Third Heaven

“ The wisdom of the angels of the third or inmost heaven shall now be described, and also how far it surpasses the wisdom of the angels of the first or outmost heaven. The wisdom of the angels of the third or inmost heaven is incomprehensible even to those who are in the outmost heaven, for the reason that the interiors of the angels of the third heaven have been opened to the third degree, while the interiors of angels of the first heaven have been opened only to the first degree ”

“ The mighty power of God raised Him up. Through the second heaven He passed, where the wonderful stars, the creation of His own power, describe their great orbits around their fiery suns. He is still attended by angels, and the angelic hosts beheld Him, who were also the witnesses of His sufferings, His death and resurrection. At last a place was reached where every angel had to halt. Even the Archangel had to cover His face and cry, “Holy! Holy!” Yonder is the third heaven and there stands the glorious throne of God. The glorified Man advances alone ”

“ For the apostle, he says, does not suppose paradise to be in the third heaven, in the opinion of those who knew how to observe the niceties of language, when he says, “I know such a man caught up to the third heaven ”

“ How diverse have been the views of learned men respecting the site of Paradise is evinced by the fact that they have located it almost everywhere on the earth, above the earth, and under the earth. Some, following the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, have contended that the home of the first parents was in the third heaven ”

“ Hence a last judgment has been executed upon the inhabitants of this planet twice before, and is now for the third time. Thus a heaven and an earth have twice passed away, and a new heaven and a new earth have been created; for the heaven and the earth are the church in either world. ”

“ My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell. ”

“ Because they long every one after an infinite good without any evil, and this is God alone. Therefore the merciful God hath sent his prophets to this world for its salvation.
'The third world is man's fallen condition of sinning, which hath transformed itself into a law contrary to God, the creator of the world. This maketh man become like unto the demons, God's enemies. ”

“ But when He declared that He had come from Heaven, it is clear that He did not mean the blue firmament but that He spoke of the Heaven of the Kingdom of God, and that from this Heaven He descended upon the clouds. As clouds are obstacles to the shining of the sun, so the clouds of the world of humanity hid from the eyes of men the radiance of the Divinity of Christ. ”

“ For since the waters were over the earth, which they covered, whilst the spirit was over the waters, both the spirit and the waters were alike over the earth. Now that which is over the earth, is of course under the heaven. And even as the earth brooded over the deep and the darkness, so also did the heaven brood over the spirit and the waters, and embrace them. ”

“ With the light of revelation and astronomy commingled, we can take a loftier view of the work of redemption. We can see that the decease accomplished on Calvary was not only to save man, but to reunite all the spiritual family of God. Heaven will be the reunion of all holy spirits into one great company. The visions of John in the book of Revelation, naturally force upon us the conviction that heaven will be such a reunion. ”

“ Thus, the sun may shine into a glass, and the glass reflect in clear water, and we see three suns, a sun in the heaven, a sun in the glass, and a sun in the water, which proceeds from both;—and this assists us to understand how the Son of God is of the Father, and the Holy Ghost is of the Father, and of the Son, and how that each is God, and yet that there are not three Gods, but one God. But, after all, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a matter of Faith, and not of Reason. We must believe, though we cannot understand. ”

“ Even though we behold the phenomenon of the ministry of the Infinite Spirit to the remote worlds of the universe of universes, even though we envisage this same co-ordinating Deity acting in and through the untold legions of the manifold beings who take origin in the Third Source and Center, even though we recognize the omnipresence of the Spirit, nonetheless, we still affirm that this same Third Source and Center is a person, the Conjoint Creator of all things and all beings and all universes. ”

“ The individual could bring his soul into relations with the Godhead so intimate that it was virtually lost in the Divine Essence, and he could become so thoroughly under the influence of the Holy Ghost that he was, so to speak, inspired, and{363} his acts were the acts of the Third Person of the Trinity. ”

“ God can by a whirlwind clear the sky and air, and produce that serenity of mind which is necessary to our communion with Heaven. Yet this whirlwind was attended with a great cloud. When we think that the clouds which arise from this earth are dispelled and we can see beyond them, yet still there is a cloud which heavenly things are wrapped in, a cloud from above, so that we cannot order our speech concerning them by reason of darkness. ”

“ From the present situation on the circle of eternity, looking backward into the endless past, we can discover only one inescapable inevitability in universe affairs, and that is the Paradise Trinity. I deem the Trinity to have been inevitable. As I view the past, present, and future of time, I consider nothing else in all the universe of universes to have been inevitable. The present master universe, viewed in retrospect or in prospect, is unthinkable without the Trinity. ”

“ After their purgation in this region, all the souls live again on earth by transmigration.18 The third realm was in the serene blue sky among the stars, the zone of blessedness, where the accepted dwell in immortal peace and joy. ”

“ When the world, indeed, shall pass away, then the kingdom of heaven shall be opened. Shall we then have to sleep high up in ether, with the boy-loving worthies of Plato; or in the air with Arius; or around the moon with the Endymions of the Stoics? No, but in Paradise, you tell me, whither already the patriarchs and prophets have removed from Hades in the retinue of the Lord’s resurrection. How is it, then, that the region of Paradise, which as revealed to John in the Spirit lay under the altar, [10] displays no other souls as in it besides the souls of the martyrs? ”

“ the mystery of the Trinity is the mystery of Holiness: the Glory and the Power of the Trinity is the Glory and Power of God who makes us holy. There is God dwelling in light inaccessible, a consuming fire of Holy Love, destroying all that resists, glorifying into its own purity all that yields. There is the Son, casting Himself into that consuming fire, whether in its eternal blessedness in heaven, or its angry wrath on earth, a willing sacrifice, to be its food and its satisfaction, [p111] as well as the revelation of its power to destroy and to save. ”

