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Hymns of the Faith: O Worship the King


Hymns of the Faith


“O Worship the King”

Psalm 104

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 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, and we’re delighted today to be talking with
you about hymns of the faith. “Hymns of the Faith” is a radio program in which
we explore the devotional treasures of the ages that have been deposited for us
in this grand repository of sung praise of the people of God, the hymnal. And
the hymnal, unfortunately, is something that has been lost on many in our
generation as churches have moved away from using hymnals and singing the songs
of the last twenty centuries, and it’s our joy and delight to explore this
treasury together.

Over the last number of months we have explored some
of the best songs that are now sung–some of them having been translated into and
some of them written in English. So although we are concentrating on
English-speaking hymnody, hymnody that’s been sung in English-speaking churches
from Britain to America to Australia and around the world in the English
language, but some of which come to us from other languages.

But today we’re actually going to be talking about a
hymn which is based on a Psalm, which has always, ever, and only been sung in
English, although no doubt it has been translated into other languages now. It’s
a song called O Worship the King, and the lyric, the text, of this
hymn is based on Psalm 104. And, Derek, it was written by a man named Robert
Grant
, who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, but who served the British
Empire in India. Good morning, my friend! Tell us just a little bit about Robert
Grant.

Dr. Thomas: Well, Sir Robert Grant, as he
became…born as you say in Scotland in 1785. His father was a Member of
Parliament and director of the most influential East India Company, and that of
course had significant ramifications for the spread of missions in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A lot of missionaries went on the
tail of…I’m not sure what sort of metaphor to use with the East India Company,
but it was a good way of getting to various parts of the world which otherwise
would not have been possible. So there was a connection between this East India
Company and missions.

Dr. Duncan: And the East India Company, I think
it has to be said, didn’t have wholly pure motives in their cooperation.
Sometimes they were desirous of having chaplains along just for the sake of
keeping order on the ship amongst the crew, and then sometimes they were
desirous of having chaplains along because it sort of kept the natives from
attacking them as the gospel was going forward.

Dr. Thomas: Right, and there’s some evidence that
some (like Carey, for example) in India were critical of the trading policies of
the East India Company, especially with natives and slave labor and so on, and
that caused a rift between the various missions and the use of East India
Company…not that there was much alternative.

Dr. Duncan: Right. I don’t think we can fault or
blame our Christian forebears for utilizing that particular way of getting into
parts of the world that Christian missionaries just would not have had open to
them in any other way than through those means, but there were certainly
tensions that were brought about by cooperating with what was essentially a
business enterprise that wasn’t always concerned about the best interests of the
people that it was trading with. And by the way, that’s not just the British
East India Company: we could talk about the Dutch East India Company, and we
could talk about the other colonial powers. In fact, you can make an argument, I
think, that the British East India Company had as good a track record of
dealings as anybody, if not better, in that time frame. But definitely that was
a major way that the gospel spread.

Dr. Thomas: Robert Grant goes to Cambridge
University, graduates with… I think he’s about 20-21 or so, in 1806; begins to
practice law. Some twenty years later, he was elected to Parliament, following
in his father’s footsteps, and five years after that becomes Privy Counselor,
and in 1834 (another decade or so), he’s named the Governor of Bombay (so he
escalates very quickly up that civil servant scale), and dies in Dapooree in
Western India. So, he’s in Bombay and in Dapooree in Western India, and dies in
1838, so he was only actually in India for four years.

While he was a Member of Parliament, he introduced a
bill to remove the restrictions imposed upon the Jews. One of the historians,
McCauley, made his maiden speech in support of that measure. So–Sir Robert
Grant.

Dr. Duncan: And just to follow up on that–because
I’m going to ask Bill Wymond to play this song in just a second, at least to the
tune that we sing it to in the United States, and we may even compare it to the
one that you sing it to or have sung it to in Britain, Derek.

But before we do that, just a comment about Robert
Grant. I did not know what you just told me about Robert Grant and the law in
Parliament about reducing or removing some of the restrictions that had been put
on the Jewish people, and that would indicate…. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the early 1800’s, you begin to have a number of British
Christians that are deeply concerned for the welfare and for the conversion of
the Jewish people, and presumably that motion that he made in Parliament may
well have been as a part of a goodwill expression to the Jewish people that
reflected a deep concern for their well-being and for their salvation. And so
you begin to see Christians sending missions to the Jewish people, and then
taking up the cause of the Jewish Diaspora.

