The Lord’s Day Evening
Hymns of the Faith - (4)
(Based on Psalm 90)
“Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III
This is the fourth of the Psalms or Psalm paraphrases that we have undertaken so far in “Hymns of the Faith.” We will no doubt do many more, because Isaac Watts was certainly one of the greatest hymn writers of his age (and many count him as one of the two greatest of all of the modern Protestant hymn writers) and one who was an impetus for much more hymn writing in not only his time, but in the time immediately after.
This paraphrase of Psalm 90 is very, very significant in the life of Britain. I’ll tell you a little bit about the story of the context in which this hymn was first sung a little bit later in the service, but not only is Psalm 90 affiliated with Moses – and of course we remember the story of his life and the tragedy that he experienced in the wilderness in his own personal rebellion against God, and God’s exclusion of him from entering into the Promised Land. We can imagine vividly these words being on his heart and on his tongue as he climbs the mountain that last time to look over into the land, and to be buried by angels that God sent to care for his body.
And of course this song has played a significant role in national events in Britain and America ever since. Because of its associations in 1714, the time that it was composed, with important events in the history of Britain, it has often been used. I think in the material that I gave you in the outline tonight I mentioned that this hymn was sung at the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, the famous wartime Prime Minister of Britain, at his funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1965, and it’s been used on many, many significant occasions. It’s almost a national hymn in Britain, so the way that we would sing America! or God Bless America or one of the favorite national hymns on special occasions here in the United States, Our God, Our Help in Ages Past would be used on important occasions of state in Britain; again, because of the associations of the hymn going back to the time of its composition.
Well, what I want to do with you first tonight is I want to look at Psalm 90 itself, and I want to highlight especially the passages that Watts picks up in the text of Our God, Our Help in Ages Past in our Trinity Hymnal.
On the outline what I’ve done is I’ve given you the passages that we have in our Trinity Hymnal from Our God, Our Help in Ages Past in bold, and then passages that are omitted, like
“The word commands our flesh to dust:
Return, ye sons of men.
All nations rose from earth at first
And turn to earth again.”
That verse is part of the hymn, but it’s not part of our hymnal so I’ve left it in regular print. And there are a couple of those verses. And then on the other column I have paralleled the passage in Psalm 90 from which Watts is getting the idea, and as you look at the Psalm and as you look, for instance, at the first two stanzas and you see only one line of Psalm 90 next to it (from Psalm 90:1), you get the idea of how free Watts was sometimes in his paraphrases. This is one of the things that got Watts criticized in his day because people were used to singing Psalms. That’s all people in the Church of England and Church of Scotland and in the dissenting churches sang when Watts came along. They just sang Psalms, and those Psalms were more or less metrical renderings of the words of the Psalms out of their English Bibles. And so when Watts came along he was a little bit more free in his paraphrasing, and he would “Christianize” some of the contents of the Psalm in order to name explicitly the Lord Jesus Christ or to make reference to events in the history of redemption that had only occurred in the time of the New Testament, many Christians were uncomfortable with that and they were critical of that, and they thought that that was playing too fast and free with the text of the Psalms. But nevertheless, you will see the way the ideas in the Psalm inspire Watts’ poetry and his reflection upon those ideas by looking at that column of the verses.
You’ll also notice that in this Psalm Watts’ focus will be on verses 1-7, verse 10, and then verses 12-14. And so there are parts of Psalm 90 that he doesn’t focus on in the text of Our God, Our Help in Ages Past. So we will focus on those passages in Psalm 90 that Watts himself is illustrating, and after expounding those passages we’ll look at the hymn itself.
Now before we read God’s word, let’s look to Him in prayer and ask for His help and blessing.
Heavenly Father, this is Your word. We thank You for it. We do thank You that You have been our help in ages past, and that You are our hope in all the years to come. We pray, O Lord, that in our study of this Psalm again, and in our study of this song that we sing that is based upon this Psalm, that our own trust in You would be enriched, and that witness to the gospel of Your dear Son would be borne not only in our hearts but in the public testimony of Your word tonight. This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This is the word of God from Psalm 90:
“A PRAYER OF MOSES, THE MAN OF GOD.
Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or ever You had formed the earth and the world,
From everlasting to everlasting You are God.
“You return man to dust and say, ‘Return, O children of man!’
For a thousand years in Your sight
Are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.
“You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
Like grass that is renewed in the morning:
In the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
In the evening it fades and withers.
“For we are brought to an end by Your anger;
By Your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before You,
Our secret sins in the light of Your presence.
“For all our days pass away under Your wrath;
We bring our years to an end like a sigh.
The years of our life are seventy,
Or even by reason of strength eighty;
Yet their span is but oil and trouble;
They are soon gone, and we fly away.
Who considers the power of your anger,
And Your wrath according to the fear of you?
“So teach us to number our days
That we may get a heart of wisdom.
Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on Your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with Your steadfast love,
That we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as You have afflicted us,
And for as many years as we have seen evil.
Let Your work be shown to Your servants,
And Your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
And establish the work of our hands upon us;
Yes, establish the work of our hands!”
Amen. And thus ends this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.
I want to draw your attention especially to verses 1-6 and verses 13-17 of Psalm 90, because it is this passage in the Psalm that the text of Our God, Our Help in Ages Past most faithfully renders. The two parts of this Psalm focusing on those two sections have to do with God himself as the home – or the refuge, or the city, or the place where His people belong – and not only the Psalm, but Watts will use different metaphors to press home that particular truth that God is our refuge, or our dwelling place, and you’ll see that in verses 1-6. And the second part that Watts concentrates on is the believer’s petition to that God who is our home and refuge and city and place, the place where His people belong. So let’s look at those two parts of the Psalm together very briefly tonight.
I. The Psalm’s central teaching.
The first thing that Moses emphasizes in this Psalm is that the Lord Himself has been the refuge or the dwelling place, or the home or the city, or the place where His people belong from generation to generation: “Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.”
I’ve given you on the second page of your handout The Book of Common Prayer rendering in English of that passage, and some of you may know that language. It comes from the old Miles Coverdale translation of Scripture which was greatly beloved in England in those days, and which is still available to you in The Book of Common Prayer to this very day, and it begins,
“Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever the earth and the world were made,
Thou art God from everlasting to everlasting.”
It’s beautiful language in the Psalm.
Well, it’s that truth…that we have no continuing city, but that God Himself is our dwelling place and we are seeking a city to come, whose architect and maker is God, and where God himself is the light that lights that city, and where there is no temple, for God dwells in the midst of His people…it is that truth that animates this whole Psalm. You can see how appropriate that is to Moses, because Moses had been denied entrance into the Promised Land. The Promised Land was going to be that place where the people of God temporally dwelled for many hundreds of years, but that Promised Land itself pointed forward to a land that would never ever end; a land that would never ever perish, from which the people of God would never ever be exiled: that land of glory in which the kingdom of God would come to all of its glorious fruition; that land in which God himself would be with His people and they with Him. And so it is particularly appropriate that Moses, having been denied setting foot in the land of Canaan because of his sin in the wilderness, in God’s mercy would be caused to reflect upon the fact that though he would not be setting foot in the land of Canaan, that temporal Promised Land, yet God was still his refuge and all the promises of God were his by grace, and that he would dwell with God.
“Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.”
And therefore Moses is pointing us to God Himself as our great comfort, and there are three things in particular that I want to remind you about this.
First of all, it is striking that Moses would emphasize that it is the Lord who is our refuge. Very often we look to the Lord to provide for us refuge; we ask the Lord to give us refuge. But this Psalm reminds us that it is the Lord Himself who is our refuge. He doesn’t just provide us refuge, He is our refuge.
Now that’s significant, because one of the real tricks to the Christian life is to remember to keep the Giver and the gifts together. Sometimes we go to God and we want Him to be the giver because what we really want is the gifts that He is giving, or the requests that we are asking of Him to be fulfilled. But when Moses says “the Lord is our refuge,” he’s reminding us that ultimately the best gift that God can give is God himself. The best gift that we could ever receive is refuge in God, communion with the living God, dwelling with God. What is the phrase in the Old Testament and in the New which is repeated to emphasize the very heart of God’s promises and the greatest blessing that His people can receive? “I will be your God, and you will be My people.” And this Psalm, in affirming that the Lord is our refuge, is affirming that great reality that God is our God, we are His people. We dwell with Him, and He is the greatest gift that He can give to us.
