The Coming Of The King

Part 4."Higher than all heavens"

A number of years ago there was published a book which set forth the views of twelve Christian ministers on the characteristics of Heaven. In nearly every case they pictured it situated a long way from the earth, somewhere in space, beyond the reach of telescopes or cameras, but having a definite geographical location so that presumably if one had some means of travelling through space and could live long enough it might be possible to take a journey to Heaven and come back to Earth. Of course none of the writers suggested as much but that is what would logically be implied. Even although some of them stressed the fact that heaven is a "spiritual" realm, inhabited only by "spiritual" beings, the idea of locality in relation to the earth and the sun and the stars remained. It is difficult for anyone to think of Heaven in any other terms. The well‑known hymn, "There's a home for little children, above the bright blue sky", is a tolerable correct reflection of the idea that exists in most minds respecting Heaven. Somewhere up there, beyond the sun and the moon and the stars, there is, suspended in space, the golden floor which constitutes the land of Heaven; there stand the hosts of the redeemed round the Throne of God. Somewhere in the upper skies shines resplendent that Holy City of which God and the Lamb are the eternal light.

When considering Scriptural teaching regarding our Lord's return to earth at his Second Advent it is important that we clarify our ideas, as far as possible, about the nature of Heaven. Naturally enough, the way in which we visualise it in our minds will affect and colour our understanding of what the Scriptures say about his return. If, for example, we believed that Heaven was on the moon, we would picture his Coming as a simple journey through space for two hundred and thirty‑eight thousand miles from moon to earth, and easily imagine him cleaving our atmosphere at the end of the journey and landing upon earth in full view of those who happened to be on the spot at the time, in just such a manner as 1 Thess.4.17, and Matt.26.64, would indicate if interpreted strictly literally. We are saved all that since we do not believe that Heaven is on the moon—which is just as well, since man, in his inexhaustible hunger for exploration, has now succeeded in effecting a landing on that satellite. And yet, if the place to which our Lord ascended when He "appeared in the presence of God for us" is not in fact a physical locality in our Universe to which men might conceivably travel if they had the machine and knew the way, and from which our Lord does travel when the time comes for him to return to the earth, how and in what terms are we to picture his coming? Putting it crudely, where does He come from and how does He get here? The answer to that question might help us to understand the manner of his coming more clearly. We might well question now whether the time has come when, in the development of our understanding both of Divine revelation and natural science, it is necessary to consider from a new angle Scriptural statements such as that Christ "ascended into Heaven" and "sat down at the right hand of God"? A clearer appreciation of what really happened to our Lord when the cloud veiled his ascending form from the eyes of the disciples on Olivet, cannot fail to be enlightening when the manner of his return to earth is considered.

It is difficult to think of the Second Advent except in terms of some kind of journey from a distant part of space. The very fact that our Lord's spiritual presence is with us all through the centuries ("Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the Age") implies that his Second Advent is a personal coming to the earth, something more than merely being present in thought and care for his Church. One truth upon which all agree is that for thirty‑three and a half years the Son of God was literally present in the earth, communing and associating with men, and that after the Olivet scene following his resurrection He was thus literally present no longer. Even although during those last few weeks He was for the most part invisibly present, there came a change at Pentecost. Thereafter He was in the earth no longer; He had "ascended into Heaven".

It may be useful at this point to trace the progressive development of human beliefs about Heaven. From earliest times the place of the after‑life has been visualised as lying just outside the boundaries of the known physical creation, transcending this earth in all the things which make for happiness and contentment, but essentially of the same physical nature as this earth. As men's knowledge of the universe widened so their ideas of the place of Heaven perforce receded farther away. The Sumerians of 2700 BC and earlier looked on their sacred mountain, the "Mount of the East", on the border between Iraq and Iran (Persia) as peculiarly the place of the gods. Somewhere in the skies above its summit they had their home from whence they ruled the world. In the Babylonian story of the Flood it was on that mountain that the Ark came to rest and from which the earth was re‑peopled. Later on the Greeks fixed on the heights of their Mount Olympus as the home of the gods and the eternal abode of the blessed, and that did duty until some hardy adventurers, greatly daring, climbed to the summits of the mountains and found no marble halls, no playing fountains, no rich feasts of food and drink of life, no gods and no goddesses—nothing but a line of snow‑clad peaks across which the wind howled and chilled them to the bone. Then in the days of the philosophers Heaven was pictured as a world in the upper atmosphere enveloping and enclosing this earth, where the gods and their favourites dwelt in eternal felicity. Plato describes this celestial world, saying that just as men dwell on earthly continents and islands which themselves float on the seas, so the islands of the heavenly world float on the top of earth's atmosphere, the air, so that righteous souls at death have only to ascend upward to find themselves in the heavenly realm. (This, the general belief in St. Paul's day, is the meaning of the reference in 1 Thess.4.17 to the resurrected Church at the end of this Age meeting the Lord "in the air", i.e., meeting him in Heaven above.) The later Christian conception of Heaven is founded almost entirely upon this belief.