There was no… the modern nation state that we call
Israel didn’t exist until 1948, so there’s obviously no single nation. The Jews
were spread throughout Europe and all over the world, and in many countries had
special restrictions on them. I couldn’t tell you exactly when that movement
began to grow, but I do know that in the early nineteenth century you have a lot
of Christians concerned about the well-being of the Jewish people and advocating
for them, and you begin to see significant conversions of Jewish people to
Christianity — like Alfred Edersheim. Was he converted under one of John
Duncan’s ministries in Germany. Then ends up writing some very famous books and
such.

But we’re looking at Robert Grant’s beautiful hymn
based on Psalm 104, O Worship the King. Now, Bill, in the United States,
ever since I was a child I’ve sung this to a tune which we think is
LYONS as opposed to “lions.” It’s
depending on whether that’s from a French origin or an English origin. It may be
pronounced one way or the other. We sing it to this, but in a minute I want you
to play it to the one that it’s sung to in Britain. But just so the people can
hear the tune in your head as we talk about it, here’s O Worship the King.
[Dr. Wymond plays.] It’s a simple and majestic tune, Bill, and we use it very
often to open our worship services.

Dr. Wymond: I like this particular tune — and I’ll
talk a little bit about the composer of the tune, whose name was Michael
Haydn.
But I like this tune because the words are majestic and they are
extolling God’s glorious nature, and every phrase
of this tune rises as the things that are being exclaimed about God as King are
laid out
. And so each line goes up like that [plays]…and it really
has this wonderful climax [plays]….as it talks about “the Ancient of Days.”
See how it keeps going up the scale
?… There was a little
eighteenth-century effect right there that occurs twice in the hymn — that
little dotted sound. So that’s a period kind of thing more than anything else.
But again, the tune doesn’t do anything dramatic as far as the intervals are
concerned. They are fairly close together and so it makes a very singable tune.

The other tune that you were talking about is the
tune which is called HANOVER, and that
tune goes like this. It’s actually an earlier English tune by William Croft.
[Plays.] Now, I like that tune, and if I compare the two tunes I actually like
that tune — partly also because of the harmony that’s with it. I think it has
particular harmonic interest. It’s an older tune, and so it follows some of the
patterns tune-wise that tunes that were written in the earlier days would
follow. But I think that for the text of O Worship the King that the
LYONS
tune works a lot better. It has a little bit more of a progression that goes
along with the thoughts of majesty
. Shall I tell you something about
the composer?

Dr. Duncan: Oh, please! I was just going to ask
that. What’s the relationship between Johann Michael Haydn and Franz Josef
Haydn?

Dr. Wymond: Well, Johann Michael Haydn is the
younger brother of Josef Haydn
, who is such a famous composer out of the
Austrian school, and we know him because he wrote a lot of wonderful symphonies
and also because he wrote The Creation, which is a glorious choral work
about the creation of the world by God. But Johann Michael Haydn was born in
1737, in a small Austrian village which is near the Hungarian border. His father
was a wheelwright, perhaps the mayor of this little small community. His mother
had been a cook in one of the palaces there. Neither one of them read music, but
the father was very interested in music and made sure that his sons all learned
music.

Both Johann and his brother, Josef, sang in the
cathedral choir of St. Stephen’s there in Vienna, which was a wonderful choir
and a great place for them to get musical training because they not only would
sing in the choir, but they would be taught all the rudiments of music and
instruments as well. So it was a really thoroughgoing musical education that
they got, just as the boys who sing in the Westminster Abbey Choir or the King’s
College Choir in England would get. And it’s said that Michael was actually the
better singer than his older brother, and perhaps in some ways a better
musician. All these things are relative, of course, I realize; but,
nevertheless…

Both of them profited so much from being in this, and
this training that they had set the course of their lives. And for Michael, his
was to be a church musician all of his life. Mainly he served in Salzburg for
about 43 years. Salzburg was where Mozart was, and they were pretty much
contemporaneous. Unfortunately, it’s said that the Mozart women did not like
Michael’s wife, and so there was some antipathy between the families. However,
Mozart appreciated Michael’s music and used several of his compositions in
his own works. That was a really common thing to do, to borrow from each other
tunes and other things like that. Nobody thought that you were stealing at that
time.

