Where is heaven located?

Question 10169.

The location of heaven has been a live question ever since Yuri Gagarin came back from orbit and reported that he had not seen God up there. It was meant as a joke against believers, and it landed only because a great many people, Christians included, had a vague idea that heaven was somewhere above the clouds.

So where is it? Scripture has more to say than you might expect, though not in the form of a grid reference.

Three heavens in biblical language

The Bible uses one word for heaven, ouranos in Greek and shamayim in Hebrew, to cover three quite different things. There is the atmosphere where birds fly and rain forms. There is the region of sun, moon and stars. And there is the dwelling place of God, which Paul calls the third heaven when describing a man caught up there (2 Corinthians 12:2).

Once you see the three uses, a lot of confusion clears. When Scripture says the heavens declare the glory of God it means the sky. When it says heaven is God’s throne it means something else entirely. Gagarin was looking in the second heaven for something that belongs to the third, which is rather like searching a wardrobe for the concept of Tuesday.

The location of heaven in the third sense is therefore not a matter of distance. It is a matter of a different order of created reality, real and definite, but not reachable by travelling far enough in any direction.

Is heaven a real place?

Emphatically yes. Jesus said that in his Father’s house are many rooms, and that he was going to prepare a place for us (John 14:2). Place is his word, not a theologian’s. He also said he would come again and take us to himself, which requires a destination rather than a state of mind.

The ascension makes the same point physically. A body went up and a body is there now, glorified and human. Whatever else is true about the location of heaven, it currently contains a man, and that man has scars. Heaven is not a region of pure spirit into which the material cannot enter.

Stephen saw it opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. Paul was caught up into it and heard things he could not repeat. John was told to come up here and was shown a throne. These are not descriptions of a mood, and I take them as reports of a location that exists whether we can find it or not.

Why the Bible uses upward language

Scripture consistently speaks of heaven as above. The Lord looks down from heaven. Jesus lifted his eyes to heaven when he prayed. He was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight. Some readers conclude that the location of heaven must therefore be directly overhead, which raises the awkward question of overhead from where, given that the earth turns.

The upward language is doing something other than mapping. Up in every human language carries the sense of authority, honour and transcendence. We speak of higher courts and rising in the world without imagining altitude. When Scripture puts God above, it is saying that he is over all rather than that he is a certain number of miles out.

At the same time the ascension really did involve an upward movement, visible to witnesses. God accommodates himself to how we are made. A departure that began upwards and ended in glory tells us both that Jesus really left and that where he went is genuinely other, and the two truths do not compete.

Heaven is where God is

The most useful definition I know is the simplest. Heaven is the place where God’s presence is unveiled. Everywhere else God is present but hidden. There he is present and seen, and that is what makes it heaven rather than the architecture or the geography.

This is why the descriptions in Revelation are so full of light and worship and so short on furniture. What matters about the location of heaven is not its coordinates but its occupant. Take God out of it and you have a very fine city with nothing to do in it, which is roughly the version people imagine when they call heaven boring.

It also explains why believers who die go there immediately. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and presence with the Lord is the whole point. I take that up when asking where believers go when they die.

The direction of travel at the end

Here is the part that surprises people. The Bible does not end with believers going up to heaven for ever. It ends with the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, and with a voice announcing that the dwelling place of God is with man. The final movement is downward, not upward.

So the eternal state is not disembodied souls in a distant heaven. It is resurrected people on a renewed earth with God dwelling among them. The location of heaven, in the end, turns out to be here, remade and filled with the presence that makes any place heavenly. My article on the New Jerusalem sets out what that city is.

That reframes a lot of hymnody. We do not spend eternity floating in the sky. We spend it in a physical creation freed from decay, with real bodies, real work and real fellowship, and with God no longer hidden. Whether the present earth is renewed or replaced I take up when asking whether the earth will be renewed or replaced.

Why this is a comfort rather than a curiosity

Knowing that heaven is a place, not a poetic idea, changes how you grieve and how you hope. Your believing father is somewhere. Your child who died is somewhere. Not diffused into the universe, not a comforting memory, but present with the Lord in a location that Jesus described as his Father’s house.

It also changes how you think about your own death. The Christian does not go out. The Christian goes home, and the journey is short. Between the last breath here and the first sight there, Scripture puts no interval at all. Today, Jesus told the dying thief, you will be with me in paradise.

That is why I never speak of heaven vaguely at a funeral. Vagueness comforts nobody. A place, a person, a promise and a resurrection are what people need, and those are exactly what we have been given.

Does the location of heaven change anything we do?

Someone will reasonably ask whether any of this matters. If we cannot reach the place and cannot map it, why bother settling the location of heaven at all? The answer is that a vague heaven produces a vague Christianity, and vague Christianity does not survive contact with real suffering.

Think of it in ordinary terms. A soldier posted abroad endures a great deal because he knows there is a specific house, in a specific street, with specific people in it, waiting for him. Tell him he is fighting for a general sense of homeliness and see how far that carries him through a hard winter. The definiteness is what does the work.

Scripture treats the location of heaven the same way. It is the Father’s house. It has rooms. It has a throne, a city, a river and a tree. It has our Saviour in it in a body that can be seen and touched. None of that is decoration. It is the sort of detail you give someone who has to keep going through a long night.

So I would rather a believer thought about the location of heaven concretely and got some details wrong than thought about it vaguely and got nothing at all. Paul set his mind on things above, and you cannot set your mind on a mist. Colossians assumes there is somewhere definite to look, and the looking is what changes the way we live down here.

One further thought about the location of heaven. Jesus prayed that those the Father had given him would be with him where he is, and that is the simplest description of the destination we have. Not a coordinate but a company, and the company is the point of the place.

So, now what?

Stop picturing clouds. Start picturing a house with your Father in it and your Saviour preparing a room. That is the image Jesus chose, and it will carry more weight in a hospital corridor than any amount of astronomy.

And ask yourself the practical question. If heaven is where God is, and if you find his presence uninteresting now, what exactly are you hoping to enjoy there? The taste for heaven is something God gives in this life, and he gives it to anyone who asks. Have you asked?

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.

2 Corinthians 12:2, ESV