Come, Let Us Sing to the Lord

Songs of Scripture

Katherine Kennedy Steiner, Steiner

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781532633034
• eBook ISBN: 9781532633027
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Word of God as it has been received by the church has embedded in it dozens of songs. Each of these songs has a story to tell us about God and God's people. In brief meditations, twelve faculty at Wycliffe College explore Songs of Scripture in this volume to answer the questions "Why do Scriptures tell us to sing? What are we to sing? What does singing make of us?" Each of these meditations will give you a new appreciation for God's gift of songs. By singing the words of Scripture, we tune our hearts to God's song.

1

Being God’s Song: Venite, Exultemus Domino

Ephraim Radner

O come, let us sing unto the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation! With this opening from Psalm 95 we begin our corporate morning prayer at Wycliffe College, joining with countless Christians who have begun their corporate morning prayer since the early church. Perhaps, if we are lucky, we even sing the psalm. That is what I want to touch on in these introductory remarks to Come, Let Us Sing to the Lord—that is, singing Scripture.

This volume reflects a preaching series offered by the faculty of Wycliffe College. Some of our preaching series are on a given book of Scripture, like Jeremiah; sometimes they are on some key aspect of the Christian life, like vocation. This series is on the biblical “canticles,” that is, on those parts of Scripture we know to be songs: the Song of Moses at the Red Sea in Exodus 15, the so-called Magnificat or Song of Mary from Luke, and so on. Here I offer a brief reflection on singing the Bible more broadly.

The focus of this reflection is not just singing in the Bible, although that’s important to get straight too. Obviously singing took place among the peoples of Old and New Testaments. Paul, in Colossians (3:18), urges that “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” be sung “with grace in our hearts.” People had been doing that for generations. But, as is also obvious, we only have the words to a few of these songs that Israelites and early Christians sang. We have no access to the music itself. That we have no divinely inspired music to accompany Scripture is theologically significant, but it has also created problems. We tend to approach the Bible only as a textual document—as words on a page to be read or spoken. In the eighteenth century, people realized that there was such a thing as biblical “poetry.”1 Yet they still treated it as literary critics do, that is, as a form of speech. But in pre-literate societies, poetry was probably never spoken as a discourse. It was—and I subscribe to this theory—always sung. If there is poetry in the Bible, we can be sure that it was sung. Not read, but sung.

The Creation of Song

The Bible itself touches on the origin of music. We are told for instance in Gen 4:31 that Jubal, the son of Lamech, was “the father of all those who play the lyre and the pipe.” There is, however, no mention of singing until Moses stands in triumph over the Egyptians, having passed through the sea, and sings to God (Exod 15:1), a song so famous it is repeated in heaven in the Book of Revelation (Rev 15:3). David, of course, is the paragon of the biblical musician. He is skilled at the lyre and at song-writing, calms the madness of Saul, and composes musical prayers that become the heart of the Psalter, the book of Psalms. David himself, we hear, “invents instruments” for the “praise” of the Lord (1 Chr 23:5), and he personally organizes singers and instrumentalists for the service of the tabernacle and then Temple (1 Chr 6:31; 9:33; 15:16, 19), famously appointing Heman, Asaph, and Ethan as “singers.” “Sing to [the Lord] a new song,” he writes (or rather, sings). “Play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts” (Ps 33:3). The beginning of some of the Psalms hint at melodies that were to be used. The word “sing” appears over sixty-five times in the Book of Psalms, not surprisingly.

Singing appears elsewhere too—almost twenty times in the Book of Isaiah, in the most astonishing of ways. To be sure, singing with instruments was also seen, at times, as frivolous and as a sign of sinful dissipation (Isa 5:12; Amos 5:23; 6:5): the lyre, the harp, the timbrel, flutes, song . . . and wine! These passages assume they go together. But this judgment is actually rare in the Bible. Jews and Christians have always, until modern times, seen music as somehow divine in origin. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an argument developed as to whether music was originally voiced or instrumental. After all, Jubal with his instruments is mentioned before Moses and his tongue. But the consensus landed on the human voice. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, some time later, famously speculated that human language itself originated in musical song—we sang before we spoke. Common discourse, he argued, is a rationalistic debasement of the heartfelt communication that musical speech primordially had for human beings.

Part of the reason Christian philosophers pressed for voice as more original than instrument was the deep insight that creation itself “sings” to God. Certainly the Psalms and Isaiah tell us this: meadows, trees, hills, birds, even the seas, the very heavens and depths of the earth make song to their Lord (cf. Pss 65:13; 96:12; 98:8; 104:12; 69:34; Isa 44:23, etc). The very act of creation is one upheld by singing. God says to Job: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding . . . When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7)

Hence, songs of praise seem to be a part of created being itself. Music precedes not just human speech, but even the creation of human beings. That is biblical. Even the ancient Greeks had the idea that the planets themselves make a music according to the proportions of their orbits. This was taken up by Christian thinkers (Boethius), most famously by the seventeenth-century astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler.2 They called it “the music of the spheres”—that harmonious sound of the very universe. While it might seem absurd that planets could make a “sound” in empty space, the ultimate idea was that God hears this music, for God has created a world that, in its very being, exists in constant praise of its creator. Isaac Newton’s notion of space as a divine “sensorium”—the realm where god perceives creation—catches some of this. In Newton’s concept God feels—and hears—the sounds of everything he creates. That is in fact what creation does in its internal being: it praises God in song. To be alive, to be a creature, is to be a song for God.

Singing the Bible

So it must seem odd that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, debates arose among Christians over the place of music in church. Reformed Calvinists were the most contentious. John Calvin himself rejected any use of musical instru...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Songs We Sing
• Chapter 1: Being God’s Song: Venite, Exultemus Domino
• Chapter 2: Song of Deliverance: Cantemus Domino
• Chapter 3: Of God’s Victory: The Song of Deborah
• Chapter 4: All Creation Sings: Benedicite Omnia Opera
• Chapter 5: A Lament: How the Mighty Have Fallen
• Chapter 6: Fearless Heralds: The Song of Good News
• Chapter 7: The Dawn of Salvation: Benedictus
• Chapter 8: Mary’s Victorious Child: Magnificat
• Chapter 9: Waiting for Salvation: Nunc Dimittis
• Chapter 10: Being Like Christ: A Hymn to Christ
• Chapter 11: A Holy God: Sanctus
• Chapter 12: Sing, Church: Dignus es
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors