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Bible and Theology

#418: Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #418, on the subject of Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.

  1. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
  2. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
  3. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?

The third objection in simple form reads “A really long line,” which is expanded, “Two and a half million people would have created a line well over 200 miles long (at eight abreast with only three feet between each row) along with their animals, of which the Bible says they had many.”

I notice that the number of people just increased by twenty-five percent, from an estimated two million to two and a half million; but it’s an estimate, so we’ll let it slide.  The issue seems to be that a column that long could not outrun Pharaoh’s charioteers.

However, we have a couple of assumptions here.

First, there’s no reason to assume that these people are walking in parade formation.  The author gets this outrageous length of the line by making it very narrow.  I think eight abreast would be roughly twenty feet wide, but we’ll call it twenty-five.  Twenty-five feet by two hundred miles creates a total area of less than one square mile–and there’s no reason to think these people were trying to follow a road or stay between the lines.  We have a mob.  If it formed a circle, it would have a diameter of about two thirds of a mile.

Obviously it’s going to cover a lot of area, and obviously it’s not going to do so efficiently, but the two hundred mile line is an artificial construct that is extremely implausible, created to make it seem absurd.

Of course, we are talking about hikers outrunning charioteers, but whether that can happen really depends on their head start.  We are not given that information.  We are told that when the Israelites departed Pharaoh was glad to see the back of them, but before they reached the water he changed his mind and pursued them.  We don’t know how long it took for them to reach the crossing; we are told that they camped along the way, but also that they traveled by day and night, so they were apparently eager to keep moving.  So given the lack of information on those details, it is not at all implausible that Israel could reach the crossing before Pharaoh caught them.

Bible and Theology

#417: Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #417, on the subject of Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.  The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?, and it was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?

The second objection in simple form reads “An implausible start”.  That is expanded to “In one day, over two million people, in Egypt, a very large country with no telephones or radios, were all contacted and instructed….”  The article considers this implausible.

Vintage engraving of Ancient Egyptians building a Pyramid

First, let’s be clear that the number “two million” is an estimate.  It is not necessarily an inaccurate estimate, but it is based on the statement that there were six hundred thousand men, extrapolating women and children from there.  However, to reach the estimated one-point-four million women and children one need only reach the male heads of their households.

Second, the perceived problem is largely based on our modern lives, overlaying twenty-first century concepts over a very different ancient world.  Were we to be faced with such a communications problem, we would of course solve it through mass media and modern communications.  Without those, we would not know what to do.  However, despite the size of Egypt, the account tells us that all the Israelites, and only the Israelites, lived in a section of Egypt called Goshen.  Town cryers were in use for millennia prior to newspapers.  Beyond that, because we do not have them today we do not understand the kinds of social networks that existed before the modern communications age.  Israel was divided into tribes, and the tribes into families.  The tribes had tribal elders, the families had family heads.

In the mid-twentieth century many local organizations had what were called telephone trees.  In essence, when the organization had to get a message to its members in a hurry, the person at the top called perhaps two to four people, who had lists of two to four people that each had two to four people, in an expanding chain which ultimately reached everyone.  It would have taken a bit longer, but not really that long for a message delivered to the tribal elders to be passed to the family heads and down the line to everyone in the tribe.  Further, as they were apparently employed Egyptian workers (we call them slaves) they undoubtedly had systems in place for delivering such messages so they would know what they had to do.

Certainly getting a message to six hundred thousand men within a few hours would be challenging, but they knew how to do it, because it was the way their society operated.

Bible and Theology

#416: Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #416, on the subject of Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?.

This is a continuation of a response to the article Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, requested by a Facebook contact.  The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?

After stating that no scholars believe the event happened (having conveniently eliminated from consideration any that do), the article offers as its first reason that there is “No evidence in history or in the ground,” that is, neither any historical accounts nor any archaeological evidence supporting the event.

Of course, the statement that there are no historical accounts begins by excluding the Bible itself from consideration.  That’s not entirely unfair.  After all, the question is whether the Biblical account is corroborated elsewhere.  We might, however, wonder where else it might have been corroborated.

We are told that the Egyptians themselves did not record the departure of millions of slaves and the embarrassing destruction of their army and death of their pharaoh in pursuit.  While this may seem a problem, the Exodus account gives us events that were embarrassing on many levels.  According to Exodus, before God delivered Israel from Egypt He made a point of upstaging the entire Egyptian pantheon.  To us those plagues seem like somewhat random disasters, but in that time and place they were demonstrations that God’s power exceeded the power of any of the separate gods of Egypt.  For the simplest example, darkness over the entire land meant that God’s power exceeded the power of Ra, the Sun God.  For this story to be recounted in detail, they would be publishing the fact that the gods they worshipped, and indeed the gods whose recognition gave authority to the priests and to the Pharaoh himself, were inferior to the God of Israel.  There is every reason to believe that Egypt took steps, what we would today call public relations damage control.