But men were beginning now to study the heavens in a spirit of scientific enquiry. The first great Greek astronomer, Hipparchus, a century and a half before Christ, accounted for the motions of the sun and planets by developing suggestions made by another, Eudoxus, two centuries earlier. According to his theory the earth was the centre of creation. The moon, sun, planets and stars revolved around the earth in a succession of concentric orbits not very far away. Outside these orbits there were three great crystalline spheres or "heavens", something like vast glass envelopes completely encircling and enclosing the earth, sun and stars. The surface of the third and outermost of these three spheres was the "sphere of happy souls", the eternal abode of the righteous. This was the accepted scientific view of astronomy at the time of the First Advent. A century later a then leading astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy, elaborated the system in his writings from which it is now generally known as the "Ptolemaic cosmology", and this remained accepted scientific belief until the seventeenth century when it was superseded by the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo. As late as 1626 John Speed's map of the world—now in the British Museum—showed these concentric spheres with the place of heaven marked!

1626 Map of the World - Johm Speed
www.dreamstime.com

The Christian Church in the early centuries of the Age grew up against the background of this system, and thus the idea of Heaven being somewhere out in space, on the uttermost of these spheres, became firmly fixed. The principal reason why the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities persecuted Galileo in the seventeenth century for denying the Ptolemaic theory by declaring that the earth and the planets were really moving round the sun, and the earth was not the fixed centre of the universe, was because it upset their theology in so far as the place of Heaven was concerned. In demolishing Ptolemy's crystalline spheres Galileo and his predecessor, Copernicus, had unwittingly demolished Heaven as well!

It was in consequence of this rapidly expanding knowledge of the heavenly bodies that in 1750 Thomas Wright, a British astronomer of Durham, hazarded the theory that the constellation known as Pleiades is the centre of the universe, and that all other stars, including our sun and its planets, circle around that central point. His thesis was not accepted but in 1846 it was elaborated and revived by a German astronomer, Prof. Maedlar (Madler). Dr. Joseph Seiss, a noted Lutheran minister of Philadelphia, came across the idea and concluded that here, surely, was the ideal place of Divine rule. He wrote "Science has discovered that the sun is not a dead centre, with planets wheeling about it, and itself stationary. It is now ascertained that the sun also is in motion...around some other and vastly mightier centre. Astronomers are not yet fully agreed as to where that centre is. Some, however, believe they have found the direction of it to be the Pleiades, and particularly Alcyone, the centre one of the Pleiadic stars...Alcyone, then...would seem to be the 'midnight throne' in which the whole system of gravitation has its central seat, and from which the Almighty governs his universe…"

But as with Ptolemy, so with Maedlar. So far from Pleiades being the centre of visible creation, current discovery has established that it is but a member of our own "galaxy" or cluster of stars, and not even at the centre of that. Pleiades is in fact a relatively near neighbour of our own sun, and with the sun is itself revolving round some other and greater centre. And even that does not locate Heaven, for outside our own galaxy there are other galaxies, great "star‑cities," at a distance so great as to defy the imagination. The extent of creation is unplumbed and unknown, and Heaven as a geographical location farther away than ever.

Against this should be set the sublime words of Solomon in 2 Chron.6.18 "But will God in very deed (truth) dwell with men on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!" Speaking thus at the dedication of the Temple, the Israelite king glimpsed a truth which all the seekers after a geographical heaven have passed over, that God "dwelleth not in temples made with hands" (Acts 7.48). He exists from eternity, before any part of the material universe came into being. He cannot be contained within the structure of that which He created. It is with this in mind that enquiry into the "going" and "coming" of our Lord Jesus Christ must be made.

In the search for Scriptural allusions that may help us to understand these things a little more clearly we are led quite naturally to the experience of the Apostle Paul when he was "caught up" to the "third heaven" and heard "indescribable things spoken, which it is not possible for a Man to relate" (2 Cor.12.2‑4 Diaglott). The Apostle cannot be expected to have been wiser in things scientific than his own generation and the "third heaven" of which he speaks is, of course, the third sphere, the heaven of happy souls, of Hipparchus and Ptolemy. That is where St. Paul must of necessity have visualised the location of Heaven. Whether he was literally translated to the celestial world "out of the body" or merely experienced a vision "in the body" he himself knew not and it has no bearing on the matter now at issue. The fact remains that he perceived and retained a definite mental impression and memory of sights and sounds unlike anything occurring in human experience, and in consequence no words or analogies existed in human experience whereby he might describe them to his fellows.

To illustrate: Two hundred feet below the surface of the sea all sunlight is so filtered out that only blue is left. All things there appear in various shades of blue. A diver, cutting his hand, sees the blood emerge as blue. Men have descended to that depth with floodlights and colour film cameras and found that when their powerful lights are switched on, the seabed and all its myriad forms of life show up in a magnificent and resplendent blaze of all colours. Suppose there had been on that seabed a race of intelligent beings, accustomed to spending their lives in that environment of blue, knowing nothing else, and one of them coming in contact with the scene thus illumined by floodlights. How could he describe to his less fortunate fellows, afterwards, what he had seen and the glory of the reds and greens and yellows? He could carry the brief vision in his own memory for ever, but it would be to him, so far as his companions were concerned, an "indescribable thing which it was not possible to relate". So must Paul have felt when he penned those words.

