Art’s true test lies not in the immediate but in the decades and centuries following its creation. Time is a tremendous truth-teller. It sifts the here and now, separating creative wheat from chaff and allowing only that of lasting value to remain. A relatively recent example would be how little demand there is to resurrect popular songs from 1924. George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” presented the same year, remains a staple of modern classical music.

With this in mind, a glance at today’s headlines demonstrates how some 43 years after its release, Bob Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming” maintains relevancy and vitality. Without getting into the usual distraction of debating Dylan’s singing, which even his most ardent fans admit is an acquired taste, the songs themselves demand attention as they detail what was then and remains the same now.

At the release of “Slow Train Coming,” there was so much furor over Dylan becoming a Christian that much of what he said in the lyrics was overlooked by fans and detractors alike. Few debated the album’s musical strength, a mixture of blues, folk, and gospel, with solid contributions by guitarist Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame. The words were then, and are now, the proverbial two-edged sword.

We start with the album’s first track, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Aside from being Dylan’s most recent Top 40 hit, the song is reminiscent of Christian rock’s founding father Larry Norman’s “Righteous Rocker #1” from earlier in the decade as it recites a lengthy list of people, places, and positions, nailing one and all with the chorus:

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

An aside. Dylan performed “Gotta Serve Somebody” during the 1980 Grammys, winning the award for Best Make Rock Vocal Performance. It was his first Grammy as a solo artist.

Dylan drives the point further home in the album’s second song, “Precious Angel”:

Now there’s spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down
Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground
The enemy is subtle, how be it we are so deceived
When the truth’s in our hearts and we still don’t believe?

These and numerous other Christ-based notes aside, Dylan wasn’t content with limiting himself to spiritual observations. He went there politically. Remember that the album came out during the Carter administration, an era uncomfortably parallel to the present day with the noticeable exception that Jimmy Carter was at least a decent human being, unlike the White House’s current usurper … er, occupant.

The album’s title track contains sharp commentary:

All that foreign oil controlling American soil
Look around you, it’s just bound to make you embarrassed
Sheiks walkin’ around like kings
Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings
Deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and to Paris
And there’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend

Not much has changed, has it?

Dylan went further:

Big-time negotiators, false healers and woman haters

Dylan Mulvaney and promoters of male athletes competing as women, anyone?

Masters of the bluff and masters of the proposition
But the enemy I see
Wears a cloak of decency
All nonbelievers and men stealers talkin’ in the name of religion

How many times in the present day have we seen progressives claim to be doing what they are doing in the name of God? However, fear not, for God is not mocked without consequence.

And there’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend

Dylan had more in store, as “When You Gonna Wake Up?” superbly details.

Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts
Karl Marx has got ya by the throat, Henry Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots

Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools
You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up
When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

Pornography in schools? Yes there is. Are lawbreakers making rules? Have you seen Congress lately?

Bob Dylan’s words rang true in 1979, and they ring even truer today. But again, fear not.

The iron hand it ain’t no match for the iron rod
The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God
For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears
It is only He who can reduce me to tears
Don’t you cry and don’t you die and don’t you burn
For like a thief in the night, He’ll replace wrong with right
When He returns