Hymns of the Faith
“How Firm a Foundation”
Isaiah 40-42
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”….. And now here with “Hymns of the
Faith” is Dr. Ligon Duncan.
Dr. Duncan: Thank you,
Bill Wymond. This is Ligon Duncan, along with Derek Thomas, for “Hymns of the
Faith,” a program in which we have the joy and privilege of talking about the
great hymns of the Christian church — a true deposit of faith and of joy that we
enjoy together as we sing Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day in Christian
congregations. These, of course, are English-speaking songs that
English-speaking congregations all over the English-speaking world will utilize
some of this rich treasury of theological devotion and doxology. We’ve just had
a joy the last number of months studying some of the great English-speaking
hymns that have been used, not just over the last 500 years, but even longer
than that — hymns that were originally written in Latin or some other language,
that have been translated into English and used in congregations like ours, the
First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, and dozens and dozens of other different
traditions.
Today, we’ve got
the joy, Derek, of looking at a wonderful old hymn that dates from the later
part of the eighteenth century, How Firm a Foundation.
We often think of this song as a song about the word of God, and certainly the
first stanza gives a wonderful declaration of the believer’s faith being based
on, founded on, the sure and certain word of God and upon the person of the Lord
Jesus Christ. But really, the song as a whole addresses the believer’s security
in a variety of biblical truths, and I’m looking forward to talking with you and
Bill about it today.
But first let me just
say, Good morning!
Dr. Thomas: Good
morning! I actually was thinking in that wonderful introduction you gave…my mind
went to not just English-speaking, but our Korean friends, you know; a sizeable,
sizeable church in South Korea especially. You know they’ve translated many of
these English hymns into Korean, and actually sing them to Western tunes.
Dr. Duncan: Oh, and
they have really taken to them. I remember a friend, an acquaintance of ours in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — an English-speaking person — telling his Korean
students, “You really must scrap these English hymns and write your own,” and
they said, “Why would we want to do that? We like these!” And they were probably
as ardent supporters of what you and I will know as the old blue Trinity
Hymnal as any English-speaking congregation around! It really is an
interesting exercise in how these things sometimes transcend cultures, because
certainly the native music in Korea would be very, very different from sort of
the English-speaking hymn tradition, and yet they’ve taken to it.
Dr. Thomas: You know I
teach among the Koreans a couple of times a year. They not only have translated
the hymns, but they use the same tunes, so that when they sing I can sing the
same hymn in English, and my Korean brother next to me sing it in Korean. But I
don’t have to stand there not knowing what’s going on; I just sing it in
English! It certainly does challenge the contextualization gurus about the
translation and integration of so-called “Western” text into an Eastern mindset.
Dr. Duncan: Well, I’ll
tell you…in that context, too, Derek, I was just talking to a mutual friend of
ours, Dr. Kim, a couple of weeks ago about this very thing, and he was saying
when Korea came to Christ (and there was a massive coming to Christ, as you’ve
already indicated, in Korea, beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth
century and extending into the early part of the twentieth century), he stressed
that Korea came to Christ from paganism, from real honest-to-goodness
paganism, so there were no cultural artifacts that could be sort of redeemed
(as we hear so many of our friends speak of theologically) to be put to use in
the Christian churches. So they were ready to grab hold of robust, monotheistic,
explicitly Christian, exalting the uniqueness of Christ, affirming Christian
doctrine over against the dominant pagan culture.
Dr. Thomas: For anyone
interested in pursuing that a little, there was a marvelous little book
published probably 25 years ago now, called The Korean Pentecost, written
by somebody called Hunt…first name escapes me now. It was published by The
Banner of Truth, but it’s just a little paperback describing the extraordinary
revival (in the biblical sense of that term), the outpouring of God’s Spirit on
South Korea.
Dr. Duncan: Well,
Derek, I want to go ahead and jump into the text of this song, because we’ve got
a whole range of theological doctrines on which the believer’s assurance is
based in the text of this song. And I want Bill to tell us a little bit about
the traditional American melody to which we sing this hymn, and also about an
alternative tune to which this hymn is often sung, both in Britain and America.
But I want to start with you, Derek, if you could tell us about this gentleman.
Dr. Thomas: Oh, yes.
