Carol stories 4 - Joy to the World

Joy to the World is sung as a Christmas carol, but in truth it is more of an Advent hymn. The first verse announces “The Lord is come”, and the rest of the words speak of the coming Kingdom of God when Jesus rules the earth by his truth and grace. Many books these days leave out the third verse of the original, which speaks about the full realisation of God’s kingdom which will be on the earth after the final coming of Jesus. It says: “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.”

The author of the hymn is Isaac Watts, who lived at a time when Christian faith in England was seen as irrelevant and a matter for private conscience - but he still had faith in the final rule of God in the earth.

Joy to the World was published by Isaac Watts in 1719. Watts called is an "imitation" of Psalm 98: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth”.

When Isaac Watts was an 18 year old student, he criticized the hymns that were sung in church, and his father challenged him to write something better. For 222 Sundays Watts wrote a new hymn every week. Some of his 600 hymns are still sung and loved, most famously, “When I survey the wondrous cross” and “Our God our help in ages past”. Watts saw his hymns as imitations and interpretations of the Psalms, but in his time he was criticised and his work was widely rejected as being too modern. One contemporary said of him, “how dare he take the Psalms and try to improve them”.

Isaac Watts himself was described as being very short and not very handsome. One young lady who had fallen in love with him from his writings, asked him to marry her, but when she saw him in person she took back the offer. She wrote later that Isaac Watts was "only five feet tall, with a shallow face, hooked nose, prominent cheek bones, small eyes, and deathlike colour.....I admired the jewel but not the casket" that contained the jewel.

For more than 120 years, the hymn was sung to many different tunes. Then, in 1839, Lowell Mason, an American musician in Boston, published a tune for the hymn. He said the tune was based on Handel, and he borrowed two musical phrases from the Messiah, from "Lift Up Your Heads," and "Comfort Ye". Mason named the tune Antioch from the city in Syria where Paul started his missionary journeys and the place where the disciples were first called Christians.