No Googling or looking anything up. Just off of the top of your head, who said the following? The first to guess correctly will win a prize.
Our music cannot be like the music of the world, because our God is not like their gods. Most of the world’s music reflects the world’s ways, the worlds standards, the world’s attitudes. the world’s gods. To attempt to use such music to reach the world is to lower the gospel in order to spread the gospel. If the world hears that our music is not much different from theirs, it will also be inclined to believe that the Christian way of life is not much different from theirs. Christians cannot honestly sing the world’s philosophies nor can the world honestly sing the Christian’s message, because they sing from utterly different hearts. The Christian’s heart and music belong to God and His righteousness, while the world’s heart and music belong to Satan and his unrighteousness.
Because the Christian’s music is God’s music, it will be sung in heaven throughout all the ages to come. And because the world’s music is Satan’s music, it will one day cease, never to be heard again. The sounds of the world’s “harpists and musicians and fluttplayers and trumpeters will not be heard . . . any longer” (Rev 18:22). To those who make music that is not His, God declares “I will silence the sound of your songs and the sound of your harps will be heard no more” (Ezek. 26:13). In hell, the ungodly will not even have their own music.
The pulsating rhythms of native African music mimics the restless, superstitious passions ol their culture and religion. The music of the Orient is dissonant and unresolved, going from nowhere to nowhere, with no beginning and no end—just as their religions go from cycle to cycle in endless repetitions of meaningless existence. Their music, like their destiny, is without resolution. The music of much of the Western world is the music of seduction and suggestiveness, a musical counterpart of the immoral, lustful society that produces, sings, and enjoys it.
Rock music, with its bombastic atonality and dissonance, is the musical mirror of the hopeless, standardless, purposeless philosophy that rejects both God and reason and floats without orientation in a sea of relativity and unrestrained self-expression. The music has no logical progression because it comes from a philosophy that renounces logic. It violates the brain because its philosophy violates reason. It violates the spirit, because its philosophy violates truth and goodness. And it violates God, because its philosophy violates all authority outside of itself.
Not only the titles and lyrics of many rock songs but the names of many rock groups shamelessly flaunt a godless, immoral, and often demonic orientation. The association of hard rock with violence, blasphemy, sadomasochism, sexual immorality and perversion, alcoholol and drugs, and Eastern mysticism and the occult arc not accentual. They are fed from the same ungodly stream. A leading rock singer once said, “Rock has always been the devil’s music. It lets in the baser elements.” Another testified, “I find myself evil. I believe in the devil as much as God. You can use either to get things done.” Putting a Christian message in such musical form does not elevate the form but degrades the message to the level already established in the culture by that form.
A great majority of young people in modern Western society are continually assaulted with a philosophy set to music that simultaneously destroys their bodies, short-circuits their minds, and perverts their spirits. A young man who was converted out of that involvement once said to me, “Whenever l hear rock music, I feel a tremendous urge to get drunk or go back on drugs.” The association was so strong that simply hearing the music triggered his old addictions.
Many of the physical and emotional effects of rock music can be demonstrated scientifically. Howard Hansen of the Eastman School of Music once wrote, “First, everything else being equal, the further the tempo is accelerated in music from the pulse rate toward the upper limit of practical tempo, the greater becomes the emotional tension.” He says further that “as long as the subdivisions of the metric units are regular and the accents remain strictly in conformity with the basic patterns, the effect may be accelerated but will not be disturbing. Rhythmic tension is heightened by increase in dynamic power.”
Several years ago a college in Colorado made a study of the effects of music on plants. Plants exposed to beautiful, soothing music thrived and turned toward the speaker. In an otherwise identical environment, another group of the same type of plant was exposed to acid rock. Those plants turned away from the speaker and within three days had shriveled and died. Further experimentation proved that the sound waves of the rock music had actually destroyed the plants cells.
Whether or not human cells are destroyed by rock music, things of even greater value are destroyed. When fast tempo, unrhythmical beat, high volume, and dissonance are coupled with wild shrieks, blasphemous and lewd lyrics, and suggestive body movements, the brain is bypassed, the emotions are mangled, the conscience is hardened, and Satan has an open door. Even the ancient pagan Aristotle wisely observed: “Music represents the passions of the soul, and if one listens to the wrong music he will become the wrong kind of person.”
About Scott Aniol
Scott Aniol is the founder and Executive Director of Religious Affections Ministries. He is director of doctoral worship studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he teaches courses in ministry, worship, hymnology, aesthetics, culture, and philosophy. He is the author of Worship in Song: A Biblical Approach to Music and Worship, Sound Worship: A Guide to Making Musical Choices in a Noisy World, and By the Waters of Babylon: Worship in a Post-Christian Culture, and speaks around the country in churches and conferences. He is an elder in his church in Fort Worth, TX where he resides with his wife and four children. Views posted here are his own and not necessarily those of his employer.
