Week 3: Joy
Joy to the World
Today we begin the third week of Advent. In addition to the first two purple candles, this week we also light the solitary pink candle, often referred to as the Shepherd’s Candle. Joy will be our theme as we move through the stories of the angel Gabriel bringing good news of great joy to Zechariah and Mary. We’ll spend the first part of this week hearing the narrative from the women’s - Elizabeth and Mary - point of view, as recorded by the physician and gospel-writer, Luke, whose writings are based on eyewitness accounts. Each day we’ll sing a verse or two of Joy to the World, by Isaac Watts. You might be interested to know of this hymn's unlikely origins.
Joy to the World, Isaac Watts (1719)
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n, and heav’n, and nature sing.
If you were asked to name your top five Christmas hymns, which ones would you list? I imagine that “O Holy Night,” “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night" quickly come to mind as favorites, but "Joy to the World" would certainly be in most of our top five. Did you know Isaac Watts, one of the church’s greatest hymn writers, never intended “Joy to the World” to even be a song and certainly not a Christmas song? In 1719, Watts published a book of poems, each based on a psalm. In his poems he hoped to demonstrate how the psalms point to Jesus as the revealed Messiah, the promised Savior of the world in the New Testament.
“Joy to the World” was one of those poems based on Psalm 98 as Watts interpreted this psalm to be a celebration of Jesus’s role as King of both his church and the whole world. He intended the words of his poem to show the return of Christ rather than His birth, but I always picture the first verse being sung by the angels, as they announced Jesus’ birth to the shepherd.
The third stanza points back to Genesis 3:17, when God disciplined Adam after eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by cursing the ground that Adam would henceforth work in order to eat and provide for his family:
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,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.
How glorious this will be, when God makes all things new - a new heaven and a new earth…no more sorrow, sin, thorns…the curse lifted for all eternity! The Lord has indeed come and is indeed coming one day. Both on that first Christmas morning and Christ’s promise to come again, let earth receive her King.
Joy to the World
Isaac Watts (1719)
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n, and heav’n, 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,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, 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,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, 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,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.
I hope you enjoy this rendition of Joy to the World, performed by numerous christian artists at the 2022 Chosen Christmas special:
I love this