Before the Throne of God Above

Lyrics

Before the throne of God above,
I have a strong and perfect plea,
A great High Priest whose name is Love,
Who ever lives and pleads for me.
My name is graven on His hands,
My name is written on His heart;
I know that while in heaven He stands,
No tongue can bid me thence depart.

When Satan tempts me to despair,
And tells me of the guilt within,
Upward I look, and see Him there,
Who made an end of all my sin.
Because the sinless Saviour died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God, the Just, is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me.

Behold Him there, the risen Lamb,
My perfect, spotless righteousness,
The great unchangeable I AM,
The King of glory and of grace!
One with Himself I cannot die,
My soul is purchased by His blood;
My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ, my Saviour and my God.

History

Charitie Lees Smith was born on 21 June 1841 at Bloomfield, Merrion, County Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of the Reverend Dr George Sidney Smith, a Church of Ireland clergyman. She wrote "Before the Throne of God Above" in 1863, in her early twenties, drawing on Hebrews 4:14-16 and Hebrews 6:19-20 for its picture of Christ the great High Priest interceding for believers "within the veil." The text first appeared, unattributed, in the London collection The Praise of Jesus (James Nisbet, 1863); Charles Spurgeon then included it in his Our Own Hymn-Book (1866), at first misattributing it to a "Cherrie Smith" before correcting the author's name in the 1867 edition. Smith herself reprinted the poem in her own collection, Within the Vail and Other Sacred Poems (London, 1867). Sources differ on the exact original heading used for the text: Hymnology Archive gives "Within the Vail with Jesus," while several other hymn-history sites give "The Advocate" — so the precise 1863 title is recorded here as unconfirmed.

In 1869 Smith married Arthur E. Bancroft in Edinburgh, becoming Charitie Lees Bancroft, the name under which the hymn is now most commonly credited; she was later widowed and remarried twice more (as Parkinson, then de Cheney), eventually emigrating to California, where she died in Oakland on 20 June 1923. For well over a century the words circulated under a variety of tunes — including William Bradbury's SWEET HOUR (1861), DUKE STREET, and Hubert Parry's JERUSALEM — without settling on a single standard setting.

The hymn's modern popularity dates from 1997, when Vikki Cook of Sovereign Grace Music, having heard the text sung to Parry's JERUSALEM and finding that tune unsuited to her congregation, wrote a new melody — now generally known as BEFORE THE THRONE — in under an hour. Cook's tune was first recorded on the Sovereign Grace album Depths of Mercy (1997) and began appearing in hymnals from 1999, carrying Bancroft's public-domain Victorian text into contemporary evangelical worship. Bancroft's original words remain in the public domain; Cook's 1997 melody is a separate, copyrighted composition.

Performance

This recording (video id CrUtdrHhyo0), titled "Before the Throne of God Above | Hymn with Lyrics" on the channel, runs 2 minutes 49 seconds and was published in 2024. The video title names no performer or musical setting, and it has not been possible to confirm from the available metadata which tune — one of the historic pairings or the now-standard 1997 Vikki Cook setting — this recording uses; that detail is left unverified rather than assumed.

Sources: hymnary.org · hymnologyarchive.com · en.wikipedia.org · hymnallibrary.org · churchmusictoday.wordpress.com