How Wide 2

              so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17-19)

 

            No, you’re not crazy. I wrote about this passage yesterday with one idea on my mind. As I posted it this morning, another idea that is probably more important than what I wrote yesterday came to mind. Let’s get dimensional. Length. Width. Height. Each of these is one-dimensional.  Put any two of them together and you have two dimensions and an area. All three together make up three dimensions and a volume.

            But here’s the problem. Paul mentions wide, long, high, and deep. The Greek word for height is ύψος (ypsos), and the word for depth is βάθος (bathus.)  It is from the latter that we get the term bathysphere. That’s the name of the round sub that was lowered into the ocean's depths in the 1930s. But while it makes sense for Paul to talk about width, length, and either height or depth, it doesn’t make sense for him to talk about both. The curious thing about the Greek word for depth is that it also means deep, thoroughly, thorough, background, and distance.

            When I skimmed along the surface of the subject of dimensions, I learned that the fourth dimension is time or duration. It might then be said that the depth to which he referred was a reference to the thoroughness of God’s love that goes the distance through all the other dimensions and beyond, into time: past, present, and future.

            There’s another application of at least some of these terms in our language. We talk about emotions as being deep, which suggests that not only does God’s love spread out over a large volume (length, width, height) but is also deeply personal and reaches our deep personhood.

            Admittedly, this is all just theorizing on my part, but at the very least we need to wonder why God, through Paul, wrote: “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ…”