Biblical Worship: Music, Art, and
Literature. John 4
We can define worship in a
nutshell as submitting everything that we think about in life to the authority
of God’s revealed Word. Another way of expressing it is what we have in Romans
12:1, 2 NASB “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of
God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God,
{which is} your spiritual service of worship.
There are clearly right
ways to worship God and wrong ways to worship God. When people make claims that
“this is worship” or “this is worshipful” then that ought to be open to
evaluation from the Word of God. That is consistent with what Jesus says to the
woman at the well in John chapter four, that in the church age those who
worship God will worship Him by means of the Spirit and by means of truth. We
are focusing on the second aspect, by means of truth. As soon as Jesus says
that He is implying that there is right worship and wrong worship, there is
true and there is false worship. So it is up to us with the Word of God in hand
to explore what that means.
There is another example
in the Old Testament in 2 Chronicles 29:25 which deals with Hezekiah. After
there is a true revival of biblical worship in Israel Hezekiah has the temple
cleansed and the worship reformed according to the law of God which has been
ignored for several generations. He brings together the Levites in the temple
with cymbals, psalteries, harps, a variety of instruments—the element of diversity.
It is a harmony where there was unity as well as diversity. NASB “He
then stationed the Levites in the house of the LORD with cymbals, with harps and
with lyres, according to the command of David and of Gad the king’s seer, and
of Nathan the prophet; for the command was from the LORD through His
prophets.” At the time of David there were set patterns that were established
for corporate worship and for the music.
Music in the
Scriptures (cont.)
5)
There are two key
issues in musical praise for God that need to be addressed. One has to do with
the lyrics. Even if they are doctrinally accurate there are lyrics that are
just simplistic and not very good, and those that fit a pattern in Scripture. The
other side of the coin is music, and this is where there needs to be a lot of
discussion.
6)
Music must be
carefully evaluated in each area because both music and words communicate. This
is not a matter of personal preference. When it comes down to evaluating the
kind of music that we use in corporate worship it cannot be a matter of
personal taste, a matter of simply subjective preference. It must be related to
the Word of God and that which fits within the structure of what is being accomplished
in the service. The music that we sing needs to be of a type that enhances and
enables concentration and thought as we study the Word of God and not music
that distracts from, takes away from, or minimizes the ability to think or to
concentrate.
We live in a context today
where there is a huge movement, a major shift that has taken place called the
contemporary Christian music movement or worship movement, and it covers a wide
range—everything from soft rock to heavy metal to Christian rap; it covers the
whole extreme—but the whole movement as it exists rests upon four basic
assumptions, and it important for us to understand these and to think them
through.
a)
First of all the
claim is that music is neutral, that there no such thing as “Christian” music
or “non-Christian” music. The claim is that music is amoral, value-neutral, or
worldview is neutral. The contemporary Christian worship movement as a
movement, which started in the late 60s, cannot be divorced from the church
growth movement, they are integrally related. You cannot go over and pick up
the contemporary Christian music without including certain philosophical and
theological assumptions (like a Trojan horse) that then come over and are
related to the whole church growth movement.
b)
The second
assumption of the contemporary Christian worship movement is that music is
supposed to be evangelistic. We want to sing the kind of music in the church
that makes the unbeliever comfortable. The ideology there is that is seen in
the church growth movement is that you don’t want “unchurched Harry” and “unchurched
Mary” to come into the church and feel uncomfortable, so let’s make the church
comfortable for the non-Christian. Is that biblical? Do we think Isaiah felt
comfortable when he came into the presence of God in Isaiah chapter six? No. When
the sinner is confronted with the character of God, and when the sinner is
confronted with the thinking of God and he has been in righteousness
suppression for all of his life, he is not going to feel comfortable. If he
comes into the church and he doesn’t feel a disconnect,
then there is something wrong with the church. The more that society at large
becomes divorced from biblical Christianity and becomes more and more mired in
paganism, enmeshed in pagan music and pagan drama and pagan literature, then
what is going to happen when they come in is that they are going to feel something
different and uncomfortable. But if it doesn’t feel any different then they can
be comfortable in their carnality and you never see a difference in the church.
You can go into many of the big mega churches and never feel any different to
the pagan society around you.
c)
The next point
comes out of the charismatic movement—you can’t divorce contemporary music
today from the charismatic movement—and that is the idea that music provides a
worshipful mood. The idea there is that real worship is a sort of contemplative,
meditative, almost ethereal mindset. So the music is designed to move people
into this particular mindset. It assumes a definition of worship that is purely
subjective, and that the focal point of the music in church is to put you into
this kind of mindset. It is the kind of mindset that doesn’t promote rational,
cognitive thought but distracts rational cognitive thought.
d)
That music is designed
to promote church growth, so that the unbeliever can feel comfortable.
If we look at those four
assumptions, music is not designed to be neutral, as will be shown,
music is not designed to be evangelistic. The meeting of the church in worship is
for the edification of the saints so that the saints can then go out into the
world and evangelize the lost. Sunday worship is not for the evangelization of
the lost and then the saints get edified somehow, someway, by Christian radio
or home Bible study; which is how things are done in 99% of the churches today.
Another things of note is that in part of contemporary
Christian worship the same choruses are sung in Lutheran churches, Roman
Catholic churches, Presbyterian churches, Bible churches, charismatic churches.
It is like a universal thing. In days long past various churches had their own hymnal
because the hymns reflected the theology unique to the church, but now it is a
part of ecumenicalism. Let’s not think doctrinally any more, there is no such
thing as “the faith,” the body of doctrine that we believer, it is all about “Just
let’s have a same experience with God and feel good about Jesus.” That is what colors music.
Music isn’t worldview
neutral. Byzantine art was heavily influenced by Greek thought, especially
Platonic and neo-Platonic thought. In Platonism the emphasis was on what is the
ideal. It was two-dimensional representational art. They are not painting real
people, it was representational. Very two-dimensional and
idealistic. The music was designed to do the same thing, to take our focus
on to that which is ideal and to take us out of this world and into another
world. It is designed to produce a contemplative, mystical, introspective view
of spirituality. And that is coming back big time in contemporary music. And
there is a change that takes place. The early part of this period was
influenced by neo-Platonism, but by the eleventh or twelfth century there is a
rediscovery of Aristotle. In Platonism reality is in the next world—ideal imagery,
not reality. There was a shift that took place in western European thought between
the 10th and 11th centuries to put the emphasis more on creation and
reality. If affected art. The Renaissance emphasis was toward nature for nature’s
sake and understanding creation as it is. So one way in which the worldview at
this time is described is that of realism, it is not longer the idealism of
Plato, it is now realism as it is. This develops in music, there is more structure
and style and resolution. Then in the next period, going into the Baroch period, there is in art Rembrandt’s Descent from the
Cross and in music there is Bach’s Magnificat. The reason for these illustrations
is to demonstrate that as the intellectual thought changed, art changed and
music changed. As the ideas that influence society change—the views of ultimate
reality, knowledge, ethics and aesthetics—it changes the culture, it changes
the music. So when we come to recent western civilization there is a radical
change between 1950 and 1970, and that is the major worldview shift into the
outworking of nihilistic existentialism and postmodernism, and it affects the
music.