The Covenant of Kingship
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.
We left off last week with the Phoenicians, and we’re going to come back and cover some of Israel’s history. In our analogy that we used of the main storyline and the side quests, we’re going to return to the main storyline before we pick up our next side quest, because it’s the main storyline that keeps all the side quests in perspective. But first we did have some audience engagement about the Phoenicians last time.
A listener pointed out (thank you, Alex) that the Phoenicians are credited with inventing the galleys, the biremes and triremes that the Greeks and Romans went on to use. They were just such excellent shipwrights that civilizations long after the Phoenicians made use of their technology, which is cool.
The Romans basically stole it during the Punic Wars. “There’s a ship, let’s get it!”
That brings up a frequent point of history that whoever actually makes it often doesn’t get the main credit for it, because others conquer the people and take that technology as their own. Another wonderful example is the Muslims. They never knew how to build boats, but they’re credited with being wonderful shipmen. They made their subjected people sail them around, basically. It’s one of those things where one group makes it and then it morphs into lots of different versions, but people forget that they were the originals.
That’s one ongoing aspect of history, the history of technology, which would be a fun episode in itself way down the line someplace.
As we come back to Israel a thought occurs to me. It’s from a textbook and I don’t remember which one, or maybe not a textbook but a history book. It says the history of the world largely percolates out of two little countries that didn’t have a lot of resources, didn’t have a lot going for them, but they changed the world. One was Greece, and surprisingly enough the other was Israel. And although the writer was writing from a humanist perspective, he’s not terribly far off. The only difference is that what Israel gave us mostly was the Word of God and the covenant of God, whereas what Greece gave us was horrible. We’ll find out about that.
And actually stolen from other people, speaking of stealing from other people.
A little quick timeline – it’s hard to know whether or not Christians who we hope faithfully read their Bibles have a good visual mental timeline for the Old Testament. I know in many cases I’ve found that young Christians certainly don’t. They don’t know what comes after what or what goes where.
Part of this is the fault of our Sunday School systems that teach random stories in random order, and that relegate everything to Bible days, Bible times, Bible stories, Bible people – Bible times being 4,000 years from creation to Christ, which is 2/3 of earth’s history. With that in mind, here’s a quick succinct history from Sinai forward.
We talked about Sinai, the giving of the law, the giving of the Mosaic covenant, establishment of the tabernacle, the priesthood, the feasts and festivals and all of that. That took a year at Mount Sinai in Horeb. Then the children of Israel were supposed to go straight to Canaan and conquer it. They got there and they saw giants in the earth and said, “Uh, no,” and God said, “Fine, so you’re going to wander in the wilderness for 40 years.” During that time the generation that was marked by disobedience and disbelief died.
The other generation went through bootcamp and was ready at the end of the 40 years to enter Canaan. Moses’s time was up. God took him home. Joshua assumed command and became the first of the judges after Moses, and the new general, and he led the conquest of Canaan. We talked about this a little bit. It lasted 6 or 7 years. Then the children of Israel, having substantially but not thoroughly subdued Canaan, went on to settle down and live.
Unfortunately, they didn’t do what God said. God said, “Drive out the Canaanites.” They chose not to. That was hard. That was dangerous. They’re tough. They have chariots of iron. So they didn’t, they settled down in their midst. Sometimes Israel had the upper hand and sometimes the Canaanites. So for the next 300 years we go through a cycle that’s described in the book of Judges, where God’s people will play footsie with the unbelievers, give their daughters to their sons, take their daughters for their sons, and the next generation ends up worshiping Baal and Ashtoreth, Phoenician gods.
Then God says, “You love pagan culture so much, I’ll give it to,” and sends in a conquering nation who subdues them for X number of years, and the number of years gets longer and longer the further we go in. Sooner or later in most cases Israel repents. Once or twice they don’t. But God is merciful anyhow and raises up a judge, a deliverer, a man (in one case a woman) who’s both a civil judge and a war leader, and the judge leads Israel to victory against the Canaanites and subdues them and drives them out, often with some relatively weird and humorous tactics involved. As I said, this goes on for 300 years. Here are names such as Samson, Deborah, Jephtha, Gideon, and other folks that you may know from Sunday School stories. At the end of that time God’s people say, “We don’t like this judges thing. We want a king, to be like all the other nations.”
At this point Samuel the prophet, the last of the judges, warns them, “This is a wicked idea. Don’t do this,” but “No, no, no, this is the way we’re going to go.” God says, “Fine, make them a king,” and God gives them Saul, son of Kish, a Benjamite.
