Contemplative Bible Reading

This is a little different contemplative Bible reading today as the words don’t come from the Bible but from a popular song. I was singing this song during a recent worship service when I noticed some words that I have never noticed before:

No more let sins and sorrow grow
Nor thorns infest the grown

This is from the second verse of “Joy to the World.” The words were written by Isaac Watts in 1719. The words describe conditions in our world and the hope that these conditions will cease.

The second phrase (nor thorns infest the ground) describes something that we see easily – thorns infesting the ground. These are weeds and weeds are anything that we don’t want to grow. I have weeds in my front yard; I have weeds in my back yard, and I have weeds in the plant that someone left on the table in my office at work when they vacated that office years ago. Weeds and thorns – they are everywhere.

The first phrase (no more let sins and sorrow grow) describes things we don’t see so easily. Well, we do see the sorrows. They are all around us in the people we meet every day. Anguish, pain, suffering, sorrows – I don’t know that we would know how to live if these things disappeared one day. Then there are the sins. We don’t like to talk about sins much. I mean, they have that tone of some things are right and some things are not right (we don’t like to use the word “wrong” much these days). But we don’t see “sins” much or at least we don’t like to admit we see them. In calmer moments when we have time to reflect, we do admit that sins are in the world. We do admit that much of the sorrows we see come from the sins that we don’t so readily see.

These two phrases describe conditions of the fallen world. Sin caused Adam and Eve to exit the Garden of Eden. They walked out into a world that had sin in it. They also walked out into a world that had weeds and thorns growing. They had to work hard to grow food around those weeds.

Life was certainly different in the fallen world than it was in the pure Garden of Eden. Joy to the world, the Lord has come. His coming set in motion a series of events that will culminate in a restored world freed from the problems of this fallen one. No more sins and sorrow, no more thorns and weeds.