I enjoy music. And when it is glorifying God, particularly so.
Music puts wings on words. It expresses the verbally inexpressible.
As such, it also reflects the soul like little else. Therefore, this can reflect some elements which may be questionable. An otherwise brilliant contemporary song has the following line in it….
“God is for us, God is on our side”.
Rightly or wrongly, since I first heard that, it has been caught in my “mental nit picker”. So, if I may, please allow me to get it off my chest now. Flick it out of the picker if you will. Sorry.
My issue with that lyric is the rather presumptive perspective the lyric seems to imply. Let’s contrast it with the perspective in Joshua 5:13-15….
And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, a Man stood opposite him with His sword drawn in His hand. And Joshua went to Him and said to Him, “Are You for us or for our adversaries?”
So He said, “No, but as Commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”
And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and said to Him, “What does my Lord say to His servant?”
Then the Commander of the Lord’s army said to Joshua, “Take your sandal off your foot, for the place where you stand is holy.” And Joshua did so.
Notice, when asked “Are You for us or for our adversaries?”, Jesus¹ doesn’t even acknowledge that as a legitimate question. Instead, He replies “No, but as Commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”
Why wasn’t Joshua’s² question a legitimate one? Whether Jesus was on Joshua’s side or his enemies side was a moot point. The question was wrong because its perspective was wrong. It looked at things from a human, earthly perspective. The real question was whether either of them on the real side, the right side, God’s side.
God is always for us but He is always on His side. Are we? That’s the real, everyday question.
¹Commentators identify this as a pre-incarnation appearance of Jesus given His identification of Himself as “Commander of the Lord’s army” and the fact He legitimately let Himself be worshipped.
²This is actually an account of two Jesus. The Hebrew name Yeshua means “Yahweh [the Lord] is Salvation” – that is how everyone would have referred to Him at the time.
The direct English spelling of Yeshua is “Joshua”. Yeshua translates from Hebrew into Greek as Ιησούς and Ιησούς translates to the English name “Jesus.”