He starts out well but it does not go very well after that. He commits numerous sins against the Lord, and God orders him deposed and instead reaches out to a young man named David, and now we’re in familiar territory because everybody knows David, at least they know David and Goliath and the sling and the rock.
So Saul reigned for 40 years. David reigns for 40 years. His son Solomon reigns for 40 years. See a pattern here? We’ll talk about what happens after that, but this is the beginning of the monarchy and it’s a step forward sort of in redemptive history. God had promised the patriarchs that kings would come out of their loins, so this was on the table.
The concept of kingship is not against God. He did invent it. It was wicked for Israel to ask at that time in that way.
And for those reasons. Deuteronomy actually contains legislation for governing such a king, which amounts to he’s not going to be a tyrant, he’s not going to exalt himself above the people, he’s going to copy out the law of God, know it and use it. He’s not going to multiply wives, gold, or horses, aggressive weapons to himself. Solomon in time violates all of those.
But we come to David the shepherd boy. Yes, it’s a real story. Yes, it really happened. Yes, he actually slew a giant who was about 9’ tall with a single shot from a sling and went on to become a very young general in the Israeli army, until Saul got suspicious of him because he was too popular, and then Saul tries to kill him. A good part of 1 Samuel is David on the run from Saul.
Saul has a bad ending. He ends up being very afraid of the invading Philistines so goes to a witch to consult with spirits, and God in his mercy sends back Samuel from the dead and says, “We’re done. You’re going to die tomorrow,” which is mercy. If you’re told you’re going to die tomorrow, you have 24 hours to do something, like repent. Saul doesn’t and he dies in battle with his sons, and David comes to the throne – first the throne of Judah and then some years later all of Israel when the last of Saul’s sons is gotten rid of, not by David, and David becomes king over all Israel.
He's of the line of Judah, so that was the tribe that God a long time ago had said would bear the scepter, so everything seems on course. We’ve moved from a family to a theocratic republic to now a kingdom, and each step shows us something more about the coming Messiah.
It’s at this point that David says, “I need to build God a house,” and the prophet Nathan says, “Great idea, go for it.” Then Nathan goes home and God says, “Go back and tell him no. Tell him this.” What comes out of this is 2 Samuel 7 and the Davidic covenant.
It’s another one of those covenants of promise that in many ways are very open-ended in the sense that God does not say, “I will only do this if…” He says, “I’m going to do this.” Now, there are some if’s. “If your children disobey, that’s bad for them, but the promise is going to hold.” And what is the promise? Let me read here from chapter 7 –
And when thy days be fulfilled and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels [so it is going to be his natural seed] and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son.
If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men, but my mercy shall not depart away from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before thee. And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee. Thy throne shall be established forever.
I didn’t call it nuance exactly. It’s more like, “What in the world is he talking about?”
There have been forces in American theological history that have said, “Well, this is easy. He’s going to have a son who’s going to sit on a throne and rule a political kingdom that’s going to conquer the world, and Israel is going to be at the heart of this thing, so that’s that. It’s going to be like a Jewish version of Caesar, except he’ll be nicer and better because what if the lion were on our side? He’s going to exalt us and we’re going to be all great,” which is exactly what the Jews were expecting when Jesus appeared.
The forever thing – interestingly enough, forever does not mean 1,000 years. There are schools of prophetic interpretation that say, “Yeah, this means that when Jesus comes back and takes his church out of the world he’s going to come to Jerusalem, sit there, and reign as a king for 1,000 years.”
The ‘forever’ is crucial because you’re talking about a king who lives forever. To borrow a line from somebody someplace, “All men die.” Oh yeah, Star Trek, of course. All men die. Yes, with two exceptions, all men do die, so how is this king going to live forever?
And even if we could get one guy who lives forever, he kind of needs people to rule over who are not dying, or he doesn’t have much of a kingdom. So we not only need this king to beat death himself, but we need him to beat death not just for himself but for all his people so that they can live and he can reign over them forever.
We’re talking now beating sin, because death is the punishment for sin. So if this man, this king, is going to rule over this people forever and ever, then he has to deal not with their political problems, not with their economic problems, not with territorial issues, not with political policy, but he has to deal with the relationship that his people have to God in terms of their character and their heart, their record of guilt before God. He’s got to deal with the sins of the world, the sins of his people. If he can do that, then death will no longer have a claim.
