Savior of the Nations, Come

The overall theme portrayed is that Christ our Lord is powerful, merciful, and relatable. Luther shows Christ's power in the line "captive leading death and hell". This imagery of holding death and hell captive, as if it were a dangerous enemy involuntarily submitting itself to Jesus, helps one better understand Christ's strength and authority over everything. Christ's merciful quality is expressed through Luther's use of pathos when he writes: "Though by all the world disowned, still to be in heaven enthroned". Writing about Christ's death for us, despite a majority of His beloved children rejecting Him, results in feelings of guilt. Readers feel guilty for denying His bountiful mercy all together. Finally, with diction, Luther shows Christ's relatability in the statement: "Not by human flesh and blood". He says that by God's works, not ours, Christ is human. He is human so that He may have something in common with us and relate to us, increasing probability that we would accept Him because we do not see Him as a distant and dissimilar God. Luther's words "flesh and blood" reveal how material humans are in contrast to God's divine power in creating a human-God hybrid that we can relate to and more easily approach with praise and trials.