Come quickly, Lord, to rescue me

Here is urgency, honesty, majesty, and victory. For this shorter Psalm which is almost a distillation of its predecessor, Bert Polman’s similarly succinct text has been chosen. It was written in 1983 and published (like 58) in the CRC Psalter Hymnal in 1987. The Scripture text is very similar to Psalm 40:13–17. ‘The writer of this Psalm is a man in a hurry’—so Donald Coggan, who entitles it ‘Emergency Call’. Spurgeon sees it as beginning ‘with an abrupt and broken cry’. Vernon Griffiths’ tune DUNEDIN was published in the 1971 New Catholic Hymnal with its adapted version of Isaac Watts’ Ps 145, My God and King, your glorious praise, and it has since appeared in several other books. But it was composed for Thou Lord of hosts, whose guiding hand by the 19th-c American Octavius Frothingham. Named after the city in New Zealand where the composer taught after emigrating from England, the tune was intended for unison singing in the King Edward Technical College in Dunedin, and often used in school assemblies from about 1935. Praise! is the first book to set it to these words.

b Rozenburg, The Netherlands 1945. After his first 2 years spent in Indonesia, he returned to Holland and in 1955 emigrated with his family to Canada. He studied at Dordt Coll, Sioux Center, Iowa (BA 1968), Univ of Minnesota (MA 1969, PhD Musicology 1981). From 1975 to 1985 he taught music at Ontario Bible Coll, before becoming Music Prof, first at Redeemer Coll, Ancaster, Ontario, then at Calvin Coll, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Latterly he has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship leading seminars, workshops and other studies, mainly in N America. A specialist in hymnology and liturgy, he served on the committee for the 1987 Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Ch (which has 23 of his texts) and The Worshiping Church (1990). The 1998 Psalter Hymnal Handbook, for which he was a co-editor and major contributor, concludes with a section relating the hymns to Dutch Reformed doctrine. Paul A Richardson (2005) writes of Polman’s ‘significant contributions to hymnody as a scholar, editor and musician, and ‘his several effective versifications of Scripture’. Nos.58, 70.