Unfortunately, the church for a long time has totally missed this – not the whole church, but good portions of it. The covenant with David is a covenant about resurrection.
Interestingly enough, when Peter preaches his first sermon on the Day of Pentecost he talks about the Davidic covenant because wouldn’t you? They’ve been waiting for a king and they just killed him, so he stands up and says, “Let me tell you about Jesus of Nazareth. You took him by wicked hands. You crucified him, killed him, but God raised him up from the dead because death couldn’t hold him.”
“Well, remember that David in Psalm 16 prophesied, speaking for Messiah, that God would not leave Messiah in hell. He wouldn’t leave his soul in hell. His body would not see corruption. That’s Jesus. Death couldn’t hold him.”
Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him [a covenant oath], that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh [he’s the true fleshly seed of David], he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne [God’s throne, David’s throne].
He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption. This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear.
And he calls Israel to repentance. So the point of the Davidic covenant is not politics. It’s not who owns Palestine. It’s not pick a side in the current Palestine/Israel conflict or any other conflict over Palestine for however long. It’s not about what political entity rules the world, at least not in any direct sense. It’s about who can beat sin and who can beat death. It’s the gospel. It’s always been about the gospel.
This is what David is handed. Like Abraham before him, he’s handed the promise of the gospel but it’s narrowed down a little bit. The Messiah is going to be his seed and he’s going to be king and he’s going to have a people and he’s going to beat death, and with his people he’s going to live forever. So things are getting clearer. It’s this covenant, this promise, that continues to structure redemptive history, not only to the coming of Christ but beyond.
With that in mind I want to read something. This is the time also when we start getting psalms. David wrote psalms. Israel had not had much in the way of liturgical music to this point, but they get this, and here is one song. It’s a song for or by Solomon, depending on how you read the title, and it goes like this. This is Psalm 72.
Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king's son. He shall judge thy people with righteousness and thy poor with judgment. The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness. He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor.
They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations. He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth. In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth. He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.
They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him and his enemies shall lick the dust. The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents. The kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, all kings shall fall down before him. All nations shall serve him. For he shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper.
He shall spare the poor and needy and shall save the souls of the needy. He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence, and precious shall their blood be in his sight. And he shall live, and to him shall be given of the gold of Sheba. Prayer also shall be made for him continually; and daily shall he be praised.
There shall be a handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains; the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon and they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth. His name shall endure forever. His name shall be continued as long as the sun, and men shall be blessed in him. All nations shall call him blessed.
Blessed be the LORD God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things. And blessed be his glorious name forever and let the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen and Amen. The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.
What else do you pray for? Are there political ramifications here? Absolutely. All kings shall bow down before him. Are there implications for the course of history? Yeah. All nations shall serve him. Oh, that’s what God told Abraham. “In thee shall all nations be blessed,” and here it is again. “All nations will call him blessed.” So this is not something that had a short-lived time reference.
It didn’t peter out with the captivity. It didn’t vanish when Jesus came. He didn’t transform into some kind of spiritual other-worldly thing. Ring the gnostic bell. <ding!> He doesn’t get postponed until we can have a real kingdom once the church is out of the way. This is the kingdom. It’s the kingdom that saves the souls of the poor and needy.
This is the significance of Israel. Is it any wonder that when you pick up a standard textbook on ancient history, Israel only gets a paragraph or two. Sometimes it doesn’t get that much. “Ah, there was this nation named Israel and we got from them the ten commandments, which people used to respect. That’s about what we got from them. But the Greeks were really cool.”
If you have an old history book, one of your kids’ history books, even if it is by a Christian publishing company, go find it, pull it out, turn to the section on Israel and see whether or not Jesus Christ is put at the center of Israel’s history or whether it’s just, “Well, they were waiting for their Messiah. Meanwhile, here’s stuff that happened.”
It’s the coming of Christ that defines the history of Israel. Did they all wait patiently for him? No. Should they have? Yeah. Did they? No. That’s in some ways the struggle. Each time they apostatized God steps in, gets them back on track, and reveals more about the coming of his Son – more prophetic books.
Here in the time of David and his son Solomon we get wisdom literature, which we could perhaps talk about a little bit, but this is what makes Israel’s history, as you said, the centerpiece. The DNA of Messiah is in the loins of his ancestor. He’s coming through this family of David. It turns out it’s not the family we think, but that’s another story. But they are the true descendants of David and of Judah.
