According to Paul in Ephesians 1:3, “God the Father has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” For Paul to write “has blessed us” means the Father has already been blessing us – and since the blessings he gives us are in the heavenly realms, then we must be experiencing heaven already.
But how can we experience heaven when we’re physical humans living here? And if it is possible, how do we know we’re experiencing it?
Paul says we can know, because we can see “the things that are unseen” 2 Corinthians 4:18. But how is that possible too? How can we see something that’s invisible?
Paul offers an intriguing clue in Romans 8:16, where he writes, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”
Working backwards through that verse, Paul is saying we can know we are God’s children. It’s real to us, even though we have no visible proof of it, and no human terms to explain it. We just know.
But how do “we just know”?
Working backwards through verse 16 again, Paul says we have a “spirit” in us. And being “spirit” it acts like a wall socket for the spiritual realm to plug in to. Which is what the first part of verse 16 covers, because it’s the Holy Spirit testifying with our spirit – or plugging into our spirit – that opens up a circuit through which the invisible spiritual dimension can flow.
Our spirit, then, is like a portal for the Holy Spirit to connect the realm we’re living in here to the heavenly realm. A circuit is created that turns the lights on, so to speak, to enable us to see the unseen. The invisible becomes real. We can see, for instance, that we are God’s children.
Which really opens up the heavenly realm to us, because as God’s children we’re being “blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). And we’ll be able to see what that’s like because, thanks to the Holy Spirit plugging into our spirit, those heavenly blessings are happening to us already. And enough for us to know it.
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