He Came Down from Heaven

The word Heaven occurs in the Lord’s Prayer twice and in the Nicene Creed three times. The clauses which contain it are: ‘Our Father which art in heaven’; ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’; ‘Maker of heaven and earth’; ‘Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven’; ‘He ascended into heaven’. A single sentence, recurrent in the Gospels, is as familiar as these: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’, or more briefly, ‘The kingdom of heaven’.