Four Thousand Praised the LORD with the Instruments Which I Made

In the midst of a variated list, 1 Chronicles 23:5 reads:

Moreover four thousand were porters; and four thousand praised the LORD with the instruments which I made, said David, to praise therewith.

Part of the worship of God was praising Him with instruments.  Instruments were made with the intention of praising Him.  These were musical instruments.

Psalm 150 teaches praising God with instruments.

1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power. 2 Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness. 3 Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp. 4 Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs. 5 Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals. 6 Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.

Other Psalms read:

Psalm 33:2, Praise the LORD with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an instrument of ten strings.

Psalm 92:3, Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; upon the harp with a solemn sound.

Psalm 98:6, With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the LORD, the King.

Psalm 144:9, I will sing a new song unto thee, O God: upon a psaltery and an instrument of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee.

God wants to hear instrumental music, but it isn't just His hearing it.  He wants instrumental music that praises Him.  That means that there is music, there is an aesthetic, that is fitting with God's nature.  He isn't praised by instrumental music that conflicts with His nature, and there is that instrumental music.

4,000 praised the Lord with instruments.  Psalms commands to praise Jehovah with trumpet, cornet, psaltery, harp, timbrel, stringed instrument, organ, and cymbal.  "Joyful noise" is King James Version language, but the translators were right.  This is a noise because it is made with an instrument.  If there is a joyful noise in contrast to other noises, then noises can be distinguished from one another, even like 1 Corinthians 14:8 says:

For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?

Different sounds or noises from instruments mean different things.  Above, Psalm 92:3 speaks of a "solemn sound," something different.  I'm sure that laments were not sung with a joyful noise, but a solemn one.  The assumption of God's Word, what one should call a "self-evident truth," is that we can judge sounds and noises.  They send different messages, have different meanings, and some can praise the LORD, when they are in accordance with His nature, and some cannot.

What I'm writing here would have been agreed upon by about everybody for hundreds of years, then by all Christians after some started rejecting it because of humanism and relativism, and now people still know it, but they don't care.  God wants to hear instrumental music that honors Him.  It must be sacred.  That doesn't relate to the words.  The music itself must praise God and can separately from words.

Only until a later date were sacred songs matched permanently with music for psalmody and hymnody.  For most of Christian history, the text could be accompanied by numbers of different tunes.  The present psalter from which we sing in Oregon gives options on the instrumental music.  The metric need only be the same.  Take away all the words, and the instruments can still praise God.  I've written this before, but I was motivated to write about this again for several reasons, but mainly because I read 1 Chronicles 23:5 in my Bible reading this week as I read through the Bible twice this year.

The New Testament is not as obvious about instrumental music.  Sometimes the New Testament doesn't say a lot to repeat Old Testament truth.  It says enough that we know that the Old Testament remains the doctrine on that subject.  It is normative.  Many of you know that "making melody" in Ephesians 5:19 translates the Greek word, psallo, which means "to pluck on a stringed instrument."  That is saying play instruments to the Lord in accordance to the Old Testament.

God is still excellent and great, and still should be praised greatly, which includes instrumental music, even majestic, gigantic pieces, as in 4,000 instruments, if possible.  That doesn't mean a small church can't do its best.

Instrumental music isn't primarily for personal pleasure.  It is to please the Lord.  Jubal created instruments for personal pleasure (Genesis 4:21), to console mankind under the harmful effects of the curse.  Music is a way for unbelievers and professing believers to kick the can down the road on true fulfillment in God.  They replace ultimate fulfillment with superficial, short term pleasure, and music masks the pain of their rebellion, the emptiness.

Instrumental music originated in heaven.  Heaven didn't see what Jubal did and say, "Good idea!"  Jubal was taking something heavenly and repurposing it for self along with all the sinful line of Cain, whose imagination was only evil continually.  Revelation 5:8 reads:

And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints.

Revelation 14:2 agrees with this:

And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.

You can see, "having every one of them harps."  They were playing those to God because He wanted to hear harp music.  Harp music was already in heaven before Jubal formed his own new and distorted purpose for serving self.

God is the standard for the instrumental music He wants to hear.  The following is not how it should work.  Man invents music for himself, that he likes and is line with his carnal nature.  He takes that music into the church and uses it for worship, because then he likes the worship more.  This keeps man at the center and most of this in history related to revivalism that used music to attract unbelievers.  Almost nothing is as perverse as concocting music for man or self and then giving that to God as an offering.  It's blasphemous.  The music should be transcendent, proceeding from the nature of God and in line with the perfections of His attributes.

A large majority of professing churches now use music.  They use it.  It isn't worship.  It doesn't conform to God.  It conforms to the world system.  They use it because they like and the carnal people who gather like it.  Then in their addiction to it, they must have it at church.  They will not have a church with sacred music.  It must be carnal.  It must be what they like.  They demand it.  It is always prominent and mainly preeminent in their church choice.  They then associate it with God, bringing Him down in their imagination to the nature of their choice of music.

The choice of music reminds me of the choice of Saul as king.  They wanted him because he was tall.  He fit central casting.  That's what they wanted, a king based on superficial, fleshly criteria.  God wanted David, and he didn't look central casting in the outward appearance.

These "worship leaders" are the same ones who degrade outward appearance, wearing their dress t-shirt and stocking cap, the outfits of their choice, while looking for their King Saul kind of music.  They want it tall, jutting, and in line with their desires.  God doesn't accept it and it destroys the true imagination of God.  On top of that, God isn't worshiped.  It's the opposite.

Churches, praise the Lord with instruments.  Praise Jehovah.  Offer Him what He wants.