Frederick Martin Lehman Grave

Author: The Love of God

Were all the skies parchment,
And all the reeds pens, and all the oceans ink,
And all who dwell on earth scribes,
God’s grandeur could not be told.

Rabbi Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai

Frederick Martin Lehman was born in Schwerin, Germany – a town east of Hamburg about 70 miles and just south of the Baltic Sea. Frederick and his family emigrated to the United States when he was four, settling in Iowa where he lived most of his childhood. It was at the age of 11 that Frederick was saved; he later wrote about the experience (interesting that he spoke of the event in the third person):

“One glad morning about eleven o’clock while walking up the country lane, skirted by a wild crab-apple grove on the right and an osage fence, with an old white-elm gate in a gap at the left, suddenly Heaven let a cornucopia of glory descend on the eleven-year old lad. The wild crab-apple grove assumed a heavenly glow and the osage fence an unearthly lustre. That old white-elm gate with its sun-warped boards gleamed and glowed like silver bars to shut out the world and shut him in with the ’form of the fourth,’ just come into his heart. The weight of conviction was gone and the paeans of joy and praise fell from his lips.” (www.hymnary.org)

He enrolled at Northwestern College in Illinois to train for the ministry as a Nazarene pastor. Following graduation, he assumed pastorates in Audubon, Iowa; New London, Indiana; and Kansas City, Missouri (where he helped found the Nazarene Publishing House). In addition to his calling to the ministry, Frederick also displayed a real knack for poetry and hymnody; during the span of his pastorates, Frederick published five volumes called Songs That Are Different, all of which contained his own creations. It is generally accepted that he composed hundreds of hymns during his lifetime, the most famous of which was The Love of God.

Frederick wrote a pamphlet in 1948 entitled “History of the Song, The Love of God” to explain his motivation for writing the hymn (notice that his reflection is from the first-person plural perspective):

“While at camp meeting in a mid-western state, some fifty years ago in our early ministry, an evangelist climaxed his message by quoting the last stanza of this song. The profound depths of the lines moved us to preserve the words for future generations.

Not until we had come to California did this urge find fulfillment, and that at a time when circumstances forced us to hard manual labor. One day, during short intervals of inattention to our work, we picked up a scrap of paper and, seated upon an empty lemon box pushed against the wall, with a stub pencil, added the (first) two stanzas and chorus of the song.

… Since the lines (3rd stanza from the Jewish poem) had been found penciled on the wall of a patient’s room in an insane asylum after he had been carried to his grave, the general opinion was that this inmate had written the epic in moments of sanity.

The key-stanza (Third verse) under question as to its authorship was written nearly one thousand years ago by a Jewish songwriter and put on the score page by F. M. Lehman, a Gentile songwriter, in 1917.”

Did you catch all that? Due to financial hardship, Frederick was forced to supplement his pastoral income by working a manual job packing fruit into wooden crates. While at work one day, the thought of God’s love for him was overwhelming, so much so that he sat on one of the lemon crates he was packing and scribbled out the first two stanzas and the chorus of his now famous hymn.

“Upon arriving home, he hurried to his old upright piano and began arranging the words and composing a melody to fit them. He soon had finished two stanzas and the melody to go along with them, but now what was he to do? In those days, a song had to have at least three stanzas to be considered complete. (A far cry from the songs of our day that only need have three words!) He tried and tried to come up with a third stanza, but to no avail.” (Eve, “Frederick M. Lehman and ‘The Love of God’, 2020)

It was then that the Lord brought to mind the camp-meeting sermon he had heard years before. Unbeknownst to the speaker at the time, the evangelist had concluded his message by quoting from a poem that had been composed by Rabbi Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai, a Jewish poet from 11th century Germany.

Were all the skies parchment,
And all the reeds pens, and all the oceans ink,
And all who dwell on earth scribes,
God’s grandeur could not be told.

BECAME THE 3RD STANZA …

Could we with ink the oceans fill
and were the skies of parchment made,
Were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill
and ev’ry man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
would drain the oceans dry,
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
tho’ stretched from sky to sky.

The song/poem of Rabbi Meir was actually constructed in the literary form of an acrostic, much like Psalm 111, where each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Psalm 119 is another example of an acrostic psalm). Frederick had preserved the poem in writing at the time he heard it, not realizing how important his actions would be later in life.

The life of Frederick and the backstory to his famous hymn is captured brilliantly by the 2013 movie Indescribable, starring J.C. Scott as Walter Lehman. You can watch the entire video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm4JJsj7aYc.

Frederick lived out the last years of his life in Pasadena, California. The German immigrant went home to be with his Savior on February 20. 1953. He and his wife, Emma Lou, are buried side by side in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park of Glendale, California.