A Short Primer on Christian Music

To you, the reader

I write this out of love—that love which has changed me and my understanding of what I took to be knowledge, and shown me the awesome wonder of what it means to live and to be.

In music, we find something which we cannot approach with the cold, hard tools of logic or measurement. Otherwise, show me the proof of the beauty of a song! I will wait.

So, you may try to prove the worth of a piece of music to someone else by pointing to the accolades of others, but all the reviews in the world cannot convince you a song is good—only you can know what the song is to you. Music has power to convey things which cannot otherwise be expressed, but which nonetheless are real and exist. But it certainly helps to understand the lyrics. My hope is to lay some groundwork for understanding better the lyrics you hear in Christian music, so you may understand their full significance when you next hear them. This is done primarily through an explanation of Exodus and a song that captures its spirit, and through an exploration of the epithet “Lamb of God”.

You don’t need to open and listen to every song, but if I quote from a song, it will click a lot better if you at least listen to that portion.

A short (and incomplete) tour of christian-influenced music

If you attend a worship session in America, you will hear from a vast sea of Christian music. This includes Christian contemporary music, with such as Holy Forever, or Come to the Altar. But because of the deep influence Christianity has had on America and history, you will find it in many, many places.

You will hear the gospel running as a thread through much of Kanye's discography, such as the intro to "Hurricane", and "Ultralight Beam", which my friends and I used to blast in the basement before a night out, long ago, before we knew anything about the lyrics, as well as this Father Stretch My Hand remix. There is Leon Bridge's "River", inspired by but nearly opposite in temperament from the wonderful "Take Me To the River" by Al Green (which is not Christian music but is a great dance tune). There is a wealth of music from the black gospel tradition, such as "Go Down Moses", and Take My Hand, Precious Lord, by Mahalia Jackson, written by Thomas A. Dorsey "in response to his inconsolable bereavement at the deaths of his wife, Nettie Harper, and his infant son in August 1932.", and which was also Martin Luther King Jr.'s favorite song. There's also "When I Rose This Morning", which I just found.

I also just found JJ's performance of "The Blood" in front of a packed stadium.

There is "Sunday Candy", which is one of my favorites, and, now that I look at the lyrics, may be a work of genius. It is a dedication by Chance the Rapper to his grandmother first and foremost, yet which mixes in the communion of Christ and romantic longing.

Let's first talk about the chorus:

Come on in this house,
'cause it's gonna rain.
Rain down, Zion,
it's gonna rain.

This may be read in several ways: the warmth and security provided by his grandmother, the house of God—the church—in which one can always seek protection from the world and which he associates with his grandmother, Zion as reference to the dwelling place of God, but also God's chosen people which includes ourselves, and the land He has promised.

And then one of the hooks:

You gotta move it slowly,
Take and eat my body like it's holy,
I've been waiting for you for the whole week,
I've been praying for you, you're my Sunday candy

Communion involves the eating of bread—the body of Christ, but also romantic undertones. What also is in play is the feeling that love may proceed gently and patiently, with no need of rushing anything. Love works at what pace it will and cannot be forced. "Slowly" may also refer to his grandmother, who in old age is no longer so limber.

And all at the same time we may look forward on Sunday to seeing our lover, or we may look forward to seeing grandma, or look forward to communion with God, and—even more than that, as it is written perhaps from the perspective of the church itself and Christ in it, it may be speaking of how He is waiting for you, as well, to come on Sunday to dwell with Him.

Deliverance

Deliver Us is the opening song to Prince of Egypt, which tells the story of Exodus from the birth of Moses to the escape of the Israelites across the Red Sea. There are many incredible things in it, such as the incomparable voice of Ofra Haza. But it is not just the song and the story told that are important. In the narrative of the human race, and in the story of humanity, Moses and the plight of the Israelites is a reflection of the state of the world and our attempts as humans to overcome it.