John Rippon was — I guess he was an
eighteenth century Baptist.. You know, if you studied English Baptist history,
for example, Dr. Rippon would figure largely in that. But in his gathering of
hymns…and I guess he’s one of a number of people who in the eighteenth century,
and Bill Wymond will know more on this than I will, but in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, various collections of hymns were published. [A
Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors, by John Rippon
(1787)].
You know we think
of hymns as being in hymn books, but these were printed in magazines as hymns
that weren’t necessarily sung on any wide basis. They had to be collected
together, and Dr. Rippon is well known for having collected a number of hymns,
from which the popularity of some of them, like this one, I think, emerges.
Dr. Duncan: And this
collection of hymns included Watts’ hymns, and then this one. We really are not
absolutely sure who wrote the text, but we think that a man named Keene wrote
the text. But Rippon is the one who gathered these things into a hymn book that
apparently was widely used in the Baptist churches into the nineteenth century.
Dr. Thomas: Right. And
I said “English Baptist” history, but Rippon’s selections of hymns immediately
became popular in places like Philadelphia and New York; and interestingly
enough, this particular hymn, “How Firm a Foundation, ye saints of the
Lord…” is not a very popular hymn in Britain. It may be…don’t let me be
mistaken! It may be in Baptist circles in Britain; that’s possible. It
certainly isn’t in any Anglican hymnbook in Britain. For example, in a
collection of the most popular hymns in an Anglican text, this one is not going
to appear there.
Dr. Duncan: That’s so
true. The American tune fits at a couple of points that I think help the singer
to emphasize to himself a couple of the comforting truths that are set forth in
this passage. There’s a place in the tune where it allows you to sort of
re-emphasize a phrase that you’ve previously stated.
Dr. Thomas: The tune —
I’d actually never sung it to this tune until I came here — We would have sung
it to the Christmas carol tune,
ADESTE FIDELIS,
but it’s also called
PORTUGESE
…something like that.
Whenever I sing this tune, I’m actually reminded of Dvorak’s Ninth “New
World” Symphony, which has that American folk tune…that if I were to sing
it, which I won’t now…but it would be very familiar to you. [Dr. Wymond plays
tune.] That’s it! And it sort of goes back to an early American history for me,
as I sing this tune.
Dr. Duncan: Well, the
tune must have been used on the frontier in the early part of the nineteenth
century during the revivals, Bill. And I know the particular hymn text that I
have in front of me dates it to a compilation of hymns from 1832. But that’s a
good segue for you to tell us a little bit about the tune and about some of the
things that the tune enables us to emphasize in the text.
Dr. Wymond: Well, the
tune name is
FOUNDATION, but it actually had another
name, which was
BELLEVUE. It appeared in a pamphlet
compilation called “The Cluster of Spiritual Songs, Divine Hymns, and Sacred
Poems” that was put together by a Baptist minister whose name was Jesse Mercer,
and he published that first in 1817. So this is sort of that magazine or
pamphlet that you’re talking about that was done frequently, not only with
texts, but with hymn tunes.
Dr. Duncan: Is that
the Jesse Mercer for whom Mercer University is named?
Dr. Wymond: I was
wondering that myself.
Dr. Wymond: But anyway,
I think that’s an interesting phenomenon that was happening during that time.
But the tune is such a basic American folk song kind of tune that has a minimum
number of notes in it, and it resembles the tune that you were talking about —
the spiritual that was in the Dvorak that we were talking about. But just listen
to this tune… [Plays tune.] I just played that much to show how simple it
is. That’s why it resembles the “Going Home” [plays]…very, very simple
kind of tune, and it does get more intense as it goes up in pitch toward the
end, where the text also gets more intense…[plays]…and so on. And then it
just finishes out to the end.
I like this tune
because I’m pretty sure that it is one of the Sacred Harp tunes. The Sacred Harp1
was an interesting phenomenon in the life of our country, and affected the
church so much. The Sacred Harp denotes both a kind of musical notation, but
also a group of people who still to this day in our part of the country get
together and sing these old hymns and these old tunes. They had a unique musical
system that used shaped notes. Now, some folks may have seen hymnals that had
these kind of fancy-looking notes (diamond shaped, round, ice cream cone shaped,
various shapes like that), and that was a system that was based on the do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do
system of seven different kinds of shapes, so that if people didn’t read pitches
they could read the shapes of these notes.
Dr. Thomas: I have
never heard this!
Dr. Wymond: You have
not?
Dr. Thomas: I am
“gob-smacked,” as they say! I must see this!
