and to know the love of the Christ which surpasses knowledge; that ye may be filled [even] to all the fulness of God.
The prayer in this chapter reaches its high point here. It asks for the knowledge of a love that no one can ever exhaust. Two questions press on any reader. How can we know what surpasses knowledge? And what could it mean for creatures as small as us to be filled with what belongs to God?
A knowledge with no end
The phrase sounds like a contradiction. We will never master this love. We can keep going further into it forever.
It may seem to be a paradox to say so, but a blessed one. He does not mean that we shall ever know it perfectly. But there may be the knowing more and more of that which surpasses knowledge. He supposes us launched upon that sea where there is no shore: we can never reach the end of His love... You could no more get to the end of the love, than you could get to the end of God Himself.
Already known, never exhausted
Believers are not shut out from this love now. They live on it, and still cannot measure it.
But do we not know it? Are we quite ignorant of it? No — it is our security, it is our motive, it is indeed our portion. It has cast out fear. The manger, the garden, the cross, the throne, all bear witness to its fullness and eternity. But who can fully know its everlasting strength?
Love set above glory
The prayer does not stop with glory. Even the brightest glory leaves the heart wanting more.
But the heart wants far more than glory. Even a human heart needs more, not to speak of God's heart. Suppose I were in heaven, with all the glory God could give a creature. Even then it would not be enough for what the heart feels the need of even now. So glory, bright as it is, is beneath what he next brings before us...
The measurements only mean something because a Person fills them:
The verse adds "and to know" — as though that were something extra — "the love of Christ". What would those measures mean to me if I did not have the knowledge of the love of Christ which fills it all? God is going to fill the whole sphere with the One in Whom His love is centred.
"Filled unto," not "filled with"
The ESV reads "filled with all the fullness of God." One writer presses a different rendering: filled unto it. That changes the picture. We do not contain God. He brings us into His fulness, and our growth in it matches our grasp of the love of Christ.
"That you may be filled unto (not with) all the fullness of God." We are filled unto that fullness in the measure in which we know the love of Christ and understand the dimensions of this love. We are filled in the measure in which Christ dwells in our hearts by faith and we are rooted and grounded in love.
Being placed inside something limitless is a different thing from containing it:
If I am placed in the middle of infinity, I am not at the end of it. I am in an infinity which I do not comprehend and do not measure. I have no smaller measure than that: it is nothing less than the fulness of God... whatever my littleness may be, I am in this blessed position... we cannot go outside this wall of enclosure with which God has surrounded us, and which is God Himself.
What the fulness of God is
This fulness is not vague. It is God's own moral character, and it should show in the people it fills.
Does not the fulness of God speak of all that God is in His moral attributes — His holiness, His love, and His grace? A vessel could be filled with water, but no vessel could hold the ocean. So our little vessels cannot take in all the fulness of God, but the fulness of God can fill our little vessels. So the beautiful character of God, as He has been pleased to reveal Himself, should fill the saints, and show in the saints.
That filling has a practical cost and a practical result:
If we are to be filled with the divine fulness then everything of self, of the world, and of the earth must be removed from the vessel... All that we are to be for God, and to do for Him, must come from the fulness of God that dwells in Christ.
Summary
- Know — we know the love of Christ now. It is our security, our motive, our portion. Yet no one exhausts it.
- Surpasses — the paradox is deliberate: we know more and more of what we will never fully know, like a sea with no shore.
- Crowns — the prayer sets love above the vast measures and above glory itself, because glory alone leaves the heart wanting.
- Filled unto — read it as unto, not with. God launches us into His fulness; He does not ask us to contain it. Our measure of it matches our grasp of Christ's love.
- Shows — the fulness of God is His holiness, love and grace. Clear out self and the world, and that fulness fills the saints and shows in them.