Beyond that, as Israel entered the land they claimed as their own, they destroyed the civilizations that existed there.  They didn’t destroy all of them, but then Assyria and Babylon came through and finished the job.  By the time of Nebuchadnezzar, there were no countries in the region with historic records to compare.  Israel was the only “little” nation to survive.

We also do have what can reasonably be thought to be cross confirmation.  Assuming that the Book of Joshua was written independently of Exodus, in Joshua 2:10 Rahab of Jericho states that the people of that city were terrified of the Jews because they had heard about God drying up the Red Sea so they could cross.  That means that whether or not God parted the Red Sea, forty years later the people in the Middle East believed it had happened.  That Israel destroyed those civilizations utterly does not invalidate their own report that that knowledge existed.

As to the lack of archaeological evidence, the argument from silence is always dangerous, and the more so when used in archaeology.  The fact that we have not found evidence of some event or site is not proof of anything.  As one archaeologist put it, the sites that will have survived at all preserve less than 5% of everything that once was; those which we have identified are fewer than 5% of that, those which we have begun to investigate are fewer than 5% of that, and the amount of each of those which we have actually uncovered is less than 5% of the total.  For those not good at math, 5% of 5% of 5% of 5% is roughly six in a million.

Of course, that doesn’t prove that the biblical accounts are true, only that they can’t be falsified by this argument.

The famed pioneering middle eastern archaeologist William F. Albright began his career with the belief that nothing in the historical records of the Bible was true.  Over the course of his career he discovered so many things that confirmed not only that reported sites, such as King Solomon’s stables, existed, but that they were exactly where and when the Bible stated they were.  By the end of his career, the early historical books of the Bible were references he used to help locate dig sites.

Of course, the Exodus account is considerably older than that–which is a factor in why archaeology supporting it is so rare.  So, too, is the fact that our Israelites were reported to be nomads, constantly on the move, living in tents, creating no permanent buildings.  There was very little that would have lasted long enough to become archaeological evidence.  About the only thing that might have survived would be the bones of the dead, by now buried so deeply under so much insignificant coverage that no one would know where to look, or what they found if they did.  Even so, there have been finds that possibly corroborate the events, such as ancient Egyptian chariot wheels in the Gulf of Aqaba, one of the suspected sites for the crossing of the Red Sea.  Liberal scholars will generally say that since the miracles never happened, there is another explanation for those discoveries; but if you argue that there is no evidence and ignore such evidence as might be relevant, that’s a losing argument.

So the argument from silence, it seems to me, is essentially saying that if no one else knows the secret it must not be true.  History is filled with secrets and coverups, many of which are true.

Bible and Theology

#415: Can the Exodus Story Be True?

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #415, on the subject of Can the Exodus Story Be True?.

A Facebook contact sent me a link to an article, Ten Reasons Why the Bible’s Story of the Exodus Is Not True, and asked for my comments on it.  After some consideration, I determined that the only effective way to tackle such a massive undertaking was to create another web log miniseries.  Here it is.

The first point that must be considered is the early statement “…most experts and scholars dismiss the story as mythology.”  Although the article does mention that there are what it calls “literalists” who believe that the events happened, it cites none of them in its presentation, and this reflects a very particular form of bias among liberal scholarship.  We might call it a litmus test.

I heard Reverend David Redding talk about his own journey to faith, in which he ultimately confronted the question of whether the miracles reported in the Gospels actually occurred.  He noted that C. S. Lewis believed in miracles, which was interesting.  Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and a respected writer in the field of myth and legend.  However, liberal Bible scholars insisted that he was no scholar precisely because he believed in miracles.  (He wrote an excellent book on the subject, Miracles:  A Preliminary Study.)  Therein lay the problem:  no credible scholars believed in miracles because a belief in miracles automatically disqualified you from being a credible scholar.

Thus in citing scholars for the article, the author sticks to “credible” liberal scholars and ignores anyone who believes that the miraculous might have happened, dismissing them perfunctorily.  I note, for example, that a professor from Hebrew Union is cited.  Hebrew Union is liberal enough, as Jewish institutions go, that they conferred a degree on Dr. Marvin Wilson, as such authorizing him to teach at any synagogue.  Dr. Wilson is no liberal, but he is an Evangelical Episcopalian who was chairman of the Biblical Studies department at the Evangelical school Gordon College.  Conservative Jews are not comfortable with his rabbinic ordination.  He, incidentally, believes that the Exodus did occur.

