Resonate: Enjoying God's Gift of Music

By Mark Beuving

It’s no secret that Christians can be ambivalent about music, both popular music and music in the church. In Resonate, author and Eternity Bible College professor Mark Beuving shows Christians how to better appreciate all kinds of music to the glory and pleasure of God.

Beuving carefully examines music in the Bible and looks at the various and powerful ways in which music influences our world and our personal lives. He devotes the first section of the book to understanding music, both sacred and secular, exploring biblically why human beings make music and how it affects us. In the second section he highlights some of the many ways we engage with music, from writing songs to discussing artists with our neighbors to worshiping God with fellow believers.

Wise and winsome, Beuving writes with an ear for recapturing the wonder of a beautiful part of God’s creation. Readers will be inspired to contemplate more deeply and appreciate more fully God’s good gift of music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780310516491

Mark Beuving

Mark Beuving (MDiv, Master’s Seminary) is professor of interdisciplinary studies at Eternity Bible College in Simi Valley, California, and co-author with Francis Chan of several workbooks and the New York Times bestseller, Multiply. He lives in Simi Valley with his wife and their two daughters.  

Book preview

PREFACE

Jesus is Lord. This was the message the earliest church preached. It’s a declaration that has been handed down throughout church history, a reality that has been transforming lives for thousands of years.

But like any frequently used phrase, Jesus is Lord can become tired and virtually meaningless to us. In many cases, Christians have sidelined Jesus’ lordship, seeing him as the Lord of their hearts, their spiritual lives, and nothing more.

This book is in some ways a response to a question that Francis Schaeffer used to ask: How much of life is Jesus Lord over?

If Jesus is Lord of only our spiritual activities, then there may not be a distinctively Christian way to think about music, aside from music used in religious settings. A book like this would be unnecessary. But if Jesus is Lord over all of life, over every aspect of our existence, over every thought and undertaking, then we must ask how his lordship comes to bear on the way we listen to, create, and interact with music.

Jesus is Lord, and music is one important part of his domain. Every night, at my oldest daughter’s request, I kneel at her bedside and sing a couple of verses from the hymn This Is My Father’s World:

This is my Father’s world

And to my listening ears

All nature sings

And round me rings

The music of the spheres¹

Christians have been singing this hymn for over a hundred years, but the truth it expresses has been a part of Christian teaching from the very beginning. It speaks of a world bursting with sound, of God as the Great Conductor whose music is being played throughout the universe at every moment. It echoes 1 Chronicles 16:31 – 33, which, after calling God’s people to praise their Lord, urges all creation to sing:

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;

let them say among the nations, The LORD reigns!

Let the sea resound, and all that is in it;

let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them!

Let the trees of the forest sing,

let them sing for joy before the LORD,

for he comes to judge the earth.

This book is written with the conviction that Jesus is Lord of all of life, that this is indeed our Father’s world, and that he cares deeply about the way we relate to the gifts he gives us, including the gift of music.

In writing a book about music, of course, I am setting up myself as the writer and you as the reader for a certain degree of frustration. Musician Elvis Costello captured some of the futility of this by comparing writing about music to dancing about architecture.² It is not easily done, and something will be lost in translation.

When speaking of songs, it’s common to discuss lyrics and leave out any discussion of the music itself, as though it were simply decoration. There is an attractive simplicity to this approach, and many choose this option for various reasons. But I am also writing with the conviction that music means more than the words themselves denote. If we could say it simply, why would we create a song to express it?

And then there’s the trouble that in writing about music I am writing about something inherently mysterious. Can it be done? Fiction writer, poet, and essayist Dorothy Sayers wrote, God is mysterious, and so (for that matter) is the universe and one’s fellow-man and one’s self and the snail on the garden-path; but none of these is so mysterious as to correspond to nothing within human knowledge.³

We live in a mysterious world. And why shouldn’t it be? Our world is the creative expression of an infinite God. There is much we simply do not and will not understand. But Sayers gives us hope that mystery does not prohibit exploration. You will not find yourself fully understanding music as you turn the last pages of this book. I did not decide to write a book about music because I had all of the answers. Having come to the end of this project, I am more convinced than ever that awe and joy are the worthiest goals for such an undertaking. My prayer is that you will enjoy music with more appreciation than you do right now.

One final difficulty in creating a book on music relates to the examples I use. I can’t imagine writing about music without referencing specific songs, bands, and composers. Music does not exist except in the moments it is being played and listened to. Because of this, I have used frequent examples to illustrate various aspects of music.

