Why We Sing

And the ransomed of the LORD shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
(Isaiah 35:10)

Unlike the movies, life does not come with a soundtrack. There is no viola and cello playing in a foreboding minor key to prepare us for tragic events, nor jubilant trumpets announcing happy ones. There was a time when public singing was very common –from holiday parties to rallies and political events and men marching off to war who “won't come back till it's over, over there.” Perhaps because in our entertainment culture we watch others rather than participate ourselves, we have become embarrassed to sing. This makes the church's public worship even more counter-cultural than it was in past days.

Christians sing. It has been so from the beginning. Jesus and the disciples sang a hymn on the cusp of his going out to pray in the garden on his last night before the cross. That was not a new tradition he began, of course. The Israelites sang victoriously on the far side of the Red Sea. Moses wrote the ninetieth psalm. God's people have always praised him by song.

Certainly, in recent decades, the style and substance of Christian songs has been the subject of much debate. In the early days of the Reformed churches, the Psalms were the sole songbook of public worship. Sadly, we have abandoned singing them at all, even though God himself wrote them for us to sing. Yet, what we sing is not in my purview today, but rather why and how we sing.

Isaiah 35 is a passage that celebrates God's great salvation of his people. It follows on the heels of an extended section where God holds the whole earth in judgment, and where the results of the long rebellion of his people has at last exhausted his longsuffering, and they themselves are facing judgment at the hands of Assyria and then Babylon. In one sense, God's Old Covenant people would never again be a sovereign nation --existing under the oppression of Babylon, Persia, Greece, the Seleucids and then finally being destroyed by Rome in 70 AD. The judgment is a serious one, but it is well-deserved. God's people rebelled against him, introduced the worship of foreign gods, worshipped by means of sexual immorality and child sacrifice, and murdered the prophets that God sent to call them back to himself. And, yet, for all of this, God has not ceased to love his people. He has promised to redeem them, in spite of themselves, for nothing good in them, but only for his sake of his Great Name. God's people deserve destruction for their defection, but are given his grace simply because of his own mercy. “It is of the Lord's mercies we are not consumed.” They experienced part of this blessing when God brought them back to the land under Cyrus the Persian. Yet, God's people would not know it in full until the coming of Christ. In fact, we will not know it fully and truly until Christ comes again, and we sing in his immediate presence.

Why do we sing? We are commanded to. We are not told precisely why this is the case, but we can speculate that it is because singing unites head and heart in a way that simple speaking does not. You can probably recall far more children's songs verbatim than you could quote any children's books read to you repeatedly by your parents. Song can make us happy or solemn, joyful or sad. Song expresses the full range of human emotion and experience, both in lyric (like the Psalms) and melody.

We sing, too, because we are redeemed. This is the lesson of Isaiah 35. The land that has been devastated by the sin of the people and the judgment of God. At long last, though, the desert blooms. God's people have been restored, and they again enjoy his favor. This is a picture of the final reality of God's people –both Jew and Gentile who become his people through faith in Christ. It is the New Heavens and the New Earth. The old earth has been scorched with flame, and everything on it has perished. But, the new reality will never pass away.

How, then, ought we to sing? Loud and joyfully, with reckless abandon. God is worthy of our praise. The volume of our praise ought to be reflective of the volume of our esteem for him, not by the skill of our singing. In Christian worship, where the Word is proclaimed in truth, the glorious realities of that coming age break into our often-bleak present experience and beckon our hearts, thoughts and intentions homeward. They take us away from the cares of the mortal world for a time, and put our thoughts on Heaven and, most importantly, on Christ exalted and reigning, the very one who will come again and whom we will praise then, in full voice.

Written by Rev. Kenneth Pierce, Senior Minister, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Jackson, MS