Sunday Hymn: Jesus Shall Reign

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Does his successive journeys run;
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

For him shall endless prayer be made,
And praises throng to crown his head;
His Name, like sweet perfume, shall rise
With ev’ry morning sacrifice.

People and realms of ev’ry tongue
Dwell on his love with sweetest song;
And infant voices shall proclaim
Their early blessings on his Name.

Blessings abound where’er he reigns;
The pris’ner leaps to lose his chains,
The weary find eternal rest,
And all the sons of want are blest.

Let ev’ry creature rise and bring
Peculiar honors to our King,
Angels descend with songs again,
And earth repeat the loud Amen.

—Isaac Watts

This is a hymn that needs to be sung like an anthem—or a coronation hymn—and if it’s sung by “people … of ev’ry tongue,” so much the better.

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

• Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus at By Grace Alone
• My Jesus, I Love Thee at Graces Daily
• Ye Ransomed Sinners, Hear at The Happy Wonderer
• All Creatures of Our God and King at Luma Simms
• Return to Him at Tried With Fire
• Lord’s Day 8, 2014 at The Thirsty Theologian
• Lifting Up Our Hearts at The Upward Call
• Your Weekly Dose of Spurgeon at Pyromaniacs: An indispensible home feature
• The Treasury of David: Psalm 13:1 at Theology for Girls

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.

The Trinity Is Greater

This morning I posted at Out of the Ordinary on the doctrine of the Trinity.

Because the Christian God is triune, he is greater the so-called gods of other religions. He is, for instance, loving by nature, something a single-person god cannot be. Before creation, the persons of the Trinity loved each other, while a single-person god cannot love unless he creates something to love. To love, a single-person god needs his creation. The Trinity, on the other hand, is eternally loving and needs nothing in order to love.  

Click over to read the whole piece. 

Linked Together: Atonement

Christ As High Priest
Turretinfan:

Sometimes it is hard to explain to people why the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death is relevant to the question of the scope of the atonement: i.e. whether the atonement was made for all, hypothetically all, or particularly the elect.  One way to explain this is by reference to the fact that Christ is not just the lamb of God, whose death takes away the sins of the world, but that Christ is also the High Priest who makes the offering

Read his entire explanation of the Christ as High Priest argument for definite atonement.

Christ As Ransom
Jared Wilson:

In C.S. Lewis’s classic work of “supposal,” The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, we see where Aslan makes the payment of his life for Edmund’s liberation in response to the White Witch’s demands. It’s a powerful scene and not without biblical resonance, but if we draw the lines to directly, we may make a theological mistake of some importance. Aslan is clearly Christ in the story, and the Witch is clearly the stand-in for our accuser Satan. But while Satan is often called the god of this world (2 Cor. 4:4), he is still subservient to the sovereign Lord of all the cosmos. So we have to be careful in how we speak of ransom, lest we lend too much power to the enemy and deflect too much glory away from God.

Read the rest for the answer to the question of to whom Christ’s ransom was paid. (Hint: It wasn’t Satan.)

Christ Made Sin
Kendall Easely: “Jesus is the only human who ‘did not know sin,’” yet “God made him ‘to be sin’” for us. What should our reponse be?