We’ve all heard of the Speed of Light, according to Einstein it is the fastest any particle can move in the universe, an incredible 186,000 miles per second. If you were to stand outside looking up at a space ship orbiting the earth at the speed of light, in the time it takes to say “Jehoshaphat” it would have passed overhead Seven times!!
The speed of sound is another fact we’re aware of. Sound travels through air from its source at about 761 miles per hour. That’s why the thunder from a lightning bolt takes a little while to reach us, and the faster it does, the closer the lightning bolt was. Yet in outer space, where there is no air, sound cannot travel at all.
So science can measure the speed of light and the speed of sound, but today what we are going to unravel is something science can never measure, never even thinks to. The sound of light and what its connection is with music.
At times of great joy we sing praises to our God. But even more so at times of great stress. I think about the scene in the Titanic movies, where the great ship is going down with all those left behind knowing their fate is sealed, and what do they do? They sing “Nearer my God to Thee.”
We may recognize from our own experience that singing moves us closer to God; even when it is hardest to do, when the words choke you as your throat closes around them in grief. But you sing anyway, sing through your pain, sing your way into God’s presence and He comforts you. How does this work? Why does music heal?
I have a confession to make: At heart I am a scientist, which to me means a person who studies the way the world is put together, trying to figure it out. I fell in love with the flow of it, the way things all worked together, interconnected, all congruent patterns and fluidity: The more I knew and understood, the more I was in awe of the way the macrocosm of the universe, the cyclical movements of solar systems and galaxies, all followed the same basic plan, and how that plan was mimicked all the way down to the simplest and tiniest particle of matter, the atom.
I was entranced by the way in which living things were designed to adapt and change as the world around them changed. Is evolution anti-Christ? No! No, not at all: Evolution, the way it works, the incredible perfection of its design, is proof that God is behind its creation, not the opposite. And I am equally as inspired and intrigued by the things that do not fit the so called “laws of nature” as those that do; those anomalies such as how a bee can dance, a hummingbird can fly 2000 miles across the ocean without a flower in sight. It is the exception that proves the rule, they say…In this case the exceptions prove that God has made the rules, and He can also break them if He wishes.
Think of the words in the beautiful song the Hillsong United team wrote: “So will I.”
“And as you speak, a hundred billion galaxies are born, in the vapor of your breath the planets form…”
One day one of my students, otherwise brilliant in the areas of physics and electronics, said that he couldn’t understand biology at all because it was like “magic.”
Indeed, magic is just what it is. The magic, the miracle of life, created by a divine hand, a perfection that could never be explained by any other rationale than that there is a Creator at work, the Lord God.
“And as you speak, a hundred billion creatures catch your breath, evolving in pursuit of what You said…”
No, this isn’t my idea, my inspiration, it’s God’s.
One day a few months back, I heard a little item on NPR, related to music and musicians,: It was talking about a belief among some musicians that there is this entire parallel universe made solely of music, and from which musicians draw their inspiration for chords, melodies and harmonies, entire symphonies floating in the universe of sound, already written, which they have only to reach into, to capture.
Hmmm. Interesting, I thought.
A week or so later, randomly and seemingly out of nowhere, God said to me “Listen for Music.”
It’s always a little strange, that quiet voice of my Maker. It doesn’t come from the brain, at least not the “thinking” part of the brain, the cortex and prefrontal lobe. It’s more like a little voice somewhere at the back of my skull, like a quiet word from Someone right behind me. It’s neither a shout nor a whisper, and for me- at least – it’s never more than a few words. My God is succinct and to the point. Sometimes in answer to my prayer about a difficult situation, the voice simply says “Don’t talk”, and I understand the meaning to be, don’t say what’s on your mind, it’s just going to make things worse. Sometimes it is “wait, be patient.” Sometimes it is just “love.” That’s the most frequent answer to any question, I’ve found. “Love.” It usually solves everything. But this time the still small voice said: “Listen for Music”, and although I didn’t hear the words “in everything” that’s what I felt He meant. “Listen for Music in everything.”
Music in everything.
