We all have things we struggle with. How do we keep perspective in hard times? One important answer is hope.

In the Bible, hope is a certain assurance that God will help us, and that we have great things awaiting us in our heavenly future.¹

As I’ve been studying hope, I’ve found some gems, and I’d like to share one with you:

Therefore we do not lose heart, but even if our outer person is being destroyed, yet our inner person is being renewed day after day. For our momentary light affliction is producing in us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure and proportion, because we are not looking at what is seen, but what is not seen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is not seen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:17 (LEB)

While we hope in God, this text says, we are gaining an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure and proportion. Hope produces this in us. I used to think this was only about the future, but I think, looking at the text better, this may already be starting in the present. We are receiving the glory of God ‘in us’, and are inwardly renewed day by day.

This glory is ‘beyond measure and proportion’ The hope is from an extraordinary degree (hyperbole) to another extraordinary degree in Greek.² Mathematically, it could be seen as infinity to the power of infinity! We cannot exaggerate our hope! Every exaggeration would still be true – and more beyond that!

1 See ‘ἐλπίς’ in Thayer, J. H. (1889). A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament: being Grimm’s Wilke’s Clavis Novi Testamenti (p. 205). New York: Harper & Brothers.

2 The Greek words used here are καθʼ ὑπερβολὴν εἰς ὑπερβολὴν. These Greek words mean something like ‘according to an extraordinary degree to an(other) extraordinary degree’. The word used in Greek is the basis of our current English word hyperbole or exaggeration. Definitions are from the Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament (2017), Logos Bible Software