Hymns of the Faith
“Day of Judgment! Day of
Wonders!”
A Presentation of First Presbyterian Church
Jackson,
Mississippi
With
Dr. Ligon Duncan, Dr. Derek Thomas, and
Dr. Bill Wymond
Dr. Wymond:
Good morning! This is “Hymns of the Faith,” brought to you by Jackson’s
First Presbyterian Church. The minister of the First Presbyterian Church is
Dr. Ligon Duncan.
Dr.
Duncan: Thank you, BillWymond!
This is LigonDuncan, and this is “Hymns of the
Faith.”
Derek, good morning. It’s good to be with you, and to join you
today to be looking at some of the great hymns of the Christian church today.
We’re looking at one by one of my favorite authors,
JohnNewton, and there’s so much to say
about him. If you’re not familiar with JohnNewton,
and you’re in the listening audience today and you’re going to be able to stay
around with us for the next thirty minutes, you’ll learn about this man who was
significantly used in the history of Christianity and wrote some of our most
beloved hymns.
Everyone will know Amazing Grace,
written by John Newton. It’s his most well-known hymn. But he wrote a number
of other hymns that are part of The Olney
Hymnal, and BillWymond is going to tell us a little
bit about how that hymnal was put together. But today we’re looking at a hymn
that my guess is that most of you in the listening audience haven’t heard
before. It’s a hymn called
Day of Judgment!
Day of Wonders! It’s a wonderful text that pertains to the Second
Coming of Christ — the Judgment Day, which is a very important doctrine in
historic Christianity. And there are not that many great hymns about it, at
least that are in currency, that we sing. We sing
Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending, which is a great Wesley text that refers to the Second Coming, but
Day of Judgment! Day of Wonders! is a
Second Coming and Judgment text. And because this tune isn’t familiar, Bill, why don’t you go ahead and play through it so
that people can get a tune in their mind, and then we’ll begin to talk.
(Dr. Wymond
plays.)
Dr.
Duncan: That tune
is called ST.
AUSTIN, which is a typical British way of abbreviating
Augustine…St.Austin.
It apparently comes from a Gregorian chant. Bill,
tell us a little bit about the tune. We don’t know much, I guess, about who
would have written the melody itself, but we do know that it came from
The Bristol Tune Book, or at least
that its arrangement came from The Bristol
Tune Book. Tell us a little bit about this.
Dr. Wymond:
Well, I think this tune is perfectly suited to the words. It has a
very dour sound to it, and a lot of people in our culture probably wouldn’t like
it because it is so serious! But it’s in a minor key, and it’s taken from
Gregorian chant. You can sort of hear a little bit… (plays). It has that kind
of meandering, wandering feel that you get from Gregorian chant, and it is made
serious, as I said, because it’s in a minor key (E minor). It doesn’t have the
brightness of a major key, but the minor key. It does not have a dramatic pulse
to it at all, and it goes down the scale when it starts, which sometimes could
be powerful…but the way it’s done adds to the seriousness of the sound and so
you get a feeling actually of…well, I’ve been using the word
seriousness, but sadness sometimes
comes from a minor key.
So it does come from Gregorian
chant, which was the main song of the church for over a thousand years, and
someone adapted this for a tune book that came from Bristol
in England.
So I think the tune fits the words. And when we talk about the text people will
see that, I think, even better.
You said something about The Olney
Hymnal, and I never want to miss a chance to talk about that hymnal,
although this tune was probably not used for this text.
The Olney Hymnal, which had the words
by John Newton, fascinates me because John Newton was in sort of a country
parish, as it were, and he had this assistant whose name was William Cowper (we
would pronounce it Cow-per, but it’s Coo-per), and this assistant was a very
talented poet. And so these men decided for prayer meeting that they would
conclude the service with a hymn about the text on which they were preaching,
and a lot of times these were texts that had narratives or story lines to them.
So in the hymn they would tell the story or they would recount the narrative
there, and then they would make an application to the Christian life. And some
great hymns have come out of that experience.
And what I like about it is not
only that it’s very creative poetry, but also I like the fact that even though
they were in a small parish, they did their utmost to apply the word and make it
come alive to their people, and they did it in this imaginative and creative way
of writing all these wonderful hymns. So, “small churches matter” to me is one
lesson that you get out of that.
Dr. Duncan:
Now, The Olney Hymns was
published in the 1770’s, and Watts’ paraphrases
would have been published — what? — forty years or so before?