Some music in nature is pretty obvious, like the sighing of wind through the leaves of the trees, or more quietly the air itself, countless billions of molecules blowing against other molecules, spinning into, hitting and spinning off again like bumper cars at the fair. There is music in the sound of waves pounding on the reef, breaking themselves apart in a crash of noisy cymbals as they follow gravity to collapse against the rocks. Even these have different symphonies: There is the sound of laughter when the waves are small and playful, or the roar of a mountain collapsing into rubble when, whipped by wind into monsters twenty feet high, they fall onto the shore.
There is the quiet music of the creatures that hide amongst the battered rocks, their silent supplications beneath the waves, their prayers drowned by the thunder of the surf can yet be heard by God. And on the distant shore the drumbeat of clattering pebbles rolling against each other up and down the beach.
“If the oceans roar your greatness, so will I.”
Audible music in nature includes the sound of birds singing, coquis calling, dogs barking, roosters crowing. But what about the music of their wings flapping, their soft little feet scrabbling over a leaf, the sound of their breath or their tiny – or not so tiny – hearts beating. And there are even quieter songs as well, sounds we never hear except in our imaginations: the music of plants growing as they reach for the sun, their leaves breathing in and out, the internal sound of their cells rearranging the air into food that feeds their extending limbs. And perhaps they also sing a song of joy and praise that only they can hear. They, and God.
‘If creation sings your praises so will I.”
Listen for music, He told me.
So I went to the Bible, to see what it says in there about music as it relates to God. And I went as well to the internet to see what I could find has been written about the music of the universe. And what I found is what I want to share with you today.
But first, because I am truly not worthy on my own to teach you anything, can you please join me in prayer that I get it right?
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Here, in this church, we regularly experience the miracle of music, don’t we? When we lift our voices in songs of praise and worship, we not only invite the presence of the Holy
Spirit into our midst, into our collective as well as individual soul, we also find ourselves invited into God’s presence, that which we call Heaven. He is here, with us; and we are there with him, and we know it, we feel it. It may be only a temporary visit before we return to the mundane world of every day, but it is enough to remind us of what is real, what is truly important. It shows us a place that we can go into and out of with God’s grace and invitation. And it would seem the entry is very often through music.
In John 10:9 Jesus said: “I am the gate, whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.”
I’m pretty sure this sense we have of entering the presence of God when we sing our praises to Him is what Jesus was talking about, this coming in and going out of heaven through Him, who is the gate. But what does music have to do with this.?
Paul exhorted the followers to sing praises in Ephesians 5:19 Amplified Bible (AMP)
19 Speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, [offering praise by] singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord;
But why? How does this singing work to connect us to God and His universe, His creation of which we are part?
It is said that God is both immanent – which means within every part of His creation – and transcendent, which means outside of all His created works. So perhaps the answer to how music and song helps connect the God within us to the God beyond lies in the very nature of creation itself, what I will call the musical universe.
This is by no means an original thought: In a theory known as the Harmony of the Spheres, Pythagoras more than 2500 years ago proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique harmonies based on their orbital revolutions, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically imperceptible to the human ear.
Maybe we don’t consciously hear the sound of the spheres because sound doesn’t travel through a vacuum. But I think that perhaps outside the limitations of the body, the spiritual self hears this music perfectly. Listen for music, then, with the spirit not the ears.
There have been scientists and musicians that have also sought to find melodies in the structure and pattern of our own DNA.
An article on CBS news from 2003 said this: “Imagine the human genome as music. Unravel DNA’s double helix, picture its components lined up like piano keys and assign a note to each. Run your finger along the keys.”
Spanish scientists – intrigued by music’s effect on us, how it can make toddlers dance and adults cry, turned human DNA into music and recorded what they call an audio version of the blueprint for life by arbitrarily assigning tones of the eight-note, do-re-mi scale to each base molecule in a sequence of DNA. The end result was what they called “Genoma Music”.
Continuing my search, I Googled “Musical universe” and found to my surprise that many of the greatest thinkers in human history have believed in a connection between the human soul and the music of the universe, and there are many passages in the Bible that support this idea as well.
