“Is all music created equal?”

“Is all music created equal?” 

 Although the quality of the music we bring to God as an offering matters, musical offerings are not solely about  quality musical performance or high-quality musical art forms. Amos 5:22-23 states, “Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.”  God declared that He would not accept Israel’s musical sacrifices because of their spiritual condition and refers to their musical offerings as noise.  God was referring to the spiritual condition of those who “leave off righteousness in the earth” rather than, at least in this case, the quality of their music.  I am drawn to this conclusion by what is recorded in Amos 5:12, “For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.”  The Bible lesson is clear that our musical melodies and our instrumental music will be considered to be noise by our heavenly father if we attempt to music unto him with sin in our hearts.

Now I will attempt to answer the question “Is all music created equal?”  First of all, only God can create.  Man always takes something that already exists and uses his God given gift of creativity to construct  musical compositions in new and wonderful (or not so wonderful) ways.  Odd as it may seem, the spiritual condition of the creative musician’s heart does not always dictate the nature and value of a musician’s creative musical works.  It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the statement above with  Luke 6:45 which states, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.”  Because of the evil condition of a composer’s heart, he or she may not use his or her artistic efforts to produce music that is suited for worship.  However, that musician could artistically arrange the formal properties of a piece of music that is appropriate and useful for Christian worship.  So, according to how a composer arranges the building blocks (the formal properties of the music), the music part of the music composition will take on meaning.  This meaning will have the propensity to affect the listener either positively or negatively.  Thus all music compositions are not created equal.