Pictures of Hyper-Grace

Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens,
Your faithfulness to the skies.
Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
Your justice like the great deep. (Ps. 36:5–6)

We can see from Scripture that God’s love and grace are hyper; they extend over, beyond, and above what you can conceive or imagine (see John 1:16, Eph. 1:7, 3:18–19). What you think of when you think of God’s love for you is inevitably inferior to what His love really is. So you could say that grace is what we imagine God’s love to be like, but hyper-grace is what it actually is.

Think of it like this.

Counting the stars in the night sky won’t give you an accurate picture of the bigness of the universe. If you live in a dark place you may be able to see several thousand stars. But what you see is such a tiny proportion of the universe, that really you ain’t seen nothing. You have actually not seen far more than what you have seen.

It’s like that with grace. You may look at Jesus and say, “I see grace,” but no matter how much grace you see, you only have a tiny glimpse of an unimaginably vast reality.

Grace is what we see; hyper-grace is what it is.

This is what John and Paul were trying to convey when they spoke of heaped-up, superabounding grace and love that passes knowledge. It’s what Jesus was trying to tell us when He spoke of the how much mores of His gracious and generous Father.

The hyper-grace of God cannot be reduced to words or thoughts that fit inside our minds. It’s simply too big. The only way we can begin to grasp it is to see the splendor and awesomeness of God that He has revealed to us through His Son Jesus.

Happy Easter!

- Paul Ellis