Wonderful Things

When Howard Carter pressed his face to a small hole chiseled through ancient stone on November 26, 1922, his patron Lord Carnarvon called out impatiently from behind him, "Can you see anything?" Carter, his hands trembling and his eyes adjusting to the candlelight, could barely whisper: "Yes, wonderful things."

For over three thousand years, the treasures of Tutankhamun had waited in the darkness beneath Egypt's Valley of the Kings — gold shrines, jeweled thrones, alabaster vessels, room after room of riches beyond anything Carter had imagined in his twenty years of searching.

Paul uses remarkably similar language in his letter to the Ephesians. He speaks of "the unsearchable riches of Christ" — a wealth so vast it defies inventory. Then he drops to his knees and prays that believers would somehow grasp what cannot fully be grasped: the breadth and length and height and depth of a love that "surpasses knowledge."

Carter spent a full decade cataloguing what he found in that single tomb. Yet even he admitted he could never fully describe the wonder of that first glimpse through the limestone.