The celestial world from which our Lord comes at his Advent, then, is something so different from the world we know that we could not understand or visualise it even if the Scriptures tried to describe it. It is not just that the trees are greener and the streams are clearer and the gold is brighter and the music sweeter. It is described in the Scriptures by many such devices but only because that is the nearest we can get to comprehending it. As Paul said to the Corinthians "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, the things that God hath prepared for them that love him" (1 Cor.2.9). Yet he goes on in the very next breath to declare "But God hath revealed them to us by his Spirit—for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God"(v.10). And if that last remark means anything at all it must mean that those who are the Lord's disciples should expect to comprehend at least the fundamental principles of the celestial realm even though they may not visualise its citizens and its landscapes.

Landscapes? Yes, landscapes! for the celestial world must be a real world, as real to its citizens as is ours to us. The fact that it may not be found on Ptolemy's crystalline globe, or in the Pleiades, or anywhere else in this physical creation of which we are a part, does not detract from its reality, nor, be it said, from a certain similarity which must subsist between that world and this. For this world is a copy of that. When God made man, He said "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness". In some very definite sense man's world is modelled after the likeness of that which God had before created for the celestials. At the very least, man is in the image of God and of the angels in his love of beautiful things and inspiring things; in his urge to create, to build, to accomplish; in his impulse to happiness, to joy, to laughter. Then there must be in that world, too, beautiful sights and inspiring sounds, things to create and build, purposes to accomplish, events that evoke happiness and joy and laughter. How inconceivable it is, when one comes to think it out, that God should make it possible for men to have laughter and merriment on earth if in all the long ages that preceded man's creation there had never been laughter and merriment in Heaven! The sights and sounds and surroundings of that world must assuredly be as real and substantial to its inhabitants as those of our world are to us, even although we may, with the aid of all that human science can give us, range throughout the whole wide domain of the starry heavens and never catch a glimpse of its splendour nor sense one note of its celestial harmonies. "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." It is not just distance in space, measured in so many millions or quadrillions of miles, that bars us from reaching the golden gates. It is something much more fundamental, a barrier that can never be crossed except by those who experience the reality of the Apostle's words "We shall be changed".

What if that "change" is a change to life on a different "wave‑length" so to speak, as if one had switched from BBC1 to BBC2 on the TV?. That may be a difficult thing—it may even seem a ludicrous thing—to contemplate. But it may serve to indicate a possibility. It is a common experience in everyday life to switch on a television receiver and "tune in" to a particular wavelength. The room is filled with music—a definite world of sight and sound is created and is perceptible to the eyes and ears of the observer. Almost everyone realises that simultaneously with that programme other worlds of sight and sound, inaudible and unperceived, are pulsating through that room, not seen or heard only because the force that creates them is on a different wave‑length. They are just as real, and in other rooms, on correctly tuned receivers, are yielding sight and sound just as evident. Each receiver can discern only that to which it is adapted and tuned.

If the spiritual world can, by analogy, be pictured as something like that, and existing, not in some other part of the material universe, but as it were upon a different wavelength, then, imperfect as this analogy must be, it can at least serve to free us from the geographical limitation which has of necessity shaped men's thoughts in the past, and help us to visualise that world as divorced from this, and yet in a sense superimposed upon it. If such a conception in any way approaches the truth, then our Lord Jesus Christ, who left the earth and ascended to the right hand of God, effected that transfer of his personal presence from earth to Heaven, not by continuing his upward progress through the cloud that received him out of the disciples' sight to some far distant point in outer space, but by passing into a world which is just as near to us here, and at the same time just as far away, as the unheard radio programme is near and yet far from the one that fills the room in which we may be sitting.

Likewise, at his coming again, He can, for a period at least, be present on the scene of earthly affairs without having necessarily come "into tune" as it were, with the material creation of human sense, and therefore unperceived by human senses, even as during most of the forty days between his resurrection and ascension. Only upon occasion then did He become apparent in a terrestrial body, the rest of the time He was out of this world and yet still near his disciples; only at the end of the forty days did He leave them to return to the Father. All the evidence goes to show that our Lord "descends from heaven", not by a physical journey from some recess of outer space into the solar system and so to the earth, but rather by something analogous to a change of "wave‑length".

Perhaps the analogy is too hard to grasp. Perhaps is not a very good one after all. But that our returning Lord comes, not from somewhere else inside our universe, but from a celestial realm which is altogether outside it, ought to be realised as a fact even if we cannot fully comprehend it; and that in turn should help us to understand why the early stages of his Advent are described as being thief‑like, unobtrusive, not detected by human eyes and ears but by the mental and spiritual faculties, rightly appraising the signs of the times. The outward manifestations, appealing to the natural senses, come later.

AOH

(To be continued)