Before Jehovah’s awful throne,
Ye nations, bow with sacred joy;
Know that the Lord is God alone;
He can create, and He destroy.
His sovereign power, without our aid,
Made us of clay, and formed us men;
And when like wandering sheep we strayed,
He brought us to His fold again.
We’ll crowd Thy gates with thankful songs,
High as the heavens our voices raise;
And earth, with her ten thousand tongues,
Shall fill Thy courts with sounding praise.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1719). Words by Isaac Watts.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Isaac Watts wrote this hymn's text in 1719 as a paraphrase of Psalm 100, part of the same larger project already discussed elsewhere in this collection that produced 'Jesus Shall Reign' (hymn 97) and 'My Shepherd Will Supply My Need' (hymn 151), and it stands as Watts's own reworking of one of the shortest and most universally recognized psalms of praise in the entire Hebrew Bible.
The hymn's opening word 'awful' uses the term in its now largely archaic original sense, meaning 'full of awe' or 'awe-inspiring,' rather than in its modern colloquial sense of something poor in quality — a linguistic shift common across several centuries-old hymn texts represented throughout this collection, where words have gradually drifted in common meaning since their original composition, sometimes creating unintentional confusion for modern singers unfamiliar with the earlier usage.
The hymn's second verse, describing humanity's creation as being formed 'of clay,' draws directly on Genesis 2:7's account of God forming the first human being from 'the dust of the ground,' while its image of 'wandering sheep' brought back 'to His fold again' echoes both Psalm 100's own pastoral imagery and the broader biblical shepherd metaphor found throughout Scripture, including in Psalm 23, the basis of Watts's separate hymn 151 elsewhere in this collection.
William Croft, the Westminster Abbey organist already discussed elsewhere in this collection as composer of the tune 'St. Anne' used with 'O God, Our Help in Ages Past' (hymn 119), also composed the tune most commonly associated with this hymn, giving Watts's paraphrase of one of the Bible's shortest psalms a suitably direct, unadorned musical setting well matched to the psalm's own original brevity and simplicity.
