The Measure of God’s Love
“And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.”
Ephesians 3:18 NLT
As I was searching for a verse for today’s Heaven On Wheels devotional, I came upon this line from Ephesians. It struck me that although most Christians feel that God does indeed love them, we don’t know think about just how much He loves us. Sure, we know from John 3:16 that “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”, but is it possible to measure just how much love that is?
To Paul, writing to the Ephesians, God’s love is indeed measurable, having width, length, height and depth. How wide is His love? Well, from John’s classic verse “God loved the world”, so His love spans all of Planet Earth. How lengthy? John provided another answer: “everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” Eternity is of infinite length - that’s an incredibly long time!
How about height? In Ephesians 2:6, Paul says “For he raised us from the dead along with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ Jesus.” As mere humans, we don’t know precisely where heaven is, but “heavenly realms” are most likely quite far above us. And depth? Paul again provides an answer in Philippians 2:7-8, where he says of Jesus “he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.” Theologian David Guzik says it best - “You can’t go lower than the death of the cross, and that is how deep the love of Jesus is for us.”
Guzik perfectly sums up Ephesians 2:6 with this statement: “To come to any understanding of the dimensions of God’s love, we must come to the cross. The cross pointed in four ways, essentially in every direction, because…
God’s love is wide enough to include every person.
God’s love is long enough to last through all eternity.
God’s love is deep enough to reach the worst sinner.
God’s love is high enough to take us to heaven.”