The authorship of this hymn has a complex history, having been attributed variously to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Johann Michael Altenburg, and Jacob Fabricius. A seventeenth-century manuscript chronicle records that King Gustavus Adolphus wrote a prose version shortly before the Battle of Lützen in 1632 and asked his chaplain, Jacob Fabricius, to create the versified form. Born during the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, the text operates on two levels: historically, it reflects the “little flock” of the Evangelical army defending their cause; spiritually, it represents the entire Christian Church standing firm in a hostile world. The hymn boldly comforts believers, declaring that as long as God’s Word is certain, the enemy’s might is “a joke, a mere facade,” and our victory cannot fail. The most brilliant detail is the hymn’s placement: it was deliberately assigned the number 666 (the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18) as a defiant reminder that Christians have absolutely no need to fear Satan when Christ is by our side.