The Role of Music in Worship-part 5

The Role of Music in Worship-part 5  

       As we enter the 21at century it is very popular to refer to God as the “object” of our music worship.  Since philosophically we are dealing with sound when we music unto God, perhaps it would contribute to our greater understanding if we were to refer to God as the “Audience” or “listener” to our musical offering. We present a musical offering and He listens to it. In this context it is perhaps easier to conceptualize why the music part of our musical offering is so vitally important to our musical offering to God.   

       If God is listening to our musicing, and He most certainly is, then it stands to reason that we should be concerned with what He is hearing.  There is no doubt about the fact that God not only sees us music unto Him but he also is aware of the sounds we produce and what the organization of the sounds that present mean.  Since He made all the elements of music when He made music in a real way during His real six day creation, He is acutely aware of the way we organize the building blocks of His personal creation as He hears our musical offering. We forget sometimes that we are, so to speak, playing with God’s football when we music with His creation.    

      The most unfortunate “joyful noise” translation has caused a mighty host of Christians to erroneously suppose that the quality of the sounds we offer unto Him in our musical offering are of little or no consequence.  This notion is predicated on the mistranslation of the word ruah (7321) in the A.V.  We must give God the best musical offering possible.  This offering should not be noise based music.  God will be listening to the musical offering that we present this Sunday morning! (We will discuss the topic of noise thoroughly in future posts on “noise” in the Bible.)