God’s People Sing New Songs

 

1. New songs are salvation songs

 

You will notice in our text that only the 144,000 could learn this new song.  That number in Revelation is the number of God’s elect.  There were twelve tribes in the Old Testament and twelve disciples in the new.  Twelve times twelve is 144 – times the number of completion, which is ten cubed.  So you have 144,000 representing all the believers in the Old Testament and all of the believers in the New Testament singing the same song.   There may indeed be unbelievers who open their mouths to sing these salvation songs – but their sound is not heard because they do not believe the very words they are trying to sing.  

If Adam and Eve could sing, which I’m sure they could, they would have sung a new song.  God came to them in the garden after they had taken the fruit of the tree in an act of open and defiant rebellion.  They hid from God among the trees of the garden.  They were sure that when God came to see them in the garden in the cool of the day, he would come to plan their funeral.  But instead of death, God gave them life after death.  Instead of putting them under the curse of the law, God gave them the promise of a Savior who would remove this curse of sin from them.   Was there ever a hint in God’s promise that Adam and Eve must do something to save themselves?   No.  From the beginning, it was all in God’s hands.  It was all by grace and by faith and not by works.   It would not surprise me in the least if Adam and Eve took the words of Genesis 3:16 and turned them into a new song.  

Was it any different thousands of years later for Abraham?   No.   What does it say in Genesis 15:6.  “Abraham believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”  This is the same theology that Paul so eloquently laid out in Philippians 3. First he bragged about his life as a Pharisee.  Then he called all his good works nothing more than garbage before God.  He said, “I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.”  Can our salvation be explained any clearer than this?  Our good works do not make us righteous before God.  Nor can our sins be counted against us.  We are righteous by faith.  We are right by God by grace alone and by faith alone.   Adam and Abraham and David and Paul all sang the same song when they proclaimed to their sons and daughters and neighbors God’s plan of salvation.

  Martin Franzmann said that theology must sing.  God’s people love to sing their theology.  Our text says that the elect of God sang a new song before the throne.  There are nine “new songs” in the Bible.  This is the last of them.   Could it be that we will make the selection of new songs complete when we sing the tenth together in heaven on the last day?  God’s people love to sing “new songs.”  These news songs are first of all salvation songs, and second, they are songs for every tribe and language and nation and people.

 

 

Page 2  October 31, 2010