us that Jesus ascended into heaven. While the disciples watched, two angels said, "This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven" (v. 11). Discussing the rapture, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 says the Lord will catch us up into heaven. When God examines His creatures, He looks down (Ps. 53:2); when man seeks God, he looks up (Ps. 121:1). The apostle John saw a door open in heaven and heard a voice inviting him to "come up" (Rev. 4:1). John pictured the New Jerusalem, the eternal home of the saints, as coming down out of heaven (Rev. 21:10).

    B. The Distance

    Second Corinthians 12:2 refers to the "third" heaven. From the earth's surface and extending upward 7-10 miles is a region called the troposphere; extending beyond that is the stratosphere; extending beyond that approximately 50 miles is the mesosphere; extending beyond that 250 miles or more is the ionosphere; extending beyond that to the outer limits of a planet's atmosphere is the exosphere, beyond which is infinite space. Beyond them all is the third heaven.

    During 1973 and 1974 a Pioneer Spacecraft passed Jupiter, which is millions of miles from earth. Our most recent satellites are designed to go even farther. But none of them have reached heaven.

    The moon is 252,000 miles from the earth, but that's still relatively close. If you walked 24 miles a day, theoretically you could arrive there in about 28 years, but you wouldn't be much closer to heaven.

    A ray of light travels from the earth to the moon in about 1.5 seconds because it's traveling 186,000 miles per second. Perhaps if we could travel at that incredible speed, we could reach heaven. Traveling 186,000 miles per second, we would arrive on the planet Mercury in about 4 minutes and 30 seconds because it's only 57 million miles from the earth. As we traveled to Mercury, we would reach Venus in about 2 minutes and 20 seconds because it's only 26 million miles away. To span the 390 million miles between earth and Jupiter would take about 35 minutes. The 793 million miles to Saturn would take about an hour and 10 minutes. Uranus, named for the Greek word ouranos, which means "heaven," is about 1.5 billion miles away. Neptune is about 2.7 billion miles away, and Pluto a billion more than that (Robert Jastrow and Malcolm Thompson, Astronomy: Fundamentals and Frontiers [Santa Barbara: John Wiley and Sons, 1977], p. 348). But after traveling that far, we would still be on the front porch of our solar system and well within our own galaxy!

    The earth is one of nine planets revolving around the sun. It has a diameter of 8,000 miles and an estimated mass of about 6.6 x 1021 tons. That massive sphere revolves on its axis, remaining 93 million miles from our sun. The sun has a diameter of about 864 thousand miles and a mass 332 thousand times larger than the earth. But it's only one star in a galaxy of billions of other stars! Distances in the universe are so great that they have to be measured by the speed of light--186,000 miles per second or 11,160,000 miles per minute. For example our sun is about 8 light minutes away.

    Our solar system has a diameter of approximately 700 light minutes--8 billion miles--but the galaxy that contains it has a diameter of 100 thousand light years and is one of billions of galaxies (Astronomy: Fundamentals and Frontiers, pp. 4, 12). Nevertheless Jesus said to the thief dying next to Him, "Today you shall be with Me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). Only God could bridge such distances.

    Edit:  If I can throw my two yen in here, I think that rather than only distance, that we must also take dimension into consideration.  If time is the fourth dimension, then for God and His heavenly realms to exist eternally outside of time, He must be outside of it.

usalapinhazzer