O Come All Ye Faithful
A Portuguese King? Some monks who hated music? A Jacobite calling his friends to arms? Nobody really knows who wrote this wonderful Christmas song, but it is still profound and deeply meaningful for us to sing each year as we 'come to Bethlehem'.
It was only a few months ago that I started this Friday Classic Hymns series and I've so enjoyed it. Judging by the messages you send me, you're enjoying it as well. This is the last one of the year, and we're going to look at another Christmas hymn: O Come All Ye Faithful.
Do you know this one? Do you remember hearing it for the first time? Unfortunately for me, a lot of my Christmas music memories are linked up to that Boney M Christmas album, so I can remember the Boney M version of this song. But of course, now I travel around with Crossroad—most of you know—doing Christmas carols every year, and we always sing this one because it's a classic and because the words are just so beautifully apt for Christmas time. O Come All Ye Faithful—it doesn't get much more Christmassy than this.
The Story Behind "O Come All Ye Faithful"
There's a bit of mystery around this hymn. Nobody's 100% sure of the author. Some believe it was written by King John IV of Portugal, who was an amateur composer in the 1700s. In fact, this song was known as the Portuguese Hymn for a long time because a Portuguese chapel in London used to sing this one so often that it became so associated with it.
Others believe it was written by a group of anonymous Cistercian monks. They didn't believe in using music instruments in worship—they believed only in chanting their songs—and this could possibly have come from them.
But most historians believe that it was a man named John Francis Wade who was the author. Wade was a Catholic living in England, but in around 1745 he had to flee England and go to France because of all the uprisings against Catholics that were taking place. It seems that Wade may have been a Jacobite. They were a group who were trying to restore a Catholic king to the British royal throne. When that failed, people rose up against the Jacobites and they had to flee to France to save their own lives. It would seem that he was one of those, and we'll talk about how the lyrics may be Jacobite in their nature in a few minutes.
He would become a music teacher and a copyist. In those days, we didn't have the technology that we do now, and all music had to be hand copied—written by hand and then copied by hand. He was a copyist and he used to copy out famous pieces of music and then sell them to wealthy musicians so that they could learn to play these songs. He made a good living doing that.
When Wade published this song in about 1740, it was the first time anyone had seen it in a publication. He had written four verses in Latin, and they are the four verses that we know best today. But it was about 100 years later when an Anglican priest named Frederick Oakley rewrote the text into English. So the version we know and the version we sing today was Oakley's rewritten version of the original four verses.
There have been other additions to the song—people have written all sorts of different verses in—and yet over time, everyone's gone back to those original four verses translated by Oakley. They're great words. Not much is known about these two guys except that they wrote this beautiful hymn, and the words of this hymn are really powerful and very Christmassy. Let's have a look at them.
What Do the Lyrics of "O Come All Ye Faithful" Mean?
Verse One: "O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant"
As I mentioned earlier, Wade was a Jacobite, and they wanted their own Catholic king in Britain. Some people believe that verse one of this hymn is a Jacobite call to arms, believe it or not. Look at these words: "O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem." Some people believe Bethlehem represents England, and this was a call to the Jacobites who were exiled to France to come joyfully and triumphantly back to England to crown their king.
But most people don't think that this is reliable. Most people look at these lyrics and believe this is clearly a Christmas hymn. I think so. The Christmas imagery is so obvious. He uses that word "come" over and over: come to Bethlehem.
In a sense, every year we, the people of God, are invited to faithfully return to the scene of Bethlehem where Jesus was born. With joy in our hearts and triumph in our hearts—because of who He would become—we behold Him who was "born the king of angels."
That's a lovely phrase, isn't it? The King of angels. The angels themselves worshipped Him. The angels sang His praise. In fact, in the book of Hebrews, there's a whole section where the writer is saying Jesus is superior to the angels. The angels are supernatural beings, of course, in their own right, but even the angels worshipped when this Child was born. A great host of angels appeared and worshipped this newborn Son and declared His greatness. Surely Jesus is the Son of God.
Christmas is a time of praise. Every Christmas time, we return to that scene and give Him glory. That's captured in the chorus: "O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord."
We don't just come to Bethlehem for no reason—we come to adore Him. That's what Christmas is all about: adoring the One who came in that manger. So is He the one that you adore most this Christmas?
Verse Two: "True God of true God, light of light eternal"
Verse two becomes quite theological and it paints various pictures of Jesus using the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed was written by the Church in 325 AD as a collection of statements describing true doctrine. If you're Christian, you've got to be able to believe these statements and affirm them. That's why it came about—to affirm true Christian belief. It's still used today. It's one of the great creeds of the Church that is very solid, very biblical, and these phrases all come from that Creed.
