When 'How Great Is Our God' was released in 2004, it arrived in a worship music landscape that had been dominated for nearly a decade by the Hillsong sound - expansive, aspirational, emotionally intense worship anthems from Australia. Chris Tomlin, Jesse Reeves, and Ed Cash wrote something that stood in that tradition while achieving a theological density and melodic memorability that made it not just a worship song but a genuine statement of faith that could be received by Christians across an unusually wide range of theological perspectives.
The song's primary source is 1 Chronicles 29:11 - David's prayer of blessing when the people had given generously for the temple: 'Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.' This is one of the most comprehensive ascriptions of divine sovereignty in the Old Testament, encompassing every dimension of reality - heaven and earth, power and glory, kingdom and majesty - in a single declarative act of worship. Tomlin's song breathes with this same comprehensiveness: every attribute that can be named is gathered into the single claim that God's greatness is beyond adequate expression.
John 1:14 - 'The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth' - provides the Incarnation dimension that prevents the song from remaining an abstract celebration of divine power. The Jesus-bridge section of the song, which names him as 'Lion and the Lamb' (Revelation 5:5-6) and 'the Name above all names' (Philippians 2:9), anchors the unlimited divine greatness in the specific person of the Incarnate Son. The God whose greatness is too large to express fully is also the God who chose to become small enough to be born in a manger.
Philippians 2:9 - 'Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name' - provides the exaltation theology that the song's bridge develops. The name above all names is precisely the name Jesus, which carries the full weight of the divine reputation (the Hebrew name Yeshua meaning 'the LORD saves'). When the congregation sings 'how great is our God,' they are confessing that the greatness of this specific God is most fully revealed in the one who was crucified and raised.
Psalm 145:3 - 'Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom' - is the psalmic source for the song's central declaration. The Psalms' habitual ascription of greatness to God is not merely doxological enthusiasm; it is a claim about the nature of ultimate reality. In a culture that had lost confidence in transcendence, a song that simply and undefensively declared 'how great is our God' was making a countercultural statement.
Within two years of its release, the song had become the most-performed worship song in American churches according to Christian Copyright Licensing International, and it remained in the top positions for years afterward. Its global reach has been estimated at performance in over 100 countries in dozens of languages. The 'How Great Is Our God' World Tour, which took Tomlin to stadiums on six continents, used the song as the vehicle for one of the most ambitious Christian music outreach projects of the twenty-first century.
The song's longevity in worship use - unusual in a market that tends toward rapid turnover - reflects its theological robustness. It can be sung by a child who has just become a Christian and by a theologian who has spent decades studying the nature of God, and both will find it honest.