“Tick, tick, tick, tick. Pre-Chorus, Vamp! Tick, tick, tick.”
The electric guitar slowly builds from a palm mute to a low growl. Across the stage, the drummer locks eyes with the lead as the music swells. Though there are no lyrics for the pre-chorus, the lead singer builds the congregation with spontaneous worship.
“All the glory to you, God! We bring you all the praise!” he cries breathlessly into the microphone. With hands lifted high, the congregation erupts into a cheer as the lights in the room pan towards the ceiling in time with the music.
Riding on the wave of emotion, the lead continues his spontaneous praise, weaving in words from the previous verse: “Break their jaws, Lord! Destroy the wicked!” The music builds to a crescendo:
Pour out Your wrath, O Lord, upon their way,
Let Your fierce anger, like a fire, display.
Desert their place, make it a barren land,
No one shall dwell where wickedness stands.For they persecute the wounded and the weak,
And mock their pain, the tears upon their cheek.
Charge them with their crimes,
heap guilt upon their name,
May they not partake in salvation's holy flame.
“Tick, tick, tick, tick, Breakdown.”
Nuclear ending.
Does the above “worship experience” seem alien to you? Would you feel surprised, or perhaps concerned if you walked into a church service, and heard them singing this? I won’t lie — I’ve been attending church for about thirty years, and I’d be shocked to hear this sang on Sunday. This song seems out of place among hymns like “Amazing Grace” and “Death Was Arrested”. Christians shouldn’t sing songs asking God to send his enemies to eternal damnation, right?
I picked those verses straight from the Bible — and dressed them up a little with ChatGPT. If you turn your Bible to Psalm 69, you can find this song with a helpful little annotation: For the choir director: A psalm of David, to be sung to the tune “Lilies”. King David, the boy shepherd who slew Goliath, also wrote seventy-five psalms of worship, recorded for all time in God’s word. And this one was meant to be sung.
Psalm 69 is an imprecatory psalm — a psalm that calls down God’s wrath on his enemies. If I feel that such psalms don’t belong in Christian worship, then I would be unable to worship with King David — one of the Bible’s greatest heroes and worship leaders.
There are three possible ways for us to think about the imprecatory psalms:
King David wasn’t Jesus, so he didn’t get everything right. The imprecatory psalms are examples of David sinning by not remembering God’s grace and mercy.
The imprecatory psalms were good back then, but now Jesus tells us to love our enemies, so we don’t need to sing these any more.
We’ve forgotten what it means to worship.
(Thanks in advance to John Piper for his excellent sermon on the imprecatory psalms.) We can do away with the first two objections in a single stroke: Psalm 69 is cited in the New Testament twice — the disciples remember it as Jesus cleanses the temple, and Jesus quotes it as he leads the disciples to the garden. Jesus explains that David was inspired by the Holy Spirit as he wrote, and the New Testament does not shy or make apology for the imprecatory psalms.
With those excuses out of the way, I’m led to believe there is only one answer to why the imprecatory psalms sound so foreign to us: we have forgotten what it means to worship.
Worship 101: A Need for Teaching
I volunteered for about five years leading a small group for middle school boys at my church. One thing I learned was how much I took for granted the Christian education I received as a young boy. Prayer has become a skill like tying my shoe laces, or riding a bike. I don’t have to think about how to do it, I just do it — and mistakenly assume everyone above the age of ten has already learned these things too.
One evening, I asked one of the boys to close out the group with prayer — and I was shocked when he sheepishly admitted he didn’t know how to pray. No one had ever taught him. I felt ill. It was like walking into an orphanage, and finding a boy that didn’t know how to tie his own shoes. No parent had ever knelt by his feet, and lovingly guided his hands to teach him how to tie his laces in a bow.
But fortunately, I didn’t forget how my parents and Sunday school teachers led me through The Lord’s Prayer. (How thankful I am for those many loyal men and women, whose names I have long forgotten!) What’s more, I didn’t have to create a lesson on the spot. Jesus had already gone before me, and taught his disciples to pray. I turned my Bible to Matthew 6, and led my boys through The Lord’s Prayer and the P.R.A.Y model: Praise, Repent, Ask for others, and then Yourself.