Dr. Wymond:
I think so, the first of them.
Dr.
Duncan: So
these are among the pioneering evangelical hymnals of
history, right?
Dr. Wymond:
Yes, because the established church would have still been doing
psalmody. In the independent churches there was a real stress on psalmody, and
yet through Watts’ paraphrases of the Psalms you got a loosening of
the text so that people didn’t feel that they were really singing necessarily
the Psalms, but the thought of the Psalms. And that opened the door for other
inspirational texts that you wouldn’t get anywhere else.
Dr. Duncan:
Think of this one. You have those Scottish paraphrases that were
written — and I couldn’t tell you exactly when they were written, but they
paraphrased important passages of Scripture. And looking at our background
information on this hymn, it’s pointing out that this hymn not only is focused
on the Judgment Day and the Second Coming of Christ and the reaction of both
believers and unbelievers to that great event, but it has sort of echoes of the
Dies Irae from
the Latin requiem mass, in which judgment is pronounced on sinners and a prayer
for mercy is lifted up for believer.
Dr.
Wymond:
And that Dies Irae was
always such an awe-inspiring thing when you came into the mass, because it says,
“Day of terror! Day of judgment!” and the music is always very dramatic…
Dr. Duncan:
Maybe the most famous one known to the general population would be
from the MozartRequiem.
Dr. Wymond:
That and Verdi’s…
Dr. Duncan:
And so this kind of captures that scene. It’s a biblical scene that’s
being described in the hymn. And you were telling us that the way
The Olney Hymnal was laid out that
different parts of it were designed to do different things.
Dr. Wymond:
Well, in their handling of that they used it as a teaching tool for their
people, so they would put the narrative of the verse or the passage they had
talked about in the first stanza or stanzas, and then they would make
applications from that in the last stanzas.
Dr. Duncan:
So that was a pattern that held in the texts that were being written.
And Cowper, as you said, participated. And
Cowper
was reckoned as one of the finest poets of his era, so you have one of the best
poets in Britain
in the era cooperating with
JohnNewton in the production of this
hymnal. No wonder so many of these hymns have lasted to today. You’ve had two
outstanding craftsmen…I mean, Newton’s
prose and poetry is excellent and he had a real creative mind. Derek, you and I
are always trying to come up with creative ways to approach Christmas texts and
things of that nature — well, he preached through the text of Handel’s
Messiah surely long before anyone else
would have thought to have done something so creative! I think that would have
been pretty out of the box for his day, don’t you think?
Dr. Thomas:
Yes, as memory serves…forty or fifty sermons.
Dr.
Duncan: And
Messiah was not received very well
among conservative Christians at the time because it was…I guess kind of like
people would have responded to AndrewLloyd-Weber’s
Jesus Christ Superstar. It was thought
that it was too secular to do sacred texts in the way that Handel had done it to be done in the opera house and that
sort of thing.
Dr. Wymond:
He had been doing all those oratorios on biblical themes, but they
were done for commercial reasons, not in the church but out in the theater. And
the same thing with Messiah in Dublin. It was not done in
a church first.
Dr. Duncan:
And so Newton,
he’s a creative mind as well, and so you put these two together and you get
The Olney Hymnal. Give us the
background on Newton.
I never cease to be encouraged and instructed and inspired by him, by his story.
Dr.
Thomas: Well, John Newton…and of
course some of our listeners may well have seen the movie on Wilberforce, which
was two years ago, in which Newton played a significant part, although it in my
opinion was badly represented in the movie.
Dr.
Duncan:
Right…almost through a kind of Catholic penitential theology instead of
evangelical theology.
Dr. Thomas:
Yes, way too grumpy in the movie, I thought. You know he was born to
godly parents. His mother died when he was quite young — seven or so, I think he
was when his mother died. His father was a ship builder and master. As is often
common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, godly parents would give to
their children a book that seems to play a significant part in their lives. In
this case it was Thomas `a
Kempis’ Imitation of Christ,
which has a significant history, although questionable whether it’s an
evangelical work or not. But it’s a spiritual work. And he was press ganged as a
teenager…
Dr.
Duncan: Which means he was
forced into service, by force of arms. He might have been in a bar or somewhere…
Dr. Duncan:
Wouldn’t the Royal Navy…they would actually go into taverns and they
would deliberately get young men drunk so that they were unable to resist being
dragged to the ship.
