The apostles were not detached academics, writing finely worded treatises with a view of persuading strangers to their positions. They were men who had personally experienced the saving grace of God---men who had been forgiven, redeemed, justified and adopted---who had encountered Jesus Christ, and had been transformed by the encounter. They often knew and loved those to whom they wrote, and their hearts yearned to see them, and longed to hear that they were growing in their love for Christ.
Sometimes, as when the Apostle Paul wrote to the church of Ephesus, which was dear to him, the apostle was simply overcome, and what he wrote seems to defy grammatical analysis. Such was the case in Ephesians 3, as Paul prayed that the Ephesians would know the love of Christ, which is, at the same time, the greatest love anyone can know---and the greatest love no one can know. He prays that they might comprehend the love of Christ, which he calls in the same breath, incomprehensible. He prays they will know experientially that which is intellectually beyond their power to know.
Robert Murray McCheyne said the love of Christ is 'like the blue sky, into which you may see clearly, but the real vastness of which you cannot measure. It is like the deep, deep sea, into whose bosom you can look a little way, but its depths are unfathomable.' Let's contemplate, for a few minutes what it is that makes the love of Christ incomprehensible. |
