4.1 Understanding Heaven-Earth
© 2018 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
I must now explain something to you about yourself and the world in which you live.
God had mercy upon mankind's first parents by covering them over with the skin of an animal, and thus blinding the eyes of their spirits so that they could no longer see the heavens all around us. God did not remove heaven from earth, or else life on earth would have ceased. Rather, God covered over the original human ability to see the full intertwining of heaven with earth. Thus you, as well as all other humans, have been blind to the obvious, that we live in heaven just as much as we live upon the earth. Heaven and earth are one place.
Inside of God. First, we must understand that everything exists only inside of God, inside His thoughts and substance, as Paul said to the unbelievers in Athens. [God] is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:27-28).
If you go into the deepest parts of the earth or to the furthest reaches of the stars, God is as much all here now as He is. David stated that the Spirit of God contains in Himself all who dwell even in Sheol, the place of the dead (Psalm 139:8).
Nothing can ever be separate from God nor can anything exist apart from being continuously sustained by the good-speaking of Jesus, as Paul said: For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things (Romans 11:36).
Heaven Is Created. Heaven is created. The heavens intertwined with the earth are as created as earth is and so are all the living beings dwelling in the heavens.
God is not heaven; heaven is not God. Heaven is passing away. Nonetheless, God fills the heavens as He fills all things, and the heavens exist inside of God as much as you and I do.
More than that, heaven is as much a part of your human construction as earth is. In a sense you have two bodies; you have a physical body made out of physical material through which you communicate with physical things, and you have a heavenly body made out of heavenly substance through which you communicate with heavenly things.
Death. Now, I said, “in a sense,” because in actuality your spirit and your body are utterly intertwined. Your earthly body cannot live, and its molecules cannot remain together unless your heavenly spirit is breathing life all through your body. Death is the splitting apart of heaven and earth. Death is when your heavenly spirit is ripped apart from your earthly body. Death is your enemy; death is God’s enemy; death is evil.
James put it this way: The body without the spirit is dead (James 2:26). Jesus came to eliminate death: Jesus Christ, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel (1 Timothy 1:10).
Union of Heaven and Earth. Now, believers in Jesus who go through that experience of having their bodies and their spirits ripped apart do continue inside of Christ, just as we are. Yet they are not whole; they are only partly there. Humans are, by nature, the full union of heaven and earth. Death is utterly contrary to how God made us.
Those believers who exist, now, in heaven-only, though in a condition contrary to salvation, are waiting with eager anticipation for that moment when they get their earth bodies back. And so Paul said, “The dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). That is, they will get their brand-new earth bodies restored to them first before our present dying bodies are swallowed up by life (2 Corinthians 5:4).
Normal Seeing. Let’s bring this understanding into your present experience. Consider someone who is physically blind from birth. That person is fully aware of the physical things of earth, but not in the way you know things because you have physical sight. In exactly the same way, you are fully aware of the spiritual things of the heavens, but not in the way you would be if you had your normal spirit eyes restored to you.
Here is an account of a person receiving normal human eyesight of the heavens. And Elisha prayed, and said, “Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw. And behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha (2 Kings 6:17).
We Live in Heaven. Heaven is all around us all the time; we are as much a part of heaven right now as we are part of earth. Read the whole story of Elisha and his servant. The servant was blind, as all humans are blind. When Elisha asked God to open the servant’s eyes, he became, for a moment, a normal human being, able to see the obvious.
We live in heaven, and heaven is all around us. More than that, everything happening in the earth is moved upon by its counterpart in the heavens every moment. Nothing of earth exists apart from its heavenly counterpart, and nothing in heaven operates except in conjunction with its earthly counterpart.
Exercising Your Spirit. You are quite familiar with heavenly things, though most humans do very little to train their spirits to function as full heavenly beings. Learning to make use of your spirit-heavenly abilities is a large part of Paul’s teaching to the church.
Now that you are immersed into the Holy Spirit, with the Spirit of God able to flow freely through your mind, emotions, and intentions, you are able to learn to make use of your heavenly giftings and abilities. A big part of why God gave you a heavenly language is for you to exercise your spirit so that you can comprehend heavenly power and life. Just as an athlete exercises his or her body, so you as a believer in Jesus should also be exercising your spirit.
Utterly Together. Consider an earthly neighborhood. On this block is a church filled with godly and Spirit-filled believers in Jesus. Over on that block is a tavern with a hidden room that could only be called a “den of iniquity.” Good and evil are in close proximity to one another in the earth; the heavens are exactly the same. All angelic beings and all dead humans, whether Christians or not, exist in the realm of the heavens. That realm is pictured for us by earth’s atmosphere, but at the same time, that realm is also contiguous with earth’s atmosphere.
Heaven and earth are utterly together, for they are one place; more than that, their parts are always corresponding with one another in very similar ways.
The World. Now, we will speak a bit more about the “place of the dead” in Chapter 5. Here we want to understand a bit more about this dynamic heaven/earth realm in which we presently exist.
The New Testament writers used the Greek work, “cosmos,” to refer to heaven/earth, meaning, the “orderly” arrangement of everything. Cosmos is typically translated into “the world” in English, meaning the present system of inter-relationships among heavenly and earthly entities, the inter-weaving of angels and demons and humans, regenerate and unregenerate, of living and dead. This entire cosmos is filled with awfulness because of the human refusal to be what we are, the image of God in weakness.
Substance versus Appearance. Now, the most important thing I want you to gain from this discussion of the cosmos in which we presently exist is the Biblical principle of the relationship between substance and appearance. Substance is what IS; appearance is what things “look like.” These two things are typically very different.
This relationship between substance and appearance operates at two different levels. The first level is that everything that appears in our lives on this earth IS being acted upon by persons or substances of the heavens. Learning to see how heavenly substance is acting upon earthly appearance is a spirit quality that Paul calls, “discernment.”
By Faith Not Sight. But there is a far deeper level of substance and appearance. The substance of all things is found in the infinite thoughts of God. Nothing real exists that God does not first know inside Himself. (God thinks no evil – 1 Corinthians 13:5) However, external appearance inside this present death-filled cosmos is very different from the real substance of things inside of God. This is why we walk by faith and not by sight; that is, we go by what God says, not by what our eyes or our human judgement imagines to be “real.”
Consider Paul’s excessive statement. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God (2 Corinthians 5:7 & 17-18).
What God Says. In order for you to know Jesus as He IS, you must understand the full implications of Paul’s words. Reality is what God says; appearance in this present age of darkness is something entirely different. In substance, that is, inside the knowledge of God, old things ARE passed away and all things ARE made new. But in our present outward appearance, what we seem to “see” all around us, everything appears as if the old IS and the new is NOT.
This reality enables us to understand one of the most important Bible statements concerning God. God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist {in appearance} as though they did {already in substance} (Romans 4:17).
We live by faith in what God says, not by what our eyes “see.”