Music, Prophecy and the Hand and Voice of God

Explanations of Scriptures that support the statement that true musicians, whether they know Christ or not, have at least a buried or potential gift of prophecy. Explores the vital spiritual role of music, a part of the image of God in us.

Yesterday morning, in a conversation at church, I stated that I thought real musicians, as opposed to mere skilled musical technicians, all have at least a buried gift of prophecy or tendency toward that gift. This is true even of musicians who do not know Christ and musicians who are the presently our spiritual enemy’s propagandists. I also said that I could not rigorously prove this statement.

In this devotional, I will present and explain, as simply as possible, the scriptures I believe to support my statement and my own experiences with music as a spiritual channel. I will not attempt a proof, but instead only give an explanation. Here are the most relevant scriptures:

¹⁵ So then, be careful how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise, ¹⁶ making the most of your time, because the days are evil. ¹⁷ Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. ¹⁸ And do not get drunk with wine, in which there is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, ¹⁹ speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your hearts to the Lord; ²⁰ always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to our God and Father; ²¹ and subject yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ.

Ephesians 5:15-21 (NASB)

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
    Tell me, if you understand.
⁵ Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
    Who stretched a measuring line across it?
⁶ On what were its footings set,
    or who laid its cornerstone—
⁷ while the morning stars sang together
    and all the angels shouted for joy?

Job 38:4-7 (NASB)

³ My mouth will speak words of wisdom;
    the meditation of my heart will give you understanding.
⁴ I will turn my ear to a proverb;
    with the harp I will expound my riddle:

Psalm 49:3-4 (NASB)

¹⁴ Elisha said, “As surely as the Lord of armies lives, before whom I stand, if I did not respect Jehoshaphat the king of Judah, I would not look at you nor see you. ¹⁵ But now bring me a musician.” And it came about, when the musician played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him.

2 Kings 3:14-15 (NASB)

¹⁵ Saul’s attendants said to him, “See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. ¹⁶ Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the lyre. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes on you, and you will feel better.” ¹⁷ So Saul said to his attendants, “Find someone who plays well and bring him to me.”…

²³ Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.

1 Samuel 16:15-17, 23 (NASB)

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
    but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.
⁵ It is better to heed the rebuke of a wise person
    than to listen to the song of fools.

Ecclesiastes 7:4-5 (NASB)

I will start with the observation that, with the possible exception of planets, humans are the only created things the Scriptures ever mention as being capable of music or song. No lower animal sings or makes music voluntarily. And, contrary to most popular thinking, angels only speak, or shout, but are never said to sing. Music is a part of the image of God unique to humans, and a part of that image that is very close to the heart of that image and the heart of God.

So it is no wonder that, in Ephesians 5:15-21 (NASB), the Apostle Paul’s major passage about the way those led by the Holy Spirit communicate with each other and the world around them, he says those who are “filled” with the Spirit in the same way drunk people are “filled” with alcohol–i.e., controlled by him–“speak” to one another with “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your hearts to the Lord.” The Apostle doesn’t say people filled with the Spirit speak to each other with objective propositional statements of truth, expository preaching, or constant “correction” of the sins we perceive in each other (or in the world!). No, we “speak” to each other with music and in song!

Music is not a nice incidental of true worship, a pleasant introduction to the real business of Christ–which is preaching. No, music is at the core of our relationship. I won’t say that preaching is secondary. But the two appear to be equals, both necessary, ideally complementing and reinforcing each other. Preaching and the individual study of the Word should naturally lead to music. There is something wrong when they instead seem naturally to lead to crushing guilt which suppresses our songs. (But there are penitential Psalms for this!).

Next, I’ll explain why I said that planets may be the only created things, other than humans, which sing. God, in correcting Job’s overly small concept of him, asked Job where he had been when he laid the Earth’s foundations, “while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” Job 38:7. Obviously, the only answer Job could have given to this rhetorical question was “nowhere–I hadn’t been born yet.” It is also pretty clear this passage does not mean that, when God created the Earth, Venus and Mercury–the morning stars–sang to him the same way we sing, by producing audible sound waves in air. Interplanetary space does not have enough density to support the propagation of such audible sound waves. However, God’s question to Job does imply that there is some sense in which his creation, on the cosmic scale, “sings” his praise.

