Hymns of the Faith: Before Jehovah’s Awesome Throne


by Bill Wymond, Derek Thomas, J. Ligon Duncan on October 19, 2008

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Hymns of the Faith

“Before Jehovah’s Awesome Throne”

Psalm 100

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. Stay tuned for “Hymns of the
Faith.”… Here now with “Hymns of the Faith” is Dr. Ligon Duncan.

Dr. Duncan: Good morning, Bill Wymond, and it’s
great to be with you on “Hymns of the Faith.” To our listening audience, I
welcome you on behalf of Derek Thomas and Bill Wymond and myself as we explore
some of the great hymns of the Christian church over the last 2,000 years, and
today we’re in a very famous text.

It is another text written by Isaac Watts. We have
studied already together several of Isaac Watts’ hymns, and it’s called
Before Jehovah’s Awesome Throne. It’s one of many, many hymns that
are heavily based on Psalm 100. Those Psalms that run from Psalm 95 to
Psalm 100 have produced…boy, it would be hard to calculate how many hymns have
been based on thoughts out of those Psalms, because those Psalms have so many
very familiar calls to worship. If you are in a congregation in which the
minister opens the worship service with a scriptural call to worship, the
language of Psalm 95-100 regularly feature in those calls to congregational
worship and they also regularly feature in a number of hymns. And Isaac Watts
based this particular hymn, Before Jehovah’s Awesome Throne, on Psalm
100, so we’re going to look at it today.

But it’s set to a tune from the early nineteenth
century. We don’t know a whole lot about the author of the tune. The tune is
called PARK STREET; and, Bill Wymond, you
were telling me off air before we came on this morning that this is not Park
Street in Boston, it’s Park Street somewhere else.

Dr. Wymond: That’s right. It’s a Park Street known
to the composer somewhere in England. But not a Park Street known to me. Shall I
play it?

Dr. Duncan: Yes, play the tune for us because
some folks may not know PARK STREET.
[Dr. Wymond plays.]

Now, Bill, if I had to give an
evaluation of that tune, I think if I were being charitable I would say it’s
pleasant, but unremarkable. I think you may have your own opinions about
that tune. Tell me about your thoughts on PARK
STREET.

Dr. Wymond: Well, actually I don’t like this tune!
And I thought, well, maybe it’s a good idea just to go ahead and talk about that
a little bit. The tunes for me from the early nineteenth century, at least
some of them, are not strong tunes, and it had to do just with the compositional
style of the time.
There are aspects of this tune that could have made it
strong. One thing that we’ve talked about before is the fact that repeated
notes sometimes in the very beginning of a hymn can suggest strength. In this
one it starts out that way
[plays].

Dr. Duncan: Yes! Let me ask you the question
then, because I noticed that too. But it never gets strong. What
happened?
Is it the key that it’s working in? Is it the pitch that it starts
on? What happens?

Dr. Wymond: I think part of it does have to do
with the low center of pitch in this hymn. It’s a low-pitched hymn,
which in
itself is not bad, but there are a couple of other factors here that weaken the
tune, I think, and one of them is that the hymn changes keys in a way
that does not suggest strength.
You have … [plays]…and then it does
this… [plays]…and here’s the key change. It’s going to another key, which
is the key of C, and I just don’t think that’s a very strong sound. And then it
has this gesture… [plays]…which is boring to me.

Dr. Duncan: It slows it down. Whatever momentum
has been built up from the little runs, it just sort of slows down, doesn’t it?

Dr. Wymond: And then it goes… [plays]…which
I think is not very attractive, and I should give a technical reason for that.
It is just a little bit…well, we’ve said pedestrian before…but it’s
unimaginative to me. And then it ends on a very weak stroke [plays].
There’s just no strength in that.

Dr. Duncan: It’s Long Meter with a chorus, with a
repetition at the very end, and we’ve talked a little bit about Long Meter and
Short Meter and Common Meter, but this repeats the last line. And again a lot of
times when you get a chorus at the end it will actually re-emphasize something
very strong. But because the tune ends on…as it were, it’s on a sloping down

Dr. Wymond: It’s a down sound, and it just
sounds to me quite honestly as though he had to end the hymn and he had to have
enough beats in the hymn! [Dr. Duncan laughs] But he didn’t have an
original thought, and so I’m just honestly critical of this tune.

Dr. Duncan: PARK
STREET gets used ubiquitously in some hymnals to service several
different hymn texts, not unlike DUKE STREET.
You know DUKE STREET gets used over and
over to do different hymns. Why?

Dr. Wymond: I am not sure. It just must have been
known, and sometimes people go for the convenient, and I think that may be well
what happened here.

Dr. Duncan: Well, here’s my challenge: You need
to write a tune for this text, because actually the text is pretty good.

