Width and Length and Height and Depth
14 For this cause, I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that you may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, to the end that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, 19 and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
The interrupted sentence resumes as a prayer, and its requests escalate to something the letter admits cannot be measured or known.
For this cause picks up the phrase abandoned at verse 1, and the sentence finally arrives at its verb: I bow my knees to the Father.
Verse 15 adds a clause that plays on the word for father — from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. Fatherhood as a category derives from him rather than illustrating him.
The requests build in four steps, each enabling the next. Strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person. That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith — the verb is to settle down and live somewhere, not to visit. Being rooted and grounded in love, which mixes a farming image with a building one, as chapter 2 mixed growing with construction Ephesians 2:21.
Then verse 18, and the object of comprehension is left without a noun. The width and length and height and depth — of what, the sentence does not say. The four dimensions describe everything a thing can be measured by, and the omission is what makes the phrase work: whatever is being measured, the readers are asked to take in all of it.
Verse 19 supplies what is most likely meant and immediately concedes the impossibility: to know Christ's love which surpasses knowledge. The paradox is deliberate and is not resolved. Knowing is asked for, and the object is stated to be past knowing.
And the last request outruns the rest: that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. The measure of the filling is God's own fullness, which is the point at which prayer stops asking for a quantity.
settled What this mark means