Dr. Thomas:
They’d wake up out miles at sea! And as I recall, his father tried to
mediate…wasn’t able to get him released from service, but was able to promote
him to a midshipman, which was the first rung of the ladder to an officer rather
than just be an ordinary sailor. But he attempted to run away…was caught and
flogged, I think, and then demoted to an ordinary sailor. He managed then to be
released to a slave ship going to the west coast of Africa, and for a
significant part of his life then would spend his time as first of all a sailor,
but then as captain of his own ship, bringing slaves from Africa to be sold in
markets in England.
He fell in love, didn’t he, with a very godly woman, and even in his darkest
days the memory of that I think kept him from perhaps the worst of offences.
But it was a storm at sea in which
he almost drowned, where they had to throw away much of what was on board the
ship, that he eventually was converted. He ends up in Olney, which is in Dartmouth, which is in the southwest corner of England — it’s
off the beaten track. It’s a very significant church building still there today,
for what is a relatively small town.
But it’s there in Olney that he
meets William Cowper…William Cowper that suffered from great spiritual
depression…maybe psychotic in part of his life…author of
God Moves in a Mysterious Way, His Wonders to Perform (“He plants
His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.”) Cowper
lived fairly close to Newton.
I think they were neighbors for a while. And it’s just a remarkable friendship
between a minister and a highly educated and very talented man who is just
broken mentally, and from which these Olney hymns came — 250-300 of them, I
think.
Dr. Duncan:
Yes, 280 hymns, I think, that
Newton
wrote; and then of course I have no idea how many Cowper
would have written over the course of his time. So it had a very substantial
collection of hymns.
This text,
Derek, has echoes of the discourse that
Jesus
gives at the end of Matthew, and also
some hints of the book of Revelation. Walk us through line by line.
Dr. Thomas:
Well, it’s a thoroughly inappropriate text for the church of the
twenty-first century because it says nothing about our self-esteem; it says
absolutely nothing to initially comfort us and make us feel good and happy about
going to church. I mean, who in the world would want to sing:
“Day of judgment! Day of wonders!
Hark! the trumpet’s awful sound,
louder than a thousand thunders,
shakes the vast creation round.
How the summons will the sinner’s
heart confound!”
Dr. Duncan:
What’s the mindset of the pastor who writes this text? What’s he
trying to do?
Dr. Thomas:
Well, he’s someone that believes the Bible! He’s an evangelist. I
think Newton was for the rest of
his life just conscious of “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a
wretch like me.” And no one spoke of judgment more than
Jesus, and that there’s coming a day when He will say to those
on His left one thing, and to His right another thing: “Come unto Me” or “Depart
from Me.”
Dr. Duncan:
You know, it strikes me, too, that he was a man who had experienced a
certain measure of judgment against his own person in his own life. And so,
coming to Jesus Christ he has a great sense of a greater judgment from
which he had been spared; and that he earnestly desired that, knowing judgment
as he did, that others would be spared of that judgment.
Dr. Thomas:
It was part of my criticism of the portrayal of
Newton
in the movie Wilberforce
that it did a fine job of conveying that
Newton
felt enormous guilt, unspeakable guilt about his involvement in the slave trade.
But it did an inadequate job of the assurance of forgiveness, I thought. But
there’s no doubt in my mind that his past life never just got away from him, of
what he had done and the enormity of the grace of God that his sins were
forgiven through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. But this is an evangelistic
hymn, but it’s almost entirely contrary to modern views of evangelism.
Dr. Duncan:
It starts out asking believers to sing, to behold, the day of
judgment, day of wonders, and the loud thunder and the shaking of the whole
creation, and the summons that confounds the heart of the sinner. And then it
does what in the second stanza?
Dr. Thomas:
Well, I was going to ask you, because it does something unexpected.
When you think of God as judgment you tend to think God is the Judge and
Jesus
is the one who is our Savior. But in that opening stanza, the opening line of
the second verse…
Dr. Duncan:
He does a very Pauline
thing, doesn’t he?
“See the Judge, our nature wearing,
clothed in majesty divine…”
And it’s exactly what Jesus
has said at the end of Matthew (that
you will see Me coming on clouds with angels and trumpets to judge), so that He
has come in mercy in His first coming and He is coming in judgment in His second
coming. And it’s the picture of the deity of Christ
and His right to judge the world according to His gospel. Newton just very graphically asks you to look
at that scene when you look up and you open your eyes, and if you’re a sinner
who’s never embraced Christ, suddenly you’re looking
at the Christ that you’ve rejected and spurned, and
He’s the Judge.
