The Divine Gift of Music—Mark Meynell

by Mark Meynell

Note: This post is based on a sermon originally given by Mark Meynell on February 23, 2025, at Eden Baptist Church, Cambridge, UK.

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinney a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar. . . .

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out—single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.

Once you’ve started a passage like that, it’s almost impossible to stop! But stop we must. It is, of course, taken from C S Lewis’s classic The Magician’s Nephew. It is surely one of Lewis’s most inspiring and beloved passages. The witnesses in the story are astonished by what they are seeing. Well, to be fair, not all. The Cabby, Digory and Polly are transfixed, but the Witch and Uncle Andrew simply can’t bear it. They’re desperate to leave for one simple reason: All are in the presence of Aslan as he sings Narnia into existence.

GOD SINGS!

We don’t often think of God singing, I suspect. We usually focus on God speaking. After all, in Genesis 1, God speaks the creation into existence. “Let there be . . . and there was . . .” But consider these words taken from one of those tiny books at the end of the Old Testament.

The Lord your God is with you,the Mighty Warrior who saves.He will take great delight in you;in his love he will no longer rebuke you,but will rejoice over you with singing. (Zeph. 3:17 [New International Version])

In context, this is God the just warrior, the one who knows when people fall far short of his righteousness. But he calls on them to turn back and throw themselves on his mercy. Notice what he promises those who are prepared to do this; it is such an intimate and lovely image.

Our problem is many of us imagine that God is reluctant to have us back, that he begrudges his grace for some reason. We worry that we have accumulated far too long a list of charges against us and so, regardless of how kind he might have been “at the start,” it’s now too late. We’ve blown it. He knows us too well to ever want us back on his team. Yet that couldn’t be further from the truth! Zephaniah has presented him as the Mighty Warrior, certainly, but he is in no doubt that God also delights in his people. He loves them. In fact, their return makes him sing with joy. There is nothing begrudging about this at all.

I love how Eugene Peterson renders the second half of verse 17:

Happy to have you back, he’ll calm you with his loveand delight you with his songs. (Zeph. 3:17 [The Message])

What does this illustrate about God? Well obviously, we see both his grace and care. But the fact that he uses song to express them is revealing. Despite being just one verse, it does seem to reflect some extraordinary truths about our Creator God and his creation as they are presented wider afield in Scripture.

The Bible is full of singing, of course, and one book entirely consists of songs—the Psalms. But it would be a mistake to see this in purely functional or utilitarian terms. We don’t sing simply because we have the physical capacity or because it is a useful way of gathering people together in a shared identity. It goes far deeper than that.

CREATION SINGS!

After many chapters demanding explanations for his appalling suffering, Job finally meets his match (Job 38:1). God confronts him with a litany of impossible questions. Were you there at creation, Job? Then what about the earth’s foundations? Did they follow your design? Did you give me a hand with them, Job? And so on. Notice how the Lord describes the early stages of creation (taking the order of Genesis 1).

On what were its footings set,or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang togetherand all the angels shouted for joy? (Job 38:6-7 [NIV])

What do the stars do when they have been created? They sing! Well of course, if their maker is an artist who sings, then it stands to reason. But this actually points to something inbuilt about the cosmos.

When he crafted that beautiful sequence in The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis was making a profound theological point, but it was hardly original to him. Lewis was a great scholar of the Middle Ages (as Jason Baxter demonstrated in his fascinating 2022 book, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis). Medieval thinkers understood that the deepest connection existed between the awe-inspiring order found throughout the created universe and the mysterious structure and beauty of music. That is why they took music so seriously.

A powerful illustration of that can be found in the Schools Quad of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Completed by 1624, it housed the university’s primary lecture halls, and it is still possible today to see signs for the various disciplines above their respective doors. Many of the expected subjects are present. These were perhaps the STEM subject equivalents for the Middle Ages: moral philosophy, jurisprudence, rhetoric, astronomy, metaphysics and arithmetic, grammar and logic. But the oddest inclusion in Schools Quad has to be music. What on earth is that doing there?

Scholars understood that there was something deeply mathematical and logical about music. Just listen to a classical musician wax lyrical about the music of J. S. Bach, for example! As such, music has something to teach us about the true nature of the universe. This is where the ancient Greek concept of the “Music of the Spheres” enters into Christian theology (and no, I’m not referring to Coldplay’s 2021 album). The human ear cannot hear this music; it operates far beyond the meager capacities of our perceptions. But the cosmos functions with such intricate complexity, order, and harmony, on an astronomical scale, that it can be said to perform a celestial form of music while following its cycles, orbits, and processes. This is a music for which God alone has the capacity to hear. While this may seem entirely fanciful to contemporary minds, it is startling to discover that modern astronomers are beginning to recognize that there might just be something in it. Don’t ask me to explain any of this, but I gather it has something to do with orbital resonance (whatever that is)!

Before we get completely transported beyond the Milky Way, consider the nitty-gritty of what music is in essence. It has many ingredients, but these are core:

• Notes: Each note is produced by the manipulation of sound-wave frequencies, their resonance and echoes. Each note’s sound is shaped by the context in which it is played—whether a stadium or a broom cupboard, whether by banging stretched skins, scraping gutstrings with hair, blowing through or over tubes with multiple holes.

  
  

  

  
  

• Melody: These notes are then strung together in particular orders to form tunes—from tunes you can hum or whistle, to big complex themes that you can’t.

  
  

  

  
  

• Rhythm: We all live with rhythm at its most basic: the heartbeat. But externally, rhythm can quicken or slow, accompany walking or running, or convey rest (because the heart always keeps pumping).

