Lo, He comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain;
Thousand thousand saints attending
Swell the triumph of His train:
Alleluia! Alleluia!
God appears on earth to reign.
Every eye shall now behold Him
Robed in dreadful majesty;
Those who set at nought and sold Him,
Pierced and nailed Him to the tree,
Deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see.
Those dear tokens of His passion
Still His dazzling body bears,
Cause of endless exultation
To His ransomed worshipers;
With what rapture, with what rapture,
Gaze we on those glorious scars!
Public domain hymn text (1758). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley wrote this hymn's text in 1758, drawing directly on Revelation 1:7 — 'Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him' — as an extended meditation on the second coming of Christ, a theme considerably less commonly addressed in the surviving body of widely sung congregational hymnody than the nativity or crucifixion, making this hymn one of relatively few historic hymns to focus so directly and extensively on Christ's promised future return rather than on events already past.
Wesley based the hymn in part on an earlier, considerably rougher hymn on the same subject written by John Cennick, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as author of 'Children of the Heavenly King' (hymn 135), who had briefly worked alongside the Wesley brothers before their later theological parting of ways — Wesley's version substantially reworked and expanded Cennick's original text rather than simply reprinting it, a fairly unusual case of one prominent hymn writer directly revising another's existing published work.
Thomas Olivers, a Welsh Methodist preacher who had himself been personally converted after hearing George Whitefield preach and who worked for a period as an itinerant preacher and hymn tune composer within early Methodism, composed the tune, titled 'Helmsley,' most commonly associated with the hymn.
The hymn's vivid, deliberately dramatic imagery of universal recognition — 'every eye shall now behold Him,' including specifically those who had earlier rejected and crucified Him, now 'deeply wailing' at His return — reflects the strand of eighteenth-century Methodist preaching that emphasized final judgment and accountability as a genuine, urgent motivation for present repentance, a theological emphasis considerably more pronounced in this particular hymn than in the gentler, more comforting tone found in several of Wesley's other, better-known hymns represented elsewhere throughout this collection.
