
Ephesians 3.13-21.
This was why he was in chains, Paul explained.
On the contrary: The gentiles drove him to rejoice.
Ephesians 3.13-17 KWL - 13 So I request you don’t despair over my suffering for you—which is in your honor.
- 14 It’s why I bend my knees to the Father, 15 for whom every “fatherland” in heaven and on earth is named.
- 16 So he could give you power from his glorious riches, make you strong in his Spirit in the person within,
- 17 and settle Christ in your hearts, planted and established through faith in love.
When Paul wrote of bending his knees to the Father,
Every “fatherland,” Paul pointed out, is named for the Father. This is a bit of Greek wordplay, so it’s a little tricky to translate. Paul compared
Nowadays we consider that idea racist… ’cause it is. Especially in empires like the Roman Empire, which were multinational; or nations like the United States, which are based on shared ideals and rights instead of culture and ancestry. And God’s kingdom is both of those things: It’s an empire
Paul’s prayer was for the Ephesians to get power from God’s riches: He has more than enough power to do whatever, and more than, we can ask or imagine. Jesus invites us to ask him for anything.
At the same time, Paul prayed the Ephesians would grow “in the person within.” Spiritual might, wielded by someone who lacks
Knowing Jesus.
More of Paul’s request: So the Ephesians would know Christ’s love.
Ephesians 3.18-19 KWL - 18 So you could be capable of grasping—with all the saints—
- what’s its nearness and farness, lowness and highness.
- 19 You could also know the knowledge-overwhelming love of Christ,
- so you could be filled with all God’s fullness.
Since the
And sometimes we then get weirdness: “Paul listed four dimensions. Not just three; not just height, length, and depth. There’s also ‘breadth.’ What’s breadth indicate?” There’s an x axis, a y axis, a z axis… and now we’re out of letters. And how do you draw this fourth axis on graph paper?
Every so often I’ve heard a preacher speculate “breadth” means the t axis: Time. And then they get all science-fiction about this verse. Although I’ve heard other preachers speculate it’s an s axis, speaking of a spiritual dimension which is greater and more profound than the three spatial dimensions we typically think of.
All this speculation is really a waste of time. Paul wasn’t describing four dimensions, but two. Plátos, short for pelatós, means “approachable”; míkos means “distance.” This describes how near and far Jesus’s love is: That’s one axis, not two. The other two adjectives, míkos and bathos, describe how low and high Jesus’s love is: A second axis. Paul wasn’t describing a cube, nor a tesseract. It’s a flat map—and considering how much Jesus loves us, there really are no limits to these distances.
True, Paul did want the Ephesians to imagine Jesus’s love in real space. Not just as an abstract idea, only to be found in our own brains. Love is an object in the real world. More: It’s an object we need to put in the real world. Stop internalizing it, and start doing it.
And if love’s an object in the real world, how big should it be? Well, there you’re gonna get Christians trying to outdo one another in our descriptions. “Bigger than anything! Bigger than the universe!”
Paul also prayed the Ephesians would “know the knowledge-overwhelming love of Christ.” You realize that’s a paradox. Know the unknowable? Fathom the unfathomable? Grasp infinity? But hey, if we know it in part, that’s still really good.
Likewise being filled with God’s fullness: Also impossible-sounding, since we’d reasonably expect God’s infinite fullness to burst any finite human, like a water balloon hooked up to a firehose. But humans aren’t containers so much as sponges. The whole point of the Holy Spirit’s fruit is his goodness doesn’t just fill us, but overfills us, overflowing into everyone around us, affecting them, and maybe producing good fruit in them too. Imagine how such Christians could affect their communities. Imagine how you could.
Praising our super-more-extraordinary God.
Paul wraps up his discussion here about God’s magnificent plan of salvation. The rest of Ephesians is about how, now that we’re saved, God expects his kids to live. So Paul caps it off with some more praise to the Father for all he’s done.
Ephesians 3.20-21 KWL - 20 To the one more capable than anyone
- to do superabundantly whatever we ask or imagine, by the power operating in us:
- 21 Glory to him in the church, and in Christ Jesus,
- in all generations of the age and ages. Amen.
Plus a little reminder that God’s able to do
Really that’s always been a problem for us. We know God’s almighty, but we don’t entirely grasp just how almighty. Blame our finite minds for that one; blame also our lack of faith. We intellectually know God can do anything he wants; we just can’t imagine the grandest, mightiest thing he could do. (Mightier than creating the universe.) We can come up with something grand, but almightiness means God can actually do greater than that. Twice as great. Two billion times as great. We fling around the word “billions” all the time in our culture, yet still struggle with that concept—and yet God’s more almighty than that.
So why don’t we see him doing such things among us? Well we could—if we stopped limiting him with our tiny finite minds. God can do more than we ask or imagine. Let’s stop imagining, or asking for, such small things. Dream bigger.