In Exodus, the Israelites have been under crushing bondage by the Egyptians for centuries, since the time of Jacob. Having grown numerous, the Israelites cause Pharaoh unease, and so he orders the killing of every newborn male Israelite. Moses's mother, Yocheved, in desperation to save him, puts him into a basket made of reeds and, trusting God, thrusts him into the Nile, where he is carried by the currents to the Pharaoh's daughter, who in a tremendous act of motherly love has mercy on him and brings him up as her own son. And so Moses grows up as an Egyptian, hence the title of Prince of Egypt.

There are many famous stories in the full book of Exodus, such as Moses going up to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. The movie itself focuses on Moses reckoning with his identity as an Israelite and as an Egyptian, his first contact with God in the burning bush, and—despite his doubts and insecurities—his uptake of the mantle of being God's instrument by which to deliver his people out of Israel, which leads to the seven plagues which strike Egypt due to Pharaoh's stubbornness in not allowing the Israelites to leave. The story reaches its climax in the parting of the Red Sea, in which Moses leads the Israelites through the waters stilled by God to escape from the pursuing Egyptians, who are then drowned when, hot on the heels of the Israelites, the waters come crashing down around them.

The movie itself ends in triumph, as Moses has led his people out of Egypt, but the journey of Moses himself does not. He never makes it out of the desert, in which his people wander for forty years, and where a loss of faith in God dooms him. It is later Joshua who succeeds in bringing the Israelites into the land of Canaan.

By the time we arrive at the New Testament, the Israelites have witnessed time and time again how even the greatest of them inevitably fall—King David who of the Israelite kings walked most closely with God, Saul, Moses, and more. They, on their own, were unable to break the cycle of human sin and deliver their people out of it. So, it seems, humanity is doomed to repeat their failures.

What Christ comes to earth to do is to finally and forever break this cycle, to do what Moses and David and all the humans who came before and all the ones who might come after could not, and not only to do it for the Israelites, but for all the nations of the world.

For it was revealed that God's chosen people were not bound by the bloodline of Abraham, but by the new covenant of Jesus and his blood, and the water of baptism, to encompass all humanity, across all time—past, present, and future—in every corner of the universe. And that we, through Christ, would be delivered not just from chains of physical oppression, but also from the bondage of the human heart to its sinful nature, and that we would, at long last, be free. And so Christ is the fulfillment of every promise and the full potential of what humanity was meant to achieve, which is why we also call Him the Son of Man, for he did what Adam and Eve could not.

As you will find, Christ has so many names, because He intersects with every human life, in all our misfortune and pain, and all our triumph and glory, across every instance of our history. So, they write in Christ the Eternal Tao, that "Christ did not come to explain human suffering or to eliminate it. Rather, He came to fill human suffering with His presence."

Moses was born to deliver his people. Jesus was born to deliver us all. That is why he is the Good Shepherd, and the Great Redeemer, and as we will soon read, the High Priest of the world.

One of the parallels between Moses's story and Christ's is that in Moses's time, the pharaoh sought to kill the newborn males of the Israelites—perhaps he sought unknowingly to kill Moses, who would free them from their chains. When Jesus was born, King Herod of the Israelites, hearing of the arrival of the Messiah who may supplant him, tries to eliminate him by ordering the slaughter of every newborn born aged two and under in Bethlehem and the surround region. Jesus survives because, in a strange reversal, his family flees to Egypt with him, having been warned by an angel in the middle of the night.

In O Holy Night (and Tori Kelly's rendition), which celebrates the birth of Jesus, it is sung:

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
'Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Because of what Christ means, because of his actions and what he has done for us all, for the Hope and Life he promises, He is the object of worship, one and the same with God the Father, and deserves every praise we can offer up to him:

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name;
O Christ is the Lord!
O praise His name forever.
His pow'r and glory ever more proclaim!

