This week, someone asked me about the Bible’s reference to ‘three’ heavens. Why does the Bible refer to three heavens? Are there multiple heavens or levels to heaven?

“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows.” 2 Corinthians 12:2

Out of all the times the Bible speaks of heaven, only once does it refer to numbered levels: 2 Corinthians 12:2. The Bible does use a couple of different words and quite a few images and metaphors to describe heaven. While some Christians over the ages have felt this means they should try to parse and quantify every nuance to create an elaborate heaven-system, this approach to the Bible never works—it’s the same mindset the Pharisees used all over again.

In essence, there is only one heaven in the Bible: The dwelling place of God. Why then does Paul refer to three heavens?

The shortest answer is that he doesn’t. This passage is a strange one, and has been prooftexted from the Bible at least since the Gnostics, into parts of the medieval church, and is still regularly grabbed out of context by modern day Mormons, mystics and other groups in order to argue for all kinds of abiblical views of heaven. Since the passage is highly poetic, we need to treat it with care.

First, most people believe Paul is referring to himself when he says, “I know a man in Christ”; he’s using indirect language to say that he was the recipient of the vision discussed in 2 Corinthians 12. The rest of the verse in English reads “caught up to the third heaven,” but in the original language of the New Testament, the preposition here is not “to,” it’s really “until.” This particular preposition is frequently used in a superlative sense; often it carries the idea of “until the end [is reached]” or “as far as” (BDAG).

So what Paul says here is, in essence, “[I] was caught up (so taken over by God’s vision) until I reached/as far as the third heaven.” In the ancient world, popular mythology held that there were lots of heavens and levels of heavens: 3 and 7 were most common, but some people even thought there were 365. What Paul says—using a popular metaphor ancient Greek speakers would have understood—is that when God gave him a vision, his spirit soared all the way to the top of heaven.



Think of it like this: If someone asks you how bad you want something—something that you really want—you might respond like, “I’d sail the seven seas to get it!” You don’t literally mean that there are only seven seas (or that you would literally sail all seven); you just mean you would do whatever it takes to get it. You would go until the end / as far as you could to get it. People who spoke Greek at the time would recognize that Paul was saying that his vision of God was the highest, greatest view of heaven he could ever imagine, and not saying that there were necessarily three levels to heaven.

The Bible always presents heaven as the place where God dwells. If a person establishes a covenant relationship with Jesus then that person will dwell with God one day. No levels, no divisions, no castes, no pecking order, for the “old order of things has passed away.”