If anyone asked how many books there are in the Bible you would immediately answer sixty-six. But have you ever stopped to think that the largest one of the sixty-six is a hymnbook, a wonderful collection of songs and psalms and hymns? These psalms touch on every phase of life, from sunrise to sunset. The choicest devotions of the ages are here—stairs, shall we say, on which the saints of other ages ascended into the presence of God.
We do not value our hymns as much as we should. This is not a criticism but a simple observation. I find that not everyone in the congregation sings, and that really is out of harmony with the clearest counsel of the Lord in both the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy. Someone says, "Well, I don't sing correctly," but that is not the point, for the Lord does not say, "Let everybody sing correctly," but "Let everybody sing." If you have something to praise the Lord for, then sing. I remember a dear old saint who was one of the great preachers in Australia in the early days of our work there. He could not carry a tune in a basket, as we say, but he would always sing just on the one note; but he always praised the Lord. It was good to stand beside him. His heart was full of the praise of the Lord.
Hymns take us back a long way. When we think of Psalms we think of David, perhaps because he wrote most of them, but not all of them, by any means. Some of the psalms might go back a thousand years before David. Perhaps even more than that. The world had songs before it had hieroglyphics. The angels sang at the creation of our world and there has been singing in our world ever since. Hebrew worship was a musical worship led by a cantor, the people responding. Often choirs were placed in different sections of the Temple and would sing in response to one another. One of the lovely antiphonal hymns of praise is Psalm 136.
The Lord was impressing upon the people the vital part of praise in true worship. "O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good," they sang: "for his mercy endureth forever." Notice how often that expression occurs—twenty-six times in all. It is a refrain. "O give thanks to the Lord of lords," one choir would sing, and another or all the congregation would join in, "For his mercy endureth forever." This particular psalm was part of the Great Hallel. Another hallel, and one which was always used at the time of the Passover as they concluded their services, was Psalm 113 through to Psalm 118. In The Desire of Ages we read that Jesus and His apostles sang Psalm 117. Very possibly they sang the others also during the meal, as was customary.David said, "I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth" (Ps. 34:1). The apostle Paul says it this way: "Be filled with the Spirit, converse with one another in the music of psalms, in hymns, and in songs of the spiritual life. Praise the Lord heartily with words and music" (Eph. 5:19, Moffatt).* This was a call to the Christian church. It was a singing church in those days and remained so for a few hundred years. There is nothing more influential in making truth clear to people than to have them sing it. That is why the devil uses those foolish songs we are exposed to all the time, because through such nonsense he keeps people on a very low level of thought. On the other hand, if we let the Spirit have His way with us, our minds will be elevated by the great hymns of the church. When the devil was trying to overthrow the church he did something that was perhaps unusual. He began to write hymns through his agents, and those hymns were hymns of heresy. Many of the great errors of the church crept in through singing. And so in order to combat these errors the bishops met and decided that the people had better not sing at all. And so in the year A.D. 380-381, the Council of Laodicea, which was the "General Conference" back in those days, passed a rule: "Besides the canonical singers who climb into the gallery and sing from the book, shall none sing in the church." A few years later, in A.D. 451, the restriction was even greater. The singing then was left to the monks. And that continued for about a thousand years. It was the Reformation that broke out of that incrustation.
The hymns as we have them in our hymnbooks are really the direct outgrowth of the Reformation. We owe a lot to Luther, of course; but also to others such as Huss, the Bohemian, and to Calvin of France and Switzerland. Before those Reformers there was Wycliffe and his singing preachers—the Lollards.
Calvin feared the intrusion of false teachings, so he restricted the singing to the psalms. "Worshippers must sing nothing but the actual word of God," he said. So the Geneva Psalter and later the Scottish Psalter, and the English Psalter became the hymnbook of the church, particularly of the Puritan group.
When the Puritans came over from Europe to America they brought with them the Geneva or the Scottish Psalter. We can imagine the great song of thanksgiving that echoed around the hills of New England when the Pilgrim Fathers were expressing their joy for what God had done for them. They would be singing the "Old Hundredth," so named because it is a metric setting of Psalm 100. I am sure they would sing that because that was one of their favorites. That hymn is No. 13 in our Church Hymnal. As we sing it together let us change the meter to conform to the way it was sung back there. This majestic tune was composed by one of the music directors in the Calvin Reformation. It is more impressive in its original setting rather than in the revision of about two hundred years later.
Hebrew poetry was not written in rhyme but in parallelism. Our poetry is in rhyme and exact meter. So our forefathers in the great Protestant heritage took the psalms and put them into a metrical version. This became the Psalter, the recognized hymnbook for more than two centuries.