1 Peter 3:22 — A Negative Allegory

[Jesus Christ] …who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.

Summary: Where is Jesus? Peter gives us a peek into the eternal dwelling place of Jesus. 

Where is Jesus?

It is a fair question. We hear a lot of people talking about him. We read about him. Our calendar was designed around him. Where is he now? 

The answer to that question is hard for us to understand. To say he is in “heaven” doesn’t help us if we have never been there ourselves. 

Photography has been an interest of mine for most of my life. My first camera was an old Argus C-3. It looked a bit like a brick with a lens on one side. Everything was manual, and it used something called “film” to make the picture. (I’m explaining film because it has been twenty or thirty years since anyone has needed to use film for making pictures.) Light exposed on the film would cause a chemical reaction. When the film was developed, meaning it was chemically processed, the image would appear. 

The image on the film was called a “negative” because the image was inverted. Where there was light in the picture, the image was dark. Where there were shadows, the image on the film was light. It was only after going through another process called “printing” that the image would look normal again. 

The reason I mention this is that we “see” things in this world a certain way. Through the eye of the camera lens, everything is upside-down and backward. Looking at the film, everything is inverted, or “negative.” Three ways of looking at the same thing; normal, backward, and inverted. Only when we take another few steps back from the process do we see something else: the darkroom. This is the room where negatives are developed and the positive prints are made. 

When we look at a picture, we don’t “see” all the processes that the image had to go through to become a picture. In the same way, when we look at the world around us, we don’t see all the processes the world went through when God created it. There is a lot we don’t know. 

As the darkroom is necessary for film photography to exist, heaven is necessary for our world to exist. Heaven is that place where the Creator of All Things exists. We don’t need to know where the darkrooms of the world are to get our film developed. We just need to know how to send the film off to the processing company, just like we send our prayers off to heaven to be heard by God. 

I suspect that the world we know is a very tiny place compared to heaven. The place where God lives is everywhere. The place where we live is finite. It is like we are each one picture out of billions on a roll of film miles long. 

Jesus is in a place we can’t see. He has told us about it. He came from there before he was born a man. He went back there after he was raised from the dead. We have the testimony of his disciples, the written Word, and His Spirit within us. The rest depends on faith. 

Application: Remember that this life is but a ”mist” (James 4:14). The real world is the place where Jesus lives. 

Food for Thought: What does Peter tell us about Jesus’ place in heaven?