The Lord died and arose from the dead to a new life of an absolutely Godlike character. It was that life that was suddenly and mysteriously illuminated for a moment on Mount Tabor. When He was on His way to Jerusalem, where He was to suffer, this Godlike essence blazed up from hidden depths. True enough, it was only for one short hour, and thereafter it subsided. Now, however, after He had walked through death, life broke through with almighty power. The Lord lived. Now He lived in a new way — alive from within, with a divine Lordship permeating His being, body and soul.
Now there was a strange interval of time. He was still on earth, and yet no longer so. He had a way of appearing, first in one place, then in another; making mysterious transitions from some other-where into the here, and then disappearing again. He had overcome the limitations of earthly existence. Gravity no longer bound Him. Space and the resistant quality of material substance could not interfere with Him. Yet He still lived on earth.
Finally He took definite leave of earth, for Heaven.
What is Heaven? When one asks a child that question, the child will just point upward: “Up there.” We should not be too swift to laugh. The child means more by those words than may be established by the metamorphosis of scientific investigation; that “up there” which cannot exist because there is no such thing as up and down in the last analysis — if the child were questioned more exactingly, the answer would be: “Heaven is where God lives.”
Could we have any better answer, any truer one, to the question of what Heaven is than this one: that Heaven is where God lives? When our Lord spoke of His forthcoming death, did He not say, “I leave the world and go to the Father”?
But if Heaven is where God lives, and God is everywhere, then it must follow that Heaven is everywhere. That is quite true. Heaven is everywhere. In every place, and here, too. That is the first and greatest answer: Heaven is right here.
Again, this was said by Jesus Himself: “The kingdom of Heaven is within you.” How is this so? God is supposed to live in the “inaccessible light.” That is true. By ourselves, we cannot get in. It is closed. Heaven is all about us, yet it is closed to us. It was open around Jesus. He entered into this openness when He left us; and then He was gone.
Heaven is where God lives. Heaven is the presence of God. Now He has opened this presence to us.
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