No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married. (Isaiah 62:4)
Beulah Land…it sounds peaceful and beautiful, doesn’t it? A lot of people must agree, because there’s a lot of places named after it, no doubt as a method of attracting business. There are more than just a few churches with this moniker, from Beulah Land Bible Church in Macon, Georgia, to Beulah Land Baptist Church in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and probably lots more in between. Farms in Texas, Arkansas, and Nebraska, a housing development in Wyoming, and a rustic resort in North Carolina all advertise themselves with this name, according to Google. There’s a restaurant in Pensacola, Florida and even a pub in Portland, Oregon that wears the name. You may remember the 1980 movie about post-Civil War Georgia, starring Leslie Ann Warren and Michael Sarrazin – Beulah Land got 6.9 out of 10 stars by reviewers. Do you like dogs? There’s a website called Beulah Land Labradors…I wonder if the dogs are always serene, of non-biting persuasion? What’s more interesting is that this name ‘Beulah’ appears only one time in the entire Bible. How would you like to have had stock in that name when it was created?! A poetic description of God’s home, like the one in a prophet’s book, has a lot of power to sway us, and maybe that’s what motivated the composer of the song “Beulah Land” to write the words that are so familiar. Indeed, anyone today whose heart has been touched by the song probably would buy stock in Beulah Land, if that were possible. Is it possible?
Christ had motivated Edgar Page Stites for many years by the time he composed the words to “Beulah Land”. In 1876, he was so moved he could only write two of its four verses at a time, on consecutive Sundays. After the second Lord’s Day effort on the song, Stites was once again overcome with emotion. “I could only pray and weep”, he says. Stites had become a believer in Christ when he was 19, during the great revival of Philadelphia, what most call the Awakening of 1857 and 1858. Soon afterwards, he joined the Methodist Church in Cape May, New Jersey and became a local missionary. He started new churches in the South Jersey area, and in 1869, Stites and other ministers and lay Christians founded the “Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association”, an organization to direct a Methodist camp meeting near Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Some say that Stites actually wrote “Beulah Land in 1875 (not 1876), along with his musical collaborator on the song, John R. Sweney, for that camp meeting association. Other well-known hymn writers of the day visited the camp during the summers, including Ira D. Sankey, William H. Doane, William J. Kirkpatrick, Fanny Crosby, Eliza Hewitt (Stites’ cousin), and others. Stites concludes the story of “Beulah Land”saying, “I have never received a cent for my songs. Perhaps that is why they have had such a wide popularity. I could not do work for the Master and receive pay for it." Perhaps Stites was truly “laying up treasure in heaven” when he refused pay for this popular and moving song. The word Beulah means “married”, an apt description of a place and a relationship with a spouse (God) who will not fail to take care of us. The imagery in the tune’s words also speak of a place that is fertile, and of an intimate bond with a special person – an eternal companion. Now who wouldn’t sign up to live in Beulah if that’s the way it is there? In our day, we cannot concretely buy stock in “Beulah Land”, but we could safely say that God does want us, like Stites did, to invest in Heaven.
Information on Edgar Page Stites was gathered from the following two websites:
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/s/t/i/stites_ep.htm
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Beulah-Land
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