"True God of true God, light of light eternal"—both of these come straight from the Creed. They state that Jesus is the true God. He's not just sort of God or kind of partly God, but He is completely the true God. He is light. We know that Jesus Himself said that He was the light of the world, and He will be the eternal light of the world for always. He will shine light into the darkness. He is the "light of light eternal."
Then come two interesting lines. The first is "Lo! He abhors not the virgin's womb."
Again, this is straight from that Creed. What it means is this: Jesus didn't consider Himself above the natural things of Earth. There were people around that time that this Creed was written who were denying that, who were saying, "Ah, Jesus was so supernatural that He didn't have any earthly functions. No, He wasn't a bodily man. He wasn't a real man. He was like a supernatural angel vision type of thing."
The early Church denied this. They said Jesus was 100% human, and He didn't abhor—or He didn't deny or look down on—being born through a virgin's womb. Jesus embraced the things of Earth. He became a true earthly human being. Of course, He was still God in His nature, but He was physically human. He didn't despise the things of Earth. He humbled Himself and became a baby so that He could live a real human life.
The next line is also from the Creed: "Son of the Father, begotten not created."
This is another line exactly from the Creed, and it was again in place to counter a false belief of the Church of the time. Some people at the time were teaching that Jesus was created by the Father—so you had God the Father by Himself, and then later He created Jesus who then became the Son of God.
This contradicts Scripture. Scripture says that the Word—Jesus—was there from the very beginning. John 1 says, "In the beginning was the Word." In the beginning, just when God was creating the heaven and the earth, Jesus was there. Jesus was part of it all. All things, John wrote in John 1, were created through Jesus.
When we talk about Jesus being begotten, not created, it's saying Jesus was there from the beginning. Jesus was part of God the Father and the Holy Spirit. He was part of the Trinity. They were all one from the very beginning. There was no time when Jesus didn't exist.
That is startling when we can look at the baby in a manger and say, "This is the human form of the One who was here from the beginning." That is amazing. That's why we come and adore Him as the refrain says: "Come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord."
He's not just a random baby. He's not just a good man. He's the very One who was one with God from the beginning.
Verse Three: "Yea, Lord we greet thee, born this happy morning"
Verse three continues on similar themes of the divinity of Jesus. "Yea, Lord we greet thee"—"yea" is just a sort of excited expression—"born this happy morning."
We accept You. We love You. We recognise that You are who You are. As the next line says, "Jesus to thee be glory divine"—or other translations say "glory given."
That's what we're here to do every Christmas: to proclaim that He is the One who deserves the divine glory, or the One who deserves to get all the glory we can give.
Then comes a very biblical phrase: "Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing."
This comes straight out of John 1 again, that said the Word was with God from the beginning, and then John says, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we've seen His glory."
A beautiful picture of Jesus. He was the One who was with God from the beginning, but He became flesh and dwelt among us. Isn't that what Christmas is all about? The fact that the eternal God, Jesus, became flesh and became a human being and lived among us. It's lovely to sing that line because it summarises the whole thing.
Then again comes the refrain: "O come let us adore Him."
I want to point out that we sing this again and again after every verse, because all of these phrases cause us to remember that He is worthy of our adoration and our praise. He is Christ the Lord.
Verse Four: "Sing choirs of angels, sing in exaltation"
Verse four is very much the same. It says, "Sing choirs of angels, sing in exaltation"—calling the angels to bow down at Jesus' feet because He is so great.
It says, "Sing all ye citizens of Heaven above"—everybody in heaven, you know, proclaim this Child who was to be born.
"Glory to God, glory in the highest."
That is what the angels sang in the New Testament. That is exactly what they sang. So this is just a little summary of the angels praising God and us joining in with the same thing, saying, "Glory to God in the highest," because Christ is the Lord.
"O come let us adore Him," the words say one more time as we close.
Conclusion
Isn't this just a beautiful Christmas song? Every line points us to Jesus' identity and the fact that He's not just a random child born in a manger, but that He is God incarnate, born to set us free.
I hope that you'll sing this song every Christmas and just marvel at who Jesus is. Every time you see every one of these lines, may it cause you to give glory to God, because Jesus deserves it.
If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to the channel. You can also support this ministry through Patreon or PayPal.
Join me as we lift up His praise. Join the angels as they sing His praise.
References
The Nicene Creed (325 AD)
John 1
Hebrews
