If Instruments, Why Not Swords? (Part 3)

Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre! For Yahweh takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with salvation. Let the godly exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to execute vengeance on the nations and punishments on the peoples, to bind their kings with chain and their nobles with fetters of iron, to execute on them the judgment written! This is honor for all his godly ones. Praise Yahweh! (Ps 149:3–9).1

So far we have considered the history of worship, then the inter-relationship between holy war and musical instruments under the Israelite theocracy. Now we turn to the way the New Testament understands both.

The New Testament Theology Of Instruments & Holy War

Blessedly, that for which the prophets searched the Scriptures is now ours, upon whom the end of the ages has come (1 Cor 10:11):

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (1 Pet 1:10–12)

If we read the Psalter in its broader canonical context, we understand that the types and shadows were always pointing to another reality. Derek Kidner’s comments on Psalm 149 take us exactly where the New Testament would have us to go:

As a nation, Israel had been charged with executing this in literal fact at her entry into the promised land; and at the last day the angels, the armies of heaven, will accompany our Lord to judgment (2 Thess 1:7ff; cf. Rev 19:11ff). By contrast the church’s enemies are ‘not . . . flesh and blood, but . . . the spiritual hosts of wickedness’; and her weapons are not those of the world. Our two edged sword (cf. 6) is the word of God, created to ‘destroy arguments (or ‘sophistries’, NEB) and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God’. Our equivalent of binding kings with chains (8) is to ‘take every thought captive to obey Christ’ (2 Cor 10:5; cf. Eph 6:12; Heb 4:12). The Apocalypse, for all its fiery images of final judgment, describes the church’s victory as congruous with that of Calvary. ‘They have conquered . . . by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not even their lives unto death’ (Rev 12:11).

This is judgment written by the cross against ‘the ruler of this world’ (John 16:11), who is the power behind the kings of verse 8. God has appointed glory for all his faithful ones at a higher level than was clearly visible in the Old Testament. Such are the battle-honours of the genuine holy war.1

Some interpreters might balk at what Kidner does with Psalm 149, but his reading is the traditional approach to these sorts of texts, and it is the New Testament way of thinking about them. That is why Thomas Aquinas explained that the use of musical instruments under the types and shadows were “figures of something else.”2 We can discuss what they were figures of, but what matters for our discussion is that they were understood as figures of new covenant worship and warfare.

Remember that in Psalms 68 and 149 the instruments of worship are cheek by jowl with the instruments of war. They have to be treated together, and what the New Testament does with the one it does with the other. Consider again Acts 10 where the Roman centurion Cornelius, a gentile God-fearer (i.e., an uncircumcised adherent to the synagogue), was given a vision of an angel and instructed to contact Peter (Acts 10:1–8). As a gentile, under the rule of herem war, under Moses, he would have been an object of destruction. Under the new covenant, however, he is something else.

Before this moment, Peter would have considered him unclean, but in the vision he was given (Acts 10:9–16), it was revealed to him that all food is now clean and so is Cornelius.3 This is no supposition, but Luke’s teaching. Peter is to go with Cornelius “without hesitation” (Acts 10:20). It was unlawful for a Jew to associate with gentiles (Acts 10:28), but now “God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean” (Acts 10:28).

What happens because of this revelation? “So Peter opened his mouth and said: ‘Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him'” (Acts 10:34). The gentiles are to be conquered, as it were, not with the two-edged sword of herem warfare but through the weapons of the Holy Spirit, chiefly the preaching of the holy gospel (Acts 10:42–43).

Something analogous happens to typological musical instruments in Ephesians 5:19. We are to address “one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.” Consistently in the Psalms, God’s people made melody with stringed instruments, lyres, tambourines, and trumpets, but in the new covenant it is “with the heart.”4 The instruments have changed.

Calvin’s comment on Psalm 33:2 and its connection with 1 Corinthians 14:16 is helpful:

Paul allows us to bless God in the public assembly of the saints only in a known tongue (1 Corinthians 14:16). The voice of man, although not understood by the generality, assuredly excels all inanimate instruments of music; and yet we see what St Paul determines concerning speaking in an unknown tongue. What shall we then say of chanting, which fills the ears with nothing but an empty sound? Does any one object, that music is very useful for awakening the minds of men and moving their hearts? I own it; but we should always take care that no corruption creep in, which might both defile the pure worship of God and involve men in superstition. Moreover, since the Holy Spirit expressly warns us of this danger by the mouth of Paul, to proceed beyond what we are there warranted by him is not only, I must say, unadvised zeal, but wicked and perverse obstinacy.5

In the new covenant, God has not instituted praise, in corporate worship, with unknown languages, including musical instruments. Instruments are emotionally powerful, but we are not being called to that kind of worship or war. With Paul, the ancient church, Calvin, and Kidner as our guides, we might even paraphrase 1 Corinthians 14:19 thus: Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand musical instruments.