“ Is it not pitiful to hear people talk lightly about going to Heaven, whose lives on earth have not any trace of the love and purity and nobleness and self-sacrifice of which Heaven shall entirely consist hereafter? To see men with the carnal notions about Heaven as a place of external glory and beauty and jasper and emerald, where, after they have misused their time on earth, they shall fly away like swallows to an eternal summer. ”

“ We are now face to face with the eternity origin of the Infinite Spirit, the Third Person of Deity. The very instant that God the Father and God the Son conjointly conceive an identical and infinite actions—the execution of an absolute thought-plan—that very moment, the Infinite Spirit springs full-fledgedly into existence. ”

“ Everything which proceeds from something else must needs be second to that from which it proceeds, without being on that account separated. Where, however, there is a second, there must be two; and where there is a third, there must be three. Now the Spirit indeed is third from God and the Son; just as the fruit of the tree is third from the root, or as the stream out of the river is third from the fountain, or as the apex of the ray is third from the sun. ”

“ It is otherwise when, as is often done, angels are raised up by the Lord out of a lower heaven into a higher that they may behold its glory; for then they are prepared beforehand, and are encompassed by intermediate angels, through whom they have communication with those they come among. From all this it is plain that the three heavens are entirely distinct from each other. ”

“ These are the angels of Paradise coming out to greet those who stand at the threshold of eternity and to complete their preparation for the transition slumber of the last resurrection. You are not really a child of Paradise until you have traversed the inner circle and have experienced the resurrection of eternity from the terminal sleep of time. The perfected pilgrims begin this rest, go to sleep, on the first circle of Havona, but they awaken on the shores of Paradise. Of all who ascend to the eternal Isle, only those who thus arrive are the children of eternity ”

“ When the matter which is to form our solar system is separated off from the infinite ocean of matter which fills space, the Third Person of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit—pours His Life into this matter to vivify it, that it may presently take form. It is then drawn together, and form is given to it by the life of the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, who sacrifices Himself by putting on the limitations of matter, becoming the "Heavenly Man," in whose Body all forms exist, of whose Body all forms are part. ”

“ The further writings of the apostle John in the Apocalypse describe the conditions of peace during the Millennium, and subsequently the last resurrection, the change of the earth, the banishment of Lucifer therefrom, and the earth celestialized as man's eternal abode, our heaven. The apostle Peter says "the elements shall melt with fervent heat," and John the apostle informs us that the earth shall become as a sea of glass, a great Urim and Thummim. ”

“ By far the greater part of these long periods is spent in the heaven-world, to which the sixth of these manuals is devoted; but what we have now to consider is the lower part of this unseen world, the state into which man enters immediately after death — like Hades or underworld of the Greeks, the purgatory or intermediate state of Christianity, which was called by mediaeval alchemists the astral plane. ”

“ What the first triunity is to evolving personalities, the second triunity is to the evolving universes. Pattern and personality are two of the great manifestations of the acts of the First Source and Center; and no matter how difficult it may be to comprehend, it is nonetheless true that the power-pattern and the loving person are one and the same universal reality; the Paradise Isle and the Eternal Son are co-ordinate but antipodal revelations of the unfathomable nature of the Universal Father-Force.
The Third Triunity—the spirit-evolutional triunity. ”

“ Unitedly in their course through heaven the seven weave the threads of fate. Silently they weave the design of terrestrial life. Upon them depend not only summer and winter, rain and drought, but also the life and death of every living being; as determined by the constellation of their birth, such is each man, so will he live. Never do the heavenly bodies repeat precisely the same relative positions, and, therefore, never are two years, two days, two human beings, two leaves, completely identical.”
So far Troels-Lund. ”

“ Our theme necessarily leads us forth through trackless realms of boundless space, where, with the mind's eye, we shall behold with wonder and amazement some of the vast creations of the Omnipotent power of God; such as will inspire the mind, and fill it with awe and reverence for the Great Jehovah. We shall have a panoramic view of millions of Suns—Heavens—planets, and worlds, standing out, or careering through ethereal regions; peopling the realms of illimitable space. We shall comprehend more fully the diminutiveness of this earth ”

“ And as man was created in the Divine image and likeness, therefore there must be in him a trinal distinction imaging, in some degree at least, the trinity in God. There being a manifest trine of essentials in the Divine Being from whom is all our life, there must of necessity be three discrete degrees of life in the soul which is the real man. And as the kingdom of heaven is within, it follows that there must be in general three heavens separated by discrete degrees. ”

“ Beyond this event lie the unsearchable transactions of eternity and the depths of infinity—absolute mystery.
And we thus portray the sequential origin of the Third Source and Center as an interpretative condescension to the time-bound and space-conditioned mind of mortal creatures. The mind of man must have a starting point for the visualization of universe history, and I have been directed to provide this technique of approach to the historic concept of eternity. ”

“ And inasmuch as it is known that the divine qualities enter into man, and that one Man, Jesus, whose composite portrait—it is agreed—could not have been factitiously invented, was filled with them, we speak of God in man as the Son. And the Spirit of God that enters into the soul of man, transforming, inspiring, and driving him, is the Third Person, so-called. ”

“ Both worlds—the light world and the dark world—are made by desire and will. Narrowing desires for individual and particular aims, which sever a being from the total whole of divine goodness, make the kingdom of darkness, while death to self-will and a yearning desire and will for all that is expressed in the Heart and Light of God, in the Person of His Son, make the kingdom of Light. Lucifer—the awful example of the dark World—fell because he stood in pride and despised the Birth of the Heart of God and its gentle, universalizing love-spirit ”