Psalm 104:3-4 vs. “O Worship The King”

Passion (Chris Tomlin) · checked 2026-08-22

What we checked

PassagePsalm 104:3-4 chapter ↗ 2 more proofs on Psalm 104 →

Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible) · fixed (the finding depends on this wording)

Presents itself asparaphrase

Categoryadditions / omissions

AlbumHymns Ancient And Modern · 2004

Words addressed tovaries by section

Teaching or experienceteaching (states truths)

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria this song presents words as scripture, so these apply

✓Text-faithful

✗Translation named

✓Context kept

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

The stanza that carries this passage tracks verse 3 closely: light as clothing, space overhead, clouds turned into a chariot, and the wind's wings as God's road are all the verse's own pictures in another meter
The hymn is catalogued as a psalm version, not as scripture. Hymnary lists Psalm 104 among its references, and Lift Up Your Hearts prints the psalm number inside the title
Every stanza is about God. The singer never becomes the subject, and the one line about human frailty exists to say what God is to frail people
The move from speaking about God to speaking to Him happens in the open, at the fourth stanza, and the last stanza keeps the angels' praise above the singer's rather than level with it
The text is public domain and traceable. Grant's stanzas can be compared with the psalm by anyone with a hymnal and a Bible

⚠ Cautions

Verse 3 gives the clouds as a chariot with no anger attached. The hymn's chariots are chariots of wrath. The wrath is elsewhere in Psalm 104, at verses 7 and 35, and in Psalm 18's storm, but it is not in the verse the stanza is built on
Verse 4 has no counterpart anywhere in the hymn. A listener told this song is Psalm 104 will not find the winds as messengers or the flames of fire as servants in it
No translation is named, so the paraphrase can be checked against the psalm's sense but not against any text's wording
The 2004 arrangement adds a chorus and a tag that are not Grant's, under a 2004 copyright, and the recording gives no heading to tell a listener which parts are the old psalm version and which are new
The publisher's page for this recording lists Psalm 99:5 as its scripture reference, not Psalm 104. A singer who followed that citation would land in a different psalm from the one the stanzas versify
Whether Grant worked from Kethe's psalm version or only shares its meter is disputed. Hymnary states the influence; the hymnologist Raymond Glover argued the two are in the same meter because they set the same psalm

Verse Proof

Psalm 104:3-4

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“laying the beams of His chambers in the waters above, making the clouds His chariot, walking on the wings of the wind. He makes the winds His messengers, flames of fire His servants.”

Psalm 104 is a creation hymn that walks roughly the order of Genesis 1. Verses 1 and 2 open with the psalmist blessing the LORD and picturing Him robed in splendor and wrapped in light, stretching the heavens out like a tent. Verses 3 and 4 continue that building picture without a break: God lays the beams of His upper rooms on the waters above, takes the clouds for a chariot, and walks on the wind's wings, and then the same sentence turns His winds and His fire into staff. The verses are description, not petition and not promise. Nothing here is angry. The psalm's rebuke comes later, at verse 7, where the waters flee at God's voice, and its judgment later still, at verse 35. Verse 4 is quoted in the New Testament at Hebrews 1:7, where it is used to argue that angels are servants and the Son is not.

What the song says, described not quoted

Robert Grant's hymn runs to six stanzas in its authorized form, and every one of them is about God rather than the singer. The first calls hearers to worship a King and speaks of Him in the third person: His power, His love, His shielding and His age. The second is the stanza that belongs to this passage. It puts light on God as a robe and space over Him as a canopy, then turns thunderclouds into war chariots and makes the storm's wings the road He travels. The third stanza moves to the founding of the earth and the sea set round it, the fourth to God's provision in air, light, hills, and rain, and the fifth to human frailty and to God as maker, defender, redeemer and friend. By the fourth stanza the hymn has stopped speaking about God and started speaking to Him, and the sixth stanza stays there, naming His measureless might and love and setting the angels' praise above and creation's smaller praise below. The 2004 Passion recording keeps Grant's stanzas and the LYONS tune and adds something Grant's form does not contain: a chorus, plus a tag, written for this arrangement and copyrighted to it. Sources differ on how many of Grant's six stanzas the arrangement keeps.

Two things move between the passage and the stanza built on it, and both are worth naming. Verse 3 makes the clouds a chariot and says nothing about anger; the hymn makes the thunderclouds chariots of wrath. Wrath is in Psalm 104, at verse 7 and at verse 35, and it is in the storm theophanies the hymn's imagery also draws on, such as Psalm 18:9-12, which Hymnary lists beside this text. It is not in verse 3. Verse 4 is simply not versified. Hymnary and the Hymnology Archive both describe Grant's paraphrase as covering roughly Psalm 104:1-13 and 24-33, and Lift Up Your Hearts prints its scripture references as Psalm 104:1-3 and 7-10. Three separate stanza inventories confirm it: no stanza of this hymn puts winds or flames into God's service. The angels who appear in the last stanza are there to sing, not to serve as verse 4's messengers. Grant's own layer is documented too. Hymnary describes the hymn as a resetting of William Kethe's Psalm 104 from the Anglo-Genevan Psalter in the same meter and a more ornate style, and the meter itself, 10.10.11.11, was carried in early printings under the label "104th M." after the psalm it was built for.

~ Faithful & Labeled: A free metrical paraphrase of Psalm 104. It versifies verse 3's clouds and wind faithfully. It adds a wrath the verse does not state. It leaves verse 4 out entirely, and names no translation.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

The hymnal prints the psalm number in the title. The recording does not.

