Heaven" and "heavens" are used many times in the Bible, with a couple of variations of meaning. Sometimes it is relatively literal, including times when the Lord is identified with it (“Our Father, who art in the heavens,” for instance), meaning heaven as the eternal home for people who chose to do what is good in this life and let the Lord lead them to a love of being good. In other references, particularly when it is paired with “earth” or other lesser ideas (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” for instance), “heaven” or “heavens” means our internal life as opposed to our external life. In a way, these two meanings are really the same. If you think about the importance of your deepest thoughts and feelings, you can see that they are the “real” you, much more so than your body is. The relationship between the spiritual world and the natural world is similar; the spiritual world is the “real” one, and controls the natural world the same way our thoughts and feeling control our actions. So in both cases, “heaven” describes a deeper reality that we will enter fully after we die.

2143. 'Jehovah appeared to him' means the Lord's perception. This becomes clear from the fact that historical events as described in the Word are representative, and nothing else, and the actual words used there serve to mean the things that occur in the internal sense. Featured at this point in the internal sense are the Lord and His perception; and that perception was represented by the event of Jehovah's appearing to Abraham. Every appearance, every utterance, and every deed recorded in the historical sections of the Word is in this manner representative. But what each represents becomes apparent only if attention is paid to historical descriptions solely as objects - as when objects of sight serve solely to give one an opportunity and the ability to think about more sublime things, as for example when people look at gardens and yet think solely of fruits and their uses, and also of the delight of life given by these, and think still more sublimely of the happiness of paradise, or heaven. When their thoughts are on those things they do, it is true, behold the particular objects in the gardens, yet with so little interest in them as mere objects that they pay no attention to them. It is similar with the historical descriptions in the Word. When people's thoughts are on the celestial and spiritual things contained in the internal sense, just as little attention is paid to the historical events described or to the words themselves used to describe them.