Two London Musicians

JOY TO THE WORLD

Joy to the world! the Lord is come;

Let earth receive her King;

Let every heart prepare him room,

And heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the earth! the Savior reigns;

Let men their songs employ;

While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains

Repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make his blessings flow,

Far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,

And makes the nations prove

The glories of his righteousness,

And wonders of his love.

ISAAC WATTS, TAKEN FROM Psalm 98

Psalm Link

Psalm 98:4, 9

4Shout to the LORD, all the earth;

break out in praise and sing for joy! . . .

9before the LORD.

For the LORD is coming to judge the earth.

He will judge the world with justice,

and the nations with fairness.

Often God doesn’t blend things together the way we would. He gets praise when unlikely combinations are melded to honor him. Take Isaac Watts and George Frideric Handel, for instance. You certainly wouldn’t have picked them to write what is probably our most joyful Christmas carol.

Watts had written his first hymn in his teenage years as a protest to his father, a minister. Watts had complained about singing from the old psalter that had been around for over a hundred years, and his father told him, “If you don’t like these hymns, write better ones.” So he did.

Watts, a small, unattractive man, was later jilted by the woman he loved. His health broke shortly after that, and he lived the rest of his life as a semi-invalid. He wrote metrical versions of all the Psalms. “Joy to the World” is a paraphrase of the last half of Psalm 98.

The music of “Joy to the World” is adapted from the Messiah by George Frideric Handel, a London contemporary of Watts. Handel, also unmarried, fell into bankruptcy after several musical failures. Partially paralyzed, he tried putting his life back together again, devoting himself to composing oratorios. Four years after his bankruptcy, he produced the Messiah.

Both Watts and Handel discovered independently that God “comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.” Out of sorrow God can produce great joy. Have you discovered that, too?

Bible Networking

For more on the curse that Christ has overcome (third stanza), read Genesis 3:17-19.