Articles
Let Us Hail Him
We don’t talk about hail much anymore. No, I didn’t misspell it, but you are correct, we don’t talk much about hell anymore either.
We used to ask people what town or state they hailed from. We still have ‘hail Mary’ passes in football. We see hail storms every year and pray we can avoid them. But we Christians need to be hailing our King more.
In this usage of the word, it simply means to call attention to something. We need to be calling attention to Christ, His message of salvation, and His commands for obedience. Hail can also be used as a complementary word. ‘I hail you’ for instance means we recognize or complement something above others. So in this use of the word too, we should be hailing Christ, and His Holy name.
We sing “All hail the power of Jesus name” in a song of both reverence and proclamation, and say our Lord is crowned “Lord of all”. He is King of kings, and should be recognized and complemented as such, and we should draw attention to Him. That song says “...to Him all majesty ascribe”. In other words, He gets the credit or recognition, and all creation is subject to Him, even all people considered royalty.
So many things in our world get hailed, many in and of themselves good or at least not evil, but it seems evil gets hailed all to regularly. Things despised 20, 30, 50 years ago in general by our society as evil, now are accepted, and even promoted, many hailed in our corrupt generation. But what about Jesus, and our Father God? How often do they get hailed?
I can assure you of this one thing with absolute certainty. If you and I, people who claim to love and follow Christ, if we don’t hail Him, there will be no hailing. The media won’t do it, the government won’t do it, our schools and especially our ‘higher levels’ of education certainly won’t do any hailing. It would seem the mission of most is to quietly bury Christ, to suppress any mention of Him, to slowly but surely reduce Him to an old myth or legend.
But our King is alive and well, ever present, always loving and caring, and we need to hail Him and His holy name every hour of every day. We need to hail what He’s done and continues to do for us. We need to hail His marvelous grace, and His plan for our lives. We should hail His promised eternal reward, and yes, we should likewise hail the eternal punishment guaranteed for those who reject Him. Let’s bring back hailing, a word seldom used anymore, but one very important in the spread of the Gospel.
