A New Song for Faith Church: Beneath the Sun
Guest Post from Joey Hoelscher, Music & AV Associate
Hey Faith Church,
Joey here. I’m excited to share a new song with you today, Beneath the Sun. You might guess from the title that this song has something to do with Ecclesiastes, and you’d be right! This is a modern hymn text by friend and fellow Cincinnati pastor, Dustin Battles (Mercy Baptist in West Chester), that closely follows the text of Ecclesiastes, tracing the themes of the entire book.
Here’s a quick preview:
Beneath the sun my soul is sighing:
how brief a vapor is my life!
My gain is gone, my days are dying.
I chase the wind and stir up strife.
Why is my life, O God, not fruitful?
Will nothing last that I have done?
Life is unfair, for all is futile.
There’s nothing new beneath the sun.
Our joy is tempered by frustration
amid the earth’s futility,
but God will soon renew creation,
His plan from all eternity.
So the conclusion of the matter:
fear God and do as He commands.
We will remember You, Creator!
Our souls and works are in Your hands.
If you want to jump straight to listening, here’s our single/demo:
We don’t usually introduce a new song with a blog post, so what’s different this time?
A couple of things. First is the content: Godwin has said a couple of times now that Ecclesiastes is, well, a weird book. “Beneath the Sun” follows the book closely, so the lyrics might feel a little weird to us at times, too.
A Song for a “Weird” Book
Why introduce a song for a “weird” book? Because that book is the inspired Word of God, and it’s “profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16, CSB). So even if the book feels a little uncomfortable at times, God intends for us to be taught, rebuked, corrected, and trained in righteousness through it.
And if we believe that’s true, then why not sing about it?
Songs for All of Life
If it’s true that the songs we sing in corporate worship should align with the Scriptures, then we benefit from songs for all of life: not just for joy and jubilation at our salvation or future reward, and not just for lament or confession. We need songs that do both of those things and many others, and we would benefit from songs that touch on other facets of life, including the gritty here-and-now observations of Ecclesiastes.
A New Song for the Church
The second reason to introduce this song in this way is more practical: this modern hymn is virtually unknown.
Most of the songs we teach at Faith are either old and well-known or new and professionally published; this is neither. It exists as a hymnal insert, and that’s it so far.
I maintain a weekly worship playlist so that the body at Faith can listen ahead of time to the songs we’re planning to sing each week, and occasionally we place some printed hymn sheets or lead sheets in the back of the sanctuary when introducing a new song. But none of those things — lead sheet, chord chart, recording — existed for this song.
So to teach this well, we needed to produce more resources ourselves. The things we would normally just buy or share from others didn’t exist — so we created them.
Not Just for Us
Then, since we’ve invested in creating resources for this modern Christian hymn on Ecclesiastes, we want to be generous with them! We want these resources to be useful to the church at large, should others want to use “Beneath the Sun” in more of a band style.
So this blog post is a way of sharing those resources with others who might want to explore the song.
A Request for Faith Church: Listen and Meditate
Faith Church, my request this week is that you listen to this new recording of this new Ecclesiastes hymn, and meditate on the truths of the book as you do so.
So far the song is available on YouTube.
Huge thanks to Aaron Thomas, who produced the track and provided guitar, pad, and drums and to our lyricist, Dustin Battles.
Resources for “Beneath the Sun”
Check out some resources for musicians and others for this song:
Recording: YouTube / YouTube Music