God Created Sound
If you have read the first chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Colossians
you will remember that in chapter one verse sixteen it states that God created
the visible (horatos 3703) and the
invisible (auratos 517) part of
music. Christian musicians are much more familiar with God creating
the visible than they are with his creating the invisible. Twenty-first
century Christian musicians are often much more fascinated with God
creating the musical notation (the te'amim) of the O.T. than with the
importance of God’s creation of sound.
We get caught up in discussions of the possibility that Moses came down from the mountain with the te'amim engraved on the tablets. We may postulate that Jehovah possibly revealed them to Moses and that Moses added them to the Decalogue. We may wax eloquent in our notion that Moses developed the system of notation used in the Old Testament since he could have learned about musical notation from the Egyptians. (We know from Acts 7:22 that "...Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds.") An even wilder hypothesis is that he learned notation from the Sumerians or the Akkadians since we know that they had written notation at least 1400 to 1500 years before the earliest surviving Greek fragments in a written notation.
However, although we now know much more about the history of world music, it is still an abstract thought to many Christian musicians that God created sound i.e. the invisible part of music. It is what I call the "music part of music." You cannot touch it, or see it, but it is very much there. The invisible part gives music life and great power. It gives our musicing the ability to function, develop, come "alive", and be efficacious. Therefore, Christian musicians should give very serious consideration to the sounds (aoratos-i.e. the invisible part of music) that we connect to the Logos Christos.
We get caught up in discussions of the possibility that Moses came down from the mountain with the te'amim engraved on the tablets. We may postulate that Jehovah possibly revealed them to Moses and that Moses added them to the Decalogue. We may wax eloquent in our notion that Moses developed the system of notation used in the Old Testament since he could have learned about musical notation from the Egyptians. (We know from Acts 7:22 that "...Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds.") An even wilder hypothesis is that he learned notation from the Sumerians or the Akkadians since we know that they had written notation at least 1400 to 1500 years before the earliest surviving Greek fragments in a written notation.
However, although we now know much more about the history of world music, it is still an abstract thought to many Christian musicians that God created sound i.e. the invisible part of music. It is what I call the "music part of music." You cannot touch it, or see it, but it is very much there. The invisible part gives music life and great power. It gives our musicing the ability to function, develop, come "alive", and be efficacious. Therefore, Christian musicians should give very serious consideration to the sounds (aoratos-i.e. the invisible part of music) that we connect to the Logos Christos.
Thought
for the Day
If you wish to get out from under the complete
Lordship of Christ over music and musicing, you should adamantly deny that sound
matters when musicing unto God.
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