The one thing I was thinking of, in addition to what you had mentioned, was specifically the geographic location of Israel. Obviously, it’s one of the elements of the Abrahamic covenant to have this land, but again the land is not in and of itself magical holy dirt, so that if you go there you are holier than you were before. The holiness of the land is that it’s set apart to be the place that Jesus comes to as the Messiah, so as we watch the history go, we’re tracking not just the people but also what’s happening to the land.
It's interesting to see the way that so many different people in a sense kind of pull it back and forth because it’s in such a central location. The Lord knew what he was doing when he chose that land and put them there. He knew that it’s at the middle of everything, so lots of different nations would end up interacting with them.
Even as we go through the Old Testament we do see small elements of the fulfillment of Psalm 72 as different nations rule and take over Israel and are influenced by it. I’m thinking of things like Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus where they end up being very heavily influenced by the people they take as slaves and servants. Then Cyrus will actually help with the rebuilding of the temple and things like that. So we do see small shadows of fulfillment that tell us more is coming, and that the coming of Messiah will have influences on kings and kingdoms and history spreading across the world.
Yes, God planted Israel at the crossroads of three continents, so it became inevitable that trade routes would lead through there and that the world would come to their door, especially in the days of Solomon. Before I go on, Emily, was there something you wanted to add here?
Yes, less of a positive statement and more of a challenge to the listener and to myself to really draw the timeline in detail. We talked about this a little bit when we talked about Judges, that it’s really hard to track. Judges itself is not given chronologically, so to keep track of what’s actually happening takes a little bit of extra effort, and I think it’s worth the extra effort.
Then also, since we’re picking on the Greeks today, the contrast between how the Greeks treated women and how women are treated in their literature, and the book of Ruth, for example – it’s just worlds apart. It’s not power plays, power dynamics. It’s grace and enfolding in love and overwhelming superabundant grace.
Very different kinds of stories. Yes, women who are neither goddesses nor priestesses to goddesses get to play key roles in the biblical narrative. We can also think obviously of Deborah, but going back further Sarah, Rachel, Leah, and of course our favorite, Jael.
You also get Samson’s mother, who doesn’t get her name mentioned, and yet the angel always goes to her rather than to Manoah. “What did I tell your wife already?”
I used to have a cassette tape when I was a child of this lady telling Bible stories, and she told the story of Samson and his parents. She points out that Manoah is all upset. He’s like, “We’ve seen God. We’re going to die!” and his wife is like, “He promised a son. He’s not going to kill us.” Then he’s like, “Well, when you put it that way…”
I look forward to learning her name someday because she seems like a woman of faith that we get to glimpse there.
We come through David and, speaking of women, there’s Bathsheba. It would be easy to say, “Oh, there you go again. You’re treating women as sluts and adulteresses,” and yet the amazing thing when we get to the New Testament is that she’s listed in the genealogy of Christ. It’s not just that she is in the genealogy, but she gets major billing as belonging to that line, as does Ruth, as does Rahab and Tamar.
The Bible does not shy away from the role of women, but neither does it make them warlords and doesn’t make them kings, although we get a queen or two.
But it is also honest about the ways that women can equally be abusive and seductive towards men. It’s not just men towards them. They also play parts. Think of Jezebel, a really good example of that.
Many queen mothers in the history of Israel. But Tamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba – there’s an element of each story where they were misused. They were abused. With Rahab it’s kind of less clear, but I would say that line of work tends to be abusive by nature. So it’s a story of rescue.
Yes. Rahab goes on to marry a prince of Judah, so herself also becomes an ancestress of Messiah.
When we come to the later part of David’s life, we find him collecting a lot of things and having received revelation from God about the house for God that he’s not supposed to build but he’s preparing for.
He delivers all of this then to his son Solomon, so Solomon not only receives the plans for the temple through David from the Lord, but also David has all sorts of stuff from his conquests that Solomon gets to start with. Solomon will himself gather many other things, including those wonderful cedars from Lebanon that we talked about before, and craftsmen from there and other places, thus beginning a lot of the international reach of Israel that was just starting with David and continues.
It's all going to be centered in temple worship in a temple that will be considered a wonder for people to come and see, but for the people of God obviously it is not first and foremost about what they see, but rather what the Lord calls them to do there.
