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34. String Theory Heaven
Across Dimensions
In our technological age, many skeptics suggest that there is no such place as Heaven. They assert that this is just an idea in someone's mind or a desire for ultimate freedom from pain and distress. Many scientists are now stating that there is a case scientifically for "Heaven." Instead of the four dimensions of breadth, length, height, and time, they have discovered eleven or more dimensions that can be proven to exist mathematically. ✞
String Theory
What is called "String Theory" requires the existence of extra spatial dimensions for its mathematical consistency. A "string theory heaven" is probably a real place in another dimension that is not apparent or immediately visible. There are, however, several examples in Scripture describing transferences between such planes. This conclusion comes out of an application of string theory. ✞
Superstring Theory
String theory is also known as the development of M-theory or a "theory in physics that unifies all consistent versions of superstring theory." Mathematics can prove that many existence levels exist about which, as yet, we know little. The Christian concept of Heaven may be one of them as a new fifth dimension. Some interesting Biblical examples back up this conclusion. "Heaven" may be defined as "a common religious, cosmological or transcendent place where heavenly beings are said to originate, be enthroned, or live." For example, the Old Testament described everyone who died as going "down." "Going down" may seem to be a minor point, but it is a significant one. People went down where Jesus went when he died. As stated in the Apostles' Creed, "He (Jesus) descended into Hell." In the later New Testament era, the Biblical record is interestingly different. ✞
Where is Heaven?
Saint Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12.4 that he is "caught up to Paradise." He does not go "down" to the underworld, which Jesus spoke about but up to Paradise. The Old Testament describes the prophet Jonah in Matthew 12.40, "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Everyone goes down to this underworld before the resurrection of Christ, but they do not all go to the same place. There are two compartments in the underworld, as revealed in the story of Dives and Lazarus, which also fits in neatly with the idea of moving across string theory dimensions. ✞
Lazarus' Paradise
This New Testament account describes in great detail the beggar Lazarus in Paradise and how Dives died. The story of Lazarus, whose name comes from the Hebrew "Eleazar," translates as "God is my help," and Dives, which means merely "rich man." This narrative is often presented to us in sermons as a parable. It is more likely the telling by Jesus of a real story about real people. Jesus and the people in the crowd probably knew both men very well. In the 3rd and 4th Centuries AD, the Early Church leaders spoke of the rich man as a real person and even named him "Neues" or "Nineveh," and in other places as "Phineas" or "Fineas." ✞
Eyewitness Account
Jesus tells the account of Dives and Lazarus, specifically giving both the rich man's name and the beggar's name. He describes what kind of clothing Dives wore and Lazarus' dreadful affliction in life as if everyone, especially the people listening, knew already. Jesus says in Luke 16.19-21, "There was a rich man dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate is laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table." Lazarus was considered a leper and was therefore sainted very early as the patron saint of lepers. This account sounds very much like an eyewitness account to me! Why else would the writer have included so many details? Jesus tells us their names, their living conditions, and then that they both had recently died. Luke 16.22 then adds, "The time came when the beggar died, and the angels carried him to Abraham's side." Lazarus' Paradise was where all the Old Testament saints, including Abraham, went before Jesus' resurrection. ✞
Dives' Hell
Luke 16.22-23 then tells us that when Dives died, he found himself "in Hell. He is in torment and looks up to see the beggar Lazarus with Abraham far away." A great gulf separates the two places. Under the Old Testament covenant, everyone who dies goes down to one of two places. They either go to the punishment portion of "Sheol," otherwise called "Hades" or "Hell," or to the reward area called "Paradise." Interestingly, in Old Testament times, the eternal rest and torment places are always described as "down," whereas, the saints go "up" to Heaven after the resurrection. ✞
Christ's Historical Body
