I awakened yesterday morning with music and words surging through my head: “Great is thy faithfulness; great is thy faithfulness; morning by morning new mercies I see.…” It was as if a full orchestra and choir were in my room; yet no sound could be heard by anyone else. What a fantastic detail of God’s creation—people can sing aloud, and can sing within; they can hear what is being sung or played in the room, or hear music in memory in the silence of a room.
God has made us with the capacity of being not just speaking people or writing people but singing people. On a dull, grey, foggy winter morning, that in itself is something to be excited about! Wake up and remember Psalm 149:5 and 6, “Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds.” And, “my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips, when I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate upon thee in the night watches” (Ps. 63:5, 6). We don’t need to waken the whole household by bursting forth in song; we can rejoice in song in our heads at night, or start the day or the year that way!
“Praise the LORD. Sing unto the LORD a new song, and his praise in the congregation of saints. Let Israel rejoice in him that made him: let the children of Zion be joyful in their King” (Ps. 149:1, 2). “Let them praise his name in the dance; let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp” (Ps. 149:3). These songs are to have content; they are not just tunes without words, waiting for a revelation to come from outside. The songs are to praise the Lord who made us.
“Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage. I have remembered thy name, O LORD, in the night, and have kept thy law” (Ps. 119:54, 55). One day we are going to have a new “house,” a new body without aches and pains; but when arthritis or some other pain awakens us, in this same “house” the Word of God is to be our song. When we can’t sleep, we can sing (in our heads, or aloud if we are alone), remembering all the things the Lord has done for us, and bringing to mind as much of his precious Word as we can.
“Great is thy faithfulness; great is thy faithfulness; morning by morning new mercies I see”—these words come from Lamentations 3:23, Jeremiah’s words when he was still in the mud pit, not when he was lifted out. We are meant to sing in the midst of our particular dungeon, our yet unchanged “house,” about things that are worth singing about.
Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the LORD, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God and I will prepare him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt him” (Exod. 15:1, 2). Here Moses leads the people in a glorious chorus, a choir without precedent, singing to God praises for what he had done in releasing them, in setting them free from Egypt. What a lovely combination: the strength of the Lord, which is to be made perfect in our weakness, coupled with song—“the Lord is my strength and song.” We sing about him, we sing to him, but also he is our song. We ask for strength to study about him, we ask for strength to know him, we ask for strength to serve him and to do his will, but also he is our strength. He is our strength and our song, and we are to prepare a habitation, a house, a song-filled dwelling place for him. “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” (1 Cor. 6:19). The house that is me, is you, is meant to be a house full of singing, a temple full of songs to the praise of God.
“Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel. For when I shall have brought them into the land which I sware unto their fathers, that floweth with milk and honey; and they shall have eaten and filled themselves, and waxen fat; then they will turn unto other gods, and serve them, and provoke me, and break my covenant. And it shall come to pass, when many evils and troubles are befallen them, that this song shall testify against them as a witness, for it shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed” (Deut. 31:19, 21). Our songs are meant to be full of history and doctrine so that they are a means of teaching; they are to help us remember the important things about the true and living God, things that warn us, that help us discern when false gods are capturing our attention.
We are told in First Kings 4:32 that Solomon spoke three thousand proverbs and had a thousand and five songs. What a repertoire! In First Chronicles 25, verse 3, Jeduthun gave thanks and praise to the Lord with a harp, and in verse 6 the fourteen sons of Heman were directed by their father to sing songs in the house of the Lord with cymbals, psalteries, and harps. In verse 7 we are told that the number of those who were instructed in the songs of the Lord, those who had a special talent for music, was “two hundred fourscore and eight.” So we find that there is a place for those who have a gift for music to represent the rest of us in praise to the Lord.
“Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” (Eph. 5:19)—here we have a whole book of teaching condensed into one short line. We are to sing to and with one another, keeping the psalms fresh in our thinking, singing spiritual truths; but also, the “melody” is to be inside us, where no one hears it but the Lord himself. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord” (Col. 3:16). The written word of Christ is meant to permeate us completely, our thinking, our meditatting, and is to come out in song that is instructive and that also brings the listener up short.
One glorious day there is to be a song sung by all those whom the Creator created in his image. Created creatures are to join in a magnificent song, outlining history and praising the living God in a choir that cannot be numbered. Will we be there? Jesus, the Lamb of God, and Moses are to be there. And the song is a special blend of theirs: “And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the lamb, saying, Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy; for all nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest” (Rev. 15:3, 4).
The song within us now is meant to be a beginning. The crescendo, as every other instrument joins in, will come later.
