Music is far more central to our lives than we perhaps assume. We come into contact with music all the time—sometimes explicitly as in worship, and sometimes implicitly as with the background music in restaurants that you scarcely notice, and other times explicitly but still thoughtlessly, as with the music that many have loaded on their iPod.
I want to begin a series of exhortations on the subject of music—not just the music of our worship services, although there will be a great deal about that, but also concerning the music we enjoy throughout our lives.
Two points then, to begin with. The first is that worship is a particular kind of event, and God has fashioned the world in such a way that different kinds of music accompany different kinds of events. You don’t expect a Sousa march at a third-graders birthday party, you don’t expect a little ragtime piano piece for the offertory here, and you don’t expect a soft string lullaby as the troops are assembling for battle. Occasions differ radically, and God has created music with the flexibility to suit virtually every kind of occasion. So when we emphasize a particular kind of music here, it should not be assumed from this that we disparage or have contempt for other kinds of music. There is a time and place for virtually everything.
But there is an error that can flow from this, if we are not careful. We don’t want “church music” everywhere else, and we don’t want thrasher metal here. But there is a great danger, especially in these schizophrenic times, for us to assume that church music is the Lord’s music, and that when we go off to do our own thing, that all bets are off, that you can listen to whatever you want. But the Lordship of Christ extends throughout all your days, and not just on the Lord’s Day. And though church music is not to be every kind of music, whatever you listen to throughout the week should be consistent with what we sing here. Why is this? Can fresh water and brackish water flow from the same spring?
We are Trinitarians, and so the musical world is before us, with numerous lawful genres waiting for us—blues, rock, jazz, classical, country, bluegrass, operatic, and so forth. It is a big world. But music that spits out hatred for God and contempt for women, to take just one all too common example, is not a lawful genre . . . and it is not consistent with the worship of God here.