Thursday, September 24, 2009

Reflections on Psalm 24

This title is misleading because I'm not really reflecting on Psalm 24, but on something that Psalm 24 made me think about.

That said, I have a small beef with worship songs that are based on Scripture. It's only a small beef because I think that worship songs should be based on Scripture; in fact, parts of Scripture are worship songs. My beef with it is that when I'm reading those Scriptures, I can't help but think of the songs. Psalm 24 reminded me heavily of this because I know of 3 songs on the top of my head that are based on the 10 verses that are said Psalm.

1. Give Us Clean Hands
Verses 3-6 talk about the person who will ascend the hill of the Lord and stand in the holy place. That person is, of course, one who has clean hands, a pure heart, and does not lift his soul to what is false (you thought I was going to say "not lift his soul to another" didn't you?) The generation that does that will be a generation that seeks the face of the God of Jacob. We sang this Chris Tomlin Classic too many times in youth group for this not to be playing in the back of my head while reading this.

2. King of Glory
Verses 7-10 tell the gates and the doors to be lifted up, that the King of glory might come in. It then asks who this King of glory is, and answers with, "The Lord, strong and mighty." I'm starting to think that Chris Tomlin has little imagination, because this is the second time where he's taken words written by David and put them to music (well, second time in this blog post).

3. King of Glory
OK, I almost feel like this one shouldn't count, because this Third Day song has the same title as the Chris Tomlin one (although, this one is older) and really doesn't borrow from the chapter save the question, "Who is this King of glory?" David's hand wasn't too heavily in this one, although the same can't be said for "Your Love Oh Lord," taken almost straight from Psalm 36:5-7.

Anyway, that's my small rant. I can at least commend Misters Tomlin and Powell for keeping their worship songs biblical. Does anyone else have this problem when reading stuff like this, or is just me?

1 comments:

valbuss said...

I make girls find the verses that their favorite worship songs come from and read it from their Bible that week. Alas, almost all my songs I write are taken straight from scripture. Not because I don't have creativity but because the words are so pungent.