St. Paul's Vision of Paradise.
I. It is not difficult to conceive the impossibility of conveying any adequate impression of the component elements of heaven to minds encumbered with the grossness of mortal nature, an impossibility resembling that of communicating problems of astronomy to a cradled infant, of describing the combination of colours in a sunset to one born blind, or of imparting to the deaf the enchantment of harmony. But while the words might consistently be rendered "impossible to utter," it would seem, from the entire suppression of any attempt to describe what he had seen and heard, and from the obvious reserve maintained in Scripture upon the precise nature of the heavenly blessedness, and from the studiously figurative language in which it is always removed, as it were, beyond the reach of close and irreverent investigation from all these considerations it would seem that it was not only difficult, but inexpedient, to blazon these celestial secrets.
II. So far from conjectures about heaven being discouraged by this reserve in Scripture and this emblematic way of painting it, does it not rather go to encourage conjecture by not tying us down to one limited and defined notion? There can be no better proof of the attractiveness, the blessedness, of what St. Paul witnessed, than the abiding effect it had upon himself. He had garnered up in his heart the ecstatic secret, as a mother garners up in her heart the memory of a departed child. Always and everywhere that vision haunted him. His soul was not distracted, but stimulated, by the never-ceasing desire to recover the rapturous privilege which for a mysterious moment had been in his possession. Piety, a perpetual sense of relation to God and to another state of being; charity, a perpetual sense of relation to men in this present world; hard labour, the outcome of both these were the most prominent characteristics of his life. The manly, cheerful, humble cultivation of these virtues would go very far towards gaining for us that heavenly-mindedness which is the nearest approach to St. Paul's singular privilege of which, perhaps, we are at present capable.
W. H. Brookfield, Sermons,p. 13.
References: 2 Corinthians 12:4. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 404. 2 Corinthians 12:5. Ibid.,vol. xxi., p. 162.