Dr. Duncan: To illustrate that from a fictional
account, some people may remember the movie Amadeus, which has all manner
of historical inaccuracies in it. But there’s one scene where a composer comes
to court and plays a really simple little boring tune, and Mozart on the spot
composes an entire new piece around this boring little tune and it is absolutely
glorious by the time he’s done with it! And that’s actually not uncommon for
that period, to take a tune or a riff or a line and then just build something
else around it.

Dr. Wymond: Absolutely! The one thing that we don’t
do now as musicians and as church musicians is to improvise. But in Europe
there’s still this great tradition of improvising, so that many of the preludes
and postludes are improvised on the spot, either on a well-known tune or on a
theme that just comes to the musician’s mind. So it was a great gift and a great
skill that they had.

Dr. Duncan: Derek, in looking at the text of this
hymn — and as Bill has already indicated, it’s a great, great text of praise
to God:

“O worship the King all-glorious
above,

O gratefully sing His power and
His love…”

And then just as Bill was saying, this expanding crescendo

“Our shield and Defender, the
Ancient of Days,

Pavilioned in splendor and
girded with praise.”

The line just soars as it picks up at that point and rises.
The text is Grant’s meditation on (in part) Psalm 104, and of course there had
been a long tradition of singing Psalms in all of the British churches —
English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish — and Sir Robert Grant would have been very
familiar with William Kethe’s rendering of Psalm 104:

“My soul, praise the Lord, speak
good of His name.

O Lord, our great God, how doest
thou appear?

So passing in glory that great
is Thy fame,

Honor and majesty in Thee shine
most clear.”

And you can almost hear the rhythm and cadence in
which he writes O Worship the King out of Kethe’s poetry–although I have
to say that I think Grant’s poetry is much better. Kethe may be a little more
faithful to Psalm 104 in his meter, but Grant’s text is really, really good from
the standpoint of the poetry. You want to comment a little bit about the Psalm
104? The metrical versions, as opposed to this more paraphrastic thing that
Grant has done?

Dr. Thomas: Well, of course you know I think you
have to put yourself in the mindset of those for whom only Psalms should be sung
in worship, and therefore once you’re in that mindset, how do you versify the
Hebrew Psalms?
You know — how do you sing, say, from the Geneva translation
of the Psalms? Or how do you sing from other King James translations of the
Psalms? Well, you can’t unless you chant them, so you have to versify them in
some way. And in doing that you’re actually — it’s one of our arguments
against what they’re doing — you’re actually moving away from the original in
order for it to rhyme
.

It would be highly unusual for
something that rhymes in Hebrew to rhyme in English without maybe changing
significantly what’s being said, but keeping within the spirit of it, which is
what Grant is doing. And maybe what Kethe is trying not to do, because the verse
does sound rather… [Dr. Duncan laughs…] You know, it ends…not with the word that
you expect it to end with! And he’s probably just trying to keep as faithful to
the text as possible. [He just needs to loosen up a little! Because even what
he’s doing isn’t accurate to the Hebrew text, I’m pretty sure.] It is an
interesting issue, and we’ve talked about it several times now in the course of
these discussions, where a Psalm text is used as a hymn

This is a great opening hymn. I can’t think of
anything better to begin a worship service on a Sunday morning than “O worship
the King, all glorious above.”

Dr. Duncan: Derek, share just a little. You’ve
got a little Trinitarian theory about hymnody in churches like the ones that you
and I have been in all of our lives, where you will typically have four or so
songs of praise sung by the congregation. You feel that there needs to be a
regular emphasis upon the one true Triune God, but also on each of the three
persons of the Trinity. Talk about that just a little bit, what your theory is.

Dr. Thomas: Well, the doctrine of the Trinity
is a central doctrine to Christianity
. It’s what distinguishes
Christianity from every other religion.
But I fear that if the church forgot
the doctrine of the Trinity tomorrow, it would continue to do what it’s always
been doing; and I’m not sure that we’re as self-conscious in our Trinitarianism
as our forefathers were, or as some of our great ecumenical creeds are.

