Answer
Heaven is most certainly a real place. The Bible speaks of heaven’s existence—and access to heaven through faith in Jesus Christ—but there are no verses that give us a geographical (or astronomical) location. The short answer to the question of “where is heaven?” is “heaven is where God is.”
The place people call “heaven” is also referred to as “the third heaven” and “paradise” in 2 Corinthians 12:1–4. In that passage, the apostle Paul tells of a living man who was “caught up” to heaven and was unable to describe it. The Greek word translated “caught up” is also used in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 in describing the rapture, wherein believers will be caught up to be with the Lord.
Other verses indicating heaven to be “above” the earth are numerous. In Genesis 11:7, God says, “Come, let us go down” to see the tower of Babel. When the chariot of fire came to get Elijah, it took him “up to heaven” (2 Kings 2:11). Heaven is described as “high above the earth” in Psalm 103:11, and the place from which the Lord “looks down” in Psalm 14:2. When Jesus prayed a prayer of thanksgiving, He did so “looking up to heaven” (Mark 6:41). In Acts 1:9–11 Jesus is taken “up” into heaven, and when God takes John to heaven in Revelation 4:1, He says, “Come up here.” Such passages lead to the conclusion that heaven is “up” from our perspective; it is above us in an exalted position.
However, as J. I. Packer points out, “since God is spirit, ‘heaven’ . . . cannot signify a place remote from us which He inhabits. The Greek gods were thought of as spending most of their time far away from earth in sort of a celestial equivalent of the Bahamas, but the God of the Bible is not like this. Granted, the ‘heaven’ where saints and angels dwell has to be thought of as a sort of locality, because saints and angels, as God’s creatures, exist in space and time. But when the Creator is said to be ‘in heaven,’ the thought is that He exists on a different plane from us, rather than in a different place. That God in heaven is always near to his children on earth is something which the Bible takes for granted” (Growing in Christ, Crossway, 2022, pt. 3, ch. 4).
Examples of God being near to us, even though He is in heaven, include the psalmist’s assurance that “the Lord is close to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18) and Paul’s teaching that “he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27). Moses asked the children of Israel, “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him?” (Deuteronomy 4:7). Heaven is only a prayer away.
The New Testament mentions heaven with considerable frequency, yet, even then, details of its location are missing. We will never find heaven with telescopes, star charts, or deep space probes. We will only find heaven through faith in Jesus Christ.
More important than knowing where heaven is, is knowing the God of heaven, for the same reason that it’s better to know your neighbor than the details of his house. On the night before His crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples, “You know the way to the place where I am going” (John 14:4). Thomas immediately raised an objection: “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (verse 5). And Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (verse 6). We may not know the exact location of heaven, but we know the Way, for He is Jesus.
