I didn’t understand, when I was in Sunday school, that the imagery of the second verse (“all the saints adore thee, casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea”) comes directly from the Book of Revelation. The rest of the lyrics also arise from the Bible.
I used to think this was just one of those tedious hymns adults liked to sing when they were showing off.
Now I know better; and as this hymn has been playing itself in my mind these past few days, I thought I’d like to share it with you.
Behold the chuckwalla, a nice big lizard. The one in the video is enjoying a feast of chopped vegetables and cheeses that some thoughtful human provided him.
The chuckwalla lives in North America’s hottest deserts, where it eats bits of cactus. The chuckwalla is edible for human beings, a fact which has occasionally saved a life. When threatened, this lizard ducks into a crack in the rock and inflates himself, making it just about impossible to pull him out.
God creates the darnedest things. He creates them for His own pleasure. There aren’t enough people who get lost in the desert to justify the trouble of creating the chuckwalla. This lizard can be domesticated, but then you have the trouble of keeping him hot enough. Like most members of the iguana family, the chuckwalla is smart enough to adjust to you and become friendly with you.
No scientific committee would have ever conceived of a large, edible lizard whose primary defense is self-inflation. Science fiction writers never thought of it. For really cool ideas that no one else ever had, you have to go to God.
And this is Mr. Nature signing off… Enjoy your Sabbath rest, everybody.
If the Church ever needed to rise up, that time is probably now. Before our glorious national leaders make sodomy compulsory, or set up an image of Obama to be worshiped.
I chose this little version of the hymn because it’s easy to understand the words, albeit not so easy to understand the pictures.
All right, those who favor a wooden-headed literal interpretation of Romans 13 (“If the Powers that Be tell you to slaughter all the babies, then you gotta slaughter all the babies”) won’t like it.
But for the sane people out there, it’s time we thought seriously about the best way to rise up against the purposeful wickedness of our own Powers that Be.
P.S.–Upon further examination, this video seems to be a Mormon production. But I will let it be. The hymn is a Christian hymn, and that’s a fact.
Here’s another oldie–and boy, if we ever needed to walk by faith, if we ever needed to trust and obey, we need it now.
Our country has been taken into captivity by the very persons to whom we entrusted her care and maintenance. Thus God chastises His people for pride and sloth and lack of love, for getting fat and forgetting Him. Now wicked and despicable people lord it over us.
Let us hold these hymns as we grope our way through the darkness back to God.
This is another hymn I remember from my Sunday school days, before my church got all hypermodern and theologically bent out of shape. I’d be surprised if they still sang this one, ever.
I chose this plain and simple piano version, with printed lyrics so you can follow along.
Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.
Serve the Lord with gladness: come before His presence with singing.
Let’s face it–we’re going to need a mighty fortress now, and the mightiest fortress is our God.
The wicked are dancing in the streets this weekend, but be advised: everything they have raised up, God will bring down. The hour of their destruction is already marked on His schedule.
Let’s see how mighty their fortress is, when God lifts His hand against it.
(Note the man in the back row, with the little baby in his arms.)
This is another one of those old hymns that I love. I passed up what sounded like a Sergio Mendes & the Brasil 66 version in favor of normal people singing, with a piano.
But of course what really matters is to experience God’s presence. Open up. Let the music be as a hot bath after toiling in a cold rain. Let the words teach.
There sure are a lot of people working on destroying our culture. And now Angel Soft toilet paper–yes, toilet paper–has joined the party.
Check out the stupid commercial, displayed here, in which assorted individuals, accompanied by schmaltzy piano music in the background, celebrate Father’s Day by reminiscing about how wonderfully they were raised by their single mommmmms.
Obviously this is the work of a couple of wankers in the advertising department (or ad agency) trying to get Angel Soft in good with the feminists and other gender-benders. So Father’s Day is now about moms, and who needs fathers anyhow, the family is an obstacle to socialism, blah-blah-blah.
Somebody out there among our cultural arbiters has a major problem with the male half of the human race.
Here is a hymn that tastes of victory. I posted this version because it has nice visuals and you can follow the words; but what I really prefer, for this, is one big monster of an organ belting this out like a full broadside from the USS New Jersey.
What? You don’t like that simile? It might offend somebody?
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that God created dinosaurs. No one that we know of has ever seen one, and our interpretations of the fossils are subject to never-ending revision–but still, those great big bones had to fit together some way. Maybe someday we’ll figure out what any dinosaur was really like.
The difficulty is that dinosaurs are nowhere specifically mentioned in the Bible. Oh, and another difficulty–they don’t exist anymore.
We are, however, assured that God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, so that would include dinosaurs. We are also taught that God pronounced His creation good: therefor dinosaurs, at least in His eyes, are good.
I think you will agree that T. rex and his playmates would be a little much for us to handle. So God removed dinosaurs before the human race multiplied and spread throughout the earth. Again, the Bible doesn’t get into this. That doesn’t mean we can’t prayerfully consider the matter and use our brains for something more than cooking up mischief.
It’s my personal belief that God has put the dinosaurs somewhere else, where they can’t eat people, and where numbskulls can’t try to put them into an amusement park and charge money to see them. God has the entire universe at His disposal. Anything we imagine that limits His use of it is almost certainly wrong.
I look at the re-assembled bones, the paintings, the videos, the vast outpouring of human creativity and human reason and emotion evoked by these creatures, and can only marvel at the work of God’s hands. Dinosaurs also make me reflect on how much fun it must be to be God, and able to do things like this–makes it easy to imagine the pleasure our Lord must take in His creation.