What is heaven? Throughout the bible we find different layers of meaning, including (1) heaven as sky, (2) heaven as God’s throne, and (3) heaven as God’s realm or dimension. Although heaven is a reality, it is not where we go when we die. Rather the bible teaches that the dead are asleep until the resurrection when they inherit the earth, renewed and restored.
—— Notes ——
Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald famously sang about heaven:
Heaven, I’m in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek
Yes, heaven, I’m in heaven
And the cares that hung around me through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek[1]
2 Samuel 18.9
9 And Absalom happened to meet the servants of David. Absalom was riding on his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak, and his head caught fast in the oak, and he was suspended between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on.
he was between heaven and earth
Heaven as Sky (Realm of the Birds)
Genesis 1.14-20
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights– the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night– and the stars. 17 And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. 20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.”
Genesis 1.28
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Matthew 6.26
26 Look at the birds of the air [οὐρανός]: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Heaven as God’s Throne
Isaiah 66.1-2
1 Thus says the LORD: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? 2 All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.
N. T. Wright:
“What then do the New Testament writers mean when they speak of an inheritance waiting for us in heaven? This has been much misunderstood…The point of such passages, as in 1 Peter 1.4, 2 Corinthians 5.1, Philippians 3.20, and so forth, is not that one must ‘go to heaven’, as in much-popular imagination, in o