Secondly, notice that Moses emphasizes that the Lord is our refuge. It’s not just that the Lord is my refuge, but that the Lord is our refuge. That is, He is the refuge of the collective people of God.
Our security as believers ought to be increased by the knowledge that we do not stand alone, but we have the testimonies of hundreds of generations of saints standing with us. Just as God has been faithful to them in times past, He will be faithful to us, and that ought to be a great encouragement to us in times of trial.
It’s been mentioned in the pulpit prayers both this morning and this evening the uncertain times in which we live. It will encourage you that the song which we have just sung, and which we’ll sing one more time, was also written in very uncertain times. In fact, I would suggest that it was written in even more uncertain times politically and economically than the time we’re living in now. And yet the saints who sang it, their lives bear witness that God was trustworthy. And we have now the privilege of living in such faith and confidence in God that perhaps a generation or two from now people will look back and say, “You know, those Christians in the early 2000’s going through great political and economic change, they trusted God. They walked by faith. They continued to do what God had called them to do. They continued to be about God’s mission. They continued to be salt and light in a dying world. They continued to be focused on fulfilling the Great Commission and upon the means of grace. And even though they went through great times of change and uncertainty, they trusted in God.” We have the opportunity to be that testimony now, even in our own time, and I trust you’ll be encouraged when I tell you the story of the composition of this great Psalm paraphrase.
But Moses’ point here is that the Lord is not just his refuge, the Lord is all of His people’s refuge, and the other glorious thing about that is all of God’s people’s story becomes our story. You know, very often you go back in the history of God’s dealings with His people, and you go to other cultures and other times to people that are very, very different from you. But if they’re trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, they’re your people, and their story is your story because you have been made one in Christ by union with Him, by the work of the Holy Spirit, by faith in Him; and, therefore, their story is your story. You have been made into one new family, one household, one kingdom, by the work of God the Holy Spirit, and so their story is your story. And just as your brothers and sisters in Christ in cultures that are very different from you around the world lend a richness to the testimony of God’s faithfulness and tell you of a part of your story that you wouldn’t have known, so also the saints in times past give us encouragement in times of trouble. Their story is your story. And of course that reminds you as well that your story one day will be somebody else’s story. And so we ought to live in such a way to encourage them rather than discourage them.
Third, however, it’s not only that it’s the Lord who is our refuge, and that the Lord is our refuge, it’s that the Lord is our refuge – He’s our dwelling place, He’s our home. In other words, the Lord wants us to understand this truth that He is our only place of security so that our belief and our passion is united when we sing our trust in Him. Very often we look for refuge and security in every place but in the Lord. We may look at refuge and security in a very wise broker or financial planner…and, boy, if we have, we’ve probably been disappointed in the last few years, because it doesn’t matter how smart they are, you can’t resist the tidal wave that we’ve just been through.
There are all sorts of strategies for security that we look for, but the Lord wants us to understand that He himself alone can be our real refuge because He’s bigger than any problem in this world; and He wants that truth to seep into us so that it’s a part of us, so that it’s worked deep down into our bones, so that when we worship the living God that truth just oozes out of our pores as we give Him praise.
So there’s the first thing that Moses drives home: that the Lord himself is the home, the refuge, the city, the place where His people belong. He is our refuge, he’s our refuge, and He’s our refuge. All of those things Moses drives home, and Isaac Watts will pick up on those things in his Psalm paraphrase.
Now look at the end of the Psalm. Look at the request that comes in verses 13-17. Now what Watts actually does is he picks up on verse 12 – “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” In other words, that’s Moses saying remember that this life is not all there is. We must remember what awaits and be preparing for a much more glorious eternal life. We’re pilgrims here. Life is short, hell is real, eternity is long, and therefore we need to live in that light. That’s the ending of that middle section which is a combination of confession and request, and now he goes into the section that focuses on the believer seeking urgently for God’s grace in verses 13-17:
“Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on Your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with Your steadfast love,
That we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as You have afflicted us,
And for as many years as we have seen evil.
