“But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee: how much less this house which I have built!” (II Chronicles 6:18).

This intriguing phrase, “the heaven of heavens,” is found at least five times in the Bible. Our text is taken from the prayer of Solomon at the dedication of the beautiful temple he had built as a dwelling for God. Solomon understood that God was infinite and omnipresent, yet it was somehow possible for Him to be also in a finite place for a finite time.

But what is this “heaven of heavens?” Can the heavens themselves have a heaven? Whatever it is, it is part of God’s creation, and He rules over all. “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD’S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is” (Deuteronomy 10:14).

There is, of course, the atmospheric heaven in which the birds “fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven” (Genesis 1:20). There is also the sidereal heaven, containing “the stars of the heaven,” the number of which God compared to “the sand which is upon the sea shore” (Genesis 22:17). Scientists know fairly well the outer boundary of the atmospheric heaven, but the boundary of the starry heaven, billions of light-years from the earth, has not yet been reached by their telescopes.

Nevertheless, it must have a boundary, for when Christ went back to the Father after His resurrection, He “ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things” (Ephesians 4:10). Perhaps this divine realm beyond the stars is “the heaven of heavens,” the “third heaven,” where Paul “was caught up into paradise” (II Corinthians 12:2,4), and where Christ, having ascended, has entered “into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Hebrews 9:24). HMM