I propose, but do not insist upon, the following explanation: I must first shift my attention from the largest to the smallest scale of the physical universe, from astronomical objects to the subatomic scale. On that tiny scale, I observe that one of the implications of quantum mechanics is that the subatomic constituents of everything we perceive of as having mass–quantifiable, fixed material existence–are, or at least behave as if they were, collections of wave functions and their standing waves and interference patterns. This is true of our familiar protons, neutrons and electrons and of all of the things that are aggregates of them–atoms, molecules, solid objects, our own physical bodies, the Earth, the Morning Stars of Job 38, stars, solar systems and galaxies. It is God who created the underlying wave forms and put order — harmony! — into them, making them into the physical things we see and experience. So God was correct when he said the Morning Stars “sang” his praise, demonstrating that same harmony with which the whole Creation praises him. And that cosmic harmony is directly related to–indeed, reflected by–our human musical sense. We reflect that harmony back to God with our music. We echo the song of all Creation.

Now for music, the voice of God, and prophecy.

If I sing to God, I should not be surprised if he sings back to me!

Remember that music is a part of God’s image in me. That means that it is in him, too, and first!

But I’ll start with the Scriptures. The Psalms are all songs–intended to be sung, and originally set to music by those who first sung and wrote them (although that music is lost). Yet Jesus himself includes them among the writings he recognized as scripture–“the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms”–and declared that everything written about him in them must be fulfilled. Luke 24:44-45. The Psalms sang forth God’s words, thus qualifying as prophecies. They also frequently included predictive prophecies, including prophecies of both comings of Christ.

But in the Old Testament the link between music and the forthtelling of God’s words is not limited to the Psalms. The Lamentations of Jeremiah were expressly written to be sung, as was the “psalm” contained in the last chapter of Habakkuk. Numerous other times in the major prophets, God tells his prophet to “take up a lament” against Israel or some other person or group that was to suffer judgment. A “lament”–a dirge–was a well-established musical form. In telling the prophet to sing his words as a dirge, God expressed his heart–the judgment was necessary, but it grieved him. In proclaiming the judgment, the prophet was to express God’s grief in song. And, as many have noted, large portions of the Prophets and even some passages in the Law were written as poetry which could be sung. This suggests that, when first presented, they were sung, or, at least, intoned as poetic readings that expressed the poetic (musical) emphasis of the words. On these occasions, God did not just make propositional statements, he showed his heart.

Next, I come to the two striking statements out of the histories of the lives of Samuel and of the Kings of Israel. I will start with the passage involving the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings 3. The context is this: the otherwise godly King Jehoshaphat of Judah had foolishly allied himself with wicked King Ahab of Israel to go to war against Moab. Jehoshaphat did not think to ask God for his direction until the eve of war. Only at that point, in Ahab’s presence, did Jehoshaphat remember to ask Ahab “is there no prophet of the LORD here… ?” Ahab remembered that Elisha was still alive, and Ahab and Jehoshaphat went together to inquire of him.

Elisha’s words to Ahab were harsh–he had always ignored God, and now God was ignoring him. It was only because he had involved godly Jehoshaphat in his quarrel that God paid any attention at all. And then, instead of delivering a prophecy, Elisha said, “now bring me a musician!”

It was only after the musician had begun to play that “that the hand of the Lord came upon him” and he prophesied God would give victory to Jehoshaphat. In this instance, it certainly appears that the music–though it was instrumental music only, that of a “string player” (the literal translation) — was a channel through which God spoke to his prophet.

