![]() He established the earth upon its foundations, So that it will not totter forever and ever. He lays the beams of His upper chambers in the waters He makes the clouds His chariot He walks upon the wings of the wind He makes the winds His messengers, Flaming fire His ministers. “Bless the LORD, O my soul! O LORD my God, You are very great You are clothed with splendor and majesty, covering Yourself with light as with a cloak, Stretching out heaven like a curtain. The unidentified Psalmist of Psalm 104 also directly links God’s dwelling with the firmament and the waters above that firmament. Flat Earther Rob Skiba has made an enticing case for the possibility that the Tabernacle in the desert was an exact picture of our entire flat stationary earth in its relationship to the firmament and heaven above us. ![]() The earthly sanctuary is a picture of the whole earth and also of the heavenly sanctuary. Each is a dome under which God rules and is worshiped. The ASV says of Exodus 24:9-10: “a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the very heaven for clearness.” This can literally be translated: “as the bones of the heavens in purity.” So when the LORD God visited Moses and Aaron and those two other guys and the seventy elders on the mountain, He was standing on a bone or fragment or in the very least the very physical substance that originated from the firmament above our heads.Įzekiel further developed the rāqîa’ and its relationship with the location of heaven in Ezekiel 1:26, which reads: “ And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it.” Ezekiel 1:26Įlsewhere, in Psalm 150:1 we read: “Praise God in His sanctuary Praise Him in the firmament of his power.” Much like Exodus 24:9-10, there’s a parallel here made between the Holy Place and the firmament above. Furthermore, the firmament is not a canopy of ice that melted and created the floodwaters, as some Creationists teach. Just keep that in mind when I later talk about the ocean of water above the firmament. A sapphire stone is blue, like the sky above us. Moses conceived of the raqia, named ‘ heaven,’ as a solid substance much like sapphire. Under His feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself.” As evidence, let me first turn to Exodus 24:9-10: “Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. GOD’S DWELLING IN HEAVEN IS LINKED TO THE FIRMAMENT They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going….” (Acts 1:10-11)Īnd when the rapture of the church happens, guess where those of us who are taken are going? “He was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. So when Elijah was taken to heaven, naturally he went up. However, it appears as though the whole of the Bible takes place in an enclosed system, with heaven taking its crowning focus. ![]() As a former Globe-Earther myself, I naturally adapted to the theory that heaven was somewhere else dimensionally. The simplest employed logic should undoubtedly show that the Hebrews were not thinking in terms of a spinning, wobbling globe. I kind of feel like I need to state the obvious here, because in the entire canon of Scripture there is never an example given that leads its reader to believe that heaven is east or west of us, side-to-side, here among us, and certainly not below. Let’s leave the ocean of water above us and its relationship with heaven for another day and concentrate strictly on the locale of heaven instead, though we may naturally find some intermingling between the two, since the Hebrews believed heaven and that body of water to roughly be in the same neighborhood. The Bible describes lots of water above the firmament, and also heaven. ![]() I’m further going to divide this up into two ways. In yesterday’s post I established the belief, as it pertained to the writers of the Bible, that God created a physical dome above our heads, the firmament, or rāqîa’ (רָקִ֫יעַ) in Hebrew. When Christians threw out the Biblical creation model of a self-enclosed system underneath a physical firmament, or dome, with the glories of heaven physically built directly above that, they turned to metaphorical steeples instead. And it wasn’t until I became a Flat Earther that the question became self-explanatory. Great cathedrals of the Renaissance, Holy Roman and Byzantine Empire all contained them, – even the Ottomans. Churches with domes can be found all over the world. ![]() It’s a question I’ve been asking myself ever since. WHY CHURCHES ARE NO LONGER BUILT UNDER DOMES is a valid question, one in which I first asked myself while standing beside the empty tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, gazing up at the breathtaking ceiling which arched directly above me. ![]()
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