Now, it is true that there are thousands upon thousands of hymns that have been written for the church. I think one in particular, Isaac Watts, wrote in his lifetime 6,000 hymns or something of that regard. don't, that's a Facebook fact, meaning I read it on Facebook and I'm telling you the fact, but it is true that he wrote a wide range of hymns, and in particular, there's a variety that are in our Trinity Baptist hymnal today, but we are not talking about one of them. We are talking about a different hymn writer. So I figured that today we could traverse off the beaten path of our normal Sabbath school lessons and do something a little different. So it's titled The Hymn Deep Dive, but in all honesty, I don't know how deep we can really go into this hymn. I'll do my best to give some historical background for the hymn writer, and then we'll examine a particular verse from the hymn. And I won't tell you what the hymn is until halfway through. So you'll have to guess what it is. And you're going to have date, time, what was going on around the time he was writing this. And I want you, when hearing the background, understand that this is part of the melting pot. that was used to distill this hymn into existence, and I think you'll figure out how that is the case later on. So as we examine the words of the hymn found in our Trinity Baptist hymnal, we ought to examine the life of the hymn writer, and then we'll close by singing the hymn under examination. I think this will be an excellent format for lessons to come, especially when we'll have like one-off or we need to take a break from the Orthodox Catechism or Baptist Catechism next year. Even for during the Christmas season where we plan to be done with the Orthodox Catechism in November and then they'll leave all of December to determine what we're going to work on. I think Christmas hymns would be good. So let's consider this. This hymn in question was written 173 years ago in 1851. Now, as a lover of history myself, one of the majors in college that I had with history, we can definitely look at years as these abstract things that, sure, that happened in the past, but I have no connection to the year 1851. One way presenters try to make them a little bit more tangible for us is by giving you details about what happened during that time period, during that year, to add more flesh to the skeleton known as the year 1851. So for instance, supposedly, A woman by the name of Ada Roe was the last living person from that decade. That means she was born during this decade. So I'm assuming 1859 and I think you'll know why. Because she died 1970. She died in 1970, so she might have been 110 to 111 years old, which is strange, but it's not unheard of. We've had someone who was 109 years old die last year, and long in the tooth, to put it like that. Does that not immediately, once we hear someone from this time period die in 1970, put this in a certain different perspective? Like this isn't just an old time where there was no electricity, there was no, you know, there's no TVs. This is now a living, breathing year. Does that not immediately bring 1851 closer than what it once was in our minds? To put it in a different way, the American Civil War would officially begin a decade after the creation of this hymn in 1851. So if you remember Civil War, it started with the Confederates bombing Fort Sumter in 1861. So 10 years before that, this hymn was created. and think about all the struggle, all the sin, all the taking of life that would take place during the Civil War, and also before the Civil War, and how there's a lot of confusion about who is the Lord, what is happening during this time, who has authority over these things, and so on. Now let's talk about literature that would come out during this time. And these are all three, these are classics and part of the Western literature world. So one is Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities was written. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was written a year before in 1850. But then in 1851 is perhaps out of these three, my favorite, Moby Dick was written in 1851. So, with those in mind, we can now have a better idea of this is what people are reading at this time. This is what's being published. Kind of even tell you, okay, these are meant to be some of these contemporary tales. This is what people thought entertainment was. And so on. And now let's talk about who was alive at this time. In 1851, England held what was called the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. That's a mouthful for a title. Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which we will call the Crystal Palace Exhibition. And let me highlight some of the guests there for you. First, we have the mathematician, writer, slash jack of all trades, Lewis Carroll, who go on to write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but he was also a mathematician and an Anglican deacon. We also have the famous gun manufacturer Samuel Colt who is at this exhibit. And then two more infamous people. We have Charles Darwin at the Crystal Palace exhibit. There he would publish, he would be there And then eight years later, he would publish his Origin of Species, which pioneered the theory of evolution and natural selection. But he doesn't even touch the next person, Karl Marx. The father of Marxism and communism was also in attendance at the Crystal Palace exhibit. A few years before, he would publish his famous Communist Manifesto. So, pause and think about the world that this hymn is being made in, where you have folks who are challenging authority in the sense of you are not created by God, you're created by a lesser version of yourself, which with a lesser version of yourself naturally selected throughout the years. And then you have Karl Marx that says religion is the opiate of the masses. He says very disparaging things about religion because based on his life, he thought religion was a tool used by people to control the working class. So, and of course, you know that both of those things leads to massive death in the 20th century. But for now, this is like a prequel, like, okay, this is where they are in their origin story. And now we know because we've seen it, heard it, where did that leads up. So in the same merry old England that the Crystal Palace exhibit was held, a man by the name of Matthew Bridges was born, July 14th, 1800. It's believed that he was the older brother to Reverend Charles Bridges, which if you know that name, you might know that he preached with J.C. Ryle. again, putting this