Why it matters

Metrical psalmody is one of the few song traditions that labels its own paraphrasing by convention. The psalm number goes in the heading, the meter is often named after the psalm, and the singer is told from the start that these are the psalm's contents in someone's verse rather than the psalm's words. That label is a service to the reader, and it is the first thing lost when an old text is re-recorded. Here the loss is measurable: Lift Up Your Hearts titles the hymn with the psalm number attached and lists Psalm 104:1-3 among its references, while the recording's own publisher lists a different psalm entirely.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song fixes your attention on God.

What repetition plants here is scale. Stanza after stanza the singer rehearses a God who is older than time, who wears light, who rides weather, and who founded the ground being stood on, and none of it is about the singer's week. That forms attention outward and upward. The one stanza about people is short and ends on what God is to them. It also plants the wrath image, since the second stanza is the one with the strongest picture in it and the strongest pictures are the ones memory keeps. Sung for years, that line teaches a storm-God whose approach is dark, which is true of Psalm 18 and of Nahum 1:3 and is a real part of scripture's picture of Him. Reading Psalm 104:3-4 alongside gives the other half: the same clouds, the same wind, and no anger in the frame at all, only a King making a chariot out of the weather and staff out of fire.

Helpful comparison

Verse 4 is worth reading in two translations before deciding what the hymn left out. The BSB above renders it "He makes the winds His messengers, flames of fire His servants." The KJV renders the same verse "Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire:". Behind the difference are two Hebrew words that each carry two senses: one can mean wind or spirit, the other messenger or angel. Hebrews 1:7 quotes the verse in the Greek form and uses it to rank angels below the Son as servants. So a hymnwriter in 1833 reading his KJV at verse 4 would have found angels and ministers there, and Grant's closing stanza does bring angels in. It does not bring them in as verse 4 does. His angels sing above while creation praises below, which is the shape of Psalm 148 rather than of Psalm 104:4, and nothing in the hymn makes fire or wind into God's staff. The omission is honest for a free paraphrase and it is still an omission. Set beside the two other Psalm 104 proofs on this site, the pattern is clear enough: one song compressed the psalm's opening without citing it, one named the psalm on the cover, and this one had the psalm number in its heading for two centuries and lost it somewhere between the hymnal and the record sleeve.

This 2004 recording arrives with a new chorus and without the psalm number its hymnals still print beside the title, so the label that tied the hymn to Psalm 104 in print is not on this recording.

Sources

Passion, “O Worship The King (Live)” on YouTube · (the recording checked for this proof; the auto-generated description gives “Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group”, the billing Passion and Chris Tomlin, the album Hymns Ancient And Modern, ℗ 2004 Sparrow Records/sixstepsrecords, producer Nathan Nockels, composer credited as Traditional)
Worship Together — O Worship The King (Passion) · (the publisher's page for this recording: CCLI 4255664, copyright 2004 worshiptogether.com Songs/sixsteps Music, three verses plus a chorus and a chorus tag, and Psalm 99:5 given as the scripture reference)
PraiseCharts — O Worship The King (Chris Tomlin / Passion) · (writer credits William Gardiner, Robert Grant and Chris Tomlin; arranger Joel Mott; CCLI 4255664; the same 2004 copyright; no scripture reference listed)
Hymnary.org — O Worship the King all glorious above · (Robert Grant 1779-1838; first printed in Bickersteth's Christian Psalmody, 1833; six stanzas in Elliott 1835 and in the posthumous Sacred Poems, 1839; meter 10.10.11.11; the text in 1,271 hymnals; the note that Grant was influenced by William Kethe's Psalm 104 paraphrase in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1561 and reset it in the same meter in a more ornate style; Psalm 104 among the listed references)
Hymnology Archive — O worship the King · (the earliest confirmed printing, in the 1824 second edition of Venn's Psalms, Partly Original and Partly Extracted from Various Authors, headed “Psalm CIV. Version III”; the 1806 Christian Observer claim called erroneous; the meter given as “104th M.” in Bickersteth's and Elliott's printings; the paraphrase described as covering roughly Psalm 104:1-13 and 24-33; HANOVER attributed to William Croft, LYONS traced to Joseph Martin Kraus by way of William Gardiner's 1815 Sacred Melodies)
Discipleship Ministries — History of Hymns: British hymnist bases “O Worship the King” on majestic psalm · (Grant's life and knighthood; the hymn called a very free version; several images drawn from the King James Version; Raymond F. Glover's argument that Grant and Kethe share a meter only because they set the same psalm; this page dates the first appearance to the Christian Observer in 1806, which the Hymnology Archive disputes)
Hymnary.org — O Worship the King (Psalm 104), Lift Up Your Hearts 2013, no. 2 · (a current hymnal printing the psalm number inside the title; author credit Robert Grant, 1833, alt.; tune LYONS; scripture references including Psalm 104:1-3 and 7-10, Psalm 18:2 and 9-12, and Psalm 145:10)
Trinity Psalter Hymnal — O Worship the King, no. 219 · (a six-stanza printing used as an independent stanza inventory: angels appear only in the final stanza, and no stanza contains ministers or flames of fire)
Indelible Grace Hymnbook — O Worship The King · (a second independent stanza inventory: text Robert Grant, music Johann Michael Haydn, public domain, no scripture reference printed, and no stanza naming winds as messengers or flames of fire)
Hymnary.org — William Kethe · (Kethe died in Dorset about 1594; twenty-five psalm versifications in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1561, later taken into the Scottish Psalter of 1565; his Psalm 104 begins “My soul, praise the Lord” and survives in greatly altered form in some modern hymnals)

Corrections

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