The Second Heaven

“Space, the final frontier. Final, because it wants to kill us. Sometimes we forget that, start taking it all for granted – the suits, the ships, the little bubbles of safety, as they protect us from the void. But the void is always waiting …

So, how does space kill you? I’m glad you asked. The main problem is pressure. There isn’t any. So, don’t hold your breath or your lungs will explode. Blood vessels rupture. Exposed areas swell. Fun fact: the boiling temperature of water is much lower in a vacuum, which means that your sweat and your saliva will boil, as will the fluid around your eyes. You won’t notice any of this because fifteen seconds in, you’ve passed out as oxygen bubbles formed in your blood, and ninety seconds in, you’re dead. Any questions?”

Doctor Who S10 E5, ‘Oxygen’ (2017)

 

This is apparently a picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of new stars emerging in Orion. Too. Damn. Beautiful.

So to Genesis 1:1, then: When God first created the heavens and the earth…¹

‘Heavens’, did you spot that? Plural. Good translation, because the Hebrew word, שָׁמַיִם (shāmayīm), is indeed plural. In fact, it’s always plural. The singular form of the word doesn’t exist. In the Hebrew linguistic mindset, we deduce, ‘heaven’ is an inherently plural concept. The heavens are multiple. Which is a very useful thing to have in mind when you hit 2 Corinthians 12:2-3: 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. I mean, if there’s a third heaven, that kind of implies there’s also a first heaven and a second heaven, doesn’t it? So then, how are we going to divide the thing up?

‘The heavens’ means the sky. What’s up, as it were. But of course, the sheer physical range covered by that is vast indeed – in purely spatial terms, vaster than just about anything else. If we keep looking at Genesis 1, the heavens is where God puts the sun, moon, and stars; and then it’s also where he ordains for birds to fly. But, you know, birds don’t fly to the moon. So it’s clear that ‘the heavens’ can refer both to Earth’s atmosphere, where there are birds and clouds and things, and also to space, where there are stars and moons and comets and things. If you think about it, we use the English ‘sky’ in pretty much exactly the same way. But then there’s another use of the word – a third heaven – because we know that as well as the above, our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases (that’s Psalm 115:3, though not going to lie, I know the phrase better from the Shai Linne track of the same name than I do from actual scripture).²

The story goes that after Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, made his successful return flight from orbit, Nikita Krushchev remarked in a speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.³ Well, um, no duh, Krushchev.⁴ It’s not as if God’s floating about in space like just another heavenly body of the type that he very firmly tells his people they mustn’t ever dream of worshipping.⁵ Go back to Genesis 1: when God creates the firmament, which he calls ‘heavens’, the point of it is to separate the waters above it from the waters below it, which were subsequently collected together to form seas distinct from dry land. I’ve called it the ‘firmament’, after the King James Version; other translations prefer ‘expanse’ or ‘vault’ or ‘dome’. The word is רָקִיעַ (rāqīaʿ), which is an officially weird little lexeme that seems to come from a root meaning ‘hammer out’, as, for example, a gold overlay. Aside from Genesis 1, the only appearances this noun makes in scripture are Psalm 19:1 and 150:1 and Daniel 12:3 – in all of which it basically seems to be functioning as a synonym for ‘heavens’, very reasonably since that was what God called it back in Genesis – and a few times in Ezekiel 1, where it describes something awesomely crystalline spread out over those winged, four-faced heavenly beings and their eye-filled wheels (you remember this jazz, I’m sure).⁶ The throne of God himself, meanwhile, is above that firmament. So, we assume, it’s found in the same space as the waters above the firmament. And what do you know, when we join John in God’s throne-room in Revelation 4, there’s a whacking great sea of crystal in front of the throne.

