My mom wrote up what I think is a really cool look at Christian scriptures and the importance of singing. I asked if I could post it and she said I could! If you're interested in hearing actual starsongs,
click on the link at the end of the post.
I thought
today was going to be Father’s Day so I was thinking about my father this
week. He was a professional singer with
a beautiful baritone voice. That led me
to researching about singing in the scriptures, and I discovered some interesting
things.
After God
parted the Red Sea, and after Pharoah’s army drowned when the sea went back ,
and the Israelites were safe on the other side, their leader, Moses, sang. One of the first things he did was sing. The song he sang is written down in Exodus
15.
“I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath
triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song, and he is
become my salvation, etc.”
Forty years
later, after going through the wilderness camping and complaining, the
Israelites had reached the Promised Land.
Moses was pretty old by now. God
called him into the tabernacle to talk to him about the future. He told him that the Israelites, once they
got around the unbelievers, would fall away and begin to worship idols and
forget all the lessons they had been taught in the wilderness. He said it was inevitable, but he (and this
is Jehovah we are speaking of) gave Moses another song. This is in Deuteronomy 32, the whole
chapter.
Verse 10 of
the song talks about the last 40 years –
“He found him (meaning the Israelites) in a
desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he
instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.”
Did you ever
wonder where that expression came from?
It’s something like 4000 years old or more, and it came from God.
Jehovah told
Moses to teach the song to all the people and he told him why. So Moses did.
And he repeated what Jehovah had told him was going to happen.
“I know that
after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves and turn aside from the way
which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you. So God has commanded that you memorize this
song and teach it to your children so
that even when you all became wicked and sinful, this song will remain in their
hearts to remind them of God.”
And so Moses
taught them, it’s a long song, but back then the people were an oral culture so
memorizing wasn’t as hard for them as it is for us.
Moses
sang. He set the tone way back then for
the importance music has in the Jewish and Christian faiths. We are people who sing in praise, in joy, in
sorrow.
That same Jehovah,
obeying God the Father, created the earth.
Remember that because I’m coming back to it. First, though, there’s a conversation between
Jehovah and a good man named Job.
Job had gone
through some tremendously troubled times that would daunt any of us, and his
friends were sitting around lecturing him about how he wasn’t faithful enough
and, well, he didn’t know God well enough, etc. etc. Finally God, Jehovah, got fed up and in
chapter 38 had his say. This is only 4
chapters from the end, so it’s God having the final word.
Basically,
he tells these men, “Who are you, speaking all these words and knowing nothing? Where were you when I laid the earth’s
cornerstone . . . while the morning
stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
Well, Job
and his friends were probably there, as were we all, but maybe he wasn’t paying
attention.
God goes on
with a pretty funny put down of them all, using a good amount of sarcasm that’s
well worth reading (chapter 38), but the relevant thing for us right now is
that the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
These days,
most Americans, even us out here, don’t see the stars. Street lights and city lights wipe the
heavens clean or else we’re inside our houses at night. But back then, in Job’s time, the stars on a
night with a new moon would come right down to the horizon, 360 degrees of a
sea of starlight!
Could those
stars really sing? Hold onto that
question.
When Jesus,
this same Jehovah who told Moses to sing, was born, a heavenly choir sang for
him. Even before then, Jesus’s mother sang
to him while he was still in her womb.
It’s something we women do. And
not just people --
A friend of
mine, Susie, lives in a gentler climate and has two finch couples nesting
outside her back door in separate trees.
At least one of the couples has nested there before, so they are used to
her spying on them as long as she doesn’t get too nosy. Well, this year Susie heard the mama bird
murmuring soft little lullabies to her four tiny eggs (which have now
hatched). The mother and sometimes the
father birds sit on the eggs singing quietly, and when the eggs hatch, the
babies know their voices from all the hundreds of other finches around.
It reminds
me of the verse where Jesus says, “My sheep know my voice.”
So Jesus was
born into a Jewish family that sang the songs of Moses and David and other
Psalmists because that’s what Jewish families do. As he grew and learned, the songs grew in
meaning for him. They might even have
seemed familiar to him since, as Jehovah, he was the one who either wrote them
or inspired others to write them.
Some thirty
years after his birth, when Jesus knew the end was near, he gathered his
disciples to Jerusalem to have one last meal with them and teach them for the
last time. This was Passover, a
ritualistic meal going back to Moses’s time when the destroying angel passed
over the houses of the Israelites before they left Egypt. It was and is celebrated by practically
everyone in Jerusalem.
During and
after this meal, there are specific Psalms to be sung, called the hallel. It’s Psalms 113-118, with the most important
one being 116 which is generally sung by the leader of the feast. At this Passover meal, that leader was Christ
himself, the same one who had inspired the writer of the Psalms to put these
exact words down.
