Arise, my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears:
Before the throne my Surety stands,
Before the throne my Surety stands,
My name is written on His hands.
He ever lives above, for me to intercede,
His all-redeeming love, His precious blood to plead;
His blood atoned for every race,
His blood atoned for every race,
And sprinkles now the throne of grace.
Five bleeding wounds He bears,
Received on Calvary;
They pour effectual prayers,
They strongly plead for me:
\”Forgive him, O forgive,\” they cry,
\”Nor let that ransomed sinner die!\”
Public domain hymn text (1742). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley wrote this hymn's text in 1742, drawing its central legal image from the concept of a 'surety' — a person who formally guarantees another's debt or legal obligation, standing personally responsible if the original debtor cannot pay — applying that specific legal and financial concept to Christ's own role interceding on the believer's behalf before God, an image reinforced by Hebrews 7:25, which describes Christ as 'ever living to make intercession' for those who come to God through Him.
The hymn's repeated image of the believer's 'name written on His hands' draws on Isaiah 49:16, in which God tells Israel, 'Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands,' a striking image of permanent, physically inscribed remembrance that Wesley applies directly to Christ's own crucifixion wounds, suggesting that the very marks of the nails driven through Christ's hands themselves now serve as a permanent, physical record of the believer's name before God.
The hymn's structure, with each verse's third line repeated immediately as its fourth line before continuing to a final concluding line, creates a distinctive, insistent musical and poetic emphasis unusual even among Wesley's own considerable body of hymn writing, the repetition functioning almost like a determined, repeated assertion working to overcome the 'guilty fears' the hymn's opening line explicitly names as the obstacle the singer must actively 'shake off.'
Lewis Edson, an early American blacksmith and self-taught singing-school teacher working in colonial Massachusetts, composed the vigorous tune commonly paired with the hymn today, known as 'Lenox,' giving Wesley's eighteenth-century English text a distinctly early American musical setting, one of relatively few hymns in widespread use where an English Methodist founder's words were eventually paired with music composed by an ordinary working tradesman on the other side of the Atlantic rather than by a professionally trained English or European composer.
