Why Is There An Altar In Heaven?

Last updated on: September 10, 2026 at 8:18 am by Clark Elder Morrow

Why Is There An Altar In Heaven? 2026-09-10T08:18:55-07:00 Clark Elder Morrow

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Why is there an altar in Heaven? The altar is the place of sacrifice. Love always sacrifices. God wants us to see that He “shows forth” these facts in the highest heavenlies, and that He has established there figurative fixtures (the Temple and the Altar of Heaven) showcasing Love itself. | Image created in Synaptic for Patheos.

Presumably there are no bulls or sheep in Heaven to be slaughtered. I think we can safely assume that there are not, in fact, and never have been, animals of any kind in the immediate Realm of God, though a branch of the angelic beings is depicted as having certain bestial attributes. However much the seraphim or Four Living Creatures are painted as resembling oxen or eagles or lions, it must be concluded that they could never serve as sacrificial meat on the Altar that stands in the Presence of the LORD.

An Altar Where There Should Be None

For an altar there certainly is. In Revelation 6:9 (NIV), John, reeling from his vision of Heaven, tells us that he saw “…under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. 10 They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’ 11 Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been.”

Verses 10 and 11 give us a hint to answering my title’s question, but we will come back to that shortly.

Love Always Involves Sacrifice

The more pressing point is this, and I will make the point axiomatically: Love always involves a measure of sacrifice. That is to say: it is impossible to love without suffering – or, at best, merely experiencing – a certain degree of loss. And a moment’s reflection will confirm the assertion. How can you genuinely love someone without spending emotional capital on them, or even more tangible capital? When has loving something (even something as slight as the gift of a tie from twelve years ago) not involved a pang somewhere along the line?

The hurt, the loss, the sacrifice might have been minuscule, but hasn’t there been some expenditure of time or feeling in regard to it? Even a glimpse of some discarded everyday item that nonetheless meant something to you long ago can spark a faint glow of nostalgic sorrow, or an inexplicable regret. I find that even wishing some stranger a quick blessing – in passing, as it were – takes a handful of seconds out of my life, and the merest modicum of effort. Of course those few moments may very well rank among the finest of my entire history, so slight are my spiritual achievements – yet still they were an expenditure, no matter how small. Love in any of its innumerable manifestations always involves some measure of sacrifice. It is the very nature of love to give, and to give is to transfer, to surrender (as in sacrifice) something, from you to the recipient. It may be better to give than to receive (“better” because what you get from your giving will surpass your original gift), but nevertheless you had to give in the first place.

This will serve to bring us to our initial question: Why is there an altar in Heaven? The altar is the place of sacrifice. Love always sacrifices. God wants us to see that He “shows forth” these facts in the highest heavenlies, and that He has established there figurative fixtures (the Temple and the Altar of Heaven) showcasing Love itself. God is love, scripture says. God sacrifices (following our logic from earlier in the essay). The Altar symbolizes His sacrifices, both through and with those of Jesus. But it goes beyond that.

The Souls Beneath the Altar

I said earlier that we could see a clue to our question regarding the Altar in verses 10 and 11 of Revelation, in which the martyrs in Heaven find their souls underneath the Altar, where they plead for divine justice – or vengeance, if you are more cynically inclined (the two are in fact identical in the wisdom and province of God). Why are those souls at the foot of the Altar?

The answer to that question lies in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The blood of the sacrificial animals was poured out at the base or the foot of the earthy altar, just as the souls of the martyrs are at the base of the Altar above. Let’s follow another chain of logic: the life (nefesh in Hebrew) of the person is in the blood (Lev 17:11). The blood is sacrificed and given to God. The lives (nefashot) of the martyrs are sacrificed and given to God. The blood – representing the life – of the animals and the souls – the lives – of the martyrs are poured out at the base of the altar, both the one in Heaven and the one on Earth.

The Sacrifice Even God Could Not Avoid

There is an Altar in Heaven because Love always involves a sacrifice. Now consider this: God Himself could not avoid this axiom. If He were to create human beings with free agency, knowing they would fail and fall, then He would inexorably have to make a sacrifice to save them from their own sin and its consequences; He could not – as far as His supremely compassionate nature saw – make people and then leave them to their self-inflicted fate. And He could not not create targets for His love, because it is the very nature of Love to make objects to lavish itself upon.[1]

Our Father found Himself, in a sense, trapped in a circle of creating and loving and sacrificing born of His own ineradicable Nature. One final chain of logic: Love had to create (for Love must have something to love), Love gave freedom to Its creatures, which was abused. Love had to sacrifice Itself to fulfill the nature of Itself. All Its creatures find themselves caught in the same circular pattern of compassion, loss, and redemption through loss. Thus is the three-act tragedy of all Creation made glorious “comedy”, but only in the light of eternity.

[1] I disagree with the notion that the Trinity was perfectly happy and satisfied with itself prior to Creation. Love is essentially outwardly-directed, not exclusively self-referential or self-involved. The fact that Creation exists seems to show that it was necessarily brought about, inasmuch as the Godhead probably does not engage in pointless or superfluous experiments with matter and energy. After all, the Lamb was slain before the foundations of the world were laid.

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