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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today, for our last carol this year, we’re looking at “Joy to the World”, which is one of my favorite hymns to sing.

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

This is one of my favorite hymns to sing, not because of the words—although we’ll get to all of those later—but because it starts like a cannon blast. The joy begins on the first syllable. And if you want to belt “and heaven and nature sing” like Mariah Carey, this song totally supports that choice.

This carol is not just joy for no reason, though. Here’s the reason:

The Lord is come.
The Savior reigns.
The curse is being undone.
The King rules the world with truth and grace.

We’ve been circling joy all Advent. We’ve seen darkness and war and grief—the massacre of the innocents, the Civil War, World War II—and here we are, finally, at release.

The reason for joy is simple: The Lord is come.

And we can have only one response.

Let earth receive her king.
Let every heart prepare him room.

This is a universal chorus. You’ll see in this song over and over that nothing is exempt from the joy. We don’t just sing alone—we recruit the universe.

Let heaven and nature sing.

This is, as so many other things, Psalm 19 territory: creation declaring the glory of God. Creation itself is joining in the song here.

The hymn keeps widening the circle. No one gets left out. No people get left out. Not a piece of creation.

The song the angels have been singing since that very first moment in Genesis 1—and they will be singing forever.

Here we are, finally, joining in.

Verse 2 doesn’t let up either. It’s not just that the king has come. Now “the Savior reigns”.

Which is a little bit weird, because usually kings reign. But here it is the Savior who reigns, and the reason is that Jesus is not easy to categorize.

Is he Lord?
Is he Savior?
Is he King?

Yes, yes, yes—and High Priest, and so much more.

Our job, again, is simple and immediate:

Our mortal songs employ.

Translation: keep singing.

And what does nature do? They join us.

Fields and floods, rocks and hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy.

Luke 19:40 comes to mind for me:

If these were silent, if the crowd didn’t scream, the stones would cry out.

Or Romans 8:22:

Creation is groaning now, today, here while you’re listening to me.

But in this song, the groan becomes praise. Joy and music.

In fact, that phrase—”repeat the sounding joy”—is basically a playground for choir directors. The echo is built right into the line. It’s like candy for them. It’s irresistible.

Verse 3 takes a turn. It’s a little weird, actually, because so far we’ve been in Psalm 98—the total joy of the entire cosmos—and here we’re going to jump back to Genesis.

The hymn is going to get theological without letting up on any of the energy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow.

Jesus comes to make his blessings flow “as far as the curse is found.”

And what curse is that?

It’s the one from Genesis 3, where suddenly man has to go get his food by the sweat of his brow. The ground is suddenly fighting you for your dinner, whereas Eden just yielded up the pomegranates whenever you wanted them.

This verse mentions thorns, and there are a couple of thorns in the Bible that are memorable.

There are those thorns in Genesis—creation resisting the pull of the humans that are trying to till the earth, work the ground, and live.

There’s also Jesus’ parable of the sower—thorns choking that young faith before it can grow.

And then there’s the crown of thorns—the king actually wearing the curse for us right before he sacrifices his life for us.

And so here we are. The curse is finally being lifted. And it’s not just like a tiny private blessing. It’s not some sacred chapel.

The blessings go as far as the curse. Every inch of broken ground is now being reclaimed.

And then verse 4—this line kind of makes you want to stop in the middle of the song and go, wait, wait, what did I just read? What did I sing?

Here’s the line:

He makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness
And the wonders of his love.

This is an older meaning of prove. Not prove like a theorem, but prove like testing—try it and find out if it’s true.

It’s kind of like that phrase “the exception proves the rule”, which means not that the exception makes the rule true, but the exception tests the rule to see if it’s good.

So this verse invites the world to come on—test the righteousness of our God. See how good it is.

And the righteousness here is not a private morality. It’s not uprightness. But instead it’s God setting things right: the faithful governance of the creator, the promise-keeping justice of the Savior.

And it matters who’s doing the proving.

It’s not Israel.
It’s not the descendants of Abraham.
It’s not the church.
It’s especially not the United States of America.

It is all the nations.

I get to say Isaiah 2 again: all nations flow to the mountain of the Lord.

And here’s the dare in this lyric: in Christ’s kingdom, go ahead. Try oppression. Try lies. Try twisting justice.

And see how that works out for you.

This is a dangerous lyric in a fallen world, and that’s why it’s worth singing.

Loudly.

The hymn finishes with this gorgeous mic drop:

The wonders of his love.

And here, I hear wonder two different ways.

First, as in awe. It’s bigger than pyramids, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than the Internet. You think those things are cool? Check out the love of Christ.

I know that sounds like a very youth pastor thing to say, doesn’t it? But the carol is really inviting us to be amazed. And not just amazed, but nearly disbelieving.

Another song says:

Amazing love, how can it be?

And that, I think, is the attitude of worship that we should have here: How can this kind of love be possible?

The joy of this song is not just hype. It has basis and grounding and reason throughout Scripture.

Joy is the appropriate response when the King comes, when the Savior reigns, when the curse is undone, and when the world finally starts working the way it was originally made to work.

Man, Isaac Watts had fun with this hymn. And I do too.

He wrote this as a paraphrase of Psalm 98, and he published it in 1719 in a book called Psalms of David Imitated. Actually, the title is much, much longer, but that’s the short version.

And he called the song The Messiah’s Coming and Kingdom.

Watts, however, is kind of weird. He was sort of a hymn-writing rebel. Churches were used at that point to just singing psalms set to music. But Watts felt like we should be able to sing Scripture-shaped hymns—hymns inspired by the Bible, not just hymns from the Bible.

And he wrote 750 of them.

And I suspect that he got much the same reception from parents in 1719 as did Elvis, and the Beatles, and Ozzy Osbourne.

The tune most of us know is associated with a man named Lowell Mason from the 1800s. He called that tune Antioch.

And many people attribute it to Handel—as in the guy who wrote The Messiah—but today that connection is considered vastly overstated. Instead, it’s much more likely that there was an older German tune that both Handel and Mason drew from.

One last little fun fact: Joy to the World is often cited as the most published Christmas carol in North America. Almost 1,900 different hymnals include it.

So let’s get back to that hymn.

It is a giant, high-energy, raucous song that invites volume. It’s boisterous and it’s wonderful—but it is not shallow.

This is a surprisingly deep song, and maybe it’s because it was, in fact, based on the Bible.

It tells us that there is joy because the King is here, the Savior reigns, the curse is being reversed, and the nations will prove—by living inside of it—that his justice, his righteousness is glorious, and his love is a wonder to beat all wonders.

So—

Let heaven and nature sing.

That’s why we sing.

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

The carols are done for this year, but we’ll be back tomorrow with a special gift for Christmas.

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