Some exegetes, when faced with this stuff, like to talk knowledgeably about the strangeness of ancient cosmology, the Hebraic concept of the structure of the universe and how different it is from our own, and the need to deliberately lay aside all our knowledge of modern astronomy and step into that mindset, in order to understand scripture properly. This attitude strikes me as a little patronising not only of the ancient Hebrews but also of the God who inspired their holy book, who I suspect knows a tiny bit more about the structure of the universe he created than human science will ever be able to tell us. Are we really supposed to concede that maybe some of what’s in the Bible isn’t true, not really, because God was constrained by the limited little worldview of those unenlightened ancients through whom he wrote it, bless their silly cotton socks? Sounds like the start of a slippery slope to me. And beyond that, I can’t see that such an attitude is even remotely necessary. The schema is straightforward enough: we’ve got the first heaven, with birds and clouds and that; we’ve got the second heaven, space; and above the first two heavens we’ve got the firmament on which sit the waters above, the crystal sea, the throne-room of God – the third heaven, where Paul’s talking about being caught up to in 2 Corinthians 12. (In the following verse, he describes the same place as ‘paradise’; I’m still having a spot of bother deciding precisely what this term as used in scripture encompasses, but it seems pretty clear that it’s a place of God’s special blessing, into which category you’d be hard-pressed to place either our planet’s atmosphere or the depths of space beyond it.) The abode of God, in short, is beyond space.

But like, beyond space? How is that even possible? How can space have an upper edge, when by definition, it’s not a thing but a lack of anything? I mean, it’s got stars and planets and meteors and whatever floating about in it, sure, but space itself is just a great big fat load of nothing extending endlessly on all sides. After all, from a spherical planet, upwards just means outwards: in every possible direction. How can space have an upper edge when it’s just a load of nothing? They say the universe is expanding – well, surely that just means that it’s pushing the edges of occupied space out further into the unoccupied space beyond? The universe is where there’s stuff, and beyond it, there’s, well, not stuff. There’s just space. And if there’s more stuff, that’s more universe, and if there’s not, that’s more space. Right?

 

More stuff, more universe. Another Hubble Telescope snap, I gather, this time of certain stars in the Milky Way that look kind of like pink roses. How is this stuff allowed to be so breathtaking?

I’m struggling a little to articulate what I mean here, but I hope something of the idea has got through. Our limited little three-dimensional worldview has no real room to conceive of what’s beyond space, but the Bible tells us that that’s where the third heaven is. We’re operating past the material and the measurable and the laws of physics here. Time and space are our fundamental frameworks for dividing and ordering and comprehending the world, but God dwells beyond both. There’s a spiritual reality that we are not, currently, able to experience with the senses, and the only way we stand any chance of getting a handle on it is by paying attention to what God tells us about it. There is a firmament of some kind that marks the upper edge of the second heaven, and there is a crystal sea in God’s throne room above it, but we just don’t have the faculties to grasp how that works. So God gives it to us in terms we can get some sort of a handle on: it’s the third heaven. Not so different from the ancient Hebrews after all, are we?

This is pretty terrifying stuff, actually, because it means that the whole vast expanse of space and everything in it is less than who God is. I spent half an hour yesterday afternoon in a planetarium,⁷ and found myself blown away afresh by how utterly, utterly vast the known universe is. At one point, the starry dome above us was turned into a map of known exoplanets; there was one small chunk of sky where there was barely any blank space between one exoplanet marker and the next, which, we were told, was because the Kepler space telescope was currently studying that particular chunk; if it’d had a chance to study the rest of the sky, no doubt that would be equally crowded with known exoplanets. We took a special look at an exoplanet called Trappist 1e, which scientists apparently reckon might be capable of sustaining life; but given that using current space travel technology, it would take over 800,000 years to get there, it seems we might have to wait a while to find out for sure.⁸ Eight hundred thousand years. It’s not as if that’s even the furthest-away place we know about. And the sheer numbers of these things: billions upon billions of galaxies, filled with billions upon billions of stars, around which orbit billions upon billions of planets and asteroids and comets and everything else. And, and, the way that this stuff is all trying to kill us. Or not even trying to kill us, but just so immediately, effortlessly bound to kill us if it gets the smallest shadow of a chance. You get exposed to the vacuum of space, you die. You get too close to a burning star, you die. You run out of the oxygen or water or food that you’ve brought from our safe green little world out into the empty, lifeless wild, you die. You run out of fuel, you drift directionless, you die. Space won’t help you out with anything you need to survive. Space is just nothing. It’s so vast and so powerful and so ruthlessly dangerous to fragile, squishy little lifeforms like ourselves. We are weak and needy and easily snuffed out, and space can do the job in under two minutes without even trying. That vastness, that power, that greater-than-us-ness: all that is less than who God is, seated as he is above it all in the third heaven. All that is an understatement to his greatness.⁹