Liberal scholars begin with the belief that miracles cannot happen and therefore never did happen, and that because of this any claimed historic accounts which contain them must be false.  It then becomes the task of the “scholar” to explain not how these things happened but how these documents which make impossible claims about supposed historic events came into existence.  You have a problem of presuppositions:  since these books contain records of impossible events requiring divine intervention to have occurred, they must be false, and we have to find another way to explain them.  The article begins from the assumption that the account is false, and looks for ways to demonstrate it, rather than approaching the evidence in an open and fair way.

In fairness, the article raises what must be called “practical” issues, and this series will attempt to address them in the articles ahead.

As a final caveat, I am not an Old Testament scholar.  My studies are very much focused on the New Testament; my Hebrew is limited to a few words which I cannot even spell because I do not know the Hebrew alphabet.  I studied these questions half a century ago, have lost all my books, and am working predominantly from memory.  I will recommend the work of Josh McDowell; his More Evidence That Demands A Verdict provided excellent insights into several of these issues and got Jeff Zurheide and me through a very grueling Old Testament Origins course (OT337) with Dr. G. Lloyd Carr back then.  He has written more since then, but I have not had the privilege of reading it.

Bible and Theology, Music

#414: The Song “You Should Have Thanked Me”

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #414, on the subject of The Song “You Should Have Thanked Me”.

I am not entirely certain when I wrote this.  My inclination is that it was the late 70s or early 80s, largely because I wrote it on a piano and in the key of C with a lot of major seventh chords–but later than a lot of other songs that fit that description.  It was written with three backup vocals, but has never been so performed or recorded.  This recording is of a live performance at the Silverlake Community Church in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey, where I would frequently visit on Sunday mornings and usually be invited to sing something.  It was recorded in June of 2011.  It’s a WMA format, so it might take a moment to download.

I like a lot about the song, the concept, the message, the way it’s constructed musically and lyrically, and I ranked it number 21.  The performance held it back–partly because it’s a solo performance so it doesn’t have the backup vocals.  I ranked that 30th.  But it’s a solid performance with only a couple of minor mistakes.  I’m also quite pleased with the improvised introduction (although the volume difference between my talking and my singing is rather large).  On the downside, that sound throughout that resembles spilled groceries tumbling down a staircase is the contribution of a dear brother named Rich who apparently decided that the song he had never heard would be enhanced if he used the opportunity to teach himself to play drums on the trap set on the other side of the sanctuary.  I think that I was unaware of this at the time.  Tristan did not list the song, which put it at number 29.

You Should Have Thanked Me.

So here are the lyrics.

You should have thanked me (For loving you}.
You should have praised me (For all I do).
I came through for you
In ev’rything I put you through.
You should have thanked me (For loving you}.
You should have praised me (For all I do).
You should have thanked me.

When skies are overcast
You think that you can’t last.
Oh, don’t you know I’ll bring you through?
When things are lookin’ bad
Why do you look so sad?
Oh, don’t you know what I can do?

Consider it all joy, each trial has been given in love.
I’m making you ready for your place in heaven above.

I’m your Father.
You know I’ll take care of you.
‘Though it looks bad you know that I’m perfecting you.

You should have thanked me (For loving you}.
You should have praised me (For all I do).
You should have thanked me (For loving you}.
You should have praised me (For all I do).
You should have thanked me.

I can only hope you benefit from the song in some way.  I will continue with additional songs in the future.

*****

Previous web log song posts:

#301:  The Song “Holocaust” | #307:  The Song “Time Bomb” | #311:  The Song “Passing Through the Portal” | #314:  The Song “Walkin’ In the Woods” | #317:  The Song “That’s When I’ll Believe” | #320:  The Song “Free” | #322:  The Song “Voices” | #326:  The Song “Mountain, Mountain” | #328:  The Song “Still Small Voice” | #334:  The Song “Convinced” | #337:  The Song “Selfish Love” | #340:  The Song “A Man Like Paul” | #341:  The Song “Joined Together” | #346:  The Song “If We Don’t Tell Them” | #349: The Song “I Can’t Resist You’re Love” | #353:  The Song “I Use to Think” | #356:  The Song “God Said It Is Good” | #362:  My Life to You | #366:  The Song “Sometimes” | #372:  The Song “Heavenly Kingdom” | #378:  The Song “A Song of Joy” | #382:  The Song “Not Going to Notice” | #387:  The Song “Our God Is Good” | #393:  The Song “Why” | #399:  The Song “Look Around You” | #404:  The Song “Love’s the Only Command” | #408:  The Song “Given You My Name” | #412:  The Song “When I Think”

Next song:  To the Victor

Bible and Theology

#413: The Abomination of Desolation

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #413, on the subject of The Abomination of Desolation.

