CEILINGS“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third Heaven…to Paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.” –2 Corinthians 12:2, 4
Ceilings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome display some of the most famous paintings in the world, stroked five hundred years ago by Michelangelo. Painstakingly brushed into fresh lime plaster as he lay on his back on scaffolding, the frescoes depict Creation, the fall of Adam and Eve, and Noah and the flood. To see them, people must look up, just as we instinctively look skyward when thoughts turn to Heaven. Why up? Perhaps because we consider Heaven the “ceiling” of all creation. Though its location and nature are wrapped in mystery, Heaven is beyond our understanding of time and space. But it’s real.
Jesus said He came “down” from Heaven (John 6:33). When He ascended after His resurrection, His body rose steadily upward from land until clouds obscured his passage (Acts 1:2). His followers would have stared at the sky all day if two white-garbed beings hadn’t told them, “This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into Heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into Heaven” (Acts 1:11).
To avoid any misunderstanding about what we call “outer space” and true Heaven, it’s helpful to realize that the Bible refers to three “heavens.” The first Heaven is the firmament and atmosphere, what we call “sky.” It is space where manned and unmanned rockets have flown. But it’s not God’s home. Soviet cosmonaut and atheist Yuri Gargarin, the first man in space in 1961, revealed his ignorance of the spiritual realm when he scoffed, “I saw no God.” He died in a plane crash in 1968, the same year that an American astronaut reminded the world of God’s indescribable creative greatness. Aboard Apollo 8 in a lunar orbit, Frank Borman beamed back to earth stunning photos of his home planet in a black vastness, plus read the creation account from Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth….”
The second Heaven is the matchless celestial universe. The psalmist wrote, “The Heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). When my family slept in the backyard on sultry summer nights, we lay amazed by the display of the moon and innumerable stars. It’s said that President Teddy Roosevelt and American naturalist William Beebe had a nighttime ritual when they were together. They’d find the constellation Pegasus in the night sky, then look for a speck of light nearby. Then they’d chant: “That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.” Then Roosevelt would conclude, “Now I think we are small enough. Let’s go to bed.” A hundred more years of scientific discovery would shrink them even more. Now scientists claim they undercounted the number of stars in our galaxy by billions. That’s just our galaxy.
The Bible’s third Heaven is the dwelling place of God. The Bible talks of God looking down from Heaven and from his lofty, holy and glorious throne (Isaiah 63:15). God said that Heaven is His throne and earth is His footstool (Isaiah 66:1). We struggle to understand this because God is a spirit. How can a spirit “dwell”? Yet we know that Heaven is a realm that can accommodate the special body Jesus had after His resurrection. Paul referred to this Heaven in his report of a heavenly vision of “inexpressible things” (2 Cor. 12:1-4). The aging apostle John, given a vision of Heaven, had the same problem. He had only earth-bound words and symbols to try to describe God’s dwelling place.
Our finite minds simply cannot envision the dwelling place of an infinite God. But He permits us to lift our hearts upward, however that comes about—even if just a ceiling in a home. One woman told how the glitter-embedded textured ceiling in her bedroom drew her heart toward Heaven during a time of sickness. “As I lay in bed, sun from the window made that ceiling glisten like the stars,” she said. “It made me homesick for Heaven, even though I knew my ceiling wasn’t the sky, and even outer space isn’t Heaven.”
That being the case, how will we ever find the way to Heaven? Jesus already answered the question: “I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am” (John 14:3). We do not need a map. He knows the way, and that is enough.
Prayer: God, that part of your creation I can see is amazing. It reminds me of your vastness and power, so far beyond what I can understand now. Amen.
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