 Dan wants to know if the third heaven also called paradise a couple of lines later is what we commonly think of as heaven What are the first and second heavens? Yeah, it's actually it's actually all of the above, you know, we have to remember when we get into this that heaven Heaven doesn't have literal geography. There's no latitude and longitude. There's no Literal levels or stages as though when you were in one you could measure their size or their distance from each other Okay, so we got we have to be careful that we don't Overly literalize the language when it talks about heaven or these levels of heaven and so on and so forth I mean there they're all This other place and they you know, they're spoken of in these ways To distinguish parts of them and again, we are forced to use the language of space We are forced to use spatial language the language of embodiment and Physicality to talk about a spiritual realm that doesn't actually have those things because it's not the world of of our Experience and our embodiment the only way we can talk about those other things is to use the language of our experience And of our embodiment. This is just always the way it is In scripture and in our own discussion. So with with that in mind the levels language is trying to communicate that the presence of God God himself like like where the presence is in the spiritual world that that spot as it were Realize we can't even speak of God in that way correctly because that makes God a spatial being but God is omnipresent Do you see the problem? We have of even using this language, but I'm just going to try to Wade through it because that's what we have to do But so the levels language is trying to communicate that the presence of God is the holiest place in the spiritual world God occupies in Paul's language the third level some there are some ancient texts from the second temple period that have three levels of heaven Second Corinthians 12 to is you know what the question is really deriving from other texts have seven levels You say well, why is it different? You know what well They're all talking trying to communicate the same idea that that the highest level the seventh level or the third You know level is that the place where God is at that's the holiest spot the holiest place The language tries to parse out where we are in the spiritual realm where other Objects are in the spiritual realm and then where God himself is in the spiritual realm And so it has to use this this level language to do that Again to to make sure that God is given the preeminent place He is the preeminent being on in this this plane of reality the spiritual world You know, again, it's just a way of establishing it to use a Levitical, you know way of expressing it gradations of holiness, you know, if you think about the temple tabernacle in the temple there were the The more inward you went the greater the sanctity Okay, so that you had you couldn't have non priests occupy Like the first level of sacred space I mean they could bring a sacrifice up to the to the gate or the door the tabernacle and It would be sacrificed, but they couldn't go beyond a certain point and priests could go there But but you know, there was there was a a subset of those priests who could go into the holy place And there's there's only one priest that could actually go into the most holy place the holy of Holies once a year This was this was designed to teach and to reinforce the idea that The ground gets holier. Okay the closer to God that you are It's this these gradations of holiness We talked about this in Leviticus about, you know, what's done with the blood and all this kind of stuff And who can go where it's the same idea sort of transferred into the spiritual realm when you get these levels of heaven There's a lot of speculation in second temple period literature You get all these heavenly visions and journeys of Individuals like Enoch and Abraham and Baruch and you know, so on and so forth There's a number of old testament characters that have these journeys and then and you get this language You know that as they're as they're on their trip So to speak to to see the presence of God you pass through certain levels these heavenly levels And it's designed again to teach the idea that the closer you to God you get the more Sanctified the spaces the more holy it is. I Personally think the three level approach is probably modeled after the temple You have the court the holy place and the holy of holies you got three levels there the seven levels again I again my suspicion is that it has something to do with the number seven being perceived or thought about as perfection And and you say well, how do you get seven and perfection? Well, it's modeled after the creation week that everything is created in six days and on the seventh day God rests in his his temple, which is you know in in Degenesis, which is you know Eden on earth, you know that that it completes the activity This is what God wanted to do. He did he did it, you know exactly the way he wanted to do it So you've got this this perception this this idea this numerical tag as it were number seven That speaks of completeness and in that sense a perfection So I tend to think that that number is used again to convey the same idea And I think that the number three is we're speaking of levels is really drawn more from Sacred space on the ground you know boots on the ground so to speak that we read about in the Old Testament