Christ's historical Body in Heaven is the reflection of what would happen over time to the World. To be a member of Christ's historical body is to share something that has occurred in the past, is happening in the present, and will occur in the future. Gathered around Heaven's throne at this very moment are a great host of believers from every historical age and geographical location who are all members of Christ's body. This host includes Early Church Christians who bear wounds from Roman lions. Saint Paul states in Ephesians 4.11-13, "So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and teachers, to equip his people for works of service. So that the body of Christ develops." The process describes Christ's Body maturing until all Christians blossom in the Faith. ✞
World Globe
As of 2010 AD, over 2.18 billion Christians worldwide or one in every three people, including an estimated 10.2 million Muslims, converted to Christianity. Reformation Lutherans, modern Suffragettes, mentally challenged persons, chaplains from wars long over, kings, princes, fools, Crusaders and paupers, children, and babies. All are united in the adoration of Jesus as part of Christ's historical body. Surrounded by the angelic host, his body focuses its praises on its Savior and Lord. In Heaven, there is another emanation of the Mystical Body called Christ's Heavenly Body. There, Christians will one day dwell in sublime eternal life. It is a powerhouse of praise! The heavenly body is the inspiration for the New Testament church and our hope and encouragement in the Twenty-First Century. ✞
Heavenly Body
When we rediscover the promise of eternal life in the Heavenly Body, it will provide what we now call the church with drive and encouragement for the future through dedication in the present. This encouragement is the testimony of every Christian who believes and looks forward to the Heavenly Body. A doctor told W. D. Hinson that he had an illness from which he would not recover. W. D. Hinson wrote, "I walked out and looked across at the mountain that I love. I looked at the river in which I rejoice, and I looked at the stately trees that are always God's poetry to my soul. Then, in the evening, I looked up into the great sky where God was lighting his lamps, and I said, 'I may not see you many more times, but I shall be alive when you are gone, and river, I shall be alive when you cease running towards the sea, and stars, I shall be alive when you have fallen from your sockets in the great down pouring of the material universe!'" What great hope and expectation we have in eternal life! ✞
Natural Bodily Death
Christians go through the dying process and natural bodily death to sleep in death and then rise to meet Jesus. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the United States' founding fathers, wrote in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789, "In this world, nothing can be certain except death and taxes." Aside from the prospect of taxes, all human beings, including every Christian believer, experience a natural bodily death. The fascinating article "What Happens During the Dying Process" and the excellent book "Stiff, the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach (1959-present) reveal the dying process in incredible detail. ✞
Death
Death is "a process, not a moment," writes critical-care physician Dr. Sam Parnia in "Erasing Death." His medical specialty is "Resurrection." Dr. Parnia is also Director of the Human Consciousness Project at Southhampton University in Britain. He writes, "It's a whole-body stroke, in which the heart stops beating, but the organs do not die immediately." He writes, "they might hang on intact for quite a while," which means that "for a significant time after death, death is fully reversible." Scientists consider how our existence is not a toggle "on" for alive, "off" for dead, but a dimmer switch that can move through various shades between life and death. The Jews had a similar belief that the spirit remained with a body for three days before departing. Jesus, however, promised something different for believers when he said in John 8.51, "I tell you the truth, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death." Bodily death is the separation of the spirit from the body, and spiritual death separates the soul from God. Believers will not experience the trauma of spiritual death and will not see it, according to Jesus. ✞
Robbing Death's Sting
Jesus removes the sting of death for the Christian. It will not be fearful but a blessed experience. Hebrews 2.14-15 teaches, "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death." Saint Paul later writes in 2 Timothy 1.10 that Jesus Christ "has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." Our Savior accompanies us through bodily death, for he said in Hebrews 13.5, "Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you." Jesus sits at the right hand of the Lord God in Christ's Highest Heavens. In Acts 7.56, Saint Stephen cried out as he died, "I see the Heavens open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." Note that Saint Stephen saw "the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." Perhaps the Savior stood to welcome home the first martyr of the Christian era into the Highest Heavens. ✞
Highest Heavens
