There is a general belief amongst most Christians that one day they will get a brand new resurrected body.
A body that never gets sick, tired, or afraid. There is an enormous amount of YouTube videos on this subject, along with heaps of blogs, websites and books. There is however a lot of disagreement as to when this event will happen. Some people who are waiting for the rapture claim that they will receive their new resurrected body just moments before the rapture occurs. Others think they will get their new body at the ‘end of the age’ when Jesus returns to create a new Earth, whilst others believe their bodies are resurrected when they die and go to be with the Lord in heaven.
Now, looking at this logically, we would need a new ‘special type’ of body to be in heaven as our 3D body is not suitable. Therefore, the resurrection would have to take place in heaven for us to get this ‘new’ body. To clarify this further I’m going to digress into a bit of science and logic.
What is heaven and where is it?
If you ask anybody on the street where they think heaven is, they’ll usually point upwards, even if you ask this question on the opposite side of the earth, they will still point “upwards”. Some people may say that Heaven is where God lives, maybe angels live there as well, along with those people who have died and ‘were good’. Many would say that it’s a peaceful place and it’s where nothing evil happens.
So that sounds pretty good, but is it true? What about Heaven’s location? Exactly where is it? Most thinking people would hypothesize that Heaven is not in our universe. We don’t die and go to another planet in our universe because that means we would still be here, in our 3D universe. So let’s have a brief explanation of dimensions.
Dimensions
Most people know that we live in a 3-dimensional (3D) world. Sometimes time is considered to be the 4th dimension. (3/4D). So to move around in our world we can go up, down, left, right and diagonally. As for the 4th dimension of time, we can only go one way and that is forward; minute by minute, day by day, year by year, etc.
Some scientists think that time doesn’t actually exist but that we use the concept of ‘time’ to organize events in our lives and our world. You need a commonly accepted definition of time if you want to get to the movie before it starts, or arrive at work ‘on time’, or know when to catch the bus. Today the whole world has adopted and standardized the measurement of time by dividing the world into 24 time zones, each zone being 1 hour long. This means if it’s midday in London everyone will know that it will be midnight in New Zealand. (apart from daylight savings time).
Now it’s my belief and a lot of other people’s belief, that God lives in a much higher dimension than we do. ..A higher plane; the spirit world; a supernatural place”… Now the only way to confirm that this theory is correct is that you must first die, go to heaven and then you will know for sure! Until then we cannot say for certain that God ‘lives’ in a ‘heavenly higher dimension’; but logically it would appear to be the case.
Are there really 10 dimensions?
You may have heard that some scientists have ‘worked out mathematically’ that there are 10 dimensions. This number of ’10 dimensions’ came about when String Theory was adopted as a possible answer to describe how the quantum world works. Nobody really knows how the quantum world works and many famous scientists have agreed that they don’t fully understand it.
Their ’10 dimensions’ theory is based on mathematical equations. They used mathematical formulas and models to come up with string theory, and then to get that theory and the ‘math’s’ to work they had to have 10 dimensions. They claim these ‘dimensions’ must exist without any proof! Of course, as many of you will know, it is not uncommon for some scientists to come up with lots of ‘theories’ that often exclude God as they don’t want to accept his existence.
So to do what God can do, he must live outside of our 3/4D world. He can
‘see the beginning from the end’(Isaiah 46:10)
therefore, he must live outside of our time dimension.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1)
which clearly indicates that he must exist outside of our universe and time because initially in our universe, there was nothing until God created it. Now, for the sake of the discussion, I’ll say that God lives in the ‘nth dimension’. We live in the 3rd dimension and our dimensional universe is a subset of God’s larger universe, which means we ‘live inside’ of God’s universe. We’re not outside, we’re not half in and half out like a Venn diagram, but we’re enclosed completely inside God’s universe. This allows God to see and interact with us.
But constraints exist. To live in our world, we need a 3D body and therefore any angels and certainly Jesus had to become a ‘type’ of a three-dimensional being. How God did that I don’t know, but the point is that’s the way, in my opinion, it would have to work.
