Through Every Age, Eternal God
Isaac Watts, 1719, & A Special Offer
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Now, to the Hymn of the Week!
In my discussion of our Word of the Week, eternal, I brought up the difference between eternity and perpetuity, and I wondered how difficult it was for the sacred authors of the Old Testament to get that difference across. As often, I think of the pagan gods, like Mr. Zeus. Now then, Mr. Zeus not only is not eternal; there was a time when he didn’t exist. His father Cronus was going to swallow him whole as he did to his other children, but the grandparents Earth and Sky gave his mother Rhea a trick to use. She wrapped a smooth stone in a blanket and gave it to Cronus as if it were the child. He swallowed it — in both senses of that phrase! Meanwhile, they hid little Zeus on the island of Crete, and the local earth-worshippers made all kinds of racket, as if they were caught in a sacred frenzy, to drown out the wails of the baby. Zeus grew up, made some nifty political alliances, and grabbed that throne for himself. The point is that you would never say of Mr. Zeus what the psalmist — whose work Isaac Watts paraphrased in today’s Hymn of the Week — says about God: that a thousand years are to him as a “watch in the night.” It isn’t just that the psalmist affirms that God always was and always will be. Time itself is nothing to him. Or rather, as I’ve said, time is his creature, and therefore he provides now for what will happen a thousand years from now; it is all the same to him, all present.
We are not like that. Nor are we without sin. Take it either way — we are bounded by mortality, and we pray to the living God. If we want to know what life is, we must look not to ourselves, because we’re like the grass that flowers for its brief day and then withers. We must look to God. These things come across powerfully in Hebrew poetry. Why, the very language of God’s first act of creation suggests, in remarkably terse and concentrated form, that for God to create is to impart existence, and he is the one who exists, without qualification: “Let there be light; and there was light,” in Hebrew y’hi ’or, w’y’hi ’or, punning on the sacred name of God.
So in our Hymn of the Week, Dr. Watts, following the lead of Psalm 90, meditates on how short our life is, and how frail we are, both physically and morally. When my father was in the last year of his life, and he was only 56 years old, afflicted by cancer, I asked him if he felt any different than when he was young, or when he was a boy. He thought about it a moment, and said, “No, I really don’t. I feel the same.” There’s something to that, isn’t there? How quickly it passes, no matter how old we grow to be! Something in the change of seasons, from summer to fall and then to late in the fall, when not many leaves are left on the trees, moves me profoundly. I sit here, and it seems, if I let the quiet beyond the windows speak, that I am twelve years old again, it is November, I am delivering heavy newspapers on a snowy day, with a big dinner waiting at my aunt’s house, with the six of us in my family, and the six in her family, and my grandmother, and some other cousins too — and I can see the room, and I know those people, I feel close to them, and something about my memory sets the many years aside, more than half a century.
“Well,” somebody may say, “all living creatures have some kind of memory. Dogs remember.” Sure, they do. But my memory is different. My memory can be engaged by an act of will: I have the power to recollect. Other creatures float along the river of time, but I can swim against it, or set myself in my memory above it, combining things long ago with things now. That’s only a shadow of God’s eternity. Only a shadow, only an echo; but it is actually a shadow, it is an echo. It is real.
The psalmist pleads with God to forgive his sins, and he does so while musing on how swiftly the days pass. Somehow these things are related. When God forgives, and when he wipes away our offenses, it’s as if they never happened, though they did happen, and though God has provided for his act of mercy in forgiving them. C. S. Lewis says, I think rightly, that God’s forgiveness works mysteriously not only in the present or even in the future, but in the past, because now the past is not simply the same as it was before; it now leads to our free act of repentance, and God’s free act of forgiveness, and the meaning of all our past takes its lead from what is now. Mr. Zeus may pardon, looking the other way, but he does not forgive, he does not re-create. He can’t, because he’s no less subject to time than Homer or Socrates were. But the psalmist yearns for more — as does Dr. Watts. As do I, when I think of the good things I have known, and the people I have loved, and trust that nothing good is ever lost, since all good has its wellspring and its fulfillment in God.
Today’s stirring hymn set to an American folk hymn tune called “Stratfield,” arranged by Alice Parker and sung by the Milwaukee Chamber Choir .
Through every age, eternal God, Thou art our rest, our safe abode; High was Thy throne ere Heav’n was made, Or earth Thy humble footstool laid. Long hadst Thou reigned ere time began, Or dust was fashioned to a man; And long Thy kingdom shall endure When earth and time shall be no more. But man, weak man, is born to die, Made up of guilt and vanity; Thy dreadful sentence, Lord, was just, "Return, ye sinners, to your dust." A thousand of our years amount Scarce to a day in Thine account; Like yesterday’s departed light, Or the last watch of ending night. Death, like an overflowing stream, Sweeps us away; our life’s a dream, An empty tale, a morning flower, Cut down and withered in an hour. Our age to seventy years is set; How short the time! how frail the state! And if to eighty we arrive, We rather sigh and groan than live. But O how oft Thy wrath appears, And cuts off our expected years! Thy wrath awakes our humble dread; We fear the power that strikes us dead. Teach us, O Lord, how frail is man; And kindly lengthen out our span, Till a wise care of piety Fit us to die, and dwell with Thee.
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.
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