But the difference is, space is indifferent. Space doesn’t care.¹⁰ Space kills you just because it does; there’s no will or intention or feeling behind that, either good or bad. God is vaster and more powerful and greater than space, and yet he loves us. There might be billions upon billions of galaxies, but he has cradled us in this safe green little world and filled it with the things we need to survive, and he is never indifferent to us. He sits in the third heaven, beyond everything we and our ever-improving astronomical science can comprehend, and he is deeply concerned about us – so much so that the Word of God stepped down from his throne room by the crystal sea and became one of us fragile, squishy little lifeforms. So much so that he died to redeem us from death. And the death he died and from which he redeemed us wasn’t an indifferent death, a death like space killing you just because it does; it was the right and just penalty for being morally unacceptable. Because God cares about that; he cares about justice being done and goodness being vindicated. The second heaven doesn’t give a damn about anything, but God in the third heaven is greater, and he who is greater cares.

Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. Remember that from Psalm 115:3 earlier? Well, take a look at this bit from a few verses later in that same psalm:

You who fear the LORD, trust in the LORD! He is their help and shield.

The LORD has remembered us; he will bless the house of Israel; he will bless the house of Aaron.

He will bless those who fear the LORD, both the small and the great.

He’s greater than space; fear him. And he loves us; trust in him. For those who fear him, he is their help and shield, and he does not forget to bless those on whom he has set his favour. Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases; and what pleases him is to bless those he has chosen.

Footnotes

¹ Here’s the chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+1&version=ESVUK. Keep it open; you’re going to need it.

² The chapter, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+115&version=ESVUK, and the track, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV3136cv3HU. I think I must have linked to it on my blog before, because YouTube is telling me I’ve played the video to the end, and I normally listen to all my music on Spotify.

³ Contrary to what I’ve previously heard, it doesn’t seem likely to be true that Gagarin said anything to the same effect himself: http://www.pravmir.com/did-yuri-gagarin-say-he-didnt-see-god-in-space/. These translated excerpts are, I believe, taken from the following original Russian interview: http://www.interfax-religion.ru/orthodoxy/?act=interview&div=73&domain=1. But I don’t know any Russian, so who knows. At any rate, it seems pretty obvious that nobody was actually using what Gagarin had seen in space as a genuine argument for or against the existence of God; Krushchev’s point was presumably more along the lines of, hey look, our human innovation and technology is pretty awesome and it’s not as if God’s someone we can see in any tangible way, so I reckon we’re doing everyone a favour by compelling them to get along without him, right comrades?

⁴ I just noticed that ‘no duh’ and ‘duh’ mean the same thing. Colloquial, spoken English is even weirder than formal, written English.

⁵ On multiple occasions of which I believe this is the first explicit one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+4&version=ESVUK. But of course, ‘don’t worship heavenly bodies’ is kind of automatically contained in any command to the effect of ‘don’t worship anything except me’.

⁶ But here’s the chapter just in case you don’t: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ezek+1&version=ESVUK. Had a very interesting study sesh on this passage last week. Lots more to say about it at some point.

⁷ We took the Guides to We the Curious, formerly @Bristol: https://www.wethecurious.org/. It’s brilliant and you should totally go if you get the chance.

⁸ More details here: https://www.space.com/35796-trappist-1-alien-planets-travel-time.html.

⁹ Concept credit owed here to the following video that I came across some time ago while digging through YouTube for bits of Owl City back catalogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuHQdlB7lgo. At that time, I hadn’t heard of John Piper, but I’m kind of not surprised to find out that it was him all along.

¹⁰ It doesn’t cooperate, as Mark Watney puts it in that bit at the end of The Martian where he’s giving a lecture to a roomful of astronaut candidates. Just like the Doctor in my opening quotation – the lecturer who’s been to space tells his students all about how likely going to space is to get them killed. I wanted to talk about The Martian a lot more in this post because I think it’s a brilliant film, but it ended up not fitting in to the thread of the thing very well, hence this lengthy footnote to compensate. If you haven’t seen it, do. Here’s a clip to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6QksihDpg8.