It becomes a replacement for the tabernacle in that the tabernacle was a mobile home. Trivia – mobile homes are called mobile because…
So when God’s people lived in tents in the wilderness, then God lived in a tent in the wilderness, but now David’s instincts were right, just a little early. He said, “I dwell in a palace of cedars and God’s still living in a tent,” which provoked Nathan to think, “Oh yeah, that seems like we’re on the right track.” Yes, but not yet. Because David had been a man of war and shed much blood, God said he was not the one to do it, but Solomon, whose name means peace, would be the one who would build this.
We hear about the seven wonders of the world. This one surpassed most of them, but we don’t hear about it because it was destroyed, but then so were most of the others. Again it’s this religious prejudice against Israel. “So they had something going on there. I’m sure it was really cute and all, but nothing compared…” Yes, it actually did compare to the wonders of the world. But as you say, it revealed God. It’s where God revealed himself in the Shekinah glory, but also in all of its ministries and functions it took what was in the tabernacle and blew it up into a bigger size.
You come to the gate which opens eastward and you have the sacrificial altar that says man can only come to God through the shed blood of a substitute. Then we have not a small laver but we have a brazen sea full of water. And on the sides of the temple we have these little water chariots signifying that this water is ready to rush out in the world, at least in picture form if not actually.
Then we go into the holy place. First of all, on each side there’s a pillar and these pillars represent the offices of king and priest, who hold up the worship of God as long as they’re faithful. This is what the people saw. They couldn’t see very far in, but they could see those pillars. The pillars themselves portray God holding up his worship by the institutions he’s created.
If you were a priest you could go in and then you’d see not a table of showbread and a menorah, you see 10 of each. Then beyond that the ark is still there with the law of God in it, but overshadowing it are these huge cherubim carved out of olive trees and covered with gold.
Along the top are skylights that light the whole thing. The thing is full of light. It’s full of gold. Everything is covered with gold. There’s water everywhere and there’s music, because although the tabernacle had a couple of silver trumpets that they blew over the sacrifices, there’s no real mention of liturgical music, but now David is writing psalms. He calls together other prophets who are writing psalms and he’s creating orchestras to perform them and choirs to sing them, so that now when you go into the temple you can hear the word of God sung.
Emily, you mentioned that you’re interested in this. Do you want to pick up on something here?
Sure. Just a note, it’s kind of anachronistic to the temple but there are certain denominations or factions of Christianity that will eschew the use of musical instruments in worship, based on what David tried to do when he was trying to bring the ark of the covenant back to the tabernacle in 2 Samuel 6. They say, “He put it on a cart because the pagans did it, and he had music accompany it because that’s what the pagans did, and it was wrong.” Except that, for one thing God doesn’t say so. There were still musical instruments the second time when no one is struck down when God does return in glory to Israel.
There was also a very specific commandment about carts that often gets overlooked. Back when God is telling the Levites what their job is going to be, he’s like, “No carts. You’re going to carry this, not on a cart, on your shoulders.”
I’ve always found that line of argument very interesting just because it requires so much of very little text in isolation. As a musician of course I feel personally invested in this conversation and that line of thinking.
I’ve heard as well that they see a lot of the temple worship just as things that David made up as a good idea, and don’t see them as sanctioned by God, kind of missing the point that David was a prophet and received revelation specifically on the temple.
He did a lot with temple worship that wasn’t just him being a good administrator. He is actually following revelation, but also there’s a sense that as we grow in the faith we can extrapolate and understand more and more of what things mean, so he’s not just making a guess. He is actually a believer with the Spirit of God working. There are a lot of ways where they seem to kind of take one small thing and run with it.
And in the whole form of worship that we practice today, we didn’t come up with that. Even the most hardcore regulative principle adherence can’t really say, “This outline of the order of worship is outlined in detail in scripture.” We’re given these forms in large part by tradition and by the continuity of God’s people and what God has revealed to his people in the past, and that’s still standing for generations that follow.
Going back to the idea that David was a prophet, when the ark is ensconced in the temple he turns to the Levites and says, “You’re not going to carry the ark on your shoulders anymore.” He says in so many words, “Instead you’re going to lift God up by your music and your singing.”
As you say, David was able to see through the implications. Once upon the time the Levites literally lifted up God’s footstool, the throne, the cherubim, but they didn’t need to do that anymore. So now they’re going to lift up God in a different way. They’re going to lift up his praises. They’re going to lift up his Word because now there’s a whole lot more of the Word than there used to be.