Dr. Wymond: I must show
you a shaped-note hymnal. Some only had four different shapes and they just
repeated the shapes, and that’s probably more common in the Sacred Harp
tradition. But these Sacred Harp folks would get together and they would
practice their shapes first, so they could get the tunes, and then they would
add the words, and they would sing all day long. Sometimes they would sing as
many as ninety hymns! You had to be rather athletic to get all the way through
this… and these were in four parts, unaccompanied, and they would sit around
oftentimes in a square shape and then a leader would be in the center and would
lead them through. And they had schools where they taught this kind of reading
of music, so that people could pass it on and could participate. It was really
just a very wholesome kind of thing.
Sacred Harp is
often found in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Florida (parts of Florida), and so
on like that. I remember as a boy reading announcements about how the Sacred
Harp folks would get together on a Sunday afternoon in the courthouse, or
something, and sing. So it’s very much a part of our tradition.
This tune
undoubtedly was a tune that they used. They used the OLD HUDREDTH tune [plays]
that we have probably already talked about, and used a lot of the tunes that are
more folk-like. And this tune certainly would have been a favorite of theirs.
They sang lustily (or should I say strongly?) and had a lot of energy in their
singing.
Dr. Thomas: And yet
this tune is an evening tune. I imagine them sitting around a campfire…you know,
sort of “Home on the Range” kind of idea…in Montana, barbecuing beef, and beans,
and….
Dr. Wymond: It’s a
Southern tune! I’m sorry! You’re going to have to get another image seeing them
sitting around on their verandas fanning themselves, or something like that! [Laughter]
Dr. Thomas: But I can
imagine, you know, in an evening, folk singing this tune. It has a folksy
element.
Dr. Wymond: And I like
the simplicity of it. It has a happy sound to me. It has to do, I think, with
the main intervals that are there — a lot of thirds, which I think are very,
very happy intervals — and so it’s just a very pleasant thing.
Dr. Thomas: And the
text is just exquisite, mainly because a lot of it is taken from Isaiah 40, 41,
42…that section. “When you pass through the deep waters, they shall not overtake
you; when you pass through the fire, it shall not hurt you or consume you,” and
especially the last stanza:
“The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to his foes.
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to
shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.”
Dr. Duncan: Yes. I
love hymns that preach the gospel to us, and that just press home the basis of
the soul’s security in Christ — and boy! does this hymn do it!
Dr. Thomas: I think
there’s something very moving about that triple “never” in the closing line,
about the security of the believer.
Dr. Duncan: Yes, and
there are several powerful repetitions, and of course it starts in the second
line of that last stanza: “I will not, I will not desert to his foes.” And the
music helps with this traditional American hymnody, because you’ve just sung
“The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,” and then “I will not, I will
not…” and the music just lets you do that. It lets you repeat that and assert it
again. Like so many of the hymns that we’ve seen already, this hymn involves the
believer preaching to himself, even as he or she lifts up a prayer or a praise
to God.
Let’s just walk through
the text real quickly, Derek.
If you look at the
first stanza, the firm foundation of the believer’s faith is based on the word
of God, “…in His excellent word,” and on the Lord Jesus Christ:
“What more can He say, than to you He has
said,
To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?”
So the word of God in the
Lord Jesus Christ.
But then we move to
the second line, and here’s where you hear the echoes of the prophet Isaiah —
(or, as those of you who speak the King’s English say, “I-sii-ah”):
“Fear not, I am with you, O be not dismayed;
For I am your God, and will still give you
aid;”
[…which is virtually a
rendering of the text in a slightly more poetic form]
“I’ll strengthen you, help you, and cause you
to stand,
Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.”
So, there, Derek, what’s
the security the believer’s based on?
Dr. Thomas: Well, on
the Lord and not on ourselves! You know when we pass through trials (which is
where it’s going to go to), we may be at an end of ourselves, and our own
strength may be failing. But our strength is in the Lord.
But there are covenantal overtones, of
course, to the language, aren’t there? “I am
with you.” That refrain goes through Scripture:
“I will never leave you nor forsake you”… “Emanuel, God with us”… very
covenantal expressions.
Dr. Duncan: Not only
is there explicit trust in the Lord to preserve us in the midst of these
difficulties, but at the end of that stanza is the affirmation that we are
upheld by His righteous, omnipotent hand. So we’re being asked to remember that
God is not only just and righteous, but He is absolutely all-powerful and
unmatched in His might by anyone or anything in this universe, so that the
believer’s faith and confidence is founded upon those realities.