The word used in the Bible of Christ's "heaven" is, in fact, in the plural, according to The Rev Canon F. E. Howitt in his booklet "Heaven." Therefore it should properly read, "Christ's Highest Heavens." The Rev Canon Howitt, a renowned Keswick Convention speaker in 1925, wrote, "He saw through the Aerial Heaven, he saw beyond the Celestial Heaven, right into the Highest Heavens." We should explain here that the Jews conceive the heavens in terms of two domes above the earth, one over the other. The Aerial Heaven is immediately above us with birds, clouds, rain, and storms in it. The Celestial Heaven is over that with the moon, comets, and stars. Beyond that is the Highest Heavens, where God and his angels dwell perhaps in an extra dimension invisible to us but from which God can, in a way, view all that we are doing. Believing Christians shall join Jesus after death in the geographical North Heaven in the Northern skies. There are several Scriptural pointers that Heaven is in the geographical north directly above the North Pole in a fifth dimension. The current scientific evidence suggests other dimensions, one of which is called String Theory Heaven. ✞
Old Testament Pointers
In Leviticus 1.11, God instructed the people of Israel about performing sacrifices on an altar. He tells them, "He is to slaughter it at the north side of the altar before the Lord." Was the Lord towards the Northern Heavens on the Northern side? Ezekiel saw a vision of the Lord from the direction of the North, believing that was where God dwelt in Ezekiel 1.4, "I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north — an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light." Mount Zion, the city of the great king, was spoken of in Psalm 48.2 as being "on the sides of the north, the city of the Great King," facing north where the great king, the Lord God Almighty, dwells. Job 26.7 speaks in one of the oldest Bible books about the Northern skies and how God arranged Heaven's stars. "He spreads out the Northern skies over empty space. He suspends the earth over nothing." ✞
Northern Stars
Professor Bernard (1857-1923 AD) of the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin discovered virtually no stars on our planet's northern side. There is nothing but space there! Dr. A.T. Doodson (1890-1968 AD), a Fellow of the Royal Society, a distinguished scientist, and publisher of significant groundbreaking work on tidal analysis in 1921, endorsed this fact. In "Science and the Word. Christ Creator and Man", he stated, "the distribution of the stars in space becomes thinner to the north. If we imagine the equator's plane extended, then this cuts at a tremendous distance 'the Milky Way.'" Most of the stars we now see are in this broad band. The Northern Heaven may be in another dimension there without being present or visible. Perhaps the Russians were partly right when their satellite flew past the dark side of the moon, and they triumphantly declared, "See, there is no God!"✞
Covenant Believers' Heaven
Where is Heaven? Many believe that the Highest Heaven is to the geographical North of the Earth in a completely different dimension. The New Testament describes believers from the first century AD to the present as "going up" to "Heaven." On the other hand, Old Testament saints "go down" to the afterlife. Jesus Christ had not yet died, and this happened because the resurrection had not taken place. ✞
Heavens and Blood
Consequently, Jesus had not yet shed his blood on the Cross, making the great sacrifice at Calvary, and as yet not forgiven anyone's sins. 1 John 1.7 reminds us, "The blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin." As Jesus had not yet shed his blood at Calvary, there was nowhere else for believers to go except down to the place called "Paradise," there to await Jesus' death and resurrection. When at last Jesus went down to visit "Hades," as he did after his crucifixion, he preached to those on the good side of "Hades," in "Paradise" as it then existed.
Northern Stars
Today, there is nothing to hinder Christians from going straight up to a "covenant believers' Heaven" when they die while that person's body remains in the grave. There are three "heavens." described in the New Testament. The first is "the aerial heaven," directly above us of clouds and birds, lightning, and thunder. The second is "the celestial heaven," with the planetary system, the sun, moon, and stars. Above and beyond the stars are "the third or Highest Heaven," though it is probably a separate and new dimension. Into that Highest Heavens, all true believers, having been cleansed by the blood of Christ, will go. At his Ascension, Jesus went up through the Aerial Heaven and the Celestial Heavens to the Highest Heaven. Luke 24.51 tells us that, "While he was blessing them, he left them and ascended into the heavens." The word for "heavens" here is plural, which supports the Biblical notion of three heavens. ✞
"String Theory Heaven"
by Ron Meacock © 2021
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