This Same Jesus Shall Come Again Hymn

One of the most popular patriotic anthems of all time, this song is often performed at the funerals of American soldiers and statesmen, presidential nominating conventions and inaugurations (both Republican and Democrat), and at Independence Day church services and festivities.  Information technology was played during the Boston fireworks bear witness on Wednesday, just a mile or so away from where its lyricist, Julia Ward Howe, is buried.

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" originated during the Civil War.  On November 17, 1861, Howe traveled with her husband, Samuel, then director of the Army's Sanitary Committee, to inspect a Union military camp outside Washington, DC.  While there, she took observe of a particularly tricky marching song that the troops were fond of singing, called "John Brown's Body (Lies A-Mouldering in the Grave)."  The song memorializes John Brown, the radical abolitionist who was executed in 1859 afterwards leading an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (at present West Virginia), that killed fourteen men.  Brown became a Union hero, praised by the pens of famous writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and even the French novelist Victor Hugo, whose open letter requesting a pardon for Brown was published by newspapers in both the U.S. and Europe.  "His soul's marching on!" the Union soldiers sung in refrain—until Howe rewrote the lyrics, that is.

She did so at the urging of a friend, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, who was office of the traveling party that winter.  "Why do y'all not write some practiced words for that stirring tune?" he suggested—something higher-minded, something grander and more poetic, not so coarse.

Howe'due south solution was "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  It carries the same rah-rah sentiment as the onetime vocal, with the added weight of biblical references to Christ'south judgment of the wicked.  She penned the new lyrics overnight, and they were published ii and a one-half months later, on the front page of the February 1862 edition of the Atlantic Monthly.  Observe the conflation of Christian apocalyptic imagery with the Spousal relationship military campaign of the 1860s.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

CHORUS:
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, celebrity, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I take seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His twenty-four hour period is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Celebrity, celebrity, hallelujah!
Glory, celebrity, hallelujah!
His twenty-four hours is marching on.

I accept read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of adult female, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."

Celebrity, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, celebrity, hallelujah!
Glory, celebrity, hallelujah!
Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to reply Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Celebrity, celebrity, hallelujah!
Glory, celebrity, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was built-in across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to brand men holy, allow u.s.a. die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Glory, celebrity, hallelujah!
Glory, celebrity, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
While God is marching on.

I never realized the central message of this song until I read through all five stanzas for the first fourth dimension this week:  the Union forces were instruments of divine judgment and retribution against the Confederate states for establishing and persisting in the evil institution of slavery.

Let's take a look at how this message plays out in each stanza.

Stanza i

Mine eyes have seen the celebrity of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

The picture of Jesus that emerges from these lyrics is not pop with nigh folks, because it is a pic of Jesus the angry, Jesus the vengeful, Jesus the judge.  Words similar "trampling," "wrath," "lightning," and "sword" are not friendly words, but they are biblical descriptors of who Jesus is or will be.  People are much more apt to embrace Sermon-on-the-Mount Jesus from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and ignore this other aspect of his person, which we find described mostly in the prophetic books and in the Volume of Revelation.  But to do so is untruthful, and an offense to Jesus himself.

     "The grapes of wrath"

No, John Steinbeck did non originate this phrase, and neither did Julia Ward Howe.  They were merely borrowing linguistic communication from the biblical authors, who frequently compare God's wrath to a winepress:  when harvest time comes, God will cut down the ripe grapevines with a sickle and trample the grapes underfoot; their juices volition be squeezed out into vats and poured out over the earth (Revelation 15-sixteen).  The grapes, of grade, correspond unrepentant sinners, and the vino their blood; the treading action represents God's fury.  This metaphor is developed the most thoroughly past the apostle John in the Book of Revelation (a revelation of what? of what Jesus Christ's second coming will look similar):

• Revelation 14:9-10:  "A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice:  'If anyone worships the animal and its epitome and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand,they, also, volition drink the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full forcefulness into the loving cup of his wrath.'"
• Revelation xiv:18-20:  "Still another affections, who had charge of the fire, came from the chantry and called in a loud vocalisation to him who had the abrupt sickle [the 1 "like a son of man," five. xiv], 'Have your precipitous sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe.'  The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the keen winepress of God's wrath.  They were trampled in the winepress outside the urban center, and blood flowed out of the press, rise every bit loftier as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia [about 180 miles]."
• Revelation 19:fifteen:  "… he [Jesus] treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty."

