Hark! Our King Has Come

Victory Worship keeps Charles Wesley's hymn text essentially unchanged through both original verses, then adds a chorus that isn't in the eighteenth-century original at all: "our King has come, our King has come, glory to the King, Emmanuel, God with us." The old text stays intact; the new addition just makes the response louder.

The second verse crowds a lot of doctrine into a small space — "veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel." Four lines covering incarnation, deity, and God's willingness to dwell among people.

Malachi's prophecy of a "sun of righteousness" rising "with healing in his wings" gives the hymn's later verse its unusual image directly, and the added chorus's repeated "God with us" translates the hymn's own closing title, Emmanuel, back into plain English so nobody misses it. Three centuries of sung theology get a modern refrain, not a rewrite.