I received a question by private message.  I prefer to answer questions publicly, partly so that more can benefit and partly so I don’t have to answer them again, so I am copying it here:

Have another biblical question for you.  What is the desolating sacrilege?  I have always been puzzled by this verse in Mark.  Is it in fact referring to the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans?

It should be said that there are interpreters who believe that it in fact refers to events still in the future, and that is not impossible.  However, there are at least three reasons to believe that it is about the destruction of the city in the first century.

The reference appears in Mark 13:14, and is paralleled rather closely in Matthew 24:15, and particularly the words my questioner cites as “desolating sacrilege” which is usually referenced as “the abomination of desolation”.  Looking at the context, in Mark 13:1 the disciples comment on the grandeur of the temple, and in the next verse Jesus declares that the entire structure is going to be totally demolished.  Two verses later the disciples ask when that is going to happen, and Jesus launches into a teaching which we think is about the end of the world but which if it is answering the question that was asked and not the question that the disciples thought they were asking is actually about the destruction of the temple.  The same sequence happens in Matthew 24:1ff.  Thus when we get to the abomination of desolation, it logically is still about that destruction.  Titus and the Roman Legions wrought that kind of devastation in 70 A.D., and so the prediction is consistent with that event.

We have the same circumstance launching the same question and the same teaching in Luke 21:5ff, and that gives us our second reason.  Following all three accounts, they go through the same pattern up to the statement that the one who endures will be saved, in Mark 13:13, Matthew 24:13, and Luke 21:19, and in Matthew and Mark the next verse is the one in question here.  However, in Luke 21:20 the following text translates (my translation) to “Yet when you see encircling Jerusalem by armies, then know that her devastation is impending”, and the next verses in all three accounts tell us to flee to the mountains.  It thus seems that Luke has replaced “abomination of desolation” with “Jerusalem besieged”–but Luke fairly commonly replaces phrases that would have particular meaning to a Jewish audience with words expressing the same concept to those in the greater Greco-Roman world.  Thus if we honor Luke’s understanding, what Mark and Matthew called “the abomination of desolation” was understood to refer to the siege of Jerusalem, which again fits the events of A.D. 70.  Some will say no, Luke is talking about something else, but since in the next verse he is back on track with the others either we have to say that Luke’s Gospel is in error here, or Luke has provided us with the correct meaning of that phrase.

What might be most telling, though, is that next part, where all three Gospels tell us to flee from Jerusalem.  The problem is that once the city is surrounded, it’s too late to escape.  However, history tells us that Titus brought his legions to Jerusalem and surrounded it, but then was called to withdraw due to a different problem, leaving the city for a brief period, then returning and finishing the job.  It was probably the case that devout but unbelieving Jews in Jerusalem believed that the withdrawal of Titus was the hand of God saving them, but Christians had this prophecy and so would have known to leave.

It might be suggested that a similar siege will occur in the future, but warfare has changed since then and such a siege is unlikely as a military strategy in the modern world.  The circumstances seem to be very particular to that event, and thus we should probably understand Jesus as predicting the first century destruction of Jerusalem.

As a footnote, we don’t have much in the way of historic confirmation of the fact that the Christians did leave Jerusalem at that time, and the suggestion has been made from that that Luke interpreted the statement after the fact to make it fit the events.  However, C. S. Lewis has somewhere noted that this is irrelevant.  By the end of the century the book was certainly in circulation, so either Christians did exit the city or they had to explain why having been warned in advance they had failed to do so, and on a naturalist viewpoint Luke would have been very foolish to include a prophetic command that had not been followed.  Therefore Luke is either providing the warning in advance or explaining after the fact why it was that Christians knew to flee the city at that time.  Either way, the pre-existence of the prediction (before the event) is confirmed.

I hope that helps.

Bible and Theology, Music

#412: The Song “When I Think”

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #412, on the subject of The Song “When I Think”.

I have long had a sort of love/hate relationship with this song.

It started when I was writing it.  I fought with the second and third verses for quite a while, and when I was finished fighting I was still quite unhappy about it.  I thought that the the second verse should be about Him always being there, and the third about being brought back, but from the first notes I knew this was a deathbed song, and it seemed obvious that the third verse had to establish that to lead into the fourth, and I could not get the words to work that way with the verses in that order.  Meanwhile, the second half of the second verse just always struck me as trite, and the third as a touch awkward, and I couldn’t make them better than that.

Plus, it was a deathbed song, and I was a bit uncomfortable as someone who struggled with suicidal tendencies related to clinical depression singing about dying.

