As Christians, we hold to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. God spoke and it was. But we are not Deists; we do not believe that God created a static thing, capable of ongoing existence by itself. God did not create the heavens and the earth, and then walk away. In His providential care, He sustains it. In Christ, Paul says, all things hold together, all things consist (Col. 1:17). In Hebrews 1:3, we are told that God continues to uphold all things by the word of His power. This is creatio continua.
But this doctrine of an ongoing sustaining of the created order includes another aspect. God created man to be the steward of His creation, and He gave us great responsibilities in this regard. Our rebellion and sin in Eden crippled us in our abilities to fulfill the creation mandate, but in Christ God has restored everything in principle. The Great Commission is a reiteration of our responsibility, as first announced to Adam, and repeated again to Noah. This means, as Paul says, that our labor in the Lord is not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58). What we do here matters. The work we do matters. This is not limited to ethical good works; it includes cultural good works.
In music, what we sing matters. The way we sing it matters. What we compose matters. In the resurrection, we will be given a new song, but this does not mean that the old songs will be taken away. Too often, evangelical Christians throw up their cultural achievements like makeshift scaffolding. We think, “It’s all gonna burn, man,” and so what we do here does not matter. But as Paul teaches us in 1 Cor. 3, some of it is going to burn, but other aspects of what we do in ministry will be tested and purified. Some of our hymns will be with us in the resurrection. Rather than trying to guess which ones, we need to turn our attention to all of them, with an educated desire for all of them to glorify the Lamb as worthy, “the Lamb that was slain.” We should sing as though we wanted all of them to make the cut.