But John wasn't the only one who had these fearsome visions of Christ.  The Jewish prophet Isaiah saw something very similar, virtually 800 years earlier:  a crimson-stained figure, who looked as if he had been crushing grapes all twenty-four hours.  After receiving this vision, Isaiah engaged in some Q&A with Jesus (Isaiah 63:one-6):

Who is this who comes from Edom, in crimsoned garments from Bozrah, he who is splendid in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his forcefulness?

"It is I, speaking in righteousness, mighty to save."

Why is your apparel red, and your garments similar his who treads in the winepress?

"I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my acrimony and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood spattered on my garments, and stained all my apparel.  For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and my year of redemption had come.  I looked, simply there was no one to help; I was appalled, simply there was no i to uphold; so my own arm brought me salvation, and my wrath upheld me. I trampled down the peoples in my anger; I made them drunk in my wrath, and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth."

No, Isaiah, that'south not grape juice.

The other prophets, as well, used the winepress metaphor.  The author of Lamentations (mayhap Jeremiah), in lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, wrote, "In his winepress the Lord has trampled the Virgin daughter of Judah" (Lamentations 1:15).  The prophet Joel recorded a "give-and-take of the Lord" in Joel iii:13:  "Swing the sickle, for the harvest is ripe.  Come, trample the grapes, for the winepress is total and the vats overflow—so great is their [the nations'] wickedness!"  (This is God-of-the-time to come speaking either to his angels, or to his Son—I can't tell.)

The prototype is gruesome, I know.  I listing all these examples only to show that John wasn't alone in his label of Jesus as wrathful, as I've heard people merits.

What'south problematic well-nigh Howe's adaptation of these passages, though, is that she strips abroad their context, which the Bible very explicitly establishes as Christ's 2d coming—an result that volition happen only in one case, at the stop of human history.  Their meaning doesn't carry over to America'southward domestic disputes.  Howe writes that she has seen the celebrity of Christ's second coming—in the Union troops.  He has already started his trampling.  In this revisioning of Scripture, she casts the Southerners as the divinely disfavored grapes, and the Northerners as the grape-crushers, the righteous sword-wielders, the marching truth.  Obviously all those prophecies that fill the Christian Scriptures were fulfilled in 1865.

To claim that God is on either side of whatever war is not but presumptuous, it's sinful.  Certain, God waged war on other nations through State of israel in Quondam Testament times, simply that was for a specific purpose (Israel'due south possession of the Promised Land); God does not piece of work that way anymore, and even and so, America is not God'south covenant people.  And when he does render to Earth to wage war on his enemies, it will be he himself, not u.s., who does the crushing.  ("Vengeance is mine; I volition repay," saith the Lord.)

     "His terrible swift sword"

God—both Father and Son—are likewise associated with the sword in Scripture.  Here are just a few examples:

• Deuteronomy 32:41:  "When I sharpen my flashing sword and my manus grasps information technology in judgment, I will have vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who detest me."
• Isaiah 66:fifteen-16:  "Encounter, the LORD is coming with fire, and his chariots are like a whirlwind; he will bring down his acrimony with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.  For with fire and with his sword the LORD will execute judgment on all people, and many will exist those slain by the LORD."
• Ezekiel 21:3-4:  "This is what the LORD says [to Israel]:  'I am against you lot.  I will draw my sword from its scabbard and cut off from you both the righteous and the wicked.  Because I am going to cutting off the righteous and the wicked, my sword volition exist unsheathed against everyone from south to n.'"
• Revelation ane:16:  "In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword…"
• Revelation 2:16:  "Repent therefore!  Otherwise, I will soon come up to you and volition fight against them with the sword of my oral fissure."

Stanza two

I accept seen Him in the lookout man-fires of a hundred circumvoluted camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I tin can read His righteous judgement by the dim and flaring lamps:
His mean solar day is marching on.

In this stanza, Howe writes that Christ was in the watch-fires of the Marriage armed forces camps, and more than that, that the camps they prepare upwardly pleased him—they were altars of worship, erected in his name.  And the worshippers are fully prepared—eager, even—to carry out the "righteous sentence" of expiry prescribed in Revelation for all God's enemies.  They'll deport it out on God's behalf.

