When Handel Heard Heaven

In the late summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel locked himself in his London apartment on Brook Street for twenty-four days. He barely ate. His servant found meals untouched outside the door. The German-born composer was setting scripture to music in what would become Messiah — and something was happening to him that went beyond ordinary inspiration.

When his assistant entered the room after Handel completed the "Hallelujah Chorus," he found the composer weeping. Handel reportedly said, "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself." He had glimpsed, even if only through the doorway of his own imagination, something of what John saw in Revelation — ten thousand times ten thousand voices crying out in unified praise to the Lamb who was slain.

What overwhelmed Handel was the sheer scale of it. Not a solitary hymn sung quietly in a chapel, but a cosmic crescendo where every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth joins one voice: "Worthy is the Lamb!"

There is a reason audiences have risen to their feet during the "Hallelujah Chorus" for nearly three centuries. Something in that music echoes what our souls already know — that one day, all creation will be drawn into a worship so vast, so thunderous, so beautiful that every concert hall on earth will feel like a whisper. The elders will fall down. The angels will sing. And we, by the grace of the Almighty, will add our voices to that eternal chorus — not as spectators, but as participants in the praise of the Lamb.