The triple exclamation that concludes each stanza of this hymn comes from ancient sources, and has appeared in some recent works also. Fred Pratt Green (1903-   ;   see Biographies), Methodist minister of England who is considered in the forefront of contemporary hymn writers, used these three major events in the life of our Lord to make a stirring hymn.

An anthem had been composed using this text, which was printed in The Hymns and Ballads of Fred Pratt Green, published in 1982 by Hope Publishing Company. The commentary in that book said, “Fred hopes someone will write a tune for it in the form of a hymn.” The committee decided to fulfill this hope, and sent the poem to some 30 SDA composers, asking for an original tune. Out of all those submitted, CHALLENGE, by Allen W. Foster (1940-   ; see SDAH 151), was chosen as the one that best gave wings to this text. The SDA Committee especially liked the upward movement of the refrain, building naturally to the “Christ will come again!” climax.

Concerning this music, foster wrote: “The hymn tune name I chose CHALLENGE, seemed appropriate to the pleasant task of fitting a tune to these challenging and inspirational words. My method of writing tunes for existing texts has always been meter-based—how the words flow from my personal reading of them. Often, from the meter, a tune will literally jump out! This is how the tune CHALLENGE managed to create a bond with the great Fred Pratt Green hymn text.”

-from Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White