What is it that gives Christians their greatest joy, their greatest confidence, their greatest amazement, their greatest hope? It is the precious blood of Jesus, the blood shed at Calvary as a substitute for guilty sinners, the blood that secured their salvation, the blood that satisfied divine justice, the blood that covered all their sins, the blood that has washed them and made them clean.
The precious blood of Jesus is the subject of many of our most beloved hymns…
When we sing (or read) Psalms, we usually think about how those are the words that the Lord has given us to be able to use as we pray those words back to Him, expressing in His own God-breathed words, whatever joys or sorrows, praises or confessions, hurts or delights we might be dealing with at the moment in our own personal experiences. That’s why Calvin (and others) have called the Psalms “the anatomy of the soul.” There is no human experience to which the Psalms fail to speak to counsel, comfort, guide, and strengthen.
We ought also to consider how those Psalms became the words of the human author who first wrote them. We know the names of some of those authors, as they are named in the lines preceding the lyrics of the Psalm, occasionally even with the name of the original Hebrew tune or even the circumstances of their composition. And we know that about half of the Psalms were written by David, the Shepherd/King. The books of Samuel and Kings give us many of the stories that lay behind those Psalms of David, as with Psalm 3 written as he was fleeing from his son Absalom and the military coup that had driven him from his palace, or with Psalms 51 and 32 written after the terrible adultery and murder conspiracy over Uriah and Bathsheba.
But shouldn’t we also think about what the words of each Psalm would have meant to the Lord Jesus as He prayed and sang them so many times during His years of earthly ministry? When we do that, they take on an incredibly different, richer meaning. It isn’t just remembering that as God Himself, the second person of the blessed trinity, He was actually and ultimately the author, through His Holy Spirit inspiring (“breathing out”) the words these human authors wrote. Here are a few examples to contemplate.
How many hymns (or sermons, for that matter) have you heard about hell? Probably not many! Why is that? It may be that our church culture has grown accustomed to wanting only themes that are happy and pleasant … and positive. There are many who just don’t want to think about this, burying their head in the sands of blissful thinking. The only thing happy and pleasant about the Bible’s teaching concerning hell is that those of us who belong to Christ can be positive that we will never go there! Part of the reason for that scarcity of attention is almost certainly that in our time fewer and fewer people even believe that there will be a hell. They have become so indoctrinated with the lie of universalism that has invented a non-existent god of peoples’ own imagination, one who loves everyone and would never send anyone to hell, even if it did exist.
But what about heaven? We do have a number of good hymns about our eternal abode, but we don’t actually hear as many sermons about heaven as we should. After all, it’s not only where God sits enthroned right now, with Jesus at His right hand. It’s also where we who belong to Christ will spend eternity, not because of anything we have done for ourselves, but only because of what He has done for us. In the midst of so much sadness and trouble and disappointment in this life, shouldn’t we think more often about the incredibly glorious future that awaits us just beyond the grave, or at the imminent return of the Lord Jesus? What joy that could bring into our day if we started our thinking about that rather than the latest disaster broadcast in the morning news report!
It has sometimes been suggested that Christians are not called to life onboard a cruise ship sailing leisurely in the tropics, but rather on a battleship on full alert, positioned in a war zone. The Bible is full of images of the spiritual battle in which we are engaged, warning us about the devil who goes about like a roaring lion seeking those whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8) as well as a list of the armor God has provided for us: swords, helmets, shields, and breastplates (Ephesians 6:10-20). Part of the job of leaders – pastors, teachers, parents, counselors – is to awaken Christians to the strategies of the enemy and to help us all learn how to use that armor in the daily battles we must fight. And this is a battle which we will wage all the way to glory. The greatest exposition of that equipment is found in William Gurnall’s 1655 classic sermons on “The Christian in Full Armor.”
Ironically, the same Bible which assures believers that their salvation is complete and which forbids them to be anxious also commands them to wake, watch, beware, be ready, be alert, and be on guard some forty-four times in the New Testament alone. If God is victorious, why does He still call us to set a watch? If his enemies are vanquished, against what are we guarding? Sometimes one of the fruits of victory is a new capacity to set a proper watch, as did, for example, modern Israel on the Golan Heights after the 1967 Six-Day War. The permanent victory of the cross gives watchful believers far more confidence than any earthly guardsman may have over his post. For the spiritual watch that comes after Christ’s victory is not a watch against an invading army with power to conquer or mount a lengthy siege, but against the once-conquered rebel who is truculent enough not to concede his obvious losses. We watch, not because the enemy has power “to lead astray, if possible, the elect” (Mark 13:22). It isn’t possible (Romans 8:38-39). We watch because God is pleased to trounce, again and again, His defeated enemies, and to use the weakest of possible means to do so.
It is the height (or should we say, the depth!) of foolishness to think that we can handle all the challenges of life on our own. We are dependent on help from many people and sources in all kinds of situations. In fact, there is nothing in our life in which we can function independent of assistance from others. It begins even before our birth, as we need a mother who will seek pre-natal care to insure that all goes well during her pregnancy while we are growing in her womb. We need her to feed and change us as a newborn in those early months after our birth. And that dependency continues all the way, even into our teen and adult years, as both mother and father guide, protect, and provide for us.
And how about all that we needed from teachers during our school years. Add to that all the things we have needed from medical professionals as problems have arisen with our health. And we dare not forget our dependence on friends whose wise counsel has so many times given us guidance in how best to respond to troubling situations in relationships. And here’s one more. How many of us could fix problems with our cars, our home air conditioning and plumbing, our retirement investments, and our job searches without help?
