The Love of God - A Hymn
One evening my wife and I were watching a movie of a
true story that took place in the early 1900’s around the time of WWI. Though I was not familiar with the content it
was still very moving in how one of today’s hymns came about.
Many have written books and songs about the love of God and have done very well at it. Some of you might be familiar with an old hymn called Love of God. Yet out of the 100% of you who know the hymn, I would be willing to say that probably less than 1% are familiar with the derivation of the words in the third stanza.
Frederick M. Lehman was forced to take a job at a packing plant because of a business loss. While there he had written two stanzas to a hymn about the love of God. Unfortunately he was unable to come up with a third stanza. In those days a song had to have three stanzas. In the movie it was mentioned three represented the trinity and a song was incomplete without a third line.
According to Al Smith’s Treasury of Hymn Histories, someone had given Lehman a card that he used as a bookmark and the following words were inscribed upon it:
“Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made; Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade: To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry, Nor could the scroll contain the whole Though stretched from sky to sky.”
At the bottom of the card it told the story how these were found written on a cell wall in a prison some 200 years before. It was not known why the prisoner was incarcerated nor the origin of the words. In due time, he died and the men who had the job of repainting his cell were impressed by the words. Before their paint brushes had obliterated them, one of the men jotted them down and thus they were preserved.
These words fit his last line of the hymn perfectly and was published in 1917. Yet it still does not answer, where did this man learn to write something so spectacular? Well let me take you back in time to the 11th century to meet a man called Rabbi Meir Ben Issac Nehoria who was a cantor in Worms, Germany.
He had written a poem 90 verses long and the first 44 verses were written as an acrostic. Acrostics are found in the Bible like in Psalm 119 where each line begins with the Hebrew letter of the alphabet, and considering there 22 letters he just doubled them up, like AA-BB-CC…
This poem eventually was instituted and read on the first day of the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost or Shavuot in Hebrew) in Ashkenazi synagogues around the world.
It was not until years later after the hymn was published that Alfred B. Smith would bring to light the reality of the mystery behind the third stanza. Yet even more so amazing was how the words just seem to perfectly fit into the hymn. Sounds like something only God could do.
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