Love is Great

One of the most stirring descriptions of God's love is found in Ephesians 3.

Here, Paul Mallard unpacks just how great God's love is...

To help the believers in their contemplation, Paul struggles to describe this love. He wants them to ‘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 . . .’ (Ephesians 3:18–19). He does not want them to have a superficial understanding, but to ‘grasp’ its greatness. The word he uses suggests a firm grip and deep insight, rather than a superficial acquaintance. To capture their imagination, he raids the vocabulary of dimensional adjectives – God’s love is wide and long, and high and deep. He may be using these simply to indicate that this love is immeasurable. However, we are not pressing the text too far if we try to put flesh on the bones of Paul’s description.

How wide is God’s love? It crosses all barriers of time, history and space. It finds its resting place on every continent and in all cultures. It reaches out to all people, irrespective of race, sex, age or social standing. It calls into existence a multinational rainbow people of God. It is so wide that it can even encompass people like you and me!

How long is God’s love? Before he created the world, the Father loved the Son with a boundless, limitless and eternal love. But there is more. In eternity, he set his love on us. We were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). He loved us long before we ever loved him.

How high is God’s love? It is so high that it raises sinners up from the depth of their failure and sin, and seats them with Christ in the heavenly realms. It blesses them with every spiritual blessing in Christ. They are welcomed to God’s table.

How deep is this love? It is as deep as Calvary. The greatest distance in the universe is not from one end of the cosmos to another – it is the distance between the throne of heaven and the cross of Calvary.

Without ceasing to be God, the Son of God took human nature, adopted the role of a servant, and was obedient even to the point of death. And so that we don’t miss the point, Paul adds that it was ‘even the death of the cross’ (Philippians 2:6–8). He was betrayed and beaten, despised and tortured, mocked and murdered. They hung him up like a carcass in the window of a butcher’s shop. He stepped into the darkness of God’s wrath, as he who knew no sin was made a sin offering for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The first verse of Welsh pastor William Rees’s best-known hymn focuses on this love:

Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Lovingkindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten,
Throughout Heav’n’s eternal days.

Just so that we really get the point, Paul reminds us that when we have stretched every sinew of our minds and pushed our sanctified imagination to its limits, we have only just begun to touch the edges of this love, which ‘surpasses knowledge’. It is wider than you thought, longer than you imagined, higher than you anticipated, and deeper than you ever dreamed. You don’t deserve it, but it is yours nonetheless, unconditionally and unreservedly. It isn’t soft, and it will chasten you if you sin. But it will never let you down, and it will never let you go.

You'll find below Paul's latest books, as well as 'The Message of Love', an exciting BST Thematic Volume that inspired another blog post...