One of my favorite Psalms is Psalm
29 because it is all about the voice of the LORD.
As someone who spent most of his
childhood taking vocal lessons, studying and learning how to make my voice
“powerful,” I read this Psalm in amazement at the sheer power of His voice.
I remember a vocal exercise that I
used to do, back when I was learning about breath control, where a candle was
lit and held up in front of my mouth. The goal of this exercise was to sing
with such power and breath control that the sound from my lungs would cause the
flame to flicker.
I read verse 7, which in the NKJV
says,
“The voice of the LORD divides the flames of fire,”
and I imagine how powerful His voice is that it could put
out all those fires in Southern California with a single note. And here I am
with my little squeak trying to make a little candle flicker.
The voice of the LORD is powerful
enough to level the cedars of Lebanon, which were known throughout the Bible to
be huge in lush and thick forests.
My favorite verse in this
particular Psalm is verse 9, which begins:
“The voice of the LORD makes the deer give birth…”
The reason this first half of the verse
stood out to me so much, is because I am a visual learner, so my notes from my
reading usually have a lot of pictures in them to get me to remember them
better. This was the picture I drew for this Psalm:
Even with all of my training and
studying and practicing, there is no way I could make my voice powerful enough
to level cedars and split huge flames and scare a poor dear into labor!
But my number one favorite part of
the whole Psalm does not come until near the very end:
“…and in his temple all cry, “Glory!””
This
entire Psalm so far was about the voice of the LORD, and now, at the very end
is where we come in. Here at the very end is the whole reason I went through
all that training, so that I could use my
voice to make a powerful and natural response to the glory of His voice. Just like the deer responded to God’s glory by giving birth,
we respond through imitation. Is this not what musical worship is about? We,
those who are “in His temple,” are crying out “Glory!” in response to His
glory!
So
next time you are worshipping God through song, make a joyful noise! Sing with
power, in imitation of His power! Sing loud! Sing strong! It doesn’t have to
sound good. Just as good as you can make it. After all, none of us can make a
sound that compares the sounds He makes. Our job as worshippers is to make a
gift to the LORD saying, “This is the best imitation I could make of who You
are!”
