Musical Instruments in Divine Worship IX.

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CHAPTER IX.

THE CEREMONIAL CHARACTER OF THE TEMPLE PRAISE.

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We are required by the advocates of instrumental music not only to prove to their satisfaction that it was employed in the Old Testament dispensation ceremonially, that is symbolically and typically, but to show in what respect it was a type—what is the particular thing in the present dispensation typified by it. In view of the fact that the Old Testament dispensation, including both the Patriarchal and the Levitical forms, was shadowy and typical, as the mode adopted by Jehovah to present Christ and His Gospel; in view of the fact that this feature stood out prominently from the beginning in the sacrifice, the priesthood, the mode of ratifying a covenant, the birthright, circumcision, the passover, the consecration of the first-born, the selection of Israel, the appointment of their home, and their whole ritual of worship, we might justly enter our protest and be silent, until they show beyond cavil that this feature of worship which they confess to be the only exception in that ritual, is not ceremonial and typical. We cannot imagine a stronger presumption, standing as instrumental music does in the midst of all these surroundings, in favor of its possessing the feature that is common, not only to the worship, but to the dispensation. If there be anything in analogy, the question is settled beyond dispute.

Let it be understood in the outset, that if we fail to show to the satisfaction of instrumentalists the particular thing typified by instrumental music, the argument for the ceremonial feature of it by no means fails. For we affirm that the definite meaning of many ceremonial rites and things has never been satisfactorily determined, either by modern

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Jewish, or Christian learning. Typology is a system of prophecy. Types “prefigure, while prophets foretell,” the same things, and if the definite meaning of many prophecies cannot be ascertained, much less can that of many of the types. A respectable writer has recently affirmed—“We have no difficulty in learning what each of the types and shadows of the ceremonial law that has been done away in Christ was intended to represent.” Another has more recently declared that “Everything that clearly constituted a part of the ceremonial worship had some symbolic or typical significance easy to apprehend or explain.” How different in tone are these utterances from those of a standard writer on Typology.* Complaining of the imperfection of the rules furnished by the mass of writers for the interpretation of types and symbols, he says: “We are far from pretending to master every difficulty connected with the practical management of the subject, and reducing it all to clear and undoubted certainty. No one will expect this who rightly understands its nature and considers either the vastness of the field over which it stretches, or the peculiar character of the ground which it embraces.” With these preliminaries, we undertake to show, as briefly as the subject will admit, that instrumental music in the temple service was ceremonial; and,

1st. We argue from the Levitical use of instruments. We know that this is “everywhere spoken against,” as an argument that does not decide the question. But it is the duty of those who refuse to accept the argument to indicate clearly why it was committed wholly to the Levites. If it be replied that the Levites had other duties assigned them which they aver were not ceremonial, we answer that the same duties were assigned to the priests. There were teaching priests, as well as teaching Levites. “The priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts.” It is

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*Fairbairn.

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a fact of no little weight in the argument that the Levites were ceremonially consecrated to the Lord. At the destruction of the first-born of the Egyptians, God set apart for Himself all the first-born of Israel, and appointed special rites for their ceremonial consecration to Him. He afterwards selected the whole tribe of Levi as a substitute for the first-born of the people. They were then given to Aaron and his sons, to be under their control and supervision for the service of the sanctuary. Hence, frequently what was said to be done by the priests was done by them, and they are found performing the functions that belonged specifically to the priests, as in 2d Chron., xxix, xxxiv, and xxiii, xxxi. Moreover, there was a special service of consecration of the Levites, in the presence of the whole people, in which Aaron and his sons offered them to the Lord, and their special duty in the gift of them to Aaron was to go in to wait upon the service of the tabernacle of the congregation.

2d. The temple where the instrumental service was performed was wholly a ceremonial institution. It was in this respect the same as the tabernacle. When priest or Levite entered it for any service he was to be ceremonially sanctified. The temple itself was thus consecrated to a ceremonial use. Prayer and all the spiritual affections had their ceremonial expression in the tabernacle service. In the consecration of the temple it was so also unless the praise service be the single exception. Even the book of the law, which was read in the service of the temple, must be ceremonially consecrated.

3d. The very people were a ceremonial people—placed under the ceremonial dispensation by their formal consecration to God. They “were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” and at Sinai formally covenanted under Moses as the mediator of a ceremonial dispensation to obey the whole law. These

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considerations, and many more that might be urged in the same line, establish beyond question the fact that if the music performed exclusively by the Levites in the temple service was not ceremonial, it needed to be distinctly so designated, or at least to have some ingredient in its nature that necessarily precluded the idea of the ceremonial; but no one will say that it could not in the nature of things be employed ceremonially.