Then, going back a few centuries to the story of King Saul’s later years in 1 Samuel 15-16, after Saul defied God’s instructions for the second time but denied his sin when questioned by the prophet Samuel, the scriptures say that God’s Spirit “departed from him.” When God’s Spirit departed, Saul became an empty house into which any unclean spirit could move. Luke 11:24-26. Subsequently, “an evil [literally, destructive] spirit from the Lord” came upon King Saul, filling the void left by the Holy Spirit’s departure, causing intermittent bouts of violent insanity. Saul’s advisers understood something many modern people don’t–namely, that music has a spiritual dimension, so that the right music can often relieve spiritually-based maladies. They therefore went looking for a skillful musician and found David–who was not only a skillful musician but also a warrior, and thus fit for the king’s service. And when David, musician, prophet and Psalmist, played and sang for the king, this usually brought temporary relief of his insanity. In the case of David and Saul, at least, the right music performed by God’s spokesperson was clearly a conduit of spiritual healing.

Finally, the passage out of Ecclesiastes 3 hints of the flip side of this. While the right music can bring healing, the wrong music, “the song of fools,” can bring futility and insanity. This is true simply because music has a spiritual dimension, and our Enemy uses it, too. In the context of the verse in Ecclesiastes, the song of fools is the song that glorifies the “house of pleasure,” that encourages us to strive for all the pleasure we can have in this life and ignore “the rebuke of the wise person.” It’s not a question of musical style or genre and isn’t answered by asking whether a “Christian” group or label produced or will profit from the music. Instead, it is solely a question of the effect the music has, and is intended to have, on our lives.

Music is not a neutral entity, mere empty background or “fill.” Whether we think so or not, music we hear affects us. Advertisers, media producers, political propagandists and other professional influencers certainly understand this, which is why they always strive to have our individual existences filled with music they control.

I know some unfortunate examples of this. One of the most striking is a dear friend, now in prison, who spent some years married to a now-deceased minor rap star. My friend knows Christ, and generally has a good, generous heart. But their childhood and adolescence were very hard–if anyone had reason to grow up angry with the world, it was this person. And, in adulthood, they gave themselves to music which glorified hanging onto anger and imagining the violence they would do to their perpetrators, if they could. I could only be around their music for a short time before I had to leave or ask them to turn it off, as I found it very distressing. And, at the present date, it seems the bitterness encouraged by their music is destroying them. I grieve.

Finally, I must confess that my personal experiences with music and my response to it seem to be very abnormal–though likely only in degree rather than underlying nature.

Though I have never really been a very skillful performing musician–owing largely to my innate poor gross motor skills and fairly weak voice (though I can hold pitch and, with practice, follow a part)–my life is filled with music. There is a track in my mind which nearly always has music running through it, even when I am not physically listening to music. Sometimes it’s music I’ve heard before, other times, it is new music that is solely my own, as far as I am aware. I have some of my greatest thoughts while focused on music and have experienced epiphanies while listening to music–I certainly understand Elisha’s request for a musician to be brought before he could prophesy. I also understand the calming and healing effects of music from my own experience. I even sometimes have music in my dreams–they are some of my most memorable dreams!–and wake up singing or humming or whistling.

I understand some of this is a little “weird,” not the “average” experience where music is concerned, but this no longer matters to me as much as it once did. I was not born to conform to the “average,” to have the “normal” experience of music or the “usual” relationship with God. In each of these things, I have my own. I don’t have yours, or the “average” person’s.

I also sometimes spontaneously sing. I’ll be reading a Psalm, or a passage of Scripture, or occasionally even a poem from another source, and find myself spontaneously fitting music to it and singing. My fear that other people would find my music unacceptable, off-pitch or even grotesque if they were listening doesn’t stop me. My church experience from the far past also might make me fear that, because someone else holding the “proper” credentials didn’t write the words and music and get them revised and approved by ten denominational committees (or the executives of a recording label) before I sang them, singing them makes me appear to be a wanton heretic. But even that matters to me now less than it once did. I’m singing it to God, not to the ten committees that never saw my song. And God is fully able to correct any errors I make. He can sing back to me!

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