That Ye May Be Able to Comprehend

Start with who was being written to, because it decides the whole thing.

Ephesians was sent to believers who were not Jewish. Paul is in prison when he writes it, and he calls himself, in Ephesians 3:1, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles. That is the occasion.

And here is what he had already told them about their own history, one chapter earlier.

That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.Ephesians 2:12, King James Version

Read that list. Aliens. Strangers. No hope. Without God.

These are people with a documented reason to believe the promises were addressed to somebody else. They were not imagining it. Their exclusion had been formal, structural, and true.

So when Paul gets to Ephesians 3:14-19 and prays for them, he is praying for people who know the doctrine and have every historical reason to leave themselves off the list.

That is exactly the person reading this.

He prays for strength before he prays about love

Here is the prayer, and I want to take it in the order he wrote it.

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner manEphesians 3:14-16, King James Version

First, the posture. I bow my knees. Standing was the ordinary posture for prayer in that world. Kneeling was not the default; it marked unusual weight. He is telling them how hard he is praying before he tells them what for.

Then the first thing he asks for, and this is the part that undid me the first time I read it properly.

To be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man.

Strength. That is the first petition. And it is not strength to endure, or to serve, or to hold on. Read what it is for, three verses later.

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 passeth knowledgeEphesians 3:18-19, King James Version

May be able to comprehend. The strength is so that they can take in how much they are loved.

Which means Paul thinks receiving love is a thing a person needs to be strengthened for.

You are not outside the measurement. Ephesians 3:18 gives four dimensions and never names a person who falls outside them, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in verse sixteen as the one who does the strengthening.

I want to stay there for a second, because it changes what your difficulty is.

If knowing it required only information, then a person who has the verses by heart and still cannot land it would be failing at something simple. That is how it feels, and that is why people carry shame about this particular difficulty.

Paul does not treat it as simple. He treats it as something requiring an act of God in the inner person before it can be received at all. He asks for power for it, and the power he asks for is the sort of power he elsewhere associates with resurrection.

You have a difficulty that Scripture treats as requiring strength rather than effort. Ephesians 3:16 asks for might before 3:18 asks for comprehension, and the same Spirit named in that verse is the one who does that work rather than the person trying harder.

Then the four dimensions, and notice what the passage does not do.

The breadth, and length, and depth, and height. Four directions and no noun. He never says four dimensions of what. Most readers supply of the love of Christ from the next line, and that is almost certainly right, but Paul leaves the sentence open, and the effect is a measurement with nothing to measure against.

And then the deliberate impossibility: to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge. Know the thing that goes past knowing. He writes it that way on purpose.

You have been asked to know something that was never going to fit, and the passage says so in the same breath. Ephesians 3:19 says which passeth knowledge, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief for somebody who has been treating their incomprehension as a failure.

There is one more phrase, and it is the one people skip, and it is the practical one.

With all saints.

The comprehending in verse eighteen is not something a person does alone in a room. It is done with all saints, together, which is to say that this particular knowledge is corporate by design, and a person cannot get at it by concentrating harder on their own.

You have been trying to do alone a thing the verse assigns to a company. Ephesians 3:18 says with all saints in the middle of the sentence, and the same Spirit who kept that phrase there is the reason a person who cannot land this by themselves has not failed at it.