The Infinity of God.
Eternity. Now there’s an amazingly big word. A vast, staggering word that we, as mankind, in and of ourselves, can’t really relate to. Every human has an expiration date stamped on our lives, and God has no such limit.
Our eyes only see just so far, our ears only hear in a narrow frequency band, our breath grows thin and slips away — in this body we were never meant to last forever. Yea, we can’t hardly relate to the word’s eternity or infinity. We’ve only ever known this one small existence. We were born under this sky, standing on this earth, breathing this air, eating this food, seeing and hearing only the sights and sounds of this single world.
Any ideas or dreams further, beyond this world, are inserted by God that we would relate to Him. Why? Because we have never stood beneath a different sun, lived in a different light, or walked on the ground of a place we can’t even imagine. Without help, we would have no bridge to the One who made us. Without Jesus, we’d be left trying to reach God through the law alone… and friends, that road was never going to get us home.
But because God loved us enough to intervene… we are not left empty. We are not lost in the dark. Because of Him who intervened, we are not nowhere, having nothing, blind and lost in the dark.
The infinity of God is pointed to in scripture by sequence and pattern but i think we walk all around it and don’t give it a thought. In Ephesians 3, and more specifically Ephesians 3:18, there is a sequence of four words that points to the infinity of God, showing the Lord has decisively acted and declared His love in Christ — and that love is an ever-present, ever-expanding, never-ending reality with no boundaries. When YHWH-God speaks, His speaking doesn’t stop, He doesn’t incur lost words, extra words, or meaningless phrases. When He dreams, it is so. When He speaks, things happen and His words do not cease.
In our hearts, we secretly long to try and look past what our eyes can see. We’re driven to search for some kind of ending point — a place where it all stops. Like the sequence in Ephesians 3:18, the length, width, breadth, and height, implying there is no end point in the love of God. We strain to find the edge of it, because in the world we live, everything seems to have a limit, real or imaginary, it all comes to an end.
Yet… at that place where the sea conspires with the sky, out on the horizon where the beyond of the beyond steps into a God-place, the air itself feels alive with the sky, and there is a beyond-ness, a vastness so deep our hearts can scarcely comprehend. And that… that is just a shadow of the love of God.
Ephesians 3:19-21, “And to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.”
When Christ loves, with His four-dimensional, measureless love sequence, unlike the love of mankind, His love doesn’t stop or shrink. The grammar of Ephesians 3:18 points to divine finality and completeness, while the spatial language of Ephesians 3:18 gives us the metaphor of divine infinity. And while we’re here at vs 18, notice Paul says, “May be able to comprehend…”, “comprehend” being a Greek verb whose tense has, once again, no concern for past, present, or future which makes all this “comprehending” to be a decisive, whole act in itself — not a partial or ongoing struggle, but something only God empowers us to grasp, get that? God empowers us to lay hold of His love as a reality. We are empowered to grasp His boundless love with no edges, no end, no “side to side” or “top to bottom”, and without Jesus, without all His boundlessness, the nature and character of God ultimately escapes our grasp.
Oh, God. No edge sharp enough to cut the hem of Your robe. No number large enough to reach the hem of Your thought. You speak — and the words do not fall. It keeps traveling, aorist and perfect tense and all, all at once, finished and never finished, rolling through the dark between galaxies and the quiet between heartbeats. Breadth without border, length without horizon, height with no ceiling, depth with no floor — Your love is the room that contains every room and still has space left for more. I stretch my small hands into forever — and they do not, cannot touch the end.
Before time learned how to tick, Oh God, You were. After time forgets its own name, You will be — the same endless I AM, breathing galaxies like dust and stooping low enough to whisper eternity into even the small dust at the edge of the universe. O God, how can the finite know the Infinite? Only because the Infinite first knew us. Eternity.
Not to be repetitive, but i want us to really get the idea of sequence and pattern. Throughout the Bible there are many sequences and patterns, either in word or thematically. A sequence is an ordered list, and a pattern is like an underlying rule, or a repeatable structure that regulates. A sequence is actual data, and a pattern is the idea of rule behind it. A sequence may or may not have a pattern, whereas a pattern generates one or more sequences.
Again, take note of the sequence in Ephesians 3:18. “Breadth, Length, Height, and Depth”. Think about that. It’s a deliberate sequence that paints a rich pattern — with the pattern being: the infinite, all-encompassing nature of the love of Christ that “surpasses knowledge”. The sequence and pattern are tied to our knowing the fullness of God. Just incredible! In the book of Ephesians, Paul repeats “hope-words” over and over, “may give unto you”, “you may know”, “you may understand”, “Christ may dwell”, “you may be able”, “you may grow”, “that you may have”, “that you may serve”, “it may be well with you”, “you may be able”, “it may be given”, “i may speak”, and “that you may know”. That all speaks to God-possibilities in a future tense. They are words of hope, of becoming and overcoming.
From the infinity of God, the Breadth, Length, Height, and Depth, He calls us to enter into His fullness to comprehend the incomprehensible — the everlasting, eternal love of God. The four dimensions, length, width, height, and depth are a vivid way of saying Christ’s love has
no edges,
no up or down,
no left or right,
no front or back,
and no side to side.
We read phrases like, “God said…” and the word “said” is a type of Greek verb, as i understand it, which has no concern with past, present, or future. So where Scripture says, “God said…” as it relates to “we heard”, both “God said” and “we heard” literally means, once He has spoken, His words do not stop being said, and once we have heard God, it does not stop being heard.
In Ephesians 3, when those powerful verbs that speak of completed and continuing action are combined with words like “eternal” or “God always”, Scripture gives us language for our God whose words, works, and character are not bound by man’s created categories. Once the Infinite speaks, it does not fade, it does not “stop being said”. When He loves, it’s a well which never runs dry and remains forever inexhaustible like an ocean with no shore.
The word of the Lord runs on into eternity. We lack words to describe God, and if we find words within ourselves, God put them there. John 15:5, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing”, and friends, nothing means nothing. If He did not give us words to describe Him, we would have no words.
When you lay in your bed, in that place between awake and asleep…
in that “gray” place between awake and asleep — I believe,
more often than we admit, every soul, in its own quiet way,
becomes suddenly, sharply aware of their own mortality —
how fragile our breath, how brief our flame — and at the same time,
how undeniably, how certainly, eternity exists.
It presses in. It whispers through the dark.
It refuses to be ignored.
Looking at the Bible and God from the platform of Ephesians 3:18, the page i write on seems to get wider and longer, as if infinity and eternity have taken over my vision. The closer the Lord gets to all things, the more all things become like Him. Our God is a consuming fire. i realize there is no format, other than the cross, resurrection, ascension, and Holy Spirit by which there is enough space or time, wisdom and knowledge to sufficiently cast a vision of the Love of God. Knowing Jesus is the only Way to begin to comprehend the incomprehensible. Paul says it all and captures the hope in Ephesians 3:18-19, that we “May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fulness of God.”
Again, our greatest strength against darkness is to come into the likeness of the Son. Character, character, character. It’s not rules to keep, but someone to be. Be the people.
i’m Social Porter for Living In His Name Ministries