Sunday's Hymn: The Church's One Foundation

The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord,
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From Heav’n He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her
And for her life He died.

She is from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

The Church shall never perish!
Her dear Lord to defend,
To guide, sustain, and cherish,
Is with her to the end:
Though there be those who hate her,
And false sons in her pale,
Against both foe or traitor
She ever shall prevail.

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, How long?
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!

’Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forevermore;
Till, with the vision glorious,
Her longing eyes are blest,
And the great Church victorious
Shall be the Church at rest.

Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won,
With all her sons and daughters
Who, by the Master’s hand
Led through the deathly waters,
Repose in Eden land.

O happy ones and holy!
Lord, give us grace that we
Like them, the meek and lowly,
On high may dwell with Thee:
There, past the border mountains,
Where in sweet vales the Bride
With Thee by living fountains
Forever shall abide!

—Samuel J. Stone

The boy playing the violin in this video is 11 years old.

Other hymns, worship songs, sermons etc. posted today:

• Update: Just As I Am, Without One Plea at Still Reforming
• Update: O Love of God, How Strong and True at Fieldstone Cottage
• This Is My Father’s World at Rosemary at Home
• Give Me Oil in My Lamp at The Happy Wonderer
• Lord’s Day 11 at Tried With Fire 
• Lord’s Day 11, 2012 at The Thirsty Theologian
• Faith Alone - March 11, 2012 at The Upward Call
• Praying the Psalms - Psalm 19 at Daily On My Way to Heaven
• A Sunday Psalm: The Treasury of David - Psalm 2:12 at Theology for Girls
• Your Weekly Dose of Spurgeon at Pyromaniacs: The Sufficiency of Scripture

Have you posted a hymn (or sermon, sermon notes, prayer, etc.) today and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by contacting me using the contact form linked above, and I’ll add your post to the list.

This Week in Housekeeping

annihilationism

• Added the quote from J. I. Packer’s 18 Words that I posted yesterday.
• Fixed a messed up link.
• Changed the link to the lecture from Wayne Grudem’s Christian Essentials class because the Scottsdale Bible Church links are unreliable. (They’re not working as I write). All the mp3s were uploaded recently to Monergism.com (see here) and I figure that’s a more stable site for linking. The lecture linked in this post is The Final Judgment and Eternal Punishment.

sufficiency of scripture

• Added a link to The Sufficiency of Scripture by David G. Peterson.
• Fixed the link to this post from the Theological Terms in Alphabetical Order page.

No Wonder He Fears to Die

From J. I Packer’s 18 Words, one last quote, which I’ll be adding to the theological term page on annihilationism. Regarding the claim that scripture speaking of “eternal fire,” “eternal destruction,” etc. refers to annihilation, Packer writes: 

Some hold that these texts imply the annihilation of the rejected — one searing moment in the fire, and then oblivion. But it seems clear that in reality the ‘second death’ is no more a cessation of being than is the first. For (i) the word rendered ‘destruction’ in 2 Thess. 1:9 (olethros) means, not annihilation, but ruin (cf. its use in 1 Thess 5:3). (ii) The insistence in these texts that the fire, punishment and destruction are eternal (aionios, literally ‘age-long’) and that the worm in Gehenna is undying, would be pointless and inappropriate if all that is envisaged is momentary extinction; just as it would be pointless and inappropriate to dwell on ‘unending’ pain resulting from an immediately fatal bullet wound. Either these words indicate the endlessness of torment, or they are superfluous and misleading. (iii) To the argument that aionios means only ‘relating to the age to come’, without any implications of endless duration, it seems sufficient to say that if in Matthew 25:46 ‘eternal’ life means endless bliss (and surely it does), then the ‘eternal’ punishment mentioned there must be endless too. (iv) We are told that in the ‘lake of fire’ (the ‘eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’, Matt. 25:41) the devil will be ‘tormented day and night for ever and ever’ (Rev. 20:10). That any man sent to join him will endure a similar eternity of retribution is clear from the parallel language of Revelation 14:10f.: ‘he (the beast-worshipper) shall be tormented with fire and brimstone … the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever; and they have no rest, day or night.’

It seems plain that what these texts teach is not extinction, but the far worse prospect of an endless awareness of God’s just and holy displeasure. Grievous as we may find it to contemplate, and sickening as we may find the Jewish apocalyptic imagery in which Christ and the apostles speak of it (this is, after all, the post-holocaust era), and endless hell can no more be removed from the New Testament than an endless heaven can. This is why physical death (the first death) is so fearful a prospect for Christless men; not because it means extinction, but precisely because it does not mean extinction, only the unending pain of the second death. The godless man dimly senses this, through God’s general revelation (Rom. 1:32); no wonder, then, that he fears to die.