In his fulfillment of all our hopes and in all the promise of our humanity, in his deliverance of us from the weight of our own history and doom to a new creation and a new age, in his arrival on this world to bring together heaven and earth, in the glory of his resurrection and the Life he brings to all, to honor his many epithets, we raise His Name above all other names, and so we sing, in "What a Beautiful Name":

What a beautiful Name it is
The Name of Jesus Christ my King

Redemption

One important name you will encounter is the Lamb of God. To understand this name, one must understand the role of animal sacrifice in the ancient Hebrew system of atonement necessary to maintain a relationship with God, which you will find described in Leviticus. In short, when one has sinned, one must come to the temple with an animal "without blemish" as a substitute for themself, and shed its blood, upon which the priest will apply the blood to the altar.

Importantly, once a year there occurs the Day of Atonement, in which the high priest atones for the sins of the entire Israelite people, and is the one time of the year in which he may enter the innermost sanctuary of the temple, the Holy Place. To atone for the sins of the people, he must bring two goats. One goat is slain, and its blood is brought into the Holy Place and sprinkled on the altar. Then, the high priest, placing his hands on the head of the other goat, confesses over it all the sins of the people of Israel, and then the second goat is sent away into the wilderness, carrying away with it the sin.

As described in Hebrews, Christ puts an end to this system by fulfilling it completely and transcendently. Jesus is, all at once, the sacrifice—an unblemished offering, innocent of all sins—the high priest of a higher order than Aaron, and the lamb who is sent away into heaven to carry away the sins of all. So, in John 1:29, we read, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world".

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

—Hebrews 4:14-15 (ESV)

By this, we also call Jesus the Man of Sorrows, who suffered alongside us.

The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

—Hebrews 7:23-25 (ESV)

Christ has no need, "like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself." To understand more fully, you may read more of Hebrews.

And in Genesis 22:8, on his way up the mountain, Abraham says to his son Isaac, "God will provide for himself the lamb", which we know to be Jesus, who not only substitutes for Isaac, but for all humanity. One need not look very far in history to see what horrors humans have done to one another, both great and small, endlessly throughout history—in the killing fields of Cambodia, the camps of Auschwitz, in Nanking, the slaughter of infants throughout ancient times, conquest and enslavement, again and again. And there are not only the great horrors, but the small ones, too: the black pit of a failed household, pitting mother against father, son against mother, daughter against father; addiction to drugs as an escape from despair, and endless pursuit of meaningless status and power, at the end of which are betrayal and pride and indifference, which cut us off from our fellow humans and from our own destiny and true purpose. Great horrors and small horrors, sins of commission and omission, all these God has seen so many times, so repeatedly, is it a wonder many great civilizations have believed time to be a cycle? And who carries out these tragedies, if not the individual, who comprises the mass, or who fails in standing up to the mass? But Christ comes to intercede on behalf of one and all, laying up His own life, blameless, as atonement for us, for all that we have done and all that we have failed to do, in the past and in the future. Therefore, instead of resigning ourselves to the endless cycles of rise and fall, we see the wheel of time shattered by Christ on a cross, so we may instead move towards His promise, with the power of Christ’s love as the winds behind our sails and as the force which moves us forward through history, to receive our true inheritance.

For all these reasons, Christ is called the Lamb of God, and so when JJ sings "All glory to the Lamb" in "The Blood", he is referring to this name, and so in the chorus of "Come to the Altar", when they sing "Forgiveness was bought with the precious blood of Jesus Christ", they are referring to the blood shed by Christ in light of his role as the final sacrifice of the previous covenant, to inaugurate a new beginning for mankind.

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To conclude, I looked through references to song in the Bible, and have found the following.

In the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, the redeemed sing:

“The song of Moses, the servant of God,
and the song of the Lamb.”
—Revelation 15:3

And also, scripture says:

“He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.”
—Psalm 40:3

And,

“The LORD is my strength and my song,
and he has become my salvation.”
—Exodus 15:2

Becoming aware of His work in our lives, we may greet the music we hear with new ears, knowing God has many ways of reaching us, and loving us, and so we have many ways to know Him, and to love Him.