As we continue to meditate on the role of music in our worship of God, we need to settle something early on. We worship God using means that He has given us in order to worship Him. When we worship God, we are returning something. Nothing appropriate that we offer to Him originates with us. God has created us with the functional ability to worship Him. The innate capacity to do what He summons us to do is built in. We must mature in these things, develop in them, grow in our sanctification, but we are honing a gift already given.
One example is language—hardwired into the very nature of the human brain. Another example is music—man is musical by nature. This also is hardwired in us. There has never been a race of men without music. This is a function of the created order. But just as some of us develop their talents for language, so also some develop their musical talents. This is well and good, but when the Bible summons us to sing, it assumes that all of us will be doing so. Everything that has breath is to praise the Lord. We do not want some who play and sing, and other who listen any more than we want some to speak and others to be mute. All of us are created to be musicians at some level.
If we deny or resist this, we are making room for evolutionary thinking about the nature of man, and the resultant musical relativism. But chord patterns and structures are not arbitrarily assigned by us; rather they are discovered and manipulated by us. And when we discover rightly, what we discover “answers to” the nature of the world, the deepest desires of the human heart, and it resonates within the triune glory of God. God has made us to sing and play, and He has made us to sing and play so that He might listen to us.
It is therefore to be one of our highest priorities to value what we offer as much as He values receiving it. If God did not want to hear us, He would not have commanded us to sing to Him with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.