February 6, 2005

The Love of God

Words and Music by Frederick Martin Lehman, 1868-1953

    Do not fear, Zion, let not your hands be weak. The LORD your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing. Zephaniah 3:16, 17.

    Lehman emigrated to America with his family at the age of four, settling in Iowa, where he lived most of childhood. He came to Christ at age 11, as he relates:

One glad morning about eleven o’clock while walking up the country lane, skirted by a wild crab-apple grove on the right and an osage fence, with an old white-elm gate in a gap at the left, suddenly Heaven let a cornucopia of glory descend on the eleven-year old lad. The wild crab-apple grove assumed a heavenly glow and the osage fence an unearthly lustre. That old white-elm gate with its sun-warped boards gleamed and glowed like silver bars to shut out the world and shut him in with the ’form of the fourth,’ just come into his heart. The weight of conviction was gone and the paeans of joy and praise fell from his lips.

    Lehman studied for the ministry at Northwestern College in Naperville, Illinois, and pastored at Audubon, Iowa; New London, Indiana; and Kansas City, Missouri. The majority of his life was devoted to writing sacred songs; his first was written while a pastor in Kingsley, Iowa, in 1898. He wrote and published hundreds of songs, and compiled five song books. In 1911, he moved to Kansas City, where he helped found the Nazarene Publishing House.
    Lehman wrote this song in 1917 in Pasadena, California, and it was published in Songs That Are Different, Volume 2, 1919.
    The unusual third stanza of the hymn was a small part of an ancient lengthy poem composed in 1096 by a Jewish songwriter, Rabbi Mayer, in Worms, Germany. The poem, Hadamut, was written in the Arabic language. The lines were found one day in revised form on the walls of a patient's room in an insane asylum after the patient's death. The opinion has since been that the unknown patient, during times of sanity, adapted from the Jewish poem what is now the third verse of The Love of God.
    The words of this third stanza were quoted one day at a Nazarene campmeeting. In the meeting was Frederic Lehman, a Nazarene pastor.
    In telling of the history of The Love of God, Lehman writes:

    The profound depths of the lines moved us to preserve the words for future generations. Not until we had come to California did this urge find fulfillment, and that at a time when circumstances forced us to hard manual labor. One day, during short intervals of inattention to our work, we picked up a scrap of paper and, seated upon an empty lemon box pushed against the wall, with a stub pencil, added the (first) two stan­zas and chorus of the song. . . . Since the lines (3rd stanza from the Jewish poem) had been found penciled on the wall of a patient’s room in an insane asylum after he had been carried to his grave, the general opinion was that this inmate had written the epic in moments of sanity.

    Pastor Lehman completed the hymn in 1917. His daughter, Claudia Mays, assisted him with the music.

Hymns by Frederick Lehman include:

The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
It goes beyond the highest star,
And reaches to the lowest hell;
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled,
And pardoned from his sin.

When years of time shall pass away,
And earthly thrones and kingdoms fall,
When men, who here refuse to pray,
On rocks and hills and mountains call,
God’s love so sure, shall still endure,
All measureless and strong;
Redeeming grace to Adam’s race—
The saints’ and angels’ song.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

Chorus:
O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints’ and angels’ song.