epouranios

This is the word the New Testament reaches for when it wants to say that something belongs to heaven. It is built from the ordinary word for heaven with a prefix that simply means "in" or "at," so at root it points to a place: the upper realm where God dwells. A common myth treats the prefix as meaning "above the sky," but that stronger sense belongs to a different Greek word; here the prefix is plain and locative.

The writers had a close cousin available, a simpler word for "heavenly" (οὐράνιος), yet they often chose this one on purpose. Its strength is that it sets up a clean contrast with its mirror-image word for "earthly" (ἐπίγειος), and that contrast lets the writers do three jobs at once:

• point to heaven as a real place
• mark something as having heaven's own quality (true, lasting, divine)
• signal the new age that God has begun to open up

In any given verse one of those three notes is usually loudest, but they are not separate words. They are facets of a single idea, heaven seen as place, as quality, and as future hope.

So the senses below are shades of one meaning, not rival definitions.

• Paul stacks the word into a fixed phrase in Ephesians for the unseen realm where Christ now reigns
• he uses it for the kind of body believers will be raised with
• John and others use it as a label for "the things of heaven"
• Hebrews uses it for the calling, the gift, the sanctuary, the homeland, and the city that all come down from above

The thread running through every use is the same: this belongs to heaven, not to earth.