The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

There is always more to learn, more to discover. Each discovery opens up a thousand more yet to come. The more I know, the more I realize how much I do not know. God is infinite. God’s love is infinite. God’s heart is infinite.

When I was a young pastor in rural Minnesota, an elderly congregant expressed his fear that heaven might be rather boring. What are we going to do? Sit on a cloud playing a harp? Be locked in an eternal church service?

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394 CE) was an early Christian theologian who served as the bishop of Nyssa in what is now Turkey, from 372 to 376 and again from 378 until his death in 394. He wrestled with the same question and arrived at a beautiful answer.

In Philippians 3:12–14, Paul says:

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (NRSVUE)

Paul uses the verb ἐπεκτεινόμενος, which means “stretching ahead” or “straining forward.” Drawing on Philippians 3, Gregory coined the noun ἐπέκτασις (epektasis). In Gregory’s theology, epektasis means endless progress into God.

C. S. Lewis ends The Chronicles of Narnia with the characters joyfully traveling “higher up and further in” the heavenly kingdom.

Years ago, a Bible teacher of mine said, “Christianity is the satisfied unsatisfaction,” by which she meant that in Christ we are content, yet always longing for more—yearning to go more deeply into the divine heart, to know Jesus more intimately, to live in the Holiest of All, and to abide “under the shadow of the Almighty” (Psalm 91:1). To plumb the bottomless depths of God’s infinite loving heart is indescribable joy.

Immediately before the Pauline passage cited above, the apostle wrote:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:7–10)

Hear his heart cry—to know Jesus intimately and experientially.

In Ephesians 3:18–19, Paul prays “that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

How can we know the unknowable? How can we plumb infinite depths?

Gregory gives us epektasis: perpetual desire for more of God, eternal transformation, never-ending growth “from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18)—an eternity of continual learning, expanding, and being filled, yet always yearning for more.

I love that vision. A perpetual church service or sitting around in a state of completion with nothing more to learn, is not my vision of eternity. Nor was it Paul’s. My goal each day is to know Jesus more intimately than I did the day before. I suspect that that yearning goes on forever.