Still, I included it on the program for the last concert of The Last Psalm.  We had the vocalists for it, and I did not know whether I would ever have the right combination for it again.  It was probably the only time the song was ever sung for an audience the way I envisioned it.

Not long after The Last Psalm dissolved, Jeff Zurheide asked me to play in Jacob’s Well.  In the interim I had written a song that I thought was perfect for that band–three vocals, guitar, bass, drums, and a solid upbeat feel with a good message.  (That song comes later on the list.)  He said no.  He wanted to do this song–a song I had not yet decided that I liked, and completely wrong for the band.  Jacob’s Well had no female vocals, no piano.  I didn’t see it–but it wasn’t my choice, so Jacob’s Well did an arrangement that was not at all what I envisioned for the song.  It did not endear the song to me.

I might have sung the song for myself sometimes; I might have done it solo somewhere.  No other band ever did it.  In fact, it could have slipped into oblivion itself had it not been for that request from Jess Oldham that I produce a disk of Last Psalm songs and I was scratching around trying to find songs I could record that had at some point been part of that band’s repertoire.

Even then, it gave me more unhappiness.  It was obvious that the soprano, which soared to an F on the fourth verse, was entirely out of my range, so I had to rearrange vocals so that that became the tenor and the top part was what had been the alto.  Even then, though, it was trouble.  I had written it in the key of F, and as I tried to record what was now the soprano there were so many Cs my voice gave out.  I had to go away and come back, pitch the whole song down to the key of D, and record the vocals with A as the highest note.  So it didn’t sound as bright as the original, and frankly it would be more difficult for any of the instruments to play it in this key.

All that said, there is something about the song that touches something, and ultimately I would pick this song to be played at my funeral.  It says something worth saying.

This recording is four vocals over midi instruments.  I ranked the song twenty-eighth for the music and lyrics, twentieth for the performance and recording quality; it did not make Tristan’s list, putting it twenty-eighth overall.

When I Think.

So here are the lyrics.

When I think of what You’ve given me
I just want to praise Your name.
When I think of what You’ve been for me,
I’m so glad You’ve stayed the same.
All my trials are over now.

When I think of how You’ve brought me back
Ev’ry time I’ve gone astray–
When I thought I’d really blown it bad,
You had something nice to say.
All my trials are over now.

When I think of how You’d be right there
Ev’ry time I’d need a friend.
And You’ve shown me that You always care
Right up to this very end.
All my trials are over now.

Now I know You’re gonna take me home
Now to live with You above,
Holy Father and Your Holy Son,
Holy Spirit, live in love.
All my trials are over now.

In my last words I would like to say
You should do as I have done:
Always follow, trust, love, and obey
Jesus Christ, God’s only Son.
All my trials are over now.
All my trials are over now.

I can only hope you benefit from the song in some way.  I will continue with additional songs in the future.

*****

Previous web log song posts:

#301:  The Song “Holocaust” | #307:  The Song “Time Bomb” | #311:  The Song “Passing Through the Portal” | #314:  The Song “Walkin’ In the Woods” | #317:  The Song “That’s When I’ll Believe” | #320:  The Song “Free” | #322:  The Song “Voices” | #326:  The Song “Mountain, Mountain” | #328:  The Song “Still Small Voice” | #334:  The Song “Convinced” | #337:  The Song “Selfish Love” | #340:  The Song “A Man Like Paul” | #341:  The Song “Joined Together” | #346:  The Song “If We Don’t Tell Them” | #349: The Song “I Can’t Resist You’re Love” | #353:  The Song “I Use to Think” | #356:  The Song “God Said It Is Good” | #362:  My Life to You | #366:  The Song “Sometimes” | #372:  The Song “Heavenly Kingdom” | #378:  The Song “A Song of Joy” | #382:  The Song “Not Going to Notice” | #387:  The Song “Our God Is Good” | #393:  The Song “Why” | #399:  The Song “Look Around You” | #404:  The Song “Love’s the Only Command” | #408:  The Song “Given You My Name”

Next song:  You Should Have Thanked Me

Bible and Theology

#410: When to Pray

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #410, on the subject of When to Pray.

I often mention that I’ve been studying the Bible since I had The Golden Book of Bible Stories as a preschooler, and I was saying grace before meals and prayers before bed back then as well.  However, the issue of when a believer should say prayers and spend time in scripture sometimes arises, and although I addressed this some in What Does God Expect? it is worth revisiting here.  We are instructed to “pray without ceasing”, but few of us manage even to approach that, and even with the notion of a constant attitude of prayer, specific times of prayer and study still seem necessary.