Let Your work be shown to Your servants,
And Your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
And establish the work of our hands….”
Here’s the petition. It comes in five parts. First, return. This is the believer begging for God’s divine pity and mercy: ‘Lord, because of our sin You ought to just leave us, but what we’re asking is that You would return to us. Come back to us; we deserve to be left…we deserve to be left to our own devices and to the consequences of our own devices, but return. Come back to us. Don’t leave us.’
Then, “Satisfy us with Your steadfast love.” This is the great biblical word for God’s covenant love and fidelity, His hesed. Satisfy us with Your covenant love. Remember when David in Psalm 51 comes to confess his sin and then comes to beg God to forgive him? What are you going to say to God when you have murdered and you’ve committed adultery and you’ve lied—and in fact you’ve broken every one of the Ten Commandments? What do you say to God? What does David say in Psalm 51? “Lord, have mercy on me according to Your hesed” According to Your wonderful covenant love and faithfulness, show mercy to me. So David begs for the mercy of God, the covenant love and mercy of God for the forgiveness of his sins, and so Moses here directs us as believers to pray to be satisfied with God’s covenant love and faithfulness. There’s the second petition.
The third petition is that the Lord would make us glad. I hear the echoes of Jesus’ teaching here in this word. God’s plan for us is to know true joy in His glory. All things work for the glory of God. The great end of all things is God’s glory, but it is God’s purpose that we would have joy in His glory, and so when Jesus came into the world, He said – what? “I have come that you might have life, and that abundantly…and that your joy may be made complete.” And so Moses is directing us to pray that we would be made glad as the glory of God is displayed, that we would experience the joy that God intends as His plan unfolds.
And connected with that, in verse 16 He points us to a fourth petition: Let Your work and Your majesty appear to us. Lord, let us see Your plans, Your purposes, Your kingdom, Your mission going forward in this world. It will give us joy and make us glad to see the gospel prospering and conquering all.
And then, finally: Confirm the work of our hands. I love that petition! Verse 17: “Lord, make what we’re doing count for something. Don’t let us just spin our wheels. Even if it’s just a little small thing, Lord, make it count for something. Prosper the work of our hands so that it matters. Don’t let us engage in meaningless labor. Let our labor be meaningful. Let the work that we do count for something eternally.
So there are Moses’ exhortations to us for petitions that we are to lift up.
II. What the hymn emphasizes
Now if you’ll take your sheet out and follow along, we’ll look at what Isaac Watts does with this material. First of all, in thinking through the idea of God being our dwelling place in all generations he gives you two stanzas. “Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations” becomes
“Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.”
Now the idea of “dwelling place” you will notice suddenly has four metaphors from Watts. God’s our help – that’s a biblical term; God is the help of His people. He comes to their aid and to their rescue. He is our hope, He is our shelter, He is our eternal home. So Watts gives you four metaphors for the one idea of God being our dwelling place. He’s giving you from all sides so that you can take in what it means that God is your dwelling place. But he’s not done yet. He continues on with another stanza:
“Under the shadow of Thy throne….”
And then there is another metaphor. We’re protected under the throne of God. Can you imagine a safer place to be than in the shadow of the throne of God? How many enemies would want to attack into the shadow of the throne of the Almighty?
“…Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone, and our defense is sure.”
Watts is working out the ramifications, the consequences of God being our help, our hope, our shelter, our home, and our dwelling in the shadow of His throne. What are the consequences? We’re secure. God’s arm can defend us. So all of these things Watts pulls out of the very first line of Moses’ Psalm.
Then he says:
“Before the hills in order stood, or earth received her frame,
From everlasting Thou art God, to endless years the same.”
And that’s a fairly close rendering of the second verse of the Psalm, and so he catches that. Then if we look down to the fourth stanza in our hymnal, he’s picking up on the fourth verse of the Psalm:
“A thousand ages in Your sight are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.”
And so that line is designed to show us how man is ephemeral. He’s passing. He doesn’t last long. God endures forever. He’s been our dwelling place from generation to generation. We’re Johnny-come-latelys and we’re not going to be around for very long, and therefore it makes sense to put your trust in God who is eternal, not man who is ephemeral.
