The Thin Partition Between Heaven And Earth
The Thin Partition between Heaven and Earth
Excerpted from “A Heavenly Pattern for Our Earthly Life” Sermon #1778, April 30, 1884
From our Earth-bound perspective, Heaven may seem impossibly far away. But in reality, Earth is merely a shadow of Heaven, a place made in the image of Heaven—and the two are much closer than we might think.
The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name. Revelation 3:12
One day the material world shall become a proper temple for the Lord of hosts. The New Jerusalem shall come down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride is prepared for her husband. We are sure of this. Therefore, toward this consummation let us strive mightily, praying evermore, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
There is an analogy between Earth and Heaven, so that the one is the type of the other. You could not describe Heaven except by borrowing the things of Earth to symbolize it, and this shows that there is a real likeness between them.
What is Heaven? It is Paradise, or a garden. Walk amid your fragrant flowers and think of Heaven’s bed of spices. Heaven is a kingdom: thrones, crowns, and palms are the earthly emblems of the heavenlies. Heaven is a city, and there again, you fetch your metaphor from the dwelling places of men. It is a place of “many mansions” (John 14:2, KJV)—the homes of the glorified. Houses are of Earth, yet is God our dwelling place.
The tables are spread here as well as there, and it is our privilege to go forth and bring in the vagabonds and the highwaymen, that the banqueting hall may be filled. While the saints above eat bread in the marriage supper of the Lamb, we do the like below in another sense.
Between Earth and Heaven there is but a thin partition. The home country is much nearer than we think. Heaven is by no means the far country, for it is the Father’s house.
Heaven is, at any rate, so near that in a moment we can speak with him that is King of the place, and he will answer to our call. Before the clock shall tick again you and I may be there. Can that be a far-off country which we can reach so soon?
Oh, brothers and sisters, we are within hearing of the shining ones; we are nearly home. A little while and we shall see our Lord. Perhaps another day’s march will bring us within the city gate. And even if another fifty years of life on Earth should remain, what is it but the twinkling of an eye?
It’s clear enough that the comparison between Earth and Heaven is not far-fetched. If Heaven and Heaven’s God be, in truth, so near to us, our Lord has set before us a homelike model taken from our heavenly dwelling place.
In his seventeenth-century classic Paradise Lost, John Milton describes Eden as a garden full of aromatic flowers, delicious fruit, and soft grass, lushly watered. Like Spurgeon, Milton connects Eden with Heaven, the source of earthly existence, portraying Heaven as a place of great pleasures and the source of Earth’s pleasures. In Milton’s story, the angel Raphael asks Adam,
What if Earth Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?a
Though the idea of Earth as Heaven’s shadow is seldom discussed, it’s a concept that has biblical support. For example, we’re told there are scrolls in Heaven, elders who have faces, martyrs who wear clothes, and even people with “palm branches in their hands” (Revelation 7:9-13). There are musical instruments in the present Heaven (Revelation 8:6), horses coming into and out of Heaven (2 Kings 2:11; Revelation 19:14), and an eagle flying overhead in Heaven (Revelation 8:13). Perhaps some of these objects are merely symbolic, but surely not all of them.
The book of Hebrews seems to say that we should see Earth as a derivative realm and Heaven as the source realm. If we do, we’ll abandon the assumption that something existing in one realm cannot exist in the other.
God created Earth in the image of Heaven, just as he created mankind in his image. C. S. Lewis proposed that “the hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as a substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.”b Why do we imagine that God would pattern Heaven’s holy city after an earthly city, as if Heaven knows nothing of community and culture and has to get its ideas from our world? Isn’t it more likely that earthly realities, including cities, are derived from heavenly counterparts?
We tend to start with Earth and reason up toward Heaven, when instead we should start with Heaven and reason down toward Earth. It isn’t merely an accommodation to our earthly familial structure, for instance, that God calls himself a father and us children. On the contrary, he created father-child relationships to display his relationship with us, just as he created human marriage to reveal the love relationship between Christ and his bride (Ephesians 5:25-32). God’s plan is that there will be no more gulf between the spiritual and physical worlds. There will be one cosmos, one universe united under one Lord—forever. This is where history is headed. This is the unstoppable plan of God.
When God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden, Earth was Heaven’s backyard. The New Earth will be even more than that—it will be Heaven itself. And those who know Jesus will have the privilege of living there. What Spurgeon calls the thin partition between Earth and Heaven will be forever broken through.
a John Milton, Paradise Lost (New York: Random House, 2008), book 5, lines 574–76.
b C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 132.
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