Easter Sunday, April 12 | by Philip Owens

(Matthew Bridges, 1851, and Godfrey Thring, 1874 – CGH #223)

During a children’s music rehearsal, the director held up a hymnal and asked the group if they knew this book. One child raised her hand and said, “That’s a Music Bible!” Could there be a more apropos name for a hymnal? How keen the mind of a child to capture so literally the nature of this wonderful gift of our faith! Its rich, carefully crafted words convey thoroughly vetted theology. With Scripture leading the way, it comforts, challenges, empowers, and encourages us at so many moments in our Christian walk.

Its rich, carefully crafted words conveying thoroughly vetted theology, which with Scripture leading the way, comforts, challenges, empowers, and encourages us at so many moments in our Christian walk.

We see those carefully crafted words in the hymn, Crown Him with Many Crowns. Revelation 19:12 provides the reference that, “…on his head were many crowns.” In the hymn, Jesus is crowned with the monikers of matchless King, Lord of Life, Lord of Peace, and Lord of Love. And we see different elements of the Easter story in each stanza. But the recurring theme throughout each verse is that the work of Easter is eternal.

God is the Great Potentate and Architect of Time. There has never been a time when God was not God, nor will there ever be. From everlasting to everlasting, unending, unchanging, The Eternal One loved us so greatly that He sent His one and only Son, Jesus. And it is His glories now we sing, who died, and rose on high, who died eternal life to bring, and lives that death may die.

“But we see him who for a little while was made lower than
the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor
because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of
God he might taste death for everyone. “(Hebrews 2:9)

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