It was apparent that I was more immersed in the Bible than most of my peers when in eighth grade the local Presbyterian church we had only recently begun attending selected me as one of their two representatives on the NBC radio Bible quiz, and we advanced to the finals.  I inherently recognized the importance of reading and understanding scripture, and immersed myself in it frequently.  I recall one occasion on which I was applying a highlighter to a copy of the Revised Standard Version while riding in a school bus to a marching band competition.  Yet it wasn’t until I was in college that I recognized the importance of regular prayer and study.  By “regular” at that time I meant “daily”, with some kind of prayer list, a minimum amount of time, a specified reading plan, and a scheduled timeslot.  I have learned much about each of those aspects, and adjusted them many times over the decades, but it is that last that I thought to address here.  I received advice on it from many quarters, although not much of it was all that helpful.

Many who have been dynamic figures in the faith have pressed the notion that every day should begin not merely with, “Good morning, Lord, I’m awake now, thank you,” but with an extended time in prayer and study.  Someone has said that if he is anticipating a particularly long and busy day, he gets up three hours earlier to spend the extra time in prayer.  I admire people who do that, and if you can, knock yourself out.  I am not a morning person, and when I have tried to do devotions early I have generally found myself falling asleep on top of the Bible.  I had to accept that morning devotions did not work for me.

The second option was obvious:  always make sure you get your devotions in before bed.  This suffered a similar fate, and although it was usually easier for me to push myself to stay up later than to get up earlier, there were still many times when I was struggling to stay awake while reading and praying.  The additional complication was that as long as I was single I could try to stay up later and pay the penalty in morning weariness, but once I was married my wife was always calling me to come to bed, and I realized that this was complicating my married life.

Malcolm Smith had some excellent advice on this.  It doesn’t matter when you pray and study, as long as you do, and a regular schedule will help ensure that you do.  For some people with rigorous schedules, securing a private room during the scheduled lunch break is a viable option.  Alas, never having had that kind of structure, I had to carve the time from my home life for most of my life.

That made it a bit hit-or-miss, that there would be days when I did not get to pray more than–well, over the years I’ve learned to pray when I hear sirens, when I’m driving long stretches alone, and at other odd moments.  Establishing prayer triggers is helpful in this regard, and if you see the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle that’s a good reason to pray even if they are not coming for you.  This is the value of “grace” before meals and prayers before bed and other “ritual” prayers, that they remind us we should always be praying and call us to do so at this moment.  But that’s not the same as putting aside time to spend with God, and the latter is important.

As life is now, it’s rare that I have two consecutive days with schedules at all similar.  As a consequence, I have developed an attitude that whenever I have a reasonable opportunity to get alone for an hour, I open my prayer list, start a timer, and start praying.  If I get interrupted, I usually try to pause the timer and return to it at my earliest opportunity.

I don’t always get the full hour into the day, but that’s fine.  This isn’t a law; it’s a privilege.  I don’t always eat breakfast, or lunch, or indeed a decent scheduled meal to which I can attach a name.  Life is like that.  Spending some of it with God is a priority, but it’s not a requirement.  I make the time when I can, and go from there.

I also try to include in my day other activities that have me focused on my faith–such as writing this article.  Exactly what you do with your quiet time doesn’t have to be much more consistent than exactly what you eat at your mealtimes.  What matters is focusing your life on Christ.  Doing so through specifically focused times helps that, but if it doesn’t always work out God is not upset.

Bible and Theology, Music

#404: The Song “Love’s the Only Command”

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #404, on the subject of The Song “Love’s the Only Command”.

This is another early one.  I remember playing it for Dennis Mullins when I was in high school–well, Dennis is another story.

It happens that our mothers were friends, but I don’t think either of us knew that back then.  He was probably half a dozen years older than I, out of high school as I was getting in, and he played in a popular local rock band.  I never heard them back then, but I saw posters for Some Other Animal, with the four of them wearing furs.  They signed with Epic Records, I’d wager around 1971 or 72, changing their name to Rock Garden, and then with the Jesus Movement sweeping through, Dennis became a Christian and didn’t want to do that music anymore.  Well, I could tell you how it spread, but within a couple months Rock Garden was playing some really good multiple-vocal Christian pop-rock at the local coffeehouse and elsewhere.

But I have to roll this back a bit.

I was probably a freshman or sophomore, and sometimes I would walk home from school rather than take the bus or get my mother to drive me.  Probably most of the shorter ways for me to get home took me past his house, and one day as I was passing I heard him plunking on the piano, and was intrigued, so I walked up to the house and positioned myself on the front stoop to listen.  He was downstairs, I think it must have been a split, but he suddenly realized someone was on the front porch, and he was swiftly up the stairs (tall and lanky) and asking me, politely, what I wanted.  I explained that I’d heard him playing and just wanted to listen, which was apparently fine with him, and I didn’t stay much longer.  But I didn’t know who he was then.

