I will sing and give praise. Awake up my glory. Awake Psaltery and harp. I myself will awake early.
Of course the Psaltery and the harp are both stringed instruments.
And he says I'll sing and give praise, psaltery, harp. He's talking about using music to praise and worship the Lord.
And this is an important theme throughout the Bible, but especially because we're in the book of Psalms, this is a song that we're reading.
So of course in the book of Psalms it has a lot to say about musical instruments and of course we as Christians believe in singing praise to God.
It's important that we are filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in our heart to the Lord.
But we don't just praise God with singing, but also the Bible says praise Him upon an instrument of ten strings.
So actually you can praise God by playing a musical instrument as well.
Now this isn't to say that any time you're playing an instrument you're praising God.
If you just get out a congo drum and just start banging it out and there's no spiritual content, obviously you're not praising God.
If you just played random music or random songs, obviously when the Bible talks about praising God on an instrument of ten strings,
there has to be some kind of a lyric involved with that that's praising God.
Not just I'm just playing music man for His glory and it just kind of has nothing to do with Him.
We see that the songs are spiritual songs, hymns and psalms and things. That's what glorifies God.
But there are some Christian groups today, and I use the word Christian very loosely because these are typically religions that are very far from actually believing the gospel of Jesus Christ,
but that believe that musical instruments are sinful.
And you know, obviously musical instruments have nothing to do with salvation,
but it's kind of a red flag when people have a doctrine that's just so far from what the Bible teaches
because you just have to wonder how are these people so blind to what the Bible actually teaches?
Why are they believing in such weird things? When you see people just believing in weird stuff, it's a red flag.
And if you look at the actual religions that are big on this, most of them are pretty far from believing the gospel.
Like for example, Church of Christ, so-called, is one where they believe that to be saved they believe you have to be baptized,
you've got to speak in tongues, you've got to endure faithful to the end, you can lose your salvation.
They don't believe in biblical salvation. Biblical salvation is that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life.
Biblical salvation is by grace through faith, not of works lest any man should boast.
And so this works-based salvation of the Church of Christ, a false doctrine,
and then they have this other bizarre false doctrine that says that, you know, musical instruments are sinful,
or they don't belong in the New Testament, or we shouldn't use them in the New Testament church.
But also I was kind of surprised to find this out, even though I guess this is common knowledge to most people,
but I was surprised that I guess there's a large segment of Presbyterians that also don't use musical instruments.
And it's just mind-boggling to me because you have so many scriptures about praising God with the trumpet,
and the psaltery, and the harp, and all these different things.
So how could you throw these out? And they say, well, but I don't see it mentioned in the New Testament.
That's because the New Testament's not about music. The New Testament's not a musical.
You know, Jesus and the disciples aren't typically just bursting into song.
You know, I mean, yeah, at the Last Supper, they sang a hymn. That's it.
That's it. I mean, read through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's not a musical journey that you're reading.
It's not just song after song after song, is it?
You know, you pretty much have one mention. They're at the Last Supper. They sang a hymn.
They go to the Garden of Gethsemane. Barely even mentioned.
You know, even in the Book of Acts, when you see the churches being founded, the missionary journeys,
the early days with the apostles and the early deacons and things, you don't see a whole lot of reference to music, do you?
Why? Because that's just not the most important part of the story.
When you're reading the Book of Acts, the thing that's emphasized is evangelism, church planting, and those type of things.
It's not a big musical emphasis.
When you read the Epistles, there's a little bit of talk about music, but not a whole lot.
So here's the thing. Just because something isn't mentioned, that's not evidence.
I don't base what I believe on what the Bible doesn't say. I base it on what the Bible does say.
And here's a good rule of thumb for reading the Bible.
If something's not explicitly changed in the New Testament, you should just assume that God feels the same way about it as he felt in the Old Testament.
What gives people the idea that God just radically changes his views from the Old Testament to the New Testament without telling us about it?
You know, like all of a sudden he's okay with sodomites or something. It's like, what?
And people love to say, well, Jesus never mentioned the sodomites.
Well, yeah, that's because Jesus already knew that Moses had already covered it.
If he mentioned it, then you could actually try to see what he mentioned and figure out what's different.
If he didn't mention it, you know what that tells me? That just falls under where Jesus said,
well, hey, think not that I'm come to destroy the law or the prophets. I came not to destroy but to fulfill.
Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.
Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven.
But whosoever shall do and teach them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Obviously, if Jesus Christ shows up and expounds upon the law, corrects misunderstandings in the law,
but in the end he says that he's establishing the law.
Even the apostle Paul in Romans chapter 3 says, do we then make void the law through faith?
God forbid, yea, we establish the law.
If he established the law, if he praised Moses and the word of God and the laws of God,
why would we assume that things have changed? It's a crazy way to read the Bible.
Like if it didn't get repeated in the New Testament, we throw it out.
Well, in that case, you might as well just throw out the Old Testament then and just go New Testament only.
But that would make absolutely no sense.
Have you ever noticed how much longer the Old Testament is than the New Testament?
So did God just repeat everything? No, it's already there.
It's there. He doesn't have to repeat stuff that he already covered.
I mean, do we really need another? I mean, look, Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 are rough enough.
We don't need another one in the New Testament. Those are some rough chapters.
We don't need that tucked into 1 Corinthians or something.
It's just like, how many times do we need to hear that list?
So the point is, it's already been covered. It's already been dealt with.
So here's the thing about musical instruments.
You've got tons of scripture in the Old Testament about musical instruments.
Not even just in Psalms, but in Psalms alone, you have scores of references and even commands commanding you.
Praise Him with the trumpet. Praise Him with the harp. Praise Him on the instrument of ten strings.
Okay, over and over again.
And then you have all kinds of other books that deal with this.
1 Chronicles has a huge section on music.
And you'll find this throughout the Old Testament scripture.
And then when you get to the New Testament, what does he tell us to sing?
Yeah, he tells us to sing hymns. He tells us to sing spiritual songs, but he also tells us to sing Psalms.
So what kind of a crazy doctrine would it be?
Sing about musical instruments. Sing about using them.
Sing commandments to use them, but don't use them.
It's bizarre, folks. That's a weird doctrine.
Imagine going to some Presbyterian church and singing a cappella Psalm 150.
Isn't that what we just sung? Isn't it on the red sheet right there?
Look at the red sheet. Can you imagine singing this a cappella in a Presbyterian church?
Like you're just singing about all these musical instruments, but you're like,
yeah, but, you know, we don't want to do that. God doesn't want us to do that.
And the argument from silence is such a bad argument here,
because how many New Testament Christian song services do we have described in the New Testament?
How many song services? How many times do they describe the musical worship in the house of God?
Very little. There's almost nothing.
So if there's almost nothing about it, then how can you form a conclusion based on silence?
What I'd rather do is say, well, the book of Psalms, this is what God wrote.
This must be God's view on music.
It's not like Jesus dying on the cross saying, it is finished,
and, you know, the temple veil rents and twain, and then like a guitar just breaks in half.
You know, the temple, the high priest's guitar is just like, it just like snaps in half.
Yeah, like that's what the New Testament's about.
It's about destroying musical instruments.
It's so weird, but people believe in it. Millions of people believe in it.
It's strange what people believe in. People believe some wild things. Amen.