Saturday 8 May. Song 146 ‘Whoever lives beside the Lord’
Words / Music: John Bell © WGRG / Iona Community.
YouTube recording:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w18nhWi54LM
Featured image: Duck with ducklings © Stephen Craven

This hymn with five verses is a setting to a Scottish tune of Psalm 91 (90 in Catholic Bibles) which is one of my favourites.  According to my tutor*, it is not addressed to God (though in the last few verses of the psalm, God responds with a promise of protection), nor is it a congregational song, but rather probably intended to be sung privately by someone who is already a believer, as a form of meditation on God’s faithfulness and trustworthiness, and perhaps a reminder that God invites and expects us to trust in him. The hymn invites us to respond: ‘My God, in you I trust, my safety, my defender’.

The photo is a recent one that I picked as a response to the opening lines (‘Whoever lives beside the Lord, sheltering in the Almighty’s shade’) and some in the second verse of the hymn (‘from unseen dangers and disease God will keep you safe and sure’). The duck and her new brood were sheltering beneath a large rock in a stream bed – a dry stream bed at present, being in the limestone country of Ribblesdale (Yorkshire) when we have not had much rain the last few weeks. It was a warm but windy day, and this location kept them both from excessive heat and the strength of the wind.

Verses 5 & 6 of the Psalm take up this idea and develop it: in John Bell ‘s version ‘you will not dread what darkness brings … nor will you fear in daylight hours’.  Psalm 121, which covers many of the same ideas as 91, puts it strikingly, especially in the words of the older ‘Authorised Version’: ‘The sun shall not smite thee by day, neither the moon by night’. I have never worked out how moonlight could be harmful, but the overall intention is clear: God is there in the face of every imaginable (and unimaginable) kind of danger, whenever it occurs. That is not to say he will keep us from ever being threatened or even harmed in any way. What it means principally is that his love for us is constant, that our love for him in turn should not waver even when life hits us with something unexpected, and that we can face up to it without dread and fear, knowing that God is with us.

But there is also scope for a more active form of God’s protection. Some of the dangers we face are spiritual ones. In the largely unseen spiritual battle that lies behind earthly forces of war, politics, economics, discrimination and so on, we will never know in this life when God did actually prevent those forces of evil from harming us.

N.B. The recording linked above omits the fourth of five verses of the hymn, corresponding to verse 7 in the psalm. 

* Simon Stocks was one of my tutors at theological college, and also led two study sessions on the psalms that I attended in 2024.