For example, Beethoven, one of the world’s greatest composers, said: “Music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit.”
What exactly did he mean by “life of the sense?”
In his physical form, all man knows of the world and even of himself, is what his brain interprets from nerve impulses sent by his sense organs. What we see exists first in our mind when light causes nerve messages to be sent to our brains. Our brains then interpret those nerve messages and feed the information back into our mind as “reality” – what the world outside of us looks like. But in truth this reality resides primarily in our heads. The same is true of what we hear, touch, smell and even of the state of our internal organs and body position in space…all of this information comes through our senses to our brains, and is interpreted and made “real” to us by that organ. This is what is meant by the” life of the senses.”
But what is the life of the spirit Beethoven talks about when he says: “Music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit.” It is that which is outside this world of senses and stimuli, it is the eternal self which has no time, place or form, but resides outside of that body. It is that part of us that connects with God.
So Beethoven is claiming that through music, through the senses of hearing and feeling harmonies and melodies and beats and rhythm, we somehow connect to the divine part of ourselves and thus to God.
As E.E. Cummings, Christian philosopher, poet and writer put it in his poem “i thank you God for this most amazing day:”
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
More than providing a link between the physical self and the soul, however, music may well play an even greater role, connecting us with all of Creation.
Corinne Heline, an American author and Christian mystic who died in 1975, wrote “By harmony all phenomena are formed and sustained. There is a scientific statement to the effect that this earth is a vast harmonic wave system that is built and sustained by unheard music”. – Corinne Heline (1882-1975)
Compare that with what Ancient Greek Philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras said 500 years before Christ was born:
Each celestial body, in fact each and every atom, produces a particular sound on account of its movement, its rhythm or vibration. All these sounds and vibrations form a universal harmony in which each element, while having its own function and character, contributes to the whole. – Pythagoras (569-475 BC)
What a wonderful, amazing symphony is in the universe around us, playing for God’s ear, in praise of their creator.
“If the stars were made to worship, so will I.”
But how do these philosophies compare with what is written in the Bible?
The prophet Isaiah, who lived about 100 years earlier than Pythagoras, and about 1000 miles to south, says in Isaiah 49:13 (AMP
Shout for joy, O heavens, and rejoice, O earth,
And break forth into singing, O mountains!
Break forth into singing, O mountains? Shout for joy, O heavens, O earth? Isn’t this a way of saying these celestial bodies have sounds and vibrations, rhythms and harmonies?
And isn’t that also like what David wrote in Psalm 98:7-87
Let the sea thunder and roar, and all the things it contains,
The world and those who dwell in it.8
Let the rivers clap their hands;
Let the mountains sing together for joy and delight.
Are these just poetic metaphors, or are they to be taken literally? Do all the things that God has created have a music, a rhythm and harmony to them, a secret song of joy and praise to their Creator?
Listen for Music in Everything.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with the structure of matter, but let me give you a super brief lesson that may help. The universe, at its essence, is constructed of three primary things, Matter, Space and energy. Space is merely that part of the universe not occupied by matter, and energy is that force which moves matter.
Now, matter itself is constructed of tiny particles which are so small they cannot be measured directly. These particles are called atoms. It is said there are more atoms in one grain of sand than all the leaves on all the trees in the entire world, they’re that small. Yet an atom is not a single solid thing but is constructed of still smaller and smaller parts. And no matter what “kind” of atom it is, from Oxygen to Gold to Lead, all atoms are made of the same few basic parts.
Interestingly, the atom is built in the same model as our planets and their moons, or our sun and its planets. Around the center of each atom, like a planet, are one or more tiny subatomic particles, like moons. These tiny particles called electrons orbit at close to the speed of light, giving the atom most of its apparent size, although most of the atom is just empty space. Since these whirring, spinning, bumping little pieces of matter make up everything, the stars, the planets, the mountains – even the rocks that sit in apparent silence – wouldn’t this movement make a constant background sound?
“If the rocks cry out in silence, so will I.”