In the Bible, the phrase "the twenty-four hour period of the Lord" consistently refers to the mean solar day Christ will enact his final vengeance upon the earth (see the Blue Letter Bible concordance).  Simply in this song, the day of the Lord is ushered in past the marching forward of the Union troops.

Stanza 3

I take read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye bargain with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, beat the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."

This stanza is appalling.  No wonder so many hymnals and recordings omit it.  The gospel beingness shot along from the barrels of rifles ("burnished rows of steel")?  Allow's spread the adept news—blindside, y'all're dead.  Unfortunately, this decadent theology of "holy war" is responsible for thousands upon thousands of deaths, stretching centuries dorsum.  And here is Howe, perpetuating the prevarication.  The Civil War was a holy war, she suggests, sanctioned by God to wipe out the sins (or rather, the sinners) of the nation; the North will be blest, but as soon as they finish off all those who scorn their God.

And here is crushing of an even more than climactic kind.  The Southerners are now compared to Satan, God's archenemy; their secession from the Spousal relationship is akin to Satan's rebellion, and volition be punished accordingly (Genesis 3:fifteen).

Stanza four

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never phone call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men earlier His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! exist celebrating, my anxiety!
Our God is marching on.

The Bible says that a series of trumpet blasts volition precede the 2d coming of Christ (Zephaniah 1:xiv-16; Matthew 24:30-31; ane Corinthians fifteen:51-52), to bespeak the start of a cracking boxing (cf. Jeremiah four:nineteen; Ezekiel 7:fourteen).  And this trumpet won't always sound along the call to retreat, because Christ is going to win.

In line 3, the speaker addresses his/her own soul.  "Come up on!  Brave upwardly!" he/she soliloquizes.  "Respond to God'southward call . . . by joining the Matrimony cause!"  Whereas in the Bible, the call of God and the soul's response nigh always refers to repentance and conservancy, here information technology refers to a literal boxing call.

Stanza five

In the dazzler of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
Equally He died to brand men holy, let u.s.a. die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Aw, how pretty.  Lilies.  Transfiguration.  Freedom.  This is the victory stanza.

The war context is obvious from the tertiary line.  Interestingly, though, the hymnal I grew up with (Majesty Hymns, Greenville, S.C.: Majesty Music, 1997), and in fact the majority of renditions, replace the word "die" with "live":  "As He died to make men holy, permit us live to brand men gratis."  This has a much nicer band to it, and a wider applicability.  We can't all go sacrifice our lives on the front lines (nor is that pick necessarily God-honoring in all cases), simply we tin make little sacrifices every day—our time, our money, our personal condolement, then on—to serve the cause of Christ.

Conclusion

So, should nosotros ban this song from our churches?  Not necessarily, though I can see why others would say yep.  Now that I know more about the song, information technology does brand me a little uneasy to sing.  But with the revisions that most churches make (dropping the second and tertiary stanzas, with their explicit references to warfare, and reframing sacrifice in the final stanza in terms of a way of life rather than an act of expiry), the song reads more biblically—as an anticipation of Christ'due south render, in all his acquisition glory.  He will vindicate his children; he will destroy sin and decease; he will make his holiness known every bit never before; he will create a new sky and a new globe; and he will rapture his children into the presence of the eternal, triune Godhead.  Celebrity, glory, hallelujah, indeed!  If nosotros are going to sing it in church, though, I propose a championship change.  What nearly "The Boxing Hymn of the Church"?  (Seems obvious enough.)

Should we ban information technology from our country's political gatherings?  Probably.  We shouldn't fill our heads with the presumption that God is on our side, merely considering we're America.  We—as a nation, I mean—are not God's chosen people.  And even if nosotros cut out the references to war-military camp altars and "(gun)fiery gospels" and annihilation else that suggests that God is pleased with united states when nosotros impale in his name, it doesn't make sense for non-Christians to gloat cease-times events.  Why sing "Hallelujah" (literally "Praise the Lord") if yous don't mean it?

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Source: https://thejesusquestion.org/2012/07/09/the-battle-hymn-of-the-republic-its-origin-and-meaning/