Everlasting Peace
Text · full lyrics
I hear the words of love,
I gaze upon the blood,
I see the mighty sacrifice,
And I have peace with God.
This everlasting peace,
Sure as Jehovah's name,
Is stable as His steadfast throne,
Forevermore the same.
The clouds may go and come,
And storms may sweep the sky;
This blood-sealed friendship changes not,
The cross is ever nigh.
This everlasting peace,
Sure as Jehovah's name,
Is stable as His steadfast throne,
Forevermore the same.
My love is often low,
My joy it ebbs and flows;
But peace with Him remains the same,
No change Jehovah knows.
This everlasting peace,
Sure as Jehovah's name,
Is stable as His steadfast throne,
Forevermore the same.
The lyricist
Horatius Bonar
Bonar was a Free Church of Scotland minister who spent his longest pastorate at Kelso in the Borders before settling in Edinburgh. His hymn-writing began almost by accident: as a young assistant minister in the rough seaport district of Leith, he ran a Sunday school of nearly three hundred children, and finding them listless under the metrical psalms that were then the only music his denomination permitted, he started writing simple verses set to tunes they already knew. The experiment took, and he kept at it for the rest of his life, producing more than six hundred hymns — many of which, by the rules of his own psalm-singing church, were never sung from its pulpit but read aloud instead. He was notably reticent about the circumstances behind individual hymns, often saying he could no longer recall the occasions that prompted them, which is part of why texts like this one are left to speak for themselves.
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