Dr. Wymond: There are a lot of other good Long
Meter tunes that it could go with, and I think I would consider marrying it with
one. The biggest objection that I have is that the tune does not suit the
exalted text. The text is really exalted, and the tune is very common.

Dr. Duncan: It really is exalted text, and
there are some…there are a couple of stanzas in here that are up there in the
top ten percent of any stanzas that Watts turned. He had an ability to in a very
few words turn a very powerful phrase, and he does that. This stanza is one of
my favorite stanzas in all of Watts’ writings. I did not check before we started
this, Bill…very often I’ll go to the hymnal site that Calvin College does, and
I’ll go to CyberHymnal to see what other tunes a particular hymn has been set to
over the course of its history. Do you happen to know, either of you, is this
the tune that this would be sung to in Britain, Derek? It is sung to
PARK STREET in Britain. Do you know of
other tunes, Bill?

Dr. Wymond: I haven’t seen it set to other tunes,
but as I say…

Dr. Duncan: That would be a real…I think we could
do a service to the church to find a more suitable tune for this very, very good
text.

Dr. Wymond: Well, now that we’ve all said this, I
guess that’s what we’re going to have to do, because I don’t think this tune is
going to survive this generation, probably, unless people such as we just don’t
go to the trouble to find a better tune.

Dr. Duncan: Listen, Bill, do you know anything
about the author of PARK STREET, this
Frederick Venua?

Dr. Wymond: Well, “bless his heart” I guess, as we
would say here in the South. I’m sorry I’ve just run down his tune. But he was
from an Italian family that lived in France, and he went to the Paris
Conservatory. These are good credentials. And he studied composition in London
and lived there. He composed for the ballet orchestra of the King’s Theater
there, and he became a member of the British Royal Society of Musicians. So he
immersed himself in the musical life of London. He retired to Exeter, and he
died there in England in 1872. So his life span was from 1778-1872, and other
than that, Frederick Marc Antoine Venua is not very well known.

Dr. Duncan: Derek, the author of most of this hymn
as we have it is Isaac Watts, but John Wesley also contributed an alternative
version of the first stanza that has been incorporated into the version that we
have in The Trinity Hymnal. You may want to remind folks who perhaps
haven’t heard our previous programs on Isaac Watts who Isaac Watts is, and why
he’s famous.

Dr. Thomas: Well, Isaac Watts of course is
probably the most important English hymn writer of all time,
I suppose,
having written hundreds and hundreds of hymns. But he was a poet in his own
right, and published a volume — perhaps more than one volume, as far as I know —
of poetry, and that poetry is still studied in eighteenth century studies. He is
the father of independency for many. His church in Southampton is still there
and still bearing witness to the gospel and to “the arid tones of Calvinism,” as
I read somewhere in these notes from somebody who obviously was not a Calvinist.

Dr. Duncan: Yes, from A.E. Bailey, who is a wonderful hymnologist, but
who hates Calvinists, yes!

Dr. Thomas: And Isaac Watts was a Calvinist with a capital “C” although
he had Episcopalian roots and was offered scholarships to study at an
Episcopalian college, which he turned down. And my independent friends in
Britain, for example, see Isaac Watts as one of the great heroes. A remarkable
story in that quite early on in his life — maybe he was in his early thirties,
perhaps — when he was taken ill and went to stay at a friend’s house and was
there for thirty years or more. I can’t find another reference as to how…yes, 36
years! You invite this fellow to stay for a few months, and he’s still there.

Dr. Duncan: He’s still there! Derek, Bill Wymond was just drawing my
attention to the original opening stanza that Isaac Watts — and I think you’ll
get a kick out of this — this is how Isaac Watts originally wrote the first
stanza. The first stanza that reads in our altered modified version (and I’ll
explain that in just a minute) in our hymnal:

“Before Jehovah’s awesome
throne,

All nations, bow with sacred
joy;

Know that the Lord is God alone,

He can create, and He destroy–He
can create, and He destroy.”

Well, this is how Watts originally wrote it:

“Sing to the Lord with joyful
voice,

Let every land His name adore.

The British Isles shall send the
noise

Across the ocean to the shore.”

Well, you Brits are pretty confident!

Dr. Thomas: I don’t know why you would change
that! What was the deal?

Dr. Wymond: Actually now, I think I like the way
the verse starts. I think it’s strong like the Psalm. But it does reflect a
tendency sometimes of British hymn writers to think of Britain as sort of the
center…

Dr. Thomas: It’s okay for you to trash the Italian
composer, Bill, but not the British writer!

Dr. Wymond: And do you know, one of my favorite
hymns is The Day You Gave Us, Lord, Is Ended. It’s a hymn by John
Ellerton, and one of the stanzas in the original of that talks about the fact
that the sun never sets on the Empire, which was a Victorian thought. I realize
that Watts was not Victorian, but anyway….