It can be very hard to live with painful experiences as Christians, wondering “Where was God?” We love Him and trust Him, but still struggle when His providence permits heartbreaking events. He is our Heavenly Father; we are His adopted children; He has told us that He loves us. We have no doubt that He will be with us always, even when we go through the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23) or go through the deep waters and fire (Isaiah 43). And we know that He is absolutely sovereign, so there is nothing that happens to us apart from His will. But we can’t help but wonder why He allows things that hurt us so much. We call these matters of “theodicy;” how do we justify God in things He does which don’t make sense to us?
Some of those things that trouble us are personal and private: a cancer diagnosis, the death of a child, a disastrous car accident, the impact of vision loss. Others are just as private and personal, but more emotional than physical: a friend that turns on us, a wonderful job where we’re terminated, a child that turns away from the Lord, an embarrassing realization of our inadvertently having hurt another. Other things bring us distress and confusion from events around us that touch us and steal our peace of mind: a devastating storm, a destructive flood, a terrorist attack, the outbreak of war, the collapse of a government.
The summer and winter Olympic games draw the attention of the entire world every four years. Thousands of athletes from hundreds of countries who have trained very hard for many years gather to compete in challenging sporting events in the water and on land and snow, and in the case of some skiing winter events, even in the air! We watch with amazement at the skills demonstrated by these champions, celebrating with them as teams or individuals from our own country win medals. And we have only a slight understanding of the rigorous discipline that was required in strenuous training to reach these levels of expertise.
This hymn study is being written for the weekend on which the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics is launched. Day after day, people from around the globe will tune in on their television sets and computers to watch broadcasts of one event after another, hoping to hear their national anthem played at the awarding of medals. What will impress us will be their speed, their endurance, their focus, their determination, and their joy when they have succeeded in their competition. None of us can imagine that we could ever do what phenomenal things they do with their bodies, especially as we age (hopefully graciously!). When our team members win, we share their ecstasy.
Why do we use music in our worship, and what is its purpose? We take for granted that there will be music in Christian worship, but how many of us have stopped to consider those two questions? Music, especially singing, has long been a part of biblical worship. Consider, just as one example, the 150 Psalms inspired by the Holy Spirit and included in the canon of Scripture for the worship of God’s people, from the time of Moses (Psalm 90) until today and until Jesus returns. The book of Revelation gives us a picture of the worship in heaven from the apostle John’s day into eternity, where saints and angels are ceaselessly singing “Holy, holy, holy,” and “Worthy is the Lamb.”
This is one of the marvelous distinctives of biblical worship. What other religion in the world has made the singing of the people to be such an integral part of worship? Yes, there is music in many religious practices, from animistic jungle tribes to that of the mantra chanting of eastern religions. But those bear little resemblance to the vast treasury of sacred music that has grown in Christianity, especially since the time of the Reformation. Even before that, this included the beautiful Gregorian plainsong melodies of the medieval church, and has now grown to include well over two million Christian hymns, not to mention the vast repertoire of sacred choral and instrumental music!
Even though it has happened in the past (Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan), it was still shocking when news media began reporting that former president Donald Trump had been shot at an open air rally in northwestern Pennsylvania. This hymn study is being written the day after that happened, with a hymn deliberately chosen to reflect the biblical perspective that Christians should embrace in the wake of that. It includes our relief that the former President’s life was providentially spared (though sadly there was the tragic death of a husband / father in the stands, and two others seriously injured). This study also seeks to be a reminder of important truths that the Bible illuminates from such events.
Here are a few thoughts about that attempted assassination. If I had been preaching the next morning, I would have changed my sermon at the last minute. Everyone in church was thinking about that terrible event, so how could I, as their pastor, ignore this divinely-ordained opportunity to provide guidance in how believers should process all this? At least one major news network has been repeatedly broadcasting interviews with people who pointed out what should be obvious to everyone … that it was God’s providence that not only spared the former President’s life, but also spared the country from unimaginable grief and trauma and confusion in the wake of such an assassination.
It should come as no surprise that many of our most beloved hymns were written as a result of some extremely painful experience. We have examples of that with “It Is Well with My Soul” (four daughters lost in a ship sinking), “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go” (a fiancé who backed out), “Just As I Am” (a bed-ridden invalid), “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (a drowning just before a wedding), and “Now Thank We All Our God” (millions of deaths during Germany’s 17th century Thirty Years’ War). In moments of our lives that are most emotionally powerful, even devastating, it’s natural that the human heart finds strength in the beauty of poetry wedded to music. That’s probably one of the main attractions to the biblical Psalms, which are, as Calvin called them, “the anatomy of the soul.”
One of those examples of hymns that came from tragedies is the Swedish hymn, “Day by Day and with Each Passing Moment.” Carolina (“Lina,” pronounced Lie-nah) Wilhelmina Sandell Berg (1832-1903) wrote this text in 1865 at the age of 26, several years after she experienced a terrible tragedy. She had been with her father, Jonas, a Lutheran pastor, on board a ship while crossing Lake Vättern in Sweden. Suddenly the ship lurched, and before her eyes her father was thrown overboard and drowned. Lina had written hymns before, but after this calamity, she poured out her broken heart in an on-going stream of beautiful songs. She grew to become Sweden’s most celebrated author of gospel hymns, and wrote so many that she has often been called “the Fanny Crosby of Sweden.” Her more than 600 hymns also included “Children of the Heavenly Father” and had a mighty influence on the revival that swept across Scandinavia after 1850.