Thinking about this concept I was reminded how sometimes we can ‘download’ versions of software (to trial) that have restricted functionality. i.e. the main features and functions of the software work, but other features and capabilities are ‘disabled’. So maybe angels, etc. who come to our earth are a bit like that in that they have to have some restrictions on their abilities simply so they can function as a 3-dimensional being., but they still maintain their overall ‘angelness.’ (Just a thought!)
Therefore, for us to go to heaven and interact with everything and everyone that’s there, we would have to turn into n-dimensional beings as well. I believe that when we die and get resurrected, we will have a new body that’s fit for heaven and that means we will have a n-dimensional body, just like everyone else who is in Heaven.
The Big Bang
Now this brings me to the creation of our universe. There’s a lot of speculation that it was the ‘Big Bang’, which is the commonly accepted theory. This theory is that there was absolutely nothing in our universe, in fact, our universe didn’t even exist. Nothing means nothing, just absolutely nothing! It wasn’t just an empty space, there was no space. It wasn’t an empty ‘space/time continuum’, there was nothing!
Suddenly, out of this ‘nothing’ and out of ‘nowhere’ came a huge ball of matter/energy which shot out into ‘nothing?’ or maybe it made space/time as it expanded. That’s the commonly accepted theory of the Big Bang and how the universe was created. Of course, this is another example of scientists explaining a theory with absolutely no proof! Nobody was there to see this. Well, at least no 3D bodies but God was there because he created our universe.
Now it is possible that he did use the ‘big bang’ concept to create our universe and it has expanded and evolved the way many ‘experts’ say it has. But! The key point is that God initiated it. It did not just come out of nowhere.
Maybe God one ‘day sat down’ and said “I’m going to create a 3-dimensional universe, fill it full of stars and planets. I’ll put people on it and they’ll love me and I’ll love them”. So God took materials from his universe and made our universe which means that everything on our earth was made by God with God’s materials.
I was explaining to my granddaughter recently about this concept using an analogy I had thought up, and whilst it is not necessarily the best analogy, I think it works well to illustrate the concept of God’s creation of our universe,
God’s fish tank
Imagine that you decided you wanted a fish tank to go in the corner of the lounge room of your house. What would you do to achieve this? You’d have to get a base for the tank. Maybe you might make it yourself out of wood or you’d buy one. Next, you’d need a tank, either glass or Perspex, depending on the size of the tank you wanted. You’d fill the tank with water, salt water if you’re having saltwater fish and corals, or freshwater if that’s the type of fish you wanted. You would put lights on the top of the tank and install pumps and a filtration system. At this stage, you would put your fish into the tank. So now you’ve made a lovely fish tank and everything in it is self-sufficient, (except you have to feed the fish now and then.)
Now maybe (no one knows) this is similar to how God made our universe. Maybe we are just ‘God’s Fish Tank’ and our universe sits in the corner of his mighty higher n-dimensional universe? Now the fish themselves could be swimming around thinking. “I wonder what else is outside. What does ‘outside’ mean? Where did we come from? How did we get here? What happens when we die? “Well, I do know that the fish can’t exist outside of the tank and they don’t have the mental capabilities to understand or answer any of these questions.
I think our universe could be like that. We are a subset of God’s mighty universe. If we want to ‘come out’ into God’s world we have to have a body that will work in the nth dimension We cannot go there with our three dimensional one.
Flatland
Many years ago, in 1884, Edwin Abbott wrote about a place called ‘Flatland’. Now ‘Flatland’ is a hypothetical place because it’s impossible in our 3D world to make one. Flatland is an imaginary 2D world, so the ‘people’ who live there only have two dimensions. They can only go left and right. They have no height because that would require another dimension, i.e. the 3rd dimension. For the same reason, they have no thickness. So obviously you can’t draw this and so we have to rely on our imagination here. You need to imagine that these people have no height and they are little ‘flat things’ going left or right or diagonally. The idea behind Flatland is Abbott’s attempt to describe the concept of multi-dimensional reality.
