Our Earth We Now Lament To See

It is perhaps hard for us to imagine, but the eighteenth century was just as turbulent and scary as ours. Disease and poverty, alcohol abuse and family discord, violence on the streets and war were all familiar threats, and the seeds of some of our modern-day ordeals were being sown with the highly lucrative business of buying and selling human beings, something John Wesley forcefully condemned.  I invite you to pray this hymn written by Charles Wesley as a cry of lament and yet as a word of hope, not in ourselves, but in the God we know as Love Divine.

Our earth we now lament to see

With floods of wickedness overflowed,

With violence, wrong, and cruelty,

One wide-extended field of blood,

Where men like fiends each other tear,

In all the hellish rage of war.

As listed on Abaddon’s side,

They mangle their own flesh, and slay:

Tophet is moved, and opens wide

Its mouth for its enormous prey;

And myriads sink beneath the grave,

And plunge into the flaming wave.

O might the universal Friend

This havoc of His creatures see!

Bid our unnatural discord end;

Declare us reconciled in Thee!

Write kindness on our inward parts,

And chase the murderer from our hearts!

Who now against each other rise,

The nations of the earth constrain

To follow after peace, and prize

The blessings of Thy righteous reign,

The joys of unity to prove,

The paradise of perfect love! ~ Charles Wesley

(Abaddon is understood as a destroyer, the king of locusts in Revelation and also as the realm of the dead in various OT passages, while Tophet was a place of human, particularly child, sacrifice.)