“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound! That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found: was blind, but now I see.”
Those who take umbrage at the lyrics of this sacred hymn and timeless anthem of the Church reflect the insidious humanism that seeks to dilute many biblical principles upheld by Christianity for centuries. We expect this of the secular world and nonbelievers. Sinners are not fond of having their sins exposed. (John 3:19-20). It’s more palatable to call them by another name, or to differentiate between little sins and big sins and good sinners and bad sinners.
So while the author, John Newton, had every reason to call himself a wretch, because he was after all, a slave trader, the lowest of the lowdown sinners, it seems it is too distasteful for the self-righteous to claim such heinous sinnership. They bristle at the thought of being called a wretch. The first time I heard it sung on TV “that saved a soul like me,” I shouted back at the TV screen: “Wretch! —that saved a wretch like me!”
Those Christians who have rewritten Newton’s line “saved a wretch like me,” to “saved a soul like me,” because they find it inappropriate to refer to themselves as wretches, are reminiscent of the Pharisee who Jesus said went into the Temple to pray. Seeing a publican (a lowdown sinner), he looked down his nose at him and prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like him!”
But the publican would not even lift up his head to heaven, but smote his breast, saying, “Be merciful to me a sinner.” Jesus said that he returned to his house justified rather than the Pharisee (Luke 18:9-14). I suppose that Pharisee would not have liked the term wretch either.
The great Hebrew prophet Isaiah stated: “But we are all an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses [good works] are as a filthy rag” (Isaiah 64:6). The literal Hebrew definition of filthy meant a menstrual rag. That is pretty close to wretched for me.
John Newton was not the originator of the term wretch. It was Rabbi Saul, a.k.a. Apostle Paul who declared it in Romans 7:24. Lamenting about the propensity to sin that dwells in humankind in fulfilling their own lusts, he exclaimed: “O wretched man that I am!” [It’s rare to see exclamation points in the Bible, so he is emphasizing how wretched he felt.] “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” The good news is: God specializes in saving wretches. Paul answered his own question: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (v.25).
In the eyes of God, all sin is wretched. It cost Him the same terrible price, the death of His Son on the cross, to redeem little sinners as well as big sinners like John Newton. This is what makes His grace so amazing!
The operative word in the phrase “that saved a wretch like me” is saved. Jesus Christ rescued delivered—set me free from sin’s power and its punishment. “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20).
And that’s what makes it so amazing to former wretches like me.
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