I think there are many such missed opportunities for teaching. Like tying laces, we just assume that everyone understands things like worship. “Why bother teaching people how to worship?” we think. “All they have to do is show up and sing along! This is too simple to mess up!”
But what happens when a young Christian with passion and talent steps up to the plate, and joins the worship band? If they’ve been taught that worship is just singing along along, then their worship will become just playing along. Eventually, a sudden departure of the current worship leader will leave that young Christian at the helm of the ship. It’s one thing to be able to lead a band in song, but it’s an entirely different thing to lead a congregation in worship.
We are failing our young men and women if we don’t train them what the Bible says about worship. Can I illustrate the importance of this? Consider this story from Leviticus 10.
1Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. 2 So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. 3 Moses then said to Aaron, “This is what the Lord spoke of when he said:
“‘Among those who approach me
I will be proved holy;
in the sight of all the people
I will be honored.’”Aaron remained silent.
- Leviticus 10:1-3
It’s important to note two things here: first, Aaron was 83 when he and Moses spoke with Pharaoh — so Aaron’s sons are not mere children, but fully grown adults. Secondly, the fact that God instantly killed them means that this error wasn’t a simple mistake, it was intentional. Nadab and Abihu didn’t just mix up Wednesday’s incense with Friday’s — they knew how the incense was to supposed to be offered, and decided to craft their own protocols.
The Gravity of Priestly Duties
God’s response may seem unreasonable at first, but you need to understand that Nadab and Abihu were top ranking priests who had a sacred duty to fulfill in the service of the Lord. It may help to illustrate the significance of this position by comparing it to something in modern day.
Consider the reverence and protocols surrounding the “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier”. The historic monument has been under 24/7 guard since 1937 to prevent the public from trespassing the sacred ground. The sentinels follow a rigid protocol, marching twenty-one steps from one end of the tomb to the other. Each trip takes exactly twenty-one seconds.
Being a guard at the tomb is a position of high honor. Sentinels are required to memorize over 35 pages about Arlington Cemetery, including the names and locations of over 300 graves. Just preparing the uniform for the next day takes approximately six hours, and errors in the uniform are measured to 1/64th of an inch.
During the changing of the guard, a Staff Sargent meticulously and mechanically inspects the incoming sentinel for any violation of the uniform dress code. In one well known incident, the Staff Sargent accidentally dropped the sentinel’s rifle during inspection, and the bayonet stabbed the sentinel in the foot. The incoming guard barely flinched. So well was he trained, so highly did he regard his sacred duty, that he instinctively suffered the pain silently to avoid bringing dishonor to the tomb he guards.
Can you imagine the shame a guard would experience, coming out for his hourly duty, only to be sent back for having a hair out of place, or his uniform rumpled? Worse still — imagine if the replacement guard came out dressed in a tuxedo, and tried to argue with the Staff Sargent that his uniform choice was good enough for his duty.
“What’s the big deal? A tuxedo is formal attire! It’s just as good as any old military uniform!”
Any guard who would make such a statement would be demonstrating a shocking level of disrespect for both his position, and all the unknown soldiers that this tomb represents — and would be immediately relieved of his duty.
Now, let’s return to Nadab and Abihu.
“What’s the big deal, God? It’s just incense! So what if it’s the wrong type, or the wrong time, or whatever? We trying to honor you!” I suspect this is how Nadab and Abihu thought about their priestly duties, and God saw it fit to relieve them of their post immediately.
How odd that we would all be shocked and angered to see a sentinel so flagrantly breaching protocol at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — but puzzled at why God would be so angry with Nadab and Abihu. If rigid protocols show honor and respect to our nation’s men and women for their sacrifice, how much more so can we show honor and respect for the living God by obeying the rules and standards he set forth for worship?
But what are those standards? Regrettably, I don’t have the time to expand on them here. Hopefully, I will be able to write more later. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe, or leave me a note.
For now, I want to leave you with these thoughts. First, the worship that we are accustomed to in our culture might not look like the worship we can find in scripture. We have great liberty in Christ to worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:23) — but we should make sure that we worship as God’s word teaches us to, not as our society is accustomed to, and not as seems appropriate to us. If scripture’s example of God honoring worship sounds foreign to us, we should engage with that scripture rather than avoid it.
