Passing Through The Heavens

There are three heavens. Most believers stop at the second.

In Passing Through The Heavens, Ronald P. Gosselin lays out a framework drawn from three shadows in scripture - Israel's journey out of Egypt, the structure of the wilderness Tabernacle, and the appointed Feast Days. Laid one over the other, these three shadows reveal a single substance: the believer's full passage from the outer court, through the Holy Place, and into the very presence of God Himself.

Paul was caught up to the third heaven and heard inexpressible words. He told us so himself. What he did not tell us - and what generations of believers have wrestled with since - is whether what he saw was reserved for him alone, or whether the way he traveled is open to anyone who would walk it. Gosselin's answer, drawn out carefully across the chapters of this study, is that the third heaven is the inheritance of the saints. The veil has already been torn. The way is open. The question, he writes, is whether we will walk it.

This is not leisure reading. It is a prayerful study, written for those willing to search out the scriptures for themselves and to run with endurance the race set before them. It is about the difference between the letter and the spirit, the danger of mistaking a high vantage point for arrival, and the third heaven that waits beyond the veil. Through eight chapters, Gosselin maps the believer's progressive passage - the Forerunner, the personal guidance of the fivefold ministry, the shadows of Israel's journey, the rightly-dividing of scripture, the three baptisms, spiritual food in due season, and finally the crossing of the Jordan into the third heaven itself.

At the heart of the book is a single chart that aligns Israel's Journey, the Tabernacle, the Feast Days, the Fruit of the Spirit, the Triune God, the Triune Man, and the three baptisms across three heavens. It is the kind of framework readers in the tradition return to season after season, marking up their Bibles alongside it.

Originally published in 1992 as a privately printed booklet and passed hand to hand among believers who knew the author personally, Passing Through The Heavens is now in print for a new generation. This second edition preserves the original 1992 text in full, including the foreword by Pastor Roger Patno of S.B.B.C. (January 1993), and adds a new Editor's Note, a Letter From the Editor by the author's son Matt Gosselin, a complete Scripture Index, and a Topical Index for further study. For readers in the tradition of Watchman Nee, T. Austin-Sparks, George Warnock, Bill Britton, and the broader sonship and feast-days stream, Passing Through The Heavens restores a quiet classic to its rightful place on the shelf.

Ronald P. Gosselin (1941-2019) was an American Christian writer, lay theologian, mechanical engineer, and family man. He served in the United States Air Force in the early 1960s as a Ballistic Missile Technician in Lincoln, Nebraska, and spent his working career as a mechanical engineer at IBM in Essex Junction, Vermont. He brought an engineer's discipline to a lifetime of biblical study. Passing Through The Heavens is the fruit of that work - written carefully, prayed over for decades, and offered freely to anyone who has an ear to hear.