THE CROSS: TWO INTERSECTING LINES . . .

Ephesians 3:16-19

“I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Ephesians 3:17-18).

The magnitude of God’s love is . . .  well, immeasurable.  It is beyond measure.

In her book, The Wonder of His Love, Nancy Stafford gives insight into the concept of “two intersecting lines on a page” to depict the Cross as a picture of God’s boundless love for us:

 God went to all lengths to redeem us.  He stretched through time and space to reach out to us and sent His own Son to free us . . . On the Cross, He spread His arms wide to embrace us, accept us.   God’s love spans the width of the universe and the length of eternity; it reaches from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell.

The ten Boom family hid Jews in their home to protect them from the Nazis during World War II.  When discovered, they also were taken to the concentration camp.  Corrie ten Boom said to her sister, Betsy, “This place is the pit of hell!”  Betsy replied, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper.”

David asked, “Where can I go from Your Spirit?  Where can I flee from Your presence?  If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there” (Psalm 139:7-8).

No matter where we go, there is nothing we can ever do that will separate us from Him and His marvelous love.  May we fully experience the length, depth, width, and breadth of His immeasurable love for us!

Now, in time and space, we can only grasp what’s on the page.  But the lines do not end at the margins of the page; they continue to infinity.  Paul’s prayer for us will perhaps only be fully realized in eternity.  Meanwhile, with wide-eyed wonder, we gaze at God’s mathematical code: two intersecting lines of a cross—the irrefutable, eternal, and exact truth of His immeasurable love.

He loves us when we’re mired deep in sin—when we are destitute and can give Him nothing.  He also loves us when we turn our backs on Him and walk away, when we run in the opposite direction as Jonah did.  He loves us when we mess up, when we stumble and fall again and again. He loves us when we deny Him and defy Him, when we destroy our lives—and the lives of others.

When we are tempted to believe that God has forgotten or abandoned us, when we are fearful that our failures will drive Him away, let us ask Him to remind us of those intersecting lines on the page.  Why not thank Him now for His immeasurable love, for sending His Son to die for you on the cross? 

 The love of God is greater far

Than tongue or pen can ever tell,

It goes beyond the highest star

And reaches to the lowest hell. –Frederick M. Lehman