more into a historical perspective, and he wrote a book on pastoral ministry that came highly recommended by Charles H. Spurgeon, who was around during this time because he died in 1892. The Bridges family, though was not Baptist, They were an Anglican family and stayed in the Church of England. Matthew would go to Oxford, again Oxford is a hub, a lot of Anglicans in Oxford at this time, and start his writing career there. Starting with a poem, which I tried to look up and try to give you an excerpt, but if you try to find one, the poem isn't just a couple of lines, it's about 90 pages. So it is a lengthy poem that if you are so interested, go forth and spend an evening reading that. But it was in 1848 that this said Matthew Bridges has a change in his life. All this time he was Anglican and he favored people who were part of the Anglican church that were part of the Oxford movement. Oxford movement was when Anglicans were aspiring to have common unity with Roman Catholicism and bridging the gap that they said years and years of bad influence led to. So now we need to be unified and have these high, in their words, high church views on what to do in the church service and so on. But his life took a turn, because Matthew Bridges in 1848 would convert to Roman Catholicism. He would espouse that it was the influence of John Henry Newman, who was part of the Oxford Movement, probably one of the heads of the Oxford Movement, that in 1845, three years prior to Matthew Bridges' conversion, resigned from the Church of England based on a protest of what he was trying to do, which was Catholic baptizing the Church of England and he resigned and took many of his followers with him in the process to become part of the Roman Catholic Church. So for the rest of Matthew Bridges' life he would be a practicing Roman Catholic and in fact is buried in a Catholic Church cemetery. So he's been following the dates This would mean that the hymn in question was written during his Catholic years. This ought not to be shocking. This ought not to be shocking at all, because many of our hymns are written by either Catholics, or those who we would call Catholic today, or those who are believers with wonky views. people who probably wouldn't even be members of our church or even call ourselves a church. So what is a saying? Well, what is the old adage that is used often about the Lord? The Lord can write with what? Crooked sticks. The Lord can write a straight line or draw a straight line with a crooked stick. Isn't that a saying that we often use? Well, if he can do that, that is the Lord taking us, we crooked sticks, to make a perfect circle, well, how much more can he use sinners to compose hymns that communicate precious truth? And by the way, that whole saying about God writes straight with crooked sticks is attributed to a Catholic as well. So, just to put that in there, this isn't the place to flesh this out. But completely, but it is to say that the Lord used Matthew Bridges, who was a Catholic, to write a blessed hymn of our church that is still in our hymnals to this day. So when we look at this hymn in our hymnals, it has four verses, even though Matthew Bridges wrote six. He wrote six. And that got me wondering about why the verses are missing. If we included the additions that the Anglican priest Godry added in 1871, we would have 12 verses in total. So imagine coming to church one day, you see, we're going to sing blank, blank, blank. and you open up your hymnal and there's 12 verses that you're about to sing. I think all the hymns that we sang this morning totaled about 13 or 14 verses. So imagine all that in one setting. That is a lengthy song, to say the least. So, thankfully, we won't look at those additions. But I did find the two missing verses from the original version by Bridge, and one is technically not really missing, because this is a common practice in hymns where if there is one particular verse that you really like the words of, and there's one particular part of another verse that you don't like the ending of, you'll just cut and then splice the verses together. Longer than the same meter, this would be a practice. So if you look at the, I believe it's the third or fourth verse of this hymn, it's actually a splicing between the third hymn that Bridge wrote and the splicing of the fifth hymn and the fourth hymn together. But again, I don't understand why they did that. I think it was to save space. but it did happen. However, verse two, verse two is one that does make a little bit more sense why they took it out. And it might give you a hint about what this song is. So, crown him the virgin's son, the God incarnate born, whose arms those crimson trophies won, which now his brow adorn. fruit of the mystic rose, as of that rose the stem, the root whence mercy ever flows, the babe of Bethlehem. Does anyone have an idea what the hymn is yet? Okay, so, so I think if we were being charitable to this verse, there's only two lines that we have issue with. I think there's much poetic goodness found in this verse, but I also see the problem removing it. So just ask yourself, in that line, fruit of the mystic rose, as of that rose's stem, what's being referred to there? What in the world is being said there? What was that? Okay. Okay. So, If you're not steeped in Roman Catholicism, you probably don't know the term Rosa Mystica is, or the mystical rose, or the term reserved for the Virgin Mary, which is the mystic rose. Because of the Marian dogmas and devotions attached to this term, I can understand removing this verse from our hymnal and not dealing with it. Just go, we don't need, that's a little bit too complicated for us to be hashing out in the middle of our worship service, or every time someone opens it and go, oh, this is kind of weird. What is this rose, this mystic rose you're talking about? I've never heard of God talked about as a mystic rose. But anyways, it's probably a box that doesn't need to be opened in the middle of our singing. So if you don't know the hymn yet, anyone have a guess yet? What was that? We have a winner. You get the gold star. You get to leave five minutes or I don't know. But anyways, so the first verse, crown him with many crowns, the lamb upon his throne. Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own. Awake my soul and sing of him who died for thee. And hail him as thy matchless king through all eternity. So we really, I really want to come back to this hymn and do the other three that we have listed here. But I think it would be important to point out one thing here, what draws my attention the most, especially with the studies for this. For the sake of time, let's look at this. The verse is not talking about actual music, mind you. He's not talking about all music, so just turn down the music that you're listening to in your car, turn up the music that is playing in heaven, no. I hope you understand that there is so much more illustrative noise in the world that this is trying to get at. Sometimes it's easy to entertain that what we are hearing is noisy junk. that ought to be treated as such. The illustration that I would point to is if you listen to any form of free-form jazz for more than 10 minutes, in a variety of artists, there's a lot that is just plain noise. And they're applauded for it. This is just noise. That's what I think about when I'm thinking about illustration of noisiness in our world. Freeform jazz even though I I do like some jazz songs But nevertheless freeform jazz noisy junk other times dare I say a lot of the times the noise is able to string a few notes together Few notes together to make something that sounds good to our ears These notes make up in this illustration the music that tickles our ears, the things that we want to hear, the things that we go, oh, this is my jam. This is my song. Let me listen to this 100 times. It is the music that not just tickles our ears, not just gives us what we want to hear, not the things that we're comfortable with, but it's also the things that drive us to self-destruction. It's the music that promotes selfishness or idolizing our neighbor to the point where we disobey God. Again, this is illustrative. It's the music that tells you that you are not worthy of the love of God, and instead of pointing to Christ, it points to the love of the self or love of idol, and the list goes on and on. Much noise tries to drive you away from the self. music of God from the Lord. Much distractions, much sin in the world tries to remove the comfort and joy and the rest that you have in the Lord. Again, think about rest. We can't rest if we have a noisy gong going in the back of our minds. How many of you have tried to sleep or tried to get work done in the house and there's construction work happening outside the window? It doesn't happen. You start to get transfixed on the jackhammer. You start to get transfixed on like I can't get anything done and your head starts hurting and what you once had was a humble home abode that you could rest and take comfort in, now you have a place that There is no comfort, there is no racket until you try to drown it out with more noise and more sound. Noise pollution is a real thing, but the music of the world can also lead us to what Darwinism did, which was take Charles Darwin's ideas of natural selection and evolution and then apply it to, oh, this is interesting that we think we see in the natural world. What if we apply this to humanity? And not just apply it, what if we now try to be proactive in the evolution of man and go, if we have this person and this person have a child, then that child could possibly have the same patterns or genes as their mother or their parents. And so if we have the mother and father are both scientists, maybe their child will become a scientist or have a proclivity to becoming a scientist. And this is essentially what eugenics becomes. Eugenics being the practice of making sure those that you want to have children, have children, and those who you don't want to have children, not have children. Sometimes it's called, in one documentary, the Great Crusade, because back in the 20th century, you would have scientists saying, no, we need to do this in order to save humanity. We have too many people becoming, in their minds, feeble-minded, or where we get the term moron from, which was a medical term at the time, and we need to make sure that we remove that element from our society for the betterment of society, and then that transfers into of forced sterilizations of women in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 60s. So anyways, that is a tune many people think is golden, but it's really just noiseless, noisy junk. Think about also the music behind Marxism and communism and how many bodies have been piled up for the sake of communism, for the sake of Marxist takeovers. And if people don't think this is a music that people are still going, yeah, this is my song, I have to say go check out the Goodwill in Rancho Palos Verdes because my wife and I went there a couple weeks ago and they had many signs for sale at a good discount, mind you, because it's Goodwill, for Che Guevara signs. talking about revolution, and they don't want to talk about how the revolution got to happen, but they go, oh, these signs are great. I'm going to have a t-shirt of this Marxist. Or you have people with shirts that have the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Ho Chi Minh, on the corner there. Again, people with body counts in the back of their bio Again, music that is of the world and that is noisy junk. Music that leads to the American Civil War, where so many preachers, so many people thought this was the end of the world. If you were in the battlefield, you thought hell came on earth and was ravaging the world. and ravaging your town. Some people are saying this is divine punishment for the sins of the country. Again, noisy junk. Yes, it can lead to great many things, great many noisy junk, but it is my joy to tell you, again, what the verse says, which is, the anthem, the heavenly anthem, drowns all music but its own. The Lord God Almighty drowns out all the music of the world. So you might have people who want to usurp the throne of God. You might have people in the name of science, in the name of social progression, want to, in the name of eugenics, try to take the crown of the Lord God Almighty. But again, they are not successful. They are weak. And they are, again, noisy gongs. All the things I listed do not compare to the mightiness and sovereignty of the Lord and the music which he rightly deserves. In times of woe and in times of joy, let us sing songs of praise for he who is crowned with many crowns. Such a blessed truth. We sing about him who died for thee. And the cross shines forth and drowns out the noisy rabble, leaving only Christ. We will look at the rest of the hymn next time we will go into this deep dive. But for now, I think it would be appropriate for us to end the lesson with singing Crown Hymn with Many Crowns. So if you can take your Trinity Baptist hymnal, turn to number 216, and we will sing, crown him with many crowns.