Mormon Tabernacle Choir - How Great Thou Art / Then Sings My Soul Lyrics

Video

O store gud ("How Great Thou Art") - Sissel and The Tabernacle Choir

Meaning & Inspiration

There is a specific, jagged edge to the phrase "I scarce can take it in."

We hear it performed by Sissel and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and because the arrangement is so grand, so filled with the weight of hundreds of voices, the line threatens to get lost in the sheer volume of the spectacle. But if you strip away the orchestration and look at those six words on the page, the scale collapses. It’s a moment of intellectual and spiritual failure—a confession that the mind has hit a wall.

In the verses prior, the poet is busy looking at "lofty mountain grandeur" and "mighty thunder." That’s easy. Humans have been looking at big things and calling them divine for millennia. It’s an aesthetic experience, a natural reflex to be impressed by physics and scale. But then, the pivot happens. The focus shifts from the macro—the universe, the stars—to the micro-absurdity of the Incarnation.

"God, his Son not sparing."

That’s where the poet admits they "scarce can take it in." It is an admission of mental indigestion. We are fine with a God who makes mountains; we are entirely unequipped for a God who bleeds. The tension here is between the awe of the observable world and the terrifying logic of the Cross. When the choir swells behind this line, it almost masks the doubt inherent in the words. It sounds like a victory chant, but the text itself is an admission of cognitive defeat. It’s the sound of someone trying to fit infinity into a human skull and failing.

This feels like the shadow side of Romans 11:33, where Paul talks about the unsearchable judgments of God. But where Paul is writing from a place of theological conclusion, this writer is standing in the middle of a grocery store or a quiet kitchen, trying to reconcile the Creator of the stars with the image of a man dying on a wooden beam.

If I’m being honest, I think the line is the only part of this hymn that keeps it from being mere ornamental poetry. Without that stumble—that moment where the singer admits they can’t grasp the math of the Gospel—the song is just a nature documentary set to music. But "scarce can take it in" changes everything. It acknowledges that the transaction of the Cross isn't something we ever really finish processing.

It’s an unfinished thought, really. Even as the music builds to that final, climactic refrain, the poet isn't saying they have it solved. They are just saying they are standing in front of something they can’t fit into their worldview, and they are singing anyway. That’s the friction point. It isn’t a tidy realization; it’s a strained, breathless surrender to a fact that is too heavy to hold.