In the time of Jesus, Israel had returned from Babylonian exile: but to a poverty-ridden society in a ravaged land, oppressed by foreign tyrants. In effect, faithful Jews saw themselves "in exile in their homeland", and prayed for God to return the full glory and blessings of his covenant-kingdom. God's response was to send the promised Deliverer-King, in an unexpected way, to form a new society based on the "true Israel." And yet, the mere presence of the church has not fully transformed society: its members are in exile from their true homeland, and still beset by the trials and temptations of the untransformed world. Just as those faithful Jews recognized that God's activity was not complete or yet completely effective, Lyte saw fear and ignorance still holding partial sway even over Christians, and God's word short of fulfilling its promise, even in the Church.

Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847) wrote hymns for his own congregation. Some of them are original¹; but he also wrote about 300 "hymns based on psalms"; over a quarter of them have been widely used. These are very much in the spirit of Isaac Watts, as the title of the published collection² suggests. Some are loosely based on psalms; some combine ideas from several psalms; some represent an expansion of part of one psalm. This hymn represents an expansion of verse 7, which contains three stiches (lines), each expanded into a stanza. The lines fully rhyme, as we expect from our own poetic ideals; they also fit the Hebrew ideal of "parallelism"³: each pair of lines are "parallel", and most are "synonymous parallelism", the most common type in Hebrew poetry.

Melchior Vulpius (1560-1616) was cantor in Weimar in the early seventeenth century; he edited two important collections of chorale tunes, including some of his own compositions. This short, simple tune was composed for an anonymous funeral hymn. It is in wide and varied use⁴ today, with both German and English texts.

Use:

This psalm provides a useful corrective to those joyful songs (which all too easily become self-congratulatory) that were staples of the tent-meeting evangelists' concerts, and still (despite some editing attempts) creep back into our hymnals and baser affections. It is suitable as a song of penitance, as preparation for hearing the Word proclaimed, or as a prayer for the success of evangelism.

The metaphorical use of "Israel" and "Zion" for the church, so common in the New Testament, should not cause problems.

Notes:

¹Including Abide with me and Jesus, I my cross have taken.

²Spirit of the Psalms, 1834. See also Praise, my soul, the King of heaven.

³Neither rhyme nor parallelism was present here in the Hebrew original.

⁴Some hymnals set Montgomery's God is my strong Salvation to this tune.