So all of that stuff previously mentioned happens, and now I’m a fan of the band, but also writing my own music, and I wrote this song, Love’s the Only Command.  For what it’s worth, I still think that the vocals on it are very like something Rock Garden would have done.  So I went over to his house, must have taken my guitar, and told him that I’d written a song I thought his band could do.  He listened; he liked it.

He did ask whether they could change the words to “open the door”, “because that’s what He said.”  “He said both,” I responded, and he kind of shrugged.

I’d like to say that Rock Garden sang my song at Carnegie Hall, but no, they never sang it.  I’m not even sure why not.  I hope it wasn’t because he thought I was arguing about the lyrics.  But The Last Psalm did it, and it might even have been our signature song.

As to Dennis, Rock Garden did sing at Carnegie Hall, the same night that Danny Taylor and Andre Crouch recorded live albums there.  Then the following week they performed one more local concert, and broke up.  Drummer Peter Hopper went to the Love Inn and worked with people like Phil Keaggy and Ted Sandquist.  Dennis had a solo career including recording a song for Mother Teresa.  Our paths crossed at least once, at some kind of reception I attended where he was playing.

Decades later I gave the members of Collision copies of about thirty-seven songs, and said if there was anything on the CDs they thought we should do, let me know.  Jonathan picked this one.  So Collision learned it, and performed it a few times.  I have to laugh, really, because it will quickly become apparent that all three verses have the same words; I thought it was sufficient variation to keep raising the complexity of the vocals.  But Jonathan asked if we could change the words to the last verse.  Then when it was too late, I remembered Dennis, and thought gee, we could make the last verse “open the door.”  But we never did.

This recording is another of the four vocals over midi instruments mp3s I did when Jessie Oldham asked me to get her a recording of Last Psalm music.  Parts of Ruthann (Mekita)’s high soprano are covered by a midi trumpet.  To this day, a few that remember those days refer to her part on the chorus as “the moose call” and tease me for my vocal arrangement there.

I remember in a Collision rehearsal, one of the early shots at this song, I told drummer Nick that on the last verse the chorus gets quiet right after I sing “scream and shout it”.  When we finished the run-through, he told me I was wrong–I had forgotten that I sing those words twice in that verse, once in the middle and again at the end.  Ah, well.  I can’t always be right.

Love’s the Only Command.

So here are the lyrics.

Haven’t you noticed miracles happen ev’ry day?
Don’t you know Jesus is the only way?
Jesus Himself said, “I am the door.”
And if we follow Him, we’ll know what it’s all for.

Jesus can be your friend.
He’ll be true to the end.
You know God understands.
Love’s the only command.

Haven’t you noticed miracles happen ev’ry day?
Don’t you know Jesus is the only way?
Jesus Himself said, “I am the door.”
And if we follow Him, we’ll know what it’s all for.

Jesus can be your friend.
He’ll be true to the end.
You know God understands.
Love’s the only command.

I’m gonna preach about it,
Teach about it,
Sing about it,
Scream and shout it.

Jesus can be your friend.
He’ll be true to the end.
You know God understands.
Love’s the only command.

Haven’t you noticed miracles happen ev’ry day?
    (I’m gonna preach about it)
    (I’m gonna teach about it)
Don’t you know Jesus is the only way?
    (I’m gonna sing about it)
    (I’m gonna scream and shout it)
Jesus Himself said, “I am the door.”
    (I’m gonna preach about it)
    (I’m gonna teach about it)
And if we follow Him, we’ll know what it’s all for.
    (I’m gonna sing about it)
    (I’m gonna scream and shout it)

Jesus can be your friend.
He’ll be true to the end.
You know God understands.
Love’s the only command.

Jesus can be your friend.
He’ll be true to the end.
You know God understands.
Love’s the only command.

I can only hope you benefit from the song in some way.  I will continue with additional songs in the future.

*****

Previous web log song posts:

#301:  The Song “Holocaust” | #307:  The Song “Time Bomb” | #311:  The Song “Passing Through the Portal” | #314:  The Song “Walkin’ In the Woods” | #317:  The Song “That’s When I’ll Believe” | #320:  The Song “Free” | #322:  The Song “Voices” | #326:  The Song “Mountain, Mountain” | #328:  The Song “Still Small Voice” | #334:  The Song “Convinced” | #337:  The Song “Selfish Love” | #340:  The Song “A Man Like Paul” | #341:  The Song “Joined Together” | #346:  The Song “If We Don’t Tell Them” | #349: The Song “I Can’t Resist You’re Love” | #353:  The Song “I Use to Think” | #356:  The Song “God Said It Is Good” | #362:  My Life to You | #366:  The Song “Sometimes” | #372:  The Song “Heavenly Kingdom” | #378:  The Song “A Song of Joy” | #382:  The Song “Not Going to Notice” | #387:  The Song “Our God Is Good” | #393:  The Song “Why” | #399:  The Song “Look Around You”

Next song:  Given You My Name

Bible and Theology, Music

#396: Why Music Matters

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #396, on the subject of Why Music Matters.

