The idea of trying to somehow “balance grace” with anything is ludicrous according to both Scripture and plain reason. Grace, by definition, is radically IMBALANCED in our favor! If it were not, it would cease to be grace on that very basis! The term “hyper-grace” is far from insulting! It is in fact the ONLY kind of grace taught, supported and promoted in the Bible.
God understands that His grace is open to the possibility of abuse by those who might misunderstand it. He understands that people may take His grace for granted or even at times misrepresent it as a license to sin. Paul addressed those concerns very clearly, as did Jesus and the other New Testament writers. He was slanderously accused of saying for people to sin now all the want because of the true gospel of the grace of Christ by those that did not understand what he was saying.
However, the fact that grace is open to misinterpretation and the possibility of abuse does not give us license to water it down, explain it away or cheapen its glory by adding a single measure of law into it as an attempt to stay "balanced."
There is nothing balanced whatsoever about the grace of God! We rejoice in that! We celebrate that! We proclaim that without apology!
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God understands that His grace is open to the possibility of abuse by those who might misunderstand it. He understands that people may take His grace for granted or even at times misrepresent it as a license to sin. Paul addressed those concerns very clearly, as did Jesus and the other New Testament writers. He was slanderously accused of saying for people to sin now all the want because of the true gospel of the grace of Christ by those that did not understand what he was saying.
However, the fact that grace is open to misinterpretation and the possibility of abuse does not give us license to water it down, explain it away or cheapen its glory by adding a single measure of law into it as an attempt to stay "balanced."
There is nothing balanced whatsoever about the grace of God! We rejoice in that! We celebrate that! We proclaim that without apology!
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"Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.19 For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.20 Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,21 so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Romans 5:18-21
"νόμος δὲ παρεισῆλθεν ἵνα πλεονάσῃ τὸ παράπτωμα· οὗ δὲ ἐπλεόνασεν ἡ ἁμαρτία, ὑπερεπερίσσευσεν ἡ χάρις,21 ἵνα ὥσπερ ἐβασίλευσεν ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ, οὕτως καὶ ἡ χάρις βασιλεύσῃ διὰ δικαιοσύνης εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν." Romans 5:20-21
No one can deny the meaning of ὑπερεπερίσσευσεν or the lexical form ὑπερπερίσσευω means "to be on a very high scale of amount, be in great excess, in Romans 5:20. This is the definition of Bauer BAGD. My exegetical book says, "to abound more exceedingly, the preposition super ὑπερ magnifies the root word in this compound work.
Well and good! Every post I read on every thread in this controversy, no one is denying God's amazing grace. Really there are no words to describe this grace - it has to be known and experienced. And there is nothing that abounds more than being a sinner who is under death, living a miserable life, going to knowing God's grace and God saving that person as he repents of his sin and turns to God.
However, this explanation in the meme above misses too many important points in Romans 5:20-21, to say nothing of 18-21, and 1-21. Ok, and all of Romans! (theBible?)
So what is Romans about? It is a theological treatise that Paul wrote to the Romans. It is as close to a systematic theology as the early church had. It just doesn't talk about ONE WORD in ONE VERSE. Instead, the book opens with an explanation of sin. See Romans 1, 2, 3!
For that matter just read the chapter in question - Romans 5. For that matter, just read Romans 5:20-21 as I have posted above in English and Greek.)
Because this passage is NOT ABOUT US! It is about the work Christ came to do. To only emphasize one word - "abounding exceedingly," is appalling hermeneutics. We are NEVER to make a doctrine out of one verse, let alone a word which is basically a hapax legomena (appears only one time - but then, we have the same issue with authentic in 1 Tim. 2:12, don't we?) Instead we need to look at words like "death," and "sin" in Romans 5:12 earlier, as well as 5:21. Why? Because the gospel is not just about the end result of justification (Romans 5:1) but also about what we are saved from. "Sin" and death."
"Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men[a] because all sinned—" Romans 5:12
So to claim that pulling a word out of context, a word (ὑπερπερίσσευω) which only appears here and in 2 Cor. 7:4, (in a different context) is not unbalanced theologically is to point to exactly the crux of the debate that most of us have been trying to make to hyper grace believers for months now. (Ok, I went back to Biblical Christianity a bit later than some others, have been swayed by a very unbalanced reading of the situation in this forum.)
(And to claim it is "unbalanced" to support your unbalanced view is just another trick to persuade the young Christians of the lie of this whole theology. What a way to twist words as usual by the hyper grace crowd!)
So yes, hyper grace, the movement originating from Joseph Prince and proselytized by his devotees is unbalanced! And unbalanced meaning - misses too many essential soteriological biblical components of salvation !
One of the better and new commentaries, The New International Greek Testament Commentary NIGTC: The Epistle to the Romans by Richard N. Longnecker, a world renowned Greek scholar says the following things about the theology of Romans 5:20-21. It is long, but it is important, because we do need a balanced view of Scripture. We do NOT need to emphasize one word, ὑπερπερίσσευω, at the expense of the other words in this passage and the entire rest of the Bible. This whole chapter is on justification, not sanctification. And it is not about us, but rather the incredible grace of God in Christ Jesus, who died on our behalf that we might be made righteous in him.
