Are there different levels of heaven?

It is important to see that, in forming the present system of this world, God made a heaven to this earth, so that the earth should be ruled from heaven. The blessing of the earth, either materially or morally, depends upon its connection with heaven. This blessing will be full when the kingdom of the heavens is established in the Son of man, and He will come in the clouds of heaven. Ps. 68:32, 35. It is the place of angelic power, 'the principalities and powers in the heavenly places' being angelic, Satan and his angels, though fallen, still being among them. Job 1:6; Job 2:1; Rev. 12:7-9.

That there are various heavens is evident; Satan cannot have entrance into the glory, and Paul speaks of being caught up into the third heavens, 2 Cor. 12:2; and the Lord Jesus passed through the heavens, and we read of 'the heaven of heavens.' Deut. 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27. Very little is said of the saints going to heaven, though their citizenship is there now, Phi . 3:20; but they are to be where Jesus is, and He went to heaven, and prepared a place for them. In the Revelation the four and twenty elders are seen in heaven sitting on 'thrones.' To Him that sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb be glory for ever and ever. Amen. Believers "look for NEW HEAVENS and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." 2 Peter 3:13; Rev. 21:1.

A positive description of such a scene is found in what the Apostle tells us in 2 Corinthians 12, of how he was caught up to the third heaven. The first heaven refers to the atmospheric heavens the home of clouds and winds; the second heaven is the stellar region, where there are hundreds of millions of stars; the third heaven is the dwelling place of God.

When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, to paradise, he could not tell whether he was in the body or not. In the glory he heard unspeakable words, which it was not lawful for a man to utter on earth. Paul’s experience was remarkable and limited only to himself. He returned to earth, and kept his experience as a profound secret.

It is worthy of note that the word, Heaven, in Genesis 1:1, in the Hebrew original is in the dual number. Who told Moses to write it thus? What did he know of the atmospheric heaven where life can exist, where the birds fly and the clouds form; of the stellar heaven, those vast spaces where the atmosphere is so rarified that human life cannot exist? Do we not see the hallmark of inspiration here?

It is interesting to note that the Apostle Paul was caught up to the third Heaven (2 Cor. 12:2). The Jews would understand this. The first, the atmospheric heaven; the second, the vast stellar spaces; the third Heaven, the dwelling place of God.

It is deeply interesting to see the division between Heaven and Earth. God would constantly remind man that he is dependent on his Creator. Where is the sun, the centre of our system, the source of light and heat, the ripener of the fruits of the earth, but in heaven? Earth is dependent upon heaven. Whence come the refreshing life-giving showers on the thirsty earth, without which we should perish, but from heaven? Earth is dependent upon heaven. Would that men would recognise this. God emphasizes this very markedly in Genesis 1.

But here is a great high priest who entered in where? Not into sanctuaries made with hands, but into heaven itself, and He has passed through the heavens. The heaven of the atmosphere above us, in which the birds fly and the clouds of heaven float, is what we may call the first heaven. Above that is the starry heaven, the firmament which showeth His handiwork; but far as eye can reach, as far as telescope can discover the most distant heavenly bodies, beyond even the reach of our thoughts, our great High Priest has passed through all the outer courts into the very presence, into the very sanctuary of God, where the throne of God itself is. "Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things" (Eph. 4:9-10).

If in chapter 11 we have seen God's grace in sustaining the vessel through all adversity, Paul now speaks of the other side of this, the grace which gives unspeakable blessedness in being "caught up" above all earthly things and occupations. He speaks of this as "visions and revelations of the Lord." It is not that he is basing any Christian teaching whatever upon this experience, but rather indicating thereby that such things may be in measure known to anyone who is "in Christ." Verse 2 is rightly translated, "I know a man in Christ." It is manifestly he himself of whom Paul speaks (as verse 7 proves); and he does not write of this until fourteen years after it happened, for it did not involve anything that, as an apostle, he was bound to communicate. The experience was simply that of "a man in Christ," and written now no doubt as an encouragement to all who are "in Christ," not as a revelation to others of the will of God. But the occasion was so sublimely that of spiritual blessedness, that he was not at all conscious of whether or not his body was present with him. This is repeated in verse 3, no doubt to press home the fact that this was something above and outside of the flesh. First it is said he was caught up to the third heaven; and this is further described in verse 4 as "paradise." This is one of three times that paradise is mentioned in the New Testament, and each indicates the presence of God, the meaning being "a garden of delights." If the first heaven is that of earth's atmosphere, and the second the astronomical heaven, then the third is higher than human intellect reaches, indescribable therefore by material comparisons.

The fact is, there will be, if we heed scripture, different companies of the blessed in heaven, as well as on the earth. It is mere traditional prejudice to conceive a single multitudinous throng. On the contrary there will be marked varieties both above and below, blessed with or by Christ. Nor can we know the glorious future for heaven and earth, but by the word of God, which is the one authority for all truth, past, present, or future. In the verses with which the Epistle to the Ephesians opens, we have a wondrous unfolding of divine grace at its very highest, and coming down to the lowest possible. The time too made it all the more striking, though eminently suitable as it must be for such a disclosure. Not a word had been divulged about it in the Old Testament as we are distinctly told in a subsequent part of this Epistle. It was a secret kept hid in God from all previous ages and generations. Indeed it would then have been quite incompatible, whether in the earlier generation, or after the law was given to Israel by Moses.