Second, I want you to understand that the role of a worship leader goes beyond leading the band. If you look at the title to Psalm 69, it says “to the director of music”. I’m led to believe that the “director of music” was an orchestra conductor. A musician leading other musicians. The worship leader was David (Psalm 42:4), and he had simply delegated leading the band to someone else! Imagine if the worship leader at your church was the head pastor!
But what of the imprecatory psalms? Where do aggressive and hostile hymns fit in modern worship? And how does this relate to teaching and leading? To illustrate these two points, I have one last story to leave you with.
Christmas in Auschwitz
Consider this historical account from the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum:
The first Christmas Eve behind the camp barbed wire, on December 24, 1940, was also one of the most tragic. The SS set up a Christmas tree, with electric lights, on the roll-call square. Beneath it, they placed the bodies of prisoners who had died while working or frozen to death at roll call. Former prisoner Karol Świętorzecki later recalled that Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch referred to the corpses beneath the tree as “a present” for the living, and forbade the singing of Polish Christmas carols.
A year later, in 1941, the Germans “organized” another tragic Christmas Eve. During the return from slave labor on the construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they killed Soviet POWs who were too weak to walk unsupported. About 300 died that day.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Archives contain an eyewitness account by former prisoner Ludwik Kryński, describing how there was a second roll call at 6:00 PM, after the SS men had finished the roll call and eaten their supper. Despite temperatures far below freezing, the prisoners had to listen to Pope Pius XII’s Christmas Eve proclamation being read out in German. 42 prisoners succumbed to the cold, and the sight brought numerous others to the point of nervous breakdowns.
Prisoners tried to celebrate in their blocks and to help those whose spirits had broken. An account in the Museum collections by Józef Jędrych from Block no. 10a describes how “the singing of German carols began, and then like the waves of the sea came the powerful words [from a Polish carol] ‘God is born, the powers tremble’ and others, until the final chord in the form of the Dąbrowski Mazurka [the Polish national anthem]. Everyone exchanged warm, cordial embraces and cried for a long time. There were those who sobbed out loud. . . . Such a grand moment never fades from memory. That Christmas is fixed forever in my heart and memory.”
I can’t help but wonder how many Polish sang “Bóg się rodzi” in the years before Hitler, and overlooked the significance of the opening line: “God is born, great powers tremble!” The rest of the hymn is what you would expect of a traditional Christmas carol, describing how Jesus came down and was born human. But the opening lyric stands out like a thorn on a fragrant rose, and glitters like a jewel in the darkness of the concentration camp.
In fact, I would argue that the thorn itself is what strengthened the prisoners to engage in worship that put their lives at risk. If I am to adopt a resilient attitude against a totalitarian dictator, what lyric is more fitting than to defiantly sing to his face, “God is born — great powers tremble!” If you take the thorn off the rose, you strip the carol of it’s strength. Like a florist, worship leaders should desire to cultivate a garden with a variety of flowers for every situation. The flowers that are the most fragrant often have thorns.
To those interested in leading worship, I would ask: could you pull this off without instruments, without a click track, without the lyrics, and without Thursday night rehearsal? Would any songs you know by heart have this sort of impact? Would your congregation know the lyrics well enough to sing louder than a mumble?
Let me raise the stakes even higher: assume you died before making it to the camp. Your congregation is without leadership. As a worship leader, how did you prepare your congregation? Did you teach them well enough that they could spontaneously pull something like this off without you?
The prisoners who celebrated Christmas in Auschwitz carried these songs in their hearts long before the hard times came. Worship was not something they showed up to experience, nor was worship something they participated in — worship was something they were trained and taught how to do.
To the young Christian desiring to help lead worship, I hope this article serves to encourage you — rather than discourage! Perhaps you may feel intimidated by the weight of these stories. If so, then good. Like those who would want to guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I want you to understand the gravity of the role you wish to fill.
But also — remember David. The Lord chose the small and insignificant to bring him glory, and fight back Goliath. If God has given you a talent, then use it for his glory!
Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.
Psalm 8:2