"1. The "dark side" of every person's life has to do with "sin," "death," and being under "divine condemnation." There are the mocking sectors that permeate every facet of human experience and invade every corner of human consciousness. They are in fact, the major factors that constitute the basic components of the universal "human predicament" and so in Paul's proclamation of the Christian gospel to pagan Gentiles in the Greco-Roman world, he struck a responsive chord in the hearts and minds of many of his spiritually sensitive hearers.
2. At the heart of the Christian gospel are such vitally important matters as "God's grace," "righteousness as a gift from God," Jesus' "one principle act of righteousness" (i.e. his death on the cross), and the provisions of "life," "the righteousness of life" and "eternal life" that are offered to all people. Ignore or minimize these central features of the Christian proclamation, and one has "no gospel" and that is, no "good news" at all, but only moral platitudes or psychological analyses of the human situation.
3. The focal point of Paul's proclamation in this period of the eschatological "now" is on "the obedience" of Jesus
Christ, as declared in 5:19 and this lies at the heart of the "Christian hymn" in Phil. 2:6-11. [All about Jesus!!] It appears in cognate forms in Romans both in the development of his teaching on "the faithfulness" of Jesus Christ, and his use of the titles "Son" and "Son of God."
4. The law, (whether a so-called natural law, or the Mosaic law) has no part in bringing about "life," "righteousness" or "eternal life" - other than revealing sin, and because of people's perverted response to God in their increased knowledge of sin, actually increasing sin. [Paul said it, not me or the commentator - "Now the law came in to increase the trespass," 5:20]
5. The universalism of God's grace, which has been made effective "through Jesus Christ our Lord," has to do with what God has provided on behalf of all people. [Another meaning for "huper" - on behalf of in the genitive!] It does not, however, as seen in the future tense ("will be") of the verbs (both expressed and implied) in 5:18-19, and the subjective mood (may" or "might") of the verse in 5:21 assure inevitability, but rather speaks of what God has graciously provided, to which people need to respond positively."
(NIGTC: Romans 600-601)
My take on it:
1. Rather than applying this to word "abounding exceedingly" (ὑπερπερίσσευω) to the totality of our Christian walk, in fact, the extremely low frequency word is specifically talking about the grace as applied to salvation. And Paul does not use it when referring to sanctification in the following chapters of Romans. (See 8 especially!)
Salvation is a miracle of God, there is no doubt about it. We all need to remember what God has done for us! Which brings us to:
2. The hyper grace phenomena tends to totally ignore sin! Because Romans 5:21 is about justification, and takes us from our state before we were saved, to our state once we have repented of our sins and believed - and that is positional righteousness. This verse never says we can forget about sin. It is a verse which is confirmed in the rest of Romans and the Bible - that sin is a big deal, but thank God, Jesus Christ beat it at the cross.
So I am already hearing the cries of "But we never said we don't sin" but the definition of sin and repentance in hyper grace theology, (to use the term loosely) has changed so badly as to be unrecognizable in the gospel according to JP.
Sin is PART OF THE GOSPEL! It is the bad part, the balancing part. We simply need to acknowledge that sin is ongoing in our lives, and we need the Holy Spirit to convict us of our disobedience. Paul knew the importance of being obedient to God.
3. By underemphasizing OBEDIENCE, the hyper grace movement has again, lost Biblical Christianity. We need to be obedient to Christ. That needs to be emphasized on a daily basis. It is too easy for our human flesh to slide backwards if we are not reminded of who Christ is in our prayers, reading the word of God and preaching in our fellowships. (Not saying we are going to lose our salvation, but who wants to live a life far from God?)
"For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything" 2 Cor. 2:9
"What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed," Romans 6:15-17
So the entire BALANCED gospel message is:
sin (and death) -->repentance --> grace abounding! --> justification-->obedience (eternal life!)
If you take "grace abounding exceedingly out of this equation, as found in Romans 5:21, then you are not preaching or teaching God's gospel, but a false one! You are teaching an incredibly out-of-context theology.
So yes, again, hyper grace is unbalanced in every way. But that is never to deny the grace of God! And hyper grace is a coined term, which is unbalanced not because of the work of Christ is so great, but because of the way hyper grace teachers and proselytizers pull the word out of context.
PS And don't bother quoting Romans 5:20 again to me, or misusing that poor word "ὑπερπερίσσευω" to encompass all of our Christian walk, instead of seeing it in conjunction with the entire gospel of repentance from sin and justification by faith in Christ to our journey of sanctification or being made holy through the power of the Holy Spirit.
PPS Oh yes, please stop copying and pasting and putting up these simple minded memes. Everyone needs to discuss the Bible in their own words. Yes, you can quote a source, for sure, but make the topic of your post one which comes from the Bible and your own heart, and experience. I know everyone would grow so much more, if they stuck to reading their Bible, instead of watching questionable internet videos from false prophets and teachers.
You just can't go wrong reading and relying on the Bible - English or Greek!