Dr. Thomas: You know,
theoretically one can imagine a deity who may have the will but lack the power,
or may have the power but lack the will; and in this case both His will and
power are determined to save. But the use of the word righteous seems to
imply that if God were not to do this, He would be doing something unrighteous
and immoral; that having committed himself to our salvation through faith in
Christ, He cannot therefore break His word.
Dr. Wymond: And it’s
interesting to me today to see how people turn to a contrary thought when they
are supposedly giving comfort. You’ll go to a funeral today in a tragic
situation, and the minister will say, “Well, God is so sorry that this happened.
He wouldn’t have had it happen for anything, and He grieves with you,” and so on
like that. But there’s no real comfort in His lack of power, if that were the
case.
Dr. Duncan: I think
that’s an important observation, that the move the Bible makes and the move that
this historic hymnody…which interestingly still persists in a day and age, Bill,
where that happens all the time…. In other words, you’ll have a sermon that says
God was not involved, and then what will they turn around and sing? They’ll turn
around and sing something that actually is sort of standing up and directly
contradicting what the preacher has just said. The preacher will say, “Oh, God
couldn’t do anything about this; He’s really sorry. Now let’s turn in our
hymnals to No. 94 and sing How Firm a Foundation,” in which we affirm
that God’s righteous, omnipotent right hand is upholding all His people!
Dr. Thomas: There’s
another side, of course, to the theology here, and that is its effect on us. The
fourth stanza uses in the very close of it…let me pick it up:
“The flame shall not hurt you; I only design
Your dross to consume and your gold to
refine.”
In my head is “The
Refiner’s Fire” from Handel’s Messiah, and the reference to John the
Baptist, perhaps. But to the Hebrews 12
passage, probably, that trials are a discipline meant to remove the
dross, impurities, so that what is left is the pure substance.
Dr. Duncan: Well, and
that theme has started in the third stanza, which comforts us in the midst of
our trials by saying “I will be with you.” It’s a promise of the presence
of God; God’s nearness; God’s watchcare over
us not at a distance, but near us. And, then listen:
“Your
troubles to bless, and sanctify to you your deepest distress.”
So that God’s purposes in
sanctification are operative even in the most difficult of our trials.
I don’t think any
of the three of us can hear those words from Isaiah (and these are just
following through God’s word from that great prophet) without thinking of Paul
Stephenson, because we sang from that passage in Isaiah at Paul’s funeral. And
to see hundreds and hundreds of young people out in the congregation for that
funeral affirming exactly what this hymn is affirming here was a heartening
sight to me, and I’m sure it was…in fact, I’ve talked with Paul and with
Jennifer and the family, and they’ve affirmed how encouraging it was to them to
hear these words, these truths.
Bill, when do we
need to sing this?
Dr. Wymond: We need to
sing this in every situation, that’s for sure! But even in old age…this stanza
says:
“Even down to old age all my people shall
prove
My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love…”
And when they have gray
hair, still like lambs they will be borne in My bosom.
Dr. Thomas: It’s more
indelicate than that, and it’s very sensitive to me, because it speaks about
“hoary hairs shall their temples adorn”; not the crown, because there’s no hair
there at all! [Laughter] It’s only on the side of their heads that they
have gray hair.
Dr. Wymond: Well, with
that very deep thought, why don’t we turn now and listen to this wonderful hymn.
Ben Roberson will sing for us, How Firm a Foundation.
“How firm a foundation, you saints of the
Lord,
Is laid for you faith in His excellent Word!
What m ore can He say than to you He has said,
To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?
“Fear not, I am with you, O be not dismayed;
For I am your God, and will still give you
aid;
I’ll strengthen you, h help you, and cause you
to stand,
Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.
“When through the deep waters I call you to
go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
For I will be with you, your troubles to
bless,
And sanctify to you your deepest distress.
“When through fiery trials your pathway shall
lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be your
supply;
The flame shall not hurt you; I only design
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine.
“E’en down to old age all my people shall
prove
My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love;
And when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn
Like lambs they shall still in my bosom be
borne.
“The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to his foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to
shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.”
Dr. Wymond: This has
been “Hymns of the Faith,” brought to you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian
Church.
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1. Sacred Harp
https://www.fasola.org/