Ephesians saves its warmest prayer for the letter's center: strength not in walls but "in the inner man"; Christ dwelling in hearts the way a god was thought to dwell in a temple; and a love to be measured in four dimensions — breadth, length, depth, height — the vocabulary of the building site.
Blueprints for people
No congregation on earth could hear those measuring-words like Ephesians. Their ancestors had solved the engineering of the immense: foundations floated on marsh to survive earthquakes, columns sixty feet tall, a platform four times the Parthenon. Paul borrows their civic pride and redirects it — the structure now being raised to impossible dimensions is you, rooted like a tree, grounded like a temple platform, in love. The prayer ends by admitting its own overflow: to know a love "which passeth knowledge" (3:19).
Standing in the verse
Read it beside any of the great foundations — the temple platform terrace, the theater's roots in the mountain, the Artemision's marshy footings that outlasted their own Wonder. Then the verse's question is unavoidable and lovely: which of the two constructions in this valley is still growing?
Sources & further reading
- Ephesians 3:14–21 (KJV) — Bible Gateway — read the passage in context
- Britannica: Temple of Artemis — the engineering the hearers knew