The institution of a single musical instrument in the eighth century was a mistake, the consequences of which Pope Vitalian could not have foreseen. He permitted it because, conceptually, the Medieval church was in the process of re-instituting the types and shadows. The ministers of the apostolic and early Patristic church were becoming priests. Gradually through the Middle Ages, the Israelite theocracy was re-instituted beginning with the unwarranted declaration by Theodosius I (AD 381) that Christianity be the state religion of the Empire. The church came to rely not so much upon the power of the spiritual weapons ordained by Christ, but upon the sword, ordained by God for the punishment of criminals (Rom 13:1–7), but never in the New Testament (or beyond national Israel) ordained by God for the institution of the church or the punishing of religious heresy.

Though the Reformation church was unable to see the expiration of the state church (and with it holy war) with the death Christ, the Reformed were able to see that the use of instruments in corporate worship expired with the “state of that people.”6

The biblical case for instruments in Christian worship depends on special pleading: Let us keep instruments in worship even though it is nigh unto impossible to explain coherently why we should not also bring back the holy war with which they were so closely associated, or to reconcile either of those decisions with the way the New Testament speaks about the fulfillment of the types and shadows. How can the defenders of the re-introduction of musical instruments into Christian worship defend themselves from the charge that they are indeed going backward in redemptive history or, as the church has traditionally spoken about such a move, Judaizing?

Notes

  1. Derek Kidner, Psalms 73–150: A Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, ed. D. J. Wiseman (Downers Grove/Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1975), 490.
  2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2009), 2a.2ae.91.
  3. Peter was given the vision or aspects of it three times, meeting the legal test of two or three witnesses.
  4. In Colossians 3:16 we are to sing “with thankfulness in your hearts.”
  5. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 538–39.
  6. Westminster Confession of Faith, 19.4.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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10 comments

  1. “Consistently in the Psalms, God’s people made melody with stringed instruments, lyres, tambourines, and trumpets, but in the new covenant it is “with the heart.” The instruments have changed.”

    Singing and making melody in your hearts – Eph. 5:19. In support of the replacement or change idea, Strong’s says the root meaning of the verb for “making melody” (psallo) is to touch or twang the strings of a musical instrument so that they vibrate. So when singing a capella (as in the chapel), we actually are using an instrument, our hearts, just not a “lifeless instrument such as a pipe or harp,” I Cor. 14:7.

    • Renwick,

      Everett Ferguson has refuted the claim that Psallo entails musical instruments. See Everett Ferguson, The Early Church and Today. Volume< 1. Ministry, Initiation, and Worship (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012). Part V addresses these issues. He has shown that the Jews regularly used Psallo to refer to a cappella music. See also his book, A Cappella Music in the Public Worship of the Church (Abilene, TX: Biblical Research Press 1972).

      John Price’s book, Old Light On New Worship catalogues some of the data and sources.

      Paul’s very language in Ephesians 5:19 argues against musical instruments. They are to sing “with the heart (ψάλλοντες ⸂τῇ καρδίᾳ⸃ ὑμῶν τῷ κυρίῳ). The instrumental dative (no pun) clearly replaces musical instruments. We should have expected to use another noun. The heart makes the instrument interior, not exterior.

      So, we can’t simply read the typological usage of Psallo into the NT.

      • “The heart makes the instrument interior, not exterior.”

        Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but that is precisely my point. Maybe I’m not understanding your reply, but I am not saying that we should use physical instruments but that the heart “replaces” the Old Covenant instruments and is that “interior instrument.” Are we not saying the same thing?

          • No problem, Dr. Clark. I greatly appreciate all of the work you’ve put into this series and hope that in time it bears fruit in many congregations.

          • No problem, Dr. Clark. I greatly all of the work you’ve put into this series and hope that in time it bears fruit in many congregations.

  2. There’s a Baptist church that recently gave up their instruments and use the TPH. This appears to be shortly after their switch to acapella. It makes me wonder if instrumental “accompaniment” is being used more like instrumental suppression.

    Psalm 60 from TPH, great tune!

  3. Still chewing on this blog series.

    It brought to mind the story Ernest Gordon told in his book Through The Valley of the Kwai. Apparently WWII Allied POWs in Japanese camps were singing hymns as US bombers flew over towards the end of the war and the Japanese guards fearing they were singing war songs, abandoned the camps and hid out in the hills.

    • Got to agree with you on that, Dr. Clark. She did a great job without musical accompaniment. Of course, she is Carrie Underwood, and I would have been surprised if she didn’t do a great job. What was not just great but surprising was that she asked the audience, almost none of whom were trained singers but many of whom probably knew the song from childhood, to join her.

      FYI, my electronic system went out Sunday evening and I had to lead a cappella singing of Genevan Psalm 42. Providentially, I know it well and have known it for at least thirty years, probably longer than that. I think a lot of Reformed people have forgotten the benefits of having a common Psalter in which people can memorize all or most of the 150 Psalms and use them in any Reformed church we visit, even ones speaking other languages. We routinely use the Genevan Psalter in Korean for those who speak Korean, and I occasionally use it in Italian, though for obvious reasons the psalters in the pews are in English. If we had a need, which we may well have at some point, I’d get copies in Spanish for the pews and in other languages if they are needed.

      What Carrie Underwood did — asking the audience to sing a (basically) secular hymn in a secular government context, with no musical notes or lyrics in front of them — is something that used to be common in Reformed churches with the psalter.

      If we’re teaching our kids to sing American secular songs by heart, maybe we should be doing that with the songs of the Bible?

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