We have purposely thus far left out of view the trumpets introduced by Moses and assigned for use to the priests exclusively. The music of these trumpets was an important feature in the ceremonial service. In addition to other occasions they were to be sounded in their days of gladness. Their feast of trumpets was especially a time of rejoicing. It was a memorial feast, and though it is not known certainly what it was intended to commemorate, yet it is generally agreed that the blowing of the trumpets signified and foreshadowed the joyful ministration of the Gospel in the New Testament dispensation. No psalmody was employed when the trumpets were first introduced, but when a psalmody was prepared and formally introduced into the temple service by David, the trumpets were employed conjointly with the voice and the instruments as employed by the Levites. The connexion of the three—the trumpets, the voice and the instruments—was so essential that in every instance in which the voice and the instruments are noted as being employed in the psalmody of the temple the use of trumpets is specified also. It is specially noted on the occasion of the dedication of the temple that the four thousand singers and players on instruments of the Levites, together with the one hundred and twenty trumpeters of the priests, were as one to make one sound. The great feature of this one sound was that of the trumpets which, in the hands of

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the priests, was ceremonial. So in 1 Chron., xxv, 5, it is said “All these were the sons of Heman, the king’s seer in the words of God to lift up the horn.” The horn is the trumpet, and the Levites are here represented clearly as acting in that ceremonial relation to the priests designated by their original consecration. The whole temple service was under the control of the chief priest, and to him were subordinate the common priests and the Levites. The instrumentation of the Levites and their singing, and the trumpeting of the priests was one service, and every part of the service had the same general character. If, therefore, the trumpets, instruments and song, in the hands of priests and Levites were combined in conjunction with other ceremonial rites as sacrifice, the carrying of the ark, the burning of incense, &c., we have the clearest evidence in the nature of the case that everything in the exercise was ceremonial. Now it was not the instrumentation alone that was ceremonial. The singing was of the same character, not only because it was rendered by the Levites under priestly supervision and connection with the trumpets, but because it was choral singing. There is no evidence in the Scripture record that the people ever united their voices with those of the Levites in the song except in the first attempt to remove the ark, which was a rejected service. The people waited upon the service as they did in the case of any other ceremonial service. In the fullness of their joy they sometimes shouted; but they are neither represented as singing or playing on the instruments. We have, therefore, in this praise service nothing that is like New Testament worship. Everything had the impress of the ceremonial. Now if the sounding of the trumpets by the priests in its original appointment was typical of the joyful dispensation of the Gospel, and that significance belongs to it as here

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used, so the same significance necessarily belongs to the whole scene of which they are the leading feature. The unity of the service, so prominently specified, necessarily implies the unity of its purpose. If the blowing of the trumpets alone typified the preaching of the Gospel, its significance as a type would be greatly enhanced by the addition to it not only of singing and playing on instruments, but of the psalmody itself, which contains the subject matter of the Gospel more than any other book of the Old Testament. Nothing would make the type more complete than to increase the outward expression by the voice and instruments, and therewith to accompany a system of praise with the Gospel itself clothed in symbolic language, and afterwards to be developed and preached in all its fullness and simplicity. There was thus a progressive development of the type itself, as it came nearer in time to the Gospel dispensation, in harmony with that development of truth which we see in the Psalms beyond any previous revelation—in harmony with the temple development itself, with all its arrangements, as contrasted with the tabernacle, and in harmony with the typical character of David, in whom we have the most distinct representation of the New Testament David.

It may be objected here that, upon this principle the Psalms were merely ceremonial as a system of praise, and that thus we admit the force of the objection urged against the use of the Psalms in New Testament worship as being a ceremonial psalmody. But the principle only adds force to the argument in favor of their continued and exclusive use as a system of praise. That which is ceremonially administered is itself moral. The believer’s relation to the church is a moral and abiding relation. Its ceremonial expression was once circumcision. The relation remains, but the ceremonial has passed away, and another form

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now indicates it. The moral law was the very basis of all the ceremonial rites of the Old Testament dispensation, and, by the whole ritual of that service, it was ceremonially administered. For this end the Jews were made a typical people, and, not only their religious, but their civil and national life were wholly conformed to this principle. Hence, the form of government as a theocracy. Hence, the peculiar nature of the sanctions by which the moral law was enforced. The penalty attached to the commandments, from the first to the seventh, inclusive, was death. Even the gathering of sticks to kindle a fire on the Sabbath was death. The principles of the whole law were specifically applicable to the Jews in the minutia of their civil code, for the purpose of distinguishing them as a peculiar people—as a typical people, in all respects conformed to the leading idea of their existence—the ceremonial administration of the moral law. The rigid and severe sanctions by which it was enforced were symbols of the inviolability of its principles, and the certainty of the application of its terrible penalty of spiritual and eternal death, and setting forth in the strongest light the necessity of that atonement which was typically exhibited to them in the sacrifice.

