Did The Thief On The Cross Go To Heaven? (Part 1) Paradise In Heaven

Did the thief on the cross next to Jesus go to heaven when he died?

No, I don’t think he did. 

There’s a short answer to this, and a long answer. The short answer is that:

1) Jesus said “You will be with me in Paradise,” and Paradise is not heaven, and

2) Jesus himself didn’t go to heaven the day he died… he went down to the realm of the dead. So it makes no sense for him to have meant “today you will be me in heaven” if on that day he wasn’t even going to be in heaven.

So what did Jesus really mean when he said to the thief “Today you will be with me in Paradise?”

That’s the long answer. 

Unfortunately, this short conversation between Jesus and thief is not quite as easy to interpret as it seems, mostly because we’ve loaded it with wrong assumptions. There’s a bit to unpack, so I’m going to do it over 4 posts. But stick with me, because I think you’ll find it will be worth it.

I’m going to look at 3 key pieces of the puzzle, and also 3 different ways to interpret this story, finishing with one the one I think makes the most sense.

In this first post I’m going to start with looking at the most common interpretation – that the thief went to heaven when he died.

But first, let’s look at the story itself. 

In Luke chapter 23 we read about this conversation between Jesus and one of the criminals who was crucified next to him. After having defended Jesus from the insults of another criminal who was also being crucified with them, this “thief” says to him, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” The response Jesus gives to this thief is absolutely astounding. He says, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Now, there are 3 important parts to this conversation between Jesus and the thief that we’re going to look at – the 3 key pieces of the puzzle. Firstly, what does Paradise mean? Second, what did Jesus mean by “today”? And third, something that is too often overlooked, any interpretation of what Jesus said to the thief needs to make sense of what the thief said first: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” This is what Jesus was responding to when he said, “You will be with me in Paradise.” 

Paradise, today, and kingdom. If we can get these 3 to line up well, then we have a good interpretation of this story.

So firstly, and probably most important in this discussion, what does Paradise mean?

Most of us automatically associate Paradise with heaven, as if they are just two words that mean basically the same thing. Now to be fair, there is a strong link between the two, but they’re not the same thing, and that’s really important to this story.

So what is the link between Paradise and heaven? Well, Paradise is only mentioned 3 times in the New Testament, and one of those times clearly links Paradise with heaven. In 2 Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul, says, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. And I know that this man… was caught up to paradise.”

So Paul clearly links paradise with the “third heaven”. Now many people assume that the third heaven here is the highest level of heaven, and that paradise is just another name for the place where God lives and everything is basically just awesome. That’s because that’s how we use the word “paradise” in modern language. For us it means a place of absolute bliss. And what place could be more blissful than being in heaven in the presence of God, where everything is perfect?

But that’s not what the word paradise meant in biblical times. It did not mean a place of bliss. The word paradise in biblical times literally meant a “ royal, enclosed garden or park”. This is how it’s always used in the Old Testament.

A few times it’s in reference to some royal gardens owned by earthly kings. But several times it’s used specifically for the Garden of Eden. God’s royal, enclosed garden, his centrepiece in the original creation, containing the Tree Of Life in the middle. There are also lots of references to Paradise in Jewish writings outside of the Bible, and most of the time it’s a reference to the Garden of Eden.

We see it used this way in the 3rd mention of paradise in the New Testament. Revelation 2:7 says “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.”

That’s a direct reference to the Garden Of Eden, because one of the defining things about the Garden of Eden was that it contained the Tree of Life. And here it is being called “the paradise of God”. Because Paradise means a royal enclosed garden.

Now we know from Genesis chapter 3 that, after Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, it was blocked off from human entry, guarded on one side by an angel and on the other by a flaming sword. But Jewish tradition also says that God moved the Garden of Eden to make it even more inaccessible to humanity. And the most popular view was that the Garden of Eden was taken up into heaven, out of reach of humanity until it will be made accessible again to the righteous in the age to come.

Alright, let’s go back to the concept of a “third heaven”. Most people look at Paul’s mention of the third heaven in 2nd Corinthians and assume that it must be the highest level of the heavens. They then say that if there’s a third heaven, there must also be a first and second heaven. And then, really loosely based off of a few mentions of heaven in the Old Testament, they say that the first heaven is the sky, where the clouds are and the bird fly… the second heaven is outer space, where the sun, moon and stars are… and then the third heaven is God’s realm, the real heaven, called Paradise.

But this is all just pure assumption. There’s actually no good evidence that the Jews believed in a three-tiered heaven, or that God’s realm at the top was called Paradise.

On the other hand, there’s actually stacks in Jewish writings about seven heavens. In a 7 layered heaven, the seventh level is always where God’s throne is, of course. But guess where the Garden of Eden, known as Paradise, is consistently placed in this 7 layered idea of the heavens?

You guessed it, the third heaven!

Paul’s comments in 2 Corinthians 12 linking paradise and the third heaven line up exactly with this popular Jewish idea, that God moved the Garden of Eden to make it inaccessible to humans, and he’s got it stored up in the 3rd layer of 7 heavens.

Paradise is NOT the name for the highest heaven.

Now let’s look at the story of the thief on the cross again and see if it makes sense to believe that the thief went to heaven with Jesus after he died. When Jesus said, “You will be with me in Paradise,” if Paradise was kept down in the third heaven – out of seven – this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Especially if we want to make sense of “kingdom” here too.

I don’t believe that Jesus “coming into his kingdom” as the thief says, meant ruling in heaven. More on that later. But even if we assumed it did mean that, then surely Jesus would have gone up to the top layer of heaven where God’s throne is, not the third, where Paradise is. The Bible says that when Jesus did go up to heaven that he was seated at the right hand of his Father. That’s just incompatible with him going to be in a lower level of the heavens, down on level 3.

“Today” also doesn’t make sense in this interpretation. As I said earlier, Jesus didn’t ascend to heaven immediately after dying. The Bible says he went into the grave, the realm of the dead, the “heart of the earth” for 3 days. Then after his resurrection, according to Acts chapter 1, he spent another 40 days on earth before ascending to the right hand of the Father. That’s about 6 weeks between his death and then his ascension to heaven.

So if Jesus didn’t go to heaven “today”, meaning the same day he died, then his words to the thief that “today you will be with me in paradise” can’t have meant “today you will be with me in heaven”.

So this most common reading of the story of the thief on the cross, that he went to heaven after he died, doesn’t do a very good job in making sense of either paradise, today or kingdom. 

There is another possible meaning of Paradise though, one that might have been used by Jews in the first Century, and one that makes much better sense of Jesus’ words to the thief.

That’s coming right up in the next post.