The Glorious Songs of Zion

A Hymn to Restore Ecclesial Confidence

We don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what we sing. God’s people are called to sing glorious songs to a glorious God (especially when it seems like they shouldn’t).

Ghostly Words

A few years ago I was in the habit of remembering random parts of hymns which I sung as a schoolboy. I wasn’t a Christian when I first sung them and so I usually had little idea what was truly going on at the time. Every now and then though, a short line from of one of them would suddenly reappear in my mind again, somewhat like a ghost. This often brought a moving sense of nostalgia. It is a nostalgia tinged with both gratitude and loss for a time that existed not all that long ago when profound theological words were sung daily by hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across Britain.

These words roused us with exotic ideas and beings and lands and battles and victories and joys which seemed so wonderfully alien to the dull monotony of the playground or the classroom or the dinner hall. Most people today who ever did sing such songs have probably now put them far away from their minds. And yet I believe many such people still ache for something half-remembered too.

The epic sense of divine purpose which those half-understood words had the power to evoke is not easily replicable. It remains entirely unmatched by the relative banality of agnostic materialism which engulfs the lives of most westerners today, without them even realising. Even apparent “success” within such lives often just distracts from the ultimately tragic drift from the things they’ve forgotten they once sung.

A Glorious Song of Zion

One of these ghostly fragments which returned to my consciousness many years later was “None but Zion’s children know,” a strange phrase which I couldn’t fully recollect at the time. It was from John Newton’s Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken. I hadn’t sung that hymn since school assembly. I’ve since introduced the hymn to my young children, and taught them to sing it with gusto, as it should be!

The words of that hymn seem well-suited to the tumultuous times Christians have faced in recent years. Despite cause for renewed optimism about the future of the West in the US of late, it may take a while to land on this side of the pond, if it arrives at all. The tumult of “the Negative World” for Christians may well turn a corner at some point as a result of the cultural “vibe shift” away from the madness of Woke. But the challenges for Christians are likely to increase before they get better. If “cultural Christianity” becomes fashionable again, this will present new problems too. We must ever learn with Paul not only “how to abound” but also “how to be brought low” (cf. Phil. 4:12).

Wherever the times lead us, however soon the sands shift, I want my children to have glorious songs to sing. I think it’s fair to say God does too. That’s why the Book of Psalms exists. Glorious songs, however, are not always sung in glorious times. This is shown most famously in Psalm 137:

“By the waters of Babylon,
    there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
    we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
    required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
    ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?”

—Psalm 137:1-4

For Israel to sing of Zion (that is, Jerusalem) at a time when were captive in Babylon, was no doubt torturous. Not least when they were forced to do so, and mocked when doing so.

Yet this lament is a song. It is a song expressing the heartache of a people who long for their present situation to match the glories for which they were destined. The rhetorical question of whether God’s people should sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land is precisely that: rhetorical. They did sing of Zion in a “foreign land”, as did Paul and Silas in prison (Acts 16:25), as should we whenever we find ourselves at odds with the world around us.

Glorious Assurance

There are different songs for different times, of course. Newton’s hymn is especially helpful for us today because of its unabashed confidence in truths which anchor us amidst the storms. The hymn’s beautifully uplifting words project a fortifying theological assurance for members of God’s kingdom. This is the security of a rescued people, safe in God’s formidable city, built on the most unshakeable of solid ground, God Himself:

“On the rock of ages founded
What can shake thy sure repose?”

An appropriate question indeed. Such security stands in glaring contrast to the imagined security offered by the ever-shakeable ground in the world.

The incessant storms of recent times—political, cultural, ecclesial, theological, medical, economic!—have shown how quickly such worldly securities can crumble. Such storms provide a perfect opportunity for the Church’s counter-message to shine most distinctly, as the city on a hill (Matt. 5:14). We are in great need of recovering this lost confidence.

At just the moment she ought to have been most radiant in recent years, the Church became fearful and docile. We worried about appearing “arrogant” or “self-righteous” so we hid our lamps away (Matt. 5:15). We ended up believing that if we must sing of such “glorious things”, we should only do so under our breath, with eyes down, apologising as we did so. The effect of this lost confidence was not unlike the experience of trying to sing with a mask on (something to which far too many Christians became far too easily accustomed when the time came).

The Bombast of Humility

Christian aspirations for humility today are often misdirected. The result is an underselling of God’s glory and a paralyzing timidity which would be alien to most Christians in the history of the world. I don’t think that was what Paul meant to happen when he wrote about humility in the famous hymn of Philippians 2, for example.