356 The third heaven here is in a different character from paradise. The third heaven is going on high - a degree of exaltation; paradise is rather the character of the thing. Our Lord went to paradise, but paradise is the character. The word "paradise" means nothing but a Persian garden; there they had beautiful gardens. The third heaven is hardly the heaven of heavens. There are the sky, the created heavens, the starry heavens, and then the heaven where the throne of God is placed, though this again is a figure no doubt. "Heaven itself" in Hebrews 9 means the reality, and not the figure. We see the same thing in Ezekiel, where he saw the covering of the cherubim and above that the throne of God or the figure of it. These have not exactly to be atoned for; but wherever any creature has been, it has to be cleansed.

We have also the tabernacle for a type. The camp is the world; the court gives the first heavens; the holy place the second; and the most holy, where the ark was, the third, with the throne of God. The brazen altar was not in the world, because Christ was lifted up out of the world. Then the holy, and the most holy; the expression "heaven of heavens" is used, I take it in rather a general way. "Rejoice, ye heavens," is in contrast with earth and that you find constantly; only we have in the tabernacle something more specific, and the Jews constantly used it so, and spoke of three heavens. It was very natural, if God had said Moses was to make all these things after the pattern of things in the heavens, that they should call them so, the three heavens, because there were the three places. The tabernacle represents three things: Christ Himself; the church because God dwells in it; and the creation or created heavens. Christ Himself, for the veil is His flesh - through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; next, as we have seen, we get, as shewn in creation, the three heavens; and then we have "but Christ as Son over his own house, whose house are we." It is not His body there, because we have it as the dwelling-place of God. We never find the temple in Hebrews, because the temple is the permanent thing, the millennium, while in Hebrews the saints are looked at as strangers and pilgrims in the wilderness.

We must consider next the sphere of his translation; and here at the outset a difficulty presents itself, the apostle's language being such as to leave it doubtful whether a single rapture or two successive ones were in his mind. Without presuming to determine this point, I would state two considerations which seem to bear strongly in favour of the former supposition. First, his being caught up to the third heaven affirms nothing more than the fact of his elevation. He was caught up thither,' and that is all. But he is said also, secondly, to have been rapt into the paradise, and then the results are stated. It is reasonable, therefore, to conclude that the rapture is one, and that the second declaration is but explanatory of the first. With respect to the former, as it is a solitary expression in the inspired scriptures* it were vain to pretend to any further knowledge than is conveyed to us by the natural meaning of his words; but of the paradise which it contains, we have a fuller mention in the word. For Paul is not the first revealer of God's paradise, but the dying Saviour on the cross. To be with Him there, and on that very day, was His promise to the penitent companion of His shame (Luke 23:43); and the same paradise is again held forth by Him who walks among the candlesticks, as a special allurement of His grace to the diligent observer of the Spirit's word (Rev. 2:7).

His being rapt, therefore, into Paradise, was his foretaste of the special joys of God's redeemed, and being there, he doubtless saw what the freed spirit of the pardoned malefactor saw and sees — things undiscoverable by mortal eyes, but which open on the view of those who, on the dissolution of this tabernacle, depart to be with Christ. For the vision and the revelations were of things Christian, and were shown to Paul as to "a man in Christ." Yet it is noticeable that no mention is here made of what he saw, his ears only are engaged. Words are his wonder and enjoyment. In Paradise he heard what there indeed was full of ravishing significance, and these words may, for aught we know to the contrary, have conveyed to him a revelation of heavens yet higher than the third; but on returning to himself, he retained indeed a perfect recollection of his vision, but as of things which he had neither license nor ability to utter among men. For as flesh and blood cannot enter into the kingdom of God, so also is our natural organism incapable of apprehending or transmitting sensations of a purely spiritual kind.*

But it is time we turned to a more detailed examination of the two papers in the Quarterly Journal. The first begins by allowing that there are "great diversities of degree" among "the innumerable company of angels;" while the next paragraph makes the following important admission: "Analogous to these diversities in that race * of unfallen beings, we find among the redeemed from among the fallen considerable diversity of rank and position." The well-known parable of the talents is first cited; and then we read, "we find mention of the 'general assembly and church of the first-born,' as well as of 'the spirits of just men made perfect,' even as we find in the Apocalypse, not only an innumerable company that no man can number, but also a special subdivision of that company, the 144,000 whose song none can learn." It is not to canvass these statements that we quote them, but to show how much is admitted in favour of the principle, that all the redeemed have not necessarily the same place in the scene of future glory. How far the subsequent reasonings of our contemporary, especially in the second paper, can be reconciled with these primary admissions, is another question. It is satisfactory to find that these admissions are made. For more than a distinction between "the church of the first-born," and "the spirits of just men made perfect," we should scarcely ourselves contend. We are told, moreover, that "these distinctions in glory are subservient, no doubt, to the manifestation of divine sovereignty in the ages to come. New Jerusalem is not built on a flat plain, nor are its palaces all of one height, † and after one model. The land of uprightness has its hills and mountains, its fields and its gardens. One star differeth from another star in glory."

As to our entrance into heaven that will be accorded equally to every believer. The Apostle Paul will not get a more abundant entrance than the youngest convert or the feeblest saint, for our entrance there depends on the blessed finished work of the Lord Jesus, and there are no degrees of acceptance in that connection.