Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free.
We have come, once again to the shore. Knowing that we would be tacking a few days at our favorite beachside town in Florida onto a business trip, I decided to hold my contemplation of the attribute of his love until I could stand before the ocean.
It’s important to have a grand view of God’s love. Because it’s such a comforting truth, it’s easy to reduce it down, to let it become like a kind of lubricant to the machinery of my daily life. But with all his characteristics, the love of God needs to be scaled up to the point of awe, where its bigness is a little daunting, even overwhelming.
Seeing the sea does that.
Using the ocean as a metaphor for God’s love in not original. Christians for millennia have thought the same:
luxuriating in this very ocean of love, and fearlessly swimming there in every direction. John Chrysostom (347-407)
for God is love, yea, an ocean of love without shore or bottom! Jonathan Edwards
Perhaps Paul, no stranger to the sea, had it in mind when he penned his famous prayer for the Ephesians:
that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 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 surpasses knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph.. 3:17-19
A boatload of Bible commentators have tried to assign meaning to each of the four directions Paul mentions. For instance, Charles Spurgeon – ever the punchiest of preachers – gives his view in a sentence:
To sum up what we have said in four words. For breadth the love of Jesus is immensity, for length it is eternity, for depth it is immeasurability, and for height it is infinity.
I’m not sure this level of designation is important. I think Paul was just trying to create a three-dimensional sketch of the greatness of Jesus’s love for us. He wants to push back the limits of our imagination. Daniel Steele (1824-1914), an American Bible scholar – not to be confused with Danielle Steel, romance novelist – simplifies the measurement:
Divine love is an ocean too deep for the plummet of man or archangel; too broad to be bounded by the thought of the loftiest intelligence in the universe.
So, we return to the ocean. As I stand here in the surf, I wonder how much I experience the love of Jesus. Though I am daily awash with gratitude, I think my view is still too small. A good friend once suggested, “See each small good that happens in your day as Jesus saying, ‘I love you!’”
And it’s not just the “good” things. Romans 8:28 reminds us that even the hard and painful things are ultimately woven into God’s plan to bless us and make us more like Jesus.
This starts to expand our view. And we need to be stretched.
Just remember: no matter how great a concept we have of it, his love is far, far greater.
Long as east from west extends,
Broad as space that has no ends,
High as heavens limitless,
Deep as oceans fathomless—
Oh, Christ’s great love! William Fiske Sherwin (1826-1888)
Lord, help us expand our view of your great love. Let your Spirit in us be a container of this vision of greatness, for our human minds cannot comprehend. But how we want to apprehend more!
Reader: How do you stretch your view of Jesus’s love?
As always, you can mail me at: bvanpatter@ailbe.org. Is there someone you think would like this post? Please use the buttons above to share it. And if you haven’t subscribed and would like to, here’s the link.