  
  

  

  
  

• Harmony: When notes are played simultaneously, we might expect a complete racket. It takes great creativity, let alone a certain genius, not just to avoid a chaotic noise, but to make something beautiful and even emotional.

  
  

  

  
  

And that’s just for starters. It is a system of extraordinary complexity. So it is easy to see why it has been regarded as a reflection of the complexity found elsewhere in the created order, within the human body, say, or the solar system. So perhaps we should consider music as an accessible, and affecting, model of the universe, rather like a watercolor of a landscape. All its many elements cohere in the most staggering way, such that the sum is infinitely greater than its parts.

Then what of us? Created by a singing creator and finding our place in a singing creation, is it any wonder that:

CREATURES SING!

The last psalm in the Psalter couldn’t be clearer. God wants his creatures to make musical praise.

Praise the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. (Ps. 150 [NIV])

But this famous psalm has surprises all its own and points us to one or two important features of music.

Music to Express Praise

Singing is the most natural thing in the world to do. Someone once said, “Whoever sings to God, prays twice.” That has been attributed to St. Augustine, but there seems little evidence of that. No matter. The point stands—because not only does music accompany and thoughtfully articulate words, it does so much more. It adds a whole new layer of intensity. No wonder so many prayers are sung. After all, many of the Psalms come with instructions for the music directors (even if today we don’t always know what they mean).

And we see all kinds of people in the Bible doing this.

• Moses and Miriam sing praise after the escape from Egypt in Exodus 15—many of its themes actually then get echoed later in the Psalms.

• In Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth, he constructs his narrative around the songs sung by Zechariah, Mary, Simeon, and the angels.

Plus many others, of course. But here’s the interesting thing about Psalm 150. In this psalm, praise for God doesn’t actually require words. Praise God for his greatness, in his heavens, for his acts of power. But do it with trumpets, with strings that you scrape and pluck, with things you bang, like tambourines and cymbals—lots of cymbals, and then with dancing. It is only by the time you get to verse 6, that singing even gets implied (although one implication of this command is that it’s not restricted to people): “let everything that even breathes praise the Lord.”

Now, one person who did all of that was King David himself. Not only did he compose countless songs (some of which were incorporated into the Psalter), he was a pretty enthusiastic instrumentalist. For example, he was all too happy to join in the fun when the people were celebrating God with “castanets, harps, lyres, tambourines, rattles and cymbals” (2 Sam. 6:5). The Bible writers clearly had a bit of a thing about getting their cymbals out.

So music is a God-given gift through which we can, and should, praise its donor . . . and with which (to coin a phrase) we should use words if we have to.

Music to Revive Spirits

But music is so much more than an expression of exuberance. When King Saul is in deep mental anguish, what does he most need? Music. That will, of course, be God’s means for bringing the shepherd boy David into service in the royal court. Whenever David plays, relief comes to Saul; he would feel better and the evil spirit would leave him (1 Sam. 16:14-23).

Isn’t that one of music’s most mysterious and beguiling properties? Think about it. An aptitude for manipulating multiple sound waves in specific combinations and permutations can also touch us at our deepest levels. Music can comfort and disturb; it can agitate and calm. Is this not a reflection of the way that the Lord has made us? We are of course far more than our reason, or our chemical makeup, or our physicality. We are such complex beings—as was God’s intention. But I am convinced that it is no accident for music to reach us in our inmost being. God made us like this (just as he gave each one of us the capacity to appreciate beauty in all manner of manifestation). I can testify to the truth of music being a source of hope and consolation at times when words seem feeble and useless. Let me quote briefly from one of my favorite contemporary composers, Sir James MacMillan, from his book A Scot’s Song: A Life of Music, since I definitely resonate with what he writes here. Music, he says, has:

the power to look into the abyss as well as to the transcendent heights. It can trigger the most severe and conflicting extremes of feeling, and it is in these dark and dingy places—where the soul is probably closest to its source, where it has its relationship with God—that music can spark life that has long lain dormant.

Music To Anticipate Heaven

Heaven will be full of music, which means that any music now is an anticipation of heaven. There will be an eternal Music, as we see again and again in the book of Revelation. John’s vision is bursting with orchestras and singers.

The sound I heard was like that of harpists playing their harps. And they sang a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and the elders. No one could learn the song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. (Rev. 14:2-3 [NIV])

Now here’s a random question. What do you think is the opposite of music? Is it silence?

The interesting thing is that John’s vision includes the odd moment of silence too—giving a sense of anticipation and hope. But the answer is not silence. The opposite of music is not silence but noise, cacophony, chaos. That is the nature of life under judgment. For example, John in his visions sees what happens to Babylon after it falls.

The music of harpists and musicians, pipers and trumpeters,will never be heard in you again. (Rev. 18:22 [NIV])

But that makes sense if music is indeed a reflection of divine order.

Music is an incredible gift by our musical creator. This is not to suggest everyone is musical or needs to be musical. But it does remind us not to dismiss the complexity of what it means to be human. We are all fearfully and wonderfully made. And we must be thankful to God for this most glorious gift.

Let me close with a glorious setting by William Harris of verses drawn from A Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, a long poem by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. Harris wrote for two unaccompanied choirs (usually just one choir split down the middle) that seem to compete with one another, each responding to the other in ever-greater heights of intensity, echoing the heavenly angels in their eternal worship. It ends with a profound longing for the reality of which this is but the merest taste! But one day, express(e) it we will!

How then can mortall tongue hope to expresse The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?

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Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor, and teacher based in the UK, and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology, and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net.

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