In a private group on Facebook, the Christian Music Network, someone named Esther Waraa asked this question:  Why is music important in praising the Lord?  I immediately decided this was a topic worth exploring, and I had already been saying that I needed a web log post this week, so here goes my exploration.

First, a few credentials and caveats.

I spent five years in Contemporary Christian Radio, but probably before most of you and many of today’s artists were born.  From that I have been publishing a series about the artists who were at the roots of the Christian Contemporary/Rock Music world, the most recent of these articles post #391:  Pat Terry, with links to forty-two previous articles going back to people like Larry Norman and Ralph Carmichael.  I have also been a musician all my life (my kindergarten teacher called me her little songbird), and have begun publishing some of my compositions, the most recent #393:  The Song “Why”, again with links reaching back to twenty-three previously released songs.  I know something about music and particularly about Christian music.

The caveat, though, is that I consider the act of leading worship to be pastoral ministry, leading believers to intimacy with God.  I am not a pastor; I am a teacher.  I have written extensively about that previously, a nine-part series culminating in #107:  Miscellaneous Music Ministries which explains how music might be used in various ministry callings.  It also addresses the modern error that music is always specifically for worship, partly by contrasting it to the error of a previous generation, that music was always specifically for evangelism.  Indeed, music is for worship, but it’s also for evangelism, teaching, and other ministry functions–and sometimes it’s just for entertainment.  The question, though, specifically asked about “praising the Lord”, and thus is about pastoral ministry and worship music.

I am starting in an unlikely place–indeed, when I started thinking about this article I thought I would put this at the end, but the more I considered it the more I thought this really was a primary reason, if not the primary reason.  When we are told in Genesis that God made man in God’s image, up to that point about the only thing we had been told about God was that God created.  He spoke His creations into existence.  Thus the image of God in man is not that we have arms and legs, nor indeed that we have thought and speech and feelings, but ultimately that, like Him, we create.  Creation, usually in the form of artistic or artisinal expression, is the ultimate expression of the image of God in us, and as such is fundamentally glorifying to God.  Thus when we create music we reveal the divine, and when we use that creation to point to the divine we intensify that aspect.

The second point I am going to propose is that music is engaging.  In theory, you can praise God simply by thinking positive thoughts about Him, but you become more involved in that praise if you speak it aloud.  Put it in a poetic form, something with meter, rhyme, alliteration, and it becomes more engaging yet.  Give it a melody, and you become more involved.  Instrumental support, harmonies, other singers, all of this draws the worshipper into the worship.  In a very real sense, your worship is more focused, more intense, when it is sung to an accompaniment.

That suggests another point:  music encourages mutuality.  There is certainly nothing lacking in the glory to God when a hundred people in a room are each individually praising Him, each in his own words and his own way.  However, get that crowd singing the same words to the same music, and suddenly you have a unity, united voices all raising the same praise to God together.  Just as there is power when we agree in prayer, there is power when we agree in praise, and music facilitates that agreement powerfully.

I’m working my way down a list here, but the next point is not insignificant:  music is interesting.  I was a child in what might be termed “light liturgical” churches–people joining in a call to worship, perhaps a responsive reading, an invocation terminating in the Lord’s Prayer, a closing benediction.  I could sleep in those services, probably still today.  That’s not to denigrate the liturgy; for some people it is a great aid to worship.  However, the interesting points really were when we all sang the Doxology, the Gloria Patri, the several hymns.  Music held my attention then, and that matters.  People can easily be lulled into inattention with long prayers and praises, but even if someone else is doing the singing, music is usually interesting.

Finally, I think, music is memorable.  I touch on this in the series on music in ministry previously linked, but the point is that you can close a service with everyone repeating the Aaronic Benediction together, but if instead you close it with everyone singing a worship song, a significant number of people are going to walk out of there still singing their praise to God.  It might even pop back into their head later in the week.  People complain about what are called “earwigs”, that is, songs that get stuck in your head.  What, though, if the song stuck in your head is glorifying God?  Singing our praise now means we are likely to wind up doing so again later.

Thank you, Esther, for the question.  I hope this has been helpful.