Heaven / Eternity

Gustave Dore's engraving of the highest heaven: ranks of angels form ring upon ring of light around a radiant center, while two small robed figures look on from a cloud below. — The saints and angels arrayed around the light of God, as imagined by Gustave Dore in his engraving for Canto 31 of Dante's *Paradiso* (1868). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is not a place you can find on a map. When John opens his Gospel with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he deliberately reaches back before Genesis 1:1 – before there was a cosmos to contain any location at all. The setting of John’s prologue is eternity itself: the fellowship of the Father and the Son “before the world existed” (John 17:5).

Scripture speaks of heaven in layered ways: the sky above, the created heavens, and the uncreated dwelling of God that “the highest heaven cannot contain” (1 Kings 8:27). The New Testament’s story runs from this eternal vantage point down into a feeding trough in Bethlehem, and back again – the Word became flesh, was raised, and ascended “far above all the heavens” (Ephesians 4:10).

Because no photograph of eternity is possible, this page carries an artist’s imagination instead. Treat every such image as commentary, not evidence: a reader of the text, drawing what the words stirred in him.

In the New Testament

The eternal existence of the Word with God (John 1:1-5)
Jesus speaks of the glory he shared with the Father “before the world existed” (John 17:5, 24)
The heavens open at Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:16-17)
The Revelation of a throne “standing in heaven” (Revelation 4) and, at the end, heaven come down to earth (Revelation 21:1-4)