Our friends who value the regulative principle in its more extreme forms are of course very devoted to the Word of God. We will not criticize them for that. But I wonder if sometimes they don’t get the idea that one of the best ways to learn the Word of God is to sing it, and one of the best ways to sing something is with musical accompaniment, unless you’re a fantastic singer. I’m not.
I’m part of a choir and that means people that generally know how to sing, and yet as soon as you put them acapella it crashes and burns. You have to practice and practice and practice to be able to sing acapella. It’s not very easy.
So we see here first of all a shift and forward development in how God’s people are to come to him, but there are cultural implications. At the heart of Israel’s worship now is the Word of God, but the Word of God is now adorned and lifted up in music. It’s sung. Singing becomes part of worship.
We’re in a generation now where you’d say for the worship service in a church, all people think of is music and that’s a mistake, to be sure. But God here connects music and the Word together so that we are doing on earth what is done in heaven. When we get to the book of Revelation, guess what? People in heaven are singing and they have musical instruments.
So there’s more going on here within liturgy, but also if you have a culture that puts music so close to the throne of God, do you think maybe that culture is going to value music? The answer is yes, it is, and not just for liturgical purposes, not just for formal worship.
As we look back over the history of the Christian west and we look at the greatest music that has come out of the west, most of it either began in the church or has its roots in people who learned their music in the church, so if you’re going to study music history you can’t ignore temple worship. You can’t ignore what happens when it goes forward. You can’t ignore the book of Psalms.
Today it’s very popular to ignore the psalms completely and just talk about your own personal experiences with God in your own words, but that lacks literary value and musical value. The Puritans foresaw some of this. They said, “Okay, you start introducing lyrics that are wholly manmade and pretty soon everyone’s just going to be singing them and the psalms will suffer.” That’s been largely true, actually.
If you look back in the time when things were switching over, you look at the hymns say of John Newton or Charles Wesley, the language of the hymns is full of scriptural language. They basically take one scriptural reference after another and link them together. I’m thinking here, for instance, of “Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken,” where every single phrase comes from scripture. Or “The Church’s One Foundation” where every line is drawn directly from scripture. This was some of the best and most beautiful, powerful, and theologically accurate music the church has ever had.
Unfortunately, we often let it drift from that to our personal experiences, but then that kind of music sets the tone for how we can sing about other parts of God’s world as well, not just directly worship but we can indirectly worship God by praising him for the sunshine and for the rain and for human love and for family, and so it goes.
When we say that we’re doing a program on history, how many strands of history? We talked about technology earlier, now we’re talking about music. If you’re going to be a historian you have to learn a lot of things about a lot of different areas of life and see how they progress over time. You can’t just be politics and war or even religion or theology. There’s a lot that has to go into it.
At this point we’re just kind of throwing some ideas out here for people who want to think more seriously and more deeply. If in the end you don’t agree with everything we’ve just said, still go look at the history of music and discover its roots and see what’s there and why it’s there. There’s a lot to see and to understand. I’m sorry, but the Greeks did not give us music.
You can actually listen to some of the earliest music we have from the Greeks. It’s not good. I’m definitely imposing my own value system of musical quality on the Greeks here but listen for yourself. It sounds like a kazoo – just saying.
One side note in thinking of history is that a culture also has to develop to a certain point before it can spend time on music. If a culture is not able to take care of basic needs, nobody’s going to be developing music or other things that are not in a sense essential to life.
It’s the demonstration of God’s blessing on a culture for there to actually be people with time to be developing all these different songs, psalms, poems, and all that type of literature. While it is beautiful and it enhances our understanding and human experience, it’s not in a sense the base of what you need to survive. So as you see cultures developing lots of music, it should cause us to pause and take note and wonder what has happened that allows them to be able to do that.
Yes, the huge explosion we have in the creation and the desire to preserve and record music is a remarkable thing. Like I said, we do have music from ancient Greece. They considered it a valuable part of their worship, certainly. I believe we have ancient Phoenician music as well, if I’m remembering correctly.
What’s interesting is how it’s still all on a diatonic scale. That blew my mind when I learned that. I was like, “Oh my goodness! The branches are not far apart.” But just as we’ve talked about the desire to record history accurately for future generations, the desire to preserve music is really interesting and the explosion in how much music you can allot the talent and time to create. It’s a very significant consideration.
We’re probably not going to say everything we need to about Israel but that’s okay. We’re running out of time, but we’re really close to this idea and that’s poetry.