John Newton, the self-proclaimed ‘wretch’ of Amazing Grace, knew that the confidence resounding from his hymn is directed entirely to God alone. Indeed, the hymn’s best-known melody (Haydn’s “Austria”) is sometimes labelled “bombastic” given its parallel use for “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles!” Yet regardless of other connotations, and other competing melodies for it, I still believe Haydn’s more “bombastic” tune fits Newton’s words perfectly. We ought to be singing such words like that.

In fact, Haydn’s memorable melody was prominent in Christian hymnody long before it became a German national treasure. There is a funny story about when Kaiser Wilhelm II once visited his godmother, Queen Victoria. Standing in church one Sunday he was said to be taken aback to be singing this cherished tune in worship to God rather than to his homeland.

This itself is a powerful reminder of how such glorious songs may always find a way of subverting worldly expectations. This is what the things of God’s kingdom always seem to do to those who think they know better (cf. 1Cor. 1-2).

A Different Kind of Kingdom

Newton himself was a former slave ship captain, with vivid memories of all the misplaced ceremonial glory gushing amidst the grand ships of the British Empire. He had little time for worldly boasting in human achievements:

“Fading is the worldling’s pleasure
All his boasted pomp and show”.

Even if we need not drift into the cacophonous imperial guilt that has so plagued Britain in recent decades, the truth remains that temporal glory is no match for eternal glory.

That self-proclaimed “wretch” knew that our wild-sounding confidence is justifiable not because of our own brilliance, but God’s, who renders us brilliant in the light of Christ, restoring us to our created glory in redemption. His kingdom is indeed an empire, but it is unlike any empire this world has ever known. Even if pietistic Christians have often misused Jesus’ words—“My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36)—to assume that this kingdom is not on earth, we must always reject the worldliness that seeks to creep into the City of God undetected.

This is a kingdom that does not stand upon the brittle promises of Man. Zion is undergirded, rather, by the One “whose Word cannot be broken”, who “Formed thee for his own abode”. Newton certainly had in mind Psalm 87:1-3 here:

“On the holy mount stands the city he founded;
the Lord loves the gates of Zion
more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.
Glorious things of you are spoken,
O city of God.”

But Newton also had in mind Isaiah 33:20–21, which is really the hymn’s beating heart:

“Behold Zion, the city of our appointed feasts!
Your eyes will see Jerusalem,
an untroubled habitation, an immovable tent,
whose stakes will never be plucked up,
nor will any of its cords be broken.
But there the LORD in majesty will be for us
a place of broad rivers and streams,
where no galley with oars can go,
nor majestic ship can pass”

There is a striking defiance to Isaiah’s words which obviously captivated Newton. Such words offer powerful resistance to the myriad attempts to undermine God’s people and purposes.

We see in that passage also the inspiration for those “streams of living waters / Springing from eternal love” in the hymn’s second verse. Zion is indeed a mighty fortress, but it is also a place of deep, tender fellowship with the Lord. These streams are vast, quenching all our needs and wants. Yet such streams remain unassailable by any enemy galleon, neither those professing to rule the waves in Newton’s time, nor those professing to rule the airwaves in ours.

Glory Over Mockery

Newton will not let us forget the anointed blessings of Zion—“life forevermore” (Ps. 133:3)—and all this implies for our life here on earth. Like bedraggled schoolchildren, we often find ourselves dragged back into doubt by our mocking contemporaries on the playground. Newton’s words call us back to holy defiance:

“Let the world deride or pity
I will glory in thy name.”

Indeed, Jesus’ questions to the disciples in Luke 24:38 could not be more apt for troubled times: “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” Jesus had just appeared to them from nowhere, somewhat like a ghost—yet very unlike a ghost, with a real, physical, yet supernatural body.

This is precisely the kind of “glorious thing” to keep singing about in our glorious songs. It is a thing of Zion, brighter than anything offered us anywhere else on earth. This is why we must not become embarrassed to sing the “glad songs of victory” (Ps. 118:15) as our heritage.

Such songs are entirely appropriate for those who believe the early Church’s victorious (bombastic?) assertions about the Resurrection: “O death, where is your sting?” (1Cor. 15:55). Newton’s very last line—the latter half of which haunted me all those years—cements the power of this epic victory, further contrasting the crucial difference between Church and world which ought to propel us from the fleeting to the utterly permanent:

“Solid joys and lasting treasures
None but Zion’s children know.”

In darker times, such unabashed confidence in God’s promises especially needs reclaiming. And there’s no better place to start than by singing out those very things which so many in this world are so desperately missing.

We must not become fixated by the present darkness, of course. We ought not sing these things as mere fictional comforts. The children of Zion have more reason to be hopeful than any children on earth. We are not called “the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14) for nothing. Let us cast back the darkness and sing the City of God into being!