AFTER this I looked, and, behold, a door _was_ opened in heaven; and the first [175]voice which I heard _was_ as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, [176]Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter. 1. _After this._ Gr., “After these things;” that is, after what he had seen, {108} and after what he had been directed to record in the preceding chapters. How long after these things this occurred, he does not say――whether on the same day, or at some subsequent time; and conjecture would be useless. The _scene_, however, is changed. Instead of seeing the Saviour standing before him (ch. i.), the scene is transferred to heaven, and he is permitted to look in upon the throne of God, and upon the worshippers there. ¶ _I looked._ Gr., _I saw_――εἶδον. Our word _look_ would rather indicate _purpose_ or _intention_, as if he had _designedly_ directed his attention to heaven, to see what could be discovered there. The meaning, however, is simply that he saw a new vision, without intimating whether there was any _design_ on his part, and without saying how his thoughts came to be directed to heaven. ¶ _A door |was| opened._ That is, there was apparently an opening in the sky like a door, so that he could look into heaven. ¶ _In heaven._ Or, rather, in the expanse above――in the visible heavens as they appear to spread out over the earth. So Eze. i. 1, “The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.” The Hebrews spoke of the sky above as a solid expanse; or as a curtain stretched out; or as an extended arch above the earth――describing it as it _appears_ to the eye. In that expanse, or arch, the stars are set as gems (comp. Notes on Is. xxxiv. 4); through apertures or windows in that expanse the rain comes down, Ge. vii. 11; and that is opened when a heavenly messenger comes down to the earth, Mat. iii. 16. Comp. Lu. iii. 21; Ac. vii. 56; x. 11. Of course, all this is figurative, but it is such language as all men naturally use. The simple meaning here is, that John had a vision of what is in heaven _as if_ there had been such an opening made through the sky, and he had been permitted to look into the world above. ¶ _And the first voice which I heard._ That is, the first sound which he heard was a command to come up and see the glories of that world. He afterwards heard other sounds――the sounds of praise; but the first notes that fell on his ear were a direction to come up there and receive a revelation respecting future things. This does not seem to me to mean, as Professor Stuart, Lord, and others suppose, that he now recognized the voice which had _first_, or formerly spoken to him (ch. i. 10), but that this was the _first_ in contradistinction from other voices which he afterwards heard. It resembled the former “voice” in this, that it was “like the sound of a trumpet,” but besides that there does not seem to have been anything that would suggest to him that it came from the same source.