While I, like every music lover, consider my own taste in music to be impeccable, I know of no two people whose musical tastes overlap exactly. The advent of the Walkman, the Discman, and now the iPod has made music a matter of personal taste to a greater extent than ever before. And with drastically reduced costs in recording and producing one’s own music, the amount of music available is incomprehensible. Add to this the apparent coolness of listening to bands that no one else knows about, and we have a recipe for vastly divergent musical tastes.

I have shared only examples of music that are meaningful to me. I have also intentionally avoided many obscure bands in hopes that I can appeal to a shared listening experience as much as possible. But I am confident you will encounter examples in these pages that will be unfamiliar. In those instances, I highly recommend that you track down a recording of the song and listen, perhaps even while you read. I have done my best to describe the music in addition to the lyrics of the songs I reference, but there is no substitute for hearing.

Music is readily available these days, and much of it can be at least previewed for free (though spending money on music affirms its value). My assumption is that you know how to find the music you want to hear. If in doubt, a quick Google search can do wonders. You can also listen to full recordings of many songs through apps like Spotify or Rdio. In any case, I leave it to you as the reader to look up any songs you want to hear.

A word of warning from the great C. S. Lewis before we begin: The young person who has only recently discovered that there is in music something far more lastingly delightful than catchy tunes may go through a phase in which the mere occurrence of such a tune in any work makes him disdain it as ‘cheap.’ ⁴

The purpose of thinking more deeply about music is not to develop a snobbish attitude. I know firsthand the tendency to look down on those who enjoy music that is too popular, too boring, too old, too straightforward, too whatever. Let’s fight the pull to see our taste in music as superior to anyone else’s.

If, as I will argue, music is God’s gift to us, then the proper response is to enjoy it. Too many of God’s gifts are hijacked and used as status symbols. But if we are true music lovers, then we will enjoy God’s gift to the fullest, and we will get excited along with everyone who enjoys the gift in its near-infinite manifestations.

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I am deeply appreciative of the people who helped me bring this book to life. Thanks to Josh Jeter, Preston Sprinkle, and Jared Dragoun for reading all or part of the manuscript and offering helpful feedback. The book is very much improved due to their insights.

I could never express sufficient appreciation to my wife, Laura; my parents, Lauren and Betty Beuving; and my in-laws, Don and Barbara Moore. Not only did they read through the manuscript and give me helpful feedback (albeit tainted with familial pride), but their loving support and constant encouragement make up the environment in which I live and write.

I am always thankful for the staff, faculty, and students at Eternity Bible College. We are pursuing something unique and a little crazy, and I deeply value the support and interaction that this environment provides. Thanks especially to the students in my Christianity and the Arts classes, on whom much of this material has been tested and sharpened.

Thanks to Madison Trammel, Dirk Buursma, Sarah Gombis, Curt Diepenhorst, Nathan Kroeze, Kari Moore, Janelle DeBlaay, and the whole team at Zondervan for their helpful input and their efforts in taking this book from my computer to the world at large. It has been a joy to partner with each of them.

Finally, I am thankful for all of the musicians whose music I enjoy on a daily basis. Some of them appear in these pages; others do not. But thanks to all of them for enriching my life and giving me something to write about.

INTRODUCTION

CAPTIVATING SOUNDS

Mozart’s Lacrimosa begins with waltzing violins. Each note is met with a rising or falling couplet. Beautiful, soft, and slow. And then the angels sing. Not literally, of course; at least, not on any recording I have heard. But when the voices join in, they seem to be echoing from eternity. Softly at first, then they swell. The strings continue their waltz as the movement gets taken up with increasing orchestration, increasing volume, and a host of angelic voices.

The effect is breathtaking. Mozart glimpsed something powerful, and he managed to express it with all the beauty and emotion that music can convey. When I actually step into the music — letting go of the distractions and allowing the music to carry me — the tears come. Not willingly. I have better things to do than weep over classical music. But when I really listen to this incredible collection of sounds, the response is always the same.

All of this is purely based on the force of the music itself. I have often been powerfully moved by the force of truth, but Mozart’s Latin lyrics mean nothing to me. And yet, even in Latin, these phrases seem to convey a sense of serious beauty and a hint of tragedy, but not without hope.

So much elegant beauty. So much passion and depth. But for what?

Lacrimosa comes about midway through Mozart’s Requiem,⁵ which means he wrote this piece to be played at funerals. Think about it. Beauty for those experiencing loss and contemplating death. The haunting Latin lyrics speak of that mournful day when the dead will rise to be judged by their Creator. They ask for mercy and long for rest.

