O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.
A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone,
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.
Public domain hymn text (1719). Words by Isaac Watts.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Isaac Watts, already responsible elsewhere in this collection for hymns including 'Joy to the World' (hymn 32) and 'Jesus Shall Reign' (hymn 97), wrote this hymn's text in 1719 as a paraphrase of Psalm 90, part of the same larger project that produced those other hymns: a systematic effort to render the biblical Psalms into explicitly Christian congregational verse rather than leaving them as literal Hebrew translations sung without any New Testament reframing.
Psalm 90 is traditionally attributed in its own superscription to Moses, making it, if that attribution is accurate, among the oldest individual psalms in the entire Hebrew Bible, and its central theme — the vast, almost incomprehensible gap between God's own eternal existence and the brief, fleeting span of an individual human life, 'like an evening gone' — gave Watts material for one of his most enduringly stark and philosophically serious hymn texts.
William Croft, organist of Westminster Abbey, composed the tune commonly used today, known as 'St. Anne,' in 1708, more than a decade before Watts wrote the words it would eventually be paired with, the two having been brought together only later by hymnal editors.
The hymn gained particular prominence in twentieth-century Britain as a hymn of national mourning and resilience, sung at the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 and regularly used at British memorial and remembrance services for those killed in war, its meditation on human transience set against divine permanence resonating with mourning congregations across a nation whose own more immediate historical griefs Watts, writing quietly in 1719, could not have anticipated.