I think one way to ensure that we are Trinitarian
and biblical is to begin with a hymn that extols God, and principally God the
Father. The third hymn, because it usually comes before the reading of Scripture
and the sermon, is, I think, suitably a hymn to the Holy Spirit, as one of the
works of the Holy Spirit is inspiration of Scripture and illumination of
Scripture. And I think then I would argue that the second hymn should be a hymn
extolling the person and work of Christ. So you’ve got the flow of Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. I don’t think I’d want to do that every service, but I think
that is a good practical way of ensuring the Trinitarian and God-centeredness of
worship, but also of maintaining in our self-awareness and consciousness the
doctrine of the Trinity.

Dr. Duncan: So the flow would be a focus on the
Father, then on the Son, then on the Holy Spirit, so that the congregation was
thinking through the reality of the one true God who eternally exists in three
persons.

Dr. Thomas: Indeed. And then to close the service
with something, obviously, that flows from the sermon that’s just gone before,
perhaps; or perhaps something that’s more doxological, which would be a good way
to end a service.

Dr. Duncan: There are songs in which there are
phrases that catch in my heart that come back to me on numerous occasions,
whether it be when I’m called upon to pray in public or when I’m encountering a
particular difficult circumstance in life, and the final two stanzas of this
song and the first stanza of this song are stanzas that stick in my mind. We’ve
read the first stanza to

O Worship the King, but the final two stanzas are:

“Frail children of dust, and
feeble as frail,

In You…

[and now this is directed towards God]…

“In You do we
trust…”

[not in ourselves, but in You, in God do we trust],

“…nor find You
to fail;

Your mercies how tender, how
firm to the end,

Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer,
and Friend!”

And that phrase, “our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and
Friend,” comes back to me. It captures different aspects of who the one true God
is. He’s our Maker (He made us, He created us); He’s our Defender (He protects
us, He providentially watches over us); He’s our Redeemer (He saved us from our
sins and from His just judgment and condemnation of us); and, He is our friend
(He is our God and we are His people). He is our great and good Shepherd, who
makes us to lie down in green pastures and leads us beside still waters.

It reminds me a little of that
famous hymn — it’s a hymn that you love about the Lord Jesus Christ — that
extols Jesus as our Master and as our Friend: “How Sweet the Name of Jesus
Sounds
in a believer’s ear.” And so that phrase, “our Maker, Defender,
Redeemer, and Friend” just rings in my ears and in my heart. So are there other
phrases from this hymn that catch you like that, Derek? Or do you want to think
about that one for a moment?

Dr. Thomas: Well, I was just thinking…and we
mentioned this before…in hymnody one can transgress the boundary of what is a
hymn. And it’s a difficult line to actually put down in black and white as to
what we mean by that. But sometimes you sing certain words that are more poetic.
In verse 4,

“Your bountiful care what tongue
can recite?

It breathes in the air; it shines
in the light;

It streams from the hills; it
descends to the plain;

And sweetly distils in the dew
and the rain.”

For me, that’s just right on the edge of what is the poetry
art, but it’s…once you know this stanza, you cannot forget it.

Dr. Duncan: Let’s hear this great hymn, Bill.

“O worship the King all-glorious
above,

O gratefully sing His power and
His love;

Our shield and Defender, the
Ancient of Days,

Pavilioned in splendor and
girded with praise.

“O tell of His might, O sing of
His grace,

Whose robe is the light, whose
canopy space.

His chariots of wrath the deep
thunderclouds form,

And dark is His path on the
wings of the storm.

“The earth with its store of
wonders untold,

Almighty, your power has founded
of old;

Has ‘stablished it fast by a
changeless decrees,

And round it has cast, like a
mantle, the sea.

“Your bountiful care what tongue
can recite?

It breathes in the air; it
shines in the light;

It streams from the hills; it
descends to the plain;

And sweetly distils in the dew
and the rain.

“Frail children of dust, and
feeble as frail,

In You do we trust, nor find You
to fail;

Your mercies how tender, how
firm to the end,

Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer,
and Friend!

“O measureless Might! Ineffable
Love!

While angels delight to hymn You
above,

The humbler creation, though
feeble their lays,

With true adoration shall lisp
to Your praise.”

Dr. Wymond: This has been
“Hymns of the Faith,” brought to you by Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church,
with Ben Roberson as our soloist this morning.