My Redeemer Lives Considered From The Standpoint Of Grammar

WARNING: gram­mar geek­i­ness ahead.

I hate songs with non­sen­si­cal lyrics, espe­cial­ly those that pur­port to be wor­ship songs. The lyrics of a song mat­ter far more to me than their accom­pa­ny­ing music: I would for­bid a song from being played in my min­istry for hav­ing bad lyrics but nev­er for hav­ing chords which I did not like.

And so I was espe­cial­ly pleased to make sense of some puz­zling lyrics in My Redeemer Lives

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in church this morn­ing.

The prob­lem­at­ic stan­za is

You lift my bur­dens
I’ll rise with You
I’m danc­ing on this moun­tain top
to see Your king­dom come

I was hung up on the word “to”, which I took to mean “I am danc­ing on this moun­tain top in order to bring about Your King­dom’s arrival.” In anoth­er lan­guage this would be called a dative of pur­pose. This trou­bled me, because as Lind­sey down­load the tragedy of mac­beth online down­load drag me to hell dvd down­load the name­sake online

said this morn­ing, “There are few things less like­ly to bring about the king­dom than danc­ing on a moun­tain. How about feed­ing some home­less peo­ple or talk­ing to some­one about Jesus?”

But then I real­ized there were at least two oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions of the word “to”. It could be like a dative of instru­ment (“I am danc­ing on this moun­tain top because I get a good view from up here which enables me to behold Your king­dom as it spreads on earth”) or like an abla­tive of atten­dant cir­cum­stances (“To see your King­dom come caus­es me to dance on this moun­tain top”).

I sus­pect it’s the lat­ter.

So now I can sing that song.

For the 1% of you who have been sim­i­lar­ly puz­zled, you’re wel­come.

For the 80% of you won­der­ing if I made up the words dative and abla­tive, check out Wikipedi­a’s list of gram­mat­i­cal cas­es.