Heaven is God’s throne, and the earth is his footstool (Isaiah 66:1). By grace, we have not only been raised with Christ, but seated in the heavens (Ephesians 2:6). Scripture commands us to seek what is in the heavens with Christ (Colossians 3:1). So isn’t the earth properly our footstool, too?

When I was growing up, we had some easy chairs in the living room with matching footstools. Those footstools were fairly substantial pieces of furniture. We could sit on them.

But now, most of my chairs are recliners. I pull on a lever, and the footstool rises from the front of the chair. My little dog can sit on it, as long as I’m sitting in the chair. I can’t sit on it. If I leave it up and walk away, it probably wouldn’t support the dog either.

I don’t know what kind of furniture households had in Isaiah’s day, but they may not have had footstools as solid and substantial as my parents’ footstools.

In any case, God certainly didn’t regard the earth as anyplace substantial enough to hold his weight. (And by the way, “glory” in Hebrew is related to the word for “heavy.” Glory has weight.)

Isaiah 66:1 goes on to imply that if people are going to build a house for him, they’ll have to show him where it is. And, of course, he won’t fit.

So he can rest his feet on earth, but he can’t sit on it. But if he has trouble finding the work of human hands, he has no trouble finding the work of his own. The next verse says he esteems humble people. He doesn’t esteem the wicked or rebellious, but they certainly catch his attention.

The proper place for our weight

Maybe that’s why Paul tells us to seek what’s above, where Christ is seated at God’s right hand. Our material body can’t comprehend the vastness of the earth, but our spiritual body ought to regard it as something small and fragile. It shouldn’t bear our spiritual weight any more than it can bear God’s.

We can’t claim heaven as our throne, but we have a place prepared for us there. So presumably we have a heavenly chair.

Problems on earth are footstool problems.

We can rest our spiritual feet on God’s footstool and look to God to deal with our problems. We have responsibilities on earth, of course. Worrying is not one of them. Let’s learn how to rest our spiritual weight in our heavenly chair and relax our feet on top of our footstool problems.