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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at Adeste Fideles, a song you probably know better as “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”

If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.

Now, I gave this hymn’s title in Latin because this is the first hymn I remember wanting to sing in Latin.

Adeste fideles, venite adoremus.

It just sounds like worship, doesn’t it?

And what’s interesting about this carol is that it’s not mainly telling the Christmas story. It’s mainly inviting us into it.

There’s this invitation to pilgrimage. There’s a kind of stealthy insertion of the Nicene Creed. And then there’s this glorious choir rehearsal right there in the third verse.

Let’s dig into it.

Verse 1:

O come, all ye faithful, to Bethlehem.

Come and do what?

Behold him, born the King of angels.

So, in Scripture, specific people get invited, right?

Shepherds get the announcement from the angels in Luke 2.
The wise men get the star in Matthew 2.

This hymn, though, widens it to all ye faithful, who are called to come and see and adore.

Not just come and understand.

We’re not tourists taking selfies at the manger. We are worshipers who got a summons to the King who deserves worship.

And the refrain gives us the only possible response: adoration.

O come, let us adore him

Over and over again. This is Psalm 95:6:

O come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.

Unlike We Three Kings, this carol is basically saying, *Look, you can bring the gold later. Right now, bring your knees and drop to them.**

This song has basically one main life application, and it is: bow down.

Verse 2 brings this incredibly dense theology:

True God of true God, Light from Light eternal

And then later:

begotten, not created.

This is the Nicene Creed in song form.

Here’s what you need to know: Jesus isn’t just a really special created being.

He is God from God. The same divine life. The same glory as God the Father, because he is the same as God the Father.

This is anchored in at least two good places in Scripture.

First, in John 1:

The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And second, in Hebrews 1:

The Son is the exact imprint of the Father.

And then, once we get through the theology, here’s the crazy part, and the reason the identity of Christ was brought up in the song.

It’s that “he abhors not the virgin’s womb”.

That means that the eternal Light, the true God, does not recoil from human limits.
Instead, he condescends to become flesh and blood—one of us.

Now, you think I’m going to quote Hebrews 2 again, but instead I’m going with Philippians 2 this time:

Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

What a beautiful way to say it.
And we, in this song, get to sing it.

And then, in verse 3, we stretch all the way into eternity:

Sing, choirs of angels
glory to God in the highest.

This hymn stitches Luke 2—that angel chorus over Bethlehem—with the cosmic worship of Revelation.

Because Christmas worship isn’t just private; it’s heaven and earth. We are joining a song that has been in progress forever.

Amazing.

And then that glorious verse 4:

Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning,

And later,

Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.

That’s basically John 1:14 set to music:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

God is not distant. He’s not abstract. He’s right here with us.

Emmanuel.
Visible.
Touchable.
Near.

See, in verse 4, the invitation that we got worked.

We came. And now we get to greet him. Now we get to adore.

I almost feel like I want to end this episode on that note, but I feel like I should tell you where this song came from.

It was originally written in Latin—Adeste Fideles.

And we don’t know for sure who wrote it, but it’s most commonly credited to a man named John Francis Wade, sometime in the mid-1700s. The oldest version we have is from 1751.

Now, this gets a little bit confusing, because Wade was a Catholic from England who fled persecution to France, where he became a musical copyist. So he has his name on a lot of music that we know he didn’t write.

Lots of other people, for that reason, have been credited for this, including some incredibly famous people—some saints, some kings. It gets a little bit crazy.

One thing we do know is that the most common English version was translated by Frederick Oakeley in 1841.

And then the big modern choir arrangement you’re probably familiar with comes from Sir David Willcocks in 1961.

That’s where that amazing descant on “Sing, choirs of angels” comes from—
that beautiful soprano line that changes everything as the angels start singing.

This carol is used in a lot of very cool places.

It’s traditionally the final anthem at Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica.

And at King’s College Cambridge’s Nine Lessons and Carols, it’s the penultimate hymn—that means the one before the last one—coming right after the reading of John 1, which is what I just quoted.

Now, before we get away from authorship, here’s just a tiny note. And this is totally nuts and wildly speculative—but serious people believe it.

There’s a theory that this song might have had coded overtones for the Jacobite rebellion in England, the attempt to put a Catholic king back on the throne.

Regem angelorum might be code, they say, for regem Anglorum.

That is, instead of King of angels, it really means King of England.

In this theory, Bethlehem is ciphertext for England, and it’s really a call for the king—the true Catholic king—to come back to England.

But please treat that as wild speculation. Don’t let it influence your understanding of this carol.

Let’s get back to those words:

O come, let us adore him.
O come, let us adore him.

This carol asks us to do exactly one thing.

It doesn’t end with now go do… something. It ends with a command to adoration.

Because the Word became flesh.

The invitation of this hymn is not yet to go and tell. It’s not just to remember Bethlehem.

It is first and finally to come and see, to be invited to the manger, and to adore Christ the Lord.

And that’s why we sing.

Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out VerseNotes Commons at: versenotes.org/commons.

We’ll be back tomorrow with another Carol of Christmas.

If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].

And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.

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