These are the basics of Christian theology. Life and death. Mercy and salvation. These realities ought to be contemplated, discussed, preached. But artistically crafted and beautifully represented?

Why would Mozart spend three minutes exploring a concept musically when he could have spoken those same thoughts in a matter of seconds?

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Have you ever been to a funeral that hasn’t involved music in some capacity? I haven’t. Does that strike you as odd? If we are ever going to get serious and think about what matters, wouldn’t a funeral be the time to do it? Funerals are serious. And we do indeed take time to think before, during, and after a funeral. But we’re not necessarily looking to make intellectual decisions. At these moments, reality is hitting us in a way that we’re never quite prepared to handle. This is the time to contemplate life’s most important questions. But this rarely means revising our doctrinal positions.

People don’t print a list of personal beliefs on their funeral programs. They print poems. They watch slideshows. They listen to music. David Ashcroft of the band The Verve says matter-of-factly, If you’ve written any good tunes, you will be involved in funerals and deaths; you will be involved in weddings and births.⁶ Why is this?

We do this because we all understand that life is meaningful beyond words. The meaning of the event can’t be conveyed through sentences alone. So we look to things like music. Pastor and theologian Tim Keller explains: If we consider a funeral as an objective event, it involves the disposal of a decomposing organism . . . In an artificially objective way a funeral would be something we do to handle a particular type of inanimate matter. In reality, a funeral is a ceremony filled with meaning, so we must have art.⁷

We look to music and other forms of art to beautify the surface-level facts, to dress them in their best clothes and reveal their true significance. There is an approach to life that would strip our existence of these irrelevant wastes of time; it judges everything by its usefulness. But none of us would stand for that. So we listen to music, not to distract ourselves from reality, but to explore the significance of what we are experiencing.

So when Mozart writes a painfully beautiful piece of music, it belongs in our funerals. It has an important role to play in our lives. Somehow — and we must certainly appeal to mystery here — those tones, cadences, and phrasings express something profoundly true about the world as we know it must be.

We sometimes get the idea that music is about entertainment. To be sure, the entertainment industry has made a killing off of music. We do long for entertainment, and music is a great place to find it; the best music will always be entertaining in some sense. But to make music a subcategory of entertainment misses the point.

Music is not something we create or listen to because we’ve had enough of real life. Rather, we create and listen to music because it expresses something important about the human experience that would otherwise be inexpressible.

So we listen to music. We turn to music at our most significant moments and during the mundane affairs of our everyday lives. We allow music to fill our lives. And even if we’re not looking for it, there is enough music playing in the background of our lives that we couldn’t escape it, even if we wanted to. Music is constantly filling our ears with beauty and intrigue, constantly pointing to something deeper than what can be seen with our eyes or felt with our hands. It adorns our lives and reminds us that everything is more meaningful than it might appear. Music captivates us, yet we’re never entirely sure why or how.

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From time to time, a weird thought enters my mind as I drive: What is going on in those other cars? Have you ever had that thought? Here I am, living my life, driving to a specific place for a specific reason that makes sense within the context of my life. And all of these cars are just traveling in the background. If my life were a movie, these cars would be driven by extras, and they would simply pull off the road and park in some Hollywood back lot as soon as my car has passed.

So I look at another car on the road and try to get some sense of the people inside. Where are they going? Who is waiting for them? What are they all about? As intriguing as this may (or may not) sound, I can’t stick with this thought for long. I’m soon back in my own world, and all the cars driven by extras return to the background of my road trip.

This line of thinking makes the story of Austin Chapman all the more fascinating to me. How many people passed his car in early August 2012 as he traveled with his friends? Who would have guessed that something unbelievable — something miraculous — was taking place in the car that was passing in the background?

As they passed through familiar streets, Austin was sitting in the car, struggling to hide his tears from his friends. It would be too embarrassing to let his friends see him crying over something so silly. But turning his head slightly, he realized that everyone in the car was crying with him.

Austin was born deaf. His world wasn’t quite soundless — he could hear the sounds around him, but only as garbled bass and midtones. Every sound wave that reached his eardrums was distorted.

He made it into his twenties by reading lips and got used to navigating his own warbled version of the audible world. But he knew other people were experiencing the world in a way he couldn’t. All he could do was laugh when people made fools of themselves by twirling and flopping on the dance floor. He couldn’t see any connection between the clumsy sounds coming out of the speakers and the comical body language we call dancing. When friends told him about being moved to tears by a piece of music, it made no