The Pastor Who Buried Four Thousand and Still Gave Thanks

In the Saxon town of Eilenburg, Germany, the Thirty Years' War brought suffering that defied description. By 1637, plague and famine had claimed so many lives that Pastor Martin Rinkart was the only clergyman left alive in the city. Day after day, he conducted funerals — sometimes forty or fifty in a single day. He buried more than four thousand of his parishioners that year alone, including his own wife.

The walls felt like they were closing in. Swedish troops besieged the town. Food vanished. Death stood at every doorstep. Rinkart personally went out to negotiate with the soldiers, pleading for mercy for his starving congregation.

And then, from the ashes of that impossible season, Rinkart did something no one expected. He sat down and wrote a hymn of thanksgiving: Now Thank We All Our God. Not a lament. Not a dirge. A song of praise that Christians have sung for nearly four centuries.

This is the heartbeat of Psalm 118. The psalmist did not write from comfort but from crisis — pressed hard, pushed to the brink, surrounded by forces that should have overwhelmed him. "I was pushed back and about to fall, but the Lord helped me." And his response was not bitterness but astonishment: "This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."