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Psalm 150:
1Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.
2Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.
3Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.
4Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
5Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
6Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.
In urging and driving the soul to God, Scripture is altogether irrepressible.
What presses itself upon you in God's Word—the exalted command to sobriety and purity, the great stress not to pursue your way with a proud look, but with humility—is no less the very sharp admonition to be on your guard in every possible way against the deadening power of money and to consecrate your goods by generous giving. But nothing of all this can be compared to the impelling force wherewith in God's Word the Holy Ghost, sparing nothing, restlessly urges and drives you to worship, to seek fellowship with the Lord, to cultivate nearness of the soul to God.
The Scripture even places itself at a still higher viewpoint.
In its estimation, it is not enough that the saints magnify Him, Whose is, in the most absolute sense, the Majesty and the Power. Every child of man must glorify God's Name. But even so, the circle is not fully drawn of what must render praise to God. In this circle the Scripture includes, together with everything that is called man, the hosts of angels. "Praise the Lord, all ye his hosts, ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure" (Psalm 103:21)— All Cherubim, Archangels and Seraphim.
And then this circle descends again from heaven, in order also to include the inanimate creation. Not only must everything that hath breath praise the Lord. All His works, in all places of His dominion, must glorify His renown. "Praise ye him, sun and moon!" "Praise him, all ye stars of light." "Praise the Lord, ye snow and vapors, stormy wind, fulfilling his word" (Psalm 148). Mountains and hills, cedar trees on Lebanon, and likewise beasts and all cattle, creeping things and the hosts of birds that sing among the branches, all must make God great, all must pour forth abundant speech. There must be no people and no language, where their voice of praise and laudation is not heard. "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth" (Psalm 8:9).
Thus you, as man, are called to praise the Lord, in the midst of a creation, which is vocal with rhythmic melody. This music of nature itself entices you to chant the praises of your God, and presently returns an echo to your hymnody of praise and adoration, that resounds among the spheres.
This is not a dead creation stricken with dumbness, but a creation that lives, that utters speech. And he who has an ear to understand this language and this music of creation overhears in it a purling stream of worship which is in perfect accord with the music and the language of adoration in his own heart.
And between these two, these impulses of your own heart and these undulations of sound in creation, Scripture has laid a tie in the emotional sphere of the world of sounds, in the wealth of musical art, in life's treasure of sanctified song.
Psalm upon Psalm calls you, not alone to overhear the voice of the Lord in creation, and you yourself, with your human voice, to glorify your God, but also to praise Him with pipes and strings (Psalm 150:4), with lute and harp, with high sounding cymbals and joyful noise.
Playing upon instruments, therefore, is no secondary, but an indispensable constituent part of worship; a means that God has placed at your disposal by which to enjoy yourself more richly in His praise and adoration; and through the world of music also to come closer to Him with your soul.
Grant that praise in the house of prayer with only human voices can be solemn and deeply impressive, even then, this human singing is musical art, and improves in merit and gains in effect, when it is artistically trained and developed.
Joyful sound from the throat and joyful sound from the harp, both take hold of the harmony which God hath included in a wondrous world about you, and which, at one time through your throat and at another time by playing on the organ, or on the harp, you quicken, and set in harmonious motion with the world of your heart.
And whether to this end you strike metal, or cause taut strings to vibrate, or by your own breath drive out sound from flute or trumpet, it is always again a motion, an impulse in your soul, which interprets itself in a vocal utterance of the world of sound, which in all spheres surrounds you.
Not the singer, not the harpist creates this world of sounds. God created it. It was there before the first man for the first time heard the joyful noise from between the branches of the trees in the garden. It lies enfolded in the air, which is susceptible to vibration and undulation, all around you. And to you, as man, it is given, by your voice or by your hand, to set this wondrous world in motion through vibration.
And when your throat, or your hand through the instrument, sets these sounds in motion, then it is as though the undulation, the motion, the inner song of your heart flows out in it, catches an echo from it, is carried along with it, is relaxed by it and wonderfully enriched. Enriched in no small part by the fact, that, at the same moment, others together with yourself undergo like emotions, experience like sensations in the soul, and that thus your praise and adoration through song and organ-play flow together with theirs into one mighty stream of adoring love and praise.
Yea, more still, because these vibrations and these undulations of sounds react upon you as a power from without and lose themselves in the infinite, it is as though this glory "when the voice may mate itself with the sound of strings," brings you into fellowship with God Himself, even as this praise and adoration ascends from out this earth and passes through the heavens till it reaches the spheres where angels finger the golden citherns and everything merges into one grand chorus of praise and adoration around God's Throne.
Altogether wondrously the human throat and voice have been adapted by God to this world of harmonious sounds, and there is no joyful sound of earth that excels the loveliness of the human voice.
It is a gift unequally divided. In countries of southern climate, people are endowed with more mellowness of voice than people in northern lands; and even in the same regions, the difference is very marked between the discordant street-singing, and the rhythmical, developed voice of the artist singer.
But whatever difference may present itself, the human voice remains in its wondrous ranges a joyful sound of heavenly origin; and only in the realm of glory that is to come will it be heard in all its purity, in all its wealth of expression and cadence, before the Throne of the Lord.
And yet, by itself, the human voice does not suffice and therefore God has endowed it with an equally wondrous complement in the musical instrument.
A piece of brass, a tightly-stretched hide, presently strings, a horn from an animal's head, even down to a reed cut by the riverside, such are the seemingly futile, and yet, in their effect, the glorious means, which God himself has ordained for man as supports for the human voice, to unite human voices in grand chorus, and to bring the human heart into co-operation and into harmony with the world of sounds that surrounds it.
Herein, also sin works, and has worked. A musical art has developed itself which aims to exist for the sake of man and not for the sake of God. An art which strives after no higher calling than to please the ear, to make the emotions experience unholy sensations, to provide a wealth of pleasure without higher aim.
A sin, less in evidence with the great masters of music, than with a public estranged from God, which abuses the products of art purely for their own pleasure, even where these aimed to glorify God and to inspire what is holy.
This accounts for the distaste for this secular music, which is in evidence among a more godly generation.
And this is beneficial, for music is never without influence for good or evil, and vitiated music is a power that degrades. It counts its victims by the thousands.
But what should not be countenanced is that, because of this abuse, God's children should leave out vocal and instrumental music from the services of the sanctuary.
Rather offset this abuse by the sanctified use, in godly circles, of voice and of stringed instruments.
And therefore the revival of sacred music is always a sign of a higher inspiration of life.
A Christian nation that does not sing and play upon musical instruments for the glory of God, enfeebles itself.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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