Then he goes on to paraphrase the tenth verse of the Psalm:
“The busy tribes of flesh and blood, with all their lives and cares,
Are carried downward by Your flood, and lost in following years.”
Then again he’ll go to the tenth verse and pick up the ideas that he’s already introduced in that fifth stanza, and in his sixth stanza he’ll also bring over some ideas from the twelfth verse of the Psalm:
“Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”
So when you wake up at the morning at the opening of the day and the dream is gone…you know, you’re going into the office and you remember parts of the dream and you’re doing your best to try and remember it, but you can’t quite bring up the details. He’s saying that’s just like time. It flies just like that, and you can’t even remember that dream that was so vivid to you at about four o’clock in the morning when you were tossing and turning in bed with that dream. It’s 8:30, you’re sitting around the water cooler at the office, and you cannot remember that thing to save your neck. It’s just like time…it goes just like that.
That leads him then right back to the truth of the eternity of God, and to verse one, but he also picks up lines from verses 13-14:
“Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come:
O be our guard while troubles last, and our eternal home.”
III. The context of the writing of the hymn and application.
Now. The context of the writing of this great paraphrase of Psalm 90. It was August 1 of 1714, and Queen Anne was the daughter of James VII…II and VII…and she was the Queen of England. And during the latter days of her reign, a series of laws had been passed by the Ministers in her courts through Parliament that had restricted certain religious freedoms for Dissenters.
Now Isaac Watts was a Dissenter. He was a Congregationalist – a Presbyterian who didn’t have a Presbytery to belong to, because in Britain at the time…if you were in Scotland, you could be a Presbyterian because the state church was Presbyterian. But in England the state church was the Anglican Church, and it was Episcopalian. And in order to go to Oxford or Cambridge, the only two universities in Britain at that time, you had to be an Episcopalian. In order to hold office in Britain you had to be an Episcopalian. And you were cut off from many of the avenues of influence and power and economic advancement if you were not a member of the Church of England.
Well, Isaac Watts was a Dissenter, just like Matthew Henry. Matthew Henry was a Congregationalist pastor. His father was a Presbyterian pastor with no Presbytery, and he ministered in a little church up in their neck of the woods in Britain – in Chester in England, if you know where that is. Well, Isaac Watts, being amongst those Dissenters and watching the laws being changed, began to be concerned that perhaps Anne…. Remember, Anne’s father had been Roman Catholic. That’s why he was deposed in the glorious revolution of 1688. And in Britain since the time of Henry VIII the requirement for the king or the queen of England had been for that person to be a Protestant. And there was great fear about this in Britain, because they still vividly remembered the years when Mary Tudor was the monarch, and she persecuted Protestants, killing 300 very prominent Protestants during her short reign. That’s why she’s known as “Bloody Mary.” And so there was a fear that this was about to happen again in the reign of Queen Anne, and sure enough there was a new Act of Succession that was passed that was to go in effect at midnight on August 1, 1714.
It was a Sunday. And Queen Anne died that day before midnight came, and so the old Act of Succession which had specified that the Protestant rulers of Hanover in Germany were to become the new monarchs upon the death of Queen Anne was the act that was still in effect, and there was great celebration throughout England on the part of the Dissenters, who had feared widespread religious persecution against Protestants should the new Act of Succession be passed.
And in the wake of that time this hymn, Our God, Our Help in Ages Past, was sung by Protestants in Britain as an indication of God’s helping them in a time of tremendous upheaval and uncertainty, and in His providence protecting them from what could have been a disastrous consequence should the law of succession be changed. And so you can see how it would be a favorite national hymn of the English people during times of great public state and national circumstances.
So let’s take up the last stanza of this hymn and sing it together. We’ll sing it before the benediction. Why don’t we stand and sing it together.
[Congregation sings.]
Peace be to the brethren, and love with faith, through Jesus Christ our Lord, until the day break and the shadows flee away.
© First Presbyterian Church, 1390 North State St, Jackson, MS (601) 924-0575 www.fpcjackson.org
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