Picture the
scene. His closest and dearest friends
are gathered around. They have eaten
their meal, heard some amazing teaching about the gospel and about his coming
death, and understood little. Everything he has done throughout his life has
been for the glory of God, not himself, and he knows what will happen later
that night, so he sings this psalm 116–
“I love the
Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.
Because he
hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I
live.
Then called I
upon the name of the Lord; O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.
Gracious is
the Lord, and righteous; yeah, our God is merciful.
The Lord
preserveth the simple; I was brought low, and he helped me.
Return unto
thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.
For thou
hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from
falling.
I will walk
before the Lord in the land of the living.
What shall I
render until the Lord for all his benefits toward me?
I will take
the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord.
I will pay
my vows unto the Lord now in the presence of all his people.
Precious in
the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
O Lord,
truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid; thou
hast loosed my bonds.
I will offer
to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord.
I will pay
my vows unto the Lord now in the presence of all his people.
In the
courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem. Praise ye the Lord.”
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And then he
and the twelve friends walked through the dark night, lighted by stars, to the
Garden of Gethsemane.
Do you think
Jesus had a fabulous voice like Pavarotti?
It is written that he was an ordinary looking man, so maybe he had an
ordinary voice. But he sang with unequaled
understanding and feeling.
Remember how
the book of Genesis recounts the Creation story? Each time something had to be done, Jehovah
says “Let there be . . .” That would
take an extraordinary voice.
A voice is
sound, and sound is a wave pattern. Deep
sounds have a longer distance between the hills and valleys, while high sounds
have short distances.
Light is
also a wave, but it’s in a spectrum we see in colors rather than hear. Just because our ears are tuned to the light,
doesn’t mean there isn’t sound. Maybe
one morning star wouldn’t have been more than a little “tweet” in the heavens,
but all the stars singing together, wow, that would have been something to
hear!
This wave
thing fills the universe. Everything in
the universe, planets, bugs, us, moves and creates waves, big and tiny. We, as people, are privileged to be finding
out more and more about this. In 500 BC,
the Greeks, well two of them anyway, theorized that all matter was made up of
tiny particles they called atoms. That
was good, but it took 2300 years before scientists began to figure out the
structure and uses of atoms, and they are still finding out more and more as
the poor little atoms are smashed around in huge cyclotrons.
OK,
everything moves. Sound is a wave. and
each tone has a different wavelength, with lower sounds having a longer
distance between peaks and valleys than higher tones. Light is also a wave (and a particle but don’t
ask). Colors are waves of light
reflected in various spectrums. Cooler colors
(the blues and greens) have a shorter wavelength than warm colors (reds and
yellows).
Earlier I
asked if you thought stars could really sing.
They emit light in different colors, and light is a wave. You find out the wavelength and assign a
pitch to it and voila, you have a sound, even music.
How about
plants and rocks and mountains and all those inanimate things around us? Scientists are finding out that plants send
out teensy little vibrations to each other in a language we don’t know but
which means something to them. I quote,
“Our results show that plants are able to positively influence the growth of
seeds by some as yet unknown mechanism.
The research adds to growing evidence that plants “talk” via
sound.”
Vibrations
can be sounds if your ear is attuned to them.
We don’t know how a plant hears, but they do. We don’t know how stars hear, but they
do.
Doctrine and
Covenants 128:23 is one of my favorites – “Let the mountains shout for joy, and
all ye valleys cry aloud; and all ye seas and dry lands tell the wonders of
your Eternal King! And ye rivers, and
brooks, and rills, flow down with gladness.
Let the woods and all the trees of the field praise the Lord; and ye
solid rocks weep for joy! And let the
sun, moon, and the morning stars sing together, and let all the sons of God
shout for Joy! And let the eternal
creations declare his name forever and ever;”
When we sing
together, we all have different voices, some really good like Bro Rochelle and
Sis Worland, others not quite so good, but put us all together and we sound
wonderful! Like that choir in verse 23
that I just read. Mountains sound
different from valleys; seas from dry lands; rivers are different from brooks,
and under it all the wonderful solid rocks -- that we think are so solid but are made up
of moving atoms -- weep for joy!
Music is
more than sound, it is light and is in everything that God created.
Jehovah told
Moses to sing, and he sang. When Jehovah
came to earth in human form, he sang, and he knew absolutely, that all Creation
was singing. Everything we see is
somehow singing even when we can’t hear it.
If you don’t
sing in a way that people consider “good,” it’s OK. It takes all the tones, for some of us are
trees, some rivers, and some rocks. And
every time we sing together we are affirming Psalms 116, just like Jesus did
when he sang, “I love the Lord”!
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