Poetry originally by and large was sung. The Iliad, the Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf – these were sung. Most of the writers and singers were men. It was a manly art. The songs and the poems were composed for some very specific reasons. As Dead Poets Society would tell us, to woo women, to worship God, to pass on wisdom to the next generation, and to describe the mighty victories of our people over our enemies. That’s basically it. The wisdom is about wooing women, God, and war.
This is again a time when Israel is extremely prosperous when we begin to get this wisdom literature which is poetic and which could be sung – Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon. Job may have come along around here, depending on how you date it.
The Greeks aren’t there yet. Homer and The Iliad and all of that – we’re still not there yet, again depending on timelines and who’s what when where. Some could date Homer as early as Joshua’s time, but on the other hand you could push it a little later. The Aeneid was certainly later.
We’re getting this explosion here, but it’s going to continue to echo through history as people come in contact with the gospel and they’re going to see, “Oh, here are ways that God uses poetry and music, and puts them together so that songs can have lyrics.” It’s not just music to listen to and tap your fingers to or dance to. It’s communicating propositional truth but in beautiful ways that go beyond necessarily the bare meaning of the word.
So you’re going to do a history of poetry? You’re going to do a history of literature? Here’s a good place to start. You could go back further certainly to Moses and even to Genesis, but this has got to be a major stopping point in your journey backward to find the roots of poetry, literature, and music. There’s a lot going on here but I’m going to guess that we are about out of time.
We’ll finish the divided kingdom next time and get as far as the coming of Assyria, Lord willing.
All right. I’m going to double down on Rachel’s recommendation from several weeks ago. I just had time to read Digital Liturgies by Samuel D. James and found it really great and very concise. It’s not a very long book, as I think you mentioned, but it mapped so closely to my experience and brought together a lot of very important themes. It’s just a very worthwhile read.
Recommendation: Digital LiturgiesExcellent. I’m glad you read it. From our discussion of music and the psalms, I am going to recommend a musical group called The Corner Room. I originally heard about them from Greg’s wife, Kate.
Recommendation: Musical groupThey started out doing primarily psalms being set to different musical tunes, but they have since branched out. They did a whole series on Isaiah 52 and 53 that I have been listening to recently with Easter and Good Friday. They also have one that is songs for kids and all of it is scripture set to music. They pick some key passages for kids to learn and put them to tunes that kids would maybe catch onto a bit more. I like them because they’re broader than some of the other ones that do psalms. I love those groups as well.
In my Sunday School class I’ve been teaching my kids the books of the Bible and they all do not say the books of the Bible. They all sing the books of the Bible to me. I gave them all the same song, at least, so they’re all singing the same thing.
The ways that music enhances our memorization ability is key, especially with kids, but then it’s also teaching them rhythm and actual musicality.
I’m going to recommend something that has very little to do with any of this, maybe indirectly. You mentioned children. I recommend reading out loud to your children.
Good children’s books are good books, and the adult who is too proud to read them does not know what he or she is missing. Some come to mind really quickly. These are the books I grew up on, read to me by Captain Kangaroo, and books that we turned around and read to our girls because they’re good. They’re good stories and they often come as illustrated picture books.
The Story of Ping, The Little House, Stone Soup, Make Way for Ducklings – that was the first book I ever bought for our girls before our oldest was even born. These books have beautiful art, for one thing. They’re not yucky. They’re not morbid. They’re not gross. They’re not distortions of God’s creation.
They’re not all exactly true to life, but they’re close enough. You look at them and they’re pleasant pictures. Even when Ping is getting spanked, or the little house is caught between skyscrapers and crying, it’s a comfortable real sort of world even when we know it’s imaginary. The stories tell us about true things in human experience.
In these older books, the cultural Christian presence is still there. They may not mention Christ, they may not mention God, but basic assumptions about meaning and truth and family and love are still under the surface. They may not know why, but they’re there, and the stories that come out of this are worth reading even if you’re very old. Children love them and the learning experience and sharing stories with children is a remarkable and very powerful thing.
So if you haven’t had a chance to read a book to a child lately, pick a random child or a grandchild and see what you can do.
Gretchen has started to read to me. It’s delightful. More often she reads to herself and I kind of overhear from the kitchen, then I have to guess what she’s reading based on what she’s saying, which is quite a fun game. The other day it was, “Hungy, hungy, hungy, hungy, beautiful butterfly!” It’s a wonderful time, just like this has been a wonderful time.
Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight as always. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling.
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