If you as a three-dimensional person walked over to where there’s 2-dimensional flat land people, and you put your fingers down in front of them. What do you think the Flatland people would see? They’ll see five little flat disks because they can’t see up as ‘up’ doesn’t exist in their dimension. They also have no concept that ‘up’ exists. They cannot see it nor can they access it. Then if you took your fingers and thumb away one at a time, to the Flatland people, they would see these little flat disks that had just ‘appeared’ now disappearing one at a time. From their perspective, they would just blink out of existence.
Well, that’s a sort of crude illustration of how a higher-dimensional being would interact with a lower one. We wouldn’t be able to understand it because we don’t have the concepts, the knowledge and the awareness to know how a higher multi-dimensional being would exist. Maybe Acts 8:39 describes such an interaction?
‘And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing.
But Philip was found at Azotus: and passing through he preached in all the cities, till he came to Caesarea. ‘
So in our current 3D body, we cannot go to heaven and be with the Lord. We need a n-dimensional body, we get this when we die and are resurrected. However, as God is a higher dimensional being than we are, he can interact with our world, sort of like we can with the Flatland idea. How God does this is unknown but Jesus said that he
“would never leave us or forsake us” (Heb 13:5)
and he has given
“his angels charge over us, to keep us in all our ways,” (Psalms 91:11).
so evidently God does interact with us in some way. He also said that he
“works all things together for good to those who love him.” (Rom 8:28).
Why is our universe so big?
Speaking of our universe as a ‘fish tank in God’s living room (absolutely no disrespect intended!) many people have speculated as to why our universe is so vast. Current estimates are that there are about two trillion galaxies in our universe that we can ‘see’ with our technology and about 100-200 billion stars in each galaxy. Scientists expect to find more as our technology progresses.
So why did God make it so big? Compared to us we are just motes of dust! However, I find it interesting that it is only in the past 2 -3 hundred years that man has been able to observe these stars. Edwin Hubble in 1924 was the first person to observe a galaxy outside of our Milky Way. (The Hubble Telescope is named after him.) Even in our solar system many of the moons of the outer planets and even the last few planets were not fully identified until the 18th-19th century.
Perhaps God made the universe so vast so that he can enjoy his creation. Watch galaxies be created, evolve and shine brightly in various colors. We humans have only discovered this recently whereas God, who is outside of our time, has an infinite amount of time to enjoy his creation.
Similarly, have you ever thought about the myriad of colorful fish and corals that exist under the sea? Many people have seen the wonders of life under the sea in movies and TV documentaries. From brightly colored ‘Nemo and Dory’ fish, to those weird fish found near the bottom of the ocean. Not excluding the largest animal on the earth, the Blue Whale which can be up to 90 feet long and one of the largest weighed in at 190 tons. Which is about the weight of 2,000 people!
This means that until man started exploring under the sea with equipment that allowed him to stay under longer and swim around easily, all of this amazing color, fish, corals and amazing sea life was only seen by God. For thousands of years, man sailed over these seas but underwater exploration didn’t fully happen until the aqualung was invented by Jacques Cousteau in the 1940s. (Some people had invented similar diving suits earlier but they weren’t as flexible and as safe as Cousteau’s). Maybe like the vast number of stars in the universe, God created such a huge variety of fish so that he could enjoy them. Mankind was fortunate enough to be able to observe this amazing creation later on.
Most people who have visited New Zealand say that it is an amazingly beautiful country. It has vast forests, long beaches, amazing mountain ranges, and a wide variety of birds and animals. But did you know, well according to Scholars, that it was uninhabited until about 1200AD due to its remoteness? Other places in the world have remained ‘undiscovered’ in a similar fashion.
God was able to enjoy all of these wonderful things he had created, long before ‘man’ came to them.
The point of these comments is to say that God may have just made everything for himself to enjoy, as well as knowing that later we would enjoy them as well.
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