The form of the Mosaic law as written upon the tables of stone is Jewish and typical, and hence founded upon the redemption from Egyptian bondage. “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Its precepts were made specifically applicable to them. This is manifest particularly in the verbiage of the fourth and tenth commandments. The Sabbath is made still to retain its positive enactment as a seventh day observance, and is made the basis of a seventh year Sabbath to the Jews. The promise attached to the fifth commandment is that of long and peaceful possession of the land of Canaan. The principle of the ceremonial administration of the moral law is one of special interest,

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as shedding a vast amount of light upon that dispensation, and might be pursued to almost any extent in showing how completely the people of Israel were subjected to the ceremonial, as a “schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.” Were the eternal and unchangeable principles of that law in any respect impaired by its ceremonial administration to the Jewish people? Nay. Rather, on the other hand, do these moral principles stand out with grander lustre. For that law comes to us as an enigma in a course of solution during the whole ceremonial dispensation, and actually solved in the death and resurrection of Christ the Savior; and in this process, completed in the close of the canon of Scripture, we have the glorious unity of the Old and New Testaments. The whole principle is applicable to the Psalms as a system of praise. They are such a combination of the principles of the moral law, in conjunction with the promises of the gospel, as to constitute a summary of Old and New Testament doctrines in their unity. As that which is ceremonially administered is itself moral, so the ceremonial always implies the moral. The Psalms are clothed in the form and phraseology of a ceremonial administration. They are a Jewish composition. There is, perhaps, not a greater proportion of this feature in the Psalms than there is in the ten commandments, as they were “written and engraven upon stone.” But there is enough to indicate the character of the institution to which they were originally subjected. The tabernacle, the temple, the priests, the altar, the sacrifice, the feasts, the trumpets, timbrels and the lifting up of the voice, were all, as ceremonies, living realities to the Jew. They were perfectly consonant with his whole outward religious life. It was necessary that, having such a system of worship overshadowing everything else in their typical system, their songs should have imbedded in them the great features of the ceremonial. Much stress has been laid by the instrumentalists upon the fact that the Psalms

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are lyrical. They are lyrical, and we would only emphasize the fact. If we consider the word Psalmoi as a lyrical term, and give to it and its verb and participle all the force that is claimed for them by the advocates of instrumental music; if we consider the injunctions to blow the trumpet and to play on the various instruments, as literal to the Jew (as they generally were,) we have only in these facts the clearer evidence that the Psalms were administered ceremonially, just as the moral law was. We may go further, and not only admit, but affirm, that the terms “sing” and “song” are terms which, as used by the Jews, and especially by David in introducing the praise service for temple use, included the whole service of the trumpets, harps, cymbals, psaltries and the voice. It is the language describing the one sound—the lifting up of the horn, as clearly the symbolical expression of praise as the incense was the symbolical expression of prayer. When the Psalmist says, “I will sing with a psaltery,” he no more means the literal and personal use of the psaltery, apart from its ceremonial character, than when saying, “I will sacrifice,” he means that he would offer sacrifices apart from their ceremonial use, or than that he himself would burn incense when he says, “I will offer unto thee burnt sacrifices of fatlings with incense.” We repeat, that the whole system of ceremonial allusions, including their lyrical feature, was necessarily interwoven with the Psalms, and imbedded in them, as the result of their having been ceremonially employed.

David, therefore, in introducing a system of psalmody into the ceremonial worship of the Jews, did a work only second in importance to that of Moses in establishing the ceremonial dispensation of the moral law, and it is because his authority stands out so prominently in bringing the kingdom up from the low estate in which Saul had left it, providing for the building of the temple and the re-ordering

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of all its service, that he became one of the most eminent types of Christ our New Testament David, and that the New Testament Church is figuratively called the Tabernacle of David. The literal tabernacle has, indeed, fallen down in the passing away of the ceremonial. But the immovable foundations remained in the imperishable moral law, fulfilled by Christ, and the psalmody, upon which are built a more glorious tabernacle. David stands as the central figure between Moses and Christ, and the very epoch for the introduction of the grand ceremonial order, which he gave to the worship of God, was significant of the greater perfection and glory of the New Testament Church. For it was the millenium of the Jewish Church and the height of the glory of the nation.

Now, this view of the ceremonial administration of the system of psalmody just leaves that psalmody in the same relation to the New Testament in which the moral law is left—easily accommodated in its ceremonial and symbolical character, to the simple dispensation of the gospel, and it exhibits clearly the basis upon which the Psalms rest, as the very same as that upon which the moral law rests, when its peculiar administration has passed away. It brings out the evidence in the clearest light, that the system remains as specifically an appointment, for its original design, as that the moral law remains specifically for its original design. Neither the law nor the psalmody needs a new enactment for New Testament use. It is upon this solid basis we rest for perpetual authority for the exclusive use of the psalms in the worship of God.

The New Testament explains and enforces the moral law as wholly spiritual, and frees it from the corrupt glosses which had been put upon it during the ceremonial administration. It indicates, in the same way, the spiritual use of the Psalms for all time. We find, in the New Testament, the moral law as fulfilled by Christ, freed from the

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ceremonial dispensation, and we, of course, have the Psalms freed from the same feature.

If there be any authority for employing instruments in New Testament worship, it must inevitably be found in the New Testament itself, which has established a new dispensation, both of the law and of the psalmody.