Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne
A paraphrase in rhyming verse of Psalm 100, a song of praise from all Creation.
A paraphrase in rhyming verse of Psalm 100, a song of praise from all Creation.
In the King James Bible, Psalm 100 begins ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands’. The hymn All People that on Earth do Dwell, written by Scottish minister William Kethe in 1561, is a well-known metrical paraphrase of Psalm 100; Isaac Watts made his own in 1719.
Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.
Psalm 100
BEF0RE Jehovah’s awful throne,
Ye nations, bow with sacred joy:
Know that the Lord is God alone;
He can create, and he destroy.
2 His sovereign power without our aid
Made us of clay, and form’d us men;
And when like wandering sheep we stray’d,
He brought us to his fold again.
3 We are his people, we his care,
Our souls and all our mortal frame:
What lasting honours shall we rear,
Almighty Maker, to thy name!
4 We’ll crowd thy gates with thankful songs,
High as the heavens our voices raise;
And earth with her ten thousand tongues
Shall fill thy courts with sounding praise.
5 Wide as the world is thy command,
Vast as eternity thy love;
Firm as a rock thy truth must stand
When rolling years shall cease to move.
* For another verse translation, by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, see Psalm 100 in .