Dr. Thomas:
And what did you say again about the view of the cross that depicts
an angry Father trying to be softened by a loving Son?
Dr. Duncan:
Well, first of all, that’s not what evangelicals have ever taught.
And Jesus is every bit acting on behalf of His own
integrity and righteousness, because He is the Second Person of the Trinity; and
it is His own righteousness that has been offended as much as the Father’s
righteousness has been offended by our rebellion. And of course He is there on
the embassy of His loving Father, and He is doing it knowing that His Father is
delighting in seeing sinners who trust in him saved. And so the idea that Jesus is somehow assuaging the wrath of a vengeful
Father who doesn’t understand love is laughable in light of the text of
Scripture which so clearly depicts it otherwise. And the best of Reformed and
evangelical and Protestant theology has always acknowledged that. But here’s the
flip side of it: He’s coming as the Judge. And Newton has you sing,
“You who long for His appearing
then shall say, ‘This God is
mine!’
Gracious Savior, own me in that
day as Thine.”
So he’s saying of those who trusted on Him, that’s my God,
that’s my Savior — and they’re going to cry out, “Lord, own me! I’ve trusted
You; I’ve rested in You alone for salvation as You are offered in the gospel.
Own me as Your child. Own me as Your saved sinner. Own me as a member of Your
family by grace. Own me as acquitted. Own me as accepted. Own me as forgiven.
Number me among those who are on Your right hand, not the goats at Your left
hand.” And so it’s asking the believer in that stanza to think about your
reaction to that Day.
Dr. Thomas:
And there’s a very solemn question asked in the third verse, and it’s
asked to careless sinners. Presumably there are careless sinners who happen to
be singing this hymn:
“Careless sinners, what will then become of thee?”
Dr. Duncan:
Yeah. Don’t you think he’s simultaneously asking believers to ask
that question so that they are not indifferent to the plight of careless
sinners? Newton’s attitude, having
been saved by amazing grace, was not an attitude of indifferent condescending
contempt for sinners. It was of compassion for those who had not embraced the
Savior, and it was a desire for them to embrace the Savior. And you almost think
that one of the things that he’s doing here is that he’s asking believers not to
be indifferent to the plight of careless sinners. But as you say, I think he’s
also assuming that there are going to be some careless sinners singing this
hymn, and he’s hoping that it will make them careful, as opposed to
careless…that it will be used by the Spirit to awaken them to a sense of their
doom.
And then in the final stanza, it’s
an encouragement, isn’t it? What does he do?
Dr.
Thomas:
“But to those who have confessed,
loved and served the Lord below,
He will say, ‘Come near, ye
blessed,
see the kingdom I bestow;
You forever shall My love and
glory know.”
That’s a beautiful ending to what is a very, very solemn…
Dr. Duncan:
Right…even grim, in that question in the third stanza. You know, the
amazing thing is the restraint of it. You know folks that are accusing
evangelical ministers of being hellfire and brimstone; he manages to address a
terrifying scene with significant restraint in the way that he describes it
while at the same time making you think really hard indeed about what is coming.
Dr. Thomas:
And the question is whether we have confessed and loved and served
the Lord below.
Dr. Duncan:
And I’ll leave that as the last word. Bill, let’s hear this great
hymn, Day of Judgment! Day of Wonders!
Dr.
Wymond:
Singing this hymn for us this morning is
VictorSmith.
~~~
“Day of judgment! Day of wonders!
Hark! the trumpet’s awful sound,
louder than a thousand thunders,
shakes the vast creation round.
How the summons will the sinner’s
heart confound!
“See the Judge, our nature
wearing,
clothed in majesty divine;
you who long for His appearing
then shall say, ‘This God is
mine!’
Gracious Savior, own me in that
day as Thine.
“At His call the dead awaken,
rise to life from earth and sea;
all the powers of nature,
shaken by His looks, prepare to
flee.
Careless sinner, what will then
become of thee?
“But to those who have confessed,
loved and served the Lord below,
He will say, ‘Come near, ye
blessed,
see the kingdom I bestow;
You forever shall My love and
glory know.”
Dr.
Wymond:
This has been “Hymns of the Faith,” brought to you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church.