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Picture, if you will, a box – four sides, a top, and a bottom. In my mind’s eye, I see a shoebox. If the size of the box determines its capacity, my little shoebox can hold little more than, well, shoes. But I can imagine a box with much larger dimensions. I’m sure you’ve been in some structure with a colossal interior that seemed to go on forever. Really it was just a box with the walls pushed out much further than my shoebox. It still possessed the same three dimensions that define all physical reality – height, width, and depth. I’m convinced these three spatial dimensions are meant to remind us of our God and His love. Allow me to explain.
We live in a reality utterly defined by these three dimensions. We can never escape them and they are never divided. Try to imagine for a moment an object that has height but no width or depth. You can’t do it. There is a unity to these three that is unavoidable. Just as our God is an indivisible unity of Three, He has made our physical reality to mirror this truth. Creation is not God, but it points to His nature, and by it, He is made known.
Recall the box again. Now imagine each side of the box is pushed outward so far that you can’t see the sides anymore. All the sides are still connected, but they’re so far apart now that it seems as though the box has disappeared. The three dimensions are still present – height, width, and depth, but they’ve become so spread out that we don’t notice them anymore. This is our universe. No, I don’t just mean our galaxy, but the entire universe, the totality of physical existence. We all live within the parameters of these three dimensions, but this box does have an end, a point at which it ceases to be.
Now, this box is unimaginably big! The farthest thing we’ve been able to see with our massive telescopes is light from a galaxy that is roughly 32 billion light-years away. Let me put that into perspective. Light travels at 186,000 miles PER SECOND. Traveling at that speed would get us to the Moon in a little over one second, and to our Sun in approximately 8 minutes. But to reach this galaxy we would need to travel at the speed of light for 32 billion years! Can you even comprehend such a distance?
But here’s the thing, the universe may be incomprehensible in its proportions, to us, but it’s still just a box. God is bigger. Those distances mean nothing to One who has no beginning or end. All that is not eternal is infinitely small. Distances only apply to the finite. We think of the vastness of space and some point in it as empty and isolated, but His very immensity ensures His nearness. For just as all things are inside His boundless being, He equally penetrates all places. We hold to an idea of remote and wasted spaces because we know we will never fill them, but no place is nearer or farther to One Who has no boundaries. He means us to recognize this vastness, feel our smallness, but remember He is close.
This is why Paul could say to the philosophers of the Areopagus, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man,” (Acts 17:24). Yet in the next breath, he says, “He is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In him we live and move and have our being.’” (Acts 17:27-28) There is no place where He is not perfectly present, filling completely all that can be measured. We can truly say with the psalmist, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” (Psalms 139:7-8)
At the end of Ephesians 3, Paul prays one of his most beautiful prayers for the saints at Ephesus. He prays that they would be strengthened by the Spirit, “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:16-19)
He seems to introduce another dimension here, a fourth one, length. But I don’t think he is referring to another spatial aspect, but rather to time itself. And here, the truth shines even more glorious. For just as our God fills and exceeds the boundaries of every imaginable place, so too He is love at every measurable moment. It is this very delight between Father, Son, and Spirit, this eternal love that isn’t old or ancient, but rather timeless, that Paul prays we would come to comprehend.
And just as our brains sizzle in our attempt to comprehend the staggering immensity of this box we call the universe, Paul prays that they (and we by extension) would have the spiritual strength to comprehend what is beyond comprehension, to know a love that is everlasting. May our living and being within these three dimensions, remind us today that it is even truer that we “live and move and have our being” within the Triune God Whose love will never come to an end. In this way may we will be filled to overflowing.