Psalm 98:4 says: Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth,burst into jubilant song with music;
This idea is echoed in the words of the 19th century Italian writer and activist, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872): Music is the harmonious voice of creation: an echo of the invisible world, one note of the divine concord that the entire universe is destined one day to sound. –
And from the words of Thomas Carlyle an 19th century Scottish essayist, historian and writer: See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of nature being everywhere music… – Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
So, there are many throughout history, both prophets and philosophers, men and women, Christians and other religious prophets, that believe that the universe has a basic foundation in music and harmony. But how does that relate to our experiences, as Christians, in reaching the divine through hymns and songs of worship and praise to the Lord?
Sufi philosopher and poet Hafiz, in the 14th century wrote:
People say that the soul, on hearing the song of creation, entered the body, but in reality the soul itself was the song. – Hafiz (1320-1390)
The soul itself was the song.
You, your soul, that part that connects the physical to the spiritual self, is music.
And from another Sufi Master five centuries later there is this:
- What makes us feel drawn to music is that our whole being is music: our mind and body, the nature in which we live, the nature which has made us, all that is beneath and around us, it is all music. – Hazrat Inyat Khan (Sufi Master) (1882-1927)
Isn’t this exactly the same as what King David says in Psalm 108.1?
1 My heart, O God, is steadfast;
I will sing and make music with all my soul…our whole being is music, …the soul itself was the song.
What a beautiful idea, and how well it explains this feeling we get of connecting with God, with heaven and with each other when we sing praises and worship to our Lord.
But the thought that struck me as the most profound was this:
Man is a musical being. His origin is in the spoken Word. By sound was he sustained and by music he evolved. One day he will recognize music as a vital factor in the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual evolution of the whole human race. – Corinne Heline (1882-1975
Let me say that again.
- Man is a musical being. His origin is in the spoken Word. By sound was he sustained and by music he evolved. One day he will recognize music as a vital factor in the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual evolution of the whole human race. – Corinne Heline (1882-1975
I started this message by saying that I wanted to discover why it is that when we sing songs of praise and worship, we enter into the presence of God.
I wanted to explore the relationship of that experience to what it says in John 10:9 ,
when Jesus said “I am the gate, whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.”
Also, I titled today’s message “The Sound of Light”, but I haven’t said one word about that yet, have I?
So here we go. Connection time.
In Genesis 1:1-3 it says .”In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth….3. And God said Let there be light, and there was light…”
But in John 1:1 it says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.”
So, which version of creation is true?
They both are of course, so now our task is to figure out how do we marry the meaning?
In the beginning God – through the Word, which was who we now call Jesus – created the heavens and the earth. God said “Let there be light” and Jesus is that Light the light of all mankind.
John 3:19 says “Light has come into the world.” in referring to Jesus.
And in 8:12 Jesus affirms this, saying “I am the light of the world.”
So how do we tie all this together, how do we answer the question: How does music connect us with the divine, with Jesus and The Holy Spirit and God?
Jesus is the light, and we sing to connect to that light, and through that light connect to God transcendent and immanent. We sing to that light, to enter His realm – heaven – through the Gate, Jesus.
Therefore if Jesus is the light, and is as well the Gate to heaven, and if we find we can enter that gate through music, through becoming one with music, then the light and the gate, and Jesus, must also be music.
So what is the Sound of light?
It’s Jesus, the Lord our God. His word is music, His light is music, His creation is music. We are music.
He said: Listen for Music.
He is the music in everything, in all creation. In us.
One of the most familiar and beloved, hymns is Amazing Grace, but did you ever notice what the first stanza says? Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound…”
So what is the take home message?
Sing.
Even when your heart is breaking and the words choke up in your throat, sing anyway. Sing louder.
Sing to enter God’s realm, sing to find peace, to connect with the divine.
No matter how you feel or what is going on in your life, sing.
And let your prayers be songs of praise.
For by knowing that all of creation is made of music, singing praises to its Creator will connect you to that creation and to the Creator himself.
It’s a Beautiful Gate.
You will find peace and love and God within.
Listen for Music.