Well I didn't look as far into this as some of you guys did, but I just think of it as painting a picture of pure emotional agony and torture, then saying "but all my sufferings lie in momentary pain", etc. Leading him toward the thing he most desires, in my mind, was just mental torture, like leading a starving man up an endless staircase with a nice steaming turkey at the top. This could be a way of depicting how life is sometimes, where you're lacking something and you really desire it, and all around you are people who posses it. By the next verse he turns it around from an anthem of self-pity to a song of praise to God for giving us such a great and infinitely-good reason to have hope even in such a horrible situation. That's why we call it the gospel, or "good news". Basically, in the end, to me the message is that sadness is madness. The end of the song, however, sounds like he's dying, so I can't argue too much about the death penalty.
Well I didn't look as far into this as some of you guys did, but I just think of it as painting a picture of pure emotional agony and torture, then saying "but all my sufferings lie in momentary pain", etc. Leading him toward the thing he most desires, in my mind, was just mental torture, like leading a starving man up an endless staircase with a nice steaming turkey at the top. This could be a way of depicting how life is sometimes, where you're lacking something and you really desire it, and all around you are people who posses it. By the next verse he turns it around from an anthem of self-pity to a song of praise to God for giving us such a great and infinitely-good reason to have hope even in such a horrible situation. That's why we call it the gospel, or "good news". Basically, in the end, to me the message is that sadness is madness. The end of the song, however, sounds like he's dying, so I can't argue too much about the death penalty.