Dr. Duncan: So just remember when you tell us how
America-centric we are, you know, we learned from past masters on that, Derek!

Dr. Thomas: We should at some point slip that old
version into the bulletin and have people suddenly come across these words as
they’re singing on Sunday morning…that would be just wonderful!

Dr. Duncan: What Wesley did is take that first
line and change it to something more closely akin to what we sing now:

“Nations attend before His throne,

With solemn fear, with sacred joy;”

And that’s been turned around now to what I think is
actually improved verse,

“Before Jehovah’s awesome
throne,

All nations, bow with sacred
joy;

Know that the Lord is God alone,

He can create, and He destroy–He
can create, and He destroy.”

So it is interesting to see the modifications that even
well-known texts undergo over the course of the years.

Watts wrote this in 1705, he
modified it in 1719; Wesley made some modifications to it, an alternative
version of it was developed in 1961, and then when The Trinity Hymnal was
being edited and published in 1990, it was modified again. So this will happen
with a number of hymns. There will be significant modifications and there will
be different reasons why that happens — sometimes for theological reasons, and
sometimes it’s just reasons of verse.

Dr. Wymond: I was just going to say the title
itself where we use the word “awesome” used to be “awful,”
and I’ve thought
it’s too bad that that word has been reduced to be a negative term…awe, awesome,
awful — you know, it was a wonderful word at one time.

Dr. Duncan: Yes, and that’s a great point. Do you
remember…let me see…I’m going to mess this story up, but I think…wasn’t St.
Paul’s Cathedral in London designed by Christopher Wren? And Queen Anne would
have been the queen when it was completed. And she was brought in and asked to
give her opinion, and Christopher Wren was in the presence, and her response was
two words: “Awful” and “artificial.” Now to us today that would seem like a
crushing criticism, but for her that was the highest compliment that she
could have given
, because when she said “awful” she meant what we
meant by “awesome” — This thing evokes awe, it is full of awe
. And
“artificial” for her meant that it bore the marks of a master artisan;
that you could see the work of his artifice in every detail
. And so “awful”
and “artificial” was actually the highest compliment she could have paid to that
architect. Well, same thing with this, Bill.

And there’s another hymn we sing, How Sweet and
Awful Is the Place
, which in many of our hymnals has been changed to How
Sweet and Awesome Is the Place
. The nice side of that is that it does
allow us to use the word “awesome” like it ought to be used, as opposed to a
filler word that it has come to be in our language.

But, Derek, looking through each of the stanzas of
this hymn, there’s some wonderful theology from Psalm 100 that Watts manages to
pack into this thing. One is simply the call that you see for the nations to
worship God. Tell us a little bit about that in the Psalms. That might surprise
some people to know that in the Old Testament there was a continual call, not
just for the Jewish people or for the nation of Israel, but for all the nations
to worship God. What’s going on there?

Dr. Thomas: Well, of course it underlines that
mission or evangelism, but mission in particular, is a theme that begins with
Abraham, that the blessing of Abraham was to be a blessing upon the world and
the nations; that through Abraham the world, the nations, would come to know
God. This Hundredth Psalm of course is probably… In another version, the
Scottish version of the Hundredth Psalm would be the most popular Psalm, along
with Psalm 23…

Dr. Duncan: “All people that on earth do dwell,”
in the old Metrical Psalter…yes.

Dr. Thomas: “…sing to the Lord with cheerful
voice.” And again, the use of mirth

Dr. Duncan: Yes! “Him serve with mirth,
His praise forthtell…” — another word that has a different connotation now.

Dr. Thomas: Of course in the early church the
Hundredth Psalm was probably not the most popular Psalm. Psalm 110…

Dr. Duncan: I was just going to say Psalms 110,
118; there are other messianic Psalms that were…

Dr. Thomas: …and Psalms that were particularly
employed in the liturgy of Passover. The Psalms 113-118 were probably more
well-known than Psalm 100. Psalm 100 is a Psalm that most congregations in
Britain — at least Presbyterian congregations in Britain — could sing without
accompaniment and without a hymnbook. If you found yourself in a context, for
example at the graveside, you could always begin to sing the Twenty-third or the
Hundredth Psalm and everybody would join in because they would both know the
tune and the words. It’s interesting how this Psalm begins as aspiration that
looks perhaps forward to a day when actually this will be true, when the nations
will bow before the sovereign throne of Almighty God
.

Dr. Duncan: Derek, the second stanza does some
things really interesting to me. One is it states something that’s very clearly
in that Psalm and in this whole set of Psalms that runs from 95-100, the
expression that God in His sovereign power created us from dust
. The
repeated emphasis that He is the sovereign, almighty, creator God just comes
through that whole set of Psalms. But then it does something really interesting
at the end of the stanza:

“And when like wandering sheep we
strayed,

He brought us to His fold again…”

and there’s almost that sort of new covenant perspective on
the Psalms that is so typical of Watts in the Psalms of David imitated, where
you have almost this evangelistic and new covenant and gospel twist on the
Psalm. Any reflections on that second stanza and what Watts does there?

Dr. Thomas: We’ve spoken several times, of course,
about how Watts Christianized the Psalms
— infused into the Psalms a
fulfilled theology of the New Testament in terms of sometimes very specific
references to Christ and the gospel that are perhaps only embryonic in the
Psalms themselves.

I’m not a fan of the repeated line at the end. I find
it a little stilted, especially the strength of “He can create and He destroy.”
I’m just not sure about that. But…

Dr. Duncan: You think it would be…unrepeated
would be more forceful. That’s an interesting thought.

Dr. Thomas: And I think you’d get a better tune
for it. If you repeat the words, you’ve obviously got to repeat…well, especially
since Bill has spoken about the unremarkableness of the…

Dr. Duncan: Well, this is the point. If you’re a
pastor out there and you’re thinking, “Boy, this is a great hymn text,” if you
lop off that repetition you’ve certainly got more Long Meter tunes that you can
choose from than you can choose from Long Meter tunes with a built-in
repetition. So there are for sure more options there.

Derek, one thing I want to comment about the third
stanza and then hasten on to the fourth stanza, because we don’t have a whole
lot of time, but

“We are His people, we His care,

Our souls and
all our mortal frame…”

That’s a beautiful and comprehensive declaration of God’s
providential watchcare over us.

Dr. Thomas: Indeed. I suspect that these are things
that would need to be brought out. And I’m quite a fan of introducing a hymn and
at least saying a sentence about what we’re about to sing. I think we assume
everybody understands what they’re singing, but that’s a false assumption.

Dr. Duncan: Yes, I think so, too.

Dr. Thomas: And you know, for somebody who’s
passing through trials and tribulations, those are tender words, that we
are…well, to follow the metaphor of the previous stanza of sheep, and it’s
continued now of course in this stanza that we are brought into His fold again,
and God as our Shepherd reflecting a link, in fact, between the Hundredth Psalm
and the Twenty-third Psalm.

Dr. Duncan: That’s right. And then the fourth
stanza says,

“We’ll crowd your gates with
thankful songs,

High as the
heavens our voices raise;

And earth,
with her ten thousand tongues,

Shall fill
Your courts with sounding praise.”

And there you see that missionary emphasis again — all the
languages of earth crowding Your courts with sounding praise. It’s a
beautiful…it’s almost sort of an O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing kind of
thing.

Dr. Thomas: Right, and there’s a sort of glimpse
of For All the Saints in there, too, that hymn that we love so much. It’s
actually beautiful poetry. I think it’s probably the best…I know you like the
last stanza, but the poetry of that fourth stanza is not…I mean, some poetry can
be high-faluting, it can be over the top…but there’s a cadence:

“We’ll crowd your gates with
thankful songs,

High as the
heavens our voices raise;

And earth,
with her ten thousand tongues,

Shall fill
Your courts with sounding praise.”

Dr. Duncan: Yes, I love how Watts manages to be
poetic and straightforward at the same time! I’ve never been able to match that
kind of ability. Here’s the fifth stanza:

“Wide as the world is Your command,

Vast as
eternity Your love;

Firm as a rock
Your truth must stand,

When rolling
years shall cease to move.”

That’s a strong textual ending to this hymn, don’t you
think?

Well, Bill, let’s hear Before
Jehovah’s Awesome Throne
, and we’ll start thinking about what tune we want
to set this to.

Dr. Wymond: This is “Hymns of the Faith” brought to
you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church, and singing this hymn this morning
is Lauren Randall.

“Before Jehovah’s awesome
throne,

All nations, bow with sacred
joy;

Know that the Lord is God alone,

He can create, and He destroy–He
can create, and He destroy.

“His sovereign power, without
our aid,

Made us lf dust and formed us
men;

And when like wandering sheep we
strayed,

He brought us to His fold
again–He brought us to His fold again.

“We are His people, we His care,

Our souls and all our mortal
frame;

What lasting honors shall we
rear,

Almighty Maker, to Your
name?–Almighty Maker, to Your name?

“We’ll crowd your gates with
thankful songs,

High as the heavens our voices
raise;

And earth, with her ten thousand
tongues,

Shall fill Your courts with
sounding praise–

shall fill
Your courts with sounding praise.

“Wide as the world is Your
command,

Vast as eternity Your love;

Firm as a rock Your truth must
stand,

When rolling years shall cease
to move–when rolling years shall cease to move.”

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