A wonderful Savior is Jesus my Lord,
A wonderful Savior to me;
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock,
Where rivers of pleasure I see.
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock,
That shadows a dry, thirsty land;
He hideth my life in the depths of His love,
And covers me there with His hand,
And covers me there with His hand.
A wonderful Savior is Jesus my Lord,
He taketh my burden away;
He holdeth me up, and I shall not be moved,
He giveth me strength as my day.
With numberless blessings each moment He crowns,
And filled with His fullness divine,
I sing in my rapture, oh, glory to God
For such a Redeemer as mine.
When clothed in His brightness, transported I rise
To meet Him in clouds of the sky,
His perfect salvation, His wonderful love,
I’ll shout with the millions on high.
Public domain hymn text (1890). Words by Fanny J. Crosby.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Fanny Crosby wrote this hymn's text in 1890, already in her seventies at the time and still decades away from the end of her remarkably long working life as a hymn writer, drawing its central image directly from Exodus 33:22, in which God tells Moses, who has asked to see God's glory, that He will place Moses 'in a clift of the rock' and cover him with His hand while His glory passes by, since no one may see God's face directly and live.
Crosby applies that specific, dramatic Old Testament scene of protective concealment — God physically shielding Moses from an overwhelming, potentially fatal encounter — to the ordinary believer's own experience of being spiritually sheltered and protected, treating the ancient story not as a one-time historical event limited to Moses alone but as an ongoing pattern still available to any believer today.
William J. Kirkpatrick, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as composer of the tune to 'Redeemed, How I Love to Proclaim It' (hymn 85), composed the tune for this hymn as well, continuing a long working association with Crosby that produced numerous hymns together across several decades.
The hymn's third verse, describing blessings that come 'each moment,' and its fourth, anticipating being caught up 'in clouds of the sky' to meet Christ directly, move the hymn's focus outward from present shelter toward future glory, a progression characteristic of much of Crosby's later hymn writing, composed as she moved deeper into old age herself while continuing to produce new hymns at a pace few writers half her age could match, her own blindness never